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If the history of political thought is, as John Pocock argues, a ‘history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on’, Restoration and eighteenth-century poetry has a very good claim to be read as a part of that history. This is not simply to state the obvious point that the poetry of this period was intensely engaged with politics, nor even to settle for the claim that political ideas were given complex imaginative embodiment in the medium of poetry. It is, rather, to assign a role to poetry in the generation and elaboration of political concepts as part of a sustained conversation with political thought conducted in other forms of writing, such as treatises, dialogues, parliamentary speeches and pamphlets. I would like to argue that this inter-generic conversation constitutes the broader frame of discourse within which eighteenth-century political thought developed, and that it becomes more fully intelligible if one attends to the contribution of poetry. Historians of political thought are fully accustomed to approaching Milton in this way, but subsequent (and often earlier) poets are more usually analysed in terms of political allusion – a second-order kind of political thought – or of their instigation or unconscious reflection of dominant ideologies. The argument here is that early-modern literature was one domain within which political ideas – as they related to party politics, but still more to abstract, overarching questions – were meaningfully contested and transformed; and that poetry, in particular, provides something more than an enlargement of the evidence for the historical ‘terms of the discourse’ of political thought, and yet, also, something more decisive in its impact than a dramatization of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here is the problem: the texts studied by historians of political thought are almost invariably systematic and discursive; they are rarely poems or plays or novels, and who could blame historians for such a choice. The careful unfolding of political thought is rarely the business of playwrights, poets or novelists, and who could blame them for failures of analytic rigour or argumentative transparency as they make their specialized, interested, often polemical, at times uncertain, ironic, and rarely even-handed interventions into political systems – that is of course not their job. There seems then a gap difficult to bridge between interests and texts – on the one side, historians who are anxious to get on with their business and go to places where they can work efficiently and without the distractions of figuration, uncertainty or irony; and on the other, students of literature who feel an obligation to explicate the political ideas that so often erupt in their texts with a sense of their genealogy, force and currency, their status and character in the masterpieces of political thought, but for whom those masterpieces are rarely objects of devotion. The recognition of this gap is no great insight into disciplinary divides, but our own moment of heightened interdisciplinarity and an awareness of the early-modern implication of politics in aesthetics suggest the importance of probing such divides and of considering the ways in which reading literature enhances our understanding of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I think the North of England has produced the best Governours for this Island A Fraternal Trio The extraordinary success achieved by Daniel Lascelles' sons in West India commerce owed as much to his family's own mercantile connections as it did to assistance from their new kinsmen. While the Stoke Newington Lascelles provided their Northallerton counterparts with useful connections, comparatively few cooperative ventures were pursued by the two families. Within only a few years, Daniel's sons were following a different business trajectory to that of their predecessors and reaping rewards on a scale few other merchants of the age could rival. Daniel Lascelles was son and heir of the Northallerton MP and dissenter Francis Lascelles Sr of Stank Hall. During the English Civil War, Francis served as Colonel in the Parliamentary army; he also numbered among the commissioners who tried Charles I for high treason. Significantly, the Northallerton Lascelles can be linked with the Thomson-Vassall circle of provincial, nonconformist merchants involved in colonial projects. In 1651, Lucy Lascelles (one of Francis' daughters) married the Virginia merchant Cuthbert Witham, son of William Witham of Garforth in Yorkshire. The Withams were staunch Presbyterians, while George Witham (another of William's sons) was a business associate of both Maurice Thomson and Samuel Vassall. Moreover, Francis Lascelles' eldest son and namesake was a nonconformist London merchant, also connected in trade with the Withams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[I]t is to bee enquired, whether instead of an inclination … towards a Commonwealth there is not in England a generall dislike to it; If this is so … it will bee in vaine to dispute by Reason whilst Humor is against it…. This maketh all the Republican Schemes, whether borrowed from the Ancient, or invented by the Moderne Doctors in Politiques, to bee no more than dreams … besides [which] … there are … some materials absolutely necessary for the carrying on such a fabrique, which are at present wanting amongst us; I mean Vertue, Morality, diligence, Religion … [so] that a Commonwealth is not fit for us, because Wee are not fit for a Commonwealth. THE QUESTION OF PARLIAMENTS, 1681–1683 By 1681, opponents of court policies perceived as popish, arbitrary and French faced even more severe problems than the ‘late