Nelson’s Circles: Networking in the Navy during the French Wars

This chapter examines the means by which Admiral Horatio Nelson established a wide range of contacts throughout his career and the ways in which he used the resulting social networks inhis campaigns during the French wars. Nelson was an officer in the Royal Navy, the largest organisation of its day and a huge network in its own right. Not only did Nelson operate within and rely on this network, he was also one of its major actors whose activities were of major public, and now historical, importance. Drawing on Nelson's letters published in the 1840s, the chapter analyses how efficiently this naval networking functioned to allow him to navigate personal, professional and political challenges. It shows that professionally motivated letter writing was central to Nelson's social networking, which is supported by the fact that Nelson did not become involved in other forms of networking, notably the club.

The Vilification of Thomas Paine: Constructing a Folk Devil in the 1790s

This chapter focuses on Thomas Paine as a ‘folk devil’, the ways in which stories and myths about him and his works were implicated in the tense politics of the 1790s. Two narratives, one involving a baker named John Atwood and the other a physician named Theodore Wilson, were deliberately designed to foster anti-Paine sentiments; both men were allegedly bewitched by Paine. The stories drew on several common elements to articulate moral and didactic tales about the dire consequences of reading Paine. The evil effects begin with the psychological impact of Paine's writings which mesmerise men, creating a desperate and deranged state of mind — a form of political madness that makes the subject lose all sense of control. The chapter examines how conservatives' characterisations of Paine as an evil force relate to the construction of deviant identities that creates personas of ‘otherness’, whereby scapegoats are stigmatised as folk devils.

British Radical Attitudes towards the United States of America in the 1790s: The Case of William Winterbotham

This chapter examines British radical attitudes towards America during the 1790s by taking up the case of William Winterbotham, a Plymouth Baptist preacher who was jailed in Newgate prison for four years (1793–1797) for allegedly seditious content in two sermons he preached in November 1792. Winterbotham's most ambitious work was An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States, published in four volumes in 1795. It demonstrates the fascination that America held for British radicals beyond Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. Among his many concerns, Winterbotham was highly critical of the institution of chattel slavery. The chapter explores Winterbotham's political analysis of the new republic and shows that his imprisonment for seditious libel was bracketed by contemporaries with the more conspicuous 'martyrdom' of five men sentenced to transportation by the Scottish High Court of Justiciary.

Edmund Burke, Dissent and Church and State

This chapter examines Edmund Burke’s attitude towards Protestant dissenters, particularly the more radical or rational ones who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards the Church of England and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke’s attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. The catalyst for Burke’s emergence as leader of those who feared that revolution abroad might become a distemper at home was Richard Price’s Discourse on Love of Our Country. The chapter analyses how Burke moved from advocating toleration for Dissenters to become a staunch defender of establishment as to have ‘un-Whigged’ himself. It also considers the debate on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as well as Burke’s attitude towards Church–state relations.

Parliament and Church Reform: Off and On the Agenda

This chapter examines the interactions between politics inside and outside of the British Parliament as well as the issue of Church reform. Attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century. During the intervening period, Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches along with various acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The chapter establishes the complex route by which challenges to and changes within the Church of England translated into a concern to act among parliamentary elites.

The Posthumous Lives of Thomas Muir

This chapter examines the ways in which Thomas Muir was used by political activists, historians and writers in both Great Britain and Australia in the centuries following his death. It analyses Muir's posthumous lives as a case study of how, when and why revolutionary figures of the 1790s have become politically usable. It discusses three important contexts that help explain both revived interest in Muir and changed interpretations of his political significance: one was provided by two global conflicts, the First World War and the ‘age of revolutions’ between 1790 and 1848; the other was provided by the success of the Labour movement in the West of Scotland. The chapter shows how the transnational dimension of Muir's life has been at least partially recovered and his legacy shaped and deployed by an emerging Australian nationalism from the end of the nineteenth century.

‘The Wisest and Most Beneficial Schemes’: William Ogilvie, Radical Political Economy and the Scottish Enlightenment

This chapter examines William Ogilvie's arguments about property, society and government where they actually originated: in the distinctive intellectual environment of the Scottish Enlightenment. While the ideas of the principal Scottish philosophers about the material aspects of human existence have most often been considered as having broadly conservative political implications, Ogilvie's sole publication, An Essay on the Right of Property in Land (1781), suggests that inquiries of that kind might also have provoked profoundly radical conclusions about the causes and consequences of social inequality. In Ogilvie's case, moreover, the revolutionary analysis that he constructed would go on to earn him an honoured place in the history of progressive thought. This chapter offers an account of Ogilvie's Essay, describing it as a unique amalgam of Scottish Enlightenment social theory and radical political speculation.

Political Toasting in the Age of Revolutions: Britain, America and France, 1765–1800

This chapter examines the emergence of political toasting in revolutionary France and during the ‘age of revolutions’ in Britain and America from 1765 to around 1800. Drinking and toasting were integral to the expression of popular politics. Contemporaries and historians have used toast lists as precious, if rough, indexes of popular opinion and, during the 1790s, as evidence of sympathy for the French Revolution and transnational republicanism. Toasting was a common practice in the American colonies and the young republic, and was adopted later in France. David Waldstreicher has shown the crucial role of civic celebrations and convivial gatherings in the forging of a new, republican identity during the American Revolution and in the early years of the republic. In his work on Ireland, Martyn Powell showed how toasting, while drawing on English and American symbolism, displayed an increasing sense of Irishness after the 1760s.

Liberty, Property and the Post-Culloden Acts of Parliament in the Gáidhealtachd

This chapter examines how the post-Culloden acts of the British Parliament, intended to ‘assimilate’ the Scottish Highlands to Whig and British norms, was appropriated and adapted by local political actors. In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–1746, Parliament passed a series of measures designed to end forever the Jacobite threat to the Hanoverian state. The accepted association of the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlands with Jacobitism made the Gàidhealtachd the explicit target of these measures. Drawing on H. T. Dickinson’s work on the political ideologies of eighteenth-century Britain, the chapter investigates how Gaels negotiated the application of state authority. It considers the Act of Proscription (1746), the second of four major parliamentary acts passed in conjunction with the suppression of the Jacobite rebellions.

Was there a Law of Sedition in Scotland? Baron David Hume’s Analysis of the Scottish Sedition Trials of 1794

This chapter examines debates over whether the crime of ‘sedition’ had any meaning within Scots law, focusing on David Hume's analysis of the sedition trials of 1794. In 1794, Maurice Margarot of the London Corresponding Society was charged with the crime of sedition. Margarot was one of the very few English delegates who had been present at the so-called British Convention, held in Edinburgh in 1793. Together with his fellow Englishman Joseph Gerrald, and William Skirving of the Edinburgh Friends of the People, Margarot had taken on a leading role at the Convention. It was for this that he had been put on trial. The chapter considers how Margarot's trial initiated a discussion about sedition as a crime under Scots law and discusses the use of ‘authoritative writings’ on Scots law in the trials, along with Hume's views about the trials.