Dissent and Toleration: Lord Stanhope's Bill of 1789

1978 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-73
Author(s):  
G. M. Ditchfield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political History ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Third ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Law ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Way

It is widely accepted among historians that the House of Lords in the eighteenth century was an obstacle to religious change. Its unfriendly mien appears to be confirmed by the fate of several Quaker tithe bills and Dissenting petitions. Despite the passage of limited relief acts for Roman Catholics and Dissenters in 1778 and 1779 respectively, it was unusual for such legislation to be well received, or even to find a sponsor, in that chamber. Yet, in the summer of 1789 the House of Lords and that House alone witnessed what has been a neglected episode in ecclesiastical and political history. This was the attempt by the third earl Stanhope to amend the law concerning religious toleration. Although admittedly far from an exception to the rule in the way in which it was greeted by the peers, it has received scant notice from modern historians of toleration. Stanhope himself, of course, has become known to the historically minded as one of the celebrated eccentrics of the period; the image of ‘Citizen Stanhope’ the defender of the French Revolution and the ‘minority of one’ is unlikely to be effaced. Accordingly such discussion as there has been of the earl's bill has tended to emphasise Stanhope's personal idiosyncrasies and peculiar brand of aristocratic radicalism rather than the detailed provisions of the measure.

Revolution

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Rapport
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Cross Section ◽  
Third Republic ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
French Society ◽  
Parliamentary Government ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
The French Revolution

This article describes many facets of the French Revolution. The French Revolution introduced parliamentary government to France, but it was only “an apprenticeship in democracy,” the first step towards modern, democratic politics, not its consummation. François Furet has controversially argued that the values and practices of democracy were not definitively embedded in France until the consolidation of the Third Republic in the 1870s, which he describes as “the French Revolution coming into port.” A continuing focus of research, therefore, are the ways in which the people entered politics outside the formal processes, namely in the dramatic expansion in civil society, which had been developing since the mid-eighteenth century, but which in the Revolution flowered with the collapse of censorship, empowering a wide cross-section of French society.

, cases such as White v Jones will not come to be regarded as actions in contract, since it must be the contract between the relevant contracting parties which expressly or impliedly confers a benefit on the third party and, in White v Jones, it was the will, rather than the contract which conferred the relevant benefit. The second question above asks if T can seek to rely on a defence contained in the contract between A and B in an action brought against him by A or B. Typically, such cases will involve the question of whether T is entitled to the protection of an exemption clause. Many commercial transactions involve many parties. Typical examples include international trade dealings under which there is a complex of relations between the buyer, seller, carrier and other parties involved in the process of shipment of a cargo. Similarly, many contracts entered into for the purposes of the construction of a building or a ship may involve a number of subcontractors as well as the party commissioning the work and the main contractor. These multipartite relationships are often difficult to explain in terms of traditional rules of the law of contract which appear to treat the two-party contract as the norm. Where exemption clauses are concerned, a simple application of the doctrine of privity of contract would suggest that a third party cannot claim the benefit of such a provision if it is part of a contract between two other parties. If a firm of stevedores, employed by a carrier to unload a cargo, negligently damages goods carried under the terms of a contract of carriage made between the consignor of goods and the carrier, the question may arise whether the stevedore, in an action brought by the purchaser of the cargo, can claim the benefit of an exclusion clause in the contract between the consignor and the carrier which purports to protect both the carrier and the stevedore. Commercial reality suggests that if the risk of loss or damage to a cargo has already passed to the buyer then he should be insured against that risk. Accordingly, since there is likely to be a valid insurance policy covering the risk of damage in the course of unloading, it makes commercial sense for the stevedores to be able to claim the protection of the exemption clause. However, a rigid application of the doctrine of privity of contract in this type of case would mean that the stevedores could be sued for the damage to the cargo despite the fact that the buyer was insured against that risk. The commercial reality approach suggests that there should be a doctrine of vicarious immunity under which the third party may rely upon an exemption clause in a contract to which he is not a party, provided it is the intention of all concerned that the benefit should be extended to such a person. However, the doctrine of vicarious immunity was later rejected by the House of Lords in Scruttons Ltd v Midland Silicones Ltd, where the

