This article explores mid-Georgian debates about the nature of citizenship by focusing on a key political scandal that has hitherto been overlooked by modern historians. In 1756, one of the many Hanoverian soldiers who were stationed in England was arrested for theft in Maidstone. The subsequent efforts to release him on the part of his military superiors and the British government created a political controversy that highlighted issues such as legal liberty, the abuse of executive power, home defence policy, and the moral state of the nation. In particular, this article argues that the furore gave weight to contemporary calls to reform the militia, not so much for instrumental military reasons, but for the supposed social and political benefits of an organization that relied upon the patriotic zeal and masculine virtue of the indigenous citizen. This article is therefore a contribution to the new cultural histories of politics that emphasize the roles of nation and gender in conceptions of citizenship, and argues that the Seven Years War was in this respect a moment of crucial importance.

Historians have long argued about the political career in Ireland of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. Analysing the extent of his viceregal power in the 1630s and his relationship to political factions, this writing has focused on ‘high politics’, as captured in state papers, pamphlets, and private letters. This article focuses on less conventional sources like paintings and accounts of court ceremonies to try and clarify a vital question. In a fragmented colonial territory that the Stuarts were determined to turn into a kingdom, to what extent did Wentworth cast himself as a king? The article examines the sophisticated way that Wentworth elaborated on ritual forms already connected with the viceroyalty to associate his political persona with that of the monarch, with particular reference to his extraordinary inauguration in 1633. Wentworth's interest in painting is well known because of his celebrated patronage of Van Dyck. Less well known is the way that he extended the conventions of portrait painting into the third dimension through court ritual, particularly the practice of allusion to recognizable models, with all the implications for prestige that this entailed. Through ‘political aesthetics’ Wentworth made the allusion to kingship, to the point that enemies detected monarchical pretensions.

Focusing on the Franconian margraviates of Brandenburg around 1500, this study argues that the process of state formation engendered an elite of nobles who derived their power and status from the possession of high office. It shows, however, that as the state expanded, and the princely debt mounted, the relationship between ruler and noble elite was transformed: the leading nobles came to control more and more of the state in terms of offices and share of the public debt. To secure themselves in this elevated but unstable position they developed a dense network of marriage alliances among themselves. By the early sixteenth century this consortium of eminent nobles acquired a powerful hold on the princely state to the detriment of the princes and the exclusion of fellow nobles. The article suggests that it is against this background that the notorious deposition in 1515 of Margrave Friedrich by his sons should be seen: his overthrow was, among other things, an outcome of a change in the balance of power between prince and nobles that had been taking place since 1450. Finally, this change played a part in the creation of the Imperial Knighthood by which the nobles constitutionally placed themselves outside the princely states.

Recent scholarship on the ideological origins of the British Empire has emphasized the importance of John Dee's imperial writings in justifying the Elizabethan exploitation of English Atlantic discoveries. Yet a closer reading of these writings in the context of European politics, Elizabethan Court intrigues, and Dee's occult natural philosophy and magical imperialism reveals their covert purpose of recovering a lost British Empire in Europe. Dee wrote initially to address both the chronic and acute problems facing the regime in 1576, but rather than being an autonomous authority whose ideas commanded attention because of their intrinsic power, he was subordinate to the Court patronage system. Consequently his writings only gained attention when revised to align with the policies of powerful courtiers such as the earl of Leicester, and even then influential Catholic courtiers could exploit contingent political circumstances to counter his influence. Dee's writings remained problematic not only because restoring the British Empire in Europe would entail confronting Spain, but also because in their hidden centre they proposed the creation of an apocalyptic empire by magical means, particularly the philosopher's stone. In the end the contingent events that made Dee's writings briefly influential ensured their ultimate irrelevance to Elizabethan policy-making.

