ABSTRACT
The author was a child of the Raj and grew up while the British Empire was still a reality. He have lived through the demise of European fascism, the collapse of communism, the rapid development of the European Community, globalization and the rise of international terrorism. There is an element of this in historical writing, of course, and it is a necessary part of the discipline. The failure of the French to capture the farmhouse at Hougoumont on the afternoon of 18 June 1815, is a matter of record, and without that record no judgments can properly be made. But whether, and to what degree, that failure contributed to the Allied victory and the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte is a matter of judgment, but a matter of no less importance. However, not everything the early Quakers said is consistent or intelligible, and there were differences of opinion among them over fairly major matters.
