Andrew Marvell's ‘An Horatian ode upon Cromwel's return from Ireland’ is the most private of political poems. It may be a solitary meditation; it may be written, after Horace, for a forward youth now unknown to us; but it scarcely seems addressed to the public audience of Marvell's tribute to Cromwell in ‘The first anniversary’. We enter an imaginative landscape beyond politics, outside the movement of history, where the figures of the ode – restless Cromwell, the royal actor, the clapping soldiers, the frighted architects, the tamed Irish, the luring falconer, the hunted Pict – appear stilled as upon some ancient vase. Yet the poem's transcendence of events need not be taken for detachment from them, nor its privacy for retreat. I want to suggest that the celebrated poise and urbanity of the ode have been created from energy and urgency of feeling. Marvell has given timelessness to a desperate and portentous moment in his country's history, the arrival of Cromwell in England in the summer of 1650. Language has been immortalized too: the language of ephemeral tracts and newspapers, which is close enough to the surface of the poem to suggest a younger Marvell as politically engaged as the restoration M.P. and whig pamphleteer.

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.

Canadian Confederation took shape at a conference at Charlottetown in September 1864, was designed in detail at the Quebec conference in October 1864 and revised into final form in London in 1866–7. The sequence of conferences forms part of the stately tread of Canadian nationhood, and provides a counterpart to the Annapolis and Philadelphia conventions which originated the other great nation of North America, just as the Fathers of Confederation echo the Founding Fathers of the United States. Subsequent meetings in other cities were to reinforce the aura of the nation-building conference, through Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Durban to the less resounding triumphs of Montego Bay and Victoria Falls. Intercolonial unions, it seemed, were formed by calling conferences. From this assumption it could be deduced as a corollary that if no conference was called, there was no interest in intercolonial union. In Canada, the preservation of the Province House at Charlottetown as ‘the cradle of Confederation’ is a gesture to national feeling, but the mystique thus fostered risks creating historical distortion.

In the familiar triptych of British political history between the first and third Reform Acts, whose panels are neatly divided by the years 1846 and 1867, the confused and uninspiring iconography of the large central canvas contrasts sharply and puzzlingly with that of its flanking pieces. In 1855 Gladstone lamented that

The Session of 1845 was the last of those that witnessed party connection in its normal state. Throughout the decade which preceded that year it was in full and brilliant blossom. Since then we have had properly speaking…none in the best sense of the term: none compact and organized after the ancient manner.

Patterns of voting in Britain between the second Reform Act of 1867 and the Franchise Act of 1918 have to be scrutinized afresh in the light of Dr Dunbabin's recent suggestion that very little changed in the period. The electoral profile of the regions, he argues, remained fundamentally constant from well before the period until well afterwards. The basis of the cleavage between conservative and anti-conservative voters was deeply ingrained in regional character and was merely modified slowly by processes of social change, of which the chief was the sprawling growth of London. This is to challenge earlier views holding that there was a deep-seated shift in the allegiance of the electorate in the years before the first World War. Of such views the most carefully worked out is that of Dr Clarke. The cleavage between the conservative and the anti-conservative at the beginning of the period, according to Dr Clarke, was founded on the gulf between different communities of which the primary social bond was religion. The confrontation between conservative and liberal corresponded to, and was the political expression of, that between church and chapel. By the end of the period, however, the basis of cleavage was no longer religion but class. Conservative strength was sapped by a tendency to working-class solidarity which at first benefited the liberals more than the infant labour party and which explains the two liberal general election victories of 1910. The social base of the parties had been transformed so that the electoral conflict was no longer a matter of ‘cultural politics’ – a rivalry of contrasted, classless cultural units – but a matter of class politics. Dr Clarke asserts what Dr Dunbabin denies, that there is a sharp discontinuity between the characteristic pattern of nineteenth-century politics and the characteristic pattern of twentieth-century politics.