In October 1775 two hoaxes, perpetrated for separate reasons by John Wilkes and his friend, the Chevalier d’Eon, briefly collided. Wilkes’s hoax, the ‘Sayre plot’, was probably intended to provoke a test of the constitutionality of the recent ‘King’s Proclamation’, which encroached upon the statutory definition of treason. The hoax involved creating the impression that a conspiracy existed to resolve the deepening American crisis by overthrowing George III. D’Eon’s hoax involved spreading the rumour that he himself was a woman in order to embarrass the French king into recalling him from exile on d’Eon’s terms, including a generous financial package. For Wilkes, although neither George III’s overthrow nor the modification of his colonial policy were likely expectations, either result would have been a bonus. And although d’Eon was unquestionably a man, he did actually (if inexplicably) desire to be perceived as a woman living the life of an heroic man. When d’Eon’s hoax suddenly progressed too far – trapping him into agreeing to dress as a woman, which, at first, he seemed unwilling to do – he delayed signing the deal for a month, until he saw that the ‘Sayre plot’ (whose success could have strengthened d’Eon’s negotiating position) had utterly failed.

The article takes issue with current orthodoxy concerning early modern republicanism, centred on Quentin Skinner's model of classical republicanism. I argue that historians of political thought need to return to first principles in their practice in order to understand early modern republicanism, and I provide an example by using those principles to reassess one canonical text, Philippe de Plessis Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos. Reading the Vindiciae in context reveals it as a work whose radicalism lies, not in its engagement with the Roman law tradition, but in its express conviction that each and every individual is responsible for maintaining a covenanted relationship with God. My reassessment tracks the political, and specifically regicidal, consequences of commitment to that belief in England from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. It destabilizes the anachronistic distinction between ‘political’ and ‘religious’ modes of thought that historians of political thought too often use to characterize early modern political discourse, and it points to the common ground shared and articulated by theorists including, inter alia, John Ponet, George Buchanan, and John Milton. The conclusion considers what this investigation reveals about republicanism as a political phenomenon in Europe and America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

This article analyses John Dryden's personal and textual relations with the Butlers of Ormond as they are played out over four decades in a series of texts – Absalom and Achitophel (1681), the dedication of his Life of Plutarch (1683), the engraved plates of the Aeneid (1697), and the verse which opens Fables (1700). This detailed case study uncovers the nature and complexities of literary patronage during years of rebellion, war and intense political uncertainty. It addresses issues central to restoration politics and society – lineage, legitimacy, loyalty, honour, and reputation – and suggests how these issues might be explored more fully by both historians and literary scholars.

This article analyses the motivation behind John Felton's assassination of the duke of Buckingham in August 1628. It focuses attention on his family's tortured relationship with the regime, and it highlights Felton's military service in Spain, Ireland, and France. Wounded in the disastrous withdrawal from the Ile de Ré, he returned to London to convalesce, and there he slipped into the metropolitan ‘underground’ manuscript culture that was saturated with poems and tracts excoriating the duke. Finally he was able to witness the mounting violence in the city in the summer of 1628 that culminated in the murder of the duke's sorcerer, Dr Lamb. Felton's murder of the duke was far from inevitable, but as this article hopes to show, his ability to slot his own personal frustration into the increasingly virulent hostility to the favourite ultimately transformed Felton into the instrument of public retribution.

For many years it was widely assumed that there was a close connection between the rapid expansion of European imperial power and acquisition of territory overseas during the nineteenth century, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the congruent Protestant Christian missionary project to save the ‘heathens’ of these places by persuading them to embrace the ‘redeeming’ message of the Gospels. Over the past several decades, however, the thesis that empire-building and Christian evangelizing were mutually supportive activities has come under sustained attack from a group of British historians led by Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter – to the point where the Stanley–Porter revisionist line now occupies centre-stage. This article shows that, contrary to the dominant consensus, the relationship between church – in the form of the missionary societies – and state – in the shape of the English East India Company, initially cool, gradually warmed as the two parties came to realize that they had a common interest in providing ‘civilizing’ Western education to the Indian elites. Indeed it provocatively suggests that the colonial state might well, in time, have given its endorsement and even its support to the spread of Christianity had not the Mutiny intervened in 1857. However the analysis of the benefits generated by this South Asian partnership finds, paradoxically, that it undermined the Company’s authority, and may well have deterred many Indians from converting to Christianity – which had come to be widely seen as a privileged and imperialist religion.

