Note, the King by his proclamation, or other ways, cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … also the King cannot create any offence by his prohibition or proclamation, which was not an offence before, for that was to change the law, and to make an offence which was not; for ubi non est lex, ibi non est transgressio; ergo, that which cannot be punished without proclamation, cannot be punished with it…

On Friday, 18 July 1679, Sir George Wakeman, Bt., a Roman Catholic of an old Gloucestershire family, and formerly physician to the Queen, was arraigned before a special commission of oyer and terminer at the Sessions House, Old Bailey, charged with high treason, in that he had conspired to murder the King. He was acquitted, as were the three Benedictine monks, William Marshal, William Rumley and James Corker, arraigned with him.

While Swift's contribution to most fields of thought has generally been well received, his science is normally considered along with the third book of Gulliver's Travels; and the usual practice is to condemn both. At first it was thought that Swift's criticism of Newtonian science in the third book of Gulliver's Travels was written at short notice, in which case it would be peripheral to the work as a whole. In this event, science would be of little concern to Swift. The important achievement of Professors M. Nicolson and N. M. Mohler was to demonstrate diat Swift's assault on Newton's science was not only premeditated, but carefully executed as well: ‘The sources for nearly all the theories of the Laputans and the Balnibarians (sic) are to be found in the work of Swift's contemporary scientists and particularly in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.’

Under pressure from the anti-slavery interest in the House of Commons, the British Government undertook, in 1823, to reform West Indian slavery and prepare the slaves for eventual freedom. This policy of amelioration was based on the assumption that the West Indian planters would co-operate with the British Government to improve slave conditions. As George Canning explained to the House of Commons, ‘The masters are the instruments through whom, and by whom, you must act upon the slave population.’ Ten years later the reform programme was abandoned in favour of abolition. This change of policy reflected, in part, the conversion of officials at the Colonial Office who began to urge the need for emancipation in 1831. For eight years the Colonial Office made persistent efforts to induce the co-operation of the West Indian planters; these attempts failed and a mass of evidence accumulated which suggested that the slave system could not be improved, it could only be abolished. This article demonstrates the efforts made by the Colonial Office to effect amelioration in the legislative colonies with particular reference to Jamaica and the nature of the evidence which demonstrated that emancipation was the only viable solution to the problem of West Indian slavery.

I am grateful to Professor W. R. Carr for giving my article on James Mill more attention than it deserved. I had many doubts about its suggestions, and more about the way they were expressed, and had hoped that an expert critic versed in Mill might help to remove them. His ‘James Mill's Politics Reconsidered: Parliamentary Reform and the Triumph of Truth’ contains so much that I can accept and profit from, that I am only at a loss to account for the captious vehemence of his language. For our arguments do not seem to me so much to conflict, as to cross and diverge. I was concerned with the Essay on Government as a practical document. I argued that it had less bearing on the movement for parliamentary reform culminating in the Act of 1832 than had been supposed. The effect of his criticism is to remove the Essay into a world of abstract speculation, even more divorced from the problems which beset the parliamentary reformers in the 1820s than I had claimed. Probably he would not admit this, because his real charge is not that I think Mill and his followers made no practical contribution to the Reform Act, but that I have not, as he has, pieced together the various parts of Mill's thought into that mosaic of ‘glittering clarity’ cemented by ‘strenuous logic’ which he conceives it to be.

Sandwiched between the Saint-Cyr law of 1818 and Niel's dazzling if futile effort to reform the army in 1867, the Soult law of 1832 has been sadly neglected by historians. Not only is the law a crucial piece of military legislation, but by studying its history one can trace the conservatism of the July Monarchy under the Périer Ministry.

The main way in which the second Home Rule Bill differed from the first was in its provision for the retention of Irish M.P.s at Westminster. Cecil Rhodes played an important part in bringing about this change, both in the way in which he obtained Parnell's support for continued Irish representation in die Imperial Parliament, and in the assistance he gave to the Liberal Party to regain power in 1892. But while most of the facts about Rhodes' only major incursion into British politics have long been well-known, his actions have been obscured; either through misunderstanding, or because they have been considered as peripheral to the more important aspects of their subjects by biographers of Parnell and Rhodes himself and by writers on the home rule crises, and so have been underestimated.

In the aftermadi of replacing Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916, David Lloyd George forged a greater change in the style of administration than in the content of the British Government's actions. Not until the spring of 1918 was he able to secure the replacement of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Wully’ Robertson, and even at that time he dared not move against the all-too-entrenched commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Douglas Haig; meanwhile, die war of deadly attrition persisted in France and Flanders.

It is often suggested that the Far Eastern crisis of 1931–3 marked tlie beginning of the Second World War, that ‘the road… is now clearly visible… from the railway tracks near Mukden to the operations of two bombers over Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. In many eyes, too, this episode was also crucial for die League of Nations and the cause of collective security, an opportunity to vindicate the peace-keeping machinery of 1919 which, had it been taken, might have proved decisive in preventing the slide into international anarchy which followed. ‘This has been the vital test for the League,’ Philip Noel-Baker wrote to Gilbert Murray at the time, ’-– and the greatest opportunity it has ever had, especially in view of U.S.A. cooperation’. When Japan had triumphed nearly two years later, he saw the whole structure of organized international co-operation as being ‘in grave danger’, and the League as ‘never having sunk to so low an ebb in influence and prestige’.