Caroline Boswell's study of disaffection seeks to shift the focus of histories of interregnum popular politics away from questions of allegiance to instead explore how local conflicts intersected with the broader, national political context. She demonstrates convincingly how local disputes and discontent were refashioned by pamphleteers and newsbook writers to present an image of popular disenchantment with the interregnum regimes.
Boswell arranges the book into two parts: the first, “Sites of Disaffection,” looking in particular at streets, marketplaces, taverns, and alehouses; and the second, “Objects of Disaffection,” examining common targets for popular hostility (the soldiery, excisemen, and the figure of the “fanatic”). In these chapters, Boswell's argument is supported by the examination of detailed case studies, such as the attack on Colonel John Hewson and other troops in London in December 1659. She is also attentive to recent scholarship, which has stressed the spatial as well as performative aspects of popular politics.
Boswell's work is most persuasive when she explores how popular disaffection was exploited for political purposes by the opponents of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. In Hewson's case, the resistance of apprentices to the threat to curtail their rights to petition was transformed in the press into a public trial of the colonel for his part in the execution of Charles I. The manipulation of popular disaffection for political ends, however, as Boswell shrewdly notes, involved conceding political agency to “lowly members of the commonality” (243), as well as implicit approval of the sometimes violent tactics that they employed.
There are interesting resonances here with the kind of “popular Toryism” that emerged during and in the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, discussed in the work of Tim Harris. Labels such as “fanatic” too clearly had a long shelf life, and, though Boswell's work understandably concentrates on the period from 1649 to 1660, it might have strengthened the work if she could have looked just a little more at the legacies of interregnum disaffection. Equally, the “royalist commons” that Boswell sees being fashioned rhetorically through the literature of disaffection could be connected with recent work by Blair Worden on actual broad coalition-building, generated in the movements for a “free” Parliament in 1659–1660.
While these wider implications point to the considerable value of Boswell's work, the nebulous nature of popular disaffection itself poses questions about the specificity of the conclusions that she draws from the 1650s. As she acknowledges, the “chimney men” of the 1660s enjoyed similar powers and met with similar popular opposition to the excisemen of the 1650s. Similarly, though there was a particular association between drink and Royalism, health-drinking was a trigger for seditious speech and gesture in other periods as well. Public spaces and sites, such as the market cross, were locations of popular contestation and defiance well before and well after 1650. There is a danger, too, in Boswell's understandable desire to rethink popular political activity during the 1650s in terms other than allegiance. The connections between “disaffection” and the wider context can, in places, seem evident only when local disputes were repackaged by the contemporary press. For example, while she very deftly shows how Sir Arthur Hesilrige's dispute with the tenants of Eslington, Northumberland was later employed by Royalist writers (themselves borrowing from Leveller commentary) to demonstrate his greed and corruption, she pays less attention to the way in which the tenants themselves appear to have utilized Hesilrige's well-known disenchantment with the Protectoral regime to advance their own cause.
Overall, however, this is a sophisticated and valuable treatment of popular disaffection in interregnum England. The flash points Boswell discusses are generally handled with great care and sensitivity. For example, in discussing reports of seditious words occasioned by health-drinking, Boswell notes not only the political divisions such incidents might reveal but also the perceived threat they posed to values of sociability. Equally, she acknowledges that the reporting of such words was likely driven by multiple factors: financial rewards in the case of some informers and political loyalties in the case of others, but also a desire to preserve these spaces of community sociability from the threat of closure.
In her conclusion, Boswell is rightly wary of drawing any parallels between the exploitation of disaffection in the seventeenth century and modern-day “populist” politics. However, if comparisons of that kind would be inappropriate, this monograph should both provide much food thought for historians of later Stuart popular political culture and shed important light on the “popularity” of Charles II's restoration.
