Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande are an impressive monument to the fruitful co-operation of sixteenth-century scholars. This paper explores part of the creation of the Chronicles and examines some of the complex evidence about the involvement of William Harrison, author of the informative and entertaining Description of Britain published in the Chronicles. For the discovery of a manuscript of Harrison's ‘Great English chronology’ allows a fuller appreciation of his role in the Holinshed group, and reveals tensions within the intellectual milieu from which the Chronicles emerged. The ‘Chronology’ demonstrates that Harrison's Description, written to a commission in 1576, was a deviation from the main thrust of his own work, and together with his other contributions was a late and complicating development in the genesis of the Chronicles. The ‘Chronology’ also shows that some of Harrison's work was censored by Holinshed where it offended his sense of legitimate historical discussion. Before the second edition of the Chronicles in 1587, there was further disagreement about the value of Harrison's contribution.

Oxford has never quite recovered from Matthew Arnold's description of his beloved alma mater as a ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties’. 1 While in popular stereotype Oxford is associated with such movements as the laudians, the Jacobites and the tractarians, Cambridge, by contrast, is seen as the home of more radical and reformist creeds: the puritans, the latitudinarians and the academic reformers of the nineteenth century. Consequently, we are predisposed to think it unremarkable that in the early eighteenth century Cambridge almost totally shed the last vestiges of the scholastic academic order which had its origins in the Tiigh middle ages and, in its place, adopted a style of education which, in its overriding emphasis on mathematics, departed significantly from the curriculum offered at Oxford.

The most recent survey of the early years of the long parliament has restated the traditional view that the parliament was united against the king from the first, under the leadership of John Pym. This opinion is so deeply ingrained in the historical consciousness that one reviewer has expressed surprise at the evidence adduced by Mr Fletcher of divisions of opinion in the Commons as early as 1641. Some of these disagreements were noticed four years ago by Professor Ashton, yet he calculated that there was a majority of 400 to 80 against the king, and titled his chapter ‘From Consensus to Confrontation’; according to Dr Manning, the king was ‘almost powerless’. It is surprising that this view has held the field so long, when the most cursory reading of the Commons Journal shows it to be a myth. In a period for which we have so little hard evidence of the course of events, the evidence of the journals should not be ignored; none the less, it will be suggested that the role of peers, in and out of parliament, was at least as important as anything that happened in the lower house in the first few months. Not all the issues involved can be discussed here: this paper will consider, in outline, some of the evidence concerning finance, the reforming legislation, and the impeachment of Strafford.

Andrew Marvell's ‘An Horatian ode upon Cromwel's return from Ireland’ is the most private of political poems. It may be a solitary meditation; it may be written, after Horace, for a forward youth now unknown to us; but it scarcely seems addressed to the public audience of Marvell's tribute to Cromwell in ‘The first anniversary’. We enter an imaginative landscape beyond politics, outside the movement of history, where the figures of the ode – restless Cromwell, the royal actor, the clapping soldiers, the frighted architects, the tamed Irish, the luring falconer, the hunted Pict – appear stilled as upon some ancient vase. Yet the poem's transcendence of events need not be taken for detachment from them, nor its privacy for retreat. I want to suggest that the celebrated poise and urbanity of the ode have been created from energy and urgency of feeling. Marvell has given timelessness to a desperate and portentous moment in his country's history, the arrival of Cromwell in England in the summer of 1650. Language has been immortalized too: the language of ephemeral tracts and newspapers, which is close enough to the surface of the poem to suggest a younger Marvell as politically engaged as the restoration M.P. and whig pamphleteer.

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.

In theory the eighteenth-century criminal law was a rigid, fixed and bloody penal code laying down the penalty of death for a broad range of property crimes. In practice it was a flexible and highly selective system. The legal process had no effective police force to provide an organizational core and it was therefore a private and negotiable process involving personal confrontation rather than bureaucratic procedure. All the major published studies of the administration of the criminal law in this period have stressed its highly discretionary nature. They have also shown that the law was important as ideology. The widely held notions that every freeborn Englishman was protected by the rule of law and that all were equal before the law both constrained authority and legitimized and strengthened it.

