Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England by Philip C. Almond

Abstract

252 BOOK REVIEWS Monmouth; the enactment of more anti-Catholic legislation; and the conversion ofJames to Protestantism. As early as 1678 Charles was prepared to accept limitations on James's power, but the fall of the Earl of Danby led to crippling disorganization at court. The king's efforts to find a solution to the succession crisis were hampered by the bitter struggle between court and country. That struggle—not the Whig-Tory conflict, which best depicts the outcome of the crisis—largely shaped the politics of at least the early years of the period. On the vexed question of party, Knights prefers to speak of political groupings that coalesced into polarities with differing views on the succession, religious dissent, and arbitrary government. Only when the court and the loyalists¦who supported it became a coherent political force in late 1680 and early 1681 —at which point they depicted themselves as defenders of right religion, liberty, and property—is Knights prepared to refer to political parties, and only then with the caveat that neither group was prepared to accept this status as permanent inasmuch as each saw itself as the eventual embodiment of the national will. Religion played a crucial role in this development, as Harris contends , but so too, avers Knights, did constitutional issues. "If party politics first emerged between 1679 and 1681 it was because the constitutional conflict added a new layer of polarity over, and to a large extent overlapping with, the religious one and because anti-popery both drew men into political controversy and to some extent justified their expressions of discontent" (p. 367). Knights thus offers a thesis that claims the middle ground between J. R. Jones and Jonathan Scott on the emergence of parties, and acknowledges the importance of religious matters without ignoring constitutional considerations. All of these issues are properly discussed with an eye to foreign policy factors involving France and the Netherlands. The result is an outstanding addition to late Stuart historical studies. Richard L. Greaves Florida State University Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England. By Philip C. Almond. (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Pp. xiii, 218. $49-95.) In his introduction, Philip Almond differentiates this study from D. P.Walker's classic work, The Decline ofHell,by claiming that its focus will be both broader and more detailed. Walker, he maintains, has laid out the "main highways,"while he proposes to complete the map by including "the pathways and byways that branched out from them." In less metaphorical terms, he aims to include conceptions of life after death drawn not only from canonical works, but from the "arcane, the obscure, and the forgotten"; to chronicle not only "the commonplace and the average, but the eccentric and the original"; and to provide a guide to the hopes and fears of the middling and lower classes as well as to those of the elite (p. 2). BOOK REVIEWS 253 In most respects, unfortunately, Almond's study does not live up to these claims. While he does indeed enlarge Walker's rather whiggish focus by devoting equal time to the orthodox proponents of eternal torment, the volume, whose text amounts to only one hundred and sixty pages, is simply too short to do justice to its subject. To return to Almond's geographical metaphor, this whirlwind tour whisks the armchair traveler along at such a rate that one is forced to conclude breathlessly,"well, ifit's Tuesday, this must be the doctrine of the transmigration of souls." On a more serious note, the brevity of the text and its grandiose claims generate a variety of significant difficulties. First, although the study seems to be directed at a public that is relatively unfamiliar with the intellectual history of early-modern religion, the explanations of relevant doctrines provided by Almond are on occasion so brief as to be misleading. (See, for example, the discussion of original sin and its impact on human free will, p. 8.) Moreover, constraints of space also force Almond for the most part to abandon analysis in favor of description. For instance, Chapter 4, which deals with "the last day," catalogues an immense number of proposed secondary causes of the earth's...