The Reformed Kirk of Scotland has a reputation for vigorous repression of festivity hardly to be surpassed by any other Protestant church. From 1560 on, the authorities of the kirk from local session to General Assembly waged a stern and unremitting campaign against the celebration of Yule, Easter, May Day, Midsummer, and saints' days; against feasting, whether at marriages or wakes; against Sunday sports and dancing and guising—in short, against anything that might distract newly Reformed laity from the central Protestant focus on the sermon, the Bible, and the godly life of moral discipline and prayer. Their goals were both negative and positive. They were intent on quashing popish superstition in part because they were convinced that its persistence helped to explain the recurrence of plague, famine, and other divine judgments on the land. In a more positive sense, they were trying to clear the way for construction of a new vision of the good life—one that exalted word over image and discipline over ritual, and in which community cohesion was achieved by a shared Protestant identity and the common goal of a devout and orderly society. Modern observers generally credit their campaign with remarkable success; certainly the popular image of Scotland after the Reformation is grim and joyless—and with some reason. Days of fasting and humiliation under presbyterian rule came close to outnumbering the old saints' days, and they vastly outnumbered new days of thanksgiving. Official policy on the matter of festivity was exemplary for a Reformed nation.

The treason trial of Connor Lord Maguire, second baron of Enniskillen, in February 1645 brought into focus competing conceptions of the constitutional relationship of England and Ireland. Maguire had been implicated in the plot to seize Dublin Castle on 23 October 1641 during the Irish revolt of that year and was tried in early 1645 before a Middlesex jury. The key issue of the trial was whether Maguire, as a peer of Ireland, having committed treasonable acts in Ireland and elsewhere and being brought “into England against his will, might be lawfully tryed … in the King's Bench at Westminster by a Middlesex Jury, and outed of his tryal by Irish Peers of his condition by the statute of 35 Henry VIII c. 2.” In the earl of Stafford's trial almost four years earlier, the defense had consistently assumed a position that will be termed Irish constitutional exceptionalism. Both Strafford and other apologists for his rule as Lord Deputy in Ireland during the 1630s adopted this constitutional stance in response to proceedings against them in both the English and Irish Parliaments during 1641. It held that while Magna Carta and the common law generally held sway in Ireland, because of circumstances unique to that particular kingdom, significant exceptions existed with regard to the legal rights and privileges these legal instruments conferred on the king's Irish subjects. In contrast, the case for Maguire rested on a view of the constitutional relationship of England and Ireland that emphasized a more closely shared heritage of legal privileges for both commoners and peers as guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law—a position best characterized as constitutionalist.

Irish historian A. T. Q. Stewart has aptly described the world inhabited by eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as one of “hidden” significance. Compared to the rise of the Ascendancy and the repression of Catholics under the penal code, the story of Ulster's Presbyterians figures as interesting, albeit less significant, marginalia. While a few studies detail the handicaps the group suffered in the years after the Williamite Settlement, their eighteenth-century experience has mainly attracted church historians interested in theological disputes, social historians charting the rise of the linen industry, and students of the '98 Rebellion exploring the ways in which a latent Presbyterian radicalism contributed to the formation of the United Irish movement. Explaining who the Ulster Scots were or how they defined themselves has not attracted much scholarly attention, an unsurprising failure given that historians have designated the eighteenth century in Ireland as the period of “penal era and golden age.”

This article argues that a new, more fully integrated approach to the study of Ireland and Britain offers possibilities for recovering the history of the Ulster Scots. Nearly twenty-five years after J. G. A. Pocock issued his “plea” for a “new British history” that would incorporate the experiences of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within a single narrative by exploring the ways in which each “interacted so as to modify the condition of one another's existence,” scholars have finally responded. The new British history, with its focus on the development of a British state system, seeks to explore, according to a chief proponent, John Morrill, the ways in which “the political and constitutional relationship between the communities of the two islands were transformed” and the processes through which they gained “a new sense of their own identities as national communities.”

The images that the phrase “Marian Protestant” summons to mind are both dramatic and predictable. Whether they are of Cranmer holding his hand in the flame, Latimer exhorting Ridley to play the man, or more generalized images of men and women dying at the stake, we see the landscape of Marian Protestantism shrouded in the smoke from the fires of Smithfield and think of it exclusively in terms of martyrs. This unblinking fixation on the Marian martyrs is partly the result of an all too human fascination with violent death, but it is also the result of our dependence on John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563–83), popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs,” a sobriquet that does justice to Foxe's preoccupations when discussing the penultimate Tudor reign.

Nevertheless, to ignore the majority of Marian Protestants who did not die for the gospel is to study the steeple and believe that you have examined the entire church. Like the steeple, the martyrs are the most conspicuous group of Marian Protestants, yet like a steeple their existence depended on the support of the rest of the church. However, even this metaphor fails to do justice to those coreligionists who provided the Marian martyrs with physical, financial, moral, and emotional support. The relationships between the martyrs and their “sustainers” (to use Foxe's phrase) were profound and complex, with both parties drawing strength from each other. The relationships between male martyrs and their female sustainers are of particular interest and importance; in fact, it will be suggested in this article that these relationships had a decisive influence on the development of English Protestantism.

