Catholic Plots Research Articles

Historic British Royal Memes

Historic British Royal Memes

Divided Devotion: A Historical Exploration of Bismarck's Kulturkampf and its Impact on German Society

This study examines the Kulturkampf, a major 19th-century German event in which Otto von Bismarck fought to limit Catholic influence in politics. Catholicism remained a powerful influence in German society despite Bismarck's efforts, posing a difficult challenge to the mid-1800s political scene. Start with the Kulturkampf, the Catholic Church's fight to adapt to liberal ideals, democracy, nationalism, socialism, and the industrial revolution. Liberal Catholicism's answer to modernity is analyzed, focusing on Ignaz von Dollinger, who strove to reconcile faith with intellectual currents. The paper discusses the First Vatican Council in 1870, which introduced papal infallibility, and liberal Catholicism's downfall. Germany is highlighted because Catholicism suffered ideological struggles and gained academic support as a secular, Protestant-influenced religion. Bismarck's Catholicism onslaught from 1853-54 to the Kulturkampf of the 1870s is examined. Bismarck's fears of Catholic violence and a Catholic plot are examined in the study. The issue deepened in 1873 when the May Laws sought state control over the Catholic Church. The Prussian bishops' resistance to the May Laws led to incarceration, penalties, and institution closures. Bismarck's authoritarianism failed to suppress Catholicism despite overwhelming opposition. Conclusions highlight the Kulturkampf legislation' impact on church-state relations and the reduction of anti-Catholic measures. This paper analyzes historical events to reveal Bismarck's political maneuvers, the Catholic Church's struggles, and the Kulturkampf's lasting effects on 19th-century Germany's religious and political landscape.

William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood

William Harvey and the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood

A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian J. Koot

Reviewed by: A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake by Christian J. Koot Keith D. Pluymers A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake. By Christian J. Koot (New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. [xiv], 283. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-3729-8.) Over the course of the 1660s, Augustine Herrman, a merchant and cartographer who navigated the borderlands of English and Dutch mid-Atlantic colonies, created a distinct, precise manuscript map of the Chesapeake region. In his wide-ranging and accessible A Biography of a Map in Motion: Augustine Herrman's Chesapeake, Christian J. Koot traces the histories of Herrman and his map as both moved in and between empires and around the Atlantic world, illuminating how these peregrinations transformed the man and the object. Koot uses Herrman's map, Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited (1673), to draw out two Atlantic worlds: the colonial, which had relatively porous boundaries and ample opportunities for interimperial trade, movement, and intellectual exchange; and the imperial, which emphasized metropolitan primacy, sovereignty, and clearly delineated authority. Three chapters framed around the details of Herrman's life as a colonial merchant and mapmaker, but offering extended discussions of mercantile life, material culture, and local politics, argue for the existence of a flexible, mobile colonial community. Herrman—who was born in Bohemia, lived in the Dutch Republic, worked as a merchant in New Amsterdam, developed trade networks across the Dutch and English mid-Atlantic colonies, and ultimately settled as a planter in Maryland—was, Koot argues, a truly colonial individual whose skills and networks were valued by English and Dutch colonial authorities. Herrman moved consistently and easily across the waterways of the Chesapeake and as far afield as the Caribbean. While Herrman stood out for his commercial success and his cartographic prowess, he typified, as Koot suggests, "colonists in the Mid-Atlantic [who] belonged to one larger cross-national community" (p. 51). Even open hostilities and the English seizure of New Netherland "did not reorient the mapmaker's imagining of the larger Mid-Atlantic as an interconnected unit" (p. 133). These dense and overlapping mercantile networks and relationships with Native peoples enabled Herrman to create "a unique map that captures a distinctive colonial geography" while displaying Dutch cartographic traditions [End Page 141] and ways of seeing (p. 55). In its manuscript form, the map conveyed colonial attitudes, knowledges, and uses, including ones at odds with imperial policy. Koot convincingly teases out these details about a manuscript map of which there are no surviving copies—a testament to his subtle, skillful visual analysis against the grain of the extant printed maps and to his deep engagement with technical histories of cartography. It is one of the book's great strengths that Koot provides such analysis without burdening nonspecialist readers or deadening his light, flowing prose. Koot's reconstruction of the absent manuscript informs his reading of the surviving prints. In peeling back engraver William Faithorne's transformations of Herrman's manuscript, Koot reveals how Faithorne and Lord Baltimore sought to transform a colonial manuscript into a metropolitan print that "spoke to the imperial uses to which the landscape could be put" and that cemented Baltimore's own interests in North America (p. 140). The new map also required a transformation of Herrman, from a planter, merchant, and mapmaker moving easily across physical and political geographies into "Augustine Herrman Bohemian." "Augustine Herrman Bohemian," Koot argues, was "a metropolitan figure" who evoked renowned Bohemian engraver Wenceslaus Hollar while simultaneously lending the image authority through a text that celebrated "an actual individual and his skill in capturing the colonies" (pp. 166, 170). But conflicting interpretations did not end the moment the printers put ink to engraved copper. The careful visual and textual rhetoric of the printed map enraged at least one anonymous Maryland colonist, who wrote that the presence of Lord Baltimore's coat of arms on the map was evidence of broader Catholic plots to usurp royal authority. People and objects in motion have long been one of the defining characteristics of Atlantic history. One of the chief virtues of A Biography of a Map...

