parliament and literature in late medieval england – by matthew giancarlo

REVIEWSparh_141 238..274

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. By Matthew Giancarlo. (Cam-bridge Studies in Medieval Literature.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.2007. xiv, 289 pp. £50.00. ISBN 9780521875394.

This interesting book tackles that period between the 1370s and 1410s in whichparliament had a particular prominence in conceptualisations of English politics andpublic life, especially literary ones. For the historian, its principal attraction lies in itsevocation and exploration of some of the discursive strands which accompaniedthis important political development, throwing light on contemporary idealisations ofparliament, and offering insights on the cultural factors that helped to produce thisparticular explosion of parliamentary consciousness. For the literary scholar, the bookprovides the first full-length treatment of the parliamentary context for this crucialperiod in the development of English vernacular literature; while that context hasscarcely gone unrecognized, Giancarlo’s sustained attention to the historical background,and (even more) his insistence on an aesthetic and stylistic ‘parliamentariness’ in some ofthe major texts of the period, breaks some new ground.

The broad lines of Giancarlo’s interpretation are easily stated. In two introductorychapters, he argues that parliament, originally a baronial and juridical institution, came inthe course of the 14th century to be seen as a communal and representative one. Itspotential for expressing the concerns of the whole of the population first became clearin the 1370s – above all in the Good Parliament of 1376; its mediating position betweenthe king and the mass of the people, and its attempts to express a unanimous vox publica,without sliding into cacophony and without succumbing to threats, sectionalism or theinducements of meed, attracted the attention of the ‘public’ poets of the Ricardian andLancastrian era. In four chapters, Giancarlo examines the writings of, successively, Gower,Chaucer, Langland and the poets of what Helen Barr has called ‘The Piers PlowmanTradition’ (the authors of ‘Richard the Redeless’, ‘The Crowned King’ and ‘Mum andthe Sothsegger’), considering their deployment of parliamentary tropes and their inter-rogations of parliamentary questions. These writers’ engagement with parliament goesmuch deeper than mere topicality: they are preoccupied with issues of mediation andrepresentation, reform and social inclusiveness, nationality and vernacularity that makethe public assembly a natural inspiration for their poetic aims. While the earliest worksin this sequence mostly treat parliament in an oblique and allegorical manner, the laterpoems are less artful in their reference to the institution, and more concerned with thereal-life difficulties thrown up by the enterprise of trying to represent the public.Throughout the period, a high consciousness of the value and significance of constitut-ing and speaking for the community is matched by a dissatisfaction at the ability of anyof those present in parliament – king, lords, prelates, commons – to do so consistently;

Parliamentary History, Vol. 29, pt. 2 (2010), pp. 238–274

© The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 2010

yet ‘Mum’, the final poem in the sequence, and no less ambivalent than its predecessors,is quite explicit that parliament, as a venue for petitions and protests, remains the onlylicit way for the community to speak. In a brief but deft conclusion, Giancarlo notes thepassing of this parliamentary phase in English literature and political culture: Agincourt,royal minority and civil war changed the political environment, while courtly adviceliterature, manifestoes and pamphlets became the new ways of expressing public opinionand political wisdom.

In historical terms, Giancarlo’s big picture is, in broad terms, compelling. In par-ticular, few would disagree with his evocation of a period of particular prominence forparliament in public life between the dotage of Edward III and the early years ofHenry V. Even so, his discussion of the background to the 1370s leans too muchtowards Sayles and over-emphasizes the judicial and seigneurial aspects of parliament;more attention to the work of Maddicott and Harriss would have produced a morebalanced appreciation of the role of representatives of the shires and towns as early asHenry III’s reign and a recognition that, from the very start, parliament was a multi-valent assembly, dealing with finance, law-making and the settlement of political ques-tions as well as with justice and petitions for justice. Giancarlo’s switch from ‘romancebaronialism’ to ‘communal voice’ is thus over-schematic: it captures something aboutthe way the institution was represented, and the discussions of Langtoft, Mannyng and‘Havelok the Dane’, in which parliaments are a chivalrous and courtly affair, throw aninteresting light on 13th- and 14th-century perceptions; but it misses the way inwhich, in reality, the magnates were pressed and obliged to represent a communitylarger than themselves. In this respect, the representation of the community is a normof parliamentary history, not a novelty of the later 14th century, even if the scope ofthat community – both real and recognized – changed over time. On the whole, thetwo background chapters work better as a survey of formative themes in the ideationof parliament than as an account of the rising social prominence of the institution. Ina way, they reflect both the strengths and the weaknesses of the literary approach – awonderful sensitivity to the connections of thought and language that run through thesources, but an unduly selective and episodic depiction of the range of factors andcircumstances that produce social outcomes. The spread of the common law, thegrowth of taxation and the multiplication of local offices, crucial factors in the pressurefor better representation and in the making of a more extensive political community,barely figure here, because commentators did not straightforwardly articulate thesedevelopments or tie them into the changing shape and significance of parliament. But,while this means that Giancarlo’s ‘parliamentary moment’ is incompletely explained, itdoes not undermine his case for the cultural and literary significance of the parliamentsof these decades, and his tracing of that significance through a wide array of texts willoffer much to historians and literary scholars alike.

JOHN WATTSCorpus Christi College, Oxford

239Reviews


Fires of Faith: Catholic England under MaryTudor. By Eamon Duffy. New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press. 2009. xiv, 249 pp. £19.99. ISBN 9780300152166.

With Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (2009), Eamon Duffy has produceda remarkable challenge to interpretations of Queen Mary’s attempt to restore Romancatholicism to England as ‘backward-looking, unimaginative, and reactionary’ (p. 1).Taking on an array of reformation historians such as David Loades, Rex Pogson, A.G.Dickens, and even John Foxe (the Tudor protestant martyrologist who supplies much ofDuffy’s source material), Duffy achieves his two principal goals: to demonstrate that atthe time of her death Mary’s religious policies were working; and to restore Mary’sarchbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, to his rightful position as the drivingforce behind those policies (and of similar importance to the broader European counterreformation).

Duffy’s celebration of Pole (as it seems) largely depends, first, on his demonstrating thesuccess of the regime’s policies (in effect, thus, Pole’s success). This he does by arguingquite convincingly that by the final year of Mary’s short reign, active evangelical dissentwas limited to a tiny minority of hardcore recidivists, and that this was a direct result ofher regime’s persecution of them.This is quite important, for it has been something ofa truism among historians that even with catholicism as the majority religion throughoutMary’s reign (and well into Elizabeth’s), the burnings were a public relations disaster forthe regime, more successful in alienating the queen’s subjects than in effectively ‘killingoff’ protestantism. In addition, it has often been suggested that the drive to executeheretics was diminishing even before the death of the queen brought them to an end,exactly because of the regime’s awareness of their counter-productivity. On the contrary,argues Duffy quite unabashedly: modern sensibilities aside, the campaign against heresy(conflated by the regime with political dissent) was not looked upon with horror bymost contemporaries and was, as the deterrent (and not just purgation) that it wasintended to be, effective in cowing English evangelicals into conformity (p. 115). Thiswas achieved through the careful staging of executions and the sermons that invariablyaccompanied them, particularly in areas where the strongest evangelical cells remained.And while there were some lost opportunities and public relations mistakes (mostimportantly, the execution of Thomas Cranmer – Mary’s fault rather than Pole’s), theregime was quite conscious of the impact of the burnings, felt strongly that they serveda positive purpose, and was committed to continuing to execute heretics as long as therewere still obdurate ones to execute: while ‘the campaign may or may not have been indanger of running out of suspects in some places’, Duffy remarks, ‘there is no signanywhere that it was running out of steam’ (p. 170).

Perhaps even more compelling than his argument in favour of the effectiveness of thecampaign against evangelical religion by fire is Duffy’s rehabilitation of Cardinal Pole as,without a doubt, the driving force behind Mary’s religious policies (including in botheducation and persecution): and here Duffy simply shatters the image of Pole as soineffectual in either restoring or reforming English Roman catholicism that even JohnFoxe could not bring himself to detest him. Two elements are especially critical toDuffy’s argument. First, he overturns the ‘myth’ of Pole’s oft-reported antipathy towardspreaching – not only was Pole not against preaching, he was, in fact, for it (p. 56). Andsecond, he convincingly argues that contrary to much traditional understanding both of

240 Reviews


Pole and of Marian catholic reform, the archbishop steered a quite effective publicitycampaign on behalf of re-catholicisation, promoting the reconciliation of England to themother church in Rome, fostering re-education in traditional religious principles, andattacking evangelical religion as disorderly and dangerous. And he did all these thingsusing both the press and – most importantly – the pulpit: as Duffy puts it, ‘Marianpolemic worked as a form of carpet bombing, driving its message home in many forms,but achieving a remarkable consistency across genre and occasion, and a powerfulcumulative effect’ (p. 75).

The source of the consistency in Marian polemic – whether delivered from press orfrom pulpit – is, again, Pole. Duffy sees the archbishop as setting the heartbeat of theMarian restoration from well before he even arrived in England – indeed, from beforeMary even came to the throne – by his attack on the schismatic Henry VIII, ProEccclesiasticae Unitatis Defensione (De Unitate), written in 1536 (and published in 1539). Inthis work Pole establishes a number of themes that will inform Marian propaganda:Henry VIII’s personal villainy, degeneracy, and sinfulness; the status of John Fisher andThomas More as martyrs, their blood paradoxically proving God’s grace towardsEngland; and the utmost importance of catholic unity through universal submission tothe papacy. Not only did Mary conform her own rhetoric regarding her father accordingto her archbishop’s direction, the themes established in De Unitate permeate the polemicemerging from the English press during Mary’s reign, including from under the pens ofHenry’s own great propagandist, Stephen Gardiner, and Pole’s right hand in Canterbury,Archdeacon Nicholas Harpsfield, author of both the Life of Moore (trumping MatthewHogarde’s Displaying of the Protestants as the ‘masterpiece of the Marian martyrdomcontroversies’ [p. 185]) and the Treatise on the Pretended Divorce between Henry VIII andCatherine of Aragon.

Duffy’s achievement with Fires of Faith is profound: he forcefully argues that Mary’sreligious policies were succeeding in stamping out evangelical dissent by 1558, and hiswork on Pole’s influence and, indeed, dominant position in her regime is utterlyconvincing. Nevertheless, this is not a book that will lack critics, particularly when itcomes (not unexpectedly, one would imagine) to Duffy’s preparedness to stomach theburnings. For while it does behove the historian to bear in mind, as Duffy reminds us,that most contemporaries of the Marian martyrs (and many of the martyrs themselves)advocated the execution of heretics, yet, as Duffy himself remarks, this was the mostintense religious persecution of its kind during an age of religious persecution, whichcould be thought to suggest that it was not, in fact, strictly ‘inevitable’, as he puts it (p.7). In short, while Duffy is quite convincing in his argument that the persecution workedin stamping out evangelical dissent, he is less effective in connecting the regime’s successin this respect to an idea of the campaign of burnings as non-anomalous (or reasonable),even in context.

There is one other sense in which Duffy’s idea (or definition) of the regime’s successmight be vulnerable, and this is in his linkage of that very ‘success’ (in terms of therestoration of catholicism) to a broad adherence to Pole’s position on papal authority, asexpressed in De Unitate – which is a quite different thing from connecting it toelimination of the protestant heresy. For example, the conclusion that Duffy draws fromthe rejection of Mary’s entire episcopal bench (save one) of Elizabeth’s protestantsettlement – that this demonstrates the successful ‘re-centring of English Catholicism

241Reviews


round the papacy’ – is somewhat lacking in force (p. 196). It remains unclear, based ontheir rejection of protestantism, whether a return to 1547 might not have gone downbetter with at least some of Mary’s bishops than what was on offer in 1558–9; after all,Gardiner and Bonner, both enthusiastic Henricians, had also rejected Edwardine prot-estantism. So while it seems that Mary’s bishops were, on the whole, of sterner stuff thanHenry’s (if not necessarily Edward’s), this does not, of itself, mean that no compromisewith the idea of the royal supremacy could have been possible for any of them (or otherof Mary’s rejuvenated catholic subjects). Nevertheless, this is an exceptional treatment ofQueen Mary’s reign, clearly standing alongside both The Stripping of the Altars (1992) andThe Voices of Morebath (2001) as among the critical texts for any student of the Englishreformation.

MEGAN L. HICKERSONHenderson State University

Burghley:William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I. By Stephen Alford. New Haven:Yale University Press. 2008. xix, 412 pp. £25.00. ISBN 9780300118964.

