“Her Zeal for the Publick Good”:1 The Political Agenda in Elizabeth Burnet's A Method of Devotion (1708)

Abstract

Elizabeth Burnet (1661–1709), third wife of Bishop Gilbert Burnet, has been categorized by most critics as the devout wife of a cleric, remembered solely for her devotional manual A Method of Devotion (1708). An examination of this text together with her surviving letters and her private journal, however, reveals a much more complex picture of this woman. A close friend and regular correspondent of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Elizabeth Burnet was a highly political figure, an avid supporter of the Whigs, strongly motivated by her desire to preserve the Protestant succession to the English throne. Her preoccupation with politics was well recognized during her lifetime; indeed, it is expounded at length in the 1709 “An Account of the Life of the Author”, which prefaces the second edition of A Method of Devotion: And as I have often heard him who had reason to know her perfectly well, say, that her Zeal for the Publick Good, and that eagerness of Spirit which kept her intent upon it, was the single Thing he had ever observed in her that looked like Excess. The emphasis in Burnet's Method of Devotion is on the practice of Christianity in everyday life, with prayers and spiritual exercises both for particular times of day and for specific situations. There is an unmistakable political subtext in this work, however. This article explores the way in which the author's political agenda is both embedded in the latitudinarian and anti-Catholic trajectory of the writing and overtly expressed in some particular passages, and argues that it is important to acknowledge this aspect of her life.