Cromohs Virtual Seminars

Later Stuart Debates

Mark Knights
School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich

M. Knights, "Later Stuart Debates", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-7
<http://www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/knights_laterstuart.html>

[Please note that this is work in progress and not a finished draft.]

This article seeks to map out key areas of historiographical debate about the later Stuart period in Britain (c.1660-c.1720), particularly as they relate to politics, religion and the culture/discourse that they spawned. An overview of different approaches will be offered before I summarise my own research findings.^[1]

1. Rethinking Whig interpretations

Perhaps the most suitable starting place for a review of the historiography of the later Stuart period is with the idea of a Whig interpretation of history, since the term Whig was first used in England in 1681 and the triumph of whiggery after 1689 has seemed to colour many accounts of the period. In 1931 Herbert Butterfield made the argument that there was an approach to history that was whiggish and profoundly misguided.^[2] This approach was teleological, looking back to chart progress towards liberal, secular, democratic ideals; and it imposed a partisan narrative on the past that curtailed the proper evaluation of evidence. This was whiggish because Whig historians, such as Macaulay in the nineteenth century, hailed the Whigs of the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries as heroes triumphing over Toryism and establishing basic principles of religious toleration and parliamentary, consensual government. Much of the Whig interpretation rested on an analysis of 1689 as a key turning point and it demonised those who appeared to obstruct what was seen as "progress". Such an interpretation has nevertheless been disowned by modern scholarship, which seeks to avoid partisan grand narratives, evaluate evidence on its merits and contextualise contemporary mindsets rather than read back into the past the mentalities of the future. The 300th anniversary of the revolution therefore witnessed a flood of material that, in varying degrees, distanced itself from the Whig interpretation.^[3]

The following paper analyses some of the resulting reassessment of the period before and after the revolution of 1689. But it is worth noting in passing that although the Whig interpretation is much frowned upon, an alternative interpretation that emphasises the enduring strength and importance of monarchy and religion is, for some reason, not called a "Tory interpretation", even though it owes much to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Tory polemical historians. The debt of modern historians to this earlier partisan, polemical tradition is not often acknowledged.^[4]

2. Rethinking Periodisation

a) early modernity and modernity

Despite, or perhaps because of, the persistence of the Whig interpretation of history the period 1660-1720 often falls out of modern conventional historiographical periods. Many "early modernists" end their studies with the outbreak of civil war, whilst many "modernists" begin their accounts in the mid or late eighteenth century. Although there are now signs that the situation is changing, the later Stuart period has thus for a long time languished in a kind of historiographical black hole. Was it the end of a "long seventeenth century" running from 1580 to 1720? Or was it the start of a "long eighteenth century", running from 1660 or 1689 to 1832? Was it the end of early modernity or the beginning of modernity?

The answer to such questions, of course, is related to how we interpret the period and what we are interested in. If we place stress on religious tensions we might see the period as a late chapter in the end of a long reformation.^[5] To do so would tell the story of how protestant unity proved impossible to restore after the sectarianism and toleration of the mid-seventeenth century. By mid century divisions between protestants proved every bit as, and increasingly perhaps more, important as divisions between protestants and catholics. Alternatively we might see the later Stuart period as the beginning of an enlightenment process that produced phenomena we associate with modernity.^[6] A stress on religious toleration, natural rights, party politics and frequent elections; the development of a fiscal-military and imperial state actively prepared to intervene abroad; the union of England and Scotland in 1707 to form Great Britain; the lapse of pre-publication licensing in 1695 and the consequent expansion of the press are all developments that might suggest transformative change. So besides the question of whether 1660-1720 belongs to early modernity or modernity we might also ask, was it the end of a long reformation or the beginning of the enlightenment?

One answer, in accord with a process of revision that now stresses the importance of religion and clerics to the process of enlightenment,^[7] is to suggest that a long reformation and enlightenment are entirely compatible and to argue that 1660-1720 was peculiarly interesting precisely because it is both early modern and modern, displaying signs of both continuity and change. If 1660-1720 is key to understanding both the nature of early modernity and in explaining the transformation of Britain into a modern state then the period becomes really very important.^[8] It also suggests that we need to problematise what we mean by early modernity in the first place, a project that will require us to examine the nature of the C15th-C16th divide as well as the C17-C18th one. Indeed, for a term that is so often invoked there are surprisingly few attempts to define "early modernity", though one interesting attempt can be found at http://www.univie.ac.at/Neuzeit/eburke.htm.