William Cecil, who became the 1st baron of Burghley in 1571, is a giant figure in thehistory of Tudor England. An increasingly influential player in the politics and protestantreformation of Edward VI, he survived both the downfall of his first master, EdwardSeymour, duke of Somerset, and implication in the attempt by the dying boy king andJohn Dudley, duke of Northumberland, to divert the royal succession to Jane Grey andthe Dudley family in 1553. Under Mary I, Cecil lost his place in government butcontinued to flourish, regularly attending catholic mass to prove his conformity to thenew regime. When Elizabeth became queen in November 1558, Cecil immediatelybecame her sole secretary of state and engineered the return of many Edwardianpersonnel and policies, not least in the making of the Elizabethan settlement of religion.As foreign and domestic threats to the Elizabethan regime grew during the 1560s and1570s, so, too, did the pivotal importance of Cecil in the queen’s government. Unlikeother great Tudor bureaucrats such as Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and WilliamPaget, Cecil’s survival instinct and Elizabeth’s tendency to remain loyal to old servantsensured that his career never burnt out. Instead, Cecil proved the great survivor ofTudor politics, accumulating offices and power into the 1590s: lord treasurer, actingsecretary of state, master of the Court of Wards, chancellor of the University ofCambridge, chief patron of Westminster and Gray’s Inn, holder of innumerable localoffices, and ‘good lord’ to scores of gentlemen. By the time he died in his bed in August1598, Cecil had also built three of the grandest ‘prodigy houses’ in England – Theobalds,Burghley House and Cecil House – and established separate baronial-sized inheritancesfor his two sons. Under James VI and I, these would become the earldoms of Exeter andSalisbury, which today survive in the Cecil family as marquessates. For scholars of earlymodern Britain, the influence of William Cecil’s extraordinary career is magnified stillfurther by the huge archive which he (and, later, his younger son Sir Robert Cecil, 1stearl of Salisbury) left behind. For much of Elizabeth’s reign, the various state papers’

242 Reviews


classes in the National Archives are virtually Cecil Papers.When combined with a further100-odd volumes of Burghley’s papers in the British Library and materials included inthe wonderful Cecil archive at Hatfield House, it is scarcely exaggerating to say thatscholars must study Elizabethan England largely through the mind and pen of WilliamCecil.

Burghley’s immense, dominating presence in Elizabethan history makes him a daunt-ing figure for biographers. The very scale of his archive and the longevity of his careermake him a formidably difficult subject. Although specific aspects of his life and careerhave been explored in literally scores of works, the essential biography of Burghley forthe past half century has remained a two-volume set by the American scholar, ConyersRead: Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (1955) and Lord Burghley and QueenElizabeth (1960). Despite the heroic efforts of research which it required, Read’s work(and many of the assumptions which underpin its analysis of Elizabethan politics) nowseems increasingly out of step with modern scholarship. This state of affairs inevitablyraises the vital question about Stephen Alford’s new single-volume biography ofBurghley: does this work finally displace Read’s old books? The short answer, unfor-tunately, is only partially.

There are many good things about Alford’s book. First, it is an attempt to write agenuine biography of Burghley, not a survey of his ‘life and times’. This means thatAlford tries to peel away the inscrutable persona of the dutiful royal servant whichBurghley habitually adopted in order to get at the man behind the mask. This endeav-our is not uniformly successful but, to be fair, the surviving sources can only take usso far – especially when some of these sources (as Alford rightly suggests) have prob-ably been pruned to remove politically damaging papers. Alford is also much moresuccessful than Read in fleshing out his portrayal of Burghley with insights into hisfamily life, and with the importance of his wives and daughters, in particular.There arealso sections which make excellent use of recent scholarship on Burghley’s enormouslyexpensive and politically conspicuous house building, and the lifestyle which it sup-ported. This book also succeeds in underlining the strong personal ties which drewCecil’s father and grandfather into royal service in the early decades of the Tudordynasty. Overall, as one might expect, Alford’s picture of Burghley is more nuanced anddecidedly more ambivalent than that advanced by Read. However, like most biogra-phers, Alford may still be too sympathetic to his subject. For all the emphasis uponCecil’s devotion to God, queen and country, it is hard to see his relentless determi-nation to prevent Elizabeth from coming to terms with Mary queen of Scots, forexample, and his collusion in the smearing of the Scottish queen as an adulteress andmurderess through the infamous ‘casket letters’ as anything other than the work of atruly ruthless politician.

Despite its very real strengths, the book is, nevertheless, curiously unbalanced and failsto engage with some hard questions about its subject. Although it is sound enough onCecil’s upbringing at Cambridge and offers important new insights into his supposedretirement from public affairs under Mary (including a previously unnoticed meetingwith the soon-to-be Queen Elizabeth in March 1558), the book’s account of Cecil’searly career under Edward VI is not entirely satisfying. Indeed, the book only reallybuilds full momentum once Cecil begins to plot the destruction of Mary queen ofScots. Indeed, Alford seems to be at his happiest in describing this 20-year drama, and

243Reviews


the various conspiracies, interrogations and executions which it entailed. As a result, thecentral core of the book revolves around this long cat-and-mouse struggle betweenBurghley and Mary, even though much of this material might be tied more directly toBurghley’s protégé, Sir Francis Walsingham (himself the subject of a three-volumebiography by Conyers Read dating from 1925). More importantly, this focus on plotsand spies squeezes out much that an enquiring reader might want to know about Ceciland Elizabeth’s government. The account of Elizabeth’s extremely grudging interven-tion in Scotland in 1560 (which Cecil supposedly treated as a resigning matter) seemsa little abbreviated and that of the disastrous expedition to Le Havre in 1562–3 evenmore so. John Guy has suggested in his recent biography of Mary queen of Scots thatCecil was at least vaguely aware in advance that Lord Darnley would be assassinated inScotland in 1567. Although Alford cites Guy’s book heavily in his endnotes, thisexplosive suggestion is pointedly evaded. Alford is also conspicuously silent on the rolewhich Cecil may have played in the seizure of ships carrying silver to pay Spain’s armyin the Low Countries in 1568 (a hugely dangerous diplomatic gambit) and on the storythat key councillors planned a coup against Cecil the following year and would havehanged him from the court gates if they had got their way. The latter may be a wildstory, but its circulation is, itself, significant and surely warrants some attention, even ifonly to dismiss it.

One of the key features of Conyers Read’s account of Cecil’s career is his insistenceon bitter factional divides within the Elizabethan privy council, especially between Ceciland Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester.Alford’s account implicitly rejects this old-fashionedinterpretation, and rightly so, but it also leaves the Cecil-Dudley relationship curiouslyunder-developed.When Leicester is mentioned, it is virtually only in the context of actsof friendship. What about occasions when they disagreed over matters of policy? Thefocus on Mary and her path to execution in 1587 also means that Burghley’s part inElizabeth’s decision to send troops to fight the Spanish in the Low Countries barely ratesa mention until the story of Mary’s destruction is completed. Yet this decision reversedmore than two decades of royal policy and plunged England into an open war withSpain which would ultimately last 19 years. In Alford’s account, this war seems to resultfrom Mary’s execution (pp. 305–7), but the English intervention had started in 1585 andPhilip II of Spain began to prepare an ‘enterprise of England’ that same year. Althoughthe account of Burghley’s career after the death of Mary given in the concluding twochapters is good at portraying the escalating health problems which he faced during the1590s, it is remarkably weak in terms of engaging with the important political events ofthe old lord treasurer’s final years.The more authoritarian religious policies endorsed byElizabeth in the early 1590s, for example, were, in many ways, a defeat for Burghley.Readers will also search in vain for any substantial discussion in the book of Burghley’srole as lord treasurer, even though he held this critically important office for more thana quarter of a century. When he was appointed lord treasurer in 1572, Burghley wascharged with cleaning up the rampant corruption in the exchequer which had flour-ished under his predecessor, the nonagenarian marquess of Winchester. Despite constantefforts at retrenchment in royal expenditure, Burghley’s tenure saw continued outrageouscorruption by his subordinates, which he seems to have hushed up to save his owncareer.This raises all kinds of questions about Burghley’s performance in this pivotal royaloffice, as well as about the many loud criticisms directed at him by catholic propagandists

244 Reviews


for being corrupt and shamelessly exploiting religious fear to maintain his hold over thequeen. Alford ignores the former issue entirely and dismisses the latter a little too easily.Many of the catholic attacks on Burghley were outrageous (‘the old bloodsucker’), butthey had resonance within England precisely because they played upon real concernsabout the extent of Burghley’s dominance over the government by 1590–1. Catholicpolemicists certainly exaggerated when they complained that Elizabeth’s realm hadbecome a regnum Cecilianum, but even some fellow courtiers privately called him ‘oldSaturnus’. No wonder Burghley repeatedly felt the need to justify his building of whatwere effectively private palaces. Finally, readers of this journal will want to know thatAlford’s narrative does mention parliament repeatedly, but his account of parliamentarypolitics offers no advance on the work published in the 1980s by G.R. Elton, MichaelA.R. Graves and Patrick Collinson.

How, then, to summarize this book? If the list of criticisms and questions here seemslonger than that of the book’s strengths, it is because this is a genuinely substantial bookon an extremely important subject and deserves careful comment. In writing a single-volume biography of Burghley, Stephen Alford has undertaken a genuinely formidabletask and it is perhaps inevitable that specialists will see where he has struggled with thematerial. For most readers, however, this will be a bracing introduction to one of TudorEngland’s most influential personalities. If it is by no means a complete replacement forConyers Read’s old volumes, this work at least offers many substantial advances on thoseold standards.

PAUL E.J. HAMMERUniversity of Colorado at Boulder

James Ussher:Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England. ByAlan Ford. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. xi, 315 pp. £64.00. ISBN9780199274444.

Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England:The Career and Writ-ings of Peter Heylyn. By Anthony Milton. Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress. 2007. xii, 255 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780719064449.

Despite the promotional gulf existing between an Irish primate and a Westminsterprebendary, the scholar polymath, James Ussher, and the polemicist, Peter Heylyn, are inmany ways representative of the two schools of churchmen who vied for ecclesiasticaldominance under the early Stuarts – until both were temporarily overwhelmed by thetriumph of puritanism in the mid 17th century.The voluminous writings of Ussher andHeylyn also make them highly suitable subjects for intellectual biographies, while anespecially interesting feature of their careers is that each changed their minds and, in thecase at least of Heylyn, did so fairly radically. Alan Ford and Anthony Milton areimpressive masters of their respective topics, having already provided a foretaste inilluminating articles written for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ford beginshis book with a helpful sketch of the religious state of play in late Elizabethan Ireland,

245Reviews


before going on to provide an evocative account of Trinity College Dublin and its rolein the intellectual formation of the young Ussher. Granted the undoubted puritaninfluences at work he is, nevertheless, sceptical of the view that Ussher started out as anonconformist. On the other hand Ussher does appear to have undergone something ofan intellectual sea change, coming by 1618 to embrace a modified version of Calvinisttheology known as hypothetical universalism. Ford does not really explain how hishappened, although it seems likely that the involvement of Ussher in drawing up theIrish articles of 1615, which incorporate a pretty unyielding statement of Calvinistdoctrine, forced him to confront the issue.At the same time, as Ford makes clear, Ussherestablished an enduring rapport with English puritans, symbolised by the fact that OliverCromwell granted him a state funeral in 1656. Probably one of the keys here was thecommitment of Ussher to preaching, his motto being ‘vae mihi si non evangelizavero’ (‘woeis unto me, if I preach not the gospel’) and, something which Ford misses, his archi-episcopal seal actually depicts him holding forth from the pulpit. Yet it was just suchpuritan links that rendered Calvinist episcopalians suspect in the eyes of Heylyn and hisfellow Laudians, both parties in retrospect blaming the other for the debacle of the 1640swhen prayer book and bishops were abolished.

The indications are that Heylyn initially had considerably more in common withUssher than latterly became the case. This can be seen most obviously as regards theirviews concerning the succession of the ‘true’ church via various medieval hereticalgroups. During the late 1620s Heylyn changed his mind on the subject and, appar-ently, on a range of other religious issues as well. Anthony Milton is able to dem-onstrate the shift by comparing the content of Heylyn’s first published work, theMicrocosmos of 1621, enlarged in 1625, with those of the 1630s and later. Miltonsuggests that the initial stimulus to this rethinking was a visit to France which Heylynmade in 1625, when he witnessed at first hand both French catholics and huguenotsin action; a subsequent trip to Guernsey in 1629 reinforced his unfavourable opinionof presbyterianism. Conversely he developed a more appreciative view of what itsEnglish advocates were now beginning to call the ‘beauty of holiness’, Amiens Cathe-dral having ‘sent him into raptures’. Heylyn first aired his new views during a theo-logical disputation at Oxford in 1627, coming, as a result, into conflict with theCalvinist regius professor, John Prideaux. All this makes eminent sense, but it is alsolikely that Heylyn had been following the controversy generated by the works of theArminian, Richard Montagu. Certainly much of what he went on to write was in theMontagu mould.

