The Act in Restraint of Appeals to Rome of 1533 has become one of the most controversial statutes of what Dr G. R. Elton has called the ‘Tudor revolution’. The central issue seems to be Elton's view that the term ‘empire’ in the Act's famous preamble provided the theoretical basis for Henry VIII's claim to a jurisdiction in spiritual cases. It is not my intention to enter this high and perhaps irresolvable debate; rather I propose to consider the solution that the Act provided for the practical problem that was its occasion, namely, the king's ‘great matter’, and the inadequacy of that solution for problems that developed subsequently. The political doctrines stated or implied in Tudor statutes are interesting and significant, but, as Elton has written in connexion with the causes of the Reformation, ‘Anne Boleyn should not be forgotten’.

‘Promotion’, says Holy Scripture, ‘cometh neither from the east, nor from the west: nor yet from the south’. Clerical aspirants knew better than the psalmist the strange geography of preferment in Restoration England, where the return in 1660 of the Stuarts did much to encourage in churchmen a greater sense of direction and purpose. Our present study is to elucidate one particular period in the history of preferment, that spanned by the short-lived and little-known Commission for Ecclesiastical Promotions which sat at the height and at the helm of the Tory Reaction. To place the Commission in its proper perspective, however, something must be said of the Restoration Settlement itself. It was, of course, no accident that the hereditary monarchy and Anglican Church returned together. Sir Edward Hyde, foremost of the statesmen at the exiled Court and, from January 1658, lord chancellor to Charles II, had bent his energies to achieve this very end. Yet, for the Church, it was a re-establishment rather than an unqualified restoration, for the loyalist nobility and gentry-the real architects of Sion's delivery-were careful not to resurrect Laud's persecuting prelacy. To understand the changed circumstances in which the Church found herself, it is essential to take account of what was not, as well as what was restored. Neither the imperious Court of High Commission nor the self-incriminating ex officio oath was brought back. Shorn of the chief weapons with which she had formerly harried the more wayward of the political nation, the Church returned as part of the only workable constitution England had ever known, that is as a buttress of monarchy.

During the early years of the nineteenth century the distribution of patronage n i Ireland—‘the spoils system’—reflected current English practice, but with peculiarly Irish overtones. The duke of Wellington's observation in 1830 that the government was losing its control of patronage to private members of Parliament may well have been applied to the Irish scene at any time after the Union. The men who benefited from the Irish system were drawn almost exclusively from the Ascendency party, that group of upper class Anglo-Irish Protestants long favoured by law and custom. Their pre-eminence had been assured during the negotiations prior to the Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. In the same manner that Pitt and Castlereagh had achieved their objective by exploiting Irish ambitions for titles, pensions and sinecures, Ascendency politicians established themselves as the dominating force in domestic politics. Commonly referred to as ‘Irish tones’, these men consistently exalted their special religious and economic needs far above any comprehensive British tory interests. Within the permanent Castle staff their influence was all pervasive. They shared a sense of power and the overriding confidence which characterized generations of Anglo-Irish families. Their satisfaction with ‘Orange’ politics served to compliment their pre-occupation with their own self-interests and the maintenance of the status quo.

John Lingard (1771–1851) was the first English historian to attempt to look at the history of England in the sixteenth century from an international point of view. He was unconvinced by the story of the Reformation in England as found in the works of previous historians such as Burnet and Hume, and believed that new light needed to be thrown on the subject. One way of doing this was to look at English history from the outside, so to speak, and Lingard held it to be a duty of the historian ‘to contrast foreign with native authorities, to hold the balance between them with an equal hand, and, forgetting that he is an Englishman, to judge impartially as a citizen of the world’. In pursuit of this ideal Lingard can be said to have given a new dimension to the source materials for English history. As parish priest in the small village of Hornby, near Lancaster, Lingard had few opportunities for travel. But he made good use of his various friends and former pupils at Douai and Ushaw colleges who were settled now in various parts of Europe. It was with the help of these friends that Lingard made contacts with and gained valuable information from archives in France, Italy and Spain. We shall concern ourselves here only with the story of Lingard's contacts with the great Spanish State Archives at Simancas.

That Britain's attitude towards foreign powers for a considerable part of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth was governed by a so-called ‘policy of isolation’, often, although not invariably, linked with the epithet ‘splendid’, was long accepted by many historians. Indeed, it would be easy to compile a list of distinguished writers, in whose works these words are to be found. There has, however, been some disagreement both as to when the alleged policy originated and as to when it came to an end. Moreover, in recent years the very existence of the ‘policy of isolation’ has been called in question. The late Dame Lillian Penson dismissed it as a ‘legend’.

The significance of the Entente Cordiale has often been disguised both by its own emotive title and by the subsequent development of Anglo-French relations. Vincent Auriol claimed on its fiftieth anniversary that ‘the convention of 8 April 1904 embodied the agreement of our two peoples on the necessity of safeguarding the spiritual values of which we were the common trustees’. Eden's interpretation on the same occasion was more prosaic and more accurate. ‘At the time when it was concluded’, he told the Commons, ‘the Entente Cordiale did not represent some great surge of public opinion on either side of the Channel. It was in fact an instrument of political policy at the time, calculated to attempt to remove the differences which had long complicated Anglo-French relations in Egypt and Morocco.’ The solution to these differences which was suggested to the English government by the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, in July 1903, and which formed the basis of the agreement signed nine months later, was the barter of Egypt for Morocco. In all that has been written on the Entente Cordiale neither the origin of this barter nor the steps by which it became the foundation for the diplomatic reconciliation of France and England have ever been explained.