The theory behind the Henrician religious settlement was that certain papal and episcopal powers of jurisdiction were vested in the Crown by parliamentary enactments because the Pope and the English bishops had failed to reform abuses in the Church. In the absence of an alternative administrative system, the bishops continued to govern the Church as agents of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy. Although some episcopal powers of jurisdiction were returned to the Elizabethan bishops, the actual authority allowed them did not suffice to effect a reformation or to enforce conformity to the established church. In order to resolve this crisis of episcopal authority the seventeenth-century prelates and divines elaborated theories of divine-right episcopacy, but the Elizabethan bishops found it more expedient to fall back upon extraordinary grants of royal authority contained in ecclesiastical commissions.

I

The Henrician and Edwardian alienations of episcopal jurisdiction are spectacular and dramatic, yet the erosion of episcopal authority began long before the Henrician Reformation. For over two centuries English bishops had been primarily royal servants. They were, by temperament and training canonists and diplomats rather than pastors; like the Renaissance popes they had grown accustomed to compromise rather than providing spiritual leadership. Not only in England, but throughout Western Europe, bishops rarely sat as judges in their own courts. Much of their authority had been permanently delegated to commissaries, who tended to become independent agents. They were, moreover, hard put to resist encroachments upon their ordinary authority by archdeacons and cathedral chapters, while ecclesiastical corporations devoted considerable effort to securing exemption from episcopal visitations.

It is a truism that the most distinctive features of the peculiarly English genius in politics are moderation and compromise. The sources of this spirit must be sought throughout the whole fabric of English history, but it should be easier to examine some of the stages by which it emerged onto the conscious level of political thought. How long have Englishmen spoken of political moderation as a good in itself? Herbert Butterfield awards to the Whigs the honor of contributing to modern British history their instinct for compromise. Locke has often been thought of as doing the same. But Toryism has come in for its share of the credit, and a student of John Dryden's thought has suggested that the Tory Dryden well illustrates the tradition of avoiding political extremes and reconciling liberty and authority. This is a fruitful suggestion, and it may be carried further by seeking evidence of this tradition in the predecessors of the Tories, the royalists of the Civil War period. These latter, far from being diehards or extremists, were the advocates of a political mean, and tried to defend at once the king's authority and the subject's liberty. In some degree, this is now widely conceded, but the significance of this moderation is not as clear as it ought to be, because its nature is not understood. When it is understood, it will be possible to say that the most important characteristic of seventeenth-century English royalism was not its defense of the king, but its defense of political moderation and limited government.

The struggle between King and Parliament in 1641-42 for command of the militia was to King Charles I “the Fittest Subject for a King's Quarrel.” As the King himself and a group of pamphleteers, preachers and members of Parliament realized, the controversy was not just a contest for control of military power. The fundamental issue was a change in England's government, a shift in sovereignty from King or King-in-Parliament to Parliament alone. As Charles explained, “Kingly Power is but a shadow” without command of the militia. His contemporaries, representing various political allegiances, also testified to the significance of the contest over the militia. They described it as the “avowed foundation” of the Civil War, “the greatest concernment” ever faced by the House of Commons, and the “great quarrel” between the King and his critics. To some men it was this dispute over military authority and the implications for government which were inherent in it, rather than disagreements about religion, taxes or foreign policy, that made civil war unavoidable.

Concern about military authority first erupted in the fall of 1641 in response to a series of events – rumors of plots involving the King, the presence in London of disbanded soldiers who had returned from the war with Scotland, the “Incident” in Scotland, and above all the rebellion in Ireland which required the levying of an army to subdue those rebels.

In recent years, the “party history” of William's and Anne's reigns has been the subject of renewed interest and controversy, centering especially on the structure of Augustan politics. But amidst the debate over the usefulness and validity of two-party or multi-party analyses, uncharted regions of the political terrain remain to be mapped. Not least among them is the electoral history of the 1690s, and the general election of 1690 is a leading case in point.