(b) Two revolutions

Besides these large questions about modernisation, a second and linked set of questions relating to periodisation need to be asked. These relate to the relationship between the two revolutions of the seventeenth century. Was the mid-century revolution the key turning point, after which British society was forever changed? Or, with the restoration, was there continuity? Was the revolution of 1689 really revolutionary at all? Or did it precipitate a fundamental transformation? For Jonathan Scott there is considerable continuity between the two halves of the seventeenth century and his recent history of the century ends with 1689 and its aftermath.^[9] For J.C.D. Clark, however, 1660 was a real turning point, marking the restoration of a church-state that endured until the repeal of the test and corporation acts and the passage of catholic emancipation in the 1820s.^[10] When was Britain's revolution: in the 1640s, 1690s or 1820s?^[11]

The frequent separation of the two revolutions of the seventeenth century is unfortunate in a number of ways. First, it dislocates what contemporaries themselves thought was linked (the invocation of the civil war in the later revolution and its aftermath was frequent and polemical, centering on the allegation that there were revolutionaries in the later period who sought forcibly to reinstate commonwealth principles^[12]) but also obscures what was different about the second revolution from the first and, indeed, how the memory of the first influenced and shaped the second. It would be enormously useful to have a history of the two revolutions that saw them as linked but different projects and which compared and contrasted them. To give just one example of how such an approach might be useful, whilst censorship lapsed in both revolutions, leading to rather similar developments in terms of output, the appearance of periodicals, and polemical genres, the slightly longer term impact of both revolutions was different. Whereas in the 1650s and more particularly in the 1660s state censorship returned, after the 1690s the press could only be controlled after publication. Similarly, whereas the 1640s proved fiscally innovatory it was the financial revolution of the 1690s that had the more enduring impact. By contrast, the army of the 1640s and 1650s had a radicalism unmatched by the one raised in the aftermath of 1689 to fight foreign war. Comparing and contrasting the two revolutions might thus be one productive way to assess the degree of continuity and change over the seventeenth century. One likely consequence of such a project is the recognition that social changes associated with the mid century revolution in terms of gender and class will need to be discussed in the light of the restoration and later revolution.

3. Rethinking the state

It has long been recognised that the state underwent significant development in the period 1660-1720 and particularly in the period after 1689. A good deal of attention has focused on the emergence of a fiscal-military state. Peter Dickson and Henry Roseveare long ago charted a "financial revolution" involving the development of the Treasury, the creation of a national debt, the founding of the Bank of England in 1694, the expansion of stock holding, paper money and recoinage.^[13] Similarly a long Whig history has mapped the transformation of the institution of parliament from a body that met haphazardly at the sovereign's will to one that met regularly, annually, and hence also became the focus for "getting things done" in a way that it had not before 1689.^[14] To be sure, there have been modern refinements of the older outline. Perry Gauci has pointed to the prominence of the mercantile community;^[15] Carruthers has examined the impact of partisan politics on the stock exchange;^[16] Craig Muldrew has examined notions of "credit" in the early modern period and stressed its dual social and economic nature;^[17] and literary scholars have explored credit and other forms of "fictional" financing in relation to the rise of the novel.^[18]

More fundamentally, however, the state has been re-examined and even reconceptualised in a number of related but distinct ways:

a) the importance of Britain's change of foreign policy after 1689 has been highlighted by John Brewer, who sees the new willingness to intervene in European and colonial theatres reflected in the emergence of Britain's capacity to sustain large-scale warfare.^[19] Britain developed "the sinews of power" to erupt on to the world stage because of the financial revolution but also because of the greater availability of information. And, as a result, Britain began to acquire a state bureaucracy of tax collectors and administrators. The ethos of public duty now found itself in tension with a new salaried class of state officials, many of whom (such as excisemen) were employed in the localities.

b) That picture has been challenged and refined by Mike Braddick's very important work. Braddick shows that the "nerves of state", as he prefers to call them, were being strengthened in the wake of civil war.^[20] It was the first, rather than the second revolution, that was important in establishing the capacity to tax. More significantly Braddick has been engaged on a wholesale revision of how we think about the state.^[21] He has questioned the distinction between "centre" and "locality", for the institutions of the centre were very often located in the locality rather than at Westminster and the culture of voluntary office-holding ensured that the state had to rely on local men of the "better sort" to effect governance of their own communities.^[22] Indeed, Braddick has developed a model of the early modern state that stresses its participatory, consensual nature, producing a society in which negotiation of power rather than the naked expression of force was predominant.^[23] Authority had to be legitimised, and legitimacy required a set of ideological, social and cultural levers to be pulled. Power could be maintained through patriarchalism and paternalism, or through the conscience; and the parish was as much the state as the institutions in London. Braddick's views, supported by the work of Steve Hindle on the poor,^[24] Mark Goldie on the "unacknowledged republic" of early modern England,^[25] and Phil Withington on the civic context of notions of self-governance,^[26] are crucial for any reassessment of the later Stuart period for they raise many important questions: did this participatory, self-governing state survive into the eighteenth century (as the work of David Eastwood would suggest^[27])? What tensions did the rise of a fiscal-military state with paid officials create in a culture reliant on public spirit to motivate office-holders ? How did ideological changes (for which see below) affect the legitimation of power and how in turn did changes in the nature of the state affect ideology? Fundamental to Braddick's approach is the integration of social with political history and the history of ideas: how much further can we push this welcome development? Might we extend the analysis so that historical sub-disciplines that have been very separate might productively converge?