Prorogations and Dissolutions … strik[ing] at the very Root and being of Parliaments’. As Neville had predicted, a peaceful settlement of the crisis would prove elusive. One watershed was the dissolution of what turned out to be Charles II's last parliament in April 1681. Prorogations were one thing; government in the entire absence of parliaments was another. This was the more so given the onset of a renewed and amplified religious persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ involved a period and process of testing new arrangements. As far as Parliament was concerned, this entailed consultation and review, with the monarchy retaining the initiative over foreign policy. Parliament could debate and fund proposals, but it did not make policy. Furthermore, parliamentary debates and complaints were predicated on the expectation that the executive would use its power to remedy failures. The somewhat uncertain use of royal authority under William III gave way to a more ‘managed’ approach under Anne and George I. Conventions by which Parliament could participate in policy formation developed. This was not so much a product of Parliament, or, more particularly, politicians able to manage it, seizing the initiative, as in conventional Whig interpretations of British political development, but rather a new stage in the longstanding relationship between Crown and Parliament. This relationship should not be in adversarial terms. Co-operation and even harmony were traditional goals. Furthermore, the challenge to this co-operation was seen to stem as much from Parliament as from the Crown. Carteret, now Earl Granville and Lord President of the Council, presented an account of ‘the people’ as an active player, capable of scrutinising both Crown and Parliament, and of the constitution as mutable, when he addressed the Lords in 1752 during a debate about entering into subsidy treaties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

that firmness, beauty, and magnificence of our excellent Constitution, founded on the mutual consent of Prince and People; both moving, as it were, in one orb, reciprocally influencing, attracting, and directing each other; whose united power may be compared to a machine for the determining the equality of weights; the Sovereign, and the representative Body, counterpoising each other, and the Peers preserving the equilibrium. This summary of the classic thesis of the British constitution appeared in 1791 as part of an ‘Address to the Public’ at the beginning of the first volume of the Senator, a new periodical devoted to reporting parliamentary debates, and the appearance of which indicated continued strong public interest in such reports. The image was appropriate, for the existence and nature of parliamentary government was regarded as both expressing and securing the fundamental character of the British constitution. The use of mechanistic language was also appropriate. It reflected the spirit of part of the political culture of the period and, in particular, an optimistic assessment of the possibility of establishing a political order that was consistent, predictable and stable, proof against the fallibility of human ambitions and schemes. The reality of parliamentary government was somewhat different, not least because of the tension expressed in the Senator's simile, a tension that led John Dunning, MP for Calne and, then, a supporter of Shelburne in opposition, to tell the Commons in 1771 that ‘our whole constitution is a political kind of chaos, and depends upon the preservation of opposing elements: the king has his prerogative, the peers their jurisdiction, and we our privileges’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliament played relatively little role in the initial calculations of George III (r. 1760–1820). He wanted peace and ministerial change, and assumed that a new government would be able to manage Parliament. Given the subsequent political instability of the 1760s, this assumption might appear ridiculous, but, in fact, the crucial business of the early years of the decade, most obviously support for peace, was carried through Parliament with few problems. The displacement of Hanover to the margins of British political contention was another change ushered in by the new king. This was not due to any triumph by extra-parliamentary forces, nor, solely, to the impact of, by now widely held, Patriot attitudes. Instead, the change reflected a marked shift in the dynastic dynamic, away from the Anglo-Hanoverian monarchy of Georges I and II, and towards a more clearly British conception on the part of the new king. This helped George III and his ministers to overcome the leading parliamentary challenge to his foreign policy in his first two decades as king, that over ending the Seven Years' War. Despite the earlier hopes of George II, the controversial return of conquests from France and Spain in the peace of 1763 were not accompanied by gains for the Electorate of Hanover. This helped lessen opposition to the peace. Government unity had already been lost in 1761–2 with the crises that led to the resignations of first William Pitt the Elder and then Thomas, Duke of Newcastle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parliament's role in foreign policy became more prominent as a result of the Glorious Revolution in 1688–9, the political and constitutional changes that accompanied the invasion of England in 1688 and the replacement of James II (r. 1685–8; James VII of Scotland) by his nephew and son-in-law William of Orange, William III (r. 1689–1702). However, a parliamentary monarchy could not simply be legislated into existence. It required the development of conventions and patterns of political behaviour that would