Some years ago my attention was drawn by Professors Paul Kristeller and William Nelson of Columbia University to two manuscripts – one in the Bibliothèque Publique de Besançon and the other in the Escorial – of a text that appeared to be the last work of Stephen Gardiner, a leading conservative churchman, diplomat and publicist in the Henrician period, and, from 1553 until his death in 1555, Mary Tudor's chancellor. The text is in Italian, and is titled Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli inglesi et normanni in Britannia – ‘ A discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to Britain’. The translator, George Rainsford, worked from an English original now lost, and appended to the Gardiner text his own Ritratto d'Ingliterra or ‘Description of England’; he dedicated the composite volume to Philip II, among whose books the Escorial manuscript had been. The dedication is dated 16 March 1556, some four months after Gardiner's death. Both the Gardiner text and the Rainsford appendix have now been published.

Not the least of the duties with which Thomas Cromwell was burdened during the period of his ascendancy was the supervision of the lordship of Ireland. There the changes effected in the function and powers of the Dublin administration in the 1530s proved to be quite as important for the development of early-modern Ireland as those occurring in England during the same decade were for that realm. These changes centred on the legislation of the Irish Reformation Parliament of 1536–7 and on the termination of a policy of aristocratic delegation whereby Anglo-Irish magnates, primarily the earl of Kildare, had ruled the lordship on behalf of the king. By the later 1530s the lordship was governed through an English deputy working with a reconstituted Irish council, backed by a small English garrison, and controlled more firmly from London. For all this, recent research has established the overall responsibility of Cromwell.

On 2 August 1521 Wolsey arrived at Calais to preside over a conference the ostensible purpose of which was to put an end to fighting that had broken out earlier in the year, fighting which had increasingly involved French and imperial forces. When, nearly four months later, the conference broke up, the fighting still continued. Clearly Wolsey had been unsuccessful in bringing about peace, but he did not return to England empty-handed. On 24 November a treaty had been signed committing England to a declaration of war against France, at least by March 1523. This treaty, and especially the fact that its terms had to all intents and purposes been settled at Wolsey's meeting with the emperor at Bruges less than a fortnight after his arrival at Calais, has led many historians to suspect that Wolsey had never been very serious about his role as peacemaker. Not, however, all. In his biography of Henry VIII, J. J. Scarisbrick has argued most powerfully that at Calais Wolsey worked very hard to reconcile Francis I and the emperor, and, indeed he sees his activities there as crucial evidence that ‘Wolsey's policy was a peace policy and for about fifteen years he struggled to make it work’. The main purpose of this article will be to argue that, at least as far as the events of 1521 are concerned, this thesis cannot be sustained. Instead, it will be shown that Wolsey's main aim in 1521 was to bring about the alliance with the emperor.

There exists in the British Museum a copy of the prayer book of 1559 bearing the signature of Sir Nicholas Bacon. It would be reasonable to infer that the book was once the lord keeper's property, but a pleasing fancy to pretend that he autographed it for a friend and well-wisher. He was not the author of this all but final recension of the Anglican liturgy but he was one of its principal sponsors. For in the words of Ralph Churton,’the business of that important parliament… in which the acts of uniformity and supremacy for the settlement of religion were passed was principally managed by the Lord Keeper Bacon’. It was Bacon who presided, not only in the House of Lords but over the theological disputation in Westminster Hall which was staged as a public signal that the English Church was to be once more reformed according to the protestant model. In a speech at the conclusion of the 1559 parliament he defended the newly made settlement against opponents and detractors, and in so doing scratched in the sand, as it were, the line of the Anglican via media:’Amongst thease I meane to comprehende aswell those that be to swifte as those that be to slowe, those I say that goe before the lawe or beyond the lawe as those that will not followe.’