Milton is quite clear that the conversion of Heylyn was genuine and not a questionof simply trimming his sails to the prevailing wind blowing from the court of CharlesI. Here, however, we encounter a puzzling conundrum, because if Milton is to bebelieved Heylyn subsequently reneged, twice, on his new views. Alarmed by accusa-tions of popery, he allegedly used the venue of the Chapel Royal at Whitehall – arather surprising place in the circumstances – to preach a series of sermons in 1638–9during which he performed a ‘volte face’, reverting to the ‘anti-Catholic themes of hisearly Micrcosmos’ and thereby contradicting what he had been saying recently in printas an official government spokesman. Unpublished at the time, Heylyn finally hadthese same sermons printed in 1659 – at the very time that he was putting thefinishing touches to his Ecclesia Restaurata (1661), a Laudian history of the English

246 Reviews


Reformation. Evidently worried by aspects of his exposition, Milton raises only toshelve the question whether the sermons are indeed ‘authentic in content and dates’.A less drastic solution and one which the present reviewer respectfully offers is thatthe sermons are not, in fact, obviously anomalous. Thus, for example, they include alengthy attack on hard-line predestinarians who are accused of making God theauthor of sin. But this should not be allowed to detract from what is, in general, afirst-rate investigation of both a leading Laudian propagandist, especially as regards thehighly controversial altar policy of the 1630s, and an important progenitor of ‘angli-canism’ via his historical works including that famous life and times of ArchbishopLaud – Cyprianus Anglicus (1668).

The Church of Ireland, being long accustomed to a degree of independence, also feltthe impact of Archbishop Laud. As early as 1634 Laud intervened to force the earl ofCork to demolish his massive family tomb, which he had erected on the site of the highaltar in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Both Archbishop Ussher of Armagh and Arch-bishop Bulkeley of Dublin wrote to Laud on behalf of Cork, but to no avail; the tombmust make way for the communion table. Oddly his normal sureness of touch desertsFord on this occasion and he can be found writing that ‘Laud objected to the locationof the tomb in the chancery [sic] as blocking the view of the altar’! Ussher, however,continued to fight a rearguard action against Laudianism more generally and althoughCalvinist doctrine was now frowned on he still managed to purvey it through themedium of ostensibly historical works. Moreover with the collapse of the Carolineregime he emerged for a time as a vital religious mediator. While Ford discusses thepossible sources of Ussher’s famous scheme for the ‘reduction of episcopacy’ he, never-theless, overlooks Scotland, where, prior to the abolition of episcopacy by the GlasgowAssembly in 1638, such a hybrid system of bishops and presbyters had been in existencefor many years.

The royalism of Ussher was to prove his undoing, yet after the fighting was over hefound a comfortable berth as lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn where he combined his twin lovesof preaching and the study of antiquity. Silenced for most of the interregnum, Heylyntoo turned to the past with an eye to the present. For Ussher a major concern was torescue early Irish christianity and St Patrick in particular for protestantism, as well asestablishing a more accurate chronology for the working out of God’s dispensation.Ford indeed credits Ussher with playing a very significant role in the construction of a‘protestant national identity’, all the more poignant since the archbishop himselfbelonged to that select band of Anglo-Irish who, unlike most of their compatriots,rejected catholicism. By contrast Heylyn sought to identify the ‘tares’ sown in the EnglishChurch by foreign protestants, as well as stressing the independence of the clergy and thepowers of convocation. Apropos this last, Milton argues that Heylyn played a major rolein the fateful decision to keep convocation in being after the dissolution of the ShortParliament, his writings also influencing the later ‘convocation controversy’. Ford andMilton are quite excellent on these aspects, at the same time as deftly weaving thethought of their protagonists into the broader intellectual history of the period. Bothbooks are major achievements.

NICHOLAS TYACKEUniversity College London

247Reviews


Marsh’s Library. A Mirror on the World: Law, Learning and Libraries, 1650–1750.Edited by Muriel McCarthy and Ann Simmons. Dublin: Four Courts Press.2009. 311 pp. €55.00. ISBN 9781846821523.

The library established in Dublin by Narcissus Marsh, archbishop of Armagh, in 1701 isnow recognized as one of Ireland’s most significant historic libraries.This well-illustratedvolume of essays is the product of a conference marking the tercentenary of the 1707 actof parliament for ‘settling and preserving’ Marsh’s Library as ‘a publick library for ever’.It joins McCarthy’s and Simmons’s earlier collection – The Making of Marsh’s Library(2004) – in the group of books published on the library in recent years.

The collection as a whole ranges broadly over the political, religious and literaryculture of 17th- and 18th-century Ireland, and the various essays will be of interest tohistorians working in the different subject areas they cover. Jack Greene investigatesIreland in the changing context of British (and European) colonial expansion, suggestingthat in the early 18th century Ireland was ‘considerably more colonial than Britain’smore distant colonies’, and charting how it subsequently came to be perceived less as acolony and more ‘as a subordinate polity within the British Isles’ (p. 31). Irish religioushistory is the subject of essays by Thomas O’Connor on the relationship between Irelandand Rome in the early 17th century, and C.D.A. Leighton on the case for a specificallyIrish ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ in the early 18th. Elizabethanne Boran deals with Irishhistorical writing in her assessment of Dudley Loftus’s Annals, offering a useful discussionof annalistic versus narrative history. Ruth Whelan’s essay on the martyrological traditionof French protestants brings both a European and a literary perspective, as well asproviding a context for considering the career of Marsh’s first librarian, the Huguenotrefugee, Elie Bouhéreau. Several of the essays make contributions to the history of thebook: both Marie-Louise Legg’s account of the Synge Library, and A.C. Elias’s discussionof John Putland and the dispersal of Swift’s books, shed light on collecting practices,book auctions, and the retail book trade.

The most successful essays in this volume unite close examination of the history ofMarsh’s Library and its collections, with a broader appreciation of their contexts. Thebulk of the library’s holdings was made up of four book collections: Marsh’s own; thelibrary of Edward Stillingfleet – at nearly 10,000 volumes, one of the finest privatelibraries of late-17th-century England – which Marsh purchased for £2,500; Bou-héreau’s library; and the printed books of John Stearne, bishop of Clogher. The lasttwo of the four are discussed in some detail here. Philip Benedict and Pierre-OlivierLéchot’s careful analysis of Bouhéreau’s collection reveals it to be a ‘record of its owner’sintellectual formation, interests and impulse purchases’, as well as ‘the palimpsest of [his]family history’ (p. 165).Toby Barnard provides an account not just of the intellectual andpractical purposes of Stearne’s library, but also of his bibliomania – or as Stearne himselfput it: ‘that disease which inclines men to buy more books than they can have much usefor’ (p. 201). Narcissus Marsh himself placed the bulk of his printed books in his ownfoundation, but bequeathed his manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. At the time ofMarsh’s death it was his intention that the Dublin library should contain only printedbooks. Despite this, as Raymond Gillespie points out, various manuscript collectionsmade their way into the library in its first few decades. His essay is an account of thechanging ‘social role of the manuscript’ over the course of this period: as record

248 Reviews


publication took manuscripts from ‘the private context of the archive into the verypublic sphere print’ (p. 250), Gillespie argues that their place in libraries and collectionsunderwent a corresponding shift.

Parliamentary historians will be particularly interested in W.N. Osborough’s account ofthe 1707 act for settling and preserving the library (and Marsh’s struggles to get it ontothe statute books), and D.W. Hayton’s essay on the legislative activities of the Irishepiscopate.The 1707 act – which has an obvious parallel in the 1708 act for the betterpreservation of parochial libraries, passed in England less than 12 months later – is areminder of the intellectual and cultural significance contemporaries placed on collec-tions of books. It is ironic, then, that Marsh’s Library appears to have had relatively fewreaders in its early years. Michael Brown’s fascinating map of the intellectual andbibliographic life of early-18th-century Dublin goes some way to explaining Marsh’slack of success by juxtaposing the library with the competing cultural institutions of thetheatre, coffee house and tavern.

Mirror on the World is a somewhat loosely-organised book.The only obvious connec-tion between the various essays is their shared focus on items now held in the collectionsat Marsh’s Library, and in some cases this, itself, is rather unclear. It would have beenuseful to have a fuller discussion of Marsh’s objectives in establishing the library, and itsoperations in the early 18th century. (For this readers will have to consult the 2004volume.) The collection would have benefited from a fuller editorial introductionexplaining its relationship to the existing scholarship on the library.As a whole, however,this book is a useful reminder that the history of libraries and their collections has animportant place in a range of other fields of historical enquiry.

ROSEMARY DIXONQueen Mary University of London

Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, Polemic and Restoration Nonconformity. ByDavid J. Appleby. (Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain.)Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2007. xiv, 255 pp. £55.00. ISBN9780719075612.

Following the restoration of Charles II, a series of legislative measures was taken toensure the political and religious loyalty of ministers to the Church of England.The mostfar-reaching of these parliamentary statutes was the Act of Uniformity (1662), whichrequired all clergy to adhere in their liturgy to the Book of Common Prayer, and whichalso required that all ministers be episcopally ordained.The deadline for compliance was24 August 1662, St Bartholomew’s Day. In the event, almost 1,000 ministers refused toconform and were, as a consequence, ejected from their livings and barred from publicministry. This book provides a detailed and revealing study of the polemical storm thatbroke out in connection with the great ejection of 1662, and reconsiders the politicaland religious significance of the event to Restoration historiography.

The textual focus of David Appleby’s study is the surviving corpus of farewell sermonspreached by departing ministers in the weeks before St Bartholomew’s Day, 1662.

249Reviews


Although the day of the mass ejection itself passed off with little disturbance, the tide ofprinted pamphlets, collections of farewell sermons, and related Bartholomean materialthat followed provoked sharp exchanges between nonconformists and their opponents(government officials, magistrates and bishops). Farewell sermons by leading Londonnonconformists such as Edmund Calamy and his fellow Smectymnuuan, MatthewNewcomen, and by Richard Baxter,William Bates,Thomas Manton,Thomas Watson andothers, were prominent among the illicit pamphlets and compilations that issued fromthe presses, but the outpouring of print was not confined to works by London ministersalone. Farewell sermons by preachers in the west country and midlands in particularswelled the torrent of print. Yet Appleby is careful to point out that this emergence ofa national sense of solidarity among the threatened clergy in no way constituted the kindof organised presbyterian conspiracy feared and reviled in print by anti-puritans such asGilbert Sheldon, bishop of London (and, subsequently, archbishop of Canterbury),and hardline royalists such as Roger L’Estrange and John Berkenhead, licenser of thepress (p. 23). Such judiciousness on Appleby’s part is characteristic of the book’soverarching aim: to challenge existing critical views that typically see the farewellsermons as quietist, yet to recognize the mixed motivations of those whom the sermonsmost offended.

To achieve these ends Appleby’s study adopts a variety of perspectives – historical,biographical, literary – to show how the ejected ministers’ sermons presented a signifi-cant obstacle to the complete restoration of monarchical and episcopal authority. Theamplification of this challenge to the new political order via the textual transmissionof the Bartholomean material – ‘the ways in which they [the farewell sermons] arerecovered, interpreted or ignored’ (p. 10) – is a central and fascinating strand ofAppleby’s study. Following chapters on the social networks within which nonconformistministers operated, the centrality of preaching to moral and political education in theearly 1660s, and the coded use of biblical texts by Bartholomean preachers for thepurposes of that education, Appleby comes to the heart of his study. The production,dissemination, and reception of the farewell sermons is explored via bibliographicalanalysis, examination of networks of scribal and printed circulation, and study of mid-to late-17th-century literacy and reading practices. Supplementary materials in theBartholomean compilations – funeral sermons, ministers’ prayers, morning exercises,reading lists, and poems on Calamy’s imprisonment – are shown to be intrinsic to thewider Bartholomean message, and at the same time to stiffen opposition within theRestoration establishment (p. 132). Given their illegality, the lack of complete publica-tion details provided by printed farewell sermons is not surprising. Yet such incom-pleteness highlights important issues of authorship and reception. ‘More than any otherearly modern author’, Appleby argues, ‘the preacher functioned within his community’(p. 10). Precise historicism, sensitive to factionalism and the resultant rhetorical posturingthat built up around the long-standing and complicated relations and debates betweenministers, their congregations, and their detractors, is required to substantiate this claim,and this Appleby delivers with thoroughness and care. His fifth chapter and epilogue, inparticular, are especially adept at showing how individual farewell sermons came to beread as part of a larger nonconformist movement. The bundling of sermons into printcompilations only increased the degree to which the most peaceable preachers wereassociated with the sentiments of the most outspoken. Yet Appleby usefully shows how

250 Reviews


such associations were hardly made in a political vacuum. The fierce polemic directedat the Bartholomeans by Berkenhead, L’Estrange and others may seem disproportionatewhen Fifth Monarchists, quakers, and other radical sects posed a far greater threat to therestored regime than relatively moderate presbyterians such as Calamy, Baxter andNewcomen. But the martyrology arising around such ejected ministers could hardly beallowed to compete with the cult of the royal martyr, Charles I; nor, in the strugglebetween factions at Charles II’s court, could any opportunity be missed to condemn thepresbyterians for sparking the civil wars and for passively allowing the regicide to takeplace.