c) How far did the English state become the British state? The act of union with Scotland in 1707 created Great Britain; but how far and fast was a British identity established?^[28] And how far was an imperial identity being forged in this period? How far was Britishness a reaction against a foreign, European (and often catholic) other, as Linda Colley has suggested^[29]? How far did affairs in Scotland, Ireland and the colonies influence and shape English ones, and visa versa? The answer to these questions is complex and there are many different possible approaches. The British dimension of later Stuart politics is a theme that has been recently developed by Tim Harris, whose work stresses the different nature of the revolution of 1689 in Scotland and Ireland to that in England.^[30] Whereas England's was a "glorious" and virtually bloodless revolution, both Ireland and Scotland experience far more trauma. Ireland's catholic support for James II required forcible suppression; and north of the border witnessed the overthrow of the established church. There has been a good deal of interest in the Jacobites and this has helped to highlight resistance to the integration of Britishness.^[31] An imperial dimension is also becoming more evident in the literature. John Pocock long ago highlighted the interconnections between what he called the Atlantic archipelago and the connected revolutions of seventeenth century England and eighteenth century America.^[32] More recent work has focused on how Britain and its colonies pursued inter-related paths.^[33]

4. Rethinking ideology

Work on the state authority and its legitimising strategies can also reinvigorate work on ideology.^[34] One of Braddick's governing assumptions is that patriarchal authority underpinned power both within the household and in the community beyond its doors. Yet the theory came under sustained attack. Although in 1680 Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, originally written in the late 1620s or early 1630s and an extreme assertion of Biblical patriarchalism, was published, it was refuted by James Tyrrell, John Locke and Algernon Sidney, the latter losing his life in defence of his cause.^[35] After 1689 Edmund Bohun, Filmer's editor and defender, was humiliated and Filmerianism was discredited. On the other hand, anti-Filmerianism did not mean the total defeat of patriarchalism in its social context. Some of this paradox is explored by Rachel Weil, who nicely shows the complexity of whiggish attitudes to paternal power in the state and in the household. Indeed, patriarchy is proving a useful concept by which to further integrate political discourse and social practice. Gaby Mahlberg's thesis, for example, shows the connection between later seventeenth century republicanism and anti-patriarchalism, especially in the work of Henry Neville.^[36] Peters on marriage and contract pursues similar themes,^[37] as does Julia Rudolph on Tyrrell.^[38] Mahlberg's work also seeks to extend the pioneering approach of Pocock and Skinner to contextualising political discourse by extending enquiry beyond canonical texts to the apparently more popular genres of satire and cheap print.

Pocock and Skinner, alongside Kenyon and others, also attempted to paint Locke out of the picture.^[39] They argued that Lockean theory, based on natural rights and contract, was at odds with the more prevalent Whig grounding of rights in the "ancient constitution" and had relatively little contemporary impact. Pocock's division of discourse into apparently discrete "languages" seemed to offer little room for Lockean discourse. Michael Zuckert has nevertheless challenged this clear separation and talks of a "new republicanism" in which Locke and the "old whigs" could sit side by side (particularly important for understanding the transmission of ideas to colonial America), and his line has been followed by Vicky Sullivan.^[40] This reconciliation of liberalism and republicanism and the re-integration of Locke into the picture has also been advanced by Mark Goldie, and the conservatism of the "ancient constitution" also challenged by Janelle Greenberg.^[41] The historiographical trend in the history of political discourse appears to be to recognise the overlapping nature of "languages".

Similarly contextualising political discourse now seems to mean something slightly different to what Skinner advanced in his theoretical work. Rather than using pamphlet literature as a reference point against which to read the canonical authors, it has become recognised as a key vehicle for the transmission and shaping of ideas in its own right. Similarly, the religious culture of the period has been mined by Justin Champion, for it was there, rather than in some anachronistic secular space, that radical thinking took place. The work of Mark Goldie, Tim Harris, Craig Rose and Tony Claydon has also shown the continuing importance of religious ideologies.^[42] On the other hand, Steve Pincus has stressed the importance of economic rather than religious thinking.^[43] For Pincus, trade and commerce, both domestic and foreign, provided an essential context for debates about national wealth. For both Goldie and Pincus, however, party ideologies were tightly drawn. 