The intention of this paper is to look at some of the problems which arise in attempts to provide ‘explanations’ of mercantilism and especially its English manifestations. By ‘explanations’ I mean the efforts which some writers have made causally to relate the historical appearance of sets of economic notions or general recommendations on economic policy or even acts of economic policy by the state to particular long-term phenomena of, or trends in, economic history. Historians of economic thought have not generally made such attempts. With a few exceptions they have normally concerned themselves with tracing and analysing the contributions to economic theory made by those labelled as mercantilists. The most extreme case of non-explanation is provided by Eli Heckscher's reiterated contention in his two massive volumes that mercantilism was not to be explained by reference to the economic circumstances of the time; mercantilist policy was not to be seen as ‘the outcome of the economic situation’; mercantilist writers did not construct their system ‘out of any knowledge of reality however derived’. So strongly held an antideterminist fortress, however congenial a haven for some historians of ideas, has given no comfort to other historians – economic or political, Marxist or non-Marxist – who obstinately exhibit empiricist tendencies. Some forays against the fortress have been made. Barry Supple's analysis of English commerce in the early seventeenth century and the resulting presentation of mercantilist thought and policy as ‘the economics of depression’ has passed into the textbooks and achieved the status of an orthodoxy.

Thomas Norton is one of Sir John Neale's parliamentary heroes. Neale demonstrates his importance in the ‘puritan choir’, that organized opposition party which was so active in the parliaments of 1563–66 and 1571. He and his colleagues are variously described as ‘troublesome’, ‘rebellious’, ‘hostile’, ‘nuisances’, ‘zealots’, ‘agitators’and ‘hotheads’, and Norton himself is depicted as ‘one of the most conspicuous of our ‘‘choir’’’. The result is a generally accepted portrait of a puritan agitator, tactician, and parliamentary organizer.

The contemporary international system is at once the continuation and the negation ofthe old European states-system. It is the continuation in the sense that the world is nowpeopled with the same kind of political bodies that were formerly concentrated within thearea of Europe alone, namely sovereign states. The overseas empires of Britain, France, Spain, and others, represented both the subordination of the rest of the world to Europe, and the media through which the state as a political structure was exported from Europe. The dissolution of these empires, foreshadowed by the independence of the United States and the emancipation of Spain's Latin American colonies, and accomplished definitively in the half-century following the Great War, signified the extension of inter-state relationships to the world in general, while it marked the end of the domination of the European states in particular.

South Wales and the border counties played a crucial part in the events known as the ‘Popish plot’. The alleged catholic conspiracy laid particular emphasis on the roles allotted to Welsh magnates like Worcester and Powis, with their neighbours and dependants, and invasion plans were said to hinge on strategic centres like Chepstow castle and Milford Haven. Men from this area were active in the’plot’, whether as informers - notably Bedloe - or as parliamentary opponents of the duke of York; Welsh Jesuits were supposedly involved in the main conspiracies and murders, and Border protestants like Bishop Croft were among their main targets. John Arnold of Monmouthshire even aspired to the position in the whig leadership held by Shaftesbury, and the tory Ailesbury regarded the worst villains of the whole ‘plot’ as Arnold himself and his Herefordshire kinsman John Dutton Colt. It was also in this area that the ‘plot’ was at its most violent, and Professor Kenyon's study of the Popish plot rightly refers to ‘this battle area on the frontier of Wale’. ‘The main damage suffered outside London’ by the Jesuits was the loss of the south Wales district headquarters at the Cwm, when this was raided in 1678 by Croft, Arnold, and another ultra-protestant named Charles Price: ‘ the south Wales mission was the only one completely eliminated’. In 1679 a Jesuit wrote from north Wales that’ the college of South Wales was totally rooted up. We of the north have fared a little better, thus far; but God knows how long it is to last, for we live in constant fears and perils, only three of us now remaining’.

England has not known a simple two-party system, or a party system of any sort. The lineage of English parties is fragmented and discontinuous. Most of the apparent continuities, like the myth of a long-standing two-party system, have been invented in retrospect by politicians and publicists seeking the justification of a pedigree. Party itself has not been a constant phenomenon, which could be defined by the political scientist and then searched for by the historian. The English experience, rather, is of a succession of discontinuous two-, three-, even four-party systems whose components both develop and relate to each other through changing conventions. Often the fiction of the ‘two-party system’ has disguised the reality of three or more parties; parties which, themselves, can be the vehicles for a wide range of issues. It is a commonplace, which was evident to Hume and Bolingbroke, that whigs and tories exchanged many of their policy commitments in the early eighteenth century; but the same suggestion has been made of the Conservative and Labour parties today. The content of a party's programme has always been almost infinitely flexible; except in respect of the questions raised by a small number of threats, challenges or problems. The existence and endurance of party systems has usually articulated the ideological polarity which such challenges induce.

