English Politics and the Blasphemy Act of 1698*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (575) ◽  
pp. 804-835
Author(s):  
Eloise Davies
Keyword(s):  
Moral Leadership ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
High Church ◽  
Standing Army ◽  
English Politics

Abstract In 1698, less than a decade after the Toleration Act, a blasphemy law was passed in England. No convictions were ever brought under the Act, and it has been largely neglected by historians. Yet, for all its apparent insignificance, the Blasphemy Act is an instructive episode in post-1688 politics, which sheds light on the political realignments of the post-revolutionary decade. The language of the blasphemy debates was theologically sophisticated, rooted in Calvin’s understanding of blasphemy as distinctively malicious, and it is clear that the contours of the extra-parliamentary Trinitarian controversy were a source of division in Westminster too. The Blasphemy Act was one means by which the Williamite bishops, under pressure from both the dissenter-dominated moral reform movement and High Church advocates of Convocation, tried to reassert the court’s moral leadership. But the significance of the dispute was not limited to ecclesiastical politics; the story of the Blasphemy Act was also closely entwined with that of the more famous ‘standing army’ controversy. William’s Court Whig ministers—often portrayed as areligious pragmatists—exploited the theological fault-lines among Country MPs to legitimise fiscal-military reform.

Denmark-Norway as a Potential World Power in the Early Seventeenth Century

Itinerario ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Már Jónsson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Huge Amount ◽  
Northern Germany ◽  
Lower Saxony ◽  
One Year ◽  
Council Of State ◽  
Standing Army ◽  
Do So

On 2 January 1625, the English ambassador Robert Anstruther met with King Christian IV of Norway and Denmark and requested his participation in a union of Protestant states against Emperor Ferdinand II and the Catholic League in Germany. Within three days, King Christian proposed to contribute five thousand soldiers for one year, as part of an army of almost thirty thousand men. In early June, despite opposition from the Danish Council of State, reluctant to put a huge amount of money into foreign affairs, Christian decided to join what he called “the war for the defence of Lower Saxony”. He then headed an army of mercenaries southwards through Lower Saxony, secured all crossings over the river Weser and prepared to confront the Catholic forces. On 29 November, it was decided that Denmark would be in charge of military operations in Northern Germany, whereas England and the United Provinces would provide a monthly subsidy. The political and military prospects for Denmark were excellent, to say the least. It had the fourth strongest navy in Europe (after Spain and the two new allies), and only a few years before the Danish warships had been described by a French observer as “merveilles de l'océan”. A small standing army of two regiments had recently been established and Denmark was the fourth European state to do so after France, Spain and the neighbouring Sweden.

The Confederacy and the Purge of the Unionist Free Traders, 1906–1910

1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Sykes
Keyword(s):  
Conservative Party ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Secret Society ◽  
Boer War ◽  
Tariff Reform ◽  
Corn Laws ◽  
English Politics

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘… in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers … [which] … saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement…’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’.

Performing Politics: Propaganda, Parody and a Women's Parliament

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-193
Author(s):  
Kym Bird
Keyword(s):  
Political Representation ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Feminist Theatre ◽  
Liberal Ideology ◽  
Material Feminism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
White Womanhood

The initial phase of women's drama in Canada coincides with the first wave of 19th-century Canadian feminism and the Canadian women's reform movement. At the time, a variety of women wrote and staged plays that grew out of their commitment to the political, ideological and social context of the movement. The 'Mock Parliament,' a form of theatrical parody in which men's and women's roles are reversed, was collectively created by different groups of suffragists in Manitoba, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia. This article attempts to recuperate these works for a history of Canadian feminist theatre. It will argue that the 'dual' conservative and liberal ideology of the suffrage movement informs all aspects of the Mock Parliament. On the one hand, these plays critique the division of gender roles that material feminism wants to uphold; they are testimony to the strength of a woman's movement that knew how to work as equal players within traditionally structured political organizations. On the other hand, they betray the safe, moderate tactics of an upper and middle-class, white womanhood who wanted political representation but no structural social change. These opposing tensions are inherent in theatrical parody which is both imitative and critical.

