whiggery assailed and triumphant: popular radicalisms in hanoverian england

Whiggery Assailed and Triumphant: Popular Radicalisms in Hanoverian EnglandVoters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 byFrank O'Gorman; Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society by James Bradley; Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Ageof Walpole and Pitt by Nicholas Rogers; Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 by PaulMonodReview by: Kathleen WilsonJournal of British Studies, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1995), pp. 118-130Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175812 .

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a Chancery case with "the ingredients of both Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet" (p. 101). This is a splendid and important book, certain to engage other historians of fifteenth-century gentry society for decades to come.

Where then have McFarlane's call and an examination of local communities led? To the knowledge that no single model will do for every county and that many of the local studies needed to paint a national picture have not yet been completed. To a need, also, for careful definition of communities and to the realization that shire boundaries are not always the most profitable avenues of approach. When geography, economy, or territorial lordships crossed county boundaries, they carried with them social and political associations. Many of the Leicestershire and Warwickshire gentry families studied here had lands or other interests scattered across the midlands or at court and looked to the crown or to greater regional magnates as well as to county offices and institutions for direction and control. When magnate or royal ties dissolved, as in midcentury Warwickshire, or when local agrarian conditions dictated a narrower circle of like- minded landlords, as the Townshends found in northwest Norfolk, then county associations belonged to only one of many overlapping and unstable circles, concentric only at the point of each gentleman's own estate.

That estate remained the focus of everyday life but never its limit. By the end of a troubled century, the gentry had become more accus- tomed to managing some aspects of local government on their own, and their relations with crown and nobility had been upgraded from administrative assistant to junior partner. All three of the books re- viewed here, and those mentioned in their exceptionally full bibliogra- phies, have helped to illuminate that transformation, albeit from slightly differing perspectives, and McFarlane's hope for a better un- derstanding of "the main outlines of local and central politics" has come a long way toward realization.

MARY L. ROBERTSON The Huntington Library

Whiggery Assailed and Triumphant: Popular Radicalisms in Hanoverian England

Voters, Patrons, and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832. By FRANK O'GORMAN. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Pp. 464. $84.00.













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Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society. By JAMES BRADLEY. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 470. $59.95.

Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt. By NICHOLAS ROGERS. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Pp. 456. $79.00.

Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788. By PAUL MONOD. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. 412. $22.95.

For twentieth-century English historians, "Whig" is a four-letter word. Since Herbert Butterfield first blasted the distortions produced by the "Whig interpretation of history" over fifty years ago, the epithet has been hurled against a wide range of historiographic perspectives that have, according to their critics, one thing in common: the desire to deprive the historical process of its innate foreignness, capri- ciousness, and complexity and English history of its peculiarities. Hence, adherence to models of linear development, teleological beliefs in the inevitability of progress or class struggle, even the importation of inappropriate "American" concepts such as individualism and opti- mism into the interpretation of the English past are among the various species of Whiggery that must be assailed if true historical knowledge is to be achieved. Although the injunction of anti-Whig historians to study the past for its own sake has been convincingly challenged by postmodernist critics as impossibly naive as well as just plain impossi- ble, the hostility toward so-called Whig history survives in many quar- ters, even if it can now take the form of mistrust and suspicion of "theory" per se. Those who approach the past from the present, it seems, are condemned to misread it.

Yet ours is not the only age in which the word "Whig" had objec- tionable, not to say ugly, connotations. In the eighteenth century, the charge of Whiggery could also be used to insult, confound, and defy; to define the boundaries of acceptable practice; and, indeed, to castigate a rather different but, to some contemporaries, no less distorting set of operations: namely, the processes and policies by which the successive Whig governments first installed in 1715 achieved unwarranted ascendancy. Tories, Jacobites, and opposition Whigs all saw in the tech- niques of government finance, the growth of the Civil List, the Septen- nial Act, and endemic electoral venality Whig ministers' deliberate efforts to build up a slavish court party that could subvert the independence of the House of Commons and legitimate a range of antilibertarian measures in terms of the public interest. The high-level corruption and illegitimacy on which the Whig state was founded or through which it was perpetuated, these critics asserted, circulated through the polity, corroding the arteries of popular freedoms and public justice, with deleterious consequences for English liberties, properties, and interna-











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tional standing. As an indictment of the constellations of power in the state, this critique proved to have remarkable longevity, resonating as powerfully among Wilkite and pro-American radicals as it had among the "patriotic" opponents to Walpole. Yet these disparate groups had one thing in common: a profound sense of grievance at being excluded from what they believed to be their rightful place within or without the formal institutions of power. The four excellent books under review concern themselves, in very different ways, with the eighteenth- century critique of the Whig state and the ways in which its oligarchic influences were circumvented by the ideologies and practices of popular politics. In doing so-each from an avowedly anti-Whig perspec- tive-they ironically both contest the currently fashionable "Tory" readings of popular politics as structured solely by paternalism, hierarchy, and deference, and confirm the survival of more modern forms of Whiggery that continue to flourish and inform, despite their critics best efforts to the contrary.

Certainly no area of eighteenth-century English history has been as radically transformed in the past two decades as the study of politics, and the studies under consideration, all four extensively and imag- inatively researched, may represent the culmination of several of the intellectually and interpretively liberatory trends that have gained mo- mentum since the 1970s.1 Frank O'Gorman offers a wide-ranging analysis of that most excoriated of political