It has been traditional to regard the reaction of Henry VIII in the face of treason and rebellion as savage and extreme. Perhaps for this reason, historians for long considered it superfluous to examine in any detail what fate actually befell those who took up arms against their king. More recently, however, findings that relatively few persons were executed by Henry, despite the savagery of his reign, and that in general his bark was worse than his bite,1 have suggested that this question could profitably be pursued further. There seems, for instance, to be a significant difference between the 178 executions in the aftermath of the Lincolnshire rebellion and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536–7 and the rather larger number for which Elizabeth was responsible following the much less dangerous Northern Rising of 1569.2 Yet how these figures were achieved and what considerations shaped and determined the extent of the government's retaliation is much less clear. Perhaps the surviving evidence will not normally admit of answers to such questions, for it was not in the government's interests to disclose that external considerations might influence the enforcement or otherwise of the law. The manifestation of this fact was therefore inconvenient, but exceptionally such disclosures might be unavoidable.

S. R. Gardiner, the doyen of English historians, wrote of the earl of Northampton's oration, delivered at a conference between the two houses of parliament in 1607, that it was ‘a speech which hardly any other man in England would have allowed himself to utter. In him was combined the superciliousness of a courtier with the haughtiness of a member of the old nobility. He treated the Commons as if they were the dust beneath his feet.’1 Furthermore, Northampton was accused by some contemporaries and most later historians of engineering the abrupt dissolution of the Addled Parliament in 1614, an abortive two-month session that was the last for seven years. For both, Northampton epitomized the authoritarian and anti-parliamentary views which came to dominate the early Stuart court.

In the last forty years the accepted portrait of the parliamentarian party during the Great Civil War has changed almost beyond recognition. A score of books and articles have been devoted, with much debate, to reinterpreting the nature of the factions comprising that party. By contrast, the accepted view of its opponent, the royalist party, is still that established by Gardiner over a hundred years ago. This situation is not unduly surprising. Some of the principal sources for a study of the royalist party, such as the journals of the royalist parliament, were destroyed at the end of the war. Furthermore, the royalists may seem ultimately less significant objects of study than their rivals, in that they lost the war and therefore contributed nothing, save as a menace, to the subsequent formation of English polity and the making of the modern world. Though not surprising, such an attitude is none the less indefensible. Considerable material for such a study does survive. Clarendon's comments, whether in his History1 or his Life2, are well known. By contrast other retrospective sources, notably Prince Rupert's ‘Diary’, a summary of his career by an unknown admirer,3 are almost unused. These may be compared with the contemporary evidence of hundreds of letters preserved in the British Library, Bodleian Library and local record offices. In favour of such a study, it may be argued that until the royalist party is understood the nature of the Great Civil War cannot be properly appreciated. Moreover, the significance of the parliamentarian victory for a future England is only clear if some suggestion can be made of the possible consequences of a royalist triumph.

On the fourth of July 1754 a garrison of Virginians, under the command of the young George Washington, marched its British colours out of a small log fort in an isolated valley of the Appalachian mountains, where it had capitulated to a French detachment the previous evening. Washington's defeat had an impact upon world history no less significant than did his more famous victories subsequent to a more dramatic removal of British colours, on another fourth of July twenty-two years later. The French expulsion of British colonials from the Ohio valley led to nine years of war in America and quickly escalated into seven years of general war, so wide in its geographical extent that Churchill called it the first world war. At the end of hostilities in 1763 the acquisition from France of Canada and a number of West Indian islands laid the foundations of the nineteenth-century British empire.

The Russian ruling elite, by the end of the nineteenth century, could be seen as being composed of three loosely defined elements, representing respectively the interests of the hereditary landed gentry, of a bureaucracy that was fast becoming hereditary and of emerging capitalist groups. Each of the three was a significant component of the old regime in Russia in its final decades, each fulfilled important social functions and each was, and was perceived to be, of importance for the Autocracy. It was their balance and interaction which helped to sustain the ancien régime in the reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II.

Decolonization has had a significant impact upon the way that historians explain the process of Europe’s late nineteenth-century imperial expansion. Assumptions about superior technology now appear insufficient in themselves to account for the ability of relatively small armies to gain control over sizeable territory and populations in Africa and Asia. Although, as has recently been argued, advances in weaponry and medicine enabled Europeans to operate in tropical climates against less sophisticated opposition with devastating effect, differences in technology cannot explain the ability of less well-endowed national resistance movements to defeat colonial armies in the mid-twentieth century.1 Since 1945 various wars of national liberation have demonstrated that advanced technology, an impressive commitment of manpower, and an enormous expenditure of money cannot guarantee military success against a nationalist resistance in a colonial setting. If anything, this discrepancy in technological advantage between colonialist powers and anti-western resistance movements was as great or greater in the post-World War II era than in the late nineteenth century. Historians thus must seek additional explanations for the rapid advance of European conquest during the heyday of imperialism.

A decade ago there appeared a volume of twelve essays on Lloyd George, written by a dozen young historians and edited by A. J. P. Taylor. These pieces, of varying merit and degree of interest, ranged widely from pre-1914 social reform to the Greek question and even to the Second World War.1 Yet strangely enough one of the most colourful patches of the huge canvas that was Lloyd George's life did not receive so much as a passing glance - namely his relations with the press. Taylor had hinted at the possibilities in that sphere when preparing a volume of his own essays a few years earlier. There he placed in sequence two entertaining chapters of quite unequal length and importance, one entitled ‘Lloyd George: rise and fall’ and the other ‘The Chief’.2 The latter requires a little explanation, for ‘ Chief was the style of address beloved of Alfred Harmsworth, Viscount Northcliffe, the man who owned The Times, Daily Mail, Evening News, and a host of other newspapers and journals. Quite simply he was the greatest press lord of them all, and Fleet Street has known many. While it is manifestly impossible in a few pages to explore in detail the full story of Lloyd George and the press, we can profitably follow his relations with Lord Northcliffe during the years 1914 to 1918 when these two giants were at the peak of their power and their fortunes were intertwined in many and strange ways. During the war Northcliffe was frequently called (and with utmost seriousness) ‘The Most Powerful Man in the Country’, while at the end Lloyd George was ‘The Man Who Won the War’. Often it seemed that the stage was not big enough for both and the British people must choose between them. Not until 1918 did two events - the ‘Maurice debate’ and the ‘Coupon election’ - prove conclusively that in the final analysis Lloyd George's power was real while Northcliffe's was largely illusory. Perhaps none was more surprised at this outcome, certainly none was more relieved, than Lloyd George himself. The reasons will become apparent as the history of their wartime relationship unfolds.