In an article in the Journal of British Studies in November 1965, Helen Taft Manning, referring particularly to the period 1830 to 1850, asked the question, “Who ran the British Empire?” She was especially concerned with the influence of the famous James Stephen, but her question raises matters of wider concern.

“Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change,” she wrote.

This legend is still to be found, as Mrs. Manning says, in general textbooks, among the more important of the fairly recent ones being E. L. Woodward's Age of Reform, and more surprisingly in the second volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Of course, Wakefield and the so-called colonial reformers are well recognized as propagandists.

John Twyne deserves to be better known. Any man raised as he was in a society still not accustomed to drawing a clear line between history and myth, yet who struggled as valiantly as he did to make the nation's distant past comprehensible to men of reason, merits more than a second glance – if only because his failure to free himself completely from the myths and legends against which he was contesting tells as much about the limitations of humanist scholarship as his partial success tells about its potentialities. As it is, no one but the rare scholar interested in Geoffrey of Monmouth's reputation or the fortunes of the Brutus legend in Renaissance thought is likely ever to have heard of him. His one known work, the engagingly levelheaded (and at times engagingly wrongheaded) dialogue, De rebus Albionicis, Britannicis atque Anglicis, remained in the limbo of forgotten books until Sir Thomas Kendrick restored it to its proper place as one of the most resourceful critiques of the British History to appear in the century.

It is less, however, for his substantive contribution to the controversy over the Trojan origin of the British people that Twyne rates additional attention than for his approach to the problems involved in it – a fact which helps account for the neglect he has suffered. An original rather than a profound mind, not quite in the first rank of scholars despite his considerable classical learning, he nevertheless makes possible the examination, in a rarely revealing example, of the sense of temporal perspective then emerging in Renaissance England.

“A landmark in the historical landscape” — The Economist; “A major contribution … an impressive achievement, which must in future put all historians in his debt” — The Listener; “A remarkable achievement … an outstanding study of a very real and great value” — History; “A mammoth and marvellous book” — American Historical Review; “Immense value” — English Historical Review; “A model” — Journal of Economic History; “A major historical contribution … a magisterial and seminal work” — Journal of Modern History; “A brilliant and original contribution” — New York Review of Books; “Social history at its absolute best” — Past and Present.

Such was the chorus of critical encomium that greeted the publication of Lawrence Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Despite the chorus Stone could hardly have helped being disappointed at the actual reviews. One or two were almost as fatuous as they were brief. Others, sensible within their limits, were still too short. This seems to have been the fault of editors, so intimidated by the pejorative sense of the term “discrimination” that they refuse to discriminate between a work worth more than twenty pages and one worth less than twenty words, performing their editorial duties in the matter of book reviews with a sort of timorous and lunatic egalitarianism. Moreover, in considering Stone's work, many of the reviewers hastily plunged into what has come to be called “the gentry controversy” or “the storm over the gentry,” and some became almost totally immersed in it.

This paper is concerned solely with the genesis of the 1903 Tariff Reform Movement. Why did a veteran, realistic politician like Joseph Chamberlain challenge Britain's long-sacrosanct free trade policy? What political, economic, social, or other factors influenced him to make his decision? Was he really the originator of the program which he championed? What empirical lessons can be learned about the methodology and rationale of political decision making? The existing scholarly works dealing with the Chamberlain agitation, although exceedingly numerous, provide no really satisfactory answers to these questions. Thus a fresh appraisal of the origins of the Tariff Reform Movement seems clearly warranted.

I

The Liberal journalist-statesman John Morley, who became acquainted with Chamberlain in 1873, is reported as once saying that his friend's faith in the free trade policy was always “only skindeep.” Chamberlain himself said that he was first shaken in his free trade beliefs in 1881 when, as President of the Board of Trade in the second Gladstone Government, he was asked to reply to a protectionist speech by a then-obscure Conservative M.P. named C. T. Ritchie. Contrary to Chamberlain and Morley, however, one of the Birmingham leader's official biographers states that he has found no indication that his hero entertained any fiscal heresies prior to the winter of 1902-03; and though the date he gives may be disputed, the view that Chamberlain was a late convert to protection is substantiated by considerable evidence. Chamberlain's reply to Ritchie, despite his later admission of doubt, reveals no misgivings about the free trade credo.

Since the days of Samuel Rawson Gardiner and Charles Harding Firth, no one has studied English Puritanism more thoroughly than William Haller of Columbia University. Yet Haller came to his study of the Puritans not by way of history and politics but by way of poetry. The occasion of his turning to read several thousands of Puritan sermons and tracts was John Milton. His early guides and inspirers were Professor William Peterfield Trent and Sir Herbert Grierson. His attention was also directed to this material by Sir Charles Firth. Puritan theology he learned, in the then approved Columbia University method, “by doing it.” So the man, the approach, and the method were all sufficiently unorthodox to produce a fresh study of the long-neglected sources of Puritanism.