Pocock's student Lawrence Klein has also led us to consider another language that usurped others: politeness.^[44] In his study of the third earl of Shaftesbury and then in a series of articles Klein suggests that politeness was at once political and social, a rhetoric connected to Whig notions of liberty, but also one that fostered a set of idealised manners and forms of behaviour. Thus politeness was not only confined to discourse; rather politeness could embrace material culture (such as items of luxury) and even, as Peter Borsay has shown, the polite landscape.^[45] Moreover, as E. P. Thompson's study of the Whig extension of the game laws showed some time ago, Whig power had social as well as cultural bite. Paul Monod's study of jacobitism stresses its utility as a cultural tool for social protest.^[46]

5. Rethinking Public and private

Yet it is gendered social friction that has attracted most attention. A rich vein of work now focuses our attention on the debates about the role of women. Much of this work has centred around female authors and female involvement in the burgeoning press, which is itself part of a wider debate about the nature of early modern communications and the Habermasian "public sphere". Let us take each of these themes in turn.

a) Habermas. The translation into English of Habermas's work on the emergence and transformation of the public sphere triggered a spate of articles questioning both his timing and his characterisation of the phenomena he identified.^[47] Yet Habermas's central thesis, that it was the conditions of the 1690s (with a financial revolution, the lapse of pre-publication licensing, and the proliferation of coffee houses) that promoted the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in England remains highly suggestive (and reanimates the class dimension that has disappeared since Thompson).^[48] Habermas's work is complex and there is a danger here of reducing it to simplicities; but another key dimension of his work relates back to discussions about the state, for he argues that the public sphere provided a forum or interface between society and the state; and it was a forum in which rational argument was prized.^[49]

b) Key to the communications revolution identified by Habermas was the availability of print and the 1695 lapse of the licensing laws has continued to fascinate, particularly in relation to the news. There is, however, debate about how far Habermas's model is useful to literary scholars and whether the 1640s or the 1690s was the more revolutionary in terms of the press.^[50] Even if the 1640s witnessed the birth of the newspaper in any meaningful sense, the proliferation of periodicals after 1695, including the development of provincial newspapers in the first decades of the eighteenth century, proved to have the more enduring impact. Whereas in the 1660s press censorship was reimposed and all but an official periodical were suppressed, after 1695 the government could only (as in 1712) tax news rather than ban it.

c) The later Stuart period saw the first women to earn their living by their pens. Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley both carved out successful careers in a male-dominated world. A number of works have explored women and the press. Paula McDowell has investigated the women of Grub street, from female authors down to female hawkers; Helen Berry has reconstructed the intensely gender- preoccupied pages of one innovative periodical, The Athenian Gazette, that responded to readers" letters; Hannah Smith has explored the ideas of Judith Drake; Katherine Shevelow has considered women and the polite periodicals.^[51] Indeed, all these works expose some of the shortcomings of Habermas's model in terms of the rather rigid distinction he implied between a male public sphere and a female private sphere.

6. Rethinking Party and political culture

The role of the press in political culture has formed the focus of a good deal of my own work.^[52] I have been interested in the way in which the public sphere, and particularly the printed public sphere, operated under the novel conditions of the later Stuart period which witnessed an extraordinary conjuncture of factors: besides the free press (briefly after 1679 as well as after 1695), the period witnessed frequent elections to parliament (on average once every two and a half years after 1679) involving a higher percentage of the adult male population than at any time before the second reform act of 1867,^[53] the rise of the fiscal-military state and ideological division (explored above), together with the rise of a two party system and partisan politics that were publicly fought out. The public was now being explicitly invoked as an audience to be wooed, persuaded, cajoled, and frightened but also increasingly as an umpire of the debates that raged between the parties.

