scholarly journals Edmund Burke and the First Stuart Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-494
Author(s):  
Philip Connell
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The Revolution

AbstractThis essay reconsiders the character and significance of Edmund Burke's attitude to the seventeenth-century civil wars and interregnum. Burke may have venerated the “revolution principles” of 1688–89 over those of the 1640s, not least in the Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he notoriously compares English dissenting radicals to regicidal Puritans. Yet his response to the first Stuart revolution is more complex than has commonly been allowed and is closely bound up with Burke's earlier parliamentary career as a prominent member of the Rockingham Whig connection. The revival of an anti-Stuart idiom within the extra-parliamentary opposition of the 1760s, together with the mounting conflict with the North American colonies, gave renewed prominence to the memory of the civil wars within English political discourse. The Rockinghamites attempted to exploit this development—without compromising their own, more conservative reading of seventeenth-century history—but they were also its victims. In the years that followed, Burke and his colleagues were repeatedly identified by their political opponents with the spirit of Puritan rebellion and Cromwellian usurpation. These circumstances provide a new perspective on Burke's interpretation of the nation's revolutionary past; they also offer important insights into his writings and speeches in response to the French Revolution.

Colonial Politics

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-26
Author(s):  
Stephen Conway
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
North American ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
Colonial Government

This essay begins by examining the establishment of English political systems in the North American colonies in the seventeenth century. It then goes on to look at eighteenth-century developments, and particularly at the conditions that allowed the colonial assemblies to assume increasing importance in colonial government. The final section considers the efforts made by ministers and officials in London to check the power of the assemblies and assert more control from the imperial center. It sheds fresh light on the great constitutional dispute between London and the colonies that formed an important aspect of the American Revolution.

Provision of Books for Poor Clergy Parochial Libraries in the British Isles and the North American Colonies, 1680–1720

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 257-267
Author(s):  
W.M. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North

For ministers of Word and sacraments in a reformed Church, books were part of their stock-in-trade. By the late seventeenth century books were widely available, and theological books were the staple of the publishing trade. Possession of books distinguished the inventories of deceased clerics whose wills were proved in consistory courts from their lay neighbours, but books were still too expensive for poorer clergy to buy.

‘A Welsh Lancashire’? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Jesuit Mission ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Popish Plot

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

scholarly journals Origin of the New England Company, London, With an Account of its Labours on Behalf of the North-American Indians.

1885 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-301
Author(s):  
Wm. Marshall Venning
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
North American ◽  
Indian Language ◽  
North American Indians ◽  
The North ◽  
The Arts ◽  
John Eliot

John Eliot, long known as ‘the apostle of the North-American Red Men,’ and other Englishmen early in the seventeenth century, laboured to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen natives of New England in their own Indian language, and in doing so, found it necessary to carry on civilisation with religion, and to instruct them in some of the arts of life. Their writings, and more particularly some of the tracts known as the ‘Eliot Tracts,’ aroused so much interest in London that the needs of the Indians of New England were brought before Parliament, and on July 27, 1649, an Act or Ordinance was passed with this title :—‘A Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England.’

The aesthetics of Burke’s constitutionalism: A dialectical reading

2020 ◽  
pp. 019145372091314
Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rustighi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Partial Representation ◽  
Constitutional Thought ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

I propose taking the beautiful and the sublime in Edmund Burke not just as aesthetic but also as theoretical categories which can help us read his constitutional thought in dialectical terms. I suggest indeed that his usage of these categories in the Reflections on the Revolution in France points to a consistently held argument concerning the aporias of early-modern contractarian theories and their influence on the French Revolution. My hypothesis is that for Burke the Revolution is unable to think of any concrete relation between beauty and sublimity, insofar as they can be associated, respectively, with particularity and universality. Furthermore, I underscore how Burke’s defence of partial representation against contractarian representation aims to overcome this impasse. My goal is to demonstrate that Burke raises decisive questions as to the intrinsically anti-democratic effects of the contractarian concept of democracy and is still useful to confront the contemporary crisis of democratic participation.

scholarly journals Translators’ Choices in Tartuffe

2003 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-64
Author(s):  
Nancy Senior
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
North American ◽  
Original Text ◽  
The North ◽  
English Translations ◽  
French Tradition

Abstract Selected passages from twelve English translations of Molière’s Tartuffe are studied. The passages are chosen because of questions they raise about the language of everyday life and of religion in seventeenth-century France. The translators choose the extent to which they will keep the structures and references of the original text, or adapt them for easier access by a contemporary audience. They also choose between the French tradition of a dark, menacing interpretation, and the North American one of seeking the maximum of laughs.

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