English political thought in the early seventeenth century is often regarded in terms of the disagreements between the king and his parliaments, and of debates amongst lawyers on the nature and contents of the ancient constitution. But a large proportion of the political writings of early seventeenth-century English theorists was directed against the views of Catholic authors. Sir Robert Filmer devoted much of his Patriarcha to refuting the theories of those two great pillars of counter-reformation Catholicism, Bellarmine and Suarez. Suarez's Defensio fidei was burned at Paul's Cross on 21 November 1613. James I believed that by ‘setting up the People above their naturall King’ the political thinking of the Jesuits laid ‘ an excellent ground in Divinitie for all rebels and rebellious people’. One aim of this paper is to suggest that many of the most characteristic ideas on politics of English writers in the early seventeenth century can best be understood in the context of their polemical aim: the refutation of the seditious doctrines of the Papists. This is particularly true of patriarchalism, a subject on which Filmer was no innovator.

On 28 January 1689 the house of commons of the newly assembled Convention resolved that King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of this kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the government and that the throne is thereby vacant.

In December 1721 the Irish parliament threw out the heads of a bill to establish a national bank in Ireland, and both houses passed resolutions which leave no doubt that the bank was perceived as a major constitutional threat. It has been clear to all historians that opposition to the bank was not based on a simple assessment of its economic viability, but it is much less clear that the political considerations that were involved have been as fully appreciated. L. M. Cullen has drawn attention to the extent to which eighteenth-century accounts of the Irish economy are coloured by non-economic criteria, and in particular ‘by a nascent constitutional agitation and economic nationalism’ in the 1720s. ‘An economic mythology established itself very quickly with the writings of the 1720s and the political concerns which manifested themselves in that decade providing the base of arguments which were repeated in subsequent writing.’ If this is true, then it is no less necessary to have a clear account of those political concerns than to have an economic history that is free of them.

Agricultural distress following the Napoleonic wars evoked various responses from those classes whose interests were most immediately bound up with the land. Such factors as decreasing market prices and hence wages, a falling standard of living, and rising indebtedness incited, on the one hand, the disciples of Captain Swing to attempt to restore to the agricutural labourer his dispossessed inheritance, or at least to register protest at its loss. For the landowners and farmers, on the other hand, constitutional means of redress were clearly more acceptable, and between 1815 and 1845 there were several attempts to develop a protectionist organization of farmers’ associations, led, particularly in the early years, by George Webb Hall, and in the latter often associated with Lord Chandos.

Many historians now recognize that the establishment of central government inspection was of great importance in advancing mid-nineteenth-century social and administrative reform. MacDonagh, for example, calls the appointment of inspectors ‘a step of immense, if unforeseen, consequences’. Parris, in many respects MacDonagh’s critic, acknowledges that inspectors ‘played a leading role in legislation, including the development of their own powers’. Other authorities have taken a similar line; indeed, Burn maintains that the period could be characterized ‘the age of the inspector’, so pervasive was his influence.

The advent of the Hitler regime in Germany in early 1933, with its emphasis on the overthrow of the Versailles- peace treaty restrictions and the re-militarization of German society, caused a fundamental shift in the focus of Bntish intelligence activity. Germany replaced Russia and the Comintern as the primary target. The arm of German military power which commanded the most attention was the Luftwaffe, Germany's new air force. The bomber was the only weapon with which Germany could directly threaten Britain; by which London and the industrial Midlands could be made vulnerable; which could strike at the civilian population. Out of this nexus of strategic anxieties, the air staff created their ‘worst-case’ assumption. The worst case, as the air ministry consistently saw it during the 1930s, was a massive German air attack launched against Great Britain with the object of forcing a quick surrender, primarily through the collapse of civilian morale. Group Captain J. C. Slessor, director of plans in the air ministry (and a future chief of the air staff), admitted in his memoirs that,’ in those years immediately before the war the possibility of what was referred to as the knock-out blow bore very heavily on the minds of the Air Staff’.

The C.I.A. was taxed with five major intelligence failures by the influential New York Herald Tribune on 2 August 1950. This newpaper article was only part of a widespread campaign to reorganize the C.I.A. The concern of the C.I.A. director, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, over the allegations was so acute that on the following day he prepared an apologia sent to President Truman. Three of the alleged failures of prediction concerned the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists, events in Palestine and the 1948 Bogota conference – the last now largely forgotten but the cause of great contemporary scandal when Secretary of State Marshall was attacked by a mob. The other two were in Europe. They were the inability to predict the fall of Czechoslovakia and the defection of Tito. Blaming the C.I.A. for not predicting the communist coup in Czechoslovakia was unfair, but there was more substance to the accusation concerning Yugoslavia.