The historiography of party politics has developed in interesting ways. At the end of the last century the debate concerned the prevalence of Whig and Tory over Court and Country polarities. This was, in effect, an extension of the argument triggered by Namier's analysis of politics at the accession of George III, which denied a role for party and for ideology, preferring instead to stress influence and connections between the aristocracy and their clients in the lower house. Robert Walcott attempted to argue that similar connections shaped later Stuart politics. He provoked Geoffrey Holmes and Bill Speck to develop a sustained counter-attack, showing the widespread nature of the Whig-Tory struggle in the constituencies through innovative use of poll books and electoral evidence.^[54] Both Holmes and Speck also stressed the importance of ideological divisions between the parties. Their work has largely been confirmed by the recent History of Parliament volumes for the periods 1660-1690 and 1690-1715, which offer a mass of information not just about all MPs of the period but also about their political activity at Westminster and the politics of the constituencies for which they sat.^[55]

More recently the debate has focused on the dating of the emergence of party. Controversy has swirled around the extent to which parties existed during the 1670s, how far the crisis years of 1679-81 polarised opinion and crystallised organisation, and how far a two party system squeezed out room for moderates.^[56]

This huge undertaking has in part cleared space for a discussion about the impact that both Whig and Tory, and Court and Country, had on the political culture of the period.^[57] I have argued that:

·      The later Stuart period witnessed the development of a national political culture in which allegiance to national political identities (Whig, Tory, High Church, Low Church) was routine.

·      The parties were groupings of allegiances that were based on shared ideologies but also increasingly on techniques developed over the course of the seventeenth century and refined in the later Stuart period, such as signing petitions and addresses; electioneering; political oath-taking; partisan polemic; and linking reward to party loyalty. Under such conditions, the notion of unity through uniformity became problematic and unsustainable.

·      The public acquired a newly invigorated role. The appeal to popularity was not new; but the public as a collective fiction that was both frequently appealed to as an umpire of politics and as a legitimating force was a phenomena that grew to new proportions. Moreover, the culture of plots and elections that dominated the later Stuart period repeatedly invited the public to participate by exercising its judgement.

·      That public found new importance structurally within the state because of the factors outlined above and because for the first time a national debt was funded by the public and based on public credit.^[58]

·      The public was also restricted and at times excluded by new political languages or shifts in existing ones. There was a reassertion of the language of consent, a new stress on popular sovereignty and an attack on 'priestcraft'. Perhaps the most striking shift was the increasingly frequent appeal to a language of politeness and reason.

·      Such developments were in part a response to growing fears about the uses to which language was being put. To be sure, anxiety about words permeated much of the early modern period, but this was sharpened in the later Stuart period because partisans a) necessarily offered rival, opposing interpretations b) sought to use all means possible to persuade the public that they had a monopoly of truth and reason c) had new means and opportunities (because of the free press and new discursive spaces, such as coffee houses in which to consume print) to effect their perceived designs and d) the consequences of being misled by words were now so much the greater, because Britain was at war with France and because public credit necessary to fight that war rested on notions of credibility.

·      Because of such fears and anxieties, the conspiratorial mindset and hostility to particular interests that characterised the early modern period was carried over into the eighteenth century (and transmitted to America), albeit shaped less by traditional 'anti-popery' or anti-factionalism and more by suspicions of 'interest', whether of self, party, crown, money or even state. Party was a vehicle that could carry anxieties previously manifest predominantly in the religious sphere into the political.

·      Party was nevertheless also a creative force that impacted on literary culture and wherever truth-claims were made, fostering a sense of ambiguity, relativity, dissimulation and fiction.

7. Rethinking the boundaries between fact and fiction

Parties necessarily saw the same events or personalities in conflicting ways, offering two very different interpretations. Parties also had a vested interest in manipulating the truth to best advantage, even to the extent of lying. Thus in 1712 John Arbuthnot, the creator of John Bull, wrote a mock prospectus for a treatise on the art of political lying. Contemporaries observing the political culture became anxious about the veracity of competing truth claims and the capacity of the public to be able to judge them. In other words, partisanship destabilised the boundaries between fact and fiction. Moreover, parties used fiction to enhance their polemic. They produced sophisticated dialogues between characters discussing politics or religion or economics; they played with invented personas, such as those created in the best-selling periodical the Spectator or the Tatler.

Partisanship thus contributed to several wider cultural phenomena and I hope that my analysis intersects both with literary critics and with the history of science:

a) There has been a "linguistic turn", not just in terms of the approach to political discourse and ideas but also in the relationship between history and literature. The "new historicism" evident in literary criticism has sought to use historical context for new readings of texts; and there has been a meeting of minds over a shared interest in print and the press.^[59] Some scholars have been interested in linking the political culture of the later Stuart period to the literature of the period, stressing that the uncertainties of political life were matched in the fictions of the stage, satire or in the rise of the novel. The contested truth-claims of the partisans echoed and were echoed in literary fictions and deceptions.^[60]

b) A parallel debate to the one raging in the political sphere about fact and the potentially misleading nature of words took place in the world of the "new science". As Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer and Larry Stewart have all shown, those engaged in experiment and the early scientific enlightenment faced many similar problems to those of the politicians: how to establish their credit with the public and how to convince and prove their truths.^[61] We should do more, then, to consider cultural movements outside of narrow disciplinary straightjackets.