On May Day 1639, Christopher Deering discovered that a lamb was missing from his property in Heathfield, East Sussex. The most accessible criminal court to try such a theft was the quarter sessions, which met approximately two months later. By the court date, Robert Walcott, a local labourer, had confessed to the felony. In court, Walcott again acknowledged his complicity. Pleading benefit of clergy, he asked the justices to spare his life. Walcott read a biblical text well enough to pass the traditional – although long outdated – literacy test of clerical status. He was branded in the thumb to mark him as an excused felon, and dismissed from public custody.

‘A mysterious dispute arose in Cumberland between the Earl of Carlisle, lord lieutenant, and Sir George Fletcher.’ So wrote Professor J. R. Western in 1965 as he speculated that the matter stemmed from party conflicts in parliament at the time of the Exclusion Crisis. While that had some bearing on the matter, the dispute can be understood more fully only by a study of county politics in Restoration Cumberland and Westmorland. The controversy originated around 1679 between the earl's son, generally known by his courtesy title of Lord Morpeth (c. 1646–92) and Sir George (1633–1700). At the time the earl, Charles Howard (1628–85), was in Jamaica as governor. When he returned to England in September 1680 he sided with his son and became Sir George's principal antagonist.

Canadian Confederation took shape at a conference at Charlottetown in September 1864, was designed in detail at the Quebec conference in October 1864 and revised into final form in London in 1866–7. The sequence of conferences forms part of the stately tread of Canadian nationhood, and provides a counterpart to the Annapolis and Philadelphia conventions which originated the other great nation of North America, just as the Fathers of Confederation echo the Founding Fathers of the United States. Subsequent meetings in other cities were to reinforce the aura of the nation-building conference, through Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Durban to the less resounding triumphs of Montego Bay and Victoria Falls. Intercolonial unions, it seemed, were formed by calling conferences. From this assumption it could be deduced as a corollary that if no conference was called, there was no interest in intercolonial union. In Canada, the preservation of the Province House at Charlottetown as ‘the cradle of Confederation’ is a gesture to national feeling, but the mystique thus fostered risks creating historical distortion.

Of the three major innovations in law enforcement in nineteenth-century England, the penitentiaries, the new police and the stipendiary magistracy, the stipendiary magistracy came first. Three years before Patrick Colquhoun published his influential Treatise on the police of the metropolis, urging the foundation of a centralized preventative police force, the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 established a system of paid magistrates for metropolitan London. The stipendiary magistracy sitting in police offices was further reformed in the 1820s and 1830s, the same decades which saw the organization of the metropolitan police. By 1838 the police courts had taken their final shape, remaining largely unaltered into the twentieth century. Side by side with the new police, stipendiary magistrates were the primary instruments of public order in Victorian London.

On 17 February 1785, William Pitt reported to the house of commons on his administration's response to the reports of the commission for examining the public accounts established by Lord North five years earlier. Since 1780, the commissioners of accounts had summarized and rationalized the new approaches to public administration that had blossomed in the economical-reform movement of the early 1780s; their work has been described by recent commentators as ‘a comprehensive and quite radical philosophy of the public interest’, and even ‘a new bureaucratic ideology’. For his part, Pitt commended the commissioners for having ‘given light to parliament on subjects hitherto involved in the most inscrutable obscurity’, and he stated that it was ‘the duty of the House to profit from the Reports’. After reviewing their findings of manifold deficiencies in the issue and audit of public money, Pitt introduced legislation to reform the treasurership of the navy and to set up a new department for auditing public accounts. The commissioners' more sweeping recommendations for reforms of official compensation and discipline were to be addressed by a new commission on fees, whose broad charge would be: to inquire into the fees, gratuities, perquisites, and emoluments, which are, or lately have been, received in the several public offices…; and to report such observations as may occur to them for the better conducting and managing the business transacted….