1995 ◽  
pp. 772-772
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Simple Application ◽  
Insurance Policy ◽  
The Third ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Third Party ◽  
Privity Of Contract

Eighteenth-Century Scotland and the Three Unions

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Kidd
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Sharp Focus ◽  
The Law ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Way

This chapter is concerned with the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. The focus of the Scottish Enlightenment was on the deeper social and economic underpinnings of political systems, not on the epiphenomenal superficialities of national status. There has been a widespread assumption that Scots law and Presbyterianism became mainstays of Scottish identity in the supposed vacuum created by the loss of Scotland's parliament. A different kind of ambivalence surrounded eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes to the law. Eighteenth-century Scottish historians made no attempt to align the Union of 1603 and the Union of 1707 in a benignly unfolding story of ever-closer British integration. Given the horrors of the Union of the Crowns, as related by the sociological historians of the Scottish Enlightenment, it becomes easier to explain why these same historians put a positive gloss on the enforced Cromwellian union of the 1650s. The Anglo-American crisis and problems in the Anglo-Irish relationship brought into sharp focus the solid loyalty of North Britons.

2. Contracts of employment (1): status, formation, continuity, and change

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-137
Author(s):  
Ian Smith ◽  
Aaron Baker ◽  
Owen Warnock
Keyword(s):  
Employment Law ◽  
Employment Contract ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Third ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Gig Economy ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Areas Of Concern ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Way

This chapter discusses the way in which the law has had to keep up with changing models of ‘employment’. Even the old ‘employee/self-employed’ division is now complicated by increasing use in modern statutes of the term ‘worker’. Part-time, fixed-term, and agency workers have featured prominently in modern employment law and consideration is given to these specifically, along with even more topical areas of concern such as zero-hour contracts and the challenges of the ‘gig economy’ more generally. Three more technical areas are then considered. The first concerns the ‘section 1 statement’ of basic terms and conditions that has been an obligation on employers since 1963 but is still not always given. The second concerns the difficult question of the extent to which an employer can seek to impose limitations on an employee even after employment ends. The third concerns the whole question of how the terms of an employment contract can lawfully be changed by one or both of the parties to it.

Uncivil Mirth

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Third ◽  
Patriarchal Power

The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth-century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. This book examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power. It brings to life a tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. It shows how the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on pretension and authority. The book examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris. Casting Enlightenment Britain in an entirely new light, the book demonstrates how the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.

A Question of Interpretation: The Roman Rota and the Theology of Marriage

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (39) ◽  
pp. 425-437
Author(s):  
Aidan McGrath Ofm
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Code Of Canon Law ◽  
Complete Reversal ◽  
The Law ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Way

Judges need guidance if they are to apply the law in particular circumstances with an even hand. For Roman Catholics, Canon 19 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law provides this guidance by reference to the practice of the Roman Curia and by the constant opinion of learned authors. Useful as these supplementary sources are, they mean that judges have to trust that those responsible for making decisions in the Roman Curia and the learned authors have drawn their conclusions on a sound basis. This study considers what happened when a specific document was misunderstood in the Roman Catholic Church for almost four hundred years. The document, a letter from Pope Sixtus V to his Nuncio in Spain in 1587, responded to a specific query concerning the capacity for marriage of men who had been castrated. The interpretation of the letter defined the Roman Catholic Church's concept of marriage in general and its understanding of the impediment of impotence for four centuries. In the twentieth century, several Roman Catholic judges and canonists refused to take at face value the conclusions offered by other judges and learned authors, and decided to carry out their own analysis of the document in question. This resulted in a complete reversal of the way in which marriage cases were considered by the Apostolic Tribunal of the Roman Rota, and contributed to the emergence of a much richer and more integrated theology of marriage.

