British National Identity Research Articles

Reshaping British History: The Historiography of West Indians in Britain in the Twentieth Century

AbstractJust after the Second World War, a group of migrants from the Caribbean arrived in Britain on a former troopship, the Empire Windrush, heralding a significant post‐war migration of Commonwealth colonials to Britain. The arrival of West Indians in Britain after 1945 launched a complex and diverse historiography that not only took notice of the centuries‐long presence of people of colour in Britain, but has been vital to reshaping the way that historians understand the field of British history. This article traces the myriad paths of the historiography devoted to West Indians who lived in Britain in the twentieth century, looking at the work of scholars as they have explored West Indians in the context of the black diaspora, immigration, British national identity and culture, the British Empire and domestic decolonisation.

Eighteenth Century Shakespeare: Image of the National Hero

This paper explores three interconnected representations of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century: the Westminster Abbey statue of Shakespeare erected in 1741, David Garrick's Jubilee held in 1769, and John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery founded in 1789. Shakespeare's statue had much to do with the advancement of Garrick's self-image in the Jubilee; Boydell employed Shakespeare as subject for history painting that was the most sublime of artistic genres. They were in line with the representation of Shakespeare in the history of his promotion as symbol of British national identity. They gave Shakespeare his cultural prominence in the period, mediating him to the public by the means of his images such as statues and portraits. The widespread popularity of images of Shakespeare became a part of the cultural and commercial activities of nationalism. The embodiment of Shakespeare as a national hero was bound up with the force of commercial, cultural and national endeavours. Also the paper observes that the eighteenth century tradition of worshiping Shakespeare's genius is kept in the current annual event of Shakespeare Birthday Celebrations held in Stratford-upon-Avon every April. Such aspects of the Jubilee as public orations and street procession of Shakespearean characters retain some influence over the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and death: the Procession, the unfurling of the flags, and laying of floral tributes at his grave in Holy Trinity Church. This association demonstrates that the recognitions of Shakespeare as Britain's foremost pride and his home town as a site of pilgrimage are still intact even in the age of going towards globalization and multiculralism.

Religion, Power and Parliament: Rothschild and Bradlaugh Revisited

AbstractThe British parliament in the nineteenth century reflected the increasingly democratic stability of the British state in a century that saw numerous convulsions on the European continent. It embodied the majesty of British law, the idea that all adult males who dwelt in Britain shared the universal rights of a true‐born Englishman, including the right to speak on the affairs of the nation. The repeated attempts of the Jewish Baron Lionel de Rothschild and the atheist Charles Bradlaugh to take their seats after having been lawfully elected to parliament showed, however, that barriers remained against those who were in some way considered ‘un‐British’. The debates that the perseverance of both men engendered inside the parliament reveal how strongly the conservative British establishment clung on to what it considered to be the Protestant national character. To make British laws, one had to be British in more than citizenship. In essence, it was a debate about British national identity in an increasingly ‘liberal’ world. The eventual inclusion of both Rothschild and Bradlaugh marked a further shift away from religious conformity as a measure of ‘Britishness’ as the century drew to a close.

Who ate all the pride? Patriotic sentiment and English national football support

ABSTRACT. The growing popularity of English national insignia in international football tournaments has been widely interpreted as evidence of the emergence of a renewed English national consciousness. However, little empirical research has considered how people in England actually understand football support in relation to national identity. Interview data collected around the time of the Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup tournaments fail to substantiate the presumption that support for the England football team maps onto claims to patriotic sentiment in any straightforward way. People with far‐right political affiliations did generally use national football support to symbolise a general pride in English national identity. However, other people either claimed not to support the England national team precisely because of its associations with nationalism, or else bracketed the domain of football support from more general connotations of English patriotism.

Cymbeline and Empire

The article discusses the use of minor characters in the theatrical production Cymbeline by William Shakespeare as a silent chorus for the events of the story. Editors have speculated that a Spaniard and Dutchman present in a scene in the play were intended to be more important characters. The author suggests the nationality of the characters may represent nations vying for imperial power. He suggests the play distorts British history and national identity.

Is St George Enough? Considering the importance of displaying local identity while supporting the England national soccer team

Anthony King (2006) suggests that soccer provides an increasingly important arena to express an emergent English (over British) national identity. This paper uses data from pub‐based participant observation and an online survey conducted during the 2006 World Cup Finals to explore the complexities of contemporary English identities among ‘everyday’ soccer fans. We discuss the relevance of local identities by focusing on contemporary displays of support for the England team, particularly by supporters of clubs situated below the English Premier League that have been neglected in previous studies. We make reference to the ways in which local identities have often become interchangeable with the English nation, before suggesting that the nation can empower local identities when on an international stage. As such we regard support for the English national team as a site for expressing both national and local layers of identity that are informed in different ways by processes of globalisation.