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.

More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.

During the Exclusion crisis, the figure of a tyrant rapist, a ruler undone by his own lust and cruelty, briefly appeared on the London stage. Early in December 1680, Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus was performed by the Duke's Company in the Dorset Garden Theater. Lee's play recounted the tale of the rape of Lucretia and the subsequent actions taken by Brutus in resistance to this act of tyranny. This theatrical production was by all accounts a success, yet the play was banned from the stage after only six days; the order of the Lord Chamberlain stated objections to its “very Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon ye Government.” Lee's Brutus was, however, soon available in print, published by Richard and Jacob Tonson in June of 1681. Like other Exclusion publications, Brutus offered a powerful argument against tyranny and arbitrary government, and the play was evidently construed as an attack on the Stuart monarchy. Many modern commentators have specifically noted the anti-Catholic overtones of Lee's drama and have read it within the context of the Popish Plot scare. Yet the central theme of Lee's play is, of course, the association between tyranny and rape: it is the tyrant's violation of woman (not of religion) that justifies resistance. In Lee's drama, just as in Livy's history, the chaste and honorable Roman matron Lucretia is raped by “the lustful bloody Sextus,” a prince of the proud and tyrannical house of Tarquin. In both stories, Lucretia's rape and her subsequent suicide set off a train of revolutionary events: Brutus seizes the bloody knife from Lucretia's twice-violated body and, holding it to his lips, vows with his fellow Romans never to suffer Tarquin “nor any other king to reign in Rome.”

In the days before Christmas 1805, William Thomas Fitzgerald's Nelson's Tomb; a Poem made its appearance in London book shops. Fitzgerald was one of the foremost loyalist versifiers of his day—and had previously published an ode to Nelson after the Battle of the Nile. When he took pen in hand, Britain was mourning Nelson's recent death at Trafalgar. Nelson's Tomb then, considered the manner in which Britons would mark his passing. Nelson's funeral would be, Fitzgerald boasted, “no hireling pageant.”

Fitzgerald's words conveyed the contemporary loyalist sense that the funeral for Lord Nelson would be genuine, ordered, harmonious, and widely acceptable—that it would avoid the accusations of artificiality and the expressions of dissent that had greeted previous patriotic pageants such as the Naval Thanksgiving of 1797. At first glance, Fitzgerald's expectation would seem to accord with the recent orthodoxy concerning state spectacle in Britain during the wars of 1793–1815, an orthodoxy holding not only that the public pageants of the period were an important manifestation of the particular brand of patriotism that loyalists were interested in marketing but also that the product itself had unifying and socially cohesive effects. But Nelson's funeral—which was held on 9 January 1806 and drew crowds of between twenty and thirty thousand people—has not been widely treated as a loyalist spectacle, largely because those who have considered it have joined Linda Colley in recognizing its apparently iconoclastic nature. Colley was attentive to the state pageants of the period; they featured in her argument for the privileging of a cult of monarchy in officially consecrated expressions of British nationalism.

In the final decade of his remarkable life, the Victorian explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton made a daring bid to provoke a confrontation with those forces in British society that he identified with moral intolerance and intellectual pedantry. Unlikely though it might seem, the instrument of this provocation was a work widely regarded as children's literature—the tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1885–86, Burton published a ten-volume translation of the tales, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, followed in 1886–88 by an additional six-volume Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The mammoth scale of the endeavor was matched by its audacity. Burton not only offered an English reading public the first frank and unexpurgated translation of the tales themselves; he also peppered the text with footnotes about esoteric aspects of Islamic culture, especially sexual customs, and closed the tenth volume with a “Terminal Essay” that included a lengthy discourse on pederasty. This quixotic enterprise thrust Burton into the middle of an intersecting network of debates about sexuality and purity, state regulation and personal freedom, the Occident and the Orient. To examine the intentions that motivated Burton's translation of the Nights and the reception it received is to explore some of the crucial elements of the late Victorian crisis of identity.

While the crumbling of a Victorian cultural consensus has long been a matter of interest, only recently has attention turned to the role that non-Western influences played in this process.

In this article we address the topic of intra-Puritan doctrinal debate and, by examining the mechanisms whereby the godly in the capital tried, if not to conclude then at least to control and ameliorate their in-house doctrinal disputes, to reconstruct some of the mechanisms—social, political, and ideological—whereby doctrinal “consensus” or “orthodoxy” was constructed, policed, and reproduced among the godly. Thus we hope to penetrate the shadowy world of what one might term the London Puritan underground. What emerges from this scrutiny is a world of interministerial dispute and rivalry, of lay activism, based on an urgent word and sermon-centered piety, that found its natural expression as much in the conventicle and the godly discussion group as in the public congregation and clerically delivered sermon or lecture. Here operated an overlapping series of networks of orally transmitted rumors and stories, of manuscript tracts and sermon notes, of conferences, conversations, and arbitrations both formal and informal. Here the reputations of the Puritan clergy were made and maintained, and the nature of orthodoxy debated and defined through mechanisms and exchanges that remain, for the most part, closed to us. This obscurity is not an accident. Only rarely did the interventions of authority or the anxiety or outraged amour propre of some wronged participant combine to leave traces, either in court records or the fulminations of the pamphlet press, of what appears to have been a very active underworld of dispute, discussion, and display.

