Cylchgronau Cymru

scholarship, and it would be unfortunate if the attention given to the omissions and inadequacies of the parliamentary record as laid out in the present volumes of the History were to be allowed to obscure what has been achieved. If the History gives less than the parliamentary record of individual M.P.s, it also gives far more. A rich diversity of valuable information has been brought together in simple, though sometimes seductively simple, lists in a series of appendices. There is an anatomy of members by age and parliamentary experience. There are overall statistics relating to the education of members, or at least to the schools and universities they are known to have attended. There are lists of dissenters, of placemen and pensioners, of diplomats, army and navy officers lawyers and writers (the last an undefined and distinctly odd category with at least one surprising omission).24 There are lists of merchants, 'principal industrialists', aldermen of the city of London, directors of the great monied companies, of East Indians and West Indians, and of Rogues, Suicides and Madmen. There is published for the first time in full, and with contemporary annotation, the Worsley list, which gives an instant sense of the comprehensiveness of the party conflict as it appeared to a contemporary at the accession of George I. There are other party lists, contemporary as in the case of alleged Jacobites, or assembled from the biographies as in the case of 'tories' who became 'whigs'. There is even a list of lists-the principal parliamentary lists known for the period. These lists provide fascinating and instructive material for the historian, even though in some cases their interest only becomes fully apparent upon reference back to the biographies. The statistics on education, for example, refer to forty-three unnamed members attending foreign universities, principally Leiden and Utrecht. Of these, thirty-three in fact were Scots: an illustration of the continuing seventeenth-century tradition of close cultural relations between Scotland and the Netherlands, and of the much higher proportion of Scots to English M.P.s educated abroad than was the case in the second half of the century.25 It is the material relating to party and to the differences between parties that will undoubtedly attract most attention. The contemporary identification of the Whigs as the party of business, for example, finds support in a clean sweep of the directors of the Bank of England (as much a Whig monopoly as madness), an overwhelmingly Whig preponderance in the directorships of the East India and South Sea Companies, and a large majority of Whig merchants. On the other hand, the danger of identifying tout court the Tory party as the party of the small, less affluent squirearchy (about which, as on everything else in this field, Professor The most serious omission is George Lytteleton, but it is not at all clear what the criteria are for inclusion. It is clearly right to include Robert Molesworth, but his biography simply refers to his skill as a political pamphleteer, not to his Account of Denmark. But if pamphlet- eering is worth mentioning and is a reason for designating an M.P. a writer, then there seems no good reason for ignoring the pamphleteering of, say, William Pulteney, and for excluding him from the rank of writers. Moreover, if J. H. Browne qualifies as a writer on the basis of a Latin poem on the immortality of the soul (H.P., 1, 496), it seems inappropriate not to include T. Noel, the author apparently of the first book on hound breeding (H.P., II, 297). The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754-1790, ed. John Brooke and L. B. Namier (3 vols., 1964), I, 111-12.