Engendering Identity: The Discourse of Familial Education in Anne Bradstreet and Marie de l'Incarnation

Engendering IdentityThe Discourse of Familial Education in Anne Bradstreet and Marie de l'Incarnation Robert Hilliker (bio) Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did'st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise then trueWho thee abroad, expos'd to publick view,Made thee in raggs, halting to th'press to trudg,Where errors were not lessened (all may judg) —Anne Bradstreet, "An Author to her Book" (1678) In her American Triptych, Wendy Martin epitomizes the traditional feminist criticism of Anne Bradstreet's poetry when she identifies "An Author to her Book" as the moment when Bradstreet begins to "view her daily experience as a valid subject for her art" (67). Martin's judgment reinforces a division, posited much earlier by Adrienne Rich, between Bradstreet's early, purportedly masculine and derivative, verse and her later, more successful, domestic poetry. This division, since supported by numerous critics, draws its rhetorical strength from an equation of the vitality of Bradstreet's later, domestic poems with their putative originality and authenticity, what Rich calls her "personal history [of] marriage, childbearing, [and] death" (xii–xiv). While critics such as Philip Round and Ivy Schweitzer have more recently reclaimed the political and even polemical significance of Bradstreet's poetry, they have largely reaffirmed this divide.1 As Tamara Harvey suggests, Round and Schweitzer find "double-voiced displays of poetic, personal, or female power" in the earlier poems, and thus still see in them in a kind of literary cross-dressing—the female poet ironically winking at us from behind a false beard and mustache, as it were (5). Further, both Schweitzer and Round deemphasize Bradstreet's own role in the production of her poetry, representing it as something appropriated [End Page 435] from her by her male Puritan interlocutors, especially her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge. The combined effect of these critical moves is to position Bradstreet as an isolated phenomenon—the lone woman poet on the American frontier—rather than part of a transatlantic community of European authors, both male and female, whose work engages the complex issues raised by the European colonization of the Americas.2 Foremost among these issues is the problem of how to maintain European identities in a "New World," and the concomitant fear of what Cotton Mather would call "Criolian Degeneracy" and "Indianization" (A Way to Prosperity 34; Decennium Luctuosum 211). By insisting that we see Bradstreet as a rara avis, both the traditional and the revisionist criticism obscure how her creative and provocative melding of religious, political, and domestic discourses responds to the challenge of creating a coherent transatlantic identity by producing a potent vision of the relationship between colony and metropole as one between a parent and child rather than male and female lovers. It is, I suggest, only by reading Bradstreet's poetry alongside that of contemporary authors, both male and female, on both sides of the Atlantic, that we can properly understand its broader significance.3 Such a reading will allow us to see how Bradstreet links sexual and cultural reproduction, thereby cementing the family as the primary locus of identity development—at an individual and a communal level—and, more particularly, smoothing over potential dissonances between her (Puritan) religious identity and her (English) national identity. It will also allow us to see how Bradstreet both responds to and anticipates contemporary educational discourse, particularly writing about women's education, but relocates education itself, placing it in a familial rather than an institutional setting. While critics such as Harvey and Patricia Pender have demonstrated how Bradstreet's work fits within a larger body of English language writing by men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, however, I want to highlight Bradstreet's place in an international discursive shift fueled by the developing European understanding of the colonization of the Americas. In order to do this, I will examine her work alongside that of Marie de l'Incarnation, a French nun who established the first educational mission for women (both native and European) in New France.4 De l'Incarnation's writings, like Bradstreet's, bear witness to an ongoing shift in the...

Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750, by Clive Emsley

Reviewed by: Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750 Paul R. Deslandes (bio) Hard Men: Violence in England since 1750, by Clive Emsley; pp. x + 225. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005, £19.99, $39.95. In his most recent book Clive Emsley tests the generally accepted, and somewhat Whiggish, assumption that English society became significantly less violent in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Linking the study of crime with other fields of scholarship—including work on the interrelated histories of gender, domesticity, sport, and the crowd—Emsley maintains that while certain types of violence may have declined over the course of the nineteenth century (due to both state intervention and cultural shifts), interpersonal conflicts still often ended tragically. Throughout this period of dramatic change, Emsley helpfully reminds readers, the state willingly sanctioned forms of violence such as death by hanging as prescriptive devices and general deterrents to transgressive behavior. A prominent historian of British crime, Emsley boldly challenges methodological orthodoxy in this book. He questions, for example, the general tendency of scholars to measure the violence of societies by citing murder statistics alone. To broaden the parameters of the field, he explores violence in a variety of different social spaces including city streets, the home, immigrant neighborhoods, and football pitches and boxing rings. Like Martin Wiener in his recent Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (2004), Emsley has produced a history of crime and violence that questions how cultural ideals about masculine self-restraint, control, chivalry, and notions of fairness informed legal decisions and operated, more generally, as guiding principles in British courts of law. Emsley is not content, however, simply to tackle these significant issues. He also uses the history of crime and violence as a lens through which to study the development of English ethnicity and national identities. His consideration of the relationship [End Page 333] between Englishness and violence allows him to chronicle how foreigners and foreign cultures, at least until the middle decades of the twentieth century, were routinely cast in nationalist narratives as violent and unruly others, discursive foils to the liberty-loving, freeborn English man and woman. In exploring the intricacies of violent behavior in the modern period, Emsley is also careful not to replicate the assumptions of Victorian elites (and others), who tended to attribute the most egregious acts to a chronically rough, slum-dwelling, and shadowy underclass. To counter these views, he points to incidents of domestic violence in "respectable" working-class and professional middle-class households, occasionally violent and confrontational Cambridge student "rags," and duels between aggrieved members of the upper classes. Emsley relies on a broad range of sources in dissecting this culture of English violence. Drawing on the annual Judicial Statistics for England and Wales, police files in the National Archives, and press accounts from The Times, the Daily Herald, and the Daily Sketch, he begins each of his chapters with an attention-grabbing anecdote before proceeding with incisive analyses of topics ranging from the role that violence has played in political protests and industrial disputes to the mythic status of the English "bobby," ultimately reconstructing a surprisingly variegated portrait of interpersonal assault and conflict in both public and private social spaces. In each of his case studies, Emsley problematizes many of the narratives constructed by historians of crime and violence. In a chapter on sport, for example, he illustrates how the introduction of the Queensberry rules to boxing and the creation of the Football Association (both of which attempted to encode hegemonic, nineteenth-century ideals of gentlemanly restraint and fair play) never eliminated rowdy and violent outbursts at British athletic events. In another chapter on foreigners, Emsley tests nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century assumptions about the inherently violent natures of Irish, Chinese, and Jewish immigrants. While acknowledging that violence did indeed occur within certain ethnic communities (citing the deportation of London's most notorious drug dealer, Brilliant Chang, in 1925), he is careful to note that the English glossed over the violence of empire and justified anti-immigrant riots as acts of extreme provocation. Emsley's observations about the occasionally violent nature of English politics are...

The Measure of Time: Rising and Falling in Victorian Meters

AbstractIn the Victorian period, metrical experiments and prosodical treatises proliferated to impressive proportions and stirred intricate controversies in poetics. In a necessary resurgence of scholarly interest in this body of work, some recent critics of Victorian meter privilege an account of it that favors either accentualism, organicism, and the body, or temporal measurement, the abstract, and the purely mental. Victorian poets and prosodists, however, did not divide along these poles but aimed to connect them within their own work. Focusing in part on blank verse, I argue that their attempt to unite the organic and the abstract in concepts of meter articulated ideals of English national identity and served as a means for the expression of social and cultural ideals. I explore how poets and prosodists connect their concepts of metrical time to the experience of the passage of time, both as a sense of progress and one of nostalgia.

Englishness and the Victorians

AbstractThe Victorian era witnessed an intensification and deepening of the debate surrounding an English national identity, a debate staged and refracted in the literature of the period. Whilst England was often visualised or conceived as an amalgam of other racial groupings, both the new vogue for topographical description and classification and the political and administrative reorganisation of the age lent weight and urgency to the sense of national identity. It was largely during the 1980s, a decade marked in Britain by polarisation and a renewed rhetoric of ‘patriotism’, that these Victorian preoccupations came under renewed scrutiny in a series of studies primarily motivated by the left‐liberal cultural studies instigated by Raymond Williams. Much work was done at this time, for instance, to identify the ‘discovery’ of a semi‐mythicised South Country embodied in the prose of George Borrow, Richard Jefferies or Thomas Hardy, whilst John Clare and Alfred Tennyson often served as paradigmatic poets in the reading of landscape as part of history and national formation. More recently, this focus has shifted to reflect a more theorised, post‐colonial sense of the Victorians and their sense of an ever‐shifting definition of literary England.