When great powers quarrel their lesser neighbours are often worst affected. Cajoled and wooed, they are drawn into conflicts they would prefer to avoid. Such involvement may exacerbate internal weaknesses and end by damaging them long after the causes of the original dispute have faded. Nineteenth-century Iran became drawn into Anglo-Russian rivalries in Central Asia as each sought to secure her assistance. Spectators of the so-called ‘Great Game’ were not allowed: the boxes were part of the field of play.

At the beginning of his venomous critique of conservative parliamentarians, Abel Bonnard commented:

Le parti modéré, négligeable en apparence et si l'on s'en tient au peu qu'il a fait, ressemble à une carafe d'eau claire où le vulgaire ne voit que le plus nul des objets, mais dans laquelle un devin penché aperçoit mille scènes du passé et de l'avenir.

To judge by the continuing dearth of works on the French parliamentary right in the inter-war years, the properties of this subject have remained hidden. Scholarly attention has been directed almost exclusively towards the ideological extremes of both left and right. Those nearer the centre of French politics, possessing a less identifiable ideology but a far greater numerical strength inside the Palais Bourbon, have been largely ignored. There is still no detailed or comprehensive account of the parliamentary right's evolution in the final decades of the Third Republic.

After the fall of France in 1940, Britain's predicament in the Middle East became worse still when the French authorities in Syria and Lebanon aligned themselves with the new Vichy government. The British, already outnumbered by Italian forces and uncertain of Arab loyalties, now found their northern flank controlled by men susceptible to Axis pressure. Both Churchill and de Gaulle responded with the determination that the Levant should be denied to the Axis and placed in friendly hands. Despite this common resolve, however, fundamental differences emerged during the Anglo-Free French invasion of Syria in 1941. This hastily improvised venture was marred by rash political tactics, poor liaison, bad diplomacy and the interventions of Churchill and de Gaulle. Although the Syrian flank was secured, this affair did serious damage to Anglo-Free French relations, created new problems in the Levant, and precipitated personal antagonism between Churchill and de Gaulle.

There is little reason to doubt that the Truman Doctrine was the direct result of the British announcement to the Americans on 21 February 1947 of the almost immediate withdrawal of financial aid to Greece. The Truman, Doctrine, in turn, is generally accepted as the real beginning of the Cold War; at least it is the declaration of full American involvement. What is not so definite is the British motivation for their withdrawal of aid. It is commonly assumed to have been the result of severe British financial difficulties in February 1947. In hindsight, this is highly credible because of the fuel crisis of that month and its effect on the export programme, as well as the approaching exhaustion of the American loan. It then follows that the British Labour government abandoned Greece at a time when its own continuation was in danger.

In 1931 Herbert Butterfield, precisely as old as the century, published a short book entitled The whig interpretation of history. It made him famous, and for the next forty years or so he stood forth as one of the leading voices in the profession. His voluminous writings in books and essays were read avidly by schoolmasters and their pupils, by students and – less regularly – by dons; to a wide range of educated and reflective people not themselves historians he represented the voice of history in England. He added a further dimension to his image when singlehandedly and with considerable courage he engaged the then dominant Namierite school of eighteenth-century studies; though he cannot be said to have triumphed in that battle, he emerged from it with honour and with the satisfaction of having been able to crack the crystalline selfregard of the opposing party in several places. Those who knew only the voice, on paper at that, were liable to be profoundly disconcerted when they encountered him: no whitebearded old testament prophet after all, preaching stern simplicities, but a clean-shaven (often somewhatrazored) man permanently about thirty-five years old, brisk, cheerful, responsive, entertaining, variously chain-smoking or sworn off cigarettes altogether, always courteous, never pompous. It might be thought that today, less than four years after his death, it is yet too early to venture upon an assessment of his achievement, but it seems to me desirable that the task should be attempted by one who still remembers the famous Butterfield giggle while reading the Butterfield writings. My own special qualification, I would claim, lies in the fact that I knew him but not all that closely and did not belong to his circle (which tended to be based on Peterhouse); in thirty years of sharing the same history faculty with him I do not remember ever once seriously talking history with him.