John Haught on original sin: A conversation

This article engages with John Haught’s views on original sin. It offers a brief orientation todiscourse on sin in the context of theological debates on human evolution. This is followed bya thick description of Haught’s so-called note on original sin. A series of five observations andquestions regarding Haught’s position is offered. It is observed that Haught’s way of tellingthe story of sin and salvation follows a classic Roman Catholic plot, namely one based on graceelevating nature. This is contrasted with the more typically reformed plot of restoration.

The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution by Owen Stanwood (review)

Reviewed by: The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution by Owen Stanwood Kevin R. Hardwick The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution. By Owen Stanwood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 288 pp. $45.00 (cloth). Owen Stanwood has produced a fine, focused monograph, analyzing late seventeenth-century efforts to reform the imperial administration of Colonial British America. The book is divided into a three-part narrative. In the first section, Stanwood traces the endeavors of late Stuart colonial administrators to bring centralized control over the disorderly English Atlantic Empire they inherited from the regimes of the British interregnum. The second section delineates the reception and implications of the Glorious Revolution in the English Atlantic colonies. The final section explores efforts, largely successful, of imperial administrators to reimagine the empire in the years following the events of 1688. The story then is one of efforts to centralize colonial administration prior to 1688—what Stanwood calls “Empire Imagined”—followed by the collapse of Stuart imperial ambitions in 1688, “Empire Lost,” followed in turn by efforts to create and impose a new imperial design, “Empire Regained.” Stanwood deftly illustrates the importance of a rhetoric of anti-Catholicism at every stage of his narrative. British administrators, colonial elites, and the larger political societies of the various colonies, he argues, together crafted the successful British Atlantic Empire of the [End Page 456] eighteenth century from an abiding understanding of Catholic malevolence dating to the very beginning of English colonization. “The reconstituted empire,” Stanwood argues, “combined the centralization favored by royal agents” with a “militant Protestantism” grounded in long standing Protestant fears of Catholic plots and conspiracies (p. 4). Stanwood is especially sensitive to and takes seriously the genuine fears expressed by the populace of the various colonies every bit as much as by local and imperial governors. Initial efforts to reform the empire—the first stage of Stanwood’s narrative—“proved difficult because they ran into the conspiratorial political culture of popish and Puritan plots that poisoned Anglo-American politics in the Restoration era” (p. 26). News of the invasion of England by William of Orange and the subsequent collapse of James II’s authority unleashed fears of Catholic menace in the colonies, and promoted deep-felt insecurity. Officials in New England and New York downplayed these rumors and popular fears, and failed to survive the crisis. In Virginia and Barbados, however, colonial governments “took them seriously” and “made a stand against the real or imagined Catholic enemies that threatened their polities.” In those places, local regimes “weathered the crisis and came out of it unscathed” (p. 86). Leaders of the new colonial governments in New York and New England emphasized a new understanding of the English dominions. These men “sought very consciously to build a Reformed Protestant empire” and “understood America as a partner in a global Protestant movement” (p. 114). At the same time, however, they rejected imperial centralization. Instead they promoted a loosely structured confederation under the umbrella of the British crown that properly should be, they argued, duly respectful of local autonomy. The inability of local colonial governments to provide real security for their people, especially as warfare between England and France intensified, forced local elites and the people they governed to acknowledge the necessity of English assistance. “This revelation,” Stanwood writes, “led to a gradual shift away from the Protestant firebrands who had championed a decentralized empire, and toward some of the very people” who earlier had lead Stuart efforts to reform the empire prior to the Glorious Revolution (p. 146). By the turn of the eighteenth century, imperial officials increasingly “realized that anti-Catholic fear could be the ideological glue that held [the] Anglo-American empire together” (p. 179). Stanwood’s argument is sophisticated and nuanced. He has synthesized a wide range of literature and has accompanied that effort with deep reading in an expansive array of primary sources. His chapters [End Page 457] consist of a series of impressive micro-narratives, focused on specific colonies and specific episodes, ranging from New Hampshire to Barbados. Much of his narrative, understandably, focuses on New York and New England; his...