On 10 May 1791 the British house of commons was divided on an unsuccessful attempt to move the repeal of the Test Act as it applied to Scotland. Since then this has been one of the more neglected of the many religious issues which were deeply embedded in late eighteenth-century British politics. It might be described as the ‘Scottish sequel’ to the movement in 1787–90 for the general repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Yet it had its own distinctive features and reverberations which were by no means confined to Scotland. It is proposed here to examine the background, nature, progress and outcome of the Scottish application, to consider how it differed from the events of 1787–90, to investigate the role of its sponsor and leading parliamentary advocate Sir Gilbert Elliot and to look closely at the voting on the subject of the Scottish M.P.s. The aim will then be to consider the episode against the background of contemporary parliamentary politics.

To most Frenchmen of the revolutionary generation the south conjured up a stereotype image of militant royalism in which bizarrely accoutred peasants followed ci-devant seigneurs and priests into battle and murder gangs toiled under a burning sun. The principal weakness of such a view lies not in the factual detail nor even in the presumption that the entire population was insurgent, but in its essentially linear perspective. As a recent historian has observed, the south can be characterized not only by its fervent royalist commitment but also by its predilection for the politics of extremes. The complicating and exacerbating factor in this southern counter-revolutionary equation was the presence of a parallel and equally uncompromising loyalty to the Republic. Of course, both stances were rationalizations whose ideological content needs careful weighing, but their interaction in small and often volatile communities provided counter-revolution with a dynamic which perpetuated confrontation and drove each side to extremes of savagery and fanaticism.

Historians have in recent years used several approaches to explain the first Reform Act. Michael Brock's elegant account sets the whole Reform crisis in its political context. D. C. Moore has attempted a ‘sociological’ explanation of ministers’ intentions, while John Milton-Smith has offered a more traditional analysis of their private papers. This emphasis on the men who framed and steered the measure through parliament perhaps obscures the role of the ordinary members in whose hands its fate rested. Like the ministers, the backbenchers also suffered intense periods of indecision, soul-searching and calculation based on a confused mixture of pragmatism and principle. This is especially true of the moderates, the men of the parliamentary centre, who provided the vital votes for the government's hair-breadth majority on the second reading in February 1831, but who deserted them to support General Gascoyne's motion a few days later. Only fifteen M.P.s voted both for the Bill and for Gascoyne's motion, thus locating themselves - at least temporarily - at the very centre of the political spectrum.

In the numerous works devoted to the French civil war of 1871, nothing has so much been taken for granted as the motives of the government during the six weeks that separated its taking office on 19 February and the outbreak of fighting on 2 April. Thiers and his colleagues are part of the myth of the Commune, the scribes and pharisees of the revolutionary passion play. They fill the roles well: there are few figures so unprepossessing in the history of nineteenth-century France.

The so-called ‘decade of reform’ witnessed far-reaching changes not only in Britain's domestic affairs but also in the colonial sphere. This applied particularly to the sugar colonies. Until the early 1830s the economy and society of those colonies had rested upon two main pillars – slave labour and a protected market for their produce in the United Kingdom. Yet within a few years the first of these pillars was completely destroyed, the second was already beginning to crumble, and the old ruling classes in the sugar colonies were in a state of frustration, rapidly despairing of the possibility of adapting themselves to the new situation.

Political economy suffered a sharp decline in prestige and influence in Britain after 1870. The methods, doctrines and policies of the classical school were called into question by a younger generation of economists, eager to respond positively to the sudden appearance of the ‘ social problem’ in politics. The most dramatic break with the old school took place in the sphere of policy, where the link between laissez-faire and political economy was severed. Economists such as Jevons, Cairnes, Sidgwick, Toynbee and Marshall led the assault on the orthodox school.1 Unfortunately, the very success of their attack has conditioned historians to assume that they spoke for all their generation. Such was not the case. Below the level of the leading academic economists and liberal social reformers a strong current of opinion ran in the opposite direction; it feared the growth of socialism and looked to a re-juvenated ‘science’ of political economy as the only counterpoise to it.

