The relationships between central government and local community have attracted much attention among historians of early Tudor England. Administrative studies have long since described the network of offices and institutions which theoretically implemented executive action; more recent work has analysed the social and political structure of individual counties. But the actual mechanics of interaction between centre and locality have received less attention. How, in practice, did an active and capable minister translate programmes and policies into action and good order at the local or regional level? What limitations, and what opportunities, did entrenched networks of local interest present to the central administration ? And what tools were available in turn at the centre to co-opt or overturn those networks as necessary in the service of the state?

For well over a decade studies in local history have occupied a significant position in the historiography of early modern England. In particular, the study of the ‘county community’ as the most significant English political and governmental unit and as the primary sphere of social and affectional loyalties for the greater number of those Englishmen constituting the political nation has become securely established. Within this wide and fruitful field for continuing research the theme of the ‘points of contact’ or reciprocal communication between the court and the county, Westminster and the provinces, which Sir Geoffrey Elton raised not so long ago and which Kevin Sharpe more recently attempted to apply to the problems of government in early Stuart England, suggests that investigations of the gentry of a particular county might illustrate how this interchange between the centre and the localities functioned. For such a study to prove fruitful, however, one prerequisite would appear to be necessary: a member of a prominent county family, perhaps its head, who also holds a major office of state or position at court. Such a man was Sir James Croft whose eminent position in Herefordshire was founded on the contacts he made and the patronage he attracted in the last years of Henry VIII's reign. Although this position was threatened in the years of his disgrace during Queen Mary's reign, it gathered strength again in the 1560s, and reached its apogee during the following two decades. Between 1570 and his death in 1590, he served at court as comptroller of the household.

Henry Parker's The Case of Shipmony (1640) may be the first intellectually significant political pamphlet of the Long Parliament era. In this crisp and well printed quarto, Parker, a publicist and man of affairs, used issues raised during John Hampden's celebrated test case of 1637 to develop his own political views.Parker wrote in opposition to the royalist majority in the case. But his carefully circumscribed objections to ship money in The Case of Shipmony show him of two minds – his opposition was of a different order from that heard in the house of commons in 1640 and 1641, and was strangely resonant of the royalist arguments. This was not a sign of political timidity. Rather, as Parker grew bolder and as his notions matured in 1640– his views and those of the royalist counsel and judges, mutatis mutandis, became even more congruent. This can be seen by comparing the ship money arguments not only with the positions taken in The Case of Shipmony but also with the idiom of Parker's fully developed thought, which is usually (though excessively) identified with his most famous tract, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (June 1642).

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.

It has been the standard wisdom of historians that whereas the rebel Dutch continued to trade with Spain and the Spanish possessions throughout the Armada war, the English did not. As the letter-writer John Chamberlain resentfully complained, ‘We for their sake and defence entering into the war, and being barred from all commerce and intercourse of merchandise, they in the meantime thrust us out of all traffic to our utter undoing’. The evidence assembled here suggests instead that English trafficking with the enemy was much greater than has been assumed, although it probably never reached the huge proportions of the Dutch effort. Moreover the substantial volume of illicit trade should point to a re-consideration of some important Elizabethan attitudes to Anglo-Spanish relations both before and during the war, and hence also more generally to religious attitudes.

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.

Little has happened in the century since Masson wrote those words fundamentally to alter his assessment and both the operation of Protectoral central government 1653–8 and the role of the Council within it remain sadly under-studied. Although recent historians would doubtless deny that they have simply forgotten the Protectoral Councillors, in practice most surveys either ignore the Council or allude to it in a few passing and usually dismissive sentences. For example, the Councillors are mentioned only once in Kenyon's Stuart England, a reference to their ‘clumsy decision’ to exclude M.P.s in 1656. And the assessment of the Council as a politically powerless vehicle for the Protector's will still generally prevails, albeit expressed in more cautious tones. Thus in his recent study of interregnum Britain, Barnard asserts that ‘in practice the Council seldom deflected him [Cromwell] from his chosen courses’ and that it is ‘likely that the councillors would usually defer to him’. Barnard himself laments the dearth of surviving evidence about the Council's work, a dearth which has all but stifled serious examination of the operation of Protectoral central government and which may have led contemporaries and later historians alike to under-rate the role of the Council and correspondingly to inflate that of Cromwell. For despite the paucity of evidence, there are clear indications that the Council was not the impotent cypher nor Cromwell the boundless autocrat of so many histories and biographies.

