The royal court known variously as the “court of the verge,” the “court of the steward and marshal,” or the “Marshalsea court,” and which was said to try “pleas of the hall” (placita aule), appeared as a distinct and separate tribunal during the second half of Edward I's reign. It is difficult to trace the process whereby it distinguished its highly specialized jurisdiction over matters of personal interest to the king and his household from the general jurisdiction exercised coram rege and thereby succeeded in separating itself from the undifferentiated Curia Regis. Since at least the early thirteenth century the steward of the household was viewed as having a special judicial role within the household, of which he was the appointed head. As a result of that process of departmentalization which created the other agencies of royal justice and administration, a special household jurisdiction appeared toward the end of the thirteenth century. About the year 1290 the court of the steward and marshal of the household emerged as a separate and identifiable judicial body with its own personnel, procedures, and rolls, and with a jurisdictional competence encompassing pleas of trespass within the verge, cases of debt involving members of the household, and pleas of contempt of the king's rights of purveyance and carriage. In substance, the court claimed to try cases involving the domestic servants of the crown and certain acts affronting the royal dignity and, in geographical terms, breaches of the king's peace within the vicinity of the royal residence, which was assumed to extend twelve miles in every direction from the especially sacrosanct presence of the sovereign.

The life of James Harrington is singularly ill-documented. None of his manuscripts is known to survive; he makes few and insignificant appearances in the state papers of his time; and though he was clearly a sociable and talkative man, in an age when scholars and writers all knew one another and wrote letters which they kept, correspondence from, to or about him is altogether lacking. Apart from the personal reminiscences of John Aubrey (who knew him well) and a few details from Thomas Herbert, we depend for our knowledge of his life on information supplied through John Toland, deist and literary adventurer, who edited his works in 1699-1700. It seems that a sister, Lady Assheton, formed a collection of papers by and concerning her brother, which entered the possession of a younger half-sister, Dorothy, the wife of James Bellingham, then of Levens Hall in Westmoreland. She was alive in 1699, though no longer living at Levens, and made the Assheton collection available to Toland. He found there, and published, a number of Harrington's manuscript writings, and we must suppose that the detail he gives of Harrington's life and circumstances is based either on personal information from Dorothy Bellingham or on material from Lady Assheton's papers. But whether these still exist is unknown, and though some of Toland's statements can be corroborated and few have been proved wrong, there is a great deal of what he says which is very hard to test against independent evidence. This state of affairs is especially unsatisfying when one is trying to reconstruct an account of the intellectual and political situation in which works were read and responded to by their first public; for it is here that Toland (though a serious and conscientious editor), writing forty years later with strong ideological prepossessions of his own, is least likely to be of help.

On October 30, 1673 Sir Paul Neile took his seat in the House of Commons. In early August he and Henry Savile had been elected the first members from Newark-on-Trent, newly enfranchised by a royal charter granted the preceding March. But the seating of the two new members proved to be no simple thing. Determined parliamentary opposition not only to the king's grant itself but also to the terms of that grant were to delay the admission of Newark's burgesses for four years and to require a second election before that admission was finally accomplished. The Commons saw in this, Charles II's only attempt to enfranchise a borough by charter, a royal design to dilute and weaken their newly and hard-won power. In the charter's offending clauses, which limited the parliamentary franchise to the Mayor and Aldermen, or Corporation of Newark, they saw a scheme to grant privilege only to those whom the crown could readily control and through whom it might strengthen the court faction in the lower House. The debate was protracted, but intermittent. The Commons knew the force of legal precedent to support the king, but they also recognized what the consequence would be if the Newark attempt were to succeed. For though the argument was legal, the debate was political.

The question itself seems slight, but its implications were not. In the end the king was forced to acknowledge defeat. The increasing momentum of the opposition, and the emergence of more important issues finally indicated that to insist would be impolitic, and the king's faction settled for compromise.

“Shortest damn age in history” was The New Yorker's comment on this little gem; and the phrase, which for some decades did manful duty among writers of school textbooks and “popular historians” like the Durants and Sir Harold Nicolson as a substitute for study and thought, deserves no better epitaph. To the serious historian, these questions of labeling — “Shall we call the Dark Ages the Age of Faith, or shall we call the Age of Faith the Dark Ages? Shall we call 1660-1800 in Britain the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment or the Neo-Classical Age or the Augustan Age?” — seem only tedious pseudo-problems, better left for journalists — and professors of literature — to play with if it amuses them and their readers; for his purposes, it suffices to call 1660-1800 “1660-1800.” He knows too well that such labels represent not only naive oversimplifications and distortions of history, but sometimes even reversals of the historical actuality. “The Age of Reason” is certainly one of these latter. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that “reason,” as signifying the power of the human mind, without external aid, to arrive at valuable truth, was, together with its handmaid “logic,” seldom in worse repute than in Britain from 1660 onward. The whole tendency of the ruling empiricist philosophy of the time, that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” — is to minimize it and exalt experience in its place.

