One of the most fruitful developments in the recent historiography of the English Civil War has been the growing interest in its local dimension. Historians are no longer content to study the constitutional and religious struggles as though they occurred in a vacuum at Westminster, but have examined the diverse reactions to those conflicts within the patchwork of local communities, and the machinery through which central orders were executed – Or circumvented – at the grass-roots level.

Francois de Callieres (1645–1717) was a diplomatic envoy and man of letters who in 1716 published De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains. A Normand of literate and noble, but modest ancestry, he lived for many years in various parts of Europe before securing, somewhat late in a long life, a position in the service of Louis XIV. Although he won admission to the Académie Française for a panegyric on the King and published several other books including a noteworthy contribution to the ‘Battle of the Ancients and Moderns’, the high point in his sombre but determined life came during the Nine Years War when as a secret envoy he negotiated the crucial terms with the Dutch which led to the Congress of Ryswick (1697) and peace. Thereafter he held the sensitive position of secrétaire du cabinet at Versailles and supplied the secretary of state for foreign affairs with a flow of memoranda on the conditions of peace.

Weak states can control strong states, provided the weak can persuade the strong to admit, that they are vitally interested in their integrity and independence. In the late nineteentli century everybody understood the influence of the Ottoman Empire upon British policy, and the influence of Austria-Hungary upon Imperial German policy in the near east. In the heyday of the Great Powers of Europe it was not expected tliat orientals should aspire to similar influence: their futures would be decided by Europeans. Until the work of Robinson and Gallagher revealed the extent to which the khedive of Egypt controlled Lord Cromer, the history of late nineteenth century imperialism was written from this assumption.

Before I start I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty Board of History who have entrusted me with the very interesting task of delivering this lecture and to Mrs Lindsay for handing me a copy of her article on the ‘Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, which appeared in volume IX of the Cambridge Historical Journal. This article surely must remain the authoritative account of the early development of the Tripos. I owe much to it, as also to an anonymous set of notes on the changes in the Tripos up to 1932, which was discovered in the offices of the History Faculty. This I suspect to have been compiled by Ronald Balfour, a Fellow of King's and close friend of mine, who was killed in the last war. I need not say that neither Mrs Lindsay, nor the author of these notes is responsible for what follows.

The view that Lloyd George designed his ‘People's Budget’of 1909–10 so as to invite its rejection by the House of Lords has fallen very largely out of favour with scholars, and it is now generally accepted that he devised his Budget as an alternative to rather than as a means to a battle with the Lords. As argued by Roy Jenkins and others, Lloyd George assumed that the peers would not dare tamper with a finance bill, and he consequently looked to his Budget as a way around the veto of the Lords: by means of it he hoped to attain some radical objectives against the wishes of the Lords.

The White Paper on Palestine, issued by the British Government in May 1939, adumbrated future British policy in Palestine at a time when all members of the Cabinet, including Chamberlain, had accepted the inevitability of war. Yet, while they were concerting measures for war on a global scale, the Middle Eastern theatre was of low military priority, and appeasement remained the order of the day, with the White Paper as its principal instrument. The White Paper severely restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine for the next five years and amde further, subsequent immigration dependent upon Arab consent. Britain also promised to set up an independent Palestinian State within the next ten years, if this should prove feasible.