Late Stuart England Research Articles

The Sport of Kingmakers: Horse Racing in Late Stuart England

This essay sketches the general outlines of an argument that locates the rise of horse racing as a national sport in England in the context of national political change. In brief, the argument might be summarized as saying that horse racing was as much the sport of kingmakers as of kings, a recreation of martyrs as well as monarchs; and that some of its early participants were associated with breeding rebellion, as well as racehorses. The earliest public mention of a ‘Jockey Club’ appears to be a newspaper notice in the summer of 1729, and I have argued elsewhere that this club can be seen acting as a quasi-official body as early as 1717, though not necessarily under that name. Here, I want to extend that argument further in suggesting that the Club whose meeting was publicly announced in 1729 coalesced over the course of the preceding half-century. The argument I sketch here identifies how a very specific emergence of a particular organization of the sport served a very specific ideological purpose during a time of considerable tension over the relationship of church and state. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics, and the anxieties about succession and rebellion that these conflicts engendered, were more than just the backdrop to the rise of the sport; and the particular sport that emerged helped celebrate and popularize a Protestant succession settlement that ultimately excluded dozens of Stuart claimants to the throne in favor of the house of Hanover.

Locke and the Churchill Catalogue Revisited


 
 
 At the time of his death, in 1704, the library of John Locke held 269 volumes of philosophy—but 275 volumes of geography and travel. Works of geography drew on discoveries related in books of travel, but Locke did nevertheless see them as distinct genres. In both, his holdings were extensive. He owned several volumes of maps; the great recent surveys of Africa, America, and Japan printed by John Ogilby; and the descriptions of the world by Abbot, Purchas, Morden, and Moll. It was in books of travel, though, of which Locke owned 195, where his holdings were most remarkable. He owned the massive collections of Ramusio (in Italian), de Bry (in Latin), Thévenot (in French), and Hakluyt and Purchas (in English). He owned accounts of the well-known voy- ages of Hariot to Virginia, de Léry to Brazil, Sandys to the Ottoman Empire, Gage to the West Indies, and Choisy to Siam. He owned as well accounts of dozens of more minor voyages, such as those of Blount to the Levant, Monconys to Syria, Ray to the Continent, Josselyn to New England, and Fryke to the East Indies. No student of Locke’s library has failed to remark upon what Harrison and Laslett, its modern editors, have called its ‘great strength’ in these areas. This is to understate the matter, for it seems that among libraries of its size in late Stuart England, only the library of Robert Hooke (and perhaps that of Robert Boyle) rivalled Locke’s in works of geography and travel.
 
 

The Reformation of the Future: Dating English Protestantism in the Late Stuart Era

In late Stuart England, print genres such as histories and almanacs were happy to put a precise date on the Reformation, but 1517 was not widely memorialised. This was partly because the complex history of English Protestantism meant that different dates for its founding could be canvassed (the arrival of Luther's ideas in the 1520s, Henry VIII's 1532 break with Rome, the reforms of Edward VI's reign (1547-1553) and Elizabeth's ecclesiastical settlement (1558-1599); and because this ambiguous past was used as a weapon in contemporary religious battles. While Anglicans tended to point to the settlements under Henry and Elizabeth as their ideal moment in the past, Dissenters and the more radical wing of the church celebrated the reforms of Edward’s rule and efforts by the Elizabethan puritan movement to perfect worship in England from the 1560s. These disputes first prevented a dating consensus emerging, and then convinced those trying to unite English Protestantism that it was counter-productive to be too precise about Tudor history. Particularly after the 1689 Revolution, commentators tried to resolve the issue by placing the Reformation in the future. The idea that reform still had to be completed provided an unfinished objective to unite different strands of opinion. This enshrined the notion of a long Reformation, that was a process – not an event; and helps explain the great spiritual energy of late Stuart Protestantism.

