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The three constitutional crises examined are that caused by the rejection by the House of Lords of Lloyd George's `People's Budget’ of 1909; that caused by the Home Rule Act of 1914; and the abdication in 1936. Each of these crises posed difficult problems for the sovereigns involved—George V and Edward VIII—and for their Prime Ministers—Asquith and Baldwin. In 1914, George V seriously contemplated refusing royal assent to legislation passed by Parliament. In 1936, abdication, a voluntary renunciation, seemed a threat to the very institution of monarchy, which depends upon automatic hereditary descent. But, paradoxically, the abdication heralded a vote of confidence for monarchy and the new style of limited, constitutional monarchy, as represented by George VI.

The United States played a significant role in unionist political thought and rhetoric throughout the Home Rule era. Ulster unionists used American examples to emphasize the need to maintain unity between Great Britain and Ireland, and to provide historical justification for unionist actions. This chapter examines the ways in which the American Revolutionary War, Civil War, and Constitution were utilized in unionist rhetoric. Unionists drew upon these American historical and constitutional examples to highlight ethnic connections to the United States, underscore the failed obligations of the British government to fight to save the Union, and legitimize Ulster militancy.

By the Home Rule period, religion and politics were intertwined as essential components of Ulster’s relationship with the United States. This chapter illustrates the ways in which evangelical religion was utilized to help build a transatlantic religious community. Scotch-Irish and Ulster Scots connections were born out of religious associations. Ulster Protestants were inspired by the American Protestant religious example and critical of the roles of Catholics in American society. Irish Protestant churches called upon their American counterparts to support anti-Home Rule stances. As this chapter demonstrates, shared religious heritage was a defining feature of the Ulster unionist view of America throughout this era.

This chapter centres on the debates over Home Rule between 1886 and 1893, when the issue exploded onto the British political scene. It examines the Gladstonian argument for Home Rule with reference to Burke, as well as the subsequent Liberal Unionist response. Both sides made significant intellectual bids for Burke’s mantle: the Gladstonians sought to establish voluntary political ties (‘the union of hearts’) between Britain and Ireland in an array of parliamentary speeches, periodical articles, edited books, and popular pamphlet literature. The Liberal Unionists looked to Burke’s wider work to show their adherence to the Liberal tradition. The Home Rule debates re-imagined Burke as a proto-Liberal Unionist, agreeable to and allied with Conservatives. The ‘spirit of Burke’ was, therefore, eventually seen to be embodied best of all in the Liberal Unionists who resurrected an anti-Jacobin vocabulary and styled themselves as Old Whigs defending the constitution.

Even if Ireland's juridical status and cultural complexion were not colonial ones during the nineteenth century, important aspects of British policy-making treated it as part of the external imperial system: this contention is explored further in this chapter. When ‘defence of the Empire’ emerged as a major electoral issue in 1880, it was mainly the Irish Home Rule question, for which Empire became virtually a synonym. It became clear amidst the first Home Rule crisis, ideas of ‘imperial patriotism’ were to be preferred to those of ‘Britishness’ and ‘British patriotism’, because the latter did not incorporate the Irish. There is little discussion of the notion of Ireland as colony: focus is mainly on the Empire building activities of the Irish diaspora, and on the Free State's relations with the Commonwealth and Dominions.

This chapter first describes the insurrection that arose in Bulgaria the late nineteenth century, which led to the massacre of Bulgarian Christians by Turkish troops. That such outrages could be committed against their fellow Christians provoked furious anger among many Britons, including Nonconformists with their traditional sympathy for oppressed peoples. The discussions then turn to how the campaign against the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria helped rebuild the alliance between Gladstone and the Dissenters; Dissenters' renewed support for the Liberal party; Nonconformists' objection to Irish Home Rule; and the growing mutual inter-dependence of the Liberal party and the Nonconformist chapels.

Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) examines the British Empire, with Chapter 5 focusing on liquor and imperialism within the British Isles, where temperance movement first took hold in the periphery of Scotland and Ireland. The chapter explores the colonizer’s alcohol narrative in Ireland, used to justify the domination of Britain’s “first colony.” In the 1840s, Fr. Theobald Mathew’s wildly popular Irish temperance movement quickly fused with the cause of Irish nationalism, thanks to Daniel O’Connell. With the advent of “Maine Law” prohibitionism, everyone from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx contributed to debates over alcohol control and prohibition. Intertwined with Irish Home Rule, British prohibitionism crested in 1895 and then gave way to Gothenburg alcohol control and pub reform, especially with World War I. Similar imperial dynamics of alco-colonization are noted in Britain’s other white settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

This chapter foregrounds female professionalisation in the FANY through an examination of two case studies of New Women: Mabel St Clair Stobart, who posed a number of challenges to Edward Baker’s chaotic governance, demanded improvements that would turn the Corps into a more professional organisation and subsequently resigned to set up a rival women’s corps, and Grace Ashley-Smith, who sought to work from within to professionalise the FANY (making changes to the Corps’s recruitment, training, uniform, discipline and activities, as well as founding a magazine) and eventually ousted Baker, taking over command herself and readying the Corps for active service during the Irish Home Rule crisis. The chapter draws on the substantial written records that both women left, including autobiographies, articles, a log book, a regimental order book and letters. It also utilises Corps ephemera, including minutes of meetings, regulations and written correspondence, as well as newspaper articles, in order to examine how female members transformed the unit from one that was premised upon the part-modern, part-premodern romantic whims of its male founder into a more professional and decidedly modern women’s equestrian and first aid movement that was in a state of war-readiness.

This chapter examines the perception of Abraham Lincoln in English political and cultural imagination. It explains that Lincoln had a varied career in the English imagination in the century or so after his death and that the salience and political content of his image shifted according to the context. It discusses how Lincoln was invoked by supporters and the opponents of Irish Home Rule and suggests that the interwar years were the high-water mark for Lincoln in England. This chapter also describes the 1941 documentary film “Words for Battle,” directed by Humphrey Jennings which featured a statue of Lincoln in front of the Houses of Parliament and suggests that the film hints at the role of Lincoln in the evolving language of democratic English culture.

In this essay, Florence S. Boos examines the career of Mary Smith, a writer who used the correspondence columns of the Carlisle Journal and other periodicals to write on religious pluralism, women’s enfranchisement, Liberal party politics, Irish Home Rule, and British imperialism. The extent of her contributions will probably never be fully known since her letters were signed with initials or with pseudonyms such as ‘Burns Redivivus’ or ‘Sigma.’ Anonymity was crucial for a lower-middle-class woman writer who could not vote but yearned to influence public debate. ‘If men knew who the writer was,’ she acknowledged, ‘they would say, “What does a woman know about politics?”’ (p. 510). When adopting various signatures, she shifted her tone and persona accordingly, reserving her most strident voice for the letters she published on Liberal party politics, styling herself as ‘Sigma’ or ‘Z.’ ‘Periodical journalism,’ Boos concludes, ‘provided Smith with the opportunity to explore a range of personae, topics, and rhetorical approaches over several decades, and to influence public opinion in favour of her chosen causes while retaining her cherished mental independence and broadly critical stance’ (p. 513).