“When Golden Time Convents”: Twelfth Night and Shakespeare's Eastern Promise

At the British Museum's Shah Abbas exhibition quotations from Twelfth Night reassured visitors Shakespeare was as familiar with ‘the Sophy’ as with Elizabeth. One of four dedicated to empire and globalization, the show used Shakespeare's ‘universalism’ in the debate about ownership of cultural property, to illustrate director Neil MacGregor's idea of the museum as ‘the world under one roof’. But critics of the series object that an emphasis on ‘the food of love’ effaces Islamic or Aztec violence, and by taking the quotations out of context curators also elided religious conflict in Elizabethan England. They ignored the way references to the Shirley brothers in Twelfth Night encode Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. But a Tate Gallery Van Dyck exhibition showed Robert Shirley in his silk suit as ‘fencer to the Sophy’ and Persian ambassador to Rome; and it is this complexity that Shakespeare stages in his Epiphany play, with its hope for ‘golden time’ but suspense that like Robert's ambiguous suit from Abbas, ‘What's to come is still unsure’.

The Scottish Parliament and the Monarchy in the Context of Absentee Monarchy and the Anglo-Scottish Dynastic Union, 1603-1707

The 1603 Union of the Crowns marked a diplomatic, dynastic and political triumph for the Scottish royal family, the House of Stewart. James VI, King of Scotland, succeeded Elizabeth I as the monarch of England as James I of England. The Anglo-Scottish dynastic union came into existence, but Scotland and England remained independent kingdoms with their own respective institutional infrastructures. The mother of James VI, Mary, Queen of Scots, had a strong dynastic claim to succeed to the English throne instead of Elizabeth I and she remained a perennial thorn in the side of the English body politic until her execution in England in 1587. Her stubborn adherence to her devout personal Catholicism, her legitimate right to succeed to the English throne in the eyes of many English Catholics and Catholic Spain, and her perceived involvement in international Catholic plots to assassinate Elizabeth ultimately ensured that her removal as a political and dynastic threat could only be implemented by her execution. What took place in 1603, therefore, was a Stewart succession in England, but this was a Protestant male succession as opposed to a Catholic female succession.

« When Golden Time Convents » Shakespeare’s Eastern Promise

At the British Museum’s Shah Abbas exhibition quotations from Twelfth Night reassured visitors Shakespeare was as familiar with ‘the Sophy’ as with Elizabeth. But critics of the show objected that an emphasis on ‘the food of love’ effaces Islamic violence, and by taking the quotations out of context curators also elided religious conflict in Elizabethan England. They ignored the way references to the Sherley brothers in Twelfth Night encode Catholic plots to exploit the Shah for Essex and King James. But a Tate Gallery Van Dyck exhibition showed Robert Sherley in his silk suit as ‘fencer to the Sophy’ and Persian ambassador to Rome; and it is this complexity that Shakespeare stages in his Epiphany play, with its hope for ‘golden time’ but suspense that like Robert’s ambiguous suit from Abbas, ‘What’s to come is still unsure’.

