For a half-century, historians, accepting an interpretation put forward by Francis Relf in the introduction to the Camden Society's publication of several of the scribbled books of Henry Elsing, clerk of the parliament in the 1620s, have viewed the revival of judicature in parliament in 1621 from the distorted framework of the struggle for supremacy between the two great systems of law in England. An explanation more consistent with all of the evidence surrounding this event - which brought with it the most significant constitutional develop ment in the house of lords since the middle ages - lies in the connection between slow process and due process in English justice. Professor William Jones singled out slow justice in the courts as the central judicial problem of the age and observed that it defeated both the great equity jurist, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and his equally famous counterpart, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, since ‘neither man could think of a remedy which would restrain litigants and yet leave their legally justified rights untarnished’. The revival of judicature in the house of lords in 1621, most especially in its appellate civil aspects, was part of the most ambitious attempt to solve this dilemma in the early seventeenth century. While it failed in its immediate goal and slow justice remained the nemesis of due process in the English legal system, the experiment begun in 1621 permanently altered the constitutional framework of England by establishing the house of lords once again as the high court of parliament.

The ordinary revenue of the kings of Scotland in the early seventeenth century was drawn from a wide variety of sources. The comptroller received the revenues known as ‘property’ - fixed revenues and rents from Crown lands, payments from royal burghs, customs duties and the impost of wines. Out of these he met the"expenses of the royal household. The treasurer was responsible .for meeting nearly all other official and royal expenses out of the ‘casualty’, which included feudal casualties (irregular payments such as wards and reliefs), escheats, compositions and other profits of justice. The collector general and the treasurer of the new augmentations received various revenues from former church property. Administration of these revenues was simplified in 1610 when the earl of Dunbar, already treasurer, was appointed in addition comptroller, collector general and treasurer of the new augmentations, thus bringing responsibility for all branches of the ordinary revenue into the hands of one man, though he continued usually to be referred to simply as the treasurer. This amalgamation of offices became permanent, though the four offices all continued to exist in name until 1707, and separate accounting for the different branches of revenue continued until 1636.

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

‘Cambridge idealism’ – the phrase sounds like a mischievous verbal paradox. Idealism, as Richter has accustomed us to suppose, set the tone of late nineteenth-century Oxford; while contemporary Cambridge, Lord Annan teaches, preserved a tradition of empirical rationalism. At Balliol Green and Toynbee evolved a ‘secular religion’ from the metaphysics of Hegel and Kant; at Cambridge Sidgwick and Marshall embarked upon a rationalist revision of utilitarianism, developing (for the most part) suggestions incompletely worked out by Mill. Green and Toynbee were idealists; Sidgwick and Marshall were rationalists: the differences between the philosophic systems thery constructed seem crystal clear. Yet the contrast can be exaggerated. Whether their fundamental premiss was the principle of utility or the conviction that ‘the Universe is a single, eternal activity or energy, of which it is the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not-itself,’ Oxford idealists and Cambridge rationalists were both preoccupied by contemporary social problems, both formulated essentially social philosophies concerned with the right conduct of individuals in their relations with others, and both arrived at comparable policy prescriptions at almost exactly the same time.

For the first two years of the war the French government drew up no programme of its war aims. When the cabinet began to consider its aims in Europe during the summer of 1916, it still avoided serious discussion of war aims overseas. Faced with the overwhelming preoccupations of the Western Front, the government paid little heed to the future of the Empire. Such war aims as France possessed outside Europe by the time of the armistice were arrived at in two ways: first, by ad hoc agreenebts with her allies in the Middle East and in West Africa, agreements forced on the government by the course of the war; secondly, by a commission d'étude established in 1918 to prepare for the peace conference, a commission from which ministers were excluded. The colonial war aims that emerged in these two separate ways were the product not of the French cabinet but of the parti colonial and its sympathizers within the foreign and colonial ministries.

David Lloyd George was a great war-time prime minister. There seems to be little doubt about this, but his was leadership has been so extolled by his supporters that adverse criticism sometimes smacks of heresy. Nevertheless criticism is warranted which, whilst not attacking the man, will qualify the myth. What follows is a critical examiniation of Lloyd George and his Irish policy in 1918.

Little has been written about the Foreign Office reforms of 1919. Contemporaries hoped that war-time experiences would lead to a massive overhaul of the whole diplomatic machine. Radical critics, in particular, were vehement in their insistence that the diplomatic and foreign-policy-making process and the diplomatic services should be subjected to ‘democratic’ oversight and control. Even the less radical reformers believed that the transition from war to peace would provide the opportunity for modernizing and rationalizing the existing administrative system. Yet the changes introduced in the years of peace proved to be less decisive than any of these men intended. The difficulty arose from the sheer number of problems to be solved, a confusion of aims among those responsible for reform, financial considerations and a sharp diminution in public interest and pressure after 1919.