Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/476

 468 SHORT NOTICES July books with which the author is acquainted, not a mere compilation o f names of books having no reference to the text. D. 0. After a six years' interval a new volume has been issued of A Calendar of the Court Minutes, &c., of the East India Company, 1660-3, by Miss Ethel B. Sainsbury, with an introduction and notes by Mr. W. Foster (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1922). From the point of view of general history the most important feature of the volume is the light thrown on Anglo-Dutch relations regarding the East which played a leading part in bringing about the war of 1665. Nowhere else in English can the course of the negotiations be so fully followed. What strikes one especially is the double dealing of the Dutch with regard to the restoration of Pulo Run, and the failure of the English East India Company to realize the consequences that were the inevitable outcome of Dutch predominance in the East. It was this predominance that made the fifteenth article of the treaty of 4 September 1662 for practical purposes a dead letter. Still, both with regard to men and to measures the policy of the restoration government sought to follow on the lines of that of the protectorate. It is, further, significant that it was at first sought to have the grant of the new charter confirmed by parliament. Amongst other items of interest in the volume are a proposal to colonize Mauritius and the pre- sentation by Richard Baxter of copies of an Arabic version of Grotius's De veritate religionis Cnristianae for distribution in the East. H. E. E. Mr. C. L. Kingsford, in The Story of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment (London : Country Life Library, 1921), displays the same painstaking research and close attention to detail which marked his history of the Middlesex regiment, published in 1916. With minute accuracy he traces the history of the regiment down to the present day through every stage of its career. His brief sketches of the campaigns in the Peninsula during the Spanish Succession and Napoleonic wars are models of masterly exposition. The history of the Warwickshire regiment is well worth telling for two reasons. It is one of the oldest regiments in the British army. First raised in 1674 for employment in the Dutch service, it owed its rank as the Sixth Foot to a very brief sojourn on English soil in 1685, when the outbreak of Monmouth's rebellion caused it to be recalled. Sent back to Holland within the month, it returned to England with William of Orange and became a permanent part of the British army. It has had an experience probably unique of foreign service. In the eighteenth century it went three times to the West Indies on war service. Each time the sickly climate caused it to be practically disbanded and sent home to be recruited afresh. From 1821 for the next forty years the regiment was almost continuously abroad in South Africa or India. Between 1780 and 1880 the first battalion was on foreign service for seventy-seven years* The Peninsula was the scene of most of its war service. It was serving there throughout the War of Spanish Succession, and in the campaigns of Vimeiro (Mr. Kingsford makes a slip in calling the French commander Marshal Junot) and Corunna, and in Wellington's campaigns of 1813-14.