In recent years the word ‘faction’ has come to dominate study of the early modern period. Despite various reservations concerning precisely what is denoted by the term, historians have begun enthusiastically to look beyond the external appearances of political events to identify the hidden, factional, motives which are assumed to have prompted them. Owing in large part to the pioneering work of Drs D. R. Starkey and E. W. Ives, the reign of Henry VIII has been seen as particularly prone to faction, as various ambitious individuals or coalitions intrigued to manipulate the peculiarly pliable character of the king in their favour and to thwart the ambitions of their rivals.

Arthur Wilson, in his History of Great Britain, (1653) named William Fiennes, first Viscount Saye and Sele, as among the few ‘gallant Spirits’ who ‘aimed at the publick Liberty more than their own interest’. He went on to say that the men he singled out, including in addition to Saye the earls of Oxford, Southampton, Essex and Warwick, ‘supported the Old English Honour and would not let it fall to the ground’. In 1640 Warwick and Saye, this time in company with their associate Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, were praised by a commoner as ‘the best men of the kingdom’ according to the report of a government informer.

Of all types of military and naval activity, combined operations have had a particular fascination for public and politicians in the English-speaking world. In England, from Drake's raid on Cadiz in 1587 through to actions initiated by Sir Roger Keyes' Combined Operations Head Quarters in 1940, this mode of warfare has offered the romantic and morale-boosting spectacle of a beleaguered nation striking back at a powerful and threatening adversary. To politicians and administrators such operations seemed to present tantalizingly rich results at little cost. From the early part of the sixteenth century, France and Spain were largely immune from decisiveEnglish military action on the continent, but seemed extremely vulnerable on their seaboards and, as their overseas empires grew, in their colonies. A naval squadron with a small seaborne army could inflict damage upon the economy and prestige of these powers out of all proportion to the forces employed. Even when France was able to continue the fight after major colonial defeats, as she did between 1761 and 1763 and after 1809, England was at least enriched by the profits from her seizures. The belief that the navy could be relied upon to defend Britainand carry the war to the enemy received significant support from the great school of naval historians that developed between 1870 and 1914.1 Their works, supplemented by popular histories, and enlisted unsuccessfully by the royal navy in its attempt to resist a reorientation of British strategy between 1905 and 1911, added great weight to the conviction that British strategy traditionally lay in the application of sea power, of which combinedoperations was a major element. Assisted by newsreel and film, the spectacular developments in the power and technology of combined operations since 1941 have ensured continued public interest in this mode of warfare.

Of the popular societies that government repressed in the 1790s, the public debating societies in London are probably the least known although some of them had been meeting without interruption for over fifty years. Since these societies admitted all who paid the weekly entrance fee and allowed anyone to stand up and speak, they were quite different from the private, limited debating clubs where new members had to be approved and where the speeches were often prepared orations. Because of their size, the public debating societies attracted men who wanted to practise speaking before a large audience. Burke is said to have gained his first experience in public speaking at one of these debating societies. Pitt not only spoke at them; he helped found one. Boswell and Goldsmith attended them. Most of the speakers and auditors, however, were men of a lower class; and in the 1790sin reaction to the French Revolution, these societies were repressed. Although they constitute a significant social phenomenon, their history has not beenj traced, as has that of the London Corresponding Socie-ty (LCS) or the United! Irishmen (UI). In a sense the debating societies form an adjunct to, and complement the history of the declared reform societies of the 1790s: Members of the Corresponding Society might go from their meeting to a debating society in order to hear an LCS member speak. The few known managers of debating societies were also prominent members of the LCS or the UI or both; 1 and when a political topic was debated, most of the speakers would take a reformist position.

Under the French Directory the line army was called into many parts of France to protect law and order and to shore up the regime. The authors of regional studies in the period have alluded to military presence but have failed to draw general inferences about the importance of military policing. The political ambitions of commanders-in-chief of fighting armies after the fall of Robespierre and the nature and history of operations have long been the subject of historical research, but no-one has yet investigated the nature of relations between civil and military authorities in any part of the interior that was not a war zone. The line army had been used in a policing role during the old regime and the early years of the revolution, but the advent of war in 1792 removed it to the frontiers. This suited revolutionary governments which were uncertain of its loyalty and uneasy about the reduction of discipline. In 1793 and 1794 revolutionary order was imposed instead by an increasingly centralized network of civilian elites and militias – revolutionary armies, committees, tribunals and representatives on mission – which operated by means of intimidation and civic denunciation. The dismantling of this apparatus of Terror in the year III (late 1794/5) in favour of a liberal constitution which breathed new life into the elective institutions of local government unleashed an anarchy of frustrated aspirations and hatreds born out of the turbulence of the revolutionary experience. Individuals and factions vied for control of local judicial and executive positions in order to make up revolutionary losses and to keep out their enemies.

For some time now, the narrative of the Liberal party's demise during the First World War has been fairly firmly defined. The war imposed strains on liberal ideology by forcing Liberals to compromise long-cherished policies such as free trade, a free market and a volunteer army. Concurrently, a growing division among Liberals emerged over how to conduct the war. H. H. Asquith and his supporters were increasingly reluctant to accept further compromises of voluntarism and the market mechanism for allocating resources; David Lloyd George and his supporters demanded massive government intervention in every aspect of the economy to mobilize the nation for total war. The replacement of Asquith by Lloyd George as prime minister in December 1916 marked the triumph of the latter approach. Traditional liberalism as a practical ideology of government was now discredited. The Liberal party was left with no unity or purpose. The leaders disliked and distrusted each other; there was no agreement on policy or the future direction of the party. Thus, it was in no position by the end of the war to compete with the resurgent Conservative and Labour parties for the allegiance of the British voter.

The success of wartime governments in the twentieth century is determined not just by their effectiveness in waging war, but also by their ability to plan for peace. Mobilizing the population for total war and winning the benevolent neutrality or active support of major uncommitted powers require the projection of a vision of a better, peaceful world which will be the necessary consequence of victory. The reordering of international society is therefore proclaimed as a war aim of each belligerent. By December 1916, when Lloyd George displaced Asquith, the desirability of establishing a league of nations was already a matter of serious popular and diplomatic discussion. The new administration almost immediately had to state its attitude on questions of post-war international organization. In launching his peace initiative President Wilson called for the establishment after the war of a ‘league of nations to insure peace and justice’. The joint reply of the Entente powers endorsed the setting up of such a body. In a separate commentary, which was given wide publicity in America, the foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, explained that, as a condition of durable peace, ‘behind international law, and behind all treaty arrangements for preventing or limiting hostilities, some form of international sanction should be devised which would give pause to the hardiest aggressor’.

‘Labour Comes of Age’, Kingsley Martin observed a few days after the party's electoral landslide of 1945. This might have been more precise if a chorus had added, sotto voce, ‘…And Comes Into an Inheritance’, for since the publication of Paul Addison's The road to 1945 (1975), the history of the Labour party during and after the war has been dominated by the notion of a political consensus forged during the Churchill coalition and left as a legacy to the Attlee government. According to Addison, it was the consensus of Keynes and Beveridge that shaped post-war politics rather than any distinctive contribution from Labour.