Of the many books written by the late Herbert Butterfield, the most influential by far was The whig interpretation of history. The importance of that essay is not just that it attained the status of a classic in Butterfield's own lifetime, and has continued to be reprinted for over fifty years. Its main significance is that the historical profession in Britain came to accept its polemical terminology. The phrase ‘whig history’ has long been used as a term of historiographical criticism, in such a way as to imply, firstly, that everyone knows what it means, and secondly, that nobody wants to be ‘whiggish’. This usage is much in accordance with Butterfield's intentions: he succeeded in implanting the term in the professional language of historians.

Historians of Tudor government have tended to write about the relationship between rulers and ruled in terms of the ability of central government to impose on the localities things which they did not want, in particular the Reformation and taxes to fight wars. Students of the localities have written in terms of the local obstructions in the way of the enforcement of central directives. Students of parliament have examined that institution in terms of its power to block government initiatives. Students of the institutions of central government have explored their subject in terms of the degree of ‘bureaucratic’ development exhibited by these institutions, in other words, how well suited they were to the task of efficient government. But there is another aspect to the functioning of Tudor government, and that is the ways in which subjects could secure their own objectives by use of its machinery. Recent research has begun to provide some insight into this neglected topic. It is axiomatic to revisionist writing on parliament that parliament was, primarily concerned with legislation, and that legislation was as much a matter for localities and interest groups as it was for the crown. Diarmaid MacCulloch and Stephen Kershaw have pointed to the ways in which local communities turned to the central courts, and even the privy council, for support against aggressive landlordism. The accessibility of parliament, the council and the law courts, it may be argued, was a major factor behind the stability of English society in this period, offering a variety of fora within which redress of grievances might be pursued.

Most seventeenth-century English historians and analysts of periods of revolutionary activity, have viewed events in England between 1640 and 1660 as, at most, a failed political revolution which, while it may have temporarily transformed the political institutions of the English state, had little lasting impact on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Repeated emphasis of this fact, however, has tended to obscure another important aspect of these years – the concerted efforts of successive puritan governments during the 1640s and 1650s to make substantial alterations in the accepted cultural norms of seventeenth-century English society. More recently this latter point has been highlighted in the work of historians like John Morrill, who has investigated the attempt to impose an alien presbyterian religious system on the country, and David Underdown, who has described puritan efforts to regularize and restrict the more unruly elements of rural popular culture. They have shown that, although such reformist initiatives were unpopular and often resisted, they nevertheless represented a determined thrust for cultural change, and in the short term were seen by many as a real intrusion and a serious threat to traditional practice.

Modern historians have been more confident than Restoration Englishmen in stating who the ‘latitudinarians’ were, what they held and where they dwelt. The ‘latitudinarians’ have been described as ‘the central force in the movement toward toleration which came from within the Restoration Church of England’ and as a clerical third force, neither anglican nor puritan, but united in an advocacy of ‘natural theology and rational Christianity’. Their ‘basic convictions’, as summarized by Professor Margaret Jacob, were that

rational argumentation and not faith is the final arbiter of Christian belief and dogma; scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are the most reliable means of explaining creation; and political and ecclesiastical moderation are the only realistic means by which the Reformation will be accomplished.

The representative credentials of the unreformed parliament are a subject of enduring historical interest. It is not surprising that much of that interest has focused on the electoral basis of the house of commons. From the beginnings of an organized movement for parliamentary reform and the first systematic investigations of the subject, criticism fastened on the anomalies and inequities of a manifestly outdated franchise. Modern scholarship, emancipated from the bias of whig history, has been less harsh in its judgement, but equally preoccupied with elections and the electorate. Successive studies have demonstrated the vitality of popular electoral politics not merely in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before the onset of so-called oligarchy, but even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when contemporary criticism was at its height.1 One of the unintended consequences of this successful search for the politics of participation has been a tendency to divert attention from the actual working of parliament, except in terms of those periodic crises, and great national issues, which were of manifest importance in the party politics of the day. Yet parliament in the eighteenth century concerned itself with an extraordinary variety of topics, and burdened itself with a remarkable quantity of business. After the revolution of 1688 it met annually for long, and lengthening sessions. It increasingly involved itself in the operations of government and played an ever more important part in the making and revision of law.

‘No matter how often it is told, the story remains fantastic’, wrote Margaret Cole in 1956, referring to the British political crisis of a quarter of a century before. It would be rash to make such a comment today, for in recent years sober research has answered many of the more ‘fantastic’ questions. The role of the Labour opposition, though, remains somewhat neglected; most spectacularly, no attempt has been made systematically to analyse the actions and motivations of its leader during the crisis, Arthur Henderson. A reappraisal is both necessary and possible.

We have recently been reminded of the existence of a ‘missing dimension’ in national security affairs, namely the whole question of secret intelligence and clandestine operations. It can also be suggested that the question of internal security has traditionally represented another gap, though one that occurs for very different reasons. Traditionally, secret intelligence was often unavailable as a subject for comment or academic study precisely because of its secrecy. Internal security included some areas of sensitive political surveillance that fell into the same category; but continued across the spectrum to regular uniformed police work, a subject apparently too mundane and obvious for inclusion in accounts of political history. Police of all categories belong, it seems, to social rather than political history – the world of ‘history with the politics left out’.