A Reformation of Manners

The Puritans ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 144-171
Author(s):  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
General Assembly ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Civil State ◽  
Political Class ◽  
The People ◽  
To Come

This chapter addresses the Puritan version of a “reformation of manners” or moral reform, situating it within a larger anxiety about “decline.” As those who signed the Covenant of 1596 surely knew, perceptions of “decline” had prompted fast days in Scotland ever since the 1560s. Several of these exercises in repentance and covenanting were means to the end of a firmer alliance between a Protestant state church and a monarchy (or civil state) susceptible to Catholic or more moderate tendencies. This was the purpose of the Negative, or King's, Confession of 1580/81, when the young James VI and most of the political class pledged never to allow “the usurped tyranny of the Roman Antichrist” to return to Scotland. John Knox had organized a similar event in 1565 at a moment when the political fortunes of Mary Stuart were on the mend. Knox had called on the General Assembly to institute a countrywide fast directed against “idolatry,” with the queen as its implied target. Responding to Knox's sense of crisis, this assembly endorsed a “reformation of manners” and “public fast” as the means of “avoiding of the plagues and scourges of God, which appeared to come upon the people for their sins and ingratitude.” Simultaneously, it urged the queen to suppress “the Mass” and other “such idolatry and Papistical ceremonies.”

The Entitlements of Merit

Sans-Culottes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sonenscher
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Political History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
War Finance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Modern War

This chapter shows how the moral and social dimensions of the subject of army reform grew out of the range of questions that it generated about property and inheritance, as against merit and distinction, in determining both the composition of the French nobility and its relationship to the French royal government. Getting the peacocks to pay raised a number of political dilemmas, however. These, in turn, helped to rule out the old vision of a powerful reforming monarch as the solution to absolute government's financial problems. The political history of the French Revolution thus began with the unavailability of this alternative. Irrespective of the damage done by the argument over military reform to any plausible prospect of relying on Louis XVI to be a patriot king, the model itself pulled strongly against both the realities of modern war finance and the more urgent political need to consolidate the royal debt.

Reform in fragments: Sovereignty, colonialism, and the Sikh tradition

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Rajbir Singh Judge
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article rethinks how we understand religious reform under colonial rule by examining Maharaja Duleep Singh, the deposed ruler of the Sikh empire, and how the Singh Sabha, a Sikh reform movement, debated, deployed, and organized around him in the late nineteenth century. I demonstrate how religious reform was a site of intense conflict that reveals the processes of argumentation within the contours of a tradition, even as the colonial state sought to continually mediate the terms. Embedded within a frame of inquiry provided by the Sikh tradition, the contestations that constituted reform within the tradition remained intimately tied in with the question of sovereignty. Ranjit Singh's empire in Panjab had only been annexed 30 years earlier in 1849 and remained a central reference point for thinking about the political at the turn of the century. These debates surrounding Duleep Singh, therefore, disclose the contentious engagements within a tradition that cannot be reduced to binary designations such as colonial construct/indigenous inheritance or religious/political.

Pens, Politics, and Swords

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Ricketts
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Army Officers ◽  
The Military ◽  
Institutional Order

The final chapter discusses in parallel the political histories of Spain and Peru in the final years of imperial rule in South America. Peru did not experience a long national struggle and lacked large elites committed to independence. As in the old metropolis, a constant and violent struggle between men of letters and military officers dominated. After decades of military reform and war, army officers with experience in command and government felt entitled to rule. Old subjects and new citizens were also accustomed to seeing them lead. Men of letters, on the other hand, found limited opportunities to exercise their new authority despite their ambitions. Additionally, both in Spain and Peru, liberal men of letters failed to create a new institutional order in which the military would be subjected to civilian rule. It would take decades for both parts of the former Spanish monarchy to accomplish that goal and allow for peace.

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