The Biopolitics of Manning the Royal Navy in Late Stuart England

AbstractThis article examines the Royal Navy's implementation between 1690 and 1710 of new and publicly controversial policies, grounded in quantitative technologies, to manage the multitude of English seamen. These policies and their promotion can be profitably interpreted using the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. Naval biopolitics meant mobilizing and promoting political arithmetic in the service of the fiscal-naval state. Thus, naval biopolitics was both a new model of statecraft and a form of state publicity, that is, a genre of works that strove to influence government policy and public opinion by promoting projects that a polemicist argued the state could and should undertake to better govern its subjects. The directives, legislation, and pamphlet literature of naval biopolitics projected a fiscal-naval state capable of counting, tracking, and mobilizing the national stock of seamen onto its ships in a predictable, salubrious, and, most crucially, orderly fashion. However, English naval biopolitics endured much longer as a genre of state propaganda than as a method of mobilizing the population of seamen onto ships.

Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul by Laura Linker

<i>Lucretian Thought in Late Stuart England: Debates about the Nature of the Soul</i> by Laura Linker

Aphra Behn, Captivity, and Emperor of the Moon

Aphra Behn, Captivity, and Emperor of the Moon Catherine Ingrassia Click for larger view View full resolution The London Gazette, No. 1338, September 12-16, 1678 The September 12, 1678 issue of The London Gazette features an advertisement for an enslaved youth who has run away from his master after "the first instant." Detailing the twelve-year old male's distinguishing characteristics, the notice captures the markings of the domestic and the global as displayed on the young boy's body. He wears a "gray cloth Livery," "the Lace mixed with black, white, and orange colors." It was fashionable among London elite to have enslaved Africans as servants, and "young black males of the period" were particularly "prized for their youth." The twelve-year old's livery likely marks his labor as a footman or personal attendant. The livery's condition, "somewhat torn," might [End Page 53] suggest its intense use or a moment of violence upon the clothing or the youth himself. The uniformity of the livery sits perhaps uneasily with the child's more exotic details like the "Silver Ring in one of his ears." His hair "newly clipped very close" could indicate that, in accordance with the style of the time, a wig is part of his required attire; or, perhaps, as contemporaneous paintings suggest, the closely cut hair was the preferred style for enslaved young boys. His polylingual skills, for he "speaks some English, Dutch, and Blacks," echo the languages circulating in the Surinam of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688). While distinguishing the two languages of the dominant colonial powers, English and Dutch, the description erases the complexity of multiple African languages, conflating them simply as "Blacks." The youth's very name, "Africa," summons a place at once partner in and subject to English imperial power. The reward for the youth's recovery can be made at James Street in Covent Garden, just blocks from where Behn's Sir Patient Fancy had debuted at the Dorset Theatre a few months before. For a seventeenth-century reader, this listing would have been unremarkable. Such advertisements, widely found in London newspapers, reveal that attempts at escape by the enslaved (or, in fact, English subjects apprenticed, indentured, or pressed into military service) frequently occurred within London's urban space, which offered the opportunity for concealment, disguise, and reinvention. It also suggests that enslavement, like other forms of captivity, had been somewhat normalized; Behn did not have to go to Surinam to encounter enslaved Africans. "People of African descent were part of the rural and urban landscape of late Stuart England," writes Susan Amussen. "[T]hey were highly visible in London, Bristol, and other ports and present in smaller numbers through the rest of the country." For the twenty-first century reader, however, such a notice signals something more complicated about the culture in which Aphra Behn lived: a culture regularly marked by the intersection of the imperial and the domestic, the foreign and the familiar. Scholars have long relied on Oroonoko (1688) to understand Behn's response to colonial practices in the West Indies, the dominant site of England's imperial presence throughout the Restoration. Behn spent time in the then-English colony of Surinam between summer 1663 and February 1664, providing her with the material for that well-known prose fiction. Behn's formative experience in Surinam, however, shaped a much wider constellation of her texts than Oroonoko. Among these we might include Emperor of the Moon, which similarly represents English practices of colonialism, human commodification, and captivity. Situated within a culture brimming with domestic manifestations of colonial power, Emperor of the Moon reveals the degree to which Behn's experience as what she termed an "American" informed her understanding of fundamentally asymmetrical relationships between imperial power and the colonial subject. Emperor of the Moon suggests the degree to which Behn perceived those same power dynamics structuring English culture as well. Behn lived in a world shaped by daily evidence of the financial and imaginative investment in England's increasing dominance in the British Atlantic. Behn witnessed English imperial expansion that accelerated dramatically with increasing control over the trade of enslaved people in the British Atlantic and the...

Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter: Theatrical Heroics in a Strange New World

Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (written 1687 or 1688) reacts to the crisis surrounding James II and the demise of the Stuart dynasty which Behn had supported during her entire writing career. In her last play, however, Behn develops a political vision that appears to depart from her earlier royalism, and to this purpose makes special, genre-bending use of the conventions of the heroic play that had been en vogue during the early years of the Restoration. The Widow Ranter is an unusual tragicomedy that accords both its comic and its tragic plot a heroic inflection. It is therefore proposed that a reading of The Widow Ranter through the lens of heroism, and more specifically through the conventions of heroic drama, can shed a fresh light on the vision of political authority that Behn projected at the end of her play, her career and the Stuart era. That her inspection of political authority is set in the colony of Virginia enables Behn to adopt a distancing perspective on the turmoils of late-Stuart England, and also establishes a strong generic link with the heroic drama and its preference for exotic settings.

Matthew Neufeld. The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 17. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 284. $99.00 (cloth).

Matthew Neufeld. The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History 17. Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 284. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 54 Issue 3

The civil wars after 1660. Public remembering in late Stuart England. By Matthew Neufeld. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 17.) Pp. xiv + 286 incl. 5 figs. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013. £60. 978 1 84383 815 9; 1476 9107

The civil wars after 1660. Public remembering in late Stuart England. By Matthew Neufeld. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 17.) Pp. xiv + 286 incl. 5 figs. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013. £60. 978 1 84383 815 9; 1476 9107

The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. By MatthewNeufeld. Boydell. 2013. xiv + 284pp. £60.00.

The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England. By MatthewNeufeld. Boydell. 2013. xiv + 284pp. £60.00.

The State, the People and the Care of Sick and Injured Sailors in Late Stuart England

The State, the People and the Care of Sick and Injured Sailors in Late Stuart England

Book Review: The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England by Matthew Neufeld

Book Review: <i>The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England</i> by Matthew Neufeld

Matthew Neufeld. The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England.

Matthew Neufeld. The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England.

The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England, by Matthew Neufeld

The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England, by Matthew Neufeld

The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England, by Matthew Neufeld

The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England, by Matthew Neufeld. Woodbridge and Rochester, The Boydell Press, 2013. xiv, 284 pp. $99.00 US (cloth). This is an enterprising addition to a burgeoning field. There has been, at least since the 1970s, an ever-growing study in how the English civil wars were remembered and debated in the half century after they ended (with the Restoration of the monarchy in May 1660) and indeed in the Victorian age, both representing prisms through which we still read this central episode in English and British History. Most attention has been focused on the publication, often in severely and revealingly bowdlerised forms, of the memoirs and diaries of both principal and peripheral actors, and several books have been devoted to the way the central figure of Oliver Cromwell was memorialized--more demonized than sanctified in the late seventeenth century, the reverse from the 1840s on. Neufeld engages with these literatures and has new things to say about the canonical texts. His discussion of the prefaces written by Henry Hyde, earl of Rochester, to the first edition of his father's History of the Great Rebellion is a case in point. But he is even more interesting in his close encounter with much less familiar material such as the hundreds of petitions written by war veterans seeking disability pensions in the Restoration, or the sermons preached annually on 29 May--the day on which Charles II entered London to reclaim his throne in 1660 (and also, as it happens) his birthday--not only in Charles II's reign but right down to the Hanoverian succession in 1714. What would have been an equally innovative chapter on how the Anglican clergyman John Walker sent out questionnaires to every parish so as to chronicle and gloss the sufferings of the clergy for Church and King in the 1660s and which he finally published in 1714 has been somewhat overtaken by the publication of a monograph on the subject (Fiona McCall, Baal's Priests, Famham, 2013), although Neufeld is still well worth reading on the subject. His central thesis is that public remembering of the civil wars and interregnum after 1660 was concerned with re-fighting the old struggle, but rather commending and justifying, or contesting and attacking, the Restoration settlements that underlay the Anglican confessional state (emphasis mine, p. 2). The phrase not ultimately is a bit careless here and Neufeld needed to tread more carefully. I do doubt that he is on to something important and well worth saying, and indeed perhaps the most compelling parts of his analysis come in the chapters covering the period after 1689--for example the chapter devoted to a wholly new analysis of 29 May day sermons shows no decline in the incidence or polemical clout of those sermons right down to the Hanoverian succession. …

