In 1956 Professor Roskell, at the end of his discussion of the attendance of the lords in medieval parliaments, showed very briefly that attendances improved considerably during the reign of Henry VIII. More recently an attempt has been made to demonstrate a political significance in the use made by the Crown of the customary right of absent lords to nominate proctors to speak and vote for them in the House of Lords. The importance of the early sixteenth century for the development of Parliament seems to warrant another approach to the problem of attendance in the House of Lords during the reign of Henry VIII. So far the evidence has not been fully exploited nor have all the relevant questions been asked.

Although after the peace of Ryswick it was generally expected that the sea powers would renew the Grand Alliance, by April 1698 King William had already concluded that he was free to embark on the Partition negotiations without infringing any obligation towards the emperor. At his audience on 13 June the imperial ambassador Count Leopold von Auersberg still brought up the question of the allied undertaking to lend a fleet to convey the Archduke Charles and a German army to Catalonia, but fortunately the emperor himself had freed the king from this outstanding obligation by telling the king of Spain that he would be unable to provide for an expeditionary force, until he had made peace with the Turks. So although Auersberg put several awkward questions they could all be answered by general and rather non-committal assurances.

Within the last twenty years, historians' views about the significance of ‘Benthamism’ for the development of British government in the nineteenth century have fluctuated pretty widely. In 1948 J. B. Brebner set decisively in motion a movement away from the interpretation, stated in classic but curiously ambivalent form by A. V. Dicey, which made Bentham the philosopher and advocate of an allegedly dominant policy of laissez faire or ‘individualism’. Brebner attacked both legs of Dicey's argument, contending that in the years 1825–70 (which Dicey had identified as the period of individualism) the scale and variety of State intervention were extensive, and that the State intervention of the time ‘in practically all of its many forms was basically Benthamite—Benthamite in the sense of conforming closely to that forbidding, detailed blueprint for a collectivist state, the Constitutional Code’. More recently, some specialists in nineteenth-century administrative history have accepted, and have in some directions extended, one side of Brebner's thesis, but have cast doubt on the other side. Thus, reinforcing Brebner's interpretation of Victorian policy-making, David Roberts has located ‘the origins of the welfare state’ in the period 1832–54, and Oliver MacDonagh has argued that in ‘the middle quarters of the nineteenth-century…(contrary to all expectation and desire) the collectivist system of the present day began to take its shape’. But in developing their themes Roberts and MacDonagh have tended to attach little importance to what Dicey called ‘opinion’—consciously formulated and coherently worked-out beliefs or programmes—and to stress instead the pragmatic responses of politicians and administrators to problems and events.

The process of parliamentary reform which laid the foundations for a democratic political structure in this country contained much that was haphazard, and it is the object of this paper to discuss some of these elements, and particularly some of the conceptions and aims on which the legislation was based, and the technical defects of the legislation itself.

It is well known that the nomination of a Radical candidate in the by-election held in April 1873 in the department of the Seine split the Republican ranks and that his victory contributed to the fall of Thiers, the President of the Third French Republic. This contest, in which the comparatively obscure Désiré Barodet, a former primary school teacher and latterly mayor of Lyon, defeated the Comte Charles de Rémusat, friend of Thiers and minister for Foreign Affairs, was one of the most exciting in the history of the Third Republic; indeed Paris witnessed no such tumultuous election again until the candidature of General Boulanger in 1889. It was important for its consequences and for the passions it aroused. But it is also of interest for reasons which are less well known, and which are considered or reconsidered here. Quite apart from the fact that it was only one, albeit by far the most dramatic, of eight by-elections which took place on 27 April, it cannot be separated from the subsequent election of Arthur Ranc at Lyon on 11 May. These two elections brought into the limelight two interesting and influential figures in the early history of the Third Republic; they also vividly illustrated the methods and influence of the leader of the Radical Republicans, Léon Gambetta.

In 1855 Sir Francis Baring described the Whigs as ‘a body of men…[who] when the people are roused stand between the constitution and revolution and go with the people, but not to extremities’. The Great Reform Bill and Russell's further franchise proposals from 1852 to 1866 were characteristic attempts to conciliate ‘the people’ by extending timely reforms which would preserve the balance of the British constitution. The Whigs had learned the moral of the story of the Sibylline books and accepted its relevance to the process of constitutional reform. Gladstone's Irish Home Rule bill signalled the passing of their moderating influence in the councils of liberalism. However, during the following six years they influenced the Tory government's response to the demands of the newly emerged Indian National Congress. From 1886 Lord Dufferin, the Whig viceroy, pressed for concessions that would ‘take the wind out of the sails’ of the Congress, and from 1889 his successor, Lord Lansdowne, pursued a similar approach. The Tory Councils Act of 1892 was no large constitutional advance. However, it embodied the principle of representation and the germ of the idea of election. That it went so far is attributable to the exertions of the Whig peers, at Westminster no less than in India. The Unionist Lord Northbrook, son of Sir Francis Baring and a former viceroy, proposed a crucial amendment to the Councils bill, and it was carried with the authoritative support of the earl of Kimberley, thrice Gladstone's secretary of state for India and one whom Morley recalled as ‘at the top of the Whigs that I have known’.

Sir Edward Grey entered the Foreign Office at a time when it was being rapidly transformed. A change in the registration system had freed the junior officials from most routine operations and encouraged the senior men to take a more active part in the actual formation of foreign policy. At the same time, a new group of men took over the most important departmental positions and entered the chief European embassies. For the most part, these men were far more conscious of German power than their predecessors and set the tone of British policy during the first years of Grey's Foreign Secretaryship. Charles Hardinge, Louis Mallet, William Tyrrell and Eyre Crowe in London, Francis Bertie, ambassador in Paris, Arthur Nicolson in St Petersburg and, after 1907, Goschen in Berlin were all to play important roles in shaping the new course.

Germany's position among the great powers of Europe had endured numerous setbacks since 1890. No longer could the Germans look at a Europe in which most of the powers were closely associated with her while her rival, France, stood alone and isolated. In 1894 Russia had become an ally of France, in 1904 Great Britain had signed an agreement with the French, and in 1907 Russia and Great Britain had come to terms. After 1904 the probability of an Anglo-German rapprochement decreased. One of the principal items settled in the Anglo-French entente had been the future of Morocco. Great Britain had agreed that France might establish a protectorate in that area when the time seemed propitious. Furthermore, the French had also signed treaties with Italy and Spain concerning Morocco's future. But Germany, who had been a signatory of the Madrid Convention of 1880, the original agreement dealing with Morocco, had not even been officially notified, let alone consulted. Thus, Morocco had become a symbol of Germany's declining prestige.