permit a constructive resolution of contrary opinions within a system where there was no single source of dominant power. The slowness of the development of these patterns was particularly serious, as Britain was at war from 1689 until 1697 and again from 1702 until 1713, and as Jacobitism, the cause of the exiled male line of the Stuarts, was a significant force. The Revolution Settlement (the term for the set of constitutional and political arrangements that followed the Glorious Revolution) created the constitutional basis for an effective parliamentary monarchy, with parliamentary control over the finances of the state: the aim of many of the critics of Charles II (r. 1660–85). However, the instability of the ministries of the 1690s, 1700s and 1710s suggests that the political environment within which such a monarchy could be effective had not been created. Looked at differently, the process of ministerial change was peaceful, and the instability of ministries reflected not simply ‘structural’ constitutional problems, but also the serious nature of the issues in dispute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Isle within itself hath almost none but imaginary bounds of separation, without but one common limit or rather guard of the Ocean sea, making the whole a little world within itself, the nations an uniformity of constitutions both of body and mind, especially in martial processes, a community of language (the principal means of civil society), an unity of religion (the deepest bond of hearty union and the surest knot of lasting peace). Countries are not laid up in heaven; they are shaped and reshaped here on earth by the strategems of men and the victories of the fortuitous. But once they take root and are bolstered by the habits and mechanics of unity and by a common mythology, they soon acquire an image, if not of immemoriality, at least of almost inevitable and organic development. One nation divided The seventeenth century has always seemed an unpromising time to look for expressions of English nationalism, which is probably why we do not hear of many claims to find it there. Its principal characteristic, in England as elsewhere, is conflict and division. It is the period of the Thirty Years War, of rebellions and revolutions in practically every major European country. ‘These days are days of shaking’, declared an English preacher in 1643, ‘and this shaking is universal: the Palatinate, Bohemia, Germania, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England’ (in Trevor-Roper 1965: 59). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The histories of reading and the book have largely been written in two, very different, ways. Early research concentrated on the long durée of publications and reading habits – on the shift in the quantities, materials and genres of books over several centuries, and on the move from the intensive study of a few titles to the extensive reading of a myriad of print. Changes in habits of reading, that is, have been viewed as changes in the types and availability of books: we write of reading revolutions effected by print, the penny pamphlet or the novel. Alternatively, specialized case studies have focused on the reading habits of particular individuals who brought to the often familiar books of their culture a radical new hermeneutics which was sometimes personal, as with Menocchio the Friulian miller of Carlo Ginzburg's study, and sometimes, as with Jean Ranson, the mark of shifting cultural sensibilities, in this case what we characterize as Romanticism. What neither approach offers is an understanding of how books with a continuous history were read, interpreted and deployed in different communities and in a variety of very different and changing circumstances over long historical periods. What, in other words, did it mean to read the same texts – the classics, Scripture, legal treatise or fable – through the upheavals of Reformation, Civil War, Hanoverian Succession, Scientific Revolution and Romantic movement? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Music in the Catholic liturgy Musicologists, in some future attempt to reconstruct the history not only of musical style and composition but also of what the listener actually heard, would not be unjustified in asking, paradoxically indeed, whether the composer of greatest significance for seventeenth-century liturgical music were not, in reality, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (d. 1594). There are no easy answers to this question. The editorial appeal of Palestrina endures, roughly speaking, to the second decade of the new century; latest of all to be reprinted are his hymns (1625, again in 1644 after the textual reforms of Pope Urban VIII – see chapter 12), most frequently published are his settings from the Song of Songs (the most highly impassioned and least severe of all his motet compositions, possibly destined for a function that was more devotional than strictly liturgical) with six editions between 1601 and 1613. But the various sixteenth-century editions of his masses were already well represented in cappelle musicali up and down the Italian peninsula, where they continued to represent a permanent corpus of performable music (surviving copies, indeed, bear every sign of wear and tear). The seventeenth century also gives rise to the myth of Palestrina princeps musicae, ‘restorer and benefactor of music’, as also to the legend which tells how his Missa Papae Marcelli (first published in 1567) was responsible, at the eleventh hour, for convincing delegates to the Council of Trent to desist from the proposal that polyphonic music be banned from liturgical use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE ANCIENT CONSTITUTION'S