Location and Assessment of an Historic (150–160 Years Old) Mass Grave Using Geographic and Ground Penetrating Radar Investigation, NW Ireland*

Reburial of human remains and concerns regarding pathogens and pollution prompted the search for, and assessment of, a 156-year-old graveyard. To locate this graveyard, historic and anecdotal information was compared to landscape interpretation from aerial photography. To assess and map the contents, surface collapses, metal detector indications, and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) were used. Some 170 anomalies compatible with burials were identified on 200 MHz GPR data, 84 of which coincided with surface collapses, suggesting both noncollapsed ground, subsequent infill, and multiple inhumations. The graveyard was possibly split into Roman Catholic plots with multiple inhumations; Protestant plots; and a kileen, or graveyard for the unbaptized (often children). The work serves as one approach to the location and mapping of recent and historic unmarked graves.

An Irish Informer in Restoration England: David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679–81

An Irish Informer in Restoration England:David Fitzgerald and the "Irish Plot" in the Exclusion Crisis, 1679-81 John Gibney (bio) Personal histories from the early modern era are often obscure, and David Fitzgerald's is no exception. But for a brief period his life comes to light, attracting attention as one of a number of dubious Irishmen to allege before the English parliament in November 1680 that the Catholic Irish, organized and funded by the Catholic Church, intended to massacre Irish Protestants and assist a French invasion of Ireland, after which a combined Franco-Irish force was to attack England and embark upon a similar massacre of English Protestants. The supposed existence of a conspiracy for an Irish rebellion had been part of the allegations made in August 1678 by Titus Oates, a highly dubious figure whose essentially criminal career "included lying, cheating, blasphemy, and sodomizing young boys."1 Oates had been an Anglican preacher, a naval chaplain, and a convert to [End Page 249] Catholicism; he was expelled from two continental seminaries before returning to England to concoct his fabulous if terrifying story. Oates's allegations precipitated and underpinned the Popish Plot in England, the outburst of anti-Catholic fervor prompted by his revelations about a Catholic conspiracy to wipe out Protestantism in the Stuart kingdoms. The most obvious Irish dimension to these events would be the execution in London of Oliver Plunkett, the Catholic primate and archbishop of Armagh, in July 1681. Plunkett was convicted on spurious charges of attempting to facilitate a French invasion of Ireland, but even aside from this infamous case, allegations of Irish Catholic plots had been a recurring theme in the events that had unfolded.2 Over time the Popish Plot gave way to the so-called Exclusion Crisis, the intense political struggle that arose between 1679 and 1681 over the vexing question of who would succeed Charles II as king. In 1678 the heir to the throne was a Catholic: Charles's younger brother James, Duke of York, who had been tainted by Oates's allegations. In an atmosphere of intense anti-Catholicism, York's faith was inevitably contentious, and over the next two years a campaign to alter the succession would be conducted both inside and outside the English parliament. This eventually became a concerted effort specifically to exclude York from the succession, and one notable element in this campaign would be the promotion of ostensible Irish informers who could supposedly prove the existence of a plot involving an Irish Catholic rebellion. The reasoning behind this was straightforward: the Catholic Irish had rebelled before, and in 1641 it was believed that they had done so in an appallingly brutal and sectarian manner. Vastly exaggerated accounts of the torture and massacre of British Protestant settlers became the stock perceptions of the 1641 rebellion as it came to occupy a special place in the Protestant imaginations of both Britain and Ireland.3 If the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis rested upon the [End Page 250] assumption that a Catholic attack on Protestants in the Stuart kingdoms was imminent, these perceptions of 1641 as a wholesale sectarian massacre made it an obvious model for what this might entail. When in January 1679 an informer alleged that the French and the papacy had plans for an invasion of Ireland at the expense of the Protestant interest there, these claims carried a particular resonance, according to Gilbert Burnet, for "the memory of the Irish massacre was yet so fresh as [to] raise a particular horror at the very mention of this."4 What Burnet had in mind was 1641. The exclusion campaign ultimately rested upon fears of a Catholic monarch derived from a more general fear of an international Catholic threat across Europe, especially in the form of an expansionist Catholic France.5 This dovetailed with a rich vein of English anti-popery that drew upon the memory of critical events in Protestant history in order to illustrate the persistent danger that England faced from Catholicism.6 The Popish Plot could be (and was) incorporated into a pattern of Catholic threats and providential deliverance stretching from the reign of Mary Tudor in the 1550s, through...

