On 2 August 1521 Wolsey arrived at Calais to preside over a conference the ostensible purpose of which was to put an end to fighting that had broken out earlier in the year, fighting which had increasingly involved French and imperial forces. When, nearly four months later, the conference broke up, the fighting still continued. Clearly Wolsey had been unsuccessful in bringing about peace, but he did not return to England empty-handed. On 24 November a treaty had been signed committing England to a declaration of war against France, at least by March 1523. This treaty, and especially the fact that its terms had to all intents and purposes been settled at Wolsey's meeting with the emperor at Bruges less than a fortnight after his arrival at Calais, has led many historians to suspect that Wolsey had never been very serious about his role as peacemaker. Not, however, all. In his biography of Henry VIII, J. J. Scarisbrick has argued most powerfully that at Calais Wolsey worked very hard to reconcile Francis I and the emperor, and, indeed he sees his activities there as crucial evidence that ‘Wolsey's policy was a peace policy and for about fifteen years he struggled to make it work’. The main purpose of this article will be to argue that, at least as far as the events of 1521 are concerned, this thesis cannot be sustained. Instead, it will be shown that Wolsey's main aim in 1521 was to bring about the alliance with the emperor.

The intention of this paper is to look at some of the problems which arise in attempts to provide ‘explanations’ of mercantilism and especially its English manifestations. By ‘explanations’ I mean the efforts which some writers have made causally to relate the historical appearance of sets of economic notions or general recommendations on economic policy or even acts of economic policy by the state to particular long-term phenomena of, or trends in, economic history. Historians of economic thought have not generally made such attempts. With a few exceptions they have normally concerned themselves with tracing and analysing the contributions to economic theory made by those labelled as mercantilists. The most extreme case of non-explanation is provided by Eli Heckscher's reiterated contention in his two massive volumes that mercantilism was not to be explained by reference to the economic circumstances of the time; mercantilist policy was not to be seen as ‘the outcome of the economic situation’; mercantilist writers did not construct their system ‘out of any knowledge of reality however derived’. So strongly held an antideterminist fortress, however congenial a haven for some historians of ideas, has given no comfort to other historians – economic or political, Marxist or non-Marxist – who obstinately exhibit empiricist tendencies. Some forays against the fortress have been made. Barry Supple's analysis of English commerce in the early seventeenth century and the resulting presentation of mercantilist thought and policy as ‘the economics of depression’ has passed into the textbooks and achieved the status of an orthodoxy.

To most Frenchmen of the revolutionary generation the south conjured up a stereotype image of militant royalism in which bizarrely accoutred peasants followed ci-devant seigneurs and priests into battle and murder gangs toiled under a burning sun. The principal weakness of such a view lies not in the factual detail nor even in the presumption that the entire population was insurgent, but in its essentially linear perspective. As a recent historian has observed, the south can be characterized not only by its fervent royalist commitment but also by its predilection for the politics of extremes. The complicating and exacerbating factor in this southern counter-revolutionary equation was the presence of a parallel and equally uncompromising loyalty to the Republic. Of course, both stances were rationalizations whose ideological content needs careful weighing, but their interaction in small and often volatile communities provided counter-revolution with a dynamic which perpetuated confrontation and drove each side to extremes of savagery and fanaticism.

In the numerous works devoted to the French civil war of 1871, nothing has so much been taken for granted as the motives of the government during the six weeks that separated its taking office on 19 February and the outbreak of fighting on 2 April. Thiers and his colleagues are part of the myth of the Commune, the scribes and pharisees of the revolutionary passion play. They fill the roles well: there are few figures so unprepossessing in the history of nineteenth-century France.

The minor heroes of anarchism have not been much noticed by historians. Johann Most, who was quite a celebrated anarchist in his own time, now lives chiefly in footnotes and in a few passing recollections in the memoirs of more famous contemporaries. His neglect is not altogether surprising. Anarchism must always suffer neglect while it remains (as yet) one of history's minor tributaries, an aberration, a movement with no discernible place in the mainstream of human political development. Anarchists themselves are generally of little intrinsic interest to anyone unless they are notable thinkers, like Kropotkin, or activists, like Malatesta. Johann Most was neither: not a philosopher of any sophistication, nor (so far as is known) a bomb-thrower. He came between the two: an acid-tongued propagandist for the cause of anarchy who advocated the use of violence, by others. As such he is acknowledged to have had a significant influence on the early growth of anarchist movements in Germany, the United States, and in Britain, where he lived from 1878 to 1882. He may however have been more significant for the things that were done to him than for the things he did. Everywhere Most moved he provoked reactions, persecution, imprisonment. It will be argued here that this is where the importance of the English stage of his career lay.

The first World War ended very suddenly. Large numbers of civilian workers lost their jobs in the period of industrial dislocation that followed, adding to the numbers of unemployed already swollen by the return of demobilized soldiers from the continent. No plans existed, however, to provide for the civilian unemployed. A last-minute decision was made in November 1918 to extend free out-of-work donation to them as well as to those newly released from the army. Although this scheme proved inordinately expensive it did provide the cabinet with a much needed breathing-space. In the event, however, general policy on how to cater for the unemployed was not tackled again for many months.

In July 1918 it was the considered opinion of Lord Northcliffe that propaganda and diplomacy were incompatible. When, only five months earlier, Northcliffe had accepted Lloyd George's invitation to take charge of the newly created department of enemy propaganda, his appointment, coupled with that of Lord Beaverbrook as Britain's first minister of information, had held out the promise of a new phase in the efficiency and co-ordination of Britain's conduct of official propaganda in foreign countries. It was then, in February 1918, that the Foreign Office had finally been forced to relinquish its control over such work. However, the creation of the two new departments had produced an intolerable situation. After three years of inter-departmental rivalry and squabbling over the conduct of propaganda overseas, Whitehall closed ranks on Beaverbrook and Northcliffe and united behind the Foreign Office in opposition to any further transference of related duties into their hands. Now, after five months of continued obstruction, Northcliffe expressed the view that:

As a people we do not understand propaganda ways…Propaganda is advertising and diplomacy is no more likely to understand advertising than advertising is likely to understand diplomacy.