It has been suggested that the political and economic power of Renaissance noblewomen declined significantlyfrom what it had been during the heyday of feudalism, and that this decline was caused by the expansion of royalpower and the growth of national monarchies, the development of centralization and the bureaucratization of government – in other words the creation of formal, male-dominated institutions to which women could not belong. Joann McNamara and Suzanne Wemple have written, ‘However, with the growth of a more structured society, where church and state aimed at centralized control, women of the high and late middle ages (1100–1500) found their rights and role increasingly curtailed and their ambitions frustrated. Women who held the most influential positions were the first to suffer from these restrictions.’

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.

Thomas Blood was born in Sarney, county Meath in Ireland around the year 1618. The circumstances surrounding his early life are obscure but his father was said to have been a blacksmith and ironworker of ‘no inferior credit’. Blood's first real appearance in the historical record occurs during the survey taken in Ireland in the period 1654–6. In this he is listed as a protestant who had owned some 220 acres of land at Sarney since at least 1640. In between these dates, however, Blood had evidently undertaken some sort of military service. The evidence concerning this military service is both slight and contradictory and there is at least the possibility that his later claims about an army career were partly bogus, or certainly inflated to suit his particular company.

Although the existence of materials relating to Hobbes's Elements of law and De cive in Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 126 has been known to scholars for some time, the first notice of these in print came as recently as 1987, in an article by Dr J. C. Hayward. The aim of this communication is to provide a full description and analysis of one of these items – the notes and extracts from the Elements – in the hope that this will shed some light on the earlier stages of the relationship between Clarendon and Hobbes.

It was not an easy task in the early eighteenth century to write a complete history of England, and Laurence Echard courageously attempted to be the first to do so. For even if one could pick a way carefully through the Saxon/Norman period (on which most attention had centred up till this time), there still remained immense problems in the interpretation of the seventeenth century and its relationship back to the chosen version of this earlier time. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century Echard wrote or contributed to six volumes on the subject of English history, all of which contained at least some discussion of the English seventeenth century, but the results were confusing. In the very small amount of modern discussion on Echard's politics and historical works, this confusion is evident in a revealing contradiction.

Probably the greatest popular movement in Georgian Britain was that formed around military volunteering during the wars against revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Often cited is the number of volunteers enrolled in 1803–4, nearly 400,000. These were the most active participants. Outside the ranks there existed an even larger mass of organizers, subscribers and supporters, including sometimes female committees; at this time volunteering was one of several developments which brought Britain recognizably close to ‘total’ war in terms of its population's war-involvement. Yet historians have said little about the movement. We have not progressed very far beyond the gospel according to Victorian and Edwardian nationalism in which Napoleonic volunteering was depicted as the British people's inevitable response to the threat of foreign invasion, proud testimony of their ‘warlike spirit’, ‘love of freedom’ and ‘patriotic unanimity’. The only critical evaluation there has been remains based on an article by J. R. Western, published as long ago as 1956. This refined the established ‘wave of patriotism’ version by linking volunteering with the counter-revolution of the 1790s directed against popular radicals. Volunteers were depicted as armed loyalists, their corps as the successors of the loyalist associations and the movement as a whole as a key component of an extensive and dominant ‘party of order’. The most recent work on the anti-radical reaction barely disturbs this interpretation. While it is not denied that the threat of foreign attack was also instrumental in producing volunteers, the emphasis continues to be on volunteering, at least in its early phase, as an outgrowth of counter-revolutionary loyalism.

