Elizabeth made the decision that the English Church should again be Protestant, but the particular form of Protestantism to be adopted by the Church was not entirely in the power of the Queen, or even the Bishops to decide. A result of the dissolution of the monasteries and the sale of a large part of monastic lands by the Crown was that a greatly increased amount of patronage became vested in lay hands. The Church's theological inclination could be determined by the type of men presented by lay patrons to livings throughout the length and breadth of the country. One particular group amongst the Elizabethan nobility, the Earls of Leicester, Warwick, Huntingdon and Bedford, exercised a very remarkable influence upon the emergent Church of England. This study of the patronage of one member of the group, the third Earl of Huntingdon, illustrates how militant Protestantism could be injected into the Church.

By his ‘attempt to formulate a general notion’ of the nineteenth-century revolution in government, and ‘to construct an ancillary, explanatory “model”‘ of its operation, Dr MacDonagh has initiated a discussion of great importance.1 For general notions are what we lack in the field of administrative history since 1832:

The Conference of Paris, which met early in 1869 to settle the dispute between Turkey and Greece over the Cretan question, appears in retrospect as one of many abortive attempts to resolve an insoluble situation. The Cretan rebellion, stemming from religious and ethnic conflicts endemic in those parts of the Turkish empire which embraced Christian communities, invites modern parallels; while the attitudes of the spectators were governed not only by the immediate needs of their external policies, but by principles often based on ideological considerations. Panhellenism and panslavism came into conflict with the traditional desire to support Turkey. Liberal sympathy with the insurgents precipitated legal problems identical with those created by the American Civil War. Yet, apart from the intrinsic interest of any aspect of the Eastern question, and the importance of any issue which influenced the development of international law, the conference has a significance of its own as an attempt to apply the process of mediation. This requires explanation, since at first sight there is little to distinguish the conference from previous workings of the concert of Europe. During the peace conference at the close of the Crimean War the plenipotentiaries made an informal recommendation that ‘states between which any serious misunderstanding may arise should, before appealing to arms, have recourse as far as circumstances might allow to the good offices of a friendly power’. The conference of 1869 put into practice1 for the first time this Protocol no. 23 of the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

Rebels against British governments could always maintain themselves far more easily at sea than on land; a guerre de course was indeed their natural resource. They could use as bases the small islands so conveniently situated athwart British trade routes in the Channel and the Irish and North seas, or the nearby ports of foreign powers; even more important, the chances of profit which a trade war held out invariably won them support not only from numbers of English seamen (especially Irish and Channel ports men), but from the cosmopolitan armateurs and floating riff-raff of the ports of France and the Low Countries as well. Yet because merchant support was vital to domestic stability and British seamen were precious, no de facto government could postpone for long a vigorous attempt to clear the seas of rebel ships.

The purpose of this communication is to describe the composition, and to analyse the character and motives, of those who collaborated with James II in his attempts in 1687–8 to pack a subservient parliament by intensive canvassing and by prearranging elections. These attempts have usually been dismissed as foolish, futile, provocative and inevitably disastrous, with the result that both the techniques and the agents employed in the campaign have not been thought worthy of serious attention.

Joseph Priestley’s statement in his letter to the editor of the Morning Chronicle, 7 March 1793, that: ‘I am not, nor ever was, a member of any political society whatever, nor did I ever sign any paper originating with any of them...‘ seems to be about as unequivocal as it could have been made. It is true that these words were written in reply to Burke’s charge that Priestley had given ‘his name to the sentiments in the Correspondence of the Revolution Society in England with the Jacobin Societies in France’, but the charge was not new, and the danger to Priestley less critical than it had been at the time of the Priestley Riots in July 1791. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, Priestley’s denial has been taken at its face-value, and even those who have had no sympathy with his point of view have been able to regard him as honest if misguided. Two letters recently discovered, however, shed new light on Priestley’s statement and suggest that he was less frank. The first, dated 27 June 1791, just over a fortnight before the riots, is from Priestley to James Watt, inviting him ‘as a friend of liberty civil and ecclesiastical’ to join the Warwickshire Constitutional Society.1 The second is a joint reply from Matthew Boulton and James Watt to Priestley’s invitation. This suggests that Boulton must have received a similar letter from Priestley to that sent to Watt.

It is surprising that while there is a considerable literature dealing with the reform of the civil service from the time of Burke to the setting up of the Civil Service Commission in 1855, very little attention has been paid to the final stages of reform following the introduction of open competition in 1870. Yet it was in this period that patronage ceased to be of importance and the modern civil service developed. The Order in Council of 4 June 1870 which made open competition the normal method of entry to the civil service enormously reduced the scope of patronage, but it did not kill it immediately. Right up to the First World War remnants of the old system lingered in most departments, although by then a lavish system of honours and subsidies from the party funds had displaced the most objectionable forms of political patronage. The purpose of this article is to give some indication