Reconsidering the British Revolutions of 1688

Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution, by Scott Sowerby. Harvard Historical Studies, No. 181. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2013. x, 404 pp. $49.95 US (cloth). The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts, edited by Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, No. 16. Woodbridge, UK, Boydell Press, 2013. x, 315 pp. $115.00 US (cloth). These are two important books that focus on what for many years was the less studied political upheaval of Britain's seventeenth century: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-89. Scott Sowerby's is a monograph derived from his Harvard doctoral thesis. Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor, both products of Cambridge, edited the collection of essays that promises to provide new insights on the final crisis of the last wholly British ruling dynasty. The monograph is about causes, the collection is concerned with contexts. The former takes a decidedly English perspective, while the latter deliberately attempts to enhance our understanding of 1688-89 by looking beyond England for explanations and consequences. The editors of the collection suggest that recent years have seen explosion of interest in the 1688 Revolution; this is probably an oblique reference to Harris's 2006 monograph (Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720, London) and Steven Pincus's 2008 veritable doorstopper, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven). Pincus's provocative argument, that 1688 was a revolution of essentially secular-minded commercial interests seeking to topple a monarch, James II, who aimed to modernize the English state in the =absolutist mode of Louis XIV, is countered directly by Sowerby several times. But Sowerby's agenda is far more ambitious than simply overturning Pincus's thesis. Making Toleration is an attempt at historical excavation and revisionism that wants us to rethink what we know about late Stuart England's political culture (p. 34). Sowerby claims to have uncovered evidence in over 130 archives and libraries of a political movement that was the key casual factor generating the revolution of 1688: the repealers. The repealer movement's chief sponsor was none other than James II. The movement's aim was to reshape the English polity by enacting liberty of conscience for all Christians. In order to achieve this ambition, Parliament would need to repeal the statutes penalizing religious dissenters, both Protestant and Catholic, as well as the laws that barred nonconformists from civil and military offices. The activities of the repealers generated political opposition, which morphed into a counter-movement; the Glorious Revolution was largely the result of the tussle between these two movements from the spring to the autumn of 1688. The revisionist component of Sowerby's book involves portraying the king as an aggressive but not authoritarian (let alone tyrannical) reformer. For example, the imprisonment of seven bishops who refused to read the king's second Declaration of Indulgence was not undertaken, Sowerby argues, to cow the clergy into accepting toleration, but instead resulted from the king's impatience: he wanted the trial of the bishops over before Parliament met. The book puts religious concerns at the heart of the 1688 Revolution. Repealers and anti-repealers had different visions of what sort of Christian polity England was to be. Moreover, confessionally-based fears, especially popular anti-popery, were crucial for mobilizing support for the overthrow of James II in England and carrying on the war against France in the 1690s. Toleration was granted in 1689 because, Sowerby contends, the Convention Parliament wanted to keep radicals loyal to the revolutionary Williamite regime during the war, not as a reward to moderate nonconformists for recently refusing the embrace of the departed Catholic sovereign. …

