Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne by Rachel Carnell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne by Rachel Carnell Joseph Hone Rachel Carnell, Backlash: Libel, Impeachment, and Populism in the Reign of Queen Anne (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2020). Pp. 312. $34.95 cloth. Historic times call for historic parallels. The litany of crises that has convulsed British and American politics over the last five years has simultaneously repulsed and intrigued historians. However bizarre or exceptional an event may at first appear, in the hands of certain scholars there always seem to be correspondences with events in the past. Every eventuality seems to have been anticipated; for each unprecedented crisis, a precedent is duly found. In suggesting parallels between early modern culture and contemporary politics, Rachel Carnell’s new book attempts to do for the reign of Queen Anne what Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018) did for Shakespeare studies. Unfortunately, it has succeeded. Backlash takes a moment of eighteenth-century history as its focus. In 1709, the British government and parliament were dominated by the Whigs; by the end of 1710, both institutions had fallen to the Tories, following a summer of rioting and vicious campaigning against the toleration of Protestant dissenters. The key trigger was the impeachment in the spring of the clergyman Henry Sacheverell for the crime of delivering a sermon critical of the government. Though notorious among experts on the period, this story is not so well-known as it ought to be and seems—at first glance, anyway—to offer some intriguing parallels with contemporary politics. Carnell’s book, which is pitched somewhere between a specialist monograph and a generalist trade book, does an excellent job of telling the tale. Linking her years of authoritative scholarship on Delarivier Manley with the broader ideological conflicts at play, Carnell deftly handles the twists and turns of the political situation, the various intrigues of the court, and the essential background on Queen Anne’s deteriorating relationship with the Marlboroughs. The book is particularly good at communicating the breakneck pace at which events unfolded, with Manley getting her moment in court only days before Sacheverell’s impeachment trial got underway. It is skillfully done. Readers new to the period will doubtless enjoy being swept along by the narrative arc. Although I expected to disagree with certain analyses and interpretations of events, I was eager to read about the familiar incidents of 1709–10 from a new angle and fully anticipated admiring Backlash (as I have Carnell’s previous work) and sympathizing with its core objectives. However, having now spent a week mulling over the book, I find myself increasingly troubled by certain recurring features. These fall into three categories: simple technical errors; a lack of historiographical awareness; and a reluctance to engage with historical actors on their own terms. Individually, it would be possible to overlook these qualities. Taken together, however, they give cause for concern. [End Page 1048] In the first instance, consider Carnell’s handling of the book trade. There are repeated claims that, for vague “ideological reasons” (33), the “Whigs tended to support an unfettered press” (44) and had a fundamental “belief in press freedom” (211). That is simply not true. The Succession to the Crown Act of 1707, masterminded by members of Whig Junto, made it a hanging offense to write or print material against the Hanoverian succession. This piece of legislation later resulted in the execution of a teenage boy.1 Both in theory and in practice, Whigs were zealous censors of the press. Then there is the confusion resulting from specialist terminology. The misunderstanding of key terms comes sharply into focus in the paragraphs documenting the printing in 1709 of Manley’s The New Atalantis. Because of the legal risks, Carnell writes, the printer John Barber “commissioned two other printers, John Woodward and John Morphew, to do the actual printing and put their names on the title page, as the ‘trade printers’ for the work” (45). Rarely have I encountered such a short sentence crammed with so many errors. The name was James Woodward, not John.2 The book was not “commissioned” by Barber; the “actual printing” was done by him in house...