Ideological arguments are commonly sustained by an appeal to the past, an appeal either to see precedents in history for new claims being advanced, or to see history itself as a development towards the point of view being advocated or denounced. Perhaps the most influential example from English history of this prescriptive use of historical information is provided by the ideological arguments associated with the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century. It was from a propagandist version of early English history that the ‘whig’ ideology associated with the Parliamentarians—the ideology of customary law, regulated monarchy and immemorial Parliamentary right—drew its main evidence and strength. The process by which this ‘whig’ interpretation of history became bequeathed to the eighteenth century as accepted ideology has of course already been definitively labelled by Professor Butterfield, and described in his book on The Englishman and his History. It still remains, however, to analyse fully the various other ways in which awareness of the past became a politically relevant factor in English society during its constitutional upheavals. The acceptance of the ‘whig’ view of early English history in fact represented only the triumph of one among several conflicting ideologies which had relied on identical historical backing to their claims. And despite the resolution of this conflict by universal acceptance of the ‘whig’ view, the ‘whigs’ themselves were nevertheless to be covertly influenced by the rival ideologies which their triumph might seem to have suppressed. It is the further investigation of the complexity and interdependence of these historical and ideological attitudes which will be attempted here.

It has been said that the Civil War was won by committees. Recent writers on this subject have begun to show how parliamentary policy and its execution was forged in the committee chambers rather than on the crowded floor of the House of Commons. This article is concerned with the personnel of these committees, in particular with those men who were not famous for their political activities and attitudes. Obviously, a core of leaders was needed in order to direct the business of the committees, to give continuity to their proceedings and to ensure that their work was in accord with the policy of the Commons. But the political ‘parties’ were relatively small, and with all the enthusiasm in the world their members could not attend personally to all aspects of government, civil and military. This study is concerned with the men who had no known political views but who contributed a great deal of time and effort to the running of parliamentary affairs. Because of their relative obscurity in the House it will be useful to ask why they were chosen to serve on certain committees, how their background and activity compared with that of their more ‘political’ colleagues, and how they reacted to situations where they were required to take a political stand. Above all, it will be possible to judge whether these men formed a coherent group rather than a random collection of individuals. These men owed their positions to their administrative skill rather than to their political affiliations. As administrators they were responsible to the legislature, and during a time of intensified state intervention, they became analogous to a non-political civil service, ready to execute the policy decisions of the party leaders.

In the year 1582 William Camden the antiquary was about to venture into a remote country beyond the mountains, called Lancashire, ‘which’, he wrote, ‘I go unto (God speed me well) after a sort somewhat against my will…but I will proceed, in hope that God's assistance, which hitherto hath been favour-able unto me, will not now fail me'. Such qualms might well assail any professional historian who plans an expedition into Shakespeare country; for the trail is marked by his predecessors’ whitening bones and, in one case, by bones which the vultures have not finished picking clean.

The increasing emphasis of historians of the eighteenth century on the role of aristocracy under the old régime justifies looking once again, more carefully, at the upper clergy of the established religious cults. The leaders of the established churches were ex officio, if not also by birth, always members of the aristocracy. No comprehension of the membership, organization, or objectives of the eighteenth-century aristocracy is possible without consideration of its ecclesiastical wing—in the case of episcopal churches, of its bishops.

The most recent biographer of Montesquieu has written:

…the similarity between the ideas of the former president a tnortier and those of the parlements is sometimes striking.…The king, they admit, is the legislator and the fount of justice. The parlements, however, are the repositories of his supreme juris-diction. To remove it from them is to offend the laws of the state and to overthrow the ancient legal structure of the kingdom.…This tradition of the parlements inspired and was inspired by the political doctrine of Montesquieu; and when the President writes of the monarchy of his own day…as being the best form of government that men have been able to imagine, it is monarchy supported by this tradition which he has in mind.

Over the so-called ‘Jew Bill’; of 1753, the Opposition press was to wage one of the most extraordinary propaganda campaigns in English history. The Bill itself was a comparatively minor measure introduced by the Pelham ministry t o relieve at least some of the disabilities under which the Jews then laboured. Although there was probably no country in Europe in which the Jews received better treatment, and Jewish merchants and financiers had attained positions of very considerable wealth and influence in England, a number of irksome restrictions remained. This was particularly the case in the matter of naturalization, which gave to aliens the rights of natural-born Englishmen, such as the right to own land and ships, and to trade with the colonies. The Jewish Naturalization Bill–to give it its proper title—was designed to remove this disability, by providing that individual Jews who had been resident i n Great Britain or Ireland for three years might be naturalized by Act of Parliament without taking the Sacrament. It was a very modest measure. It certainly did not confer on all Jews in the country the rights of British citizens, and would, in fact, have applied only to a very small number of extremely wealthy Jews, for a private Act of Parliament was a very expensive proceeding indeed. Nor did it relieve Jews of religious disabilities. Yet this Bill was to produce a quite remarkable clamour on the part of the Opposition press, in which it was to be denounced as a blasphemous attack upon Christianity, and the unfortunate Jews were to be accused of every imaginable vice and enormity. There were few political issues in the early eighteenth century to arouse the emotions of Englishmen: but the ‘Jew Bill’; was certainly one of them.