ROLE IN CONTROVERSY TO THE SETTLEMENT of 1689 IN the remainder of this retrospect I shall review the closing chapters of the book, in particular those which deal with the controversy of the 1680's and proceed to consider the role of historic constitutionalism in the period from 1690 to 1790 (and after). A great deal of research and publication has gone on since 1957, and is still going on; it is not too much to say that our understanding of John Locke, of the Revolution of 1688–9, and of the main lines of English and Scottish political argument in the eighteenth century, has been transformed and is still fluid. The last chapter of my 1957 text, ‘Conclusion: 1688 in the history of historiography’, is now less a conclusion than a curiosity, and in re-issuing the book an attempt must be made to bring it up to date. This in turn cannot be done without some review of the penultimate chapter, which deals with ‘the Brady controversy’, ‘the Filmerian controversy’, or ‘the Exclusionist controversy’—terms which are never quite interchangeable—and with the still-vexed question of the relation between John Locke's role as an actor in these controversies and his role as a publicist and author after 1689. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Duke of Richmond, a prominent Rockingham Whig, observed in 1772 that the Dissenters' ‘religious principles and our political ones are so very similar, and most probably will make us generally act together’. The Dissenting pulpit will take us to the very heart of ‘true Whig’ ideology, it will demonstrate the convergence of religious and political principles, and it will illumine the way in which ideas contributed to consistent political action. The Established Church with the king at its head and its bishops in the house of Lords was still a major pillar of the state in the eighteenth century, and just as certainly as the political allegiance of the majority of the clergy was predictable, the religious independence of Nonconformity was readily transferred into politics. There was nothing uniquely ‘Nonconformist’ about English pro-Americanism, but the Dissenters' tradition, their religious identity, and their legal status contributed to a far more consistent radicalism than that found among Anglicans. Bereft of the monetary support of the state and excluded from the advantages of the parish system, the Dissenting minister proclaimed ‘the Word of God’ from an elevated platform, and the act of preaching itself symbolized at once the minister's independence from the Establishment and his belief in the political importance of the proclaimed Word of God. Dissenting ministers during the American Revolution became outspoken advocates of religious and political independence and the Dissenting pulpit thereby provides us with one of the clearest expressions of political radicalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study relates to literature in the four main areas of ecclesiastical, intellectual, political and social history. The classic works on the Church of England in the eighteenth century remain those of Norman Sykes which, rightly, did much to rehabilitate the Hanoverian church after the criticisms of earlier writers such as C. J. Abbey and J. H. Overton. But Sykes's sympathy with the latitudinarian and Erastian strains in the church led him to concentrate, intellectually, upon men like Hoadley and Watson, and on Warburton's theory of the alliance of church and state. Like many ecclesiastical historians, his interests were more constitutional, ecclesiological and pastoral than metaphysical and theoretical. This is true even of a man of the breadth of vision and understanding of G. F. A. Best, who has provided the definitive account of church-state relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and much else along the way. Sykes paid only limited attention to the last decade of the century; unfortunately, the best study of the Church of England in the 1790s, by Nancy Murray, remains unpublished. Murray also neglects theoretical arguments, but analyses the various parties in the church and the ideological and theological differences between them. She examines the high-church Hackney Phalanx, the orthodox bishops, the liberal Latitudinarians, and the Evangelicals. All these groups in the Church of England have had their historians, but the Evangelical movement has grabbed the lion's share of attention. A host of monographs, theses and articles examines the evangelical phenomenon from almost every angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christianity has acted as a prop of the state since the conversion of the Emperor Constantine. The connexion of religion and political theory has a long history. A sacerdotal concept of the anointed monarch survived the Protestant Reformation in England, and the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century had an important religious element. The restoration of Charles II was celebrated with Anglican sermons which spoke unequivocally of divine hereditary right, passive obedience and non-resistance. James II's adherence to the Catholic faith posed a cruel dilemma to the Church of England, and desperate steps were taken to clothe the ensuing settlement in the language of Holy Writ by Whig and Tory alike. The dispute between Benjamin Hoadley and Francis Atterbury, and the trial of Dr Sacheverell established both the crucial differences between Whig and Tory views, and the common arena within which their positions stood. Between 1679 and 1719, abstract and normative principles relating to political authority and obligation and the possibility of revolution, which are fundamental to any scheme of political values, were related to a specific set of constitutional arrangements. Like