David Appleby’s sharply-focused study thus builds on the work of literary critics andhistorians such as Neil Keeble, Tim Harris and others, to deepen understanding of thereligious, political, and literary culture of Restoration nonconformism. Especially valu-able is this book’s contribution to a growing body of scholarship on early modernpreaching, which up to now has tended largely to concentrate on the ‘golden age’ ofthe Jacobean pulpit at the expense of the sermons of the mid and late 17th century.Ironically, one quibble I have with Appleby’s study is that it might usefully havedevoted more space to looking back to the Jacobean era, and earlier, in order todemonstrate the abundance of precedents and models available to ejected ministers intheir adoption of specific exegetical methods, consolatory and apocalyptic topics, andpublishing tactics. But this is a minor criticism of what is a substantial work ofscholarship. Appleby’s study will not only provoke overdue reconsideration of thesignificant part played by the Bartholomean materials in the Uniformity crisis, it willalso provide an important model for future literary-critical and historical studies ofearly modern sermons; a model simultaneously alive to social and political history,rhetorical performance and methods of textual interpretation, and the dissemination ofideas via manuscript and print.

HUGH ADLINGTONUniversity of Birmingham

Ireland and the Popish Plot. By John Gibney. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.2009. x, 206 pp. £45.00. ISBN 9780230574212.

Drawn from Dr Gibney’s doctoral thesis, Ireland and the Popish Plot seeks to unravel thecomplex circumstances surrounding Ireland’s experience of the Popish Plot and Exclu-sion Crisis, delving into ‘what did not happen’ and why (p. 3), tempting the reader withthe gun not fired and the sword left sheathed. Ireland’s impact upon the same events inEngland (much less Scotland) is meant to play a secondary role in this narrative.This isstated from the outset in chapter 1, which highlights the ‘problems and prejudices’inherited and innovated by Restoration Ireland. Drawing upon an established body ofwork on the subject, Dr Gibney reaches back to the 1530s to trace the ‘visceral Englishanti-Catholicism’ (p. 8) which would fuel the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. Therebellion of October 1641 is naturally established as the seminal event of the 17thcentury for fomenting this anti-catholic fervour both in Ireland and the three kingdoms

251Reviews


at large, providing the catholic rising par excellence for the politically motivated and thegenuinely fearful alike.

The events and non-events of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis rotate around thiscentral theme as the author describes the ways in which these fears of catholic violencewere manifested and manipulated. Looming large over affairs both in Ireland andEngland throughout the period is the figure of James Butler, then 1st duke of Ormondand Charles II’s trusted viceroy. Ormond’s composure and discretion with regard to theactual danger posed is ultimately Dr Gibney’s explanation for the stability whichprevailed in Ireland: ‘the right man in the right place at the right time’ (p. 155).This wasno easy task, as the machinations of individuals on all sides of the equation sought toemploy these fears to their own ends. Within Ireland, Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery andexemplar of the ‘militant colonial identity’ of Munster protestants (p. 39), provided apowerful counter to Ormond as he wielded fears of catholic activity to prod his politicaladversary and gain security for his protestant interests. Henry Jones, bishop of Meath,sharing Orrery’s ability to exert influence in London, inflamed anti-catholic opinion byboth pen and politic. In London, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st earl of Shaftesbury and,like Orrery and Jones, a vociferous critic of Ormond, seized upon fears of catholicviolence in Ireland to aid the case against the duke of York during the Exclusion Crisis,employing 1641 as a forewarning of what a catholic massacre under a catholic kingmight look like (p. 84). Caught in the whirlwind of such rumours was a host of Irishmenwhose testimonies and trials were used to both assuage and inflame these fears. Thesetrials arrayed ‘obscure and dubious Irish informers’ (p. 99) promoted by Shaftesburytoward a decidedly English audience with the aim of further provoking the alreadyvirulent anti-catholic environment. That it took the execution of Oliver Plunkett tobring about the arrest of Shaftesbury is cast as the zenith of Ireland’s role in the crises(p. 150). In the process, the institutions and governance of both kingdoms were mired inthese polemic debates – a point illustrated by Dr Gibney’s recurrent imagery of Ormondattempting to call a parliament amid allegations of being at once the friend and foe ofthose catholic conspirators.

The difficult task of constructing a cohesive narrative from this sea of rumour andintrigue is generally well met by Dr Gibney. Nevertheless, given the inherently murkynature of these allegations – and the author’s continuous assertion that there simplynever was any evidence for a catholic plot – the clarity of the narrative often falters. Asdiscussion of each new wave of allegations is layered one upon another, finding thecontext for such discussion in each chapter and sub-section can prove difficult. This isalso hindered at times by prose which, though on the whole pithy, can prove awkwardand occasionally cloud the argument further.

A number of questions are left unanswered. For instance, considering their perceivedinterest in an invasion of Ireland, how active were powers in Rome, Paris and Madridin combating or engaging with these anti-catholic fears? A passing look into thesemajor archives, in addition to those in Ireland and Britain, would provide an enhancedtreatment of catholic political thought and allegiance in Ireland in the mid and late17th century, balancing the author’s treatment of elite protestant identities during thisperiod. Equally useful would be a more comprehensive study of contemporary catholicprint culture in contrast and opposition to inflammatory protestant publications, espe-cially given an ever-expanding body of research on publishing and pamphleteering in

252 Reviews


both England and Ireland. In both cases, figures central to Dr Gibney’s narrative suchas Archbishop Peter Talbot or Archbishop Plunkett provide dialogues, printed andotherwise, extending back into the 1660s, when the study begins. As it stands, Irelandand the Popish Plot is predominantly grounded upon sections of Ormond’s vast corre-spondence printed by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, with scattered referencesto the Carte manuscripts and a number of collections in the British Library andNational Library of Ireland. This has produced a text which offers only the morefamiliar contributions and perspectives of Ormond, Orrery, Jones and others, ratherthan a more expansive view of the Irish element which, though not straddling Dublinand London politics, nevertheless articulated and experienced these fears. The morefundamental question of the actual place of anti-catholicism within Ireland remainsopen to further interpretation, as neither the reading public which was to be stirred bythese publications and conspiracies nor the wider political and clerical audience areilluminated.

Nevertheless, there is much to be found in Ireland and the Popish Plot which willcontribute to further debate regarding Restoration Ireland and the three kingdoms atlarge.The authoritative studies of the period by Barnard, Connolly, Kenyon, Lake, Millerand others upon which Dr Gibney draws will remain so by virtue of their scope andgreater depth of research; however, by explicitly focusing upon Ireland within thisfour-year drama, the author has provided a worthwhile supplement to these largerstudies. Moreover, while not the first historian to assess remembrances of 1641 in Irelandand Britain, the intertwining of this factor with acute political and religious circum-stances offers helpful insight into its practical implications.The result is an interesting, ifproblematically narrow, study of the institutions and politicians who both mustered andweathered these storms before the tempest of 1688.

MARK WILLIAMSHertford College, Oxford

James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops. By William Gibson. Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. x, 251 pp. £52.00. ISBN 9780230204003.

It is remarkable how little is known about an event as famous as the trial of the sevenbishops. We lack a full accounting of the king’s legal strategy. Why were the bishopscharged with seditious libel rather than the more serious charge of praemunire? Why wasthe case tried before the high court justices rather than before the Ecclesiastical Com-mission? Who were the jurors and how were they selected? What opinion did theepiscopate as a whole have of the trial and to what degree did they affiliate themselveswith the seven bishops? Though the trial has occupied a key place in the whig narrativeof the revolution of 1688–9, this mythical role has obscured as much as it has revealed.Because only certain facts about the trial are held to be relevant to that narrative, onlythose facts are related in one history after another. The trial needs a comprehensivelynew treatment and a fresh perspective. Unfortunately, neither is provided in WilliamGibson’s James II and the Trial of the Seven Bishops.

253Reviews


Gibson offers a narrative history that intertwines the lives of the seven bishops withan account of English politics from the accession of James II to the coronation ofWilliam and Mary.The author’s sympathies remain with the bishops throughout and heis keen to counter what he terms ‘revisionist’ accounts of King James II, contendinginstead that James was a despot. The main argument of the book is that the publicreaction to the trial of the seven bishops facilitated the revolution of 1688–9.While thisthesis is not inventive, it does bring the conventional view into sharp focus. Gibson paysclose attention to public reactions to the trial, which he charts through an examinationof contemporary pamphlets, newsletters and personal correspondence.The strength of hisbook is its tilling of new sources, particularly the rich and relatively unexplored manu-scripts held at the National Library of Wales. These sources are used to supplement theconventional narrative of the trial rather than to upend it.

Unlike other recent micro-histories of trials, such as Cynthia Herrup’s A House inGross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven, Gibson’s work does not explorethe ways in which the bishops’ trial revealed underlying cultural fault-lines or societaltensions. Instead he suggests that the trial emboldened a unified English ‘people’ to takea stand against their king.This viewpoint leads him to neglect the individual jurors andto see them only as the embodiment of a unified nation. The fascinating story of thejury’s selection is not told here.The bishops were, in fact, given the opportunity to strikeoff 12 names from the original list of jurors, as the contemporary accounts by RogerMorrice and William Westby attest. Notably, they chose to blackball the only knownnonconformist on the panel, the presbyterian physician, Sir John Baber. Despite theirprofessions of friendliness to dissenters, the bishops did not wish to be judged by one ofthem. This is a fault-line worth considering.

The motives of the king, beyond his anger at being defied, are also left unexplored.James is consistently presented as being outmanœuvered by the bishops, which canhardly be otherwise since he is accorded no grasp of strategy. He had, for instance,good reason to send the bishops to the Tower. Had he not done so, the trial wouldhave been delayed for three months, which would have interfered with his plans for aparliament that autumn. But Gibson simply scores the imprisonment as a propagandawin for the bishops, without giving us an account of the king’s motives for impris-oning them.

The attitudes of many of the other English and Welsh bishops are reported, but thetreatment is uneven, with an incorrect account given of the response of Bishop Lam-plugh of Exeter to the royal measures. Gibson asserts that the bishop ‘refused to sign thepetition against the Declaration though he had not asked the clergy to read it’ (p. 136).The opposite, in fact, is true. Lamplugh did sign the petition against the declaration ofindulgence, as Archbishop Sancroft’s manuscripts in the Bodleian Library attest, and hedid initially ask his clergy to read it, though he later reversed himself under pressurefrom his dean. Lamplugh was indeed a trimmer, but he took the opposite tack to thatattributed to him by Gibson.

The considerable number of errors in this volume makes it unsuitable for use as aclassroom text. Some of these errors are minor; others are not. The king’s printer wasHenry Hills, not ‘Henry Mills’ (p. 165). Gilbert Burnet was James Johnstone’s cousinrather than his uncle (p. 75).The number of county seats in the house of commons was92, not 312 (p. 75). Bishop Turner of Ely died a year before James II, not a few weeks

254 Reviews


after him (p. 188). James did not appoint a catholic as bishop of Oxford upon the deathof Samuel Parker; he left the bishopric vacant (p. 76). Lord Chancellor Jeffreys isdescribed as both a crypto-catholic (p. 70) and a ‘staunch Anglican’ (p. 106); the latter iscorrect.

SCOTT SOWERBYHarvard University

Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707. By Allan I.Macinnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. xv, 382 pp. Hardback£45.00; paperback £18.99. ISBN 139780521850797; 139780521616300.

Of the rash of publications prompted by the tercentenary of the creation of the unitedkingdom of Great Britain, Professor Macinnes’s heavyweight study vies with Christo-pher Whatley’s The Scots and the Union (co-authored with Derek Patrick, EdinburghUniversity Press, 2006) as the most substantial and important. Union and Empire offersnew research findings and new perspectives, that give a fresh view of an old subject, andradically challenge received opinions.The historiography is reviewed in a helpful intro-ductory chapter, recounting how a once-dominant ‘whig’ interpretation was subjectedto sustained, if diverse, attacks in the 1960s and 1970s, first by Christopher Smout’sargument for the necessity of union to reinvigorate an ailing Scottish economy; then byWilliam Ferguson’s exposure of the venality underlying the unionism of Scottish par-liamentarians; and finally by Patrick Riley’s neo-Namierite analysis of Scottish factions,which refined Ferguson’s depiction of the treaty as a massive political ‘job’. (Reflectingthe emphasis on the Scottish side of the bargain, Riley’s equally controversial thesisabout English ministerial motivation, which attributed the actions of Lord TreasurerGodolphin and the whig junto to calculations of immediate political advantage, is notdiscussed.)

In his turn, Professor Macinnes revises the interpretations of these earlier ‘revisionists’.In doing so, he builds on recent work by economic historians, and specialists in thehistory of Scottish political thought, but breaks new ground by the way in which heseeks to place the events of 1707 in a broader geographical context and a longerchronological perspective. The constitutional implications of the establishment of anintegrated British state are seen in the light of developments across the Stuarts’ domin-ions (especially in Ireland) in the century following the union of the crowns in 1603,while discussion of the economic implications is informed by a consideration of the fullreach of Scottish trading links, with continental Europe and across the Atlantic.The resultis an emphasis on ‘political economy’ as the primary intellectual context for union. Putcrudely, the argument is that, pace Smout, union was not necessary to facilitate Scottisheconomic growth; indeed, the Scots, far from securing vital trading advantages by union,were deceived by the English into relinquishing the promising position they had alreadyachieved in European and colonial commerce, and accepting instead a subordinateposition in an English-dominated global economic network. Given the customaryassumption made by historians of a prevailing gloom about the state of the Scottish

255Reviews


economy in the late 17th century, and the anguish expressed by some contemporariesover the failures of the Company of Scotland and the fiasco of Darien, such aninterpretation may appear counter-intuitive. For a self-conscious ‘revisionist’ or ‘post-revisionist’ this might be one of its prime attractions; nevertheless, this particular counter-intuitive interpretation does appear to be based on familiarity with the details of Scottishoverseas trade, and to be supported by impressive original research into the archives oftrading firms and families.

