If English reform lacked a Luther or a Zwingli at least it had Thomas Bylney. In his capacity as an inflammatory preacher and a leader of men, he took the lead in starting the English Reformation. He often evoked the epithet of ‘Little’ – a reference to his slight stature – but a more fitting description would have been ‘aggressive’ or ‘tough-minded’ Bylney. Although he expressed doubts about the papacy he never openly repudiated the see of Rome: nor did he doubt the traditional doctrine of the real presence in the eucharist. Clearly, he cannot be called a Protestant although he is often portrayed as one. His conversion to evangelical reform came through reading the Novum testamentum of Erasmus, but his subsequent attack on the saints puts him beyond the pale of the milder, conservative Erasmianism. His personal influence at Cambridge was immense since he was responsible for converting key men in the coming Reformation of England: Thomas Arthur, Hugh Latimer, Robert Barnes and John Lambert. The portrait that Foxe paints of him is of saintly hue. Like the apostle Paul he was an insignificant-looking man, temperate in his habits, ascetic in his tastes, and unflagging in his concern for others. He visited ‘lazar cots’ where he comforted the sick, and went to the prisons to reclaim the hopeless. He was something of a Puritan since when his college neighbour, the future Bishop Thirlby, practised his recorder, Bylney would resort to prayer.

Twenty-five years ago J. G. A. Pocock first argued that the Norman conquest was the rock upon which all arguments for the continuity of the common law finally came to wreck. Believe in the conquest qua conquest, and you could not believe that English law represented a continuous stream of unviolated custom or fail to see it as very much the offspring of Norman parentage. In the English revolution, the Levellers exemplified the logical necessity of Pocock's argu ment. Having seen the conquest for what it was, the group criticized the common law as none other than a Norman yoke and surrendered all appeals to history. By re-examining the Leveller use of history, this essay tests that proposition, turning it not upside down but on its side, and suggests an alternative conclusion both about the Levellers and the doctrine of continuity itself.

Like other areas central to the royalist cause, Wales experienced a social and political revolution between about 1648 and 1660. In every county except Pembrokeshire, only a small minority of the traditional ruling families had supported the parliamentary side before 1645, and even fewer accepted the radical solutions proposed after 1648, or during the extremist revival of 1659. As a result, governments during the ‘radical’ periods had to turn to new social groups to administer these recalcitrant areas, and to supervise their conversion to puritanism and republican loyalty. The radicals in county society can normally be identified from their participation in local government in such periods (1649–53, 1659) although this is not an infallible guide, and appointment to a committee did not necessarily mean active service. If we compare the lists of justices, sequestration commissioners and committee men for, say, Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Radnorshire, then in each case we find that about thirty or forty names consistently appear during radical periods. In Pembrokeshire these were mainly drawn from the traditional rulers who had supported parliament in 1642, while the ‘radicals’ of Carmarthenshire were broadly the socially conservative followers of the powerful earl of Carbery, the old royalist leader who won and retained the favour of Cromwell. In Radnorshire by contrast, the committees for these years contained a very strong radical element, from families often not hitherto represented in county government. Of about thirty-three men whose radicalism is suggested by their periods in office, at least seven were not only strong republicans, but also followers of the millenarian Vavasor Powell, who loyally supported the Rump and the Barebones experiment, and plotted against Cromwell. Moreover, it was Radnorshire which was representative of Welsh counties in the 1650s, while the two south-western shires were exceptional in their preservation of gentry continuity in government.

He might be regarded indeed as a representative specimen of the Teutonic type.1 He was essentially Teutonic in his whole personality, physical, as well as moral and mental; in his square, sturdy frame, his ruddy hair, his fair complexion, his plain and simple habits of life, no less than in his love of truth, and straightforwardness in deed and word. For the pure Celt he entertained a kind of natural antipathy, mingled with something like contempt, which often manifested itself in odd and amusing ways, suggestive of Dr Johnson's attitude towards the Scotch.

The Second International's socialism saw itself as a moral force. That moral force served to maintain a precarious balance between politics conducted perforce within a national framework, and an internationalist rhetoric; between politics which in practice worked within an established system, and a theoretical rejection of that old society. The First World War broke one part of this precarious balance by demonstrating the impotence of the organized working class in stopping an imperialist conflict; but another pillar of marxist orthodoxy, economic dogma, remained for the marxist parties of the post-war world. That pillar was unshaken by the collapse of societies and politics in Central Europe; it held up an intellectual elite in the world of post-war socialist politics.

It is generally agreed that the body of legislation passed by the Liberal governments after 1905 represented a uniquely important contribution to the problems of social policy in the twentieth century. The attitude of the Unionist opposition of these years to such matters has, however, received little attention. Yet the posture taken by the Unionists was, it will be suggested, of crucial importance in the development of the party in this period, playing a major part in the determination of its electoral fortunes. An appropriate starting point for this study is the reaction of the Unionist leader, Arthur Balfour, to the electoral disaster of 1906, in which he personally had lost his parliamentary seat. ‘What is going on here’, he argued, ‘is the faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin… We are face to face (no doubt in a milder form) with the Socialist difficulties which loom so large on the Continent. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the Election of 1906 inaugurates a new era.’

The work of one member of the British intelligence mission in Russia was once described as ‘consist[ing] chiefly in passing little notes to other noodles of his calling all over the world to warn them of this or that innocent and bar their exit from or entry to all and sundry countries’. Others, even less charitable, characterized the intelligence mission and the war propaganda bureau as ‘joy rides’ and dismissed them entirely, discounting as worthless their efforts to promote closer understanding and coordination between Britain and her eastern ally.

It has been said of Lloyd George that ‘coming into the British system from outside, he had no respect for its traditions or accepted formalities… Most of all, he distrusted the permanent officials’. His reliance on the Garden Suburb, and what Milner described as his tendency ‘to settle things that really mattered, or unsettle them, in his own favourite way — by devious methods and through anything but the regular agents’, could be seen as evidence which supports this view. However, it was also during Lloyd George's premiership that two of the most influential officials of the interwar period, Sir Maurice Hankey and Sir Warren Fisher, acquired the standing which they held until their retirements in 1938 and 1939 respectively. Like the men of the Garden Suburb, they owed their success to Lloyd George and were personally devoted to him, but while the Garden Suburb came and went with its creator, Hankey and Fisher survived his departure. Lloyd George, the supreme individùalist as prime minister, bequeathed to his successors not the amorphous, ill-defined government machine which he had inherited from Asquith in 1916, but a reorganized and newly centralized public service.