those arrangements, the principles on which they were based had a long life, but neither were immutable. In the period from 1760 to 1789 religion continued to be used to support and defend the constitutional principles upon which British government was founded, but noticeably more so by clerics than by laymen. The records of parliament from 1760 to 1789 show that religion was rarely invoked in purely secular debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ireland and Scotland are two of the four countries that make up the British Isles. They represent over time interesting parallels and contrasts. They also both experienced over time a growing degree of integration into the larger political and economic entity that revolved around London and its imperial interests. For both countries, small and lacking in a wide range of opportunity for the ambitious, London and empire provided a stimulus that powerfully affected their development. Centralisation of power and wealth in London and the rapid economic development of both Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century are closely related phenomena. Peripheral resources in manpower and capital helped to reinforce the centralised power of London, and at the same time the opportunity and mobility that London and the empire created powerfully influenced Irish and Scottish society in many ways. Scotland was the more geographically mobile of the two societies and imperial outlets were greatly to enhance that mobility. The contrast in mobility even at the outset meant that Scotland and Ireland were already different societies in 1600. Close links had long existed of course between the north of Ireland and the Highlands. Indeed, as Scotland was seen more by outside visitors who travelled through the Lowlands but did not cross the Highland line, the similarity between much of Irish and Scots society can be overlooked. However, Lowlanders were predominant in contacts with Ireland in the seventeenth century, and contact with the Highlands recedes to a few patchy ties in trade in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION Western Europe saw a widespread move in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to replace the basis of charity and support of the poor, hitherto carried by religious bodies and charitable individuals, with a wider and better-organised system of support and control, whether by a city or by a state. In Protestant countries this was an evident need, since the secularisation of monastic property had removed an important if erratic source of alms, and the doctrinal devaluation of good works discouraged private almsgiving. Attempts to provide civic or national structures of relief involved a clearer definition of the poor: the word ‘poor’ had always meant the less favoured part of society, and continued to, but it also came to mean more specifically people whose need of help was recognised and categorised, whom a later age would label ‘objects of charity’ and a still later one ‘paupers’. In England by the mid sixteenth century a distinction was used between those recognised as suitable for charity and ‘sturdy beggars’, but those who begged were not clearly marked off in most people's minds from poor householders. In the 1570s, unemployment was recognised as a reason for destitution, and by the time of the dearth of the 1590s it was clearly seen in England that there was a class of poor householders who needed help in times of scarcity. THE ORIGINS OF THE OLD SCOTTISH POOR LAW In Scotland there had, from the twelfth century, been statutes which encouraged the gift of alms and the provision of justice to the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Malplaquet the strategy which Marlborough and Eugène had followed lost its validity, and as a result the campaigns of 1710 and 1711 in France and the Low Countries were bound to be inconclusive. The allies after Marlborough's three victories and Eugène's expulsion of the French from Italy had concentrated on forcing the enemy to fight a major set-piece battle which they confidently expected would result in the final destruction of the main French army, and so compel Louis to accept peace on allied terms. The survival of Villars's army disproved this belief, something that Marlborough, but not Eugène, came to realise. From the autumn of 1709 it was the defensive strategy adopted by the French that became valid: Villars had only to avoid defeat in a major battle for a compromise peace settlement to become inevitable, and he had already demonstrated his ability – on the Moselle in 1705 – to checkmate the allies without having to risk one. In the campaigns of 1710 and 1711 Marlborough executed a succession of brilliant manoeuvres to out-flank French defensive lines, and he covered a number of sieges deep in enemy territory, but he did not succeed in pinning Villars down and forcing him to fight under unfavourable conditions. When Marlborough did find himself with an option to fight a battle it was only when Villars faced him from behind defences as strong as those at Malplaquet, and no assault was attempted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When on 1 July 1701 Marlborough left England with William his role was to act as the king's deputy. The dual appointments which he held also reflected a situation in which war against France was highly likely, but not yet inevitable. As ambassador extraordinary he received instructions to negotiate with French and Spanish diplomats at the Hague for a settlement on what by later standards were very generous terms – a French evacuation of the Spanish Netherlands and satisfaction to the Emperor for his claims. His instructions did not spell these out because it was for Marlborough to negotiate