Few men have ever shown a more sublime faith in the divine origin of their mission than the papal reformers of the eleventh century. They set to work with a ‘modest proposal’ to destroy two of the most intimate and powerful foundations of clerical society: they aimed to abolish simony and with it the lay control of patronage; they tried to destroy the family life of the clergy. From one point of view they were doing only what every policeman does—they were trying to enforce the established law. From another point of view their platform was a devastating social revolution. If we may admire the high idealism of Leo IX, Humbert, Hildebrand and Peter Damian, we must also concede that their work had many victims; the legislation of the eleventh-century Popes on clerical marriage must have produced as many broken homes and personal tragedies as the morals of Hollywood. Both Damian the ascetic and Heloise the deserted wife have a claim on our sympathy as historians; and both found their supporters in their own day. Between the unbending demand for the enforcement of celibacy and the view of the Anonymous of York that it was entirely proper for the clergy to be married there were many possible positions. The Anonymous (writing at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) was propounding opinions already obsolescent; and clerical marriage found few defenders in the middle and late twelfth century. But if the field narrowed, the subtleties of the problem were more fully appreciated. The twelfth century was an age of growing sophistication in lay circles as well as clerical. Nowhere was this more true than in the world of love and of marriage; in that century (whatever the lot of womankind as a whole) the romantic ideal was born, under whose spell we still live. It is the variety and the subtlety of the view-points which give my subject its interest, and also its intractability. Clerical marriage is an exceedingly delicate topic, though it has not always been delicately treated.

More than three-quarters of a century have elapsed since the part played by Sir William Coventry (1627–1686) in the government of England under Charles II was first adjudged worthy the attention of political historians of the period. These latter can scarcely be charged with idleness in the interim; but it has been to more prominent men of his time that they have attended, and to their pages Coventry is at best a transient and rather confused visitor. It is natural to wonder why. None of his contemporaries, not even Clarendon, denied him to possess administrative ability of the first order; he occupied for some years, including the critical ones of the second Dutch war, offices of considerable importance; yet his figure remains discernible only within the penumbrae of brighter bodies.

The royal election of 1697 is a topic of Polish history that has enjoyed greater popularity with foreign than with native historians: the quantity of German contributions to the subject is exceeded only by the output of French chroniclers and researchers That this should be so is understandable. The German writers have examined the elevation of an Elector of Saxony to the Polish throne, the French have studied the defeat of a Bourbon prince, but neither group has showed any interest in the part played by Russia in this double process. Polish scholars have paid only incidental attention to it and expressed widely divergent views of its significance. Jarochowski, writing a century ago, states categorically that ‘a hundred years before the last partition Poland had morally lost her independence. First the Austrian and French, next the Russian and Prussian ambassadors usurped that power which the nation denied to its own kings’. Szujski, in a work published ten years later, outbids Jarochowski and speaks of a de facto renunciation of political independence; Bobrzyński, the leading historian of the next generation, merely notes that the year 1697 marked the end of French influence in Poland. In more recent times K. Piwarski referred to the interregnum between the death of John Sobieski and the election of Augustus II as ‘the last in which the nation was still free to settle its own fate’, while W. Konopczyński discerned in it ‘a fact hitherto unprecedented in a Polish election and pregnant with consequences, the fact of Russian intimidation”.

The story of the Pardon of the Clergy in 1531 and all that it entailed has long been familiar to historians of the English Reformation; and despite the several gaps, not to say incongruities, in the accepted narrative, no writer has found difficulty in repeating the inherited version. Indeed, this most important episode in the story of Henry's overthrow of the medieval church has been distinguished by the unquestioning and brief, even peremptory, treatment which it has usually received. In the course of time, minor accretions have added to the first statement of events contained in the Chronicles. But perhaps because the Calendars are disappointingly reticent about public affairs during the winter of 1530–1, no author has seriously questioned that statement, however uneasy he may have felt about it on a priori grounds. The earliest version, therefore, compounded from Hall and Wilkins, still stands. According to it, shortly after Wolsey's death at the end of November 1530, the whole of the English clergy were indicted on a praemunire charge in the King's Bench by the Attorney General for having submitted themselves to the late cardinal's legacy. To escape from their dilemma, the two Convocations made a cash payment to Henry allowing him at the same time a new, if guarded, title of overlordship that was to prove full of consequence. Whatever the significance of the celebrated ‘saving clause’ and despite the reluctance of the clergy to concede any ground, the fact remained that Henry had won the first round with comparative ease and it was only a matter of time before he would proceed with confidence and equal success to the second.