One of the recurrent challenges to the historian of the French Revolution is that of interpreting the transition from the liberalism of its early years to the centralized dictatorship of the Terror. Why did the constitution of 1791, that remarkable legislative achievement which stood for so long as a model to nineteenth-century liberal reformers, collapse within a year of its enactment? How did the individual and political liberties guaranteed by that constitution become submerged so rapidly under the flood of repressive legislation during the Year II? What made the impressive façade of the annus mirabilis of 1790 crumble into political dissension from the summer of 1791 onwards, revealing the stark realities of religious conflict, war, insurrection and civil strife? Whether one regards this transition as the unfortunate consequence of a succession of political accidents or as the inevitable result of deeply rooted social conflict, the role of Jacobinism in the process is fundamental, for it provided both the personnel and the ideology that was to dominate political life throughout the Terror. As Michelet was one of the first to point out, Jacobinism underwent several transformations during the five years of its existence as a formal political movement, moving decisively to the left after the secession of the Feuillants in July 1791 and again with the expulsion of the leading Girondins in the following autumn, until it reached its final and most characteristic stage only at the height of the Terror, during Year II.

The minor heroes of anarchism have not been much noticed by historians. Johann Most, who was quite a celebrated anarchist in his own time, now lives chiefly in footnotes and in a few passing recollections in the memoirs of more famous contemporaries. His neglect is not altogether surprising. Anarchism must always suffer neglect while it remains (as yet) one of history's minor tributaries, an aberration, a movement with no discernible place in the mainstream of human political development. Anarchists themselves are generally of little intrinsic interest to anyone unless they are notable thinkers, like Kropotkin, or activists, like Malatesta. Johann Most was neither: not a philosopher of any sophistication, nor (so far as is known) a bomb-thrower. He came between the two: an acid-tongued propagandist for the cause of anarchy who advocated the use of violence, by others. As such he is acknowledged to have had a significant influence on the early growth of anarchist movements in Germany, the United States, and in Britain, where he lived from 1878 to 1882. He may however have been more significant for the things that were done to him than for the things he did. Everywhere Most moved he provoked reactions, persecution, imprisonment. It will be argued here that this is where the importance of the English stage of his career lay.

Important landmarks, especially on the well-trodden ground of British history, sometimes appear to be so precisely delineated that they leave little room for re-interpretation. Yet if familiar episodes are looked at from perspectives which pose new questions and call for different evidence the result may well be unexpectedly illuminating. The making of the Second Reform Act is a good example. Though the subject of close scholarly investigation in terms of British parliamentary politics, it has not hitherto been viewed as only one of many closely linked domestic and foreign pressures which bore upon the British polity between 1866 and 1868 and which together exercised a decisive influence upon it. Reform, public order, economic recession, integration of the classes, concern about defence, and the challenge to Britain's international standing, were all components of the same crisis, and whether by chance or ingenuity it was the same power groups which had to handle them within the confines of time and circumstance.

Some years ago in this journal, Oliver MacDonagh suggested a general framework for the study of administrative growth and change in nineteenth century Britain. The chief significance of this work is that it views the transformation of executive government as ‘a genuine historical process’. In the peculiar circumstances of the nineteenth century, he argues, administration was’ creative and self-generating’ in the sense that its functional and structural elaboration operated ‘beyond the control or comprehension of anyone in particular’. To this extent, administrative development is depicted as having remained remarkably free from the influence of ‘external forces’, while breeding and feeding off its own internal momentum.

In 1915 and again in 1917 the British government almost decided to buy out the whole of the licensed liquor trade in the United Kingdom. An examination of the circumstances in which this ambitious proposal was contemplated poses serious questions of interpretation for the historian of the first World War. The episode figures in the historiography of temperance as a missed opportunity to use the power of government to solve a longstanding social problem; this, however, was a minor part of the story. In 1915 state purchase was to have helped to reduce industrial absenteeism, and thus to increase munitions production. In 1917 it was to have conserved foodstuffs and saved shipping during the submarine crisis. It can thus be seen as yet another manifestation of ‘war socialism’: but it has two distinctive characteristics. First, the government had little understanding of the economic and social phenomena which it sought to control by assuming ownership of the liquor trade, though much political effort was put into the manoeuvre. Second, the private interests concerned were quite eager, partly because of pre-war conditions, to be expropriated for their own good as much as for the nation's benefit. It is an unexceptionable part of conventional wisdom that the first World War, like the second, was a major catalyst of change, and especially of state intervention in society. The history of state purchase shows how tenuous and haphazard the causal connexion between war and social change could be. The demands of war were (almost) translated into major state intervention, but the process was mediated by the political mythology of drink, by the operation in the political system of a powerful business pressure group, and by the shifting priorities of governments which subordinated all policy to the need to guide a war economy to victory.