them in working out the terms of the Grand Alliance. Secondly, as commander-in-chief of the English and Scottish forces assembling in the Dutch Republic Marlborough was to assume the active role of general which William's failing health made it impossible for him to sustain. However William would still have been in the background, and had he lived longer would certainly have intervened, a serious complication which Marlborough was spared. William's choice of Marlborough, despite their mutual dislike and past antagonisms, was dictated by the king's life-long commitment to subordinate all personal considerations to the mission of containing and reducing the excessive and aggressive power of France. William knew that the recent parliamentary and journalistic onslaughts against the employment of foreign soldiers made it impossible to nominate a Dutch general, such as the experienced Athlone (Ginkel) or the royal favourite Albemarle to whom he had recently given the Garter, still withheld from Marlborough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In military terms the campaign of 1706 was to prove the most successful of all in Marlborough's career, but in the weeks before it began he was consistently pessimistic about the prospects of the allies. He had expended a great deal of time during the winter in trying to persuade them to make a major and early military effort to put the maximum forces into the field, and he had attempted to allay their mutual suspicions and jealousies. But when he reached the Hague on 14 April it seemed that his work had had at best only limited effects. He feared that allied weaknesses could produce a succession of disasters since they faced a confident enemy who was fielding larger forces than ever before in a conscious attempt to reestablish an ascendancy in all theatres of war. Marlborough found his apprehensions about Dutch attitudes sadly confirmed. The concentration of French strength in the Low Countries continued to intimidate their political and military leaders, making them ultra-cautious, yet it was increasingly obvious that the public was becoming war-weary and would question the vast expenditure which yet another inconclusive campaign would necessitate. The danger of the States General being induced into accepting French offers of a separate peace (as in 1678) was now very real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For all effective purposes Marlborough's dismissal by Anne ended his active career. He spent his period in exile in almost continuous but futile and unproductive intrigue, aimed at bringing down the Tory administration at almost any cost. But that ministry self-destructed in Anne's very last days, and Marlborough (who was travelling back and arrived in England on the day after she died) contributed little to the smooth and unopposed accession of George I. George restored him to the office of captain-general, and he did supervise the suppression of the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, but his former assistant Cadogan actually directed the operations. In May 1716 Marlborough suffered a disabling stroke, with a second in November. After this he lived in retirement, becoming increasingly isolated by the incessant and bitter quarrels that Sarah provoked with almost everyone near to them – surviving daughters, sons-in-law, former army and political colleagues and, not least, John Vanbrugh the architect of Blenheim Palace – until he died on 16 June 1722. It has been said that the careers of almost all great public servants end in failure because they do not know when to retire gracefully but cling on to the power and influence which they have come to love as they acquire and use it, and after they have outlived their usefulness. This was particularly true of Marlborough's contemporaries. William III died unmourned in England. Godolphin had become a discredited captive of the Whigs when he lost office. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Churchill came from an obscure family of minor provincial gentry impoverished by the Civil Wars. Its only real asset were social connections which enabled John's father Sir Winston to find places for his children at Court; thereafter everything depended on their using their opportunities to advance themselves. In the first decades after the Restoration the ruling class had not yet narrowed into an oligarchy, and ministers and leading politicians who originated in the gentry (although mostly from families more substantial than the Churchills) outnumbered those from established aristocratic and Court families and connections. Several upward routes existed for the politically and socially ambitious, of which the commonest way was through leadership in Parliament combined with patronage management, direction of royal finances or the execution of other major administrative and legal functions. But with the exception of Monck and possibly Sandwich, and both earned their distinction by bringing about the Restoration, nobody rose to the very top through military or naval service. Certainly John Churchill did not. He owed his rise to prominence and great influence to his skills as a courtier, not a soldier. It was as an adept courtier that he obtained a succession of opportunities, all of which he turned to maximum advantage and which culminated in his command of the allied armies in the Low Countries in 1702–11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marlborough's earliest biographers were concerned to vindicate his reputation from the libels of hostile politicians and journalists. Both Francis Hare, whose Life and Glorious History appeared in 1705, and Thomas Lediard, who published a full Life in 1736, had served Marlborough personally, Hare as his