The Date of Edwin Sandys's Paul's Cross Sermon '... at what time a maine treason was discouered'

MILLAR MACLURE's The Paul's Cross Sermons 1534–1642 uses a sermon preached by Edwin Sandys (1519?–88), Marian exile, Bishop of Worcester 1559–70, of London 1570–7, and Archbishop of York from 1577–88, to exemplify the development of ‘a scheme of adulation, a formula of praise’ among the preachers at Paul's Cross: Catholic plots against Elizabeth, culminating in the Ballard-Babington affair, finished the task of cementing affection between Queen and people. When Sandys preached at the Cross, probably in August 1586, “at what time the main treason was discovered,” his pious fear and heart-felt praise found an echo, no doubt, in the minds of most of his auditors.1

Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685-1821 (review)

Reviewed by: Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685-1821 Tricia T. Pyne, Director of Associated Archives Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685-1821. By Jason K. Duncan. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii, 253. Cloth, $70.00.) In Citizens or Papists? The Politics of Anti-Catholicism in New York, 1685–1821, the author sets out to address an important but largely overlooked period in U.S. history, when Catholics made the transition from being a despised and persecuted minority to an equal partner in the building of the new republic. By examining the political activities of Catholics from the colonial period through the eve of the Jacksonian era, he hopes to show how the efforts to advance and defend their political interests influenced the formation of the political party system in New York. The book's seven chapters are organized chronologically, and the author begins by providing readers with a brief history of Catholicism in New York during the colonial period. He brings attention to the work of French missionaries among the native peoples in what is now upstate New York; to the brief and tumultuous tenure of Thomas Dongan, the Catholic governor of the colony at the time of Leisler's Rebellion; and to the Slave Uprising of 1741 that resulted in the execution of John Ury, a man wrongfully accused and convicted of being a Catholic priest. The thread that connected all of these events was a pervasive anti-Catholicism that resulted in the enactment of penal laws intended to stamp out the nascent Catholic community and fueled countless rumors of Catholic plots and conspiracies. These deep-seated feelings predominated until the American Revolution, when, as Duncan shows, the contributions of [End Page 661] Catholics to the Patriot cause along with the critical French alliance relieved tensions between Catholics and other colonists. When the new country embraced the principle of religious toleration for its citizens, Catholics were at long last free to practice their religion without fear of persecution. This period in U.S. history is typically portrayed as an "Era of Good Feeling," when Catholics and Protestants learned to live together peaceably and be respectful of each other's religious traditions. While conditions were markedly improved, Duncan argues that historians have downplayed a palpable anti-Catholicism for the sake of upholding this perception. He shows how in New York a distinction was soon made in the minds of many between allowing Catholics to worship freely and granting them equal rights under the law. Nowhere is this distinction more apparent, he points out, than in the annals of the New York state legislature for 1787–1788, where debates over whether Catholics should be denied the franchise and prevented from holding public office can be found. Political factions soon stood on opposing sides of these issues, with the Anti-Federalists, led by Governor George Clinton, supporting the movement to deny Catholics these rights and the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, arguing that religious discrimination of any kind had no place their new society. A majority of Hamilton's colleagues felt differently and enacted legislation that prevented Catholics from holding public office through the use of a religious test. This act remained in place until 1806 when it was repealed largely through the efforts of DeWitt Clinton, an emerging leader in the Atlantic Republicans, an urban-based faction of the party that was courting the immigrant vote. What role did Catholics play, if any, in determining the rights they were to hold as citizens? Duncan admits that they remained on the periphery of New York politics until the end of the eighteenth century, when the Anti-Federalists declined in importance and were replaced by the Jeffersonian Republicans. An alliance between Catholics and Federalists was borne out of this struggle and further reinforced when both reacted strongly against the radicalization of the French Revolution and the excesses that followed. Duncan argues, however, that this alliance would prove to be short lived, as the social, political, and economic forces set in motion by the Revolution resulted in a period of unprecedented growth and change. These growing pains were...

