Between the summer of 1912 and the summer of 1914, while the British political world seethed over Marconi, the National Health Insurance doctors' revolts, Home Rule, and the cost of oil-fired battleships, the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, himself a centre of controversy, began to put together a legislative project to reconstruct the system of British land holding. He saw land reform as the major effort of his political career. Not only would it break up the monopoly of the squire in the countryside, but it would snatch away also the untaxed profits of the city land speculator. With a new system of land valuation, uniform throughout the kingdom, local authority rating resources would be immensely broadened, making possible the imposition upon local government of wide new responsibilities in public and personal health, education and housing. Land courts would set higher wages for labourers and lower rents for farmers, all at the expense of the landowner.

The victory of the Allied powers in November 1918 gave the French a unique opportunity to establish a secure frontier on the Rhine. Throughout the peace conference that followed, the politicians, generals and intellectuals of the right who perceived this opportunity most clearly conducted a vigorous campaign to achieve France's ‘natural frontier.’ The separation of the Rhineland from Germany had three incontestable advantages for France. It would diminish Germany's superiority in population; it would establish a buffer zone between the two countries, and it would render impossible a German concentration of troops west of the Rhine itself. Such a ‘paix française’, however, would have been insensitive to the main consideration of post-war diplomacy: the creation of a lasting European peace that satisfied the conflicting foreign policies of the major allies. Chiefly to preserve the victorious alliance, Clemenceau, who at first had favoured the demands of the right, was forced to abandon the proposed separation and to accept a compromise. The French generals like Foch and Mangin who had worked to ‘deprussify’ the Rhineland did not realize their dream. The disputed territory, though occupied by a temporary, inter-allied force, remained German.

Historians have examined in great detail the dramatic debate in American politics over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles which culminated in the physical collapse of President Wilson and the defeat of his peace programme. The failure of Wilson to carry his programme through the United States senate represented also a distinct setback for the peacemaking strategies of the British government whose policies at the peace conference had been based in large measure on the hope that an enduring trans-Atlantic partnership could be established. The British government followed closely the American treaty debate, sending Viscount Grey, the former Liberal foreign secretary, as a special ambassador, and played a significant if unsuccessful role in the outcome of the drama. It is the intention of this article to examine the attitudes and role of the Lloyd George government through the latter part of 1919 and into 1920 with regard to the fate of the Treaty of Versailles in America, and in particular to reassess the part played by Viscount Grey. It is hoped to shed some new light on the dilemmas of foreign policy and defence strategy encountered at this time by Britain and the empire, as well as to elucidate certain aspects of the American struggle. Since the Covenant of the League of Nations lay at the heart of the American fight over the treaty, it is hoped also that new insight will be provided on the uncertain inauguration of the League.

The Allies' conduct of the Great War has frequently been castigated by historians as inept and amateurish. But it is perhaps the conduct of their diplomacy which most merits this description. Until the creation of the Supreme War Council at the end of 1917 there existed, apart from a number of liaison officers, no machinery to synchronise the strategy and diplomacy of Great Britain and France other than the periodic meetings of the politicans and generals of the two countries. Yet, as David Lloyd George came to realize, these were not really conferences at all, but rather meetings of men with pre-conceived ideas who desired only to find a formula which could obscure the underlying differences of opinion from the general view. They were really nothing but a ‘tailoring’ operation at which different plans were stitched together. What was required was the construction of an inter-Allied General Staff, designed to examine and give advice on the changing military situation. Obviously no government could abdicate its right to issue orders, but if the Central Powers were to be defeated the Allies needed to concede that there was far more to participation in a coalition than the mere lip-service to unity involved in the periodic gatherings of soldiers and statesmen. An examination of the Calais Conference of December 1915, called at a time when Allied operations on all fronts were showing a marked lack of success, will illustrate many of the failings and dangers of this primitive form of war diplomacy.