Sovereign Historicism: The Case of Shakespeare's Anti-Politics

In recent months I have been participating in a graduate course called ‘‘Renaissance Literature and Politics after the New Historicism.’’ Our primary object of inquiry has been the scholarship itself, specifically works of literaryhistorical criticism engaged with not only the literature and political culture of late Elizabethan and early Stuart England, but often equally preoccupied with the history of critical or methodological approaches to those fields. Beginning with Nietzsche’s theories of history and Frank Lentricchia’s extensive overview of twentieth century criticism up to poststructuralism in After the New Criticism, we moved on to programmatic and foundational New Historicist documents written by Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Adrian Montrose before reaching the portion of the syllabus properly ‘‘after’’ the New Historicism. Perhaps unintuitively, it is the preposition that has proved to be the operative term in the course title. What does it mean, we were asked to consider, to go ‘‘after’’ a movement—if we can call it that—so influential in literary studies, and particularly the early modern discipline? Of course the answer to that question is determined in part by the extent to which we assume that ‘‘after’’ implies the closure of the thing it follows. A conception of post-New Historicism which supposes the methodology to be closed would need to concern itself with imagining, or more likely enacting, an approach that would replace it wholesale. But that is the least flexible kind of ‘‘afterness.’’

Could the Crown Credibly Commit to Respecting its Charters? England, 1558-1640

This chapter offers a twofold shift in the application of the ‘credible commitment’ concept laid down by North and Weingast in their classic 1989 article. It examines the concept in the context of charter-granting, rather than in that of the national debt and the government bond market, and applies the concept to the pre-Civil War period, rather than the post-Glorious Revolution period. The chapter focuses on charters for the incorporation of business corporations. At a basic level the puzzle is: if the state could not credibly commit to enforce or not to annual charters why were incorporators willing to pay for the charters and accompanying privileges? The chapter examines multiple mechanisms that could have succeeded in solving the commitment problem: reputation, type of charter activity and its organizational form, the law and judiciary, the extent of parliamentary or common law restraint on the sovereign and interest groups organizing to discourage default. Four case studies demonstrate how each of these mechanisms functioned. This chapter shows the usefulness of the ‘credible commitment’ framework. A nascent rule of law, unavailable elsewhere in Europe, explains the widespread use of charters and corporations in late Tudor and early Stuart England.

Daily News and the Construction of Time in Late Stuart England, 1695–1714

AbstractRecent scholarship has suggested that frequent receipt of news, especially in new media such as newspapers, altered conceptions of time in the early modern period. In particular, a new and modern “present” was born. This occupied a half-known and semifluid point between the fixity of the past and the unpredictability of the future. It created an imagined contemporaneous moment that linked geographically dispersed events. It was progressive, appearing to move the world ever forward into a novel state. However, close examination of English newspapers in the period 1695–1713, the first era of sustained news periodicals, calls these suggestions into question. Certainly the press of this era provided a constant and corrective update of information from all over Europe. This might have encouraged a sense of a fluid, contemporaneous, and progressive present. However, newspapers also tended to catalog information like a chronicle, which had the potential to fix contents as established history rather than fluid news. Delays in communication from distant places and journalistic practices of holding back stories for later publication ensured that information of different ages was presented on the same page. This destroyed any clear sense of a contemporaneous moment. The requirement to print the next issue even when there was no new information drew explicit attention to the lack of progressive development in some stories. This article posits a highly fractured presentation of time in later Stuart newspapers. It suggests that this is perhaps best analyzed by concepts drawn from “postmodern” theory rather than a hunt for emerging features of “modernity.”

Tom Wharton and the Whig Junto: Party Leadership in Late Stuart England*

This previously unpublished lecture by Geoffrey Holmes looks at the parliamentary career of Thomas, 6th Baron Wharton, 1st earl and 1st marquess of Wharton, a leading member of the whig junto in the reigns of William III and Queen Anne. It examines his ‘unsavoury’ character and how his reputation as a libertine and swordsman may have helped his role as a party leader. It also examines his historical reputation, partly through the works of Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele and Lord Macauly and attempts to restore his position as a much‐maligned major figure in Augustan parliamentary and electoral politics.