Walpole's Tax On Catholics

General Cadogan, who had succeeded the Duke of Marlborough as commander-in-chief of the Army asked for an increase of 10,000 men in the armed forces, after the discovery of the Atterbury Plot in 1722. Robert Walpole knew that additional taxation for the standing army was unpopular in Parliament and in the country at large. He, therefore, decided to impose a tax of £100,000 on Catholics to pay for it. This was over and above the double land tax which Catholics and Protestant Nonjurors had paid since 1689. The land tax at the time stood at 4s in the pound. The Atterbury Plot was a Tory Anglican plot, not a Catholic plot, as Walpole well knew. Walpole suspected, probably rightly, that Catholics were generous in sending money to the Stuart Court in Rome. He could not prove it and neither can we for the receipts of money in the Stuart papers in Windsor Castle do not reveal the names of the donors.

Religious ideology and cultural fantasy: Catholic and anti-Catholic discourses in early modern England

In this new book, Arthur F. Marotti analyzes some of the rhetorical and imaginative means by which the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority defined themselves and their religious and political antagonists in early modern England. He considers Catholic writings that have been relatively neglected, as well as the discourse of anti-Catholicism. Straddling the boundary of history and literature, this study offers an intriguing cultural history that focuses on the ideologized fantasies and language found on both sides of the early modern Christian religious divide. Marotti focuses on the period between the arrival of the first Jesuit missionaries in England in 1580 and the climax of ongoing religious conflict in the Restoration-era Popish Plot and the 1688 Glorious Revolution. In a series of thematically focused essays, he covers such issues as the relationship of print culture to the residual Catholic culture in Elizabethan England; recusant women, Jesuits and the cultural othering of Catholics, martyrdom accounts, and the manuscript circulation of Catholic martyrdom accounts; polemically charged Catholic and Protestant narratives of conversion; and the depiction of Catholic plots or outrages and providential Protestant deliverances in the construction of Protestant English history and identity. This important and eagerly anticipated book makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in the early modern period. It also points to a cultural dynamic in Anglo-American history that persisted far into the modern era.

Au nom des valeurs républicaines et de la mémoire des leurs. Les militants de la laïcité face à l'affaire Finaly

As soon as the beginning of 1953, the Finaly affair gave rise to a burst of articles and satirical cartoons in the secularist and anticlerical press, among which the harshest were those of La Calotte and Le Canard enchaine. Their authors denounced the permanency of behaviors inherited from medieval anti-Judaism and the anti-Semitism of the XIXth century (the Mortara affair), a contradiction to their benefits of the French Revolution as concerns freedom of conscience and equality, an international catholic plot, the taking over of the still fresh Nazi persecutions. Far beyond the caustic exultation of insults and satirical cartoons, can be underlined here one of the misadventures of the multisecular fight between the spirit of the Age of Enlightment and that of Faith, totally impenetrable one by the other. Freemasonry described it as a sign of the decay of a republican government unable to make its decisions respected. In the press the stir died down as rapidly as it was aroused ; Franc-Tireur alone, which had refused to admit that the rescue of children could bestow some sort of power upon them, persisted in its concern about the Finaly children.

Rehearsing the Revolution: Radical Performance, Radical Politics in the English Restoration. By Odai Johnson. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000; pp. 184. $34.50 cloth.

This superb monograph examines how radical politics found expression in performance in the decade prior to the Glorious Revolution. The years from 1678 to 1688 saw the English monarchy rocked by successive crises, ranging from allegations of secret Catholic plots to murder the king (largely fabricated) to murmurings of dark dealings between Louis XIV and Charles II (largely true). The inability of Charles II to produce a legitimate heir also worried a Protestant citizenry who feared that the line of succession would devolve to James, the Catholic brother of Charles II. Arbitrary rule, strict censorship, excessive taxation, and an atmosphere of Stalinesque surveillance further inflamed the populace. As Johnson wryly notes, the problem with the Restoration was that it restored too much, especially the oppressive political attitudes that caused the Civil War in the first place. Amid this tumult, Johnson situates the patent theatres and street performance. He is certainly not the first scholar to do so, but he is, happily, the first in a long time to combine keen intelligence with common sense. That he tells this compelling story stylishly and with verve gives one all the more reason to read this first-rate study.