John Locke received the following letter from the Hague on 31 January 1689, whilst he was waiting in Rotterdam for a ship to take him home, now that his exile in Holland could come to an end after the Revolution:

I have been very ill this fortnight. The beginning was what is called the disease of one's country, impatience to be there, but it ended yesterday with violence, as all great things do but kings. Ours went out like a farthing candle, and has given us by this Convention an occasion not only of mending the Government but of melting it down and making all new, which makes me wish you were there to give them a right scheme of government, having been infected by that great man Lord Shaftesbury.

In 1780 the protagonists of Economical Reform openly admitted that their principal aim was not economy but the reduction of the influence of the executive in the House of Commons. In pursuit of this object the Rockingham party rallied other opposition groups in Parliament in support of its elaborate programme of constitutional purification—a programme embracing Crewe's Bill for the disfranchisement of revenue officers, Clerke's Bill for the exclusion of contractors from the House of Commons, and Burke's Establishment Bill, which provided for the abolition of numerous offices and sinecures, and for a strict limitation of the grant of royal pensions at pleasure. ‘The saving of money’, declared Dunning, on 21 February, ‘is but a secondary object. The reduction of the influence of the Crown is the first.’ And on 8 March, Thomas Townshend similarly asserted, that ‘the first great consideration was the lessening of the influence of the Crown, which in the opinion of the people, and he believed, a majority of that House, had enormously increased of late years, and particularly so since the accession of his present Majesty.’

The Colony of Sierra Leone originated in settlements of freed slaves on the West African coast carried out on the initiative of British philanthropists in the later eighteenth century. For over a century, British responsibility was as far as possible restricted to the small mountainous peninsula on which Freetown stands, and to certain nearby islands; but influence was inevitably obtained over nearby coast and hinterland, and during the nineteenth century some additional territories were incorporated in the Colony, though not always brought under effective administration. In 1896 the remaining regions not conceded to be under French or Liberian influence were proclaimed a British Protectorate; which also included, for administrative purposes, certain chiefdoms formerly part of the Colony. In this period, therefore, the term ‘Colony’ is applied to the peninsula and islands originally settled, with a few predominantly tribal areas around the river Sherbro; the term ‘Protectorate’ to territories the size of Ireland, which form the great bulk of the area marked ‘Sierra Leone’ on a modern map, and whose social organization was at this time exclusively tribal. At the beginning of 1898 British officials began to collect a House Tax which had been imposed on three of the five districts of the Protectorate. In February, resistance to the tax by certain Temne chiefs developed into open warfare in the north, and at the end of April a series of savage attacks took place on British and American subjects, mostly of African birth and descent, among the Mende and Sherbro people further south. These two outbreaks constitute the insurrection to be studied in this paper.

The peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England have long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash. My excuse for nevertheless making that attempt is not the discovery of any new material, which, even if it were to become available, could hardly alter the well-known outlines of the harrowing tale as told in the standard histories: nor could much be added to the careful sketch made of the Church's contribution by F. Warre Cornish, or the excellent summary of the educational principles in conflict given by W. F. Connell. To the details of these, and of the distillation of them which appears in the best text-books, I can suggest only one positive amendment. But looking at the matter from the sheltered advantage of one who has not to write a detailed thorough book about it, it seems to me that none of the existing books can do the subject justice, for none of them tells the whole story. If such substantial books as have already been written fail to tell the whole story, it is obvious that a brief article will not succeed in doing so, and I can only aim to suggest something which the ideal complete history must not omit. For more than half a century we have been learning that the issues of Church and State in the Middle Ages can never be understood if Church and State are regarded as susceptible of separate histories. To see them thus is to see two things where men at the time saw but one. Similarly, the problems of Victorian public education cannot properly be understood in their multi-dimensional reality if they are split into categories normal, perhaps, for our own time, but strange to theirs.