The Habsburg monarchy – its Iberian branch, at least – could regard 1559 as the beginning of a new era; a lasting peace had been made with France and the new King had returned to Castile. In Europe the Empire had withstood the stresses of the previous fifty years with remarkable success: Habsburg control of the Netherlands and the thin ribbon of territories linking them with Italy remained unimpaired: in Italy, Charles V and his successor had defeated all attempts by France and the Papacy to weaken the Imperial hold on the peninsula.

The Elizabethan religious settlement was meant to secure the unity of England by means of religious uniformity. As a political compromise it brought eighty years of relative peace and prosperity, but as a religious compromise it failed to satisfy either Catholic or Puritan. The problem of enforcing the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 was complicated by the lack of adequate administrative machinery. The delay in purging the commissions of the peace, the failure to promote sufficient zeal among the justices of the peace, coupled with the decline of episcopal power and disenchantment with the High Commission and the various diocesan ecclesiastical commissions, led the government in the late 1580s and early 1590s to issue special royal commissions to carefully selected magistrates for dealing with seminary priests and recusant affairs. Thus, the Elizabethan government's policy towards recusants at any given period of time was a reflection not only of the degree of tension in the international situation, but also of the need to devise effective ways of enforcing die penal laws.

The government of the parliamentary party during the Puritan Revolution of 1640–60 instituted changes in judicial and legal procedures to maintain its power and subdue its enemies. This study of treason trials conducted by the state will examine their legal basis and the events and activities considered treasonable. It will show the ways in which the concept of treason changed under a revolutionary government, and to what extent those trials conducted during the interregnum differed in their legal—judicial bases and content from those held before the King's death. Although there were hundreds of treason convictions during the interregnum throughout England, either by military courts-martial, or by common-law courts sitting in the provinces — as is shown by the Acts providing for die sale of estates forfeited to the Commonwealth for treason — this discussion will limit itself to trials initiated by the government in London. These state trials illustrate die political use of the treason charge; diey provide a direct link between the enactment of the interregnum treason laws and their implementation by the same legislative body. Not only was the meaning of treason determined, and die machinery of trial set up, by parliament; but who was to be tried was also decided eidier by parliament or die Council of State, and, after 1654, by the Protector and his council. It will dierefore be instructive to examine the types of treasonous action considered sufficiendy threatening to warrant parliamentary attention.

Since the advent of the social sciences, historians have been ploughing up large areas of well-trampled history. Sociology, for example, has lent them an expanding range of hypotheses and interpretations. In particular, studies more concerned with behavioural patterns than with the mere details of what happened have cast the traditional accounts aside. But there are dangers in this rush to produce fresh formulations. The historian, once caught in the tangle of an ingenious general explanation, abandons too easily the normal rigorous standards of historical research. Frequendy, in such cases, he fails to establish the relationship between his evidence and his generalizations. These criticisms often apply when broad concepts from political sociology are used to explain the motives and behaviour of specific politicians and groups of politicians. Any background study of the Great Reform Act is exposed to all these risks.

The writing of history involves not only the search for evidence concerning particular events, but a selection of the evidence which appears to the historian to be most relevant to his task and also the imposition of labels on this evidence, its division into categories, resulting in a neat explanatory pattern being imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated mass of information.

Unlike their fellows in a number of other industries, English farm labourers came relatively late to the idea of trade unionism. Admittedly, unsuccessful attempts at combination had been made by some few labourers from the 1830s onwards – and particularly during the later 1860s – but it was not until the years 1871–2 that appreciable numbers of them displayed real interest in the principles of trade unionism

Critical research into the motivation and content of Liberal social policies before 1914 has qualified much of the credit the party's accomplishments originally received. Yet such qualifications may go too far and in the struggle to do justice to all the facts, historical accuracy may suffer both from tendencies to look for dominant motifs or patterns, and from the temptation to emphasize the ‘real’ empirical nature of politics, so losing sight of all purposes and patterns – especially value-patterns. For example, the emphasis upon nineteenth century administrative development may certainly correct the previously overdrawn distinction between, firstly, individualism and the negative state, and secondly, collectivism and the positive state, but if such emphasis is carried too far it may appear that the social reforms passed after 1906 were no more than the logical continuation of a legislative trend already well-established. It may appear through the simple cataloguing of administrative growth, in conjunction with the attention focused on the rise of the Labour movement and the ensuing attempt to place both in a long-term historical perspective, that the Liberal party was largely the passive instrument of movements and ideas which passed around and about the party, rather than through and within it; and, this being so, that interpretations such as those of Laski, dating the emergence of ‘fundamental’ party divisions from post-1914, may be too easily accepted.

Lord Hardinge, returning to the Foreign Office as Permanent Undersecretary in June 1916, after an interval of six years spent as Viceroy of India, remarked that he could scarcely recognize the pre-war Foreign Office in the structure with which he was confronted. Hardinge was thinking of the more obvious changes wrought by the war on the Foreign Office, where the work had increased dramatically since August, 1914 – indeed, by 1918, it was estimated that it had ‘more than quintupled since the outbreak of hostilities’ – and the resulting increase in staff had produced almost insurmountable practical difficulties. Yet there were other, more subtle ways in which the Foreign Office of 1916 differed from that over which Hardinge had presided from 1906 to 1910. Lord Bertie, British Ambassador in Paris, hinted at what was perhaps the most fundamental change when, writing to congratulate Hardinge on his appointment, he commented: ‘I think you will find that the Foreign Office is in great part a “pass-on” department viz. it issues instructions at the instance of other offices often without considering whether such instructions are advisable or feasible…’ Bertie's comment was to prove as relevant to the second as to the first half of the war. Indeed, there were occasions during the 1916–18 period when the Foreign Office might more properly have been described as a ‘passed-over’ department with little influence on the policy-making process.