The British Past in the Imperial Crisis

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-126
Author(s):  
Michael D. Hattem
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Ancient Constitution ◽  
Parliamentary Supremacy ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Fundamental Shift

This chapter explores the use of the British past in the political writings of the imperial crisis. Primarily, it explores how colonists’ interpretations of the Glorious Revolution changed during the crisis and how their new understanding of that event helped shape patriot rhetoric after 1767. Having previously served as the foundation of their identities as British subjects, patriots came to understand the Glorious Revolution not as having restored the balance of the “ancient constitution” but as having given rise to the doctrine of “parliamentary supremacy,” which allowed Parliament, in colonists’ minds, to exert absolute authority over the colonies and act as arbitrarily as any seventeenth-century Stuart monarch. This fundamental shift in their historical understanding brought colonists’ cultural relationship to the Glorious Revolution, and hence the British past, into question and resulted in the turn toward more universal arguments based on natural law after 1773.

Stair, James Dalrymple, Viscount (1619–95)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott C. Styles
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Civil Court ◽  
Active Life ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

An outstanding lawyer, senior judge, politician, and the founding father of modern Scots Law, Stair is also an interesting, if minor, philosopher of law of the seventeenth century. Stair believed that law is an inherently rational discipline and that its content can be derived from the principles of natural law which are self-evident to all humans. Stair led an active life at the heart of public affairs in seventeenth-century Scotland, finishing up as the chief judge of the supreme civil court. Born in Ayrshire, Scotland, he became a teacher at Glasgow University in 1641, was called to the Bar in 1648, became Judge in the Scots Cromwellian Court 1657, Vice President of the Court of Session 1660, Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s most senior judge) 1671, exiled to Holland 1682, and reappointed Lord President in 1689 subsequent to the ‘Glorious Revolution’.

scholarly journals Az isteni jogalaptól a népszuverenitásig

PONTES ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 228-249
Author(s):  
Sashalmi Endre
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Major Change ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Divine Will ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Written Sources

The study intends to present the main features of the political doctrine commonly called by contemporaries the ‘divine right of kings’ in seventeenth-century England, and its transformation brought on by the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688. The new version of the doctrine was named ‘divine right of providence” (G. Straka) and it was refl ected not only in written sources, the Bill of Rights included, but also in the change of the iconography of coronation coins. However, by 1714, the growth of the power of parliament led to a new perception of the right to the throne: popular sovereignty replaced divine will, which caused a major change in the imagery of coronation coins. Henceforward, for the rest of the century, in coronation coins power was conferred on the ruler not by the act of the Almighty but by the hand of the female allegorical figure of Britannia.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

Religion, Politics, and Oaths in the Glorious Revolution

1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Mullet
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

‘The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-185
Author(s):  
Paulina Kewes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Direct Attack

This chapter explores the seventeenth-century afterlife of the most daring political tract of the Elizabethan era, A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594/5) by the Jesuit Robert Persons. The chapter begins by explaining what is distinctive about A Conference, notably its direct attack on the hereditary principle and on the pre-eminence of the monarchy itself, and gives an overview of its transmission, reception, and appropriation. It goes on to trace the text’s signal and varied influence on Protestant writers from Henry Walker and Henry Parker during the Puritan Revolution and John Somers and Algernon Sidney during the Exclusion Crisis, to the defenders of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution. It thus invites a rethinking of the republican and Whig traditions in English political thought by revealing their dependence on the work of an Elizabethan Jesuit.

scholarly journals ALL THE KING’S MAN»: MILITIA IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND DURING THE STUART AGE

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 90-97
Author(s):  
D.O. Gordienko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Regular Army ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

The article presents the results of a study devoted to the history of the British armed forces in the “long” 17th century. The militia was the backbone of England's national military system. The author examines the aspects of the development of the institutions of the modern state during the reign of the Stuart dynasty, traces the process of the development of the militia and the formation of the regular army. He reveals the role of the militia in the political events of the Century of Revolutions: the reign of Charles I, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the Restoration age, the Glorious Revolution, and also gives a retrospective review of the eventsof the 18th century.

Church Life

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Rich ◽  
John Owen ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Pastoral Theory

These original essays from ten leading experts in early Dissenting history, literature, and religion address the rich, complex, and varied nature of ‘church life’ experienced by England’s Baptists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians during the seventeenth century. Spanning the period from the English Revolution to the Glorious Revolution, and beyond, they examine the social, political, and religious character of England’s ‘gathered’ churches and reformed parishes: how pastors and their congregations interacted, how Dissenters related to their meetings as religious communities, and what the experience of church life was like for ordinary members as well as their ministers, including notably John Owen and Richard Baxter alongside less well-known figures, such as Ebenezer Chandler. Moving beyond the religious experience of the solitary individual, often exemplified by conversion, this volume redefines the experience of Dissent, concentrating instead on the collective concerns of a communally-centred church life through a wide spectrum of issues: from questions of liberty and pastoral reform to matters of church discipline and respectability. With a substantial ‘Introduction’ that puts into context the key concepts of ‘church life’ and the ‘Dissenting experience’, these studies offer fresh ways of understanding Protestant Dissent in seventeenth-century England: through differences in ecclesiology and pastoral theory, and via the buildings in which Dissent was nurtured to the building-up of Dissent during periods of civil war, persecution, and revolution. To do so, they draw on a broad range of printed and archival materials: from the minutes of the Westminster Assembly to the manuscript church books of early Dissenting congregations.

What's New About the Restoration?

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Harris
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
History Of ◽  
Excellent Work ◽  
Modern Textbook ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

When I first began my researches into later Stuart history as a graduate student back in 1980, the Restoration was a relatively underdeveloped field of inquiry. Although there were a number of scholars producing excellent work in this area, there was not the same depth of scholarship as characterized study of the first half of the seventeenth century: wide gaps in our knowledge existed, and for some of the most crucial episodes of the period we were dependent upon a limited range of studies and dated works. The best general entrée into the period was still David Ogg's classic two-volumeEngland in the Reign of Charles II, first published in 1934! A suitable modern textbook did not emerge until 1978, with the publication of J. R. Jones'sCounty and Court: England 1658–1714, a book that had neither Ogg's range nor lively analytical style. For our understanding of why the monarchy was restored we were reliant upon a study that had come out in 1955, which was supplemented only in 1980 by Austin Woolrych's book-length “Historical Introduction” to volume seven of the Yale edition of theComplete Prose Works of John Milton. On the Exclusion Crisis we had J. R. Jones'sThe First Whigs, which had appeared in 1961, although for the first Tories we still needed to use Sir Keith Feiling's 1924History of the Tory Party. For the Glorious Revolution we had a book written by a man who tragically died (at a young age) before he could complete the work, and another self-consciously thought-provoking work designed to raise questions and suggest future avenues of research—both excellent studies in their own right, but hardly the plethora of monographs that we possessed for the mid-century revolution.

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