There is less on offer for the narrowly parliamentary historian. Certainly, ProfessorMacinnes has analysed the voting records printed in the Acts of the Parliament ofScotland (as part of a grant-funded project) much more comprehensively and system-atically than his predecessors. This produces some interesting results. There is said to beno obvious correlation between payments of salary arrears to officeholders and par-liamentary support for union. High voting rates are also observed, and a remarkablefrequency of cross-voting, which encourages the inference that Scottish MPs weregenuinely interested in issues, especially economic issues. However, the fact that thesearguments are presented statistically, rather than by reference to individuals, means thatthey lack the more convincing richness of texture to be found in Ferguson and Riley.Professor Macinnes also makes use of some promising new sources – in particular theLoudoun papers at the Huntington Library, the unfamiliar ‘parliamentary memoran-dums’ of the court MP, William Dalrymple, and diplomatic despatches in the Danishroyal archives. Analysis of his footnotes discloses an emphasis on these newly-discovered or newly-exploited collections at the expense of more conventional sourcessuch as the Hamilton, Montrose and Seafield papers in the National Archives ofScotland, and, even more strikingly, the family papers of the 1st duke of Queensberry,long considered the prime architect of union on the Scottish side. This would notnecessarily be a problem if the new material was rich, but it is not obvious from thetext that a great deal of gold has remained in the pan after a strenuous sifting.Moreover, the preference for new sources reflects an apparent lack of interest in theusual suspects behind the Scottish parliament’s abandonment of its independence, themagnates who brokered the treaty negotiations and ensured the passage of the Scottishact.This is perhaps surprising, since the general conclusion of the book, that union ranagainst Scottish national interests, seems to demand a close explanation of the Edin-burgh parliament’s decision.

Less surprising, but in its way as disconcerting, in a book ostensibly concerned withthe making of the union, is the relative lack of interest shown in the attitudes andactivities of English politicians and parties, a feature both illustrated and compounded bythe author’s less confident touch in dealing with the English scene, where mistakes overpoints of detail occasionally slip through. Of course, concentration on the Scottish sideof the treaty negotiations has long been a feature in Scottish historiography of the union,and Professor Macinnes is not alone among ‘revisionists’ or ‘post-revisionists’ in payingmuch less attention to the English side of his story. But it is disappointing, given theotherwise refreshingly broad horizons of the book, and unfortunate from the point ofview of constructing a satisfactory explanation of why union happened when it did. Ifthe union was indeed a master-stroke of English policy, as well as a disaster for Scotland,it would be as well to know how (as well as why) that master-stroke was devised and putinto execution. Contemporary evidence suggests that not every English MP in 1707 was

256 Reviews


sufficiently well versed in the essentials of political economy to appreciate that union wasthe best course of action to secure England’s dominance over its troublesome northernneighbour.

D.W. HAYTONQueen’s University Belfast

William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century. By Wilfrid Prest.Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xvii, 355 pp. £29.99. ISBN9780199550296.

Scholarly interest in Sir William Blackstone has accelerated over the last 20 years and thepublication of his collected letters by the Selden Society in 2006 has now been followedby Wilfrid Prest’s accomplished biography. Professor Prest has exhaustively scoured thearchives for every scrap of Blackstone material (there is no Blackstone archive as such)in his determination to convey the breadth and diversity of his subject’s achievementsinside and outside the law: as an academic administrator, poet, architectural writer,antiquary, bibliophile, and lay anglican. The result is an authoritative and fully-contextualised (and occasionally dull and over-stuffed) chronological survey and assess-ment that should finally put to rest the Bentham caricature of the great common lawjurist. Prest suggests that Blackstone’s Oxford career path developed earlier and moresmoothly than his progress as a lawyer. Elected a fellow of All Souls in 1743, Blackstoneheld a variety of college offices and often acted on its behalf in the courts, especially inseeking limits to the operation of ‘founders kin’. His talent was huge and his energieswere enormous but Blackstone’s progress in Hanoverian England beyond Oxford Uni-versity was hampered by his lack of patronage, his unclubbable character and the reducedbusiness coming before the central courts in the 1740s and 1750s. It was his Oxford legallectures (complete with innovative printed handouts) that thrust him into the publicspotlight and gave him a national profile that would find its consummation in hiselection to the Vinerian chair in 1758 and publication of the Commentaries on the Lawsof England between 1765 and 1768. This prominence brought him new patrons in theform of the young 2nd earl of Shelburne and 4th earl of Abingdon as well as mem-bership of the house of commons from 1761 until his nomination as a puisne judge in1770. Oxford still laid a major hold on his affections. He served as university assessor(chief legal officer) between 1753 and 1759 and even after his marriage in 1761,Blackstone found it hard to stay away from involvement in All Souls’ business orwrangling over the terms of the Vinerian bequest. Prest urges the importance of hisworking partnership with the long-serving MP for the university, Sir Roger Newdigate,and devotes much attention to Blackstone’s work as a barrister MP in the house ofcommons, first for Hindon then for Wallingford, making a strong case for his effective-ness in committee rather than on the floor of the House working to secure localinfrastructure improvements such as the transforming into a turnpike of the Wallingfordto Faringdon road. He refused the solicitor-generalship in 1770, a sure token of his wishto leave the hurly-burly of the House for a judgeship. In that capacity during the next

257Reviews


ten years, Blackstone served as a careful and conscientious justice and the significance ofindividual cases is fully unpacked here: an emphasis on the supremacy of parliament runsthrough them like a thread. Prest’s biography is by no means uncritical of its subject; thushe shows Blackstone to be habitually indifferent to the impact that his words and actionscould have but, overall, he pitches his contemporary importance extremely high in fieldsoutside the law. We thus end up with Blackstone as ‘a great educational innovator’(p. 308) and a rather negative view of Oxford to enable this hat to be fitted. And thereis, strangely, no sustained analysis of what gave the Commentaries such an extraordinaryimpact on contemporaries and posterity alike. This is not intended to depreciate thequality and range of Wilfrid Prest’s exhaustive scholarship or his completing the job ofLucy Sutherland, Ian Doolittle and others in rescuing Blackstone from ‘legal history’.But, in the end, it is as a jurist that William Blackstone will be understood, and not asa poet, architectural dilettante, or academic politician.

NIGEL ASTONUniversity of Leicester

Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair. By JonLawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. xv, 328 pp. £30.00. ISBN9780199550128.

Having previously written on British politicians’ rhetorical claims to represent thepeople, Jon Lawrence now turns to the forms, characteristics, and degrees of politicians’contact with the represented. Among the virtues of this study is its chronological sweep,spanning the mid 18th century to the present day, and its coverage of a wide array ofmodalities in which politicians interacted with the people over that period, including thetraditional hustings, the canvass, the mass platform, the campaign meeting, the constitu-ency surgery, the walkabout, and the broadcast studio. Lawrence also treats the alliedmeans by which politicians projected their image and message to the people: pressreporting, posters, leaflets, amplification, cinema, and televised ‘media events’.

In addition to these practices and mediations, Lawrence traces the emergence of newstructures and agents that sought to shape (or control) politicians’ exposure to their public,from 19th-century party organisations and their operatives to 20th-century media strate-gists and TV news interviewers. In the context of the growing nationalisation of electionsand the increasing individualisation of politics, he presents the dynamic web of tensionsamong all these forces as the state of the electoral art evolved and each party sought toobtain a margin of advantage over the other through superior techniques of electoraloutreach.The most effective forms of contact, changing with broader developments in thepolitical system and the available means and sophistication of communications, requireddifferent skills from each successive political generation. Lawrence ends, interestingly, withan optimistic view of the media’s place in contemporary electoral politics.

What was (and remains) fundamentally at stake, Lawrence contends, is the legitimacy tobe garnered by politicians through direct, and not infrequently difficult, confrontationwith those they aspired to represent (including non-electors before the advent of

258 Reviews


universal suffrage). In its various forms, this is a tradition of political trial by ordeal,whether it means facing a volley of rotten produce or dead animals, boisterous andheckling crowds, rough physical handling, implacable interviewers, or, latterly, TonyBlair’s ‘masochism strategy’ to expiate his public sins. Because it has been historicallynecessary at least to appear to be going before the people and to appear to be establishinga rapport, politicians and their advisors have continually devised new ways to manage thelevel and nature of actual contact.While the forms, strategies, and meanings of electoralencounters changed over time, the great continuity is that politicians had to show theirreadiness to risk public abuse – and take it with some good grace – as the price ofpower. (Lawrence does not consider whether politicians’ ability to withstand suchpunishment correlated in any way to successful performance in the Commons.)

In assembling this account, covering 36 general elections (from 1830 to 2005) and nota few by-elections, Lawrence has drawn upon and synthesised a vast secondary literatureon numerous facets of electoral practice, which is a substantial feat in itself.To illustratehis general points, he also makes extensive use of politicians’ papers and their publisheddiaries and memoirs. These cover both leading figures and those less well known toposterity, a helpful mix since it situates the efforts of those who attained high officewithin a more general view of election activities. In cases, such contextualisation makesa useful contribution to explaining later leaders’ early successes. The inner workings ofparty organisations and the techniques of political agents are documented throughmanuscript sources and political trade periodicals. Finally, Lawrence brings to beardetailed psephological data assembled by historians for earlier periods and the Nuffieldseries of election studies since 1945. Overall, Lawrence does an admirable job of bringingtogether these different types of information in a clear and concise manner.

In addition to its breadth of coverage, this book is also to be admired for its insistenceon not making a single-minded linear account of the development of electoral politics.Lawrence stresses that, at every stage, there is both continuity in change and change incontinuity as electoral practices and traditions were adapted, re-framed, or had theirfunctions assumed to a greater or lesser extent by succeeding innovations. As a result,however, he repeatedly circles back to ground he has covered before (almost as ifexpecting the book to be read in isolated chapters rather than as a whole). Also, afteradvancing a particular line of analysis, he habitually follows up by adducing otherevidence to show that readers should not take the case too far. It is highly commendableto see things in the round in this way, but at times the result is descriptive irresolution.

That Lawrence stops short of using the data he has assembled so well as the basis fora larger and more definite argument about British politics stems, in part, from the factthat his study resembles its protagonists living inside the ‘campaign bubble’. By stickingclosely to its brief to examine the forms and methods of ‘electioneering’, this accountleaves virtually no room for the wider context of concerns, events, and controversies towhich voters responded when they went to the polls. Lawrence makes clear that hisfocus is on the mechanisms rather than the content of politics (p. 8), but this severelylimits what may be gained from this study.Without factoring the significant public issuesof the day into his analysis, it is impossible to understand the extent to which theelectioneering techniques that Lawrence describes contributed to producing votes (bothcore and ‘floating’).Thus, Lawrence cannot properly assess the political consequences ofany given electoral development. Instead, public issues are generally invoked as subjects

259Reviews


of mediation rather than as determinants of electoral outcomes. The mediation ofpolitics, too, is not well contextualised since all the forms of communication Lawrenceexamines, such as speech-making, graphic arts, and broadcasting, were important inshaping public culture more generally.Accounting for such limitations points to the needfor further research, but that work will be greatly facilitated by Lawrence’s history ofBritish electoral practices.

JOSEPH S. MEISELThe Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Wellington Studies IV. Edited by C.M. Woolgar. Southampton: Hartley Institute,University of Southampton. 2008. x, 388 pp. £10.00. ISBN 9780854328956.

With the decline of grand narratives and theoretical structures to explain history,biography has returned as a means for understanding the past. Wellington Studies IV,edited by Christopher Woolgar, offers a fine example of taking a major figure’s life andcareer as a starting point to consider their age. Its publication coincides with the 25thanniversary of the University of Southampton’s acquisition of the Wellington papers, andperiodic conferences hosted there provide an opportunity for reflection on scholarshipfostered by the collection.The 14 essays presented in the present volume came out of thethird Wellington Congress held in July 2006.Their subjects range across politics, foreignand military affairs, government administration, and medial culture over the course ofWellington’s long life.

Peter Jupp’s opening chapter assesses the balance of change and continuity in Britishpolitics from 1770 through 1850. An earlier book on politics during Wellington’s three-year administration in the late 1820s prompted the late Professor Jupp to write a majorstudy on the governing of Britain from 1688 to 1848. Here he focuses on the three areasof executive government, parliamentary government, and public opinion. Pointing outthat the office of prime minister only received official recognition much later in 1878,Jupp emphasizes how the individual holding the post determined the scope of the firstminister’s authority.While strong figures, includingWellington, assumed a supervisory roleover departmental business, many others largely co-ordinated their colleague’s efforts andconciliated their differences. Significant continuity lasted in parliamentary government upto 1830, and even beyond, though the number of private members’ bills on publicbusinesses decreased substantially. Increased parliamentary scrutiny over the executivecounter-balanced a modest growth over ministerial control during Wellington’s tenure.Jupp also notes continuity in the structure of the electorate after the 1832 Reform Actdespite the fact that its numbers doubled.Wellington, however, dreaded the prospect thatpublic opinion would turn against parliament and even in 1834, believed the conse-quences of reform were still emerging. Jupp concludes that despite holding office indifficult times, Wellington did not face unique circumstances and the considerablecontinuities that balanced changes meant that his fears never came to pass.

