It was Harold J. Laski who said “the road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one,” and he did so when speaking of the constitutional theories enunciated by the Conciliar thinkers and put into practice at the Council of Constance. These closely related theories had their roots deep in the corporative thinking of the medieval canon lawyers but sprang into prominence during the years after 1378, when the Western Church was divided first into two and then into three “obediences” under the sway of rival claimants to the Papacy. Basic to all the Conciliar theories was the central insistence that the final authority in the Church lay not with the Pope but with the whole body of the faithful and that the Pope possessed, therefore, not an absolute but merely a ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church. This belief made it possible to appeal from the obduracy of the rival pontiffs to the decision of the faithful as expressed through their representatives assembled in a General Council of the whole Church, and such a possibility was actualized at the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Basel (1431-1449) and, most strikingly of all, at Constance (1414-1418). There it found expression, not only in the judgment and deposition of popes, but also in the promulgation of the decree Sacrosancta (1415), which declared:

The reign of Charles II was described by Wodrow as “one of the blackest periods,” and by the late Hume Brown as “the most pitiful chapter” of Scottish history, The former attributed Charles's tyranny to the influence of popery; Hume Brown thought it stemmed from his desire to maintain his prerogative and to fill his purse. Doubtless the latter was more nearly correct. Nevertheless, a re-examination of the events of 1660-61 in the light of certain new materials suggests that the restoration of Scottish episcopacy was accomplished only after much hesitation by the King and his principal advisers, who were far less sanguine of success than the firebrands in Edinburgh. The interdependence of Scottish and English developments was also probably more important than has hitherto been supposed. In this paper the Erastian character of the restoration in Scotland has rendered necessary the inclusion of certain political questions, but its main purpose is to elucidate the ecclesiastical settlement.

The extravagant rejoicings at the restoration of monarchy afford ample proof of Scotland's relief at the prospect of the dissolution of the union with England. The nation eagerly looked forward to the withdrawal of the English forces, the end of the cess, and the re-establishment of the old government by King, Council, and Parliament. The King's return seemed so desirable that no one thought to impose any conditions as the price of his restoration, and no Declaration of Breda was issued for Scotland.

Popular enthusiasm temporarily concealed the deep divisions between the Protesters (or Remonstrants) and the Resolutioners, the two principal parties in both church and state.

The most familiar view of party, and one held almost universally for a century and a half, sees a continuity in party history from the Whigs and Tories of Charles II's reign to the Liberals and Conservatives of Victoria's. This view received its classic expression at the hands of Macaulay, and with him it was a verdict arrived at before he even began The History of England and more than thirty years before he finished with it. In an election speech at Edinburgh in 1839 he proudly traced his Whig ancestry back to the Roundheads of the time of Charles I. In the opening section of the History he was more specific and selected a certain day in October of 1641 for the birth of the modern party system. “From that day,” he wrote, “dates the corporate existence of the two parties which have ever since alternately governed the country.”

Macaulay was not the first historian to reach such a conclusion. Writing some twenty years earlier the Catholic John Lingard, in dealing with the 1678-1681 crisis over Exclusion of the Duke of York, wrote that “it was during this period that the appellations of Whig and Tory became permanently affixed to the two great political parties which for a century and a half [1680-1830] have divided the nation.” Even before the turn of the nineteenth century the same idea had been suggested by Thomas Somerville in his History of England which appeared in 1792.

In most histories of Great Britain in the eighteenth century the ministry of Henry Pelham, 1743 to 1754, is accorded small space. For example, Basil Williams' The Whig Supremacy, in the Oxford History of England, devotes only slightly more than thirty pages to these eleven years. No full-scale biography of Pelham has appeared since Archdeacon Coxe's enormous two-volume work in 1829, and this, as Macaulay wrote of a similar work, was the product of the author's scissors and paste pot rather than of his pen. Much has been done on phases of the career of Newcastle, but no complete biography has been attempted. It has been suggested that the enormous mass of material in the Newcastle and Hardwicke papers available in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum has scared off possible biographers. This, however, is not the only explanation. At one time I gave serious consideration to devoting several years to a full biography of the Duke; but in the end it was the quality of Newcastle and not the quantity of the material which deterred me.

