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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.)