Carl Schmitt's Vattel and the 'Law of Nations' between Enlightenment and Revolution

Grotiana ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Nakhimovsky
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Total War ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law ◽  
History Of International Law

AbstractThis article questions the status of Vattel's Law of Nations as an exemplary illustration of eighteenth-century developments in the history of international law. Recent discussions of the relation between eighteenth-century thinking about the law of nations and the French Revolution have revived Carl Schmitt's contention about the nexus between just war theory and the emergence of total war. This evaluative framework has been used to identify Vattel as a moral critic of absolutism who helped undermine the barriers against total war, as well as an architect and defender of those very barriers. Neither of these opposing readings is corroborated by late-eighteenth-century commentators on Vattel's treatise. To its late-eighteenth-century critics and defenders alike, Vattel's Law of Nations was distinguished by the weakness of its derivation of the law of nations from principles of natural law. Insofar as these readers did link Vattel to justifications of relatively unrestrained forms of warfare, they did so in connection with the perceived weakness of Vattel's moral position rather than with its strength. This late-eighteenth-century consensus on the defining features of Vattel's approach to the law of nations sits uncomfortably with Schmitt's evaluative framework, and indeed with other assessments of Vattel that limit themselves to orienting his treatise along fault lines in the historiography of international law.

scholarly journals The Churches and the Prevailing Social Sentiment

1913 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-406
Author(s):  
Charles William Eliot
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Complete Separation ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
The Third ◽  
Civil Authority ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
The Church ◽  
Do So

Churches in the great religions have been allies of all ancient governments and most modern ones. The Emperor of Japan was believed to have, and in the popular mind still has, intimate relations with the heavenly powers. He used to be held in a seclusion suitable for this peculiar relationship to Deity. The Emperor of China for thousands of years under various dynasties was a high priest, whose offerings and prayers were peculiarly acceptable to Deity, and frequently procured for his people good seedtimes and good harvests, although he sometimes failed to avert pestilences, droughts, floods, and famines. The Indian castes are family clans and trades-unions with strong religious sanctions. The Koran contains the foundations of civil law as well as of ecclesiastical, and the Sultan claims succession to the religious as well as to the civil authority of the Caliphs. Under the feudal system there was a chaplain in every great noble's house, and the king ruled “by the grace of God,” and by the same grace transmitted his office to his son. Both Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the Little claimed as Emperor the support of the Church; but Napoleon the Third never seemed to see the extraordinary pathos in the formula he used so much, “By the grace of God and the national will Emperor of the French.” The French Revolution tried to divorce civil government from religion, but failed to do so. National established churches supported by the state exist all over Europe, although their tenure is frail in several European countries. The American Republic has carried into practice complete religious toleration and complete separation of church and state; but every now and then some one proposes to bridge the gap between church and state by a phrase such as “Vox populi, vox Dei,” or to “recognize” the Divine Immanence by inserting the word God in the Constitution.

Opposition in late eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of the Townshend viceroyalty

1981 ◽  
Vol 22 (88) ◽  
pp. 313-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Way

Political life in Ireland in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was disturbed by three major opposition campaigns. From 1753 to 1756 there was the so-called money bill dispute in which Henry Boyle (later first earl of Shannon) mounted a formidable and largely successful opposition to the designs of the Dublin Castle administration for replacing him as chief undertaker. The years 1769-71 saw a noisy but ineffective opposition to Viscount Townshend’s plans for re-modelling the way Ireland was governed. And from 1778 to 1783 there was the famous patriot opposition led by Henry Grattan and Henry Flood which won for Ireland ‘a free trade’ and the ‘constitution of ’82’ The first and last ofthese opposition campaigns have been studied in detail; but the opposition to Townshend has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because the result was so unequivocally a victory for the Castle and hence less ‘heroic’ in its outcome than the other two campaigns. This paper sets out in the first instance to correct this imbalance by examining the reasons for the failure of the Irish opposition to Townshend.

scholarly journals Describing Eighteenth-Century British Satire

2019 ◽  
pp. xxiv-19
Author(s):  
Paddy Bullard
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Associational Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The Way

This introductory chapter looks at the problem of how we should describe eighteenth-century satire, and considers how to place it historically in the British eighteenth century. It gathers key literary extracts and anecdotes from the period, statements in which different discussions of satire intersect with larger ideas about the period’s culture and society. The chapter is organized into three sections. The first looks at satirical commonalities, including the uses of satire in associational life, the body of commonplace critical opinion about its function, and its connection with emerging constructions of British nationhood. The second turns to literary satire’s material forms, looking for patterns in the way it was consumed by readers of printed books. The third moves on from these generalized contexts to examine some of satire’s personal, particular implications, including the question of whether satire should always be general, whether it could avoid referring to individuals.

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