The neglect of Pelham, however, is more puzzling; and appears to be a case of unsalutary neglect. Possibly the best explanation lies in the Pittolatry (if the term is allowable) of the great majority of both English and American historians writing on this period. Usually Pelham is not even ranked as a John the Baptist to William Pitt, but rather is treated in the same relationship to him as the older interpretation of the Old Regime in France is to the French Revolution and the Unreformed House of Commons to the Reform Bill of 1832.

Of the many books which have been written about Edmund Burke, very few compare in importance with a book which was never written. Burke's “official biography” was first promised by his literary executors four years after his death; it was to be the final volume in their edition of his Works. When contemporaries realised, as they soon did, that the bringing out of the Works was going to take many years, some guessed that the biography might be postponed indefinitely. Sir James Mackintosh late in 1806, having remarked of Burke that “perhaps a fit biographer is more important to his just fame than ever such a person was before to a great man,” added a sharp comment:

Alas! it was exactly the case. When Dr. French Laurence, the most energetic of Burke's literary executors, died in 1809, he had seen through the press four volumes of the octavo edition of the Works but no portion of the promised biography. He had collected biographical materials, which are still among Burke's papers, but nothing was thrown into form. His collaborator and successor, Dr. Walker King, went on collecting materials, and renewed the promise of a biography, but he too put off its execution until his other tasks could be accomplished.

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.

Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.

I

A Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.

In the familiar line “Time makes ancient good uncouth”, James Russell Lowell enunciated what can almost stand as a natural law of endowed charities. Over the decades, as social values change and new institutional arrangements develop, obsolescence becomes the inevitable destiny of masses of these benefactions in perpetuity, especially those with specific and rigid trusts. And broadly speaking, the more ancient the good, the more uncouth it will seem in the light of latter-day needs.

The goodly company of Victorian reformers numbered in its varied ranks a small group of individuals whose particular concern was the condition of Britain's charities. Here, they suspected, was a national resource that might be made to contribute more productively to the new age. Early in the century Henry Brougham had professed to see in properly administered endowments the basis for an adequate system of elementary education, and had inspired the exhaustive survey of the nation's nearly thirty thousand charitable trusts. The inquiry lasted for two decades, cost more than £250,000, and filled about forty volumes — the “Domesday Book of Charities.” Parliament took nearly fifteen years to act on the report, and in the end granted to the Charity Commission (the agency that emerged from it all) less ample powers of initiative and supervision than the more eager reformers had demanded. As a general thing, only when the administration of an endowment became so scandalous as to raise questions of breach of trust or when its objects were so antiquated as virtually to immobilize the charity was the state inclined to intervene.

Customarily, the British Labour party has been regarded as the natural product of an advanced industrial society. Given a sufficiently developed economy, like Britain's in the early years of the twentieth century, it was assumed that a socialist working-class party was due to emerge as an increasingly large and effective force. In this democratized version of Marxism, the absence of such a party in the United States had to be explained as the result of the relative immaturity of American industrial society. Labor in the United States was on the same political road as labor in Western Europe, but well behind. Especially did it seem behind labor in Britain, “the country in which modern Capitalism first emerged to full growth — the country which was, therefore, the pioneer of Labour organisation.

That this entire approach needs to be reconsidered is now plain. Recent American political trends fail to support the expectation of a European-style working-class movement in the United States, and this type of party in Western Europe itself appears by this time to have had more of a past than it has a future. Socialism is hardly a thriving faith in advanced western nations, and the old class base for protest movements is being shaken as Western European societies share larger national products, assimilate increasingly their higher paid workers to bourgeois styles of life, decrease the proportion of manualists in the total work force, and provide wider educational opportunities. As Aneurin Bevan said deploringly of the new generation of British working-class voters, whose support Labour had failed to attract in the 1959 general election, “This section of the population has become thoroughly Americanized.”