The relationship between Arminianism and Roman Catholicism in the early Stuart period has long been a source of historiographical controversy. Many contemporaries were in no doubt that such an affinity did exist and that it was politically significant. This article will consider how far there was ideological sympathy and even rhetorical collaboration between Caroline Catholics and those members of the Church of England whom both contemporaries and modern scholars have tended to describe as Arminians and Laudians. It will suggest that certain members of the English Catholic community actively tried to use the changes which they claimed to observe in the government of the Church of England in order to establish a rapport with the Caroline regime. In particular they enthused about what they perceived as a strongly anti-puritan trend in royal policy. Some of them argued that a similar style of governance should be exercised by a bishop over Catholics in England. This was something which they believed would correct the factional divisions within their community and align it more effectively with the Stuart dynasty.

This article contributes to current historical knowledge on the relationship between Crown and local municipal power in Old Regime France. In particular, it examines the political language of bien public mobilized by Marseillais elites and royal administrators between 1660 and 1700 in the context of French commercial expansion. Traditionally, ‘public good’ could be understood in two distinct ways. Derived from royal absolutist doctrine, public good was what the king willed to preserve the state, a collection of diverse, corporate bodies held together by royal justice and reason. Derived from civic humanistic, municipal traditions, public good was the united will of the civic community. Investigating three moments where these two definitions of public good converged and collided – during Marseille's urban expansion (1666), in the local justification of modern commerce, and in the deliberations at the Council of Commerce (1700) – this article points to several mutations in the language of public good at the end of the seventeenth century. Pointing to the convergence of civic humanistic and absolutist traditions, this article demonstrates that centralization under Louis XIV, rather than obscuring local traditions, allowed for the intensification of civic humanistic, republican sensibilities.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, scholarship on ancient Stoicism generally understood it to be a form of theism. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Stoicism was widely (though not universally) reckoned a variety of atheism, both by its critics and by those more favourably disposed to its claims. This article describes this transition, the catalyst for which was the controversy surrounding Spinoza's philosophy, and which was shaped above all by contemporary transformations in the historiography of philosophy. Particular attention is paid to the roles in this story played by Thomas Gataker, Ralph Cudworth, J. F. Buddeus, Jean Barbeyrac, and J. L. Mosheim, whose contributions collectively helped to shape the way in which Stoicism was presented in two of the leading reference works of the Enlightenment, J. J. Brucker's Critical History of Philosophy and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert.

This article explores some of the main bibliographical dimensions of economic literature at a time when there was much interest in economic matters but no discipline of economics. By looking at what was published in the round much economic literature is shown to be short, ephemeral, unacknowledged, polemical, and legislatively orientated. This fluidity is underscored by the uncertaintities about what constituted key works of economic literature and by the failure of attempts to make sense of that literature through dictionaries and histories. Economic literature in the period was, consequently, more unstable and uncertain than has often been acknowledged. It cannot, therefore, be simply characterized as either ‘mercantilist’ or nascent ‘political economy’.

This article examines the changes and continuities in the depiction of the violent relationship between the popular glove-puppets, Punch and Judy, over the course of the nineteenth century. While the puppet show emerged as a low-brow street entertainment during the first decades of the nineteenth century, by 1850 it had been hijacked by the middle and upper classes, and began to appear with increasing frequency in fashionable drawing rooms. At the same time, the relationship between the two central characters, Punch and Judy, was substantially modified. On the streets, during the first half of the century, the Punches’ marriage had both reflected the continuing popularity of the early modern theme of the ‘struggle for the breeches’ and encapsulated familial tensions that resulted from the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. However, from 1850 the middle classes attempted to reshape the relationship into a moral tale in order to teach their children valuable lessons about marital behaviour. Yet, at the same time, the maintenance of violence in the portrayal of the Punches’ conjugal life exposed crucial patterns of continuity in attitudes towards marriage, masculinity, and femininity in Victorian England.

