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.

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.

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.

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.