Bentham has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, a controversy which has illuminated an important area of English social history but has left obscure an essential part of Bentham himself. The main point at issue has been his influence as a social reformer — the extent to which he was personally or ideologically responsible for the reforms of the nineteenth-century, ultimately the extent to which any person or ideology was responsible for those reforms. But a prior issue has been largely ignored. This is the question of his character as a social reformer, the character and quality of the reforms which he proposed and which are presumed to have inspired, or not to have inspired, the reforms later adopted. The only aspect of this question which has been raised is the hoary one of whether he was primarily a laissez-fairist or government-interventionist. And even here his general pronouncements have been quoted more often than his actual proposals for reform. For the rest, it has been assumed that his reforms were humane, benevolent, philanthropic, enlightened, rational, progressive; the words recur with tedious predictability in one account after another. Even those critics who have found his philosophy unsatisfactory have been content, and more than content, with his practical efforts to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But while we are often called upon to admire and emulate “the humble, rational, humanitarian spirit of this great man,” we are rarely shown the actual working and practical results of that spirit — the reforms themselves.

Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British authorities, both in London and Calcutta, were becoming progressively more concerned about the security of India's undefined northern border along which the empires of Britain, Russia and China and the kingdom of Afghanistan met. Although the Russian capture of Francis Younghusband in 1891 and the consequent danger of war had forced the British and Russians to the conference table, Russia, China and Afghanistan were still on a collision course in those reaches of the Pamirs beyond the purview of Anglo-Russian bilateral border talks. Consequently, when the Russians forced the Chinese to withdraw from Ak-Tash and defeated an Afghan force encamped at Somatash, the nightmore vision of Russian armies poised at the gates of India suddenly appeared both real and terrifying.

The Government of India's reaction was prompt. The governor general, Lord Lansdowne, determined to strengthen the garrison at Gilgit, the British station to the north of Kashmir. But the position in Gilgit was viable only if Chitral, to the west, were secure. This mountain satrapy was, in the eyes of Calcutta, the key to the defense of the whole northern border, and while Mehtar Aman-ul-Mulk occupied the throne of the state, British influence was paramount. But in September 1892, this venerable and crafty autocrat died, opening a Pandora's box of succession controversy that had remained largely sealed during the deceased ruler's lengthy hegemony.

The immediate consequences of the mehtar's death gave little indication of what was to follow.

When a powerful state seeks to impose its will on a weaker one, it expects to be subject to condemnation, which must be weighed against its assessment of national interest. Failure does not eliminate the condemnation; indeed it may intensify it. In most books and articles on the Jameson Raid and its antecedents, the fact that it was a fiasco foredoomed to disaster seems to add to the gravity of the indictment against those who planned it. In recent years scholars have devoted considerable attention to the question of the complicity of Joseph Chamberlain. Most of them have concluded that he was aware of an impending rising but that he was not acquainted with the details, principally because he did not choose to know. Most investigators have also averred that the High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Hercules Robinson, knew far more about the preparations for a coup than he was willing to admit.

The overthrow of the Transvaal Government, of course, had been the subject of discussions among Imperial officials long before the Raid. Robinson's predecessor, Sir Henry Loch, had plans as early as 1893 to intervene in the Transvaal in the event of an insurrection and the Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Ripon, knew of these plans and did not prohibit such action, even though he did not encourage it, and at the time of Robinson's appointment in 1895 he discussed with Ripon intervention to support a Johannesburg rising. Edmund Garrett, who talked to Ripon at this time, stated that if the raid had occurred while Ripon was in office, he could have telegraphed, “Ripon is in it up to his neck.”

Eric Hobsbawm recently observed that “a good deal of economics has the function not so much of telling government or business what they ought to do, as of telling them what they are doing (or not doing) is right.” Economic history, happily or unhappily, does not suffer from the same weakness. Its problem is rather the reverse: a good deal of economic history has the didactic function of telling us what should have been done, as though that were always possible. So it is with the critics of the Lloyd George coalition's postwar economic policies; they work from a retrospectively-divined ideal back to an explanation for the coalition's melancholic failure to grasp and pursue that ideal. This has made for portrayals of the untried paths as relatively unobstructed, clearly marked and negotiable, while the route actually taken is seen as a gamut, bordered by briars and surfaced with quagmires, through which the nation emerged badly scathed and shaken. To veer off the course of this prickly metaphor, the critics of the coalition's refusal to deflate or its negligence – one might almost say abandon – toward inflation and permissiveness make two types of arguments.

Most conspicuous by their unmitigated scorn are the socialists who see in the wartime state the first buds of what a socialist Britain could flower into.