The condition of the Anglican elite in eighteenth-century Ireland has been the focus of some debate by historians. Members of the Protestant Ascendancy class have been variously cast as a community under constant threat, or as a self-confident group secure in their control of the country's political and economic systems. Various contributions to this dialogue have been made through the study of popular movements and civil disorder. Rather than further comment on such phenomena this article seeks to examine the reactions of the Irish political elite to them. Although the country had no general Riot Act on the English model until 1787, legislative initiatives were made on several occasions prior to this. While these initially tended to be unsuccessful in parliament, local in their application, and to impose relatively lenient punishments, attitudes began to change in the 1770s. The political elite then moved comparatively rapidly to general legislation that created riot as a felony. Such developments suggest that prior to the last quarter of the eighteenth century civil disorder was not seen as a real threat to Protestant ascendancy, though Protestant fears finally culminated in legislative action in 1787. Arguably it was this event that marked the first great nadir in Anglican self-confidence in eighteenth-century Ireland.

This article argues that during the closing decades of the nineteenth century a significant group of British imperial thinkers broke with the long-standing conventions of political thought by deliberately eschewing the inspiration and intellectual authority provided by the examples of the ancient empires. While the early Victorian colonial reformers had looked to the template of Greece, and while many later Victorians compared the empire in India with the Roman empire, numerous proponents of Greater Britain (focusing on the settler colonies, and associated in particular with the movement for imperial federation) looked instead to the United States. I argue that the reason for this innovation, risky in a culture obsessed with the moral and prudential value of precedent and tradition, lies in contemporary understandings of history. Both Rome and Greece, despite their differences, were thought to demonstrate that empires were ultimately self-dissolving; as such, empires modelled on their templates were doomed to eventual failure, whether through internal decay or the peaceful independence of the colonies. Since the advocates of Greater Britain were determined to construct an enduring political community, a global Anglo-Saxon polity, they needed to escape the fate of previous empires. They tried instead to insert Greater Britain into a progressive narrative, one that did not doom them to repeat the failures of the past.

The dense marginal annotation made by freethinker, John Toland (1670–1722) and republican author and parliamentarian, Sir Robert Molesworth (1656–1725) on a copy of Martin Martin's Western Islands (1716) is an exceptional source for exposing the relationship between elite sociability and intellectual conversation. As an example of collaborative serial reading the case-study is unique, and allows a number of historical enquiries. Contextualizing Toland's and Molesworth's collaborative reading of the Royal Society sponsored work with the political and anticlerical projects both men pursued, the article argues that the surviving annotations are emblematic of the erudite, but still politically engaged, republic of letters of the period. Establishing the polemical engagement with clerical discourses about superstition, credulity, and ‘natural’ knowledge, by examining the literary, intellectual, and personal rhetoric at work in the marginalia, the article explores a case-study of cultural and intellectual debate at work in the early English Enlightenment.

This article studies the political significance of the schism that occurred at Liverpool's single professional football club in 1892 and which led to the incorporation of two clubs, Everton FC and Liverpool FC. Significantly, the management and direction of professional football had become bound up with community politics and identity at a time of important change in municipal politics when the tories' ascendancy faced a Liberal challenge partly predicated on the success of a virulent moral crusade over the influence of alcohol, social decay, and corruption in local government. At its simplest, the dispute at the club concerned allegations of commercial exploitation by the largest financial stakeholder. More fundamentally, rival factions were championing competing models for the role they believed a successful football club should be performing within the community which, in turn, embraced attempts by the political parties to engage male, working-class voters. Interestingly, the schism was within Protestant ranks for, despite the prominence often assigned to the role of sectarianism in Liverpool politics, differences between Catholics and Protestants played very little part in the dispute. This case study highlights the complexity of Liverpool political activities and alliances and reveals the importance of a multi-layered interplay of local and national issues.

This article seeks, through the medium of a case study of the York Lunatic Asylum scandal of 1813 to 1815, to rethink aspects of the existing historiography of early nineteenth-century asylum reform. By moving away from the normative medical historical focus on ‘madness’ and ‘custody’, it relates the reform of lunatic asylums to the wider social, cultural, and political currents of the early nineteenth century. In particular, it demonstrates how the conflict over the administration of the York Asylum represented a clash between different conceptions of social power and public accountability which were rooted in mutually opposed cultural ideologies. In addition, by bringing more recent work on identity and performance to bear on a classic set of historical issues, it also seeks to investigate how the reform of lunatic asylums, and the cultural shifts which they embodied, impacted upon the social identities of medical practitioners engaged in the charitable care of the sick and mad.

The late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.