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.

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

A spectre is still haunting historians of nineteenth-century France, the spectre of the bourgeois revolution of 1830, surviving despite the exorcism of revisionists. It is a spector that distorts our image of the liberal opposition to Charles X and of the victors after the July Days. Restoration prefects, moved from department to department with increasing rapidity in Charles X's reign, were content to categorize critics of the Polignac government as bourgeois. In the July Monarchy socialists vilified the elite as an established bourgeoise who robbed the real revolutionaries, the artisans, of their rights.3 Early socialists, including Marx, defined bourgeois broadly, to embrace landowners, but later marxists, writing when France was less of an agrarian state, labelled the bourgeoisie of 1830 as a business and industrial elite. The most recent generation of revisionist historians has shown, by empirical and detailed investigations, that the development of industry and accompanying social change occurred over several centuries and that revolutions, in particular, 1789, were mainly political events and more likely to retard than to facilitate the evolution of bourgeois capitalism. Thus revisionist historians of nineteenth-century France refer to ‘notables’ and stress the numerical dominance of landowners rather than businessmen in the elite of both the Restoration and the July Monarchy.

The First World War saw the collapse of the old order in the Eastern Mediterranean with the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, an event which threatened to create a dangerous power vacuum. Great Britain for the pastcentury had attempted to prevent just such a crisis by supporting the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman state. Britain had a number of crucial strategic concerns in the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular the Suez Canal and the Straits. The former was the more critical interest and Britain was determined to keep this essential link to its Indian empire firmly under its own control. As to the Straits Britain, which was concerned about over-extending its strategic capabilities, was content to see this critical waterway dominated by a friendly state. The question inevitably arose therefore as to what would replace the Ottoman empire. One alternative was Greece, a possibility which became increasingly attractive with the emergence of the supposedly pro-British Eleftherios Venizelos as the Greek leader in early 1917.

The general view still prevails that the French bishops performed badly in the elections held to the estates-general in the spring of 1789. The final figure of only 49 bishops going to Versailles amid a horde of curés tends to be treated by historians as a clear demonstration of the new power of the lower clergy, confirming the view of the episcopal corps as aristocratic, out of touch, and unprepared for an electoral contest on a level of equality with the parish clergy. Prestigious casualties like Rohan-Guémenée at Cambrai, Mont-morency-Laval at Metz, Marbeuf at Lyon, and Dillon at Narbonne have attracted much notice, but they are really the exceptions. Closer examination indicates that the majority of prelates in fact put up a spirited performance, faced with Necker's electoral règlement of 24 January 1789 – arrangements weighted deliberately in favour of the curés.

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.

On 21 December 1909 the house of lords rendered judgement in the Osborne case. The lords' decision, at a minimum, prohibited trade union contributions to the Labour Party, and therefore threatened with destruction the newly-formed party whose income depended almost entirely upon trade union support. The legal basis upon which a majority of the law lords rested their ruling was that trade union political activity was ultra vires – that is, beyond the unions' lawful authority – because not expressly sanctioned by the 1871–6 Trade Union Acts, which the law lords treated as the functional equivalent of a charter for trade unions. An alternative, possibly more convincing, rationale for the judgement, not mentioned by the law lords but relied upon by two of the lord justices in the court of appeal decision in Osborne and paramount in the public debate surrounding the judgement, was that trade union political fund-raising involved compelling individual trade unionists to support financially their political opponents. The Labour Party, quickly recognizing that the Osborne judgement threatened its very existence, launched an intensive lobbying campaign – both in parliament and in the country – to secure a complete legislative reversal of the lords' decision. Yet the Liberal government's posture towards a legal decision from which it stood to derive immediate political gain was unpredictable; by no means was it clear from the outset that the Liberal Party would acquiesce in any measure curtailing the effect of Osborne, much less indulge Labour's demand for complete rescission of the judgement.