More than three-quarters of a century have elapsed since the part played by Sir William Coventry (1627–1686) in the government of England under Charles II was first adjudged worthy the attention of political historians of the period. These latter can scarcely be charged with idleness in the interim; but it has been to more prominent men of his time that they have attended, and to their pages Coventry is at best a transient and rather confused visitor. It is natural to wonder why. None of his contemporaries, not even Clarendon, denied him to possess administrative ability of the first order; he occupied for some years, including the critical ones of the second Dutch war, offices of considerable importance; yet his figure remains discernible only within the penumbrae of brighter bodies.

The royal election of 1697 is a topic of Polish history that has enjoyed greater popularity with foreign than with native historians: the quantity of German contributions to the subject is exceeded only by the output of French chroniclers and researchers That this should be so is understandable. The German writers have examined the elevation of an Elector of Saxony to the Polish throne, the French have studied the defeat of a Bourbon prince, but neither group has showed any interest in the part played by Russia in this double process. Polish scholars have paid only incidental attention to it and expressed widely divergent views of its significance. Jarochowski, writing a century ago, states categorically that ‘a hundred years before the last partition Poland had morally lost her independence. First the Austrian and French, next the Russian and Prussian ambassadors usurped that power which the nation denied to its own kings’. Szujski, in a work published ten years later, outbids Jarochowski and speaks of a de facto renunciation of political independence; Bobrzyński, the leading historian of the next generation, merely notes that the year 1697 marked the end of French influence in Poland. In more recent times K. Piwarski referred to the interregnum between the death of John Sobieski and the election of Augustus II as ‘the last in which the nation was still free to settle its own fate’, while W. Konopczyński discerned in it ‘a fact hitherto unprecedented in a Polish election and pregnant with consequences, the fact of Russian intimidation”.

In 1780 the protagonists of Economical Reform openly admitted that their principal aim was not economy but the reduction of the influence of the executive in the House of Commons. In pursuit of this object the Rockingham party rallied other opposition groups in Parliament in support of its elaborate programme of constitutional purification—a programme embracing Crewe's Bill for the disfranchisement of revenue officers, Clerke's Bill for the exclusion of contractors from the House of Commons, and Burke's Establishment Bill, which provided for the abolition of numerous offices and sinecures, and for a strict limitation of the grant of royal pensions at pleasure. ‘The saving of money’, declared Dunning, on 21 February, ‘is but a secondary object. The reduction of the influence of the Crown is the first.’ And on 8 March, Thomas Townshend similarly asserted, that ‘the first great consideration was the lessening of the influence of the Crown, which in the opinion of the people, and he believed, a majority of that House, had enormously increased of late years, and particularly so since the accession of his present Majesty.’

The peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England have long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash. My excuse for nevertheless making that attempt is not the discovery of any new material, which, even if it were to become available, could hardly alter the well-known outlines of the harrowing tale as told in the standard histories: nor could much be added to the careful sketch made of the Church's contribution by F. Warre Cornish, or the excellent summary of the educational principles in conflict given by W. F. Connell. To the details of these, and of the distillation of them which appears in the best text-books, I can suggest only one positive amendment. But looking at the matter from the sheltered advantage of one who has not to write a detailed thorough book about it, it seems to me that none of the existing books can do the subject justice, for none of them tells the whole story. If such substantial books as have already been written fail to tell the whole story, it is obvious that a brief article will not succeed in doing so, and I can only aim to suggest something which the ideal complete history must not omit. For more than half a century we have been learning that the issues of Church and State in the Middle Ages can never be understood if Church and State are regarded as susceptible of separate histories. To see them thus is to see two things where men at the time saw but one. Similarly, the problems of Victorian public education cannot properly be understood in their multi-dimensional reality if they are split into categories normal, perhaps, for our own time, but strange to theirs.