Wellington’s political and military careers fit together from an early stage, and RoryMuir’s fine essay looks at politics and the army during the peninsular war. A significant

260 Reviews


proportion of MPs were serving officers, not least because the army drew from the sameelite as parliament and membership provided leverage for professional advancement.Wellington took a more active partisan role than most officers in parliament, but theoverlap between parliament and the army created a danger that political differences athome might be reflected among senior ranks in the peninsula. Opposition criticism ofearly campaigns further presented Wellington with the task of ensuring respect for hisauthority. Military ability rather than political affiliation determined Wellington’s views ofhis officers, and Muir shows that he devoted significant effort and tact to conciliatingthose he valued. Indeed, Wellington’s talent for managing difficult men seems moreapparent in managing the army command than during his later cabinet tenure. Sieges, asBruce Collins demonstrates, had a political aspect, whether in India or the Peninsular,though limited artillery and siege equipment often prompted Wellington to stormfortifications rather than wait for the defenders to surrender.The symbolism of fortifiedtowns in India conferred prestige upon capturing them, but Collins emphasizes how theneed to keep campaigns on schedule militated against siege warfare and made stormingbreaches a preferred tactic to avoid delay. Charles Esdaile takes the story of John Downie,a British commissary turned Spanish general, to show how the revolutionary era markedthe ‘age of the adventurer’.Although Wellington had the place in society to use his talentsand become a hero – ‘the man of courage, principle, an honor who never compromisedhis beliefs and was above all scandal’ – Downie, who lived by his wits, could nevertranslate his exploits into the renown in England he craved. Queen Marie Louise of Spaindrew a different kind of renown, and Antonio Maturana takes her image as an openingto discuss the mingling fact and fiction in the public reputation of ancien regime consorts.

Image – and its political implications – mattered to Wellington, and several chaptersexplore aspects of his own changing image. Susan Jenkins sets out the relationshipbetween Wellington and Sir Thomas Lawrence as sitter and portraitist. Much as heresented the time involved in sitting for paintings, Wellington developed a relationshipwith Lawrence and facilitated his efforts to paint leading European figures. RichardGaunt looks at caricatures that created a particular visual image of Wellington, oftendrawing on formal portraits for depictions providing ‘staging points on Wellington’s longcivilian journey from Waterloo to the grave’ (p. 166). Print culture, whether in ephemeralpamphlets or the newspaper press, shaped that image at key moments no less than visualrepresentations. Wellington’s role in passing catholic emancipation sparked an avalancheof pamphlets, while casting a former hero as the villain for ultra-tories. His duel withLord Winchelsea in 1829 provides the focus for Kathryn Beresford’s chapter on how thatincident fits with charges of betrayal, while Douglas Simes reassesses ultra-toryismthrough a discussion of how the ultra-tory press responded to Wellington’s administra-tion.Though leading scholars of an earlier generation dismissed ultras as little more thana nuisance, Simes discerns greater resilience and influence on the emerging ConservativeParty of the 1830s. Even by Victoria’s coronation, Wellington remained controversial ashis strong views, often at odds with natural allies, balanced his authority.Woolgar closesthe volume with reflections on Wellington as a conversationalist whose distinctive voiceshaped an image through the memories and published reflections of contemporaries.While no recordings exist, other printed and manuscript sources give a window onWellington’s conversation and speech. Not only are these materials valuable for under-standing Wellington, especially in private, but they also provide information on politics

261Reviews


and society. Indeed, as with the volume as a whole, Woolgar’s engaging chapter pointstoward opportunities for further study with materials held at Southampton.

WILLIAM ANTHONY HAYMississippi State University

Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815. By Katrina Navickas.(Oxford Historical Monographs.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. x, 274pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780199559671.

This book is an appeal for a more developed regional history. In her introduction andon the last page Katrina Navickas asks for ‘a new form of “national” study, in whichthe history of the nation is analyzed from the region upwards, rather than, as is usuallythe case, from the state and high politics downwards’. One cannot help remembering thebevy of county studies of the civil war period that years ago profoundly affected ourunderstanding of that crisis. Navickas makes a convincing case that in her period thereare important local and regional particularities that lie undetected if we regard suchmatters as class formation, popular radicalism or emergent Britishness as nationallysynchronised and unified developments.

The region dealt with is essentially south-east Lancashire, roughly the area described byDr John Aikin in his Description of the Country from Thirty to Forty Miles around Manchester(1794), itself good evidence of a developing sense of regional distinctiveness. An infra-structure of roads and markets increasingly linked this part of the county.While Navickasdoes full justice to local, including village and township, peculiarities, she also explainshow the social connections of the working population were expanded by religioussocieties, friendly societies and the putting-out system. Manchester became the organisingcentre of radical agitation, receiving delegates from the surrounding districts. There aretantalising hints that other comparable regions, for example the West Riding, weredifferent in important ways: why was evangelical religion relatively weak in Lancashire;why were friendly societies and the revolutionary United Englishmen relatively strong?

The United Englishmen was the most active radical element left after the loyalistcrackdown in the 1790s.The book’s main thrust is to explain how Lancashire radicalismre-emerged from this trauma to become the most potent force in northern popularpolitics in the post-war period. Hence the starting date of 1798. To end in 1815 wasdeliberate, partly because the events leading up to Peterloo have been well covered, butalso because Navickas wants to make the point that mass platform radicalism was alreadywell-prepared organisationally and ideologically. No one needs to be told that ‘reform’sheltered different languages and ideas and different strategies and programmes. But itcan be argued that the moderate reformers of Liverpool – ‘bourgeois radicals’ toNavickas, but sometimes called the Roscoe circle – are short-changed here. They werealways a force to be reckoned with in the town and their ‘liberal’ politics, all thingsconsidered, held up well during the entire period.

Liverpool possessed a much stronger civic identity and culture than did Manchester,and Roscoe and his friends readily co-operated across party lines when it came to

262 Reviews


various cultural, philanthropic and patriotic projects. It could be claimed that they hada royal protector in Prince William, duke of Gloucester, who acted as local militarycommander from 1803. Canning’s election as MP for Liverpool in 1812 was even avictory of sorts for them, for Canning as a supporter of catholic emancipation yetprotégé of Pitt’s was hardly the man to represent the Orangeism and unprogressivetoryism to which Lancashire loyalism by this time adhered. Post-war there was an elitereformist as well as a popular radical inheritance for Lancashire that in this book ratherescapes notice. Huskisson, after all, succeeded Canning at Liverpool and the first MPelected for Manchester in 1832 belonged to a prominent local family of dissenters whohad carried a liberal rather than radical flag during the war years.

That said, Navickas is right to emphasize the strength of loyalism’s hold on the politicsof the region as a whole after the turbulence of the 1790s. Loyalists dominated localgovernment and the magistracy, civic rituals and the articulation of patriotism. In a tellingphrase, Navickas reminds us of how they had successfully carried ‘ “vulgar conservatism”on to the streets’. Then follows a thoughtful account of how loyalist control of publicspace was gradually lost – St Peter’s Square, Manchester where Peterloo occurred, was anew venue for public meetings opened by the radicals – and of how loyalism’s hold onthe gentry and business elites weakened until it was too socially exclusive and tooconfined to select clubs and societies for its own good.A critical event was the Manches-ter Exchange riot in April 1812 when a crowd prevented the town’s rulers from holdinga petitioning meeting on their ground. Navickas is also excellent and original on thespecial character of Lancashire’s church and king loyalism which imbibed the highanglican, non-juring traditions of the region and transmuted into fierce anti-catholicismand fear of the mob. Officers of the county’s militia regiments who served in Ireland afterthe 1798 rebellion probably introduced Orangeism and its lodges into the area.

Radicalism as a popular movement in Lancashire from 1807 developed as a general-ized protest in response to trade depression and a war which seemed endless. Theregion’s economic distress was particularly severe, and the state could be blamed becauseof the blockade it had imposed on Napoleonic Europe, the hostility of the United Statesit had provoked and the war without allies its diplomacy had produced. A convincingcase is made that Lancashire radicalism was largely home grown; the metropolitanradicalism of Burdett and Cartwright was neither an initiating nor a particularly inspi-rational influence.What existed indigenously was a strong country tradition suspicious ofcorruption in high places, the survival of Paineite ideas of social justice, trade unions thatwanted the regulation of employer self-interest and numerous religious congregationsthat believed ‘perpetual war’ was anti-christian.This broad coalition of interests mobilisedagainst state corruption easily became the mass platform that made the north the centreof radicalism post-war.

Navickas asks the question, as she must, whether patriotism and an associated sense ofBritishness overrode these local divisions. Volunteer corps, military reviews and civicoccasions like the royal jubilee of 1809 produced high levels of popular participation inLancashire as elsewhere, but the meaning that was attached to these activities is difficultto determine. The conclusion here is that a stronger sense of ‘provincial’ identity andinterests against centralist intrusion or the metropolitan ‘other’, together with localparticularities, acted as a ‘filter’ for patriotic emotions and prejudices. So, for example, thelocalism of the volunteer movement is emphasized where often companies were formed

263Reviews


around local leaders and communities and resisted integration into larger, more efficientmilitary formations. The propertied elite could regard volunteers as more useful forreinforcing local policing than for national defence against French invasion. Only abouthalf of Lancashire’s volunteer officers transferred their services to the newly-formed localmilitia in 1809 compared with about two-thirds over the whole country.

Does Navickas overstate provincialism? The firmer regional identity of the ‘cottondistrict’ must be accepted, and it is true that parliamentary legislation (notably theCombination Acts) and government policy (notably the orders in council) seriouslyaffected economic interests in Lancashire. But resistance to such interference also led,sooner or later, to attempts to organise action on a national scale invoking nationalconcerns. After the orders in council were withdrawn, there was real interest in forminga general chamber of commerce to provide more powerful representation at the centreof government in the future. Even more to the point, local military mobilisations weredirected towards national defence; volunteers were trained to ‘serve in the line’ and theplan in 1803–4 was for several thousand Lancashire men to march towards London inthe event of a French invasion in the south-east. Volunteers took a personal oath ofloyalty to the king. Finally, a good argument can be put up that evangelical religionrepresented the apex of Britishness in this period: evangelicals were supremely consciousof the providential history of nations and much of their interest in slave trade abolitionand overseas missions, and, indeed, eventual victory over Napoleon, represented theirgrowing sense of national destiny.

J.E. COOKSONUniversity of Canterbury

A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism.By Aaron Edwards. (Critical Labour Movement Studies.) Manchester: Manches-ter University Press. 2009. xiii, 240 pp. £60.00. ISBN 9780719078743.

In 1948, the senior Labour Party minister, Herbert Morrison, paid a visit to NorthernIreland. It was not a happy experience. Afterwards, he told the house of commons that:‘I felt that democracy was either dying or almost dead there, because we held a meetingunder the auspices of the Northern Ireland Labour Party [NILP], of which we informedthe police. Prior to the meeting the “Lambeg” drummers came out and it was impossiblefor us to make ourselves heard. They were allowed to parade the streets and to comewithin two feet of the platform from which I was speaking. [. . . ] Although I went to thepolice prior to the meeting and during the meeting, they were quite helpless in thematter’ (Hansard, Commons Debates, cdlvii, cols 344–5: 28 Oct. 1948). The episodeillustrates clearly the nature of the difficulties faced by the NILP as it struggled to createa viable alternative to sectarian politics. It also helps explain the British Labour Party’stendency – fraternal visits, financial aid, and other formal links notwithstanding – to keepits sister party at arm’s length. As Aaron Edwards shows in this worthwhile book, theAttlee government established a functional relationship with the Stormont administrationwhilst taking little note of the NILP’s complaints about religious discrimination in the

264 Reviews


province. (NILP members complained that Morrison had spent too much time during histrip ‘in the company of Tory bosses’ (p. 42).) If Morrison and others found NorthernIreland’s sectarianism distasteful, then they also tended to relegate it to the status of‘somebody else’s problem’.This approach, of course, blew up in the British Labour Party’sface in 1968–9; and the NILP, which by that point had made some (fairly modest)electoral advances, was one of the victims.Although it staggered on until formally woundup in 1987, the party could not hope to thrive in an atmosphere in which the idea ofnon-sectarian politics struck most of the province’s voters as an irrelevance.

