Over forty years ago with great elegance and scholarship Professor Notestein gave his famous Raleigh lecture on ‘The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons’: in this he developed the thesis that amongst the reasons for the great yet inconspicuous change ‘between the time of Elizabeth and that of the Long Parliament in the relation of the Council to the Commons’ was that

Almost without observation, Privy Councillors ceased to guide the Commons. And, quite as much unobserved, with no document or charter to serve as a milestone, there came into power in the Commons a group of leaders, who had no official connexion with the Government, who had no common tie, except those of the opinions and feelings that bound English country gentlemen together. These men without purpose or intent but to do the next thing that came to hand, created a new leadership. With the establishment of that leadership the Commons gained the real initiative in legislation.

Between 1046, when the Emperor Henry III reformed the papacy, and 1099, when Pope Urban II died, a very drastic change came over the loyalties of the church and city of Milan. In 1046, these loyalties were chiefly local; their centre was St Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan who was its patron saint. Apart from certain rather artificial purposes of propaganda in its long struggle for precedence over Ravenna and Aquileia, Milan did not actively look to the see of St Peter; nor was it, in practice, subject to Roman interference. Politically, it did, indeed, acknowledge an ultimate loyalty to the emperor; but this was because, so long as he ruled his kingdom of Italy from a distance, he was a safeguard for Milan's virtual autonomy in spiritual and temporal affairs. Milan had the appearance of a proud and self-sufficient metropolis, subject only to the ecclesiastical and civil rule of its own archbishop. But, after 1056, its order and independence were rudely challenged when the Patarene movement gave rise to nineteen years of civil strife. The Patarenes sought help from Rome, where they found some ready and effective allies amongst the reformers. Milan, accordingly, reacted by showing itself actively hostile to the papacy; for a while, its citizens called upon the Emperor Henry IV to be active in vindicating his rights. Then, in 1075, tne Patarenes suffered a sudden collapse and ceased to be an effective movement.

Ten years ago a well-known Swiss writer on Middle Eastern affairs published an article on patriotism and nationalism among the Arabs. Discussing the attitude of nationalists to the past, and their tendency to substitute fanciful constructions for serious history, he quotes ‘a high Syrian government official’ as saying, ‘in deadly earnest’: ‘If the Mongols had not burnt the libraries of Baghdad in the 13 th century, we Arabs would have had so much science, that we would long since have invented the atomic bomb. The plundering of Baghdad put us back by centuries.’

Few historians of the Long Parliament would regard the form of Church government as the first concern of the parliamentary leaders in their negotiations with the king. Contemporary historians considered that the early struggle was not about religion. The royalist Clarendon, the parliamentarian Thomas May, even Richard Baxter, a deeply religious Puritan, were unanimous. To the aristocracy and gentry, it was essentially a conflict over political power and public safety. Religious fervour would inspire the New Model Army, rouse the London citizens, and stimulate the printing presses. But how many members of Parliament or of the gentry in 1640 supported fundamental religious change? Sir Edward Dering told the Commons on 20 November 1641 that he had heard no one there declare themselves for either Presbyterianism or Independency. When Baxter described the composition of the Rump Parliament, he did not see it as the culmination or fulfilment of a religious movement, the expression of Independency.

In a well-known passage at the conclusion of his preface to the Confutation of Tyndale's Answer Thomas More expressed his fears about the possible effects of the public controversy in which he was then engaged. ‘I would advise any man’, he wrote, ‘neither to rede these heretikes bookes nor myne, but occupye theire mindes better, and standing firmely bi the catholike faithe of thys .xv.C. yere, never ones muse upon these new fangled heresies.’ It was inappropriate, More suggested, for ‘the people unlearned’ to be concerned with ‘what may well be aunswered unto heretiques’; rather they should occupy themselves ‘beside their other busines in praier good meditacion, and reading of suche englishe bookes as moste may noryshe and encreace devocion. Of which kind is Bonaventure of the lyfe of Christe, Gerson of the folowing of Christ and the devoute contemplative booke of Scala perfectionis wyth such other lyke.’

‘It is not more than seventy or eighty years since,’ wrote ‘A Member of the Manchester Athenaeum’ in 1844, ‘that a few humble mechanics in Lanarkshire, distinguished by scarcely anything more than mechanical ingenuity and perseverance of character, succeeded in forming a few, but important mechanical combinations, the effect of which has been to revolutionize the whole of British society, and to influence, in a marked degree, the progress of civilization in every quarter of the globe.’

On Monday, 16 November, 1495, Henry VII, accompanied by his queen and court, attended a banquet at Ely Place to mark the promotion of nine barristers to the rank and dignity of serjeant-at-law. A glittering occasion, the feast was carefully noted by the chroniclers as the social event of the year. But to Francis Bacon, writing over a century later, Henry VTTs presence at Ely Place was more than an event in the court calendar, it was symbolic. Henry VII, he wrote:

to honour the feast was present with his Queen at the dinner; being a Prince that was ever ready to grace and countenance the professors of the law; having a little of that, that, as he governed his subjects by his laws, so he governed his laws by his lawyers.

Early in the seventeenth century an English or Scottish buccaneer settled with a few companions at the mouth of a river in a deserted section of the coast of Central America. The man's name was Wallace, called ‘Valis’ or ‘Balis’ by the Spaniards. The river to which he gave his name was the Belize river, and the settlement which he founded ultimately became, in 1862, the colony of British Honduras.