Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

The freedman Gregorio Cosme Osorio’s extant letters from Madrid in 1795 are the focus of Chapter 6. They provide a direct perspective of a cobrero leader’s legal culture, his views on the case, and his activities as liaison between Madrid and El Cobre (including an alleged meeting with the king). Cosme’s missives from the royal court, which high colonial officials considered subversive, critiqued politics of the law in the colony and kept the cobreros abreast of the imperial edicts issued in Madrid in their favor which colonial authorities ignored. His liaison role during fifteen years was crucial to keep the case alive in the royal court.

The age of Atlantic revolutions brought hope for fundamental change, a scarce good in the early modern world. Change was achieved through the creation and legal incorporation of rights, which differed from privileges, as they transcended all structures of authority and were thus common to humankind. Yet inequalities persisted, especially inequality of property and religion. What did change was the ability to voice one’s opinion. Slogans used in national debates were utilized by people across social boundaries in countless local settings to express their political views or personal interests. This instrumentalization in turn reverberated on the national level. To succeed in achieving political goals, the mobilization of public opinion became indispensable. Likewise, revolutionaries agreed that the regimes they built had to be supported by some form of popular control over the government. But the actual people – rather than the abstract one that was a source of legitimacy – was feared nonetheless. Most new regimes were republics, while royalists tended to uphold the status quo or pursue their goals without overthrowing the government, although royalism did not necessarily denote a progressive or conservative ideology.

The age of Atlantic revolutions brought hope for fundamental change, a scarce good in the early modern world. Change was achieved through the creation and legal incorporation of rights, which differed from privileges, as they transcended all structures of authority and were thus common to humankind. Yet inequalities persisted, especially inequality of property and religion. What did change was the ability to voice one’s opinion. Slogans used in national debates were utilized by people across social boundaries in countless local settings to express their political views or personal interests. This instrumentalization in turn reverberated on the national level. To succeed in achieving political goals, the mobilization of public opinion became indispensable. Likewise, revolutionaries agreed that the regimes they built had to be supported by some form of popular control over the government. But the actual people – rather than the abstract one that was a source of legitimacy – was feared nonetheless. Most new regimes were republics, while royalists tended to uphold the status quo or pursue their goals without overthrowing the government, although royalism did not necessarily denote a progressive or conservative ideology.

The age of Atlantic revolutions brought hope for fundamental change, a scarce good in the early modern world. Change was achieved through the creation and legal incorporation of rights, which differed from privileges, as they transcended all structures of authority and were thus common to humankind. Yet inequalities persisted, especially inequality of property and religion. What did change was the ability to voice one’s opinion. Slogans used in national debates were utilized by people across social boundaries in countless local settings to express their political views or personal interests. This instrumentalization in turn reverberated on the national level. To succeed in achieving political goals, the mobilization of public opinion became indispensable. Likewise, revolutionaries agreed that the regimes they built had to be supported by some form of popular control over the government. But the actual people – rather than the abstract one that was a source of legitimacy – was feared nonetheless. Most new regimes were republics, while royalists tended to uphold the status quo or pursue their goals without overthrowing the government, although royalism did not necessarily denote a progressive or conservative ideology.

As they had in early modern Spain, Africans and their descendants across the Spanish Empire were able to achieve freedom through a variety of legal means. In the seventeenth century, as European competitors contested Spain’s claims on the Americas, free black military units became key to the defense of Spanish territories and the Spanish Crown recognized and rewarded their service. After a French monarch assumed the vacant throne of Spain in the eighteenth century, Bourbon administrators established Disciplined Militias offering additional protections and privileges to the African descended men who joined their ranks, and to their families. In return, this expanding free black class often expressed its loyalty to the Spanish Crown. The French and American Revolutions that rejected monarchy and disseminated new ideas such as the Rights of Man and constitutional forms of government forced Africans and their descendants to re-consider their options. Some rejected monarchy. Others, however, continued to trust in the monarchical system that had benefitted many generations of African descended families. Those chose royalism over rebellion. Africans and their descendants continued to face such choices as independence movements sprung up across Latin America in the early nineteenth century and as Spain sent armies to crush them.

By March 1793 revolutionary France was at war with Austria, Prussia and Spain, and Britain was preparing a naval blockade. The National Convention responded to this desperate military situation by imposing a levy of 300,000 conscripts. In the west of France the levy was the trigger for massive armed rebellion and civil war, known, like the region itself, as ‘the Vendée’. The insurrection resulted in terrible loss of life before it was finally crushed in 1794. Estimates have ranged from exaggerated claims of 500,000 rebel deaths to more accepted recent estimates of up to 170,000 insurgents and 30,000 republican troops. The rebellion and its repression left deep and durable scars on French society and politics. In republican historiography, the scale of repression of the rebellion has been seen as a regrettable but necessary response to a military ‘stab in the back’ at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis, whereas right-wing politicians and historians from the west of France have applied the label of ‘genocide’ to the repression and therefore to one of the foundation acts of the first French republic. This chapter argues that ‘the Vendée’ was not a genocide: huge numbers of people were killed, but not because they were a distinctive Vendéan people nor because they were devout Catholics. This was instead a brutal civil war studded with examples of atrocity which would later be known as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’.

Although the heterogeneity of topics in Natures Pictures has discouraged discussion of the volume as a whole, one salient topic throughout is Cavendish’s experience of the English Civil Wars – explicitly treated in her poem, “A Description of the Civil Warrs,” and recounted in “A True Relation” – as it relates to her interest in political theory in the tales. Despite the prevailing assumption that Cavendish was an unequivocal royalist, her explicit statements of royalism in “The She-Anchoret” and “A True Relation” coexist with – but also place under erasure – the more veiled critique of Charles I in “The Moral Fable of the Ant and the Bee” and the complex political analysis concerning the monarch’s relationship to the subject in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” The contrast between the discursive on the one hand, and the literary or fictive on the other, enables Cavendish to hew to her expected royalist position in the former while exploring oppositional political perspectives in the latter.

This chapter describes and explains the early weakening of consensual decision-making in the Commons between the opening of the Short Parliament and December 1642. The political conflicts of these years were not able, in themselves, to topple the consensual tradition prevailing in Parliament, but some of them further revealed the conditions under which consensual decisions become increasingly infeasible. Divisions that did occur often involved ideological conflict, but ideological conflict was insufficient for causing majoritarian decisions. Instead, divisions in the House were overwhelmingly related to perceived threats to the honor, privilege, existence, or authority of the House of Commons, the Parliament as whole, or its members in particular. Conflicts over what course of action best conduced to maintaining the status of the House were what consistently led to divisions.

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870-71 exercised a dramatic impact on the rhetoric around private collecting, this chapter suggests. It examines why conservative collectors such as baron Jérôme Pichon felt that they were personally under attack as the city was shelled and burned during the année terrible, and suggests that heritage became intensely politicised, as radicals were blamed for repeating the vandalism previously seen in the Revolution of 1789. The chapter emphasis the emergence of a belligerent branch of art history written by Pichon’s associations- like Louis Courajod and baron Charles Davillier- and stresses that conservative collectors took their vision of the past into the public sphere through the vibrant culture of temporary exhibitions which emerged under the Second Empire. Through the figure of baron Léopold Double, it explores the cult of the old regime created by royalists but also argues that this cult proved very unstable in the new political and economic circumstances of the 1880s.