A recent article in the Calcutta magazine Desh outlined the exploits of a revolutionary fighting for “national freedom” against the British Empire. The article related how, during wartime, this revolutionary traveled secretly to secure the aid of Britain's enemies in starting a rebellion in his country. His mission failed, but this “selfless patriot” gained immortality as a nationalist hero. For an Indian—and particularly a Bengali—audience, the logical protagonist of this story would be the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, the former president of the Indian National Congress, assumed the leadership of the Indian National Army with the support of the Japanese imperial government during the Second World War in the hopes of freeing India from British rule. The subject of the story, however, was not Bose, but the United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone and his efforts in 1796 to secure assistance for an Irish rebellion from the government of Revolutionary France. The article went on to narrate how Ireland had been held in the “grip of imperialism” for an even longer period of time than India and concluded that the Irish and Indian nationalist movements were linked by a history of rebellion against British rule.

As the Desh article illustrates, the popular image of the relationship between Ireland and India within the British Empire has been that of two subject peoples striving for national freedom. This linkage of Irish and Indian history has had particular resonance in Bengal.

When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiles's interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content.

By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiles's own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the women's movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for women's rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.

Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women's suffrage movement. The WSPU introduced the use of militancy, first interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, then moving to the use of street theater, such as large-scale demonstrations, and ultimately to the destruction of government and private property, including smashing windows, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to buildings and pillar-boxes. Once the Liberal government introduced forcible feeding as an antidote to the suffragette hunger strike, militants created a visual activism, dependent upon the exhibition of women's tortured bodies as spectacle. By this account, the activities of the WSPU became exemplary of what critic Barbara Green has called “performative activism” and “visibility politics” in early twentieth-century feminist praxis, creating “almost entirely feminine communities where women celebrated, suffered, spoke with, and wrote for other women,” and that “allowed women to put themselves on display for other women.”

In June 1913, on a holiday trip to Paris, George Wyndham died suddenly of a heart attack—he was not quite fifty years old. Shocked by this unexpected loss, colleagues in the Conservative Party and the House of Commons, whose inner circles he had occupied for a quarter of a century, organized the usual tributes. Obituaries laid out Wyndham's pedigree as scion of one of England's more romantic landed families, charted his meteoric rise in the 1890s under Arthur Balfour's patronage, referred briefly and discreetly to his troubled tenure as Irish secretary from 1900–1905, and applauded his versatility as a sportsman and a man of letters. Despite his truncated career, interest in Wyndham did not wane after these first homages. Working through the interruption of war, his family saw that collections of letters and essays, with the 1925 set prefaced by J. W. Mackail's “life,” reached the public. These materials prompted pen portraits and biographies that appeared at regular intervals into the 1970s.

A largely sympathetic group of authors, those who wrote about Wyndham faced the interesting challenge of presenting as inspiring and exemplary a life whose disappointments had threatened to outweigh its achievements. The solution they found was one that Wyndham would have accepted, for, indeed, he helped to shape it. In their hands, George Wyndham became a modern Siegfried, the charming, versatile, and disinterested son of an extraordinary ruling class—now, alas, eclipsed—who had guided Britain through two centuries of unprecedented grandeur and prosperity.

As imperial pride flourished in the racial discourse of late Victorian British politics, ethnic revival and Celtic nationalism also gained purchase and resonance. These complex and seemingly competing issues of identity extended beyond the “four nations” of the United Kingdom to the Isle of Man, a crown dependency constitutionally outside the United Kingdom but at the very center of the British Isles. In this “land of home rule,” adrift in the Irish Sea, the juxtaposition of Britishness and Celticism was particularly acute, compounded by the proud persistence of Norse traditions. Manx independence within the Atlantic archipelago was symbolized by the annual Tynwald Day ceremony, a Viking “Thing” or general meeting, at which the year's new legislation was promulgated in both English and Manx Gaelic. In the late Victorian period, as Anglo-Manx business syndicates invested heavily in the “visiting industry,” transforming the island into “one large playground for the operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire,” gentlemanly antiquarians constructed (and/or invented) the necessary traditions to safeguard Manx cultural distinctiveness and its devolved political status. Through the assertion of Celticism, a project that tended to downgrade Norse contributions to the island's past, the little Manx nation girded itself against cultural anglicization, yet remained unquestionably loyal to the British empire.

Slightly other than English, the Manx have displayed what Sir Frank Kermode has described as “mild alienation” and “qualified foreignness,” characteristics that need to be considered in the wider debate about British identity.

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.

The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.

The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.