It is almost a commonplace nowadays that the passing of the Ballot Act of 1872 revolutionized Irish politics. Sir Robert Ensor is quite categorical: ‘But where the act had revolutionary consequences, which its authors had neither foreseen nor intended, was in Ireland.’ The authority quoted is Charles Stewart Parnell, who had insisted: ‘Hitherto the Irish voter, powerless against the intimidation of his social superiors, had returned members to one or other of the two English parliamentary parties’ and now with secret voting ‘need do so no longer’. By way of conclusion Ensor goes so far as to reflect: ‘that but for the undesigned gift of this act, the whole of his meteoric career, with its profound reactions upon English history for half a century, might never have occurred’. Elsewhere he attributed the emergence of the classic Irish party to agricultural depression and Parnell's magnetic leadership, though without in any way specifically retracting the ballot point.

Despite intensive research into the history of parliamentary electioneering, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several questions, particularly concerning the electioneer himself, remain partly unanswered. Although the extent of patronage in various constituencies and the actual electioneering techniques used have been closely studied it has been more difficult to answer such questions as why certain men participated in electioneering and why they were prepared to spend so much money on it. There has been a tendency to describe these men, and to estimate their motives, in a rather stereotyped and oversimplified way. It has been the characteristic of these stereotyped generalizations to account for the activities of the electioneer in terms of purely material motives: he ‘electioneered’, it is suggested, because he was trying to promote the interests of a certain political group; or because he wanted political office; or because he wanted a peerage; or because he wanted to ensure a handsome share of patronage or income for himself and his dependants. No doubt some electioneers were swayed, even exclusively, by motives of this kind. But such motivation sounds suspicious in its brutal simplicity; if we had more individual studies of this type of politician, we might find that many of the famous electioneers were prompted just as strongly by motives of a less directly material kind, which reflected their personal characters, their personal problems in life, and even their personal idealism.

The Government which Lord Russell formed on Palmerston's death in October 1865 met Parliament first on 6 February 1866. On 12 March it introduced a Reform Bill, the chief objects of which were to lower the Borough Franchise of 1832 from £10 rental to £7 and the County Franchise from £50 to £14, and to give votes to £50 Savings Bank depositors, £10 lodgers and certain others (enfranchising altogether about 400,000 new voters). On 7 May it introduced a Seats Bill which provided for grouping of boroughs with populations smaller than 8000 and removal of second seats from small towns with two members; and which proposed to distribute the 49 seats thus freed so that Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Salford and London would have 10 new seats between them, Scotland 7, London University and a number of new boroughs 1 each and the English counties 26 in all. These measures were recommended by Gladstone, as Leader of the House of Commons, in the hope, which the Queen shared, that they would put an end to the reform question for a generation. Their authors, Russell and Gladstone, intended them to wind up the line of abortive measures which had been presented to Parliament in the previous seventeen years: they expected, innocently as it turned out, that a degree of enfranchisement which the Cabinet had accepted, however reluctantly, which had been tailored in order to pass through Parliament and ‘which we had so much cut down…from the standard of the Palmerston measure of 1860 would be accepted by the Liberal majority in the House of Commons.

The future of Morocco was not an issue which suddenly began to agitate international politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a sort of left-over of imperialism belatedly brought to mind. ‘We are living… on the crater of a Volcano’ was neither a new, nor untypical view of the situation as seen from Tangier in 1881. Britain had already made an attempt to regenerate the ‘sick man of the West’, before he could cause as many complications as the fellow Muslim invalid to the East, by taking the initiative which led to the Madrid Conference respecting the right of Protection of Moorish Subjects in 1880. But this was not a success. Nor did the attempts which followed to persuade the so-called Shereefian Empire, in its vital strategic position at the entrance to the Mediterranean, to provide itself with the revenue, tools and incentive necessary for reform by the conclusion of a liberal commercial treaty, gain their objective. France also was concerned with Morocco, and the Algerian military point of view, which stressed the security danger of allowing any other power to establish preponderant influence there, was gradually gaining ground. One French minister at Tangier, Ordega, had gone as far as to try and present his government in 1884 with the fait accompli of a revolution in Morocco, with a French protégé on the Moorish throne. But the Paris authorities were not willing, or at this stage even able, to sanction such a forward policy. Spain was the power which, at official level, had long considered it had the right of reversion to the Moorish heritage. But internal weakness precluded direct action, and Spanish governments were reduced to other approaches. The negative one, associated with the conservative statesman Cánovas del Castillo, stressed the need to ‘prolong the dying agony of Morocco’, until Spain had recovered sufficiently to claim her rights. Others, however, argued for a more active policy, and they had an opportunity in the ‘Liberal’; ministries of the 1880's. It is in this context that the activity of Segismundo Moret, Minister of State from November 1885, was of relevance in bringing Morocco further into the international arena.