Haller began his career as an original interpreter of Puritanism when he became a member of the editorial board for the then projected Columbia Edition of the Works of John Milton. He soon came into print with an article, “Before Areopagitica,” on the immediate contemporary background of Milton's plea for unlicensed printing. Next came his edition of the Areopagitica and other tracts for the Columbia Milton, followed by a three-volume opus, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, 1638-1647. Then The Rise of Puritanism appeared. Despite the turmoil of World War II, a second collection of documents, The Leveller Tracts, 1647-1653, edited by Haller and Godfrey Davies, was published. After forty-one years on the faculty of Barnard College and the graduate school of Columbia University, Haller retired in 1950 and became a fellow, later honorary fellow, of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Sea ice is a unique environment providing a vast habitat for a variety of life, including microscopic organisms. It accounts for roughly 5–6% of the surface area of the oceans. It is a complex porous structure of crystalline water, gas bubbles, and pockets of brine, as well as a connected structure composed of macro- and micro-porosity filled with concentrated aqueous liquids. Using micro-Raman spectroscopy, it is possible to characterise features of ice at a spatial resolution of a few to tens of micrometers, the scale of relevance to trapped microorganisms, by providing information concerning the presence and amount of molecular species present in the trapped liquids. We have applied this technique to determine the spatial distribution of sulphate, phosphate and carbonate anions in sea-ice veins using ice obtained from the vicinity of the Palmer Station, Antarctica. The observed sulphate concentrations were approximately 20–30% higher than nominal surface seawater concentrations, consistent with the concentration of brine in vein and inclusion liquids during the ice formation process. This concentration was lower than that in veins present in laboratory-prepared ice. Carbonate and dibasic phosphate anions were also observed in the sea ice. This speciation is consistent with an alkaline environment in the sea-ice aqueous system. The mean dibasic phosphate concentration found throughout the sample was 648 mM, while, for carbonate, it was 485 mM. However, these anions showed extremely high spatial variability. The high phosphate and carbonate enhancements observed relative to sulphate point to the influence of processes other than brine formation controlling the chemistry of these anions in sea ice.

W. E. Gladstone resigned twice as leader of the Liberal Party. His final retirement of 1894 has received much attention, but his resignation two decades earlier is not well known. At age sixty-five, the recent loser in a surprise general election, the former prime minister stepped down from the Liberal leadership in January, 1875. Some observers doubted the permanence of his retirement, but previous speculation about the Liberal succession had assumed that Gladstone could hope at most for one further premiership. After he regained the leadership in 1880 and soldiered on as the Grand Old Man at the head of three further governments, Liberal sympathizers dismissed his 1875 resignation in retrospect as an unrevealing mistake, a temporary meandering from the true path of his career.

Recent studies have pointed to the decisive importance of Gladstone's course in the 1870s, especially to the implications of his return to public life. R. T. Shannon ties Gladstone's resignation to his loss of rapport with the popular forces that had once rallied to the banners of Reform and Irish disestablishment. His government's rejection at the polls in 1874 seemed to end “his great romance with the people of England.” Bitter, disillusioned, and mystified about the popular verdict, he resigned his post as Liberal leader. Freed from parliamentary responsibilities, Gladstone went on, almost in spite of his conscious intentions, to capture the soul of popular Liberalism, beginning with his hesitant but inspiring participation in the 1876 agitation against the Bulgarian atrocities, a campaign which held few attractions for the official Liberal hierarchy.

The present paper is concerned with “political history” — with the problems of the statesman who looks at the situation from above and has to make decisions about it. Granted that conditions are of a given sort and that society has a certain form — granted that men are what they are and events have produced a predicament that calls for action — there are people who have a presiding position and an over-all responsibility; and their strategies and decisions are themselves an object of study. A crucial question of “political history” is the question of the kind of statesmanship that was necessary for operating the constitution as it existed in the early years of George III's reign. On this subject one who does not speak with the authoritarian voice of the expert may claim that the experts should be carefully scrutinized, especially in a world now terribly subject to intellectual fashion. But one who has always valued originality (and has been reproved even for measuring historians by this quality) is in a predicament — calling, now, for the reverse of this, and wanting, rather, to recover continuity with an earlier stage of historiography. Whereas at the present time new evidence, manuscript sources, and the thrill of the hitherto-undiscovered fact are always prized, this paper must take on the dull work of making sure that some old material is not neglected, material which, if it appeared in print long ago, did so only because its importance was so obvious from the first.

December twenty-ninth of this year will mark the eight hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury. There will be no such superfluity of books as commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Conquest, the one hundredth of the American Civil War, or the fiftieth of the Soviet Revolution. Few will even recall the murder, since the propers have been deleted from the general calendar of the Roman Church. If Thomas's feast has been quietly dropped from the missal, his career has by no means been neglected by historians in recent years. New editions of the writings of participants in the dispute have appeared, new interpretations of the quarrel are numerous, and important new studies in the history of canon law have altered traditional perspectives on the dramatic confrontation. Now is therefore an opportune time to survey modern scholarship on the Becket controversy and to indicate fruitful directions for further research.

There is, first, the problem of context. The most recent scholarly study of the dispute is that of H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles. The eccentricities of the provocative, peppery, and erratic Governance of Mediaeval England have been amply, if cautiously, alluded to by reviewers. Richardson and Sayles commence their discussion of the relations of regnum and sacerdotium in the later twelfth century with the reign of Stephen, neglecting questions of continuity from the reigns of earlier Norman kings. They dispute the received interpretation of Stephen's Second Charter, of which the central clause has been generally interpreted to mean that this King granted benefit of clergy in some form to the English church.