In November 1920 Lord Hardinge succeeded Lord Derby as ambassador to France, thereby acquiring the position that he had wanted and been expected to get for so long. Ironically enough, he had, as he realized, George Nathaniel Curzon, the foreign secretary, to thank for the Paris plum. His gratistude, however, did not prevent him from remarking later that one of the main reasons why he accepted the offer was that it gave him satisfaction that it was Lloyd George and Curzon, ‘who three years earlier had done their utmost to hound me out of the Diplomatic Service’ just after the publication of the Mesopotamia Commission Report, who offered him the coveted post. Hardinge's appointment was generally well received, and he was happy to escape from the ‘never-ending strain’ of the Foreign Office.

On 27 February 1919, while Britain and most of Europe were gripped by serious industrial unrest, 600 trade unionists and 300 employers met leading cabinet ministers and civil servants at a National Industrial Conference in London. After a morning's debate, the trade unionists and employers separated, each to select thirty representatives to form a ‘provisional joint committee’ (P.J.C.) which might translate the morning's general good humour into hard practical proposals for mutual cooperation and reform. Within five weeks the committee had drawn up a report embracing twenty-six reforms, which was duly confirmed by the reconvened conference on 4 April and approved in principle by Lloyd George (with impeccable timing) on 1 May. The report was a major initiative in domestic policy. Although pledged at the 1918 election to build a ‘land fit for heroes’, the government – fully absorbed in the immediate problems of European settlement, demobilization and decontrol – had had little time to consider its practical implementation. With the report, both sides of industry had provided it with an agreed programme of reform which enabled it, in the industrial sphere at least, to commence the fulfilment of its election promises.

Historians have spilt much ink in explaining the diplomatic machinations which led to war in 1914, but rather less ink in accounting for the bitterness which the war aroused. The answer to that question probably lies outside the realm of diplomatic documents. For Britain at least, a tiny part of the answer can be found in a myth which became increasingly virulent in the decade or so before the war: the myth of the evil and ubiquitous German spy.

After almost forty years of discussion and analysis, British policy at Munich in 1938 remains as controversial a subject as ever. But despite the fact that many thorough and important studies have been written, the focus of the controversy has not shifted very substantially. Much emphasis is still placed upon the ‘men of Munich’ and the question of whether they were guilty men who betrayed Czechoslovakia or reasonable and astute statesmen who sought to preserve the peace of Europe. And, in consequence, both their defenders and their critics have invested a great deal of effort in scrutinizing their contemporary writings to see whether their intentions in September 1938 were laudable or contemptible. However, it is by no means certain that the fundamental causes of governmental behaviour during a crisis are revealed in their clearest perspective by a concentration upon the contemporary utterances of policy-makers. For, by the time such a situation has been reached, the available options are normally strictly limited so that the task of the ‘decision-maker’ is often to provide a rationalization, both for himself and posterity, for a course of action which has been all but predetermined by earlier decisions. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Munich crisis was of such a type: that it represented a continuity in Britain's Central European policy and that the behaviour of the ‘men of Munich’ can only be judged in the context of this continuity. It argues, in fact, that the British adopted a policy of ‘passive pragmatism’ in defence of their world position throughout the inter-war period and that it was this which accounted both for their inaction between 1933 and 1937 and the Munich policy in 1938.

During the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century more than fifty men were hanged for sodomy in England. This was less than a seventh of the number of people executed for murder in the same period, though in one year, 1806, there were more executions for sodomy than for murder. Nevertheless, it was the case that in the first third of the nineteenth century trials and executions for sodomy were much commoner than they had been in any earlier period.

The letter dated 28 April 1882 which Parnell wrote in Kilmainham jail to Captain O'Shea has become indelibly known to history as the Kilmainham Treaty, with or without benefit of quotation marks or capital letters; and though probably few historians would today maintain that anything properly describable as a treaty was intended, let alone concluded, between Parnell and Gladstone, the influence of the name and myth persists. For example, the most recent and excellent biography of Parnell by Professor F. S. L. Lyons, while repudiating the existence of a bargain, nevertheless refers to ‘the Kilmainham settlement’ and even states that Parnell ‘negotiated the Kilmainham “treaty” that brought the ordeal [of the detainees] to an end’. A re-examination, however, of the original document, its textual content and its detailed circumstances casts a new and sinister light upon the letter, revealing Parnell as the victim of a series of malpractices by O'Shea, to which Joseph Chamberlain was at least partly privy.