I want to end this overview of historiographical debates with one that might strike a chord with an Italian audience: how far was Britain exceptional?^[62] Although a number of studies consider and even foreground the British contribution to the early Enlightenment, European comparisons of political culture are relatively seldom made. The political cultures of Holland, Switzerland, Scandinavia and elsewhere seem particularly useful for comparative purposes; but so too is the southern European context. How extensive was the level of public debate in Italy or Spain? Which of the factors offered to explain Britain's political culture were present or absent, and how far did their absence reshape the national experience?

References

^[1] For excellent introductions to the historiography of the period see G. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power. Late Stuart and early Georgian Britain (1993) and B. Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (2003).

^[2] The Whig Interpretation of History.

^[3] R. Beddard, The Revolutions of 1688 (1988); L. Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688-9 (1989, reissued in paperback 2004); J. Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (1991); E. Cruickshanks (ed.), By Force or By Default?: The Revolution of 1688-1689, (1989); Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution (2000); D. Hoak and M. Feingold, eds., The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688-89 (1996); W.A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688  (1988).

^[4] I explore some of this alternative perspective in “The Tory interpretation of History in the Rage of Parties”, Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 1-2 (March 2005), pp. 353-373. For an overview of later Stuart historical writing see also L. Okie, Augustan Historical Writing. Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham, Maryland, 1991) and R. MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974); D. Woolf, “Narrative Historiography in Restoration England: A Preliminary Survey” in The Restoration Mind, ed. G. W. Marshall (Newark, 1997), pp. 207-51; P. Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (1996). For a recent defence of the Whig tradition see A. Patterson, Nobody’s Perfect. A New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven, 2002).

^[5]  The concept is developed in Nicholas Tyacke, England’s Long Reformation 1500-1800 (1998).

^[6] R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2001). See also the works of Margaret Jacob.

^[7] The case is made, and perhaps overstated, in S.J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion. The Myths of Modernity (Manchester, 2003) and in a more subtle form in J. Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian Culture 1696-1722 (Manchester, 2003).

^[8] The question of transformation is best tackled in A. Houston and S. Pincus (eds.), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (2001).

^[9] England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century English Political Instability in European Context (2000).

^[10] J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688-1832 (1985, 2nd edition 2000).

^[11] See also A. McInnes, "When Was the English Revolution?", History 67 (Oct 1982): 377-392

^[12] See, for example, A. Lacey, The Cult of Charles the Martyr (2003); B. Worden, Roundhead Reputations. The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2001); M. Zook, “The Restoration Remembered: The First Whigs and the Making of their History”, The Seventeenth Century 17 (2002), 213-229.

^[13] Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1756 (1967); Roseveare, The Financial Revolution 1660-1760 (1991). See also C. Chandaman, The English public revenue, 1660-1688 (1975); J.K. Horsefield, British Monetary Experiments, 1650-1710 (London, 1960); P. K. O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660-1815”, Economic History Review 2nd ser., 41 (1988), 1-32.

^[14] For a recent restatement that this was the period in which parliament “came of age” see J. Hoppitt, A Land of Liberty? England 1689-1727 (2000).

^[15] Gauci, The Politics of Trade: The Overseas Merchant in State and Society 1660-1720 (2004).

^[16] B. Carruthers, City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution (1996). Cf Neal, L., The Rise of Financial Capitalism. International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (1990).

^[17] Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The culture of credit and social relations in Early Modern England (1998).

^[18] S. Sherman, Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe (Cambridge, 1996); C. Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994); J. Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, N.C., 1996).

^[19] Brewer, Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State 1688-1783 (1989).

^[20] Braddick, The Nerves of State. Taxation and the Financing of the English State 1558-1714 (1996).

^[21] Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c.1550-1700 (2000). He was building on P. Collinson, De Republica Anglorum or History with the Politics Put Back (1990). See also K.Wrightson, “The Politics of the Parish in early modern England” in P. Griffiths, A. Fox, S. Hindle (eds.) The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (1996).

^[22] See also Braddick, “Parliamentary Taxation in Seventeenth Century England”; and “State formation and social change in early modern England” Social History  16 (1991)

^[23] See also Braddick and J. Walter (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society (2003).

^[24] Hindle, The State and Social Change in early Modern England (2000);

^[25] Goldie, “The unacknowledged republic: office-holding in early modern England” in T. Harris (ed.) The Politics of the Excluded c.1500-1800 (2001).

