Current knowledge of politics during the coalition government headed by William Pitt between July, 1794 and March, 1801 resembles a fen set amid drained lands, in that neither ministerial relations within the executive nor the internal affairs of the opposition have attracted much recent attention. For the government, such attention has been directed toward questions of foreign policy and of the motives and effects of the domestic repression. For the Foxites, a relative paucity of materials and the fact of the 1797 secession have conspired substantially to halt scholarly concern at 1794. I have elsewhere attempted to redress somewhat the latter state of affairs. In this essay I propose to deal with two interrelated topics of wartime politics during Pitt's government; the nexus of allegiances among the ministers, and some procedural aspects of executive decision-making. The first, centering upon the specific question of the degeneration of the Portland Whigs, also throws some additional light on the formation of the coalition ministry; the second, attending to restrictions on participation and information and their effects on the subtle dialectic between George III and his ministers, can further explicate the fall of the government.

In preparing the Vita Ædwardi Regis…, the First Latin Life of King Edward the Confessor, for its convenient modern edition, Frank Barlow has subdivided the work into two internal “books,” which he sees as very loosely connected, to which he assigns dates of 1065-6 and 1067 respectively, and for which he editorially supplies the subtitles: Book I “Queen Edith's Family,” Book II “Edward's Religious Life.” Much of Barlow's work, not only on The Life but also on the whole subject of Edward and his times, is so good that it is not surprising that this division of the text has been widely accepted: even Sten Körner, who questions Barlow's dating, writes: “The Vita Edwardi is in two parts.…” Nevertheless, viewed in the light of this two book theory, the “work” remains, as Barlow has recently said, one “we now find most difficult to understand,” partly because we must see its author as changing his literary purpose during the course of the writing. It is my own purpose to show that a closer reading of The Life does not support the conclusion that the work has no internal literary unity and that, once this unity is perceived, both the dating and the evaluating of the text become easier. Indeed, when The Life is seen as one work all written during those “evil times” to which its anonymous author refers, its interest is much enhanced; through it we can then glimpse “Edith, the first gem in the middle of the kingdom,” covertly lamenting the fall of her kinsmen and the tribulation of her land during its first years under the victorious William of Normandy, yet at the same time refusing to believe that there was no future for the kingdom of the English.

This essay examines the role of Parliament in the formation and conduct of foreign policy after the Restoration. My principal interest has been to see how the Members of the House of Commons viewed that role. I have, therefore, focussed on the parliamentary debates rather than the diplomatic correspondence in order to observe the changes and limits of the parliamentary position.

These limits can be observed initially in a view of the prerogatives of the Crown. Charles II was a francophile king. He loved the country of his mother; he openly admired the absolutism of his cousin, the Sun King; he secretly cherished the Roman Catholic faith which he associated with successful Kingship. Like his model, the King of France, Charles interested himself actively in foreign affairs. Although not remarkable for diligence and industry in many aspects of government, he was a regular attender at the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The membership of this group fluctuated at the royal will, but always included the two Secretaries of State. Sir Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, as Secretary of State for Southern Europe, was virtually Minister for Foreign Affairs for about a dozen years. The King, acting with the Secretaries in Committee, instructed diplomats, who negotiated treaties independently of Parliament. The Triple Alliance of 1668, for example, although publicly known, was concluded while Parliament was not in session. Occasionally, Charles II acted without even these intimate advisors. The classic example is the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 whose real provisions were kept even from some members of the Foreign Committee.

Although there is an ever increasing amount of scholarship describing the individual and collective experiences of British women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has been, as yet, little written on the period after 1914. It is not my purpose here to fill that void. Rather it is the aim of this essay to sketch in the most striking features of British women's economic position during the inter-war years. Two interrelated aspects will be stressed: the actual employment of women during the period and the extent of changes in women's traditional economic roles. This essay proceeds on the assumption that pre-war feminism and the increased employment of women during the war heightened women's economic expectations. In post-war Britain, new vistas seemed to be opening as indicated by a flood of legal changes affecting women and as discussed in the analyses of contemporary social commentators. The reality, however, was not altogether encouraging. Employment gains made during the war by skilled and unskilled women in industry evaporated within a few years after 1918. The position of professional women showed some improvement but did not achieve the levels of their earlier hopes. The economic dislocations of the twenties and thirties were in part responsible for the slowness of change, but just as importantly, the accepted economic roles of women underwent no fundamental alterations.