I have tried in another article to consider the preparation of the Local Government Act of 1888 as illustrative of the politics of the time. I shall here discuss the prognostications made of the new English County Councils, the extent to which these were realized at the first council elections, and the way in which the new bodies settled down, in the hope of shedding some light on the social and political feelings of, and the forces prevalent in, the countryside. My treatment of these themes will necessarily be rather selective, an attempt to illustrate the broad general currents of thought, as far as possible in the words in which they were expressed.

Wandering in his mind during his last illness in 1869, Bertrand Russell's maternal grandfather ‘heard a loud noise in the street and thought it was the revolution breaking out’. The memory of the Terror haunted educated early Victorians just as Belsen and Auschwitz haunt the modern intellectual: ‘one cannot shake off the feeling of disgust with such horrors and shame that Human Nature should be so bad’, wrote Wellington to Miss Burdett-Coutts in 1847 after reading a history of the Girondins. Attacks on aristocratic extravagance by William Wilberforce and Queen Victoria were inspired by dread of an English 1789—of those ‘women almost unsexed, men almost unhumanized’ whom Envy might summon forth at any moment from the backstreets of Victorian cities. Such fears helped push many reforming measures through nineteenth-century parliaments. Indeed, ‘the danger of revolution was in some degree as much a cause of change in England as the fact of revolution was abroad’.

One of the basic points of the National Socialist programme was the promise of the ‘Liberation’; of German nationality groups who had come under the control of neighbouring states through the peace treaties of 1919. Accusing a country of maltreating its German minority became a classic Nazi gambit in opening aggressive operations in the late 1930's. In most instances Nazi propaganda charges were vastly exaggerated, but if ever there existed a situation which might have provided some justification for Hitlerian wrath, it was Fascist repression in South Tyrol.

Charles Booth dates the beginning of the agitation for old age pensions from the late 1870's, which were marked by two publications of first importance in the field. He himself drew inspiration from the pamphlet of Mr Hookham who, in 1879, published ‘The Outline of a Scheme for dealing with Pauperism. The Question of the Day’. Running neck and neck with Mr Hookham, however, was another now long-forgotten gentleman named Canon Blackley who produced a scheme of national insurance which acquired widespread commendation. The two of them together symbolize both the desire for social action and the cleavage of opinion as to the direction such action should take.

On 31 March 1905 the Unionist Government issued Letters Patent granting to the Transvaal a representative constitution, known almost at once, and to history, as the Lyttelton Constitution. This constitution never came into force; it was abrogated in February 1906 by the new Liberal Government, who decided, at a dramatic Cabinet meeting on 8 February, to grant responsible government instead. Until the opening of the government and private archives within the last few years, the accounts of the part played by the Liberal prime minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, at this Cabinet, and of the encounter between him and General J. C. Smuts, who had come to England on a mission to persuade the Liberal Government to grant responsible government, have necessarily been largely based on hearsay. Something approaching a ‘mythology’ has therefore tended to surround these events; this ‘mythology’ views the Smuts' mission as ‘the climax in the drama of the South African settlement’; it assumes Smuts ‘convinced’ Campbell-Bannerman immediate responsible government should be granted, and that the prime minister then persuaded the Cabinet. This paper is an attempt to carry a stage further the ‘de-mythologizing’ begun by recent historians with partial access to the relevant papers.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War the number of seats contested at general elections in the United Kingdom rose sharply though not altogether steadily. This note contains tables of uncontested seats and constituencies for the fifteen elections from 1852 to December 1910; earlier elections have already been tabulated, in a slightly less detailed form, by Professor Gash in Appendix E of his Politics in the Age of Peel, and after 1918 uncontested seats no longer made up a significant part of the total. (It is true that over a hundred seats went uncontested in the Coupon Election of 1918, because the parties in opposition were not prepared for the struggle. But this has little to do with the lack of contests in earlier elections.)