^[26] Withington, The Politics of the Commonwealth. Citizens and Freemen in early modern England (2005).

^[27] Eastwood, “Local Government and Local Society” in H. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain (2002).

^[28] J. Robertson (ed.), A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (1995).

^[29] Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (1992).

^[30] The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685-1720 (2006).

^[31] E. Cruickshanks (ed), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism 1689-1759 (1982); T. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts : Party Conflict in a Divided Society (1993); D. W. Hayton, “The Williamite revolution in Ireland, 1688-91”, in J. Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch moment: essays on the Glorious Revolution and its world impact (1991).

^[32] Pocock (ed.) Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688 and 1776 (1980); P. Marshall (ed), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (1998); K. Wilson, The island race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in Eighteenth Century (2003); D. Armitage, The ideological origins of the British Empire (2000).

^[33] See, for example, S. Middleton, From Privileges to Rights. Work and Politics in Colonial New York (2006).

^[34] For an excellent overview see Justin Champion, “Political Thinking between Restoration and Hanoverian Succession” in Coward, Companion. See also Pocock, The Varieties of English Political Thought 1500-1800 (1993).

^[35] For the debate about Filmer and patriarchalism see J.Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (1979); G. Schochet, Patriarchalism in political thought (1975); Schochet, “Patriarchalism, politics and mass attitudes in Stuart England”, Historical journal, 1969, vol.12, pp.413-441.

^[36] “Henry Neville and English republicanism in the seventeenth century”, UEA PhD 2005. For the ongoing debate about the nature of republicanism see also J. Scott, 'What were Commonwealth Principles?', Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 591-613.

^[37] B. Peters, Marriage in Seventeenth Century Political Thought (2004).

^[38] Rudolph, Revolution by Degrees: James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century (2002)

^[39] Summarised in M. Goldie, The Reception of Locke’s Politics (1999) vol.1. For a controversial analysis of Locke’s radicalism see R. Ashcraft, “Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government” in Political Theory (1980) and his Revolutionary politics & Locke's Two treatises of government (1986).

^[40] M. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (1994); V. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes and the formation of liberal republicanism in England (2004).

^[41] J. Greenberg, The radical face of the ancient constitution (2001).

^[42] The Politics of Religion in Restoration England ed. T. Harris, P. Seaward and M. Goldie (Oxford, 1990); J. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: the Church of England and its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge, 1992); Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722 (Manchester, 2003); C. Rose, England in the 1690s. Revolution, Religion and War (Oxford, 1999); T. Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge, 1996); D. Hayton, “Moral Reform and Country Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons”, Past and Present 128 (1990), 48-91; C. Rose, England in the 1690s: revolution, religion and war (1999).

^[43] Pincus, “Neither Machiavellian Moment nor possessive individualism: commercial society and the defenders of the English Commonwealth”, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 725; The First Modern Revolution: England’s Glorious Revolution 1688-9 (forthcoming).

^[44] L. Klein, “The Political Significance of ‘Politeness’ in Early Eighteenth Century Britain”, in Politics, Politeness and Patriotism ed. G. Schochet (Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought Proceedings vol. 5, Washington, 1993); Klein, ‘Coffee-house Civility, 1660-1714: An Aspect of Post-Courtly Culture in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59 (1997), 30-51; Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994); ‘The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness’, Eighteenth Century Studies (1984-5), 186-214. See also A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility. Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998), 50, 276-7, 283; P. Burke, “A Civil Tongue: Language and Politeness in Early Modern Europe”, and J. Barry, “Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: the Meanings of Urban Freedom”, both in Burke, B. Harrison and P. Slack (eds.), Civil Histories. Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford 2000); J.G.A. Pocock, “Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment” in P. Zagorin (ed.) Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (California, 1980); N. Phillipson, “Politics and Politeness in the Reigns of Anne and the early Hanoverians” in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), The Varieties of British Political Thought 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1993)

^[45] L. Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (1996); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the English Town 1660-1760 (1989).

^[46] P. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (1989). See also Harris, Politics of the Excluded.

^[47] J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989). The book was first written in German in 1962.

^[48] For the usefulness of Habermas see H. Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians”, JMH 72 (2000), 153-182; Pincus and Lake (eds.), The Public Sphere in Early Modern England (forthcoming); T. Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the ‘Public Sphere’ and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England”, in L.A. Ferrell, and P. McCullough (eds.), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750 (Manchester, 2001); Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture; McDowell, Women of Grub Street; B. Robbins (ed.), The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis, 1993); P. Backscheider and T. Dystal (eds.), The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England (1996).