The NILP has been marginalised in the historiography of the British Labour Party.One must not, of course, exaggerate its importance. It never returned an MP toWestminster, and at no election returned more than four members to Stormont; itselectoral peak came in 1962 when it achieved 26% of the vote (p. 72). Nevertheless, itis striking that, for example, the party does not receive even a solitary mention inLabour’s First Century (2000), the collection edited by Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane andNick Tiratsoo. Edwards is, therefore, to be commended for his effort to rescue the NILPfrom the historical ghetto. He has mined such sources that are available (including BritishLabour Party records and oral history) to produce a coherent and sympathetic accountthat is, however, no whitewash. From his account, it is clear that, from its foundation in1924 until the end of World War II, the party formed a fairly insignificant challenge toUnionism. Its acceptance of partition in 1949 – following a bitter internal battle – helpedcement such electoral success as it had in the post-war years. Yet, even in quiet times,its efforts to create a social democratic alternative could make only limited headwayagainst the powerfully-held sectarian feelings of many voters. Edwards relates, forinstance, the story of Billy Boyd, who was both a Stormont NILP MP and a localcouncillor in a protestant area of West Belfast. He was expelled from the party in theearly 1960s because, in opposition to its policy, he supported his council constituents’wish that children’s playgrounds in the city should be shut on Sundays. This ostensiblytrivial argument ran much deeper, of course, than mere swings and roundabouts, becauseit involved conflicting protestant and catholic views of the sabbath and the attempt ofone group to impose its standards on another.

The book has weaknesses as well as strengths. It is part of Manchester UniversityPress’s excellent Critical Labour Movement Studies series, but it appears to be less amonograph than a general history of the NILP. As such, it does not claim to be makingany radical new interpretation, although it does offer some useful corrections to thework of previous scholars. Yet as a historical overview it is lacking, in so far asopportunities to bring the story to life are missed. For example, Edwards provides aless-than-complete picture of Harry Midgley (1892–1957), a key figure in the NILP’searly development, who resigned from the party during World War II before making thetransition to Unionism. He was a colourful individual, but the book omits a number ofsalient biographical facts. These include his deprived personal background and warservice as well as his loss of support amongst catholic voters in the 1930s on account ofhis opposition to Franco in the Spanish civil war. Nor are we told of the occasion in1945 when Midgley punched NILP leader Jack Beattie in the course of a parliamentarydebate. The overall effect of such omissions is to render a potentially fascinating topicrather dry. In fairness, it must be added that the book gains much in readability from thepoint where it tackles the dramatic events of the later 1960s.

265Reviews


Criticisms aside, this book serves as a valuable reminder of the ambivalent position thatNorthern Ireland held (and still holds) within the United Kingdom. It reminds us thatthe instinct to treat the province’s problems as peculiarly local and indigenous, separatefrom the ‘normal’ history of the rest of the UK, must be resisted. With luck, Edwards’swork will encourage historians of the British Labour Party to integrate the story of theNILP much more firmly into their own accounts.

RICHARD TOYEUniversity of Exeter

NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non-State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945.Edited by Nick Crowson, Matthew Hilton and James McKay. Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. xi, 303 pp. £55.00 ISBN 9780230221093.

This is an ambitious and eclectic study which skilfully and successfully enshrines severaldiscrete objectives. Extending the term non-governmental organisation (NGO) beyondpolicy actors such as the international development agencies to which it has often beenprimarily applied, this rich and valuable collection of case-studies applies it to theplethora of social movements which have burgeoned in Britain since 1945, most notablywith regard to campaigns and issues pertaining to anti-apartheid, environmentalism, fairtrade, gender politics, human rights, nuclear disarmament and poverty. In analysingNGOs in these spheres, as well as various others, such as the late Mary Whitehouse’sNational Viewers and Listeners’ Association (NVLA) – thereby illustrating that not allsocial movements are liberal, left-leaning or progressive – this volume examined suchaspects as the expansion of NGOs in Britain since 1945, the constituent groups whichcollectively constitute specific social movements, modes of collaboration and sources ofconflict, methods of campaigning and lobbying, and their relationships with formalpolitical actors and governing institutions.

The significance of tracing the development of NGOs from 1945 is not simply that oftreating the end ofWorldWar II as a convenient or neat starting point for such a study, butbecause this heralded the shift, for the next 30 years or so, to Keynesian economicmanagement and the Beveridgian welfare state, both of which, indirectly or unintention-ally,had significant consequences for the subsequent trajectory or transformation of sundryNGOs.Economically, the post-war boom facilitated by demand management, full employ-ment, and increased prosperity for the majority of the population, paved the way for the1960s’ development of what Ronald Inglehart termed post-materialism, whereby thegeneral satisfaction of primary material needs led some citizens to turn their attention towider issues of a cultural, ethical or social character, although some of these, particularlyanti-poverty campaigns and fair trade, obviously enshrined an economic dimension.

At the same time, the state’s assumption of formal responsibility for cradle-to-gravewelfare provision, along the lines proposed in the 1942 Beveridge Report, provided anew impetus and focus for charities, voluntary bodies and anti-poverty campaigners.Indeed, an apparent paradox is identified, for whereas it might have been expected thatthe establishment of the welfare state would lead to the demise of bodies concerned

266 Reviews


with social provision, the obverse is true, as various organisations have sought tohighlight the deficiencies or gaps in the welfare state, and draw attention to residualpoverty. Furthermore, some of these charities and voluntary bodies have effectivelyacquired greater prominence and importance by virtue of being ascribed a role indelivering social and welfare services. They remain NGOs by virtue of being formallyindependent of governments, and remaining politically neutral, as befits those withcharity status, but are, none the less, assisting governments in the implementation ofvarious policies, as part of the much-vaunted ‘third sector’ betwixt the state and theprivate sector.

One particular aspect of the growth of NGOs which a number of contributorshighlight concerns the disagreements and occasional schisms within specific social move-ments over political strategy or tactics. For example, Jodi Burkett notes how campaignersfor nuclear disarmament in the late 1950s and early 1960s were somewhat dividedbetween the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) itself, which generally soughtto focus on peaceful campaigning, and lobbying politicians, particularly the Labour Party,whereas the Direct Action Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons, along with the Com-mittee of 100, eschewed such constitutionalism in favour of civil disobedience. Suchdifferences variously reflected or reinforced personality clashes and power struggles withinthe anti-nuclear movement. Meanwhile, Christopher Rootes observes how environmen-talists have also been characterised by divisions between proponents of professionallobbying and the presentation of carefully-researched evidence and arguments to influ-ence environmental policies, as increasingly symbolised by Friends of the Earth, and thosewho prefer to focus primarily on direct action, often reflecting scepticism that profes-sionalisation is tantamount to co-option or emasculation by the political establishment.

Another manifestation of professionalisation, though, is examined by Tanya Evans inher chapter on the poverty lobby, where she delineates the increasing utilisation ofempirical evidence and academic analyses in campaigns to alert public opinion andpolicy makers alike to the continued existence of poverty in contemporary Britain. In sodoing, anti-poverty groups have sought to illustrate that poverty is largely structural inorigin, or a consequence of government policies, rather than caused by the failings ormoral culpability of the poor themselves. Moreover, Evans notes how a group like OneParent Families transformed itself from a voluntary body dispensing advice to unmarriedmothers, to one which focused on their rights, and also evidence derived from empiricalresearch and academic studies into poverty, thereby often lobbying alongside bodies likethe Child Poverty Action Group.

In all of these cases, though, along with others studies in this volume, tensions not onlymanifest themselves between distinct organisations operating in the same broad sphere orcampaigning on the same issue, but also within individual bodies in cases where theleadership seeks to prioritise professionalisation and elite-level lobbying, and some of themass membership is wary of incorporation and neutralisation, and thus want to pursue(or continue pursuing) direct action or other modes of civil disobedience. In thiscontext, Darren Halpin provides a sophisticated and nuanced discussion of some of thetensions between the need for effective and cohesive leadership, as reflected and rein-forced by professionalisation of various NGOs, and the compatibility of this with internaldemocracy and membership recruitment. Halpin also emphasizes the conceptual distinc-tion between ‘authenticity’ and ‘representativeness’ of various NGOs; to what extent can

267Reviews


an organisation claim to represent the interests of a particular section of society if theindividuals who comprise that section of society do not chose to join the organisation?In other words, to what extent can the poverty lobby claim to represent the poor ifits leadership, and even most of its membership, comprises well-educated, socially-concerned, middle-class professionals engaged in ‘benevolent advocacy’, rather than thepoor themselves?

This is an intellectually-stimulating study whose breadth of coverage, and the issues itraises, should readily appeal both to political scientists and to social/cultural historianswhile also proving of great interest and utility to those who are themselves directly orprofessionally involved in NGOs. In other words, this is a book which deserves to beread by academics and activists alike.

PETER DOREYCardiff University

Reinventing Britain: Constitutional Change under New Labour. Edited by AndrewMcDonald. London: Politico’s. 2007. ix, 261 pp. £19.99. ISBN 9781842752081.

The constitutional reforms begun by the Labour government after 1997 were not quiteintroduced in a fit of absent-mindedness. But they were introduced without muchthought about the consequences, or about their compatibility with other things whichthe government hoped to achieve. Having given the presents of limited self-governmentto the people of Wales, Scotland and London, the government was astonished when therecipients wanted to decide for themselves what to do with the gift, and swiftly tried totake back with a political right hand what had been donated with a constitutional left.Tony Blair reacted in alarm at the apparently completely unforeseen consequences: ‘Youcan’t have Scotland doing something different from the rest of Britain.’ It was if the(new) party somehow thought that devolutions of power would do no more than givelocal legitimation to central decisions.The result was to make the eventual triumphs ofRhodri Morgan and Ken Livingstone even more resounding, since they could presentthemselves as the people’s choice standing up to the bully boys of Westminster and, inthe case of Wales and Scotland, English bullies as well.

Yet despite constitutional reform being the most lasting contribution of the govern-ment which came to power in 1997, the changes have been surprisingly peripheral topublic political consciousness, a marginalisation which the contributors to this collectionof essays, a mix of public servants, academics, journalists, and politicians, sometimes in theshape of the same person, seek to redress.

There are nine chapters, divided under the headings ‘Story’, ‘Origins’, ‘Process’ and‘Meaning’, and the editor, Andrew McDonald, presents the three chapters which comeclosest to a narrative or record of events, as the ‘spine’ of the book. The editor is clearabout both the book’s assumptions and its responsibilities: ‘we have seen the institu-tional architecture of the state remodelled and the relationship between citizen andstate refashioned . . . Britons have been given new rights’. The contributors, whilsthaving different views on what has happened, ‘share two assumptions. First, that the

268 Reviews


reforms are of fundamental importance for the future of the state and its citizens.And second, that the reforms could and should be better understood at home andabroad.’

But given the commitment to public enlightenment and hence to the politicalconsequences of reform, the book is restrained in its institutionalism and legalism. Thefirst chapter, of which the editor is co-author, is more a chronicle than an analysis, aninterpretation, or a commentary. Its glossing over the politics of the events it describesis remarkable; indeed it is a chronicle with the politics effectively left out, so that it israther like reading the minutes of a meeting with no knowledge of the discussion, letalone of the context.

The second of the editor’s three key chapters, by the journalist Peter Riddell, is farmore illuminating. Giving his account a political dimension, he notes the connectionbetween radicalism and opposition, and traditionalism and power: parties who have beenout of office for several sessions are far more likely to seek restraints on and dispersal ofcentral power, than those who enjoy that power. Riddel comments that the Labour Party‘wanted to hold power, not share it’. But so have all governments; that, after all, is whatgovernment is about.

The remaining chapters mop up the bits and pieces: Kenneth MacKenzie records theadministrative and legislative progress of the various reforms; Mark Bevir relates whatwas done to the possible justifications and inspirations in social democratic and liberalthinking; Joseph Fletcher examines rights; Kate Malleson discusses the judiciary; AilsaHenderson looks at Scotland and Wales; Craig Parsons at Britain and Europe; and JackCitrin at the reforms and their implication for British identity.

The book suffers one of the, frequently unavoidable, consequences of contemporarycomment and record: the relentless advance of contemporaneity beyond the date ofpublication, leaving the very desire for up-to-the-minute discussion which a book isintended to fulfil, unsatisfied.A minority Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) government inEdinburgh had emerged the month before the book was published, whilst the conse-quences of devolution to both the nations of the United Kingdom and at least some ofits cities, are, as several of the authors precisely and perhaps ruefully point out, dynamicand evolving.

The editor writes that one of the aims shared by all contributors was a convictionthat, whilst not enough was known about constitutional reform, a greater degree ofunderstanding amongst the citizenry was greatly to be desired.The current volume maynot make a major contribution to that enterprise. But a book with such a clear publicpurpose, directed at the enlightenment of citizens, needs more engagement with thepolitical world which citizens inhabit.

It is off-putting when a book begins with a brief note of approval from an importantperson, in this case Lord Falconer, halfway between an episcopal imprimatur and a royalendorsement of marmalade. When the book is a study of the actions of a government,and the cheer leader is a senior member of the same government, one is naturally a bitcautious.The dust jacket is so heavy with encomiums that the roll of potential reviewersmust be severely reduced.

RODNEY BARKERLondon School of Economics and Political Science

269Reviews


Blair’s Britain 1997–2007. Edited by Anthony Seldon. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press. 2007. xviii, 690 pp. Paperback £15.99. ISBN 9780521882934.