“Scottishness,”“Britishness,” and Scottish Tourism, 1770–1914

AbstractThis article examines the cultural significance of Scotland for the legions of English tourists who headed north in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and provides an overview of several scholarly debates that are currently taking place in the fields of tourism and of British national identity. The image of Scotland was refashioned in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the result of changing cultural fashions and new political developments. Because the industry of tourism and the idea of Scotland developed alongside each other, Scotland played a disproportionately important role in the history of tourism, and tourism a disproportionately important role in the history of modern Scotland. The image of Scotland, for both Scots and foreigners, did not evolve in isolation. It developed simultaneously with the descent upon Scotland of masses of tourists, lured by a certain type of advertising, and armed with guidebooks and preconceived expectations of what they would find. Prompted by promotional materials, the comments of previous travelers, and literature, tourists claimed a sense of mastery over Scotland and its people. However, the tourist image of Scotland was not hegemonic. Thoughtful tourists were challenged by what they found in Scotland, discovering that they could not always make the country fit their expectations.

‘Set in the silver sea’: English national identity and European integration

ABSTRACT. Although many short‐term reasons for a specifically English Euro‐scepticism have been proposed, a long‐term perspective is required to provide a fuller and more rounded treatment of this important and topical political issue. It needs to be grasped in terms of cultural, political and religious factors in English history, specifically, the antiquity and political character of a sense of English national identity, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the nature and impact of Protestant covenantalism. Among the factors that have shaped a sense of English national identity are its insular, geopolitical situation, the early development of a centralised English state, and the concomitant growth of a unified English legal system. To the existing sense of national identity under the Tudors was added a strong current of religious separatism, manifested first through Henry VIII's break with Rome and his vindication of monarchical supremacy in a national church, and second through the Puritan return to the idea of election modelled on the Old Testament narrative of the Exodus and Covenant of the Israelites. These currents have lent to the sense of English national identity a strong oppositional character, in contrast to the transterritorialism of Christendom characteristic of the leading Roman Catholic powers. This can be seen both by comparing English with French historical trajectories, and more recently, in terms of the separate, but allied, position of England in relation to European integration.

English and French national identity: comparisons and contrasts*

ABSTRACT.The English and the French are both former imperial peoples, and to that extent they share certain features of national identity common to peoples who have had empires. That includes a ‘missionary’ sense of themselves, a feeling that they have, or have had, a purpose in the world wider than the concerns of non‐imperial nations. I argue that nevertheless the English and the French have diverged substantially in their self‐conceptions. This I put down to a differing experience of empire, the sense especially among the French that the British were more successful in their imperial ventures. I also argue that contrasting domestic histories – evolutionary in the English case, revolutionary in that of the French – have also significantly coloured national identities in the two countries. These factors taken together, I argue, have produced a more intense sense of nationhood and a stronger national consciousness among the French than among the English.

THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN FOREIGN POLICY AND DOMESTIC POLITICS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

Parliament and foreign policy in the eighteenth century. By Jeremy Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+261. ISBN 0-521-83331-0. £45.00.Art and arms: literature, politics and patriotism during the seven years' war. By M. John Cardwell. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 0-7190-6618-2. £49.99.The British Isles and the war of American independence. By Stephen Conway. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. vii+407. ISBN 0-19-820649-3. £60.00.Revolution, religion and national identity: imperial Anglicanism in British North America, 1745–1795. By Peter M. Doll. London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-8386-3830-9. £38.00.Politics and the nation: Britain in the mid-eighteenth century. By Bob Harris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 392. ISBN 0-19-924693. £45.00.Parliaments, nations, and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850. Edited by Julian Hoppit. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xii+225. ISBN 0-7190-6247-0. £15.99.Politik-Propaganda-Patronage. Francis Hare und die englische Publizistik im spanischen Erbfolgekrieg. By Jens Metzdorf. Mainz: Verlag Philip von Zabern, 2000. Pp. xv+566. ISBN 3-8053-2584-3. DM 114.00.Irish opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–1783. By Vincent Morley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x+366. ISBN 0-521-81386-7. £48.00.Breaking the backcountry: the Seven Years War in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1754–1765. By Matthew C. Ward. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. Pp. 329. ISBN 0-8229-4214-3. $34.95.The Jacobites and Russia, 1715–1750. By Rebecca Wills. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. 253. ISBN 1-86232-142-6. £20.00.It has never been possible to write the history of eighteenth-century Britain as that of an island entirely by itself. Over a century ago, the Cambridge historian, J. R. Seeley, famously insisted that the history of England (sic) lay as much in America and Asia as in England, whilst G. M. Trevelyan's classic narrative of England under Queen Anne (3 vols., 1930–4) was presented against the background of the War of the Spanish Succession. More recently, John Brewer's remarkable Sinews of power: war, money and the English state, 1688–1784 (1989) demonstrated the extent to which the British state, and its fiscal-political structures, were geared towards the mobilization of military power, primarily to be deployed against France. In The sense of the people: politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (1995), Kathleen Wilson revealed the importance of empire and imperial expansion in popular politicization, whilst Linda Colley's Britons (1992) showed just how central the struggle with France was to the development of eighteenth-century British national identity. At the same time, our understanding of the European and global state system in which Britain played such a prominent role has been illuminated by Hamish Scott's British foreign policy in the age of the American revolution (1990), together with many publications by Jeremy Black including British foreign policy in the age of Walpole (1985) and America or Europe? British foreign policy, 1739–1763 (1997).