^[49] For work on public opinion see J. Miller, “Public Opinion in Charles II’s England”, History 80 (1995), 359-81; B. Sharp, “Popular Political Opinion in England 1660-1685”, History of European Ideas 10 (1989), 13-29; I. Atherton, “The Press and Popular Political Opinion”, in B. Coward (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2003); S. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 (Cambridge, 1996); Pincus, “Coffee Politicians”; Harris, London Crowds; Montano, Courting the Moderates.

^[50] J. A Downie, “How Useful to Eighteenth-Century English Studies is the Paradigm of the ‘Bourgeois Public Sphere’”, Literature Compass 1 (2003), 1-18; B. Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press. Britain and France 1620-1800 (1996).

^[51] H. Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury (London, 2003); P. McDowell, The Women of Grub Street. Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730 (Oxford, 1998); H. Smith, “English ‘Feminist’ Writings and Judith Drake's An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696)”, Historical Journal 44 (2001), 727-47; Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies ed. P. Springborg (1997); K. Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: the Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (1989).

^[52] For overviews of the political culture of the period see T. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660-1715 (London, 1993); T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987); J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 1991); M. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-1681 (Cambridge, 1994); J. Montano, Courting the Moderates: Ideology, Propaganda and the Emergence of Party, 1660-1678 (Delaware, 2002); P. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730 (Cambridge, 1998); J. Miller, After the Civil Wars. English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (2000); J. Spurr, England in the 1670s (Oxford, 2000); J. Richards, Party Propaganda Under Queen Anne: The General Elections of 1702-13 (Athens, Georgia, 1972); J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London, 1967).

^[53] F. O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electoral System of Hanoverian England 1734-1832 (Oxford, 1989), tables 4.2 and 4.3.

^[54] W. Speck, Tory & Whig: the Struggle in the Constituencies, 1701-1715 (London, 1970). For an overview see the introduction by David Hayton to History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1690-1715 ed. E. Cruickshanks, D. Hayton and S. Handley 5 vols. (2002), volume 1.

^[55] The History of Parliament. The House of Commons 1660-1690 ed. B.D. Henning (1983); Cruickshanks, Hayton and Handley, History of Parliament.

^[56] I attempted to summarise this historiography at the start of my Politics and Opinion. Since then J. Montano has published Courting the Moderates. Ideology, Propaganda and the Emergence of Party, 1660-1678 (2002), which adds to the debate.

^[57] What follows summarises parts of my Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005).

^[58] See also G. Baldwin, “The ‘public’ as a Rhetorical Community in Early Modern England”, in Shepard and Withington, Communities in Early Modern England (2000).

^[59] Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979); J. Raymond, The Pamphlet and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2002)

^[60] I explore this connection more fully in “History and Literature in the Age of Defoe and Swift”, History Compass 3 (2005), 1-20. See also R. Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660-1730 (Cambridge, 1993); K. Loveman, “Shamming Readers: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture c.1640-1740” (Cambridge, PhD. 2003); L. Davis., Factual Fictions: the Origins of the English Novel (New York, 1983); J.P. Hunter, Before Novels: the Contexts of Eighteenth Century Fiction (New York, 1990); M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 (Baltimore, 1987). See also P. Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (1972); B. Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670-1740 (Oxford, 1997). See also B. Vickers, “The Royal Society and English Prose Style: a Reassessment”, in Vickers and N. Streuver (eds.), Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth: Language Change in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar by Brian Vickers and Nancy Struever (Los Angeles, 1985); P. Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); S. Achinstein, “The Uses of Deception: from Cromwell to Milton' in K.Z. Keller, and G.J. Schiffhorst (eds.), The Witness of Time. Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Pittsburgh, 1993); Achinstein, “The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution”, in J. Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution (1992); N. Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven, 1994); S. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-89 (New York, 1993); Zwicker, “Politics and Literary Practice in the Restoration” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation ed. B.K. Lewalski (Harvard, 1986); Zwicker, “Language as Disguise: Politics and Poetry in the Later Seventeenth Century”, Annals of Scholarship 1 (1980), 47-67; Zwicker, “Lines of Authority: Political and Literary Culture in the Restoration” in Sharpe and Zwicker, The Politics of Discourse (Los Angeles, 1987).

^[61] Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life  (Princeton 1985); S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994). Schaffer, “Defoe's Natural Philosophy and the Worlds of Credit”, in J. Christie and S. Shuttleworth, Nature Transfigured. Science and Literature, 1700-1900 (Manchester, 1989); L. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain 1660-1750 (Cambridge, 1992); B. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-century England: a Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, 1983); Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (London, 2000); M. Poovey, The History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998).

^[62] Good attempts to situate Britain is made in J. Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (2001) and T. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture (2002).

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