Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, ennobled as Count of Gondomarin 1617, served as Spanish ambassador to England from 1613 to 1622 and continued thereafter in a sort of emeritus status as Spain's leading, almost only, expert on English affairs until his death in 1626.

In this tense, crisis-ridden time of uneasy peace prior to the Thirty Years' War and during the opening years of that war, when its course and its eventual extent were still much in doubt, what was going to happen in Europe, and to Europe, was very much in the hands of the relatively few men who guided or influenced affairs of state in a few key capitals. None were more important than such men in Spain and England, widely recognized as the heads of ‘the two protectorats’ over Catholic and Protestant Europe. Gondomar must certainly be counted among these few.

The granting of an extension to James Watt's patent for an improved steamengine (or fire-engine as it was then called) might be considered the most important single event in the Industrial Revolution. Its implications have been fully debated. Some have argued that without it Watt's steam engine might never have been perfected and that consequently the steam revolution might have been delayed; others have said that it proved a block to progress, and in particular hindered the work of Trevithick and others who appreciated the importance of high-pressure steam. Whichever view one takes of it, it is a crucial event in the history of steam power, and therefore it is important to understand fully the circumstances in which it came about, so that we can assess the motives of those who promoted the measure and those who opposed it. And when we consider that the opposition to it was led by Edmund Burke himself, an added interest is given to the matter, for we may expect to learn something of Burke's attitudes to monopolies and patents. Lastly, the material on which this paper is based has a further interest. It gives a detailed account of a parliamentary lobby in the later eighteenth century, giving the names of those who were approached, and allowing us to see the methods which were pursued by an eminent manufacturer, Matthew Boulton, and his partner, James Watt, in getting such a measure through Parliament. As is so often the case during the early years of the Industrial Revolution what appears at first sight to be a local affair proves to be a matter of national, even international importance, in its repercussions. The history of Birmingham becomes the history of the world.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their book The State and the Doctor, which was submitted in the first instance as a memorandum to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1909, dismiss the work of the free dispensaries and medical missions in one short paragraph.

During the three great nineteenth-century debates on the charter of the East India Company, Whiggery's finest orators arraigned the system of patronage by which the Directors nominated civil servants to appointments in India. In 1813, Lord Grenville, in a speech to which for decades men turned for ‘inspiration and guidance’, advocated the appointment of writers ‘by free competition and public examination from our great schools and universities’. Defeated at the time, the case for the competitive principle was revived twenty years later by Macaulay in an address before the House of Commons which, it was said, would ‘console the young people for never having heard Mr. Burke’. That ‘universal genius’, as Sir Charles Trevelyan, his brother-inlaw, once described him, carried into legislation a plan for selecting by competitive examination the students for Haileybury, the Company's training college for civil servants. Nominees, four times as numerous as the places at the College, would be examined and the best of them enrolled. However, as Macaulay's biographer observed, ‘backstairs influence in Leadenhall Street’ contrived to render the plan inoperative, until ‘backstairs influence in Parliament’ effected its repeal.

Britain acted as a principal arbitrator of the Eastern Question throughout the nineteenth century. During the 1890's, however, Britain lost this position owing to diplomatic isolation, the hostility of the Sultan of Turkey—who had found a new ally in Germany—and an equal hostility to the Sultan in Britain, where he was regarded as a brutal oriental despot presiding over an empire in the last stages of decay. The immediate cause of Britain's loss of status in Turkey was her failure to provide vigorous support to Sultan Abdul Hamid in the critical period following the Congress of Berlin. Turkey was bankrupt, but the Sultan's appeal for a loan met with no response in Britain; Turkey's European provinces were on the verge of slipping out of the Sultan's control but Britain refused to extend the terms of the Cyprus Convention (which guaranteed the Sultan's dominions in Asia Minor) to cover the more turbulent Balkans. The Convention itself had an alienating effect, since the guarantee was dependent upon the introduction of administrative reforms in Asia Minor under the direction of British military consuls. Britain's insistence on the application of this provision aroused the suspicion that she was actually seeking political control over this area. Turkey's loss of confidence in Britain, however, had deeper roots. ‘Many Muslims believed that Britain had deserted Turkey in the hour of need, that her protection of Islam was disproved by her war with Afghanistan, that her desire for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was shown to be a pretence by the occupation of Cyprus, and that her power to rule provinces properly was doubtful after her failures in Egypt.’ In fact as early as 1879 Britain had lost the special position which she had held in Turkey for nearly half a century; and thereafter her prestige diminished rapidly, especially after the strong public reaction to the Armenian massacres of 1894-95.

The Arab question in British diplomacy, it is remarkable to observe, has conjured up, both among those directly involved and among subsequent commentators, an amount of passionate discussion, of anguished retrospection, of accusation and self-denunciation, quite out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. For after all, compared to the great issues of Europe, America, the Commonwealth, and India, the Husain-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, are small and paltry transactions which, as luck would have it, have turned out, it is true, to be inopportune and profitless and the cause of much loss and tribulation. For the historian of the Middle East, of course, the British connexion must loom very large by reason of its immediate impact and of its ultimate consequences, but in British history can the short-lived middle-eastern episode be more than a passing incident in the Indian summer of the Empire? For they are perhaps right, those who assert that had Britain been able to retain India, her middle-eastern position could probably have been maintained, regardless of mistakes and confusions in middle-eastern policy itself, and that, once India gone, neither virtue nor virtuosity would have availed to preserve Suez, Haifa and Habbaniyya. But this cool, sceptical view is rarely met in the writings either of the participants or of the subsequent commentators, whose mode is one of burning regret, and vehement lamentations, and who are for ever weighing good faith against bad faith, promises kept and promises broken, scrutinizing motives and examining scruples, like the diligent followers of some strict pietism, oppressed by sin and dolefully thirsting for justification.