The theological position of the anonymous female author of Eliza’s Babes: Or The Virgin’s Offering (1652) is yet to be established with any certainty. This essay intends to go some way towards clarifying this point by analysis of her text in relation to various doctrinal options available to her in the contemporary religious climate. A brief introduction to this little-studied book precedes a preliminary sketch of the author’s beliefs drawn from internal evidence. The sketch will serve as a starting point from which to proceed to analysis of three particularly interesting passages in Eliza’s Babes: the poem, “To a Friend for her Naked Breasts” (p. 56); the prose meditation, “On ECCLES. 9.7. Goe eat thy bread with joy, &c” (pp. 80-84); and the poem, “My Descent” (pp.45-46).

On Whitsunday in June 1593 William Sinclair of Galwaldmuir and two of his sons attended a kirk near Stirling to hear the Sabbath day's sermon. Perhaps they and some of their fellow parishioners were inspired by hearing the word of God, but not everyone in the neighborhood was in a forgiving mood. Just after they left the kirk, “immediatlie aftir sermond,” the Sinclairs were attacked by Sir Archibald Stirling of Keir and several of his followers. When the melee was over, the three Sinclairs lay dead. This was no random act of violence. Rather, it was part of an ongoing feud; Sinclair of Galwaldmuir had earlier been involved in the killing of Stirling of Keir's brother James. The discord originated with a disputed title to the lands of Auchinbie in the parish of Dunblane. The Sinclairs claimed that they held it in feu from the king, while the Stirlings countered that they held it on similar terms from their kinsman William Chisholm, bishop of Dunblane, and they had backed this with a royal confirmation of the feu charter the previous December. The attack was also a significant incursion of profane activity into sacred space—an act situated in such a way as to maximize its dramatic impact.

By following the course of the Sinclair-Stirling feud to its conclusion and also drawing on other examples in which officials of Scotland's Reformed Kirk became involved in conflicts, either as peacemakers or antagonists, this article will examine two related issues.

In 1210, King John led to Ireland an army that consisted of the feudal levy of England, mercenary knights from Flanders, and a large force of Serjeants and crossbowmen, supported in the course of the campaign by some seven hundred ships. Money paid out for the ships totalled over £3,800, while wages for the crossbowmen and Serjeants topped £2,380. The 1210 Irish expedition was an impressive operation and showed Angevin government at its most effective. Modern historians, needless to say, have been impressed by the organisation and scale of the undertaking. What makes John’s Irish campaign not only impressive but terrifying was that, in one sense, it was all done to hunt down one man and his family.

Towards the end of the 1563 Parliamentary session, John Hales, Clerk of the Hanaper and an M.P. sitting for the Borough of Lancaster, wrote and circulated a tract entitled, A Declaration of the Succession of the Crowne Imperiall of Ingland. In this work, Hales argued that until such time as Queen Elizabeth married and produced an heir, the law clearly designated a successor—Catherine Grey, the leading Protestant claimant and heir according to the terms of Henry VIII’s will, which had been enacted into law. The leading Catholic claimant, and heir by strict hereditary descent, Mary Stuart, was, Hales contended, legally ineligible to succeed to the throne. Crucially, Hales concluded that in the face of inadequate governance by a female monarch wherein the queen violated the law regarding the succession, Parliament would become the rightful body to exercise the queen’s governing power for the good of the people.

In January 1773, Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the colonies, received a letter urging him to appoint no more Scots or Irishmen to offices in America. While the author claimed that, as a “Cosmopolite” he had no vulgar “national Prejudices,” he declared that “the English, particularly the Americans,” had conceived such Prejudices against the Scots and Irish, that it is great Impolicy to nominate them for governors or for any Employ in America….” One cannot know exactly what public relations disasters might have inspired this strong advice. Nevertheless, recent changes in both the United Kingdom and the empire at large had clearly heightened age-old English prejudices against these “alien” groups. Never before had so many Scots and Irishmen held public office in Britain and its colonies, and Scottish merchants were making considerable inroads in imperial trade at the expense of their English counterparts. However, jealousy on account of this new-found power does not completely explain the widespread animus against these groups. Many Englishmen and Anglo-Americans also perceived that Scots and Irishmen approached imperial government in ways that threatened English liberty. While it would be going too far to accept the contemporary English notion that Scots, and indeed most non-Englishmen, were “tinctured with notions of despotism,” this stereotype points toward the reality that officials from the fringes of the British Isles took a new approach to imperial government: they emphasized metropolitan authority while, at the same time, regarding the Crown's diverse subjects from a cosmopolitan perspective.