When Gordon Took the Helm: The Palgrave Review of British Politics, 2007–2008,Edited by Michael Rush and Philip Giddings. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.2008. xiii, 285 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780230002609.

Tony Blair became prime minister in an electoral blaze of glory in May 1997 with alandslide parliamentary majority, a strong economy inherited from the Conservatives,virtually universal press support, and an opposition split, exhausted and discredited by‘sleaze’. In 2007 he retired as a prime minister who had eclipsed all previous Labourpremiers in winning three successive general elections but with his reputation forhonesty damaged by the Iraq war, ‘cash for peerages’ and ‘spin’, and (within a year of hisdeparture), his reputation for competence damaged by an economic recession.

Seldon’s multi-authored book invites its contributors to ask the following questions:‘What difference does a prime minister make across the waterfront of policy andgovernment?; what changes were made under Blair?; what changed and why?; howeffective have any changes been?; could more have been achieved?; who or what droveany change – Blair himself, No 10 in general, Brown, other ministers, departments, thinktanks, or other factors?; what has been the “Blair effect”?; how far did policy depart fromtraditional Labour or Thatcher-Major policies?; and how lasting might any changesprove?’ – an exhaustively demanding checklist, clearly stretching the capacities of manyof the contributing scholars. Dennis Kavanagh sets the tone by noting that Blair had astrong basis for success in 1997 (as already outlined), but his quest for a successfulpresidential system of decision making was thwarted by Brown’s control of domesticpolicy from the treasury; by his own lack of departmental experience (he was the leastexperienced of any prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924); by his lack ofsubstantial colleagues of the sort surrounding Attlee in 1945; by a wide but shallowelectoral coalition; by lack of support from Labour MPs for his free market ‘reforms’; andby an addiction to spin which led to a loss of trust, most damagingly over the Iraqinvasion, following which Labour lost and never retrieved its opinion poll lead, except inthe election of 2005 when the economy was still robust enough to compensate for lossof trust over Iraq.

For all Blair’s reputation as an electoral wizard, the 2005 election result returnedLabour to a total electorate of 9.5 million, exactly where it had been in 1992 before Blairtook over in 1994; his triumph of 1997 (11.3 million votes) and the repeat landslide of2001 (10.7 million votes) were a happy parenthesis between two much lower totals, oneof which under his leadership. His electoral net effect was nil, his last victory in 2005being obtained on 36% of the vote, almost as the same as the 35% with which Kinnocklost in 1992. If Labour’s electoral hegemony under Blair was an ephemeral phenomenon,it also owed much to a Conservative Party in disarray (which had established a poll leadfor Labour from 1992, long before Blair became leader), and an electoral system biasedtowards Labour. But this is not to discount Blair, who (as John Curtice notes) understoodthe need to appeal to the white-collar Southern electorate so as to remove the incubusof ‘Southern discomfort’. He also, given his Conservative family of origin, understoodthe force of individualism and the absence of collective values, especially in the south.

270 Reviews


ForVernon Bogdanor, even ‘social democracy’, with its concern for equality, is no longeran option.

The key to Blair’s success was competence resting on a prolonged economic boom –managed by the semi-autonomous treasury under Brown – supplying low inflation, lowinterest rates, a buoyant stock market, rising living standards, and robust consumerspending.There was little original about economic policy under Blair; it was effectivelythe continuation of Thatcherism by other means. Traditionally, Labour governmentsfailed on the economy. Blair courted big business and finance; the government continuedprivatising state enterprises and nationalised nothing; it retained anti-trade union legis-lation, and replaced union money with cash from rich backers to finance campaigning.As Peter Sinclair notes:The Blair government ‘inherited a strong macro-economy fromMajor and a policy framework set mainly by Margaret Thatcher; their greatest achieve-ment was to consolidate the revolution of their Conservative predecessors’ (p. 212).

This made Blair less than loved within the Labour Party whose standing ovationsmerely acknowledged his electoral successes. But Richard Heffernan sees Blair as ben-efiting from the now pervasive model of the ‘electoral professional’ party with itsdownward vertical links from leader to voters. This party is a projector of the leader’scompetence and image, not a controller of ideology or policy; this is the party as officeseeker, not as policy seeker. In opposition before 1997 this party model gave Blair theonly means to convince the wider electorate of his capacity to govern by his margin-alising of the unions and activists, the symbolic discarding of Clause Four and thecurbing of the role of the National Executive Committee and the party conference,though much of this built on constraints already imposed by Kinnock and Smith. Blairsought to impose a similar command structure on government to that he imposed on theparty, but Seldon speculates (p. 649) that he mistakenly thought he could run agovernment as he ran the party – ‘heavy on presentation; light on policy and process’,and an anonymous civil servant is quoted as saying: ‘he intervenes, persuades, and thenforgets, . . . he lacks policy making and management skills’, so that although he wantsresults ‘he finds it hard to understand why things can’t happen immediately’ (p. 101).

Blair’s premiership was destroyed by Iraq – the worst foreign policy disaster sinceSuez, and by a further loss of trust engendered by spin – the mendacity of thegovernment’s news management. It was on the world stage where, free from Brown’sobstruction on domestic policy (though also on the euro), he had the opportunity todeploy his persuasive charm and display his thespian skills, according to Seldon (p. 643),yet in so doing on Iraq destroyed his reputation for competence and honesty. As to hislegacy, given he and Brown were continuing Conservative free market strategies, albeitwith Brown’s enhanced public spending, he was not leaving a legacy, rather preservinganother one – though Brown-enhanced levels of public spending could prove electorallyhard for a Conservative government to rein back. Rather more menacing, as legacy, werethe, presumably entirely unintended, consequences of Scottish devolution, a major policy,yet one in which Blair had no interest, having merely inherited it from Scottishpoliticians worried about losing seats to the Scottish Nationalists, but which could leadto the break-up of the United Kingdom, a state which under Blair, especially, sought tocarry out a world role.

Blair remained an enigma. Was he an actor in search of a role? Was he in politics tobe someone rather than to do something? Was the occupancy of office more important

271Reviews


than the use of office? Was he pushed into his great foreign policy disaster by beinghamstrung by Brown at home? Was he constrained by the Murdoch press? Or did hesecretly endorse a sentiment expressed to this reviewer in 1963 by Reginald Maudling,that ‘England is a Conservative country that occasionally votes Labour’? Seldon’s volumewith its many scholarly contributions presents much material to enable a maturereflection on Tony Blair’s ultimate significance.

And so to Brown’s replacement of Blair as covered in the third volume in the series ofannual surveys of British politics edited by Rush and Giddings, comprising specialistcontributions and informative appendices, and in this instance entitled ‘When GordonTook the Helm’.What changed? Not much. As an implied side sweep at Blair, Brown’spremiership opened with a Green Paper ponderously entitled ‘The Governance ofBritain’ and talking of increasing parliament’s powers against those of the government, ithaving been a feature of Blair’s regime that whether by intention or design some changes(such as ‘family friendly’ hours) had eroded the legislature’s ability to scrutinise theexecutive. The aim, too, was to restore trust in government, but consultation, notlegislation, was all that was involved. Brown also invoked early the importance of‘Britishness’ in the wake of the SNP’s capture of the Scottish executive, which waspromptly and provocatively renamed by them the ‘Scottish Government’, in May 2007.Bradbury’s chapter on devolution approves the pragmatic way the government reacted tothe SNP capture but also notes its potentially disruptive impact, not least when aConservative government with no significant electoral interest in Scotland has to dealwith the separatist regime in Edinburgh. Meanwhile, insufficient consideration appears tobe given to the potential of an English backlash with all three devolved entities (Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland) containing nationalist ministers, and with Labour lumberinginto a general election led by a Scotsman of slight appeal in the south. Not that this addssignificantly to Labour’s woes, for as this book confirms, Labour’s electoral performanceat all electoral levels in the period covered was dire, Giddings surmising that Labour couldwell have reached that ‘tipping point’ beyond which recovery is impossible.With a pollinghoneymoon lasting only two months in the summer of 2007, Brown re-established theflat lining ratings of Blair’s last years, with convincingly negative measures both oncompetence and trust.These findings were for 2007–8.The next volume in this series willrecord the further impact on ratings for competence and trust in the wake of the onsetof the recession in late 2008 and the exposure of MPs’ expenses claims in May 2009.

BYRON CRIDDLEUniversity of Aberdeen

The New British Constitution. By Vernon Bogdanor. London: Hart Publishing.2009. xiii, 319 pp. £17.95. ISBN 9781841136714.

Since the New Labour government was elected in 1997 pledging to implement awide-ranging programme of constitutional reform, there has been an outpouring ofliterature from academics interested in constitutional politics and history. However, withwell over a decade now passed since that programme of reform was begun, it is arguably

272 Reviews


easier to draw conclusions on the outcome of that process than it was four or five yearsago. Ten years may not be much in the context of centuries of British constitutionalhistory, but it is enough to begin to make reasonably robust arguments about how recentreforms have impacted on that constitution. In addition, the expenses scandal of 2009sparked a series of discussions about how to make political processes and institutionswork better, and how to reform them in order to ensure that politicians serve the publicgood rather than themselves.

Vernon Bogdanor is an acknowledged expert in the field of constitutional politics, andThe New British Constitution stands as a testament to his interest in, and knowledge of, thisarea. And, as the title suggests, Bogdanor argues forcefully that a new constitution doesnow exist in Britain, a constitution which increasingly shapes the way that politicshappens and the structures and processes through which political issues are negotiatedand resolved. One of the key criticisms of New Labour with respect to its constitutionalreforms was that there was too much rhetoric about change and insufficient change inpractice. While Bogdanor explores some of these issues, particularly in relation to thefunctioning of parliamentary sovereignty and the continued strength of the Westminsterexecutive in British politics, he points, none the less, to a fundamental shift in theconstitutional architecture in Britain, a shift that has far-reaching implications, some ofwhich are not yet fully understood.

The book provides an excellent account of the whole idea of parliamentary sover-eignty, the often strange convention on which the ‘old constitution’, as Bogdanor puts it,rested. The whole notion of parliamentary sovereignty, under pressure for decades as aresult of membership of the EU, has, in many ways, begun to unfurl even more as a resultof the various pieces of constitutional legislation enacted since 1997. Bogdanor arguesthat the Human Rights Act of 1998 and the various pieces of devolution legislation allhave the character of fundamental, constitutional law. In this respect, old debates abouthow there cannot be any entrenched legislation in the context of the Westminsterparliament, and thus no written constitution, begin to pass away, because constitutionaltheory and practice have diverged so much in recent decades.While there may well beimportant debates about the future format of human rights in Britain, they have takenon a fundamental importance in political practice that cannot easily be reversed. Simi-larly, while the Westminster parliament could in theory overturn the legislation thatfacilitated devolution, it would be almost impossible to do so in practice, because the UKstate has become quasi-federal in nature.

Human rights and devolution may well be the new cornerstones of the Britishconstitution, but much remains undone. Bogdanor examines aspects of the electoralsystem, the house of lords, and the use of new mechanisms for popular participation, suchas the referendum, all of which are set to play some role in the future development ofthe new British constitution. House of lords’ reform, for example, is far from complete,with debates still raging about what a reformed composition should look like, andWestminster electoral reform was pushed back up the agenda again as a result of the May2009 expenses scandal, even if it fell from view thereafter. Devolution, in particular,continues to provoke much debate in the context of the English question. Here,although Bogdanor offers an excellent overview of the various options that could addressthat question, the cursory treatment of English regional government as one of thoseoptions is puzzling: a book of this sort arguably needs a more thorough treatment of this

273Reviews


idea, and even if Bogdanor himself disagrees with it, there should have been a betteraccount of why.The chapter on localism is also puzzling, in that it offers a broad historyof local government, but perhaps needed to say far more about exactly what a rein-vigorated system of local government would look like and how it could address some ofthe issues related to popular participation that are supposedly key to this book.

Indeed, the book’s final chapter on the shift towards a popular constitutional state doesnot really say what that popular constitutional state would look like, nor how processesof democratic participation might be enhanced by it. Debates about how to promotepolitical engagement and participation are long-standing, and it is far from clear that theBritish public are particularly interested in the details of constitutional politics. Conse-quently, while debates about a codified constitution and the mechanisms by whichpower could be transferred to the people are the staples of many undergraduate seminars,the book would have done well to explain exactly why a codified constitution (howeverdifficult to achieve) would, in practice, help produce a popular constitutional state, andwhat this idea of transferring power to the people would mean in practice, why it isdesirable, and how it could result in increased participation in political life.

Any reviewer is always going to find something in a book that they would havepreferred to see more space committed to or explained in more detail. Ultimately,however, The New British Constitution is an excellent piece of scholarship, which will beilluminating to other academics interested in the topics covered, and which will be aninvaluable teaching text, able carefully to demonstrate the complexities inherent inBritish constitutional politics and the absence of ‘simple’ answers to any of the consti-tutional dilemmas we find there.

ALEXANDRA KELSOUniversity of Southampton

274 Reviews


parliament and literature in late medieval england – by matthew giancarlo

Documents