chaplain, Lediard as an attache during his mission to Altranstadt. The latter based his work on wide manuscript materials and so has served as a quarry for later historians. This is also the case with William Coxe's Memoirs of John, Duke of Marlborough (1818–19) and the relevant portions of Onno Klopp's Der Fall des Hauses Stuart (Vienna, 1880–5). The latter is historiographically interesting because it reflects the ambivalence of contemporary Habsburg attitudes to Marlborough – unease at their unfortunately unavoidable dependence on him and predominantly Protestant allies, disgust at his betrayal of legitimist principles in 1688 and social contempt for an upstart who saw himself as the equal of hereditary princes. In the second half of the eighteenth century three Scottish exponents of the new Toryism produced new criticisms of Marlborough. David Hume in leading the rehabilitation of the Stuarts excoriated his behaviour in 1688. Sir John Dalrymple and James Macpherson published documents from the French and Jacobite archives compromising him as a traitor after as well as in 1688. But it was the classical Whig historians of the nineteenth century who set out with effect to demolish his reputation. First Henry Hallam presented a ferocious indictment on moral grounds in his History (1827). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the extent of women's political participation in the early modern period we need to exercise historical imagination to see beyond courts and legislatures to the myriad other institutions in which significant sorts of political power have been exercised. Although the histories of companies are usually thought of as proper subjects for business or economic history, I want to consider here two companies that ought also to be considered subjects of political history: the South Sea Company and the East India Company. Both companies were joint state/private ventures, chartered by the state and given monopoly trading privileges in their respective areas of the world. Both were involved in underwriting the national debt, a fact which produced company leverage on government officials. Government officials were also significantly involved in the affairs of each company. Parliament passed, in addition to the statutes granting and renewing the charters, a series of regulatory statutes concerning each company. A corollary of the fact that these companies were chartered by statute in return for payments to the state was that the companies were dependent upon politicians to introduce bills they wanted, to muster parliamentary support for their passage, to organize the defeat of unwanted bills, and, in general, to see to it that negotiations between the state and company produced results advantageous to the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let us begin by recalling the best-known facts about Catharine Macaulay. She wrote a number of works, of which by far the most prominent is a History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (i.e., that of George I), which appeared in eight volumes between 1763 and 1771 and, after an interval often years, 1781. During that interval she began a separate history of England from the revolution of 1688 to her own time in a series of letters to a friend; but she fell out with the friend (on account of her second marriage) and only one volume of this appeared, in 1778. She wrote several political pamphlets, one attacking Edmund Burke for not being radical enough in his criticism of the policies of George III in the 1760s, another for being too conservative in his Reflections on the Revolution in France; there is one essay in straight political theory, in the shape of some reflections on Thomas Hobbes, and some reflections on education which show she had been reading Rousseau. This last may be considered feminist in the limited sense that it is concerned with the education of women, but is of course one of many works written on the same subject, by both women and men, of which some are not to be considered feminist at all and several consider history, her chosen subject, as a branch of literature which women should read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When this Right Honorable Author first threw down the gauntlet, and entering the ground from whence Sir Robert Filmer was forced so shamefully to retire, stood forth the champion of hereditary right, he undoubtedly expected to be opposed by all those men, who in a liberal and enlightened age, had ranged themselves on the side of liberty; but how deeply must it wound the feelings of a chivalrous knight, who owes the fealty of “proud submission and dignified obedience” to the fair sex, to perceive that two of the boldest of his adversaries are women! At the end of the eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay were considered by their contemporaries to be among Edmund Burke's “boldest adversaries.” Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men was the first published reply to the Reflections on the Revolution in France as well as the pioneering feminist's earliest argument for equal rights and democratic government. Macaulay's Observations on the Reflections of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France represented the last volley in a war of words between the celebrated republican historian and the famed parliamentarian. In this chapter I argue that by using the notions of sense and sensibility we are better able to understand how Wollstonecraft and Macaulay challenged the gender and class hierarchy of the Reflections. These terms played a central part in each woman's rhetorical strategy and made it possible for both to invert the gender logic of the Reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]