The quality of the Norman impact upon England in the eleventh century has occupied the attention of generations of historians. Nevertheless it is hoped that some adequate apology may be found for the subject of this paper. Certainly, however, the topic I have chosen calls for strict delimitation. No attempt is made here to reopen the time honoured comparison between the Norman and Old English Churches in the earlier half of the eleventh century. Indeed I wish wholly to avoid that controversial theme—and for a particular reason. Most of those who have been concerned to emphasize the importance of the Norman Church at this period have concentrated their attention—and obviously rightly—on the monastic revival which swept through the Norman Duchy at this time. Perhaps, however, the Norman bishops of this period also merit some particular attention. For these men, put properly into the shade by their monastic contemporaries, have had a very bad press from historians. Doubtless, they deserved it. Nevertheless, it might be to the advantage of Anglo-Norman studies if the Norman episcopate between 1035 and 1066 were to be studied a little more fully for its own sake. At all events, these bishops and their work form the restricted subject of this very tentative discourse.

Few Lord Chancellors have defended the laws of England with greater steadfastness than Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon. Yet the House of Commons impeached him in 1667 for attempting to subvert those laws. Standing guardian over the English constitution, he was accused of plotting its ruin. Less guilty than Francis Bacon, he suffered a harsher fate. More innocent than Lord Keeper Finch, he endured the same painful banishment from the England he loved. On 11 November 1667 the House of Commons impeached him for high treason, and though they were unable to prove their accusation, they forced him, by the violence of their prosecution, to flee to France. It was his personal tragedy to suffer disgrace, calumny, and banishment though guilty of no crime.

Parliament governs by means of acts of parliament. When the number of acts of parliament increases over a period we may speak of a rise of parliamentary government, and when it decreases, of a decline. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts parliamentary government declined. Taking into account the length of their reigns, Elizabeth and James I passed fewer acts than either Henry VIII, Edward VI or Mary. Charles I passed fewer again. Under Charles II, however, the number increased, and under William III it was much higher than ever before. Thus:

The Exclusion Controversy of 1679–81 echoes many of the constitutional issues debated before and during the Civil War, just as it anticipates many of the arguments used to support the 1688 Revolution. If the attempt to exclude James, Duke of York, from the succession to the throne was abortive, it still provides an important key to contemporary opinion about the vital political problems of the century; and at this time when the structure, indeed the very existence of the early Whig and Tory parties is being questioned, the Exclusion Controversy can be shown in one respect at least to have had a markedly unifying effect on the former party, as demonstrated in its literature. The attempt at Exclusion was the supreme effort of Shaftesbury to rally the early Whig party, and it was accompanied by an intensive propaganda campaign, issuing forth a steady stream of pamphlets, most of which are still extant. Some of the best of these have been printed in Somer's Tracts, The Harleian Miscellany and State Tracts: A Collection of Treatises relating to the Government, Privately Printed in the Reign of Charles II, 1693; while others are now very rare, and single copies may be found only in the British Museum or Bodleian Library, or in such repositories as the City Guildhall Library, London. Together with the Tory replies, they form a list of nearly two hundred titles, not as vast a collection as the Civil War produced, but one to compare favourably with the volume of pamphlets occasioned by the Restoration and the Revolution.

If any single turn of events condemned the Great Rebellion to its final collapse and made the Restoration ultimately inevitable, it surely took place that April night in 1659 when the regiments about London gathered at St James's in defiance of Richard Cromwell, ‘unanimusly crieing up the good ould cause And A Comanwealth, and noe single person’. The coup d'état which virtually ended the Protectorate left England at the mercy of the military grandees who had headed it and the Republican politicians who meant to profit by it. Both groups found themselves sunk too low in credit to erect a new regime in place of the one they destroyed, and after exposing their political bankruptcy for half a year longer they finally committed political suicide by quarrelling between themselves.

