The passage of twelve years has not materially affected the conclusions reached in this study, which is why I have re-issued it unchanged apart from the correction of a few minor errors.

When I wrote this book in 1976 I wish I had had by me the new diary of the Commons debate on the state of the nation on 28 January 1689 discovered and published by Lois G. Schwoerer. It would have enabled me to amplify some of the arguments I used in chapter 2, though I do not think it would have altered them. Much the same can be said of Professor Schwoerer's exhaustive study of the Declaration of Rights: there her research was, as it were, parallel with mine, the two scarcely meeting. Similarly H. T. Dickinson's valuable study Liberty and Property: Political Ideologies in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1977), which appeared within a few months of my own. Since Professor Dickinson carried his exposition down to the late eighteenth century his treatment of the period 1689–1720 was necessarily briefer than mine, but it does not seem to me that we are in disagreement on any essential point.

Readers engaged in this period will probably not need to be reminded of some recent articles which supplement or extend my own work. I am thinking of D. W. Earl's paper on early eighteenth-century notions of feudalism, J. W. Gough's work on Tyrrell, an undeservedly neglected figure, and Martyn Thompson's further thoughts on conquest theory.