English and British National Identity

AbstractNational identities in the British Isles have been a neglected subject of study for a long time, though interest has been growing recently. Why the neglect, and why the new interest? This article proposes that much of the puzzle has to do with the peculiar, and dominating, position of England historically within the United Kingdom. This has led to a relative indifference to questions of national identity on the part of the English, and, by a defensive reaction, a corresponding increase, over time, with such questions on the part of the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The English developed a largely ‘non‐national’ conception of themselves, preoccupied as they were with the management of the United Kingdom and the British Empire; the ‘Celtic’ nations followed a more familiar pattern of developing national consciousness, as shown elsewhere in Europe. With the loss of the British Empire, large‐scale immigration, the call of Europe, and renewed nationalist movements that threaten the ‘break‐up’ of Britain, it is the English who find themselves most acutely faced with questions of national identity. Hence the new interest in national identity, especially among the English but also generally throughout the United Kingdom as other groups seek to imagine alternative futures for themselves.

Rescuing Businesses through Transnationalism: Embedded Chinese Enterprise and Nationalist Activities in Singapore in the 1930s Great Depression

This article argues that the embeddedness of Chinese enterprises in Singapore society explains the limited success of the nationalist movement in Singapore. To respond to the economic crisis in the 1930s, Chinese business elites employed nationalist rhetoric to appeal to their compatriots in the British colony to support Chinese “national products.” With dual allegiance to both British rule and Chinese national identity, Chinese business nationalists took a transnational approach. Because Chinese business communities in Singapore were organized along subethnic lines, Chinese transnationalism failed to surmount these social divisions.

Breaking the Bad News: Plans for the Announcement to the Empire of the Death of Elizabeth II and the Proclamation of Her Successor, 1952–67

This article uses recently released official papers to examine British planning for the announcement of the death of Elizabeth II to the Empire/Commonwealth, and for the involvement of Commonwealth representatives in the proclamation of her successor. The planning process was complicated by the complex and varied nature of the relationship between the Crown and different parts of both the colonial Empire and the independent Commonwealth. While the debates generated by this process tended to revolve around relatively minor issues of protocol, they were informed by a much more serious concern: the extent to which the institution of the British monarchy should adapt to meet the needs of the ‘new’ Commonwealth. Those advocating flexibility saw this as essential if the Crown was to continue to have a unifying role within the Commonwealth. Traditionalists, however, feared that reform would weaken the value of the monarchy as the focus of a specifically British national identity.

The "Lustful Buggering Jew": Anti-Semitism, Gender, and Sodomy in Restoration Political Satire

