British and Irish Early Modern History

Oscar Wilde's disastrous libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry dominated British newspapers during the spring of 1895. This book shows that the Wilde scandal was just one of many events to capture the public's imagination that year. Had Jack the Ripper returned? Did the Prime Minister have a dreadful secret? Were Aubrey Beardsley's drawings corrupting the nation? Were overpaid foreign players ruining English football? Could cricket save a nation from moral ruin? Freak weather, flu, a General Election, industrial unrest, New Women, fraud, accidents, anarchists, balloons and bicycles all stirred up interest and alarm. The book shows how this turbulent year is at the same time far removed from our own day and strangely familiar. It interweaves literature, politics and historical biography with topics such as crime, the weather, sport, visual art and journalism to give an overarching view of everyday life in 1895. The book draws on diverse primary sources, from the Aberdeen Weekly Journal to the Women's Signal Budget, and from the Illustrated Police News to The Yellow Book; and is illustrated with stills from plays and reproductions of newspaper front pages, to bring Victorian culture to life.

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a revisionist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's evolving response to the English Civil War and Revolution. Conventionally, Hobbes is portrayed as a consistent, if intellectually maverick, royalist partisan. This book challenges that view, and vindicates the widespread contemporary belief that Hobbes had betrayed the royalist cause and accommodated himself to England's revolutionary regimes. In sustaining these conclusions, Professor Collins emphasizes the central importance of religion to both Hobbes's political thought and to the broader course of the English Revolution itself. Hobbes and the Revolution are both placed within the tumultuous historical process that saw the emerging English state securing political authority over public religion and the national church. This cause animated the radicals who propelled the English Revolution, including, Collins argues, Oliver Cromwell and his supporters. It also animated the evolution of Hobbes's political theory, which was centrally concerned with vindicating this aspect of the revolution's political program. Seen in this light, Thomas Hobbes emerges as a theorist who moved with, rather than against, the revolutionary currents of his age.

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-16th century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their reintroduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of changes imposed from above, the laity is revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents — a division later translated into competing protestant views. This book integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws on hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records — especially churchwardens' accounts.

This book examines the military experiences of peers and gentlemen from the British Isles who volunteered to fight in the religious and dynastic wars of mainland Europe, as well as the ordinary men who were impressed to serve in the ranks, from the time of the English intervention in the Dutch war of independence to the death of the soldier-king William III in 1702. The apprenticeship in arms exposed these men to the technological innovations of the military revolution, laid the foundations for a professional officer class based upon merit, established a fund of military expertise, and helped to shape a British identity. The remilitarization of aristocratic culture and society was completed by 1640, and provided numerous experienced military officers for the various armies of the British and Irish civil wars and, subsequently, for the embryonic British army after William III invaded and conquered the British Isles and committed the Three Kingdoms to the armed struggles against Louis XIV during the Nine Years War. Conflicts between amateur aristocrats and so-called ‘soldiers of fortune’ led to continuing debates about the relative merits of standing armies and a select militia. The individual pursuit of honour and glory by such amateurs also obscured the more rational military and political objectives of the modern state, subverted military discipline, and delayed the process of professionalization of the officer corps of the British army.

From 1649–1660 England was ruled by a standing army for the only time in its history. The nature of that military rule was far more complex and nuanced than has traditionally been appreciated. This is the first book to describe the nature of that rule, both for members of the army and for civilian society. The first part of the book describes the character of the army by looking at the life that officers and soldiers led, the promotion structure, and the ways in which political engagement changed to provide a sense of the day-to-day reality of being part of a standing army. The second part of the book considers the impact of the military presence on society by establishing where soldiers were quartered, how they were paid, the material burden that they represented, the divisive effect of the army's patronage of religious radicals, and the extensive involvement of army officers in the government of the localities. The final part of the book re-evaluates the army's role in the political events from Cromwell's death to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, and explains why the army crumbled so pitifully in the last months of the Commonwealth. The book casts new light on: the changes in the army between 1649–60; Cromwell's control of the army; the co-existence of political ideals and a professional ethos among army officers; the place of the major-generals in English history; the attitude of the political nation to a standing army; the army's support of religious radicals; the reasons for the fall of the Commonwealth.

One of the most important aspects of the Reformation in England was its impact on the status of the dead. Protestant reformers insisted vehemently that between heaven and hell there was no ‘middle place’ of purgatory where the souls of the departed could be assisted by the prayers of the living. This was no remote theological proposition, but a revolutionary doctrine affecting the lives of all 16th-century English people, and the ways in which their Church and society were organised. This book illuminates the (sometimes ambivalent) attitudes towards the dead in pre-Reformation religious culture, and traces (up to about 1630) the uncertain progress of the ‘reformation of the dead’ attempted by Protestant authorities as they sought to stamp out traditional rituals and provide the replacements acceptable in an increasingly fragmented religious world. It provides surveys of perceptions of the afterlife, of the cultural meanings of ghosts, and of the patterns of commemoration and memory which became characteristic of post-Reformation England. Together these topics constitute an important case-study in the nature and tempo of the English Reformation as an agent of social and cultural transformation.

From childbirth and baptism through to courtship, weddings, and funerals, every stage in the life-cycle of Tudor and Stuart England was accompanied by ritual. Even under the Protestantism of the reformed Church, the spiritual and social dramas of birth, marriage, and death were graced with elaborate ceremony. Powerful and controversial protocols were in operation, shaped and altered by the influences of the Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration. Each of the major rituals was potentially an arena for argument, ambiguity, and dissent. Ideally, as classic rites of passage, these ceremonies worked to bring people together. But they also set up traps into which people could stumble, and tests which not everybody could pass. In practice, ritual performance revealed frictions and fractures that everyday local discourse attempted to hide or to heal. Using first-hand evidence, this book shows how the making and remaking of ritual formed part of a continuing debate, sometimes strained and occasionally acrimonious, which exposed the raw nerves of society in the midst of great historical events. In doing so, it brings to life the common experiences of living and dying in Tudor and Stuart England.

This book explores the religious, political and cultural implications of a collision of highly charged polemic prompted by the mass ejection of Puritan ministers from the Church of England in 1662, providing an in-depth study of this heated exchange centring on the departing ministers' farewell sermons. Many of these valedictions, delivered by hundreds of dissenting preachers in the weeks before Bartholomew's Day, would be illegally printed and widely distributed, provoking a furious response from government officials, magistrates and bishops. The book re-interprets the political significance of ostensibly moderate Puritan clergy, arguing that their preaching posed a credible threat to the restored political order.

This is a full-length modern study of the Diggers or ‘True Levellers’, who were among the most remarkable of the radical groups to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640–60. Acting at a time of unparalleled political change and heightened millenarian expectation, the Diggers believed that the establishment of an egalitarian, property-less society was imminent. This book establishes the local origins of the Digger movement and sets out to examine pre-Civil War social relations and social tensions in the parish of Cobham—from where significant numbers of the Diggers came—and the impact of civil war in the local community. The book provides a detailed account of the Surrey Digger settlements and of local reactions to the Diggers, and it explores the spread of Digger activities beyond Surrey. In chapters on the writings and career of Gerrard Winstanley, the book seeks to offer a reinterpretation of one of the major thinkers of the English Revolution.