One of the most distinctive features of the French Ancien Régime was the sale of offices. Several European states resorted to this method of tapping the wealth of their richer subjects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but nowhere did venality spread further through society than in France, and nowhere did its importance persist so long. Although the revolutionaries of 1789 abolished it, it reappeared for certain public functions in the early nineteenth century, and has not quite vanished even today. The origins and early history of the system have been authoritatively studied, but its eighteenth-century history has received very little attention. This is all the more curious in that France continued to be governed largely by holders of venal offices, they constituted the backbone of opposition to the government in the form of the magistrates of the parlements, and huge amounts of capital continued to be absorbed by office-buying. Even so, most historians consider that by this time the venal system was in decline. This seemed to be demonstrated by unsold offices remaining on the market, and above all by falling, office prices. For Alfred Cobban, indeed, these trends were symptoms of the decline of a whole class, the officiers. Here was ‘a section of society which was definitely not rising in wealth, and was barely holding its own in social status’ as falling office prices showed. ‘The decline seems to have been general, from the parlements downwards, though until the end of the eighteenth century it was much less marked in the offices of the parlements than in those of the présidiaux, élections, maréchaussées and other local courts.’ Resentment at this decline explained the revolutionary fervour of the officiers, whom Cobban had previously shown to be the largest bourgeois group in the National Assembly; and 1789 was largely the work not of a rising capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather of a declining professional one.

The return of Gladstone as prime minister, after the Liberals had secured a decisive majority at the polls in April 1880, has for long been established in the mythology of the Liberal party. In retrospect, the series of events which had drawn Gladstone back into active politics after his retirement in 1875 – his opposition to Beaconsfield's Eastern policy, the oratorical campaigns in Midlothian, and the rout of ‘Jingoism’ at the general election – came to be seen as a natural, linear development, whereby his special sense of affinity with the ‘;people’ was re-established and the great election victory assured. His subsequent resumption of the premiership accordingly became surrounded by an air of inevitability: the hesitant leadership of the whigs giving way to that of the man who had inspired the struggle against Beaconsfield's ‘system of government’ and who alone could command the allegiance of all sections of the great Liberal majority.

In defining the tradition of Austria's German policy between 1815 and 1870, Helmut Rumpler wrote recently that it was both consistent and contradictory. On the one hand it was characterized by a struggle against the establishment of Prussian hegemony in Germany while, on the other, it sought co-operation with Berlin based upon the unspoken but clear assumption of a shared or dualistic supremacy within the German Confederation. Far from wanting to weaken Prussia or significantly to diminish the role Berlin would play in either German or European affairs, Vienna was painfully aware of the importance of a strong Prussia for the maintenance of Austria's position as a European power. The problem of Prussia for Austrian policy was therefore the need to find ways to reconcile the necessity of opposing Prussia's ambitions with the equally obvious need to secure her co-operation and support. The dilemma facing Vienna was one of devising policies consistent with the fact that Prussia was at the same time Austria's most dangerous rival and her most important ally.

In November 1844 the young Lord Ashley, not for 16 years to become the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, was in search of a public school for his son and heir, Anthony. ‘I fear Eton,’ he confided to his diary:

…it makes admirable gentlemen and finished scholars, fits a man, beyond all competition, for the dancing-room, the Club, St James' Street, and all the mysteries of social elegance; but it does not make the man required for the coming generation. We must have nobler, deeper, sterner stuff; less of refinement, and more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward gentleman; a rigid sense of duty, not a ‘delicate sense of honour’; a just estimate of rank and property, not as manners of personal enjoyment and display, but as gifts from God, bringing with them serious responsibilities, and involving a fearful account; a contempt of ridicule, not a dread of it; a desire and a courage to live for the service of God, and the best interests of mankind, and by His grace, to accomplish the baptismal promise… Unless we have such men as these for our successors, goodbye to the British Empire.

