The Vocabulary of Theory and Practice in the Bullion Controversy, 1797–1811

This chapter uses the Bullion Controversy to test the hypothesis articulated at the close of the previous chapter—that Malthus and Ricardo did not use the notions of method and model in their work but rather tended to think in terms of theory and practice. The debate over the Bank of England does indeed represent confirming evidence for Malthus’s and Ricardo’s use of the vocabulary of theory and practice. Moreover, the episode shows that Ricardo was porous to his argumentative context, deploying Ancient Constitution style rhetoric to legitimize his attacks on an august Whig institution. For his part, Malthus also used this vocabulary while registering some doubts over Ricardo’s intellectual performance as a theorist, a title to which Malthus also laid claim.

Delightful Horror

Edmund Burke remains one of the great theorists of the aesthetic dimensions of political life, and this chapter focuses on his account of the sublime production of political authority. Burke’s theory of the sublime identifies an instinctive “delight” that human beings take in their own subordination: it is an affective device for naturalizing order and rank in human society and the psychological foundation of such distinctive Burkean formulations as “proud submission” and “dignified obedience.” However, the French Revolution, and its enthusiastic reception by British radicals during the 1790s, occasioned a revision of Burke’s political aesthetics, whereby the sublime was no longer associated with astonishment, novelty, and ennobling disorientation, but with the gravity of an historical inheritance transmitted across time by the ancient constitution. Burke’s antirevolutionary writings mark a transition in his thinking from a political aesthetics of sublime transcendence to one of historical immanence.

The British Past in the Imperial Crisis

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.

Introduction

The introduction offers a definition of custom as the basis of England’s common law and provides a lexicon of legal custom, including terms like time immemorial, the ancient constitution, consent, and commons, each of which contribute to the significance and power of custom as a legal concept. It argues that custom appealed to English literary writers who were experimenting with genre and form because of their society’s broad skepticism of novelty and thus it was crucial to ideas of Renaissance authorship. It situates the project within the larger body of work on early modern law and literature by showing how the latter can illuminate changes in the former. It further argues that the study of early modern law and literature should inform how we understand periodization because it offers different models of how the Renaissance understood itself and the past.

Time Out of Mind

This chapter examines aspects of common-law custom crucial to early modern literary production. It sets the stage for understanding how a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed a legal-political concept into an evocative mythopoetics. It does so by focusing on a central aspect of custom that allowed for this relationship: the long duration of a practice, its supposed use since “time immemorial.” Temporality played a role not only in establishing the practice itself as a pattern, but also in legal education and professional knowledge about the practices that made up common law, often called “common learning.” Finally, “time immemorial” undergirded the increasingly political idea of the “ancient constitution.” This temporality was dynamic in nature and, as a result, it rendered custom and the ancient constitution a poetics that proved crucial for early modern literary writers.

Time and the Constitutional Legitimacy of the Revolution

Chapter two examines the legal and constitutional arguments around the revolution. It argues that contemporaries who defended William’s coming to power—although using a variety of arguments, broadly divided into ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’—were united in developing a ‘static chronology’ that effectively denied fundamentals of politics could change, and so were happy to cite precedents from long-distance periods as binding. The chapter considers the version of the ‘ancient constitution’ used after 1688–9, showing that it was more resistant to the possibilities of historical development than versions of the concept that had been used earlier in the seventeenth century.

Progressive Williamite Time

Chapter five examines ways in which supporters of the revolution began to develop more dynamic perceptions of time after their initial defence of its constitutional legitimacy. Partly this was in reaction to the Jacobite and opposition rhetorics of the 1690s: William’s supporters were forced to consider developmental chronologies as they answered a case that was based on them. There was also, however, a specifically pro-revolution account of the Stuart age, which saw it as a developmental process of degeneration from the golden age of Elizabeth I. Despite these more ‘modern’ features of Williamite time however, it retained many static qualities: it continued to defend 1688–9 as a restoration of an ancient constitution and of godly religion, while its conception of Stuart history was cyclical rather than linear.

PARLIAMENT AND THE CROWN JEWELS IN THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION, 1641–1644

This article argues that parliamentary debates over the access to and control of the crown jewels from 1641 to 1644 were intrinsic to the emergence and proliferation of revolutionary ideas about political sovereignty in the earliest stages of the English Civil Wars. In combining the methodologies of parliamentary history with theoretical scholarship on the material foundations of power, it demonstrates that shifting attitudes toward the royal regalia were indicative of more general developments in parliamentary thinking on the origins and limits of monarchical authority. In so doing, it contributes to recent scholarship on the problem of ‘ideological escalation’ at Westminster, demonstrating how quickly an initially radical proposal for access to the crown jewels became sufficiently popular in the House of Commons to authorize the melting down of the royal regalia only a year later. By emphasizing the centrality of the crown jewels to ongoing debates over the ‘ancient constitution’, it suggests that their destruction was understood as a step towards the abolition of monarchy per se.