William Austin (1802–1857), the child of Deptford laborers, was adopted de facto as an infant by Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales. She rendered the child's identity such a mystery that it prompted the Delicate Investigation in 1806, a quasi-judicial affair published in 1813 in the vexed volume known as The Book. “Prince Austin” was regularly on stage during Caroline's carnivalesque rambles on the Continent from 1814 to 1820, frequently attacked in the loyalist press as “that bastard Billy Austin.” In the uproar of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820, Austin remained a target of loyalist scorn. Because Queen Caroline named him her residuary legatee at her death in 1821, his name registered aftershocks of queenite disruption through the middle of the century. In these narrative contests about Austin's identity, the metonymic traffic between a provisional family form and an absolutist national model bobbed and weaved in a disorderly fashion on the conspicuous stage of a dysfunctional royal family. On this prominent platform, adoptive contingency intermittently confounded closed absolutism.

The English Royal Navy's relationship with Scotland during the years preceding the Union of 1707 is usually cast as problematic in scholarly discussion, with the navy viewed as the enforcer of an embargo on Scottish trade with France. This study examines the Scottish use of Royal Naval convoy in the first years of the War of Spanish Succession through to 1707, focusing on the North Sea region. It adds nuance to security issues surrounding the parliamentary union by arguing that convoys to Scotland were more frequent than generally acknowledged, an improvement on the situation in the 1690s, and that when combined with the small Scottish navy, provided coverage that largely met Scottish needs. As a result, in a period of otherwise fierce debate, naval protection for Scotland was relatively uncontroversial. Convoy was therefore an unusual, if belated, success for regal union, and that success meant that Scots were more deeply enmeshed in the English system of maritime security than has been often been credited.

The necessity of adopting or redefining illiberal measures—such as torture, internment, or targeted-killings of terrorists—to protect states places burdens on the meaning of liberalism around the world. After 1969, liberal intellectual responses to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland identified two conflicted groups of Irish liberals. Then academic and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien attempted to reduce responses to the crisis to the choice between supporting the state and condoning terrorism. “Consenting liberals” compromised professional practices in the law, journalism, broadcasting, and academia to support the state's counterinsurgency. Alternatively, “dissenting liberals” defended their “neutrality” alongside the freedom to criticize the counterinsurgency. Justifying infringements on individual freedoms, O'Brien and others said the democratic state was imperiled. But, anomalously, freedoms were sacrificed in defense of the Irish state, which in security terms did little to defend itself. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency became an organizing principle in intellectual life, and over forty years colored self-perceptions of Irish society, past and present.

This article focuses on the Irish-born metropolitan radical and parliamentary journalist Peter Finnerty, exploring, in particular, the distinctive nature of his political engagement. Chiefly remembered as a friend of William Hazlitt and an implacable opponent of Lord Castlereagh, Finnerty was an influential figure in his own right, who moved between a range of social and political spaces. Framing him as an unrepentant Irish radical, indifferent to the coercive power of authority, this article will examine Finnerty's involvement in a range of scandals, controversies, and causes célèbres, and will highlight the ways in which he succeeded, through enacting a contempt for authority, in subverting both the courtroom and Parliament itself.

Throughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.

This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonomous individuals. Gender intersected in British courts with locality, resources, jurisdiction, social status, and familial, religious, and political affiliations to inform different women's access to justice, which involved negotiations between unequal actors within various constraints and in complex alignment with multiple and often competing interests.

This paper was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Atlanta in November 2021.

A conceptual revision occurred at the heart of anarchist theory between the end of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. As anarchist thinkers grappled with a state transformed beyond recognition by technological change, they reassessed their critique of state power and the rhetorical methods used to expose its inherent violence. Where nineteenth-century anarchists favored organic metaphors to emphasize the monstrosity of the state, twentieth-century anarchists tended to adopt a set of mechanical metaphors. This change focused attention on the idea of technocracy, and informed a more comprehensive assessment of the state's activities. This article analyses this innovation in anarchist political thought, before tracing it through to Herbert Read's critical appraisal of C. P. Snow's influential lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” and Snow's response to Read. Their debate, in which Read challenged Snow's argument that the pursuit of technological and political modernization was essential to maintain the nation's international role and address the social and economic challenges of the mid-century, was a contest for Britain's future. Drawing on his anarchism, Read saw such ideas as an existential threat, with the unthinking promotion of a technological “revolution” imperiling “the tender shoots of all that is human.” Contextualizing Read in his anarchist intellectual milieu, this article recovers a neglected voice in British intellectual and cultural history, the complexities of an overlooked political tradition, and a radical vision of Britain's future that questioned the dominant assumptions of the age.

This article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.

The rise and fall of the office of sheriff is a frequent theme in English administrative history. In medieval times sheriffs were the principal representatives of the king in the local community and bore the king's authority and acted in his name. Their courts entertained a wide variety of criminal and civil proceedings. By Tudor times such powers and authority were things of the past. Edward IV had effectively ended the sheriff's power by removing all indictments before the sheriff in his tourn to the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace for trial. The sheriff's judicial powers passed to the justices of the peace and his military powers to the deputy lieutenants. What powers did remain were exercised under the supervision of the magistrates both in and out of formal sessions. When James I came to the throne in 1603, the once powerful sheriff presided at elections, distrained and sold goods for the payment of fines, summoned juries, hanged criminals, and carried out other miscellaneous tasks. For most gentlemen of England a year's tenure as sheriff was an expensive inconvenience.

By 1640, however, the sheriff was once again a public figure of some consequence. The first two Stuarts, especially Charles I, had turned to the sheriff to execute many of their financial and administrative programs. Three times James I ordered sheriffs to collect extra benevolences. It seemed to many that Charles I had used the office for inappropriate political purposes. A sheriff had to be resident in his county throughout his term of office so he could not serve in parliament. In 1625 Thomas Wentworth was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire, and the even more troublesome Edward Coke was appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire. Two years later Walter Long, M.P. was appointed sheriff of Wiltshire, an affront to the electors of Bath who had recently returned him to the House of Commons. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, these events were remembered with considerable bitterness; and the Grand Remonstrance noted “the usual course of pricking sheriffs [was] not observed, but many times sheriffs made in an extraordinary way, sometimes as a punishment and a charge unto them, sometimes such were pricked out as would be instruments to execute whatever they would have done.”