Historians from Boyer and Burnet down to the most recent student of the politics of William's reign, D. A. Rubini in his Court and Country 1688-1702, have commented briefly on this election, describing its conduct and characterizing its results primarily in terms of the rivalry of Whig and Tory. However, in his passing comments on the 1690 election, Rubini does challenge the received notion that the new Commons of March 1690 was “at least moderately Tory” in complexion. Noting that historians have failed hitherto to use the “black lists” published by supporters of the opposing groups during the campaign as a yardstick of its outcome, he goes on to suggest that the Whigs “did considerably better than has generally been supposed and the Tories less well.” His brief, but questioning remarks may perhaps serve, then, as a point of departure for a somewhat fuller account of the campaign and a more detailed analysis of the results of the election which returned the longest lived of William III's parliaments.

When the third Earl Grey attempted, between 1846 and 1851, to promote federations in Australasia, South Africa, and British North America, he found scant support either at home or in the colonies concerned. He failed (except, in a sense, in New Zealand) partly because his schemes were more visionary than practically suited to existing colonial conditions, and partly because measures “imposed by the imperial authority” were apt to encounter difficulties abroad and, therefore, political trouble at home. Following Grey's departure from the Colonial Office, imperial policy makers refrained from prescribing federal systems for the settlement colonies. His abortive plans, however, had consequences during the next twenty years which, though different from Grey's intentions, amply vindicated the ability of the imperial government to exert its authority, and established, in the end, the desirability of colonial federations. For a decade and a half after 1850, the home government repeatedly and successfully frustrated local proposals for federation in the three continental groups of colonies. Then, between 1864 and 1870, it hurried to completion the union of British North America, and set about promoting that of South Africa. At the same time, it refrained from pressing any such development upon Australia, and actually arranged the dismantling of New Zealand's federal/provincial system.

No inconsistency was involved. Britain's policy towards all these colonies was designed in favor of its own interests, tempered by a remarkable consideration of those of the colonies. The chief imperial object during the period in question (c. 1850-1870) was to reduce the country's military and political commitments; and the chosen device for the purpose was encouragement of colonial self-government, in various forms, including republican independence in the Boer states of South Africa.

“The revolution is made,” the Duke of Wellington declared in 1833, “that is to say power is transferred from one class in society, the gentlemen of England professing the faith of the Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers being dissenters from the Church, many of them being Socinians, others atheists.” Wellington's political postmortem was, to say the least, premature. The gentlemen of England and Wales continued to prosper, especially in the counties. In fact, most local government historians have argued that the landed classes virtually monopolized the administration of county affairs before 1888 when county government was institutionally restructured by the County Councils Act. The instrument of their control was the county magistracy acting in Quarter and Petty Sessions. K. B. Smellie, expressing a widely-held viewpoint, describes the county magistracy in the nineteenth century as the “rear guard of an agrarian oligarchy,” the “most aristocratic feature of English government.” Yet no one has furnished statistical evidence for this contention on a countrywide basis or for an extended time span. Is the notion of an aristocratic stranglehold over the counties really more impressionistic than substantive? By examining the “Returns of Justices of the Peace” between 1831 and 1887 in the British Parliamentary Papers, a nearly untapped statistical storehouse, it is possible to determine the degree of continuity in the social composition of the county magistracy.

Before doing so, it might be helpful to sketch the changing character of the Quarter Sessions.

For the British, the Anglo-Russian Convention was the culmination of repeated efforts, first begun by Lord Salisbury's government in the 1880s, later reiterated by the ministry of Arthur Balfour after the turn of the century, to come to terms with Russia in Asia. What was the effect on the British position in Asia of the agreement which the Liberal administration of Henry Campbell-Bannerman finally obtained in 1907? The actual working of the Convention in Asia has not received close attention. Since Britain and Russia were wartime allies, it appears to have been taken for granted that, before World War I, the Anglo-Russian Convention produced no major disenchantment or dangers for either partner. One purpose of this essay is to show that for the British, the Convention eventually generated serious dissatisfaction, that it failed to fulfill the British aim of halting Russian expansion in areas strategically crucial to the defense of India, and that in Central Asia after 1912, the Anglo-Russian Convention hindered rather than furthered the British quest for security. Further, a thesis of this paper is that Anglo-Russian relations dominated British policy in Central Asia, and that it was British anxiety about Russian expansion in Central Asia which led the British after 1912 to attempt to establish a veiled protectorate in Tibet. This view diverges from that of a recent major work on the once obscure history of Central Asia: in The McMahon Line, Professor Alastair Lamb emphasized the importance of Sino-Indian relations to the formulation of British policy in Central Asia.