The "Lustful Buggering Jew":Anti-Semitism, Gender, and Sodomy in Restoration Political Satire Jeremy Webster (bio) In "Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England," Rachel Weil analyzes the implications of the fact that the "manuscript books into which Restoration men and women copied items of current interest usually contained a mixture of sexual and 'purely' political material, with no effort being made to create a distinction between them" (141). According to Weil, this lack of distinction "suggests that stories about royal or court sexuality were a legitimate part of political discourse, not cordoned off into a separate category" (142). Weil focuses her study of Restoration poetic satire on the ways in which these works use pornographic imagery to comment on Charles II's policies. As she writes, "Narratives about the king's body, its powers and vulnerabilities, its healthy and unhealthy states, and its relationship to the body politic, provided writers with a way of dramatizing their deepest political concerns" (142). The king's body, however, is not the only one that provided Restoration satirists with this opportunity. In this essay, I analyze another site of pornographic and political satire, the male Jew's body, in two Restoration poems that circulated in manuscript in 1680 and were quickly included in some of the poetic miscellanies that were compiled following the death of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in July of that year: "Tho' Wean'd from all Those Scandalous Delights" and "The Queen Street Ballad."1 These poems depict a dinner party that turns into a sexual orgy when a Jewish character introduces the other guests to the joys of anal sex. My purpose here is to examine these satires' representational practices in [End Page 106] associating Jews with sodomy. Borrowing Cameron McFarlane's strategy of analyzing "the nexus of ideas, relations, behaviors, discursive practices, and meanings that could be set in motion under [the] signs" "sodomy" and "sodomite" (20), I am interested in examining the cultural work the representation of the "Lustful Buggering Jew" ("Tho' Wean'd" 32) performed in Restoration political satire.2 I argue that the "Lustful Buggering Jew" is a stereotype that uniquely expresses anxieties about the stability of English national identity during the Exclusion Crisis. Harold Love notes that Restoration manuscript books and miscellanies "have usually been treated simply as quarries for texts of individual writers and as providers of dating evidence" (177). He argues, however, that these works are also important for the social functions they served. Scribal publication, writes Love, "was one of several means of acquiring and transmitting information" (177). Manuscript books helped bond together "like-minded individuals into a community, sect, or political faction, with the exchange of texts in manuscript serving to nourish a shared set of values and to enrich personal allegiances" (177). And finally, scribal publication was "a means by which ideologically charged texts could be distributed through the governing class, or various interest groups within that class, without their coming to the knowledge of the governed" (177). The Gyldenstolpe Miscellany, a manuscript collection belonging to Count Nils Gyldenstolpe, Sweden's ambassador at The Hague from 1679 to 1687, was typical in its transmission of ideologically charged information about court intrigue and political factions. As David Vieth and Bror Daniellson, who published a facsimile edition of the collection in 1967, argue, "With the marriage between...Mary and William of Orange in 1677, it became very important for the Swedish ambassador... to familiarize himself with the doings at the court of Charles II, including gossip and the latest scandals" (xxi). Because of their political and satiric content, Vieth and Danielsson say, the poems in the collection "would render it valuable to a foreign diplomat trying to follow the changing situation in England in order to determine where and how strings should be pulled in the interests of his country" (xxi). Knowledge of events at Charles's court was particularly important in 1680—the height of the Exclusion Crisis. By August of that year, the probable compilation date for the collection, Titus Oates had already declared the existence of a Popish Plot to kill the king and thousands of Protestants, and the first exclusion...

A Stronger or Weaker Union? Public Reactions to Asymmetric Devolution in the United Kingdom

A system of asymmetric devolution was established for the first time in Great Britain in 1999. Its advocates hoped it would strengthen public support for the maintenance of the United Kingdom, whereas its critics feared it would have the opposite effect. This article examines which of these two perspectives appears to have been correct by looking at trends in national identity and constitutional preferences in each of England, Scotland, and Wales following the advent of devolution. It finds that although there may have been some erosion of British national identity and although there are some pressures for further changes, a system of asymmetric devolution appears to be the only constitutional structure capable of enjoying public support throughout Great Britain. Copyright , Oxford University Press.

SCOTLAND AND THE CREATION OF A NATIONAL REFORM MOVEMENT, 1830–1832

The popular movement for parliamentary reform after 1830 managed to sustain its campaign for over eighteen months. The popular movement itself has largely been studied at a local level, and undoubtedly local contexts were influential in conditioning responses to reform. Reformers, however, predominantly represented themselves as patriots involved in a pan-British struggle, and this was a key factor in sustaining the mobilization. This article explores the reform movement on its own terms in one ‘national’ context, that of Scotland. If the immediate political context of reform was a spur to unity, the languages and strategies of reformers provided the real glue. Scottish reformers represented themselves as patriots involved in a ‘national movement’ and this article will analyse how the reform movement could act as a solvent for apparently conflicting aspects of Scottish and British national identities. It will argue that reformers deployed a language of ‘unionist-nationalism’ – which coupled demands for greater access to the British constitution with appeals to popular understandings of Scottish history – to call for reform, mobilize support, and maintain the unity of the movement.