Constitutional history has not bulked large in risorgimento studies, because events of greater dramatic impact take precedence on this particular stage. The 1848 constitution of Piedmont has been studied, but this was a haphazard document drawn up hurriedly by inexperienced lawyers and open to either liberal or illiberal interpretation. Far more important was the formative period after 1848, during which first the Marquis Massimo d'Azeglio and then Count Camille de Cavour created traditions of parliamentary and cabinet rule. Cavour was the most successful and authoritative parliamentarian in Italian history. On his development of the constitution, however, we possess little more than the provocative but fragmentary essays of Adolfo Omodeo, largely because for nearly a century his papers have been inaccessible. The modern Italian parliament grew directly out of Cavour's theory and practice, and what he understood by liberal government is therefore highly important. There is room, at any rate, for enquiring whether he was the straightforward liberal that a dozen biographers make out.

Henry Sidgwick was one of the most prominent university reformers in later Victorian Cambridge. His resignation of his Trinity fellowship in 1869 helped to precipitate the final abolition of religious tests in 1871, and, in the following decades, he was the leader of those who wished to develop research and to open up new branches of study. In national politics he was, as might have been expected, a Liberal, yet, when the Home Rule crisis of 1885–6 came to a head, his allegiance veered over sharply. In 1885 he voted Liberal ‘after some hesitation’; the next year he voted for the Tory candidate for the borough of Cambridge who was elected by an increased majority. That summer he wrote: ‘Unionists gaining slowly but steadily. Dined in Hall, and was surprised to find the great preponderance of Unionist sentiment among the Trinity fellows—a body always, since I have known Trinity, preponderantly Liberal.’ In the history of Victorian politics more attention might be given to the change which converted a large part of the educated classes from the Liberal side to the Conservative. J. F. Stephen, writing in 1880 to the first Earl of Lytton, said of the Conservative leaders that they were ‘all of them people whose political creed was chosen when the Conservative party was emphatically the stupid party, and when to be a Conservative meant to be opposed to pretty well all the main intellectual movements of the time’. The phrase, ‘the stupid party’, comes from J. S. Mill, whose books had been the chief intellectual influence in triumphant mid-Victorian Liberalism. By the end of his life Mill himself was becoming sceptical of the results achieved by democracy. In Representative Government (1861) he had pointed out that a popular assembly was not fitted to conduct administration or to frame laws, and that one of the great problems of democratic government is to combine popular rule with the skilled administration of the modern state. The need for increased efficiency in a more competitive age was worrying many Englishmen by 1870, and, although their criticisms cut across party and sectional boundaries, they were hostile to much in conventional Liberalism. One answer was the ‘social engineering’ of the Fabians; another approach was Matthew Arnold's assault on our educational system and on the Philistinism of our semi-educated middle classes. The only remedy for the anarchic individualism of English life lay, he thought, in the positive activity of the state, which should purify and deepen the national culture and give it direction and purpose.

The career of John Capodistrias (1776–1831) is briefly described, and his personality is discussed, in every work which deals with the diplomatic history of Europe and of Russia during the second half of the reign of the Tsar Alexander I. Entering the Russian foreign service in 1809, he rose five years later to a leading position in it and retired, disappointed, to Switzerland in 1822. As President of Greece from March 1827 until his death in October 1831 he became a more central, and a still more controversial, figure in the history of that country; this period still has a special fascination for Greek writers, and much has been added in recent years to the number of published works, including more than one biography, several studies of one period or one aspect of his career and a host of books which, directly or indirectly, throw some light upon it. But the modern Greek language is a barrier to many readers outside Greece, and there has been no biographical study in a more ‘accessible’ language since K. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's book, Graf Kapodistrias (1864) which was intended to be sympathetic but reflected strongly the outlook of a German liberal constitutionalist of that age. Much of the early writing about Capodistrias was also coloured by the fear and suspicion of Russia which prevailed in Western Europe in the half century after his death. No English writer seems to have been attracted to him except in relation to British foreign policy; the most detailed modern study in French, perhaps, is to be found in E. Driault and M. L'Héritier, Histoire diplomatique de la Grèce de 1821 à nos jours (in vols. 1–11, 1925–6); but this is confined, as the title shows, to the diplomatic side and, though valuable, is not free from some rash judgments.