In the familiar triptych of British political history between the first and third Reform Acts, whose panels are neatly divided by the years 1846 and 1867, the confused and uninspiring iconography of the large central canvas contrasts sharply and puzzlingly with that of its flanking pieces. In 1855 Gladstone lamented that

The Session of 1845 was the last of those that witnessed party connection in its normal state. Throughout the decade which preceded that year it was in full and brilliant blossom. Since then we have had properly speaking…none in the best sense of the term: none compact and organized after the ancient manner.

There is at present much interest in historical explanations for the political attitudes and collective behaviour of industrial workers. Typically, such I explanations develop out of descriptions of production relations. In some cases, historians have adduced the constituents of such relations (including shopfloor conditions, job skills and hierarchies of workers and employers) to explain strikes, unions, and mass-based political parties. In other cases, historians of labouring people have emphasized one or another of these elements – e.g. relative levels of skill – in efforts to explain collective behaviour. Still others have taken a more general view, ascribing workers' collective rebellion to the history of industrial capitalism itself; in this view, conditions for rebellion depend upon the historical moment, or conjuncture.

Lynn Zastoupil, in his article ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, (Historical Journal, 26, 3 (Sept. 1983)), has made an important contribution to our understanding of the sources and character of Mill's views on Ireland. He is right to suggest that insufficient attention has been paid to the lengthy series of Morning Chronicle leaders written by Mill in response to the Famine. No less instructive is his emphasis on the centrality of moral regeneration to Mill's political and ethical enterprise. Ably analysing the evolution of Mill's opinions on Ireland between the 1840s and late 1860s, Mr Zastoupil effectively demonstrates the way in which Mill's changing position on the issue was at each stage informed by a fundamental moral purpose. What his article does not fully convey, however, is the extent to which the expression of that purpose was shaped and conditioned not only by Mill's assessment of Irish circumstances at any particular time, but also by a certain tension and ambivalence in his attitude towards Ireland and her people.

Patterns of voting in Britain between the second Reform Act of 1867 and the Franchise Act of 1918 have to be scrutinized afresh in the light of Dr Dunbabin's recent suggestion that very little changed in the period. The electoral profile of the regions, he argues, remained fundamentally constant from well before the period until well afterwards. The basis of the cleavage between conservative and anti-conservative voters was deeply ingrained in regional character and was merely modified slowly by processes of social change, of which the chief was the sprawling growth of London. This is to challenge earlier views holding that there was a deep-seated shift in the allegiance of the electorate in the years before the first World War. Of such views the most carefully worked out is that of Dr Clarke. The cleavage between the conservative and the anti-conservative at the beginning of the period, according to Dr Clarke, was founded on the gulf between different communities of which the primary social bond was religion. The confrontation between conservative and liberal corresponded to, and was the political expression of, that between church and chapel. By the end of the period, however, the basis of cleavage was no longer religion but class. Conservative strength was sapped by a tendency to working-class solidarity which at first benefited the liberals more than the infant labour party and which explains the two liberal general election victories of 1910. The social base of the parties had been transformed so that the electoral conflict was no longer a matter of ‘cultural politics’ – a rivalry of contrasted, classless cultural units – but a matter of class politics. Dr Clarke asserts what Dr Dunbabin denies, that there is a sharp discontinuity between the characteristic pattern of nineteenth-century politics and the characteristic pattern of twentieth-century politics.

Some years ago Henry Pelling offered one of his stimulating and provocative challenges to a conventional wisdom of labour history. He pointed out that it is often assumed that the significant extensions of the welfare activities of the state by the post-1906 Liberal governments were in some way associated with the growth of the organized labour movement; that they were, if not simply responses to pressure from Labour (which has rarely been seriously argued), at least supported and welcomed by a significant proportion of the working class, and therefore could be expected by Liberal politicians to increase their credit with working-class voters, perhaps sufficiently to persuade them to resist the lure of Labour.