On Commencement Sunday in the summer of 1826, Hugh James Rose ascended the pulpit of the University Church at Cambridge to deliver a sermon. As Rose surveyed the assembled crowd, he would have been well aware that before him sat the future of English political, religious, and intellectual life—present and future members of Parliament, the leaders and local prelates of the Church of England, and the next generation of Cambridge scholars. While commencement addresses today are rather formulaic in their celebratory character, the sermon Rose had prepared for that day was far from uplifting. Rose had chosen to preach on Ecclesiastes chapter eleven, verse five: “No man can find out the work, which God maketh, from the beginning to the end.” Using this passage as a decree upon the limits of human knowledge, Rose launched into a blistering attack on the University and the educational philosophy that he believed it espoused. Far from praising the University and its graduates, Rose called into question much of what Cambridge had been doing to educate its students. The essence of Rose’s critique was that the University had lost its way as a religious institution and had become dominated by the search for “knowledge of the material Universe.” Pursuing this end, Rose warned, was a tremendous danger, because in so doing Cambridge was failing to provide a proper moral and religious foundation for those who would guide the nation. Naturally, Rose’s sermon came as a shock to many of those gathered before him, especially since it not only took the University to task but also implicitly seemed to indict some of Rose’s closest friends. His sermon battered one of the girders of Cambridge intellectual and religious life, and of Anglican theology more generally: the notion that natural philosophy was an appropriate handmaiden to religion. The tradition of reasoning up from nature to the Creator had long flourished at Cambridge in the hands of both men of science and theologians. Most at Cambridge took for granted the compatibility between the study of God’s creation and religious faith. For the previous three decades Cambridge had made the works of alumnus William Paley, replete with the ways nature manifested the wisdom and goodness of God, a cornerstone of undergraduate instruction. Ironically, many of Rose’s acquaintances from his own undergraduate days at Cambridge were themselves involved in scientific and mathematical pursuits and were generally sympathetic to Natural Theology. His dearest friend at the University was William Whewell, an intellectual polymath who excelled in mathematics, physics, and mineralogy, as well as moral philosophy, history, and theology. Rose also was a close associate of John Herschel and Charles Babbage, men who were renowned for their astronomical and mathematical work. Himself a fairly accomplished mathematician a decade earlier, Rose even had considered publishing some work to support Herschel and Babbage’s efforts to revitalize Cambridge mathematics during his undergraduate days.

On 1 June 1683, ten proprietors of East Jersey gathered in London for one of their periodic meetings to discuss colonial business. Of the ten, nine were Quakers, including Robert Barclay, Gawen Lawrie, and Edward Byllynge. The tenth, who served as the group’s treasurer, was the London attorney Robert West.’ Unknown to the Friends with whom he met was West’s involvement in the Rye House plotting, the first details of which Sir Leoline Jenkins, secretary of state, learned about eleven days later. On the 19th, the government began its crackdown on the conspirators, in part by issuing an order to search West’s chamber in the Temple. Three days later, West, now in custody, began providing the authorities a detailed account of the conspiracy to murder the king and James duke of York. Among those he implicated were other non-Quaker proprietors of East Jersey, including the barrister Nathaniel Wade and the attorney John Ayloffe, both of whom were involved in the assassination plot. As the authorities pursued the investigation, they learned of plans for a general uprising, at the heart of which were James duke of Monmouth and Lord William Russell.

In an October 1861 letter to Charles Sumner, the prominent Republican Senator from Massachusetts, William Howard Russell, The Times’ correspondent in America, explained England’s attitude toward the American Civil War: “In England we are threatened with Americanization which to our islands would be anarchy & ruin, & the troubles in America afford our politicians & writers easy means of dealing deadly blows at Brightism which is often attacked under the guise of war & the troubles in America.” Indeed, as Russell claimed, the conflict allowed those who identified the radicalism of John Bright with Americanization and disorder to present a plausible case to the English public. Americans, so this argument went, were but Englishmen transformed by Americanization, a social and political process that fostered a licentious individualism and a pernicious egalitarianism. This transformation had not only precipitated disorder in America, but the deterioration of civilization. England could also succumb to Americanization if it allowed Brightism to achieve dominance by extending the suffrage and introducing a radical, middle-class Parliament. The consequent implementation of free trade and destruction of privilege would lead to political and social democracy, making Americans of the English in England. From this perspective, Bright was an American in the most pejorative sense of the word.

In the late nineteenth century professionalism and consumerism collided in a vociferous debate over the commodification of health. In medical journals, before government panels and through independent publications, doctors condemned “quackery,” especially patent medicines—the Victorian appellation for over-the-counter drugs. They dismissed myriad pills, tonics and appliances as addictive, dangerous, or useless. This professional critique, doctors claimed, was an altruistic defence of patients. Their commercial opponents, patent medicine men (and frequently the press), countered that the professional critique was rooted in a pecuniary struggle to achieve monopoly. While ascribing different motivations to each other, both sides assumed that medical professionals were unanimous in their condemnation of so-called “secret remedies.” Peter Bartrip has shown, though, that professional opposition to patent medicines was far more complex and muddied by self-interest. The British Medical Journal, while criticizing patent medicines, carried ads for them, which made the BMA the focus of allegations of hypocrisy in the Journal of the American Medical Association and before the Select Committee on Patent Medicines (1912). At the organizational level, Bartrip has established that the financial interests of the British Medical Association undercut its opposition to patent medicines. This compromised position, I will argue, permeated the profession. If the British Medical Association could not resist the advertising revenue derived from patent medicines, it was equally true that many doctors could not resist recommending patent medicines to patients. Far from epitomizing professional altruism, the patent medicine question demonstrates the reluctance of doctors to abandon individual self-interest in the wake of consumerist challenges that would ultimately transform twentieth-century medical practice. In doing so, the patent medicine debate engages and complicates arguments about the role of collective social mobility in the history of the professions.

Anti-alienism has frequently been the dark underside of organized patriotic movements in twentieth-century Britain. Love of nation has all too frequently been accompanied by an abstract fear of foreigners or a concrete dislike of alien immigrants residing in Britain. Numerous patriotic leagues have used xenophobia and the supposed threat posed by aliens to define themselves and their Conservative creed. Aliens symbolized “the other,” which held values antithetical to members of the patriotic leagues. These currents have usually become even more pronounced in times of tension and crisis. From the end of the First World War through the 1920s, Britain suffered an enormous economic, social, and political crisis. British unemployment never fell below one million as traditional industries such as coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, and textiles declined. Electoral reform in 1918 and 1928 quadrupled the size of the electorate, and the British party system fractured with the Liberals divided and Labour becoming the alternative party of government. Industrial unrest was rampant, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. The example of the Russian Revolution inspired many on the Left and appalled their opponents on the Right, while many British Conservatives felt that fundamental aspects of the existing system of capitalism and parliamentary democracy were under challenge.

Radical disunity and diffusion of effort were cardinal features of mid-nineteenth-century British politics, but only infrequently has Chartism been viewed in this context. Some historians of Chartism prefer to stress its economic roots, or treat it as a rational response to political events, or regard it as a collection of local mobilizations rather than an organized national movement. Others focus upon its democratic ideology and practice, its significance as a mass activity involving “outsiders” (the unskilled, women, the Irish), its symbols, dress, and other forms of display, or upon the deployment of military and police to combat Chartism at times of serious disorder (notably in 1839, 1842, and 1848). Some commentators regard Chartism as the basis for mid-Victorian working-class liberalism, commending the intelligent artisans of London who drew up the Charter, and condemning the violence of the Chartist North. For Dorothy Thompson Chartism was a political movement inspired by concern about threats to workers’ rights. Gareth Stedman Jones has argued that Chartist agitation marks a continuation of familiar pre-1832 radical aims and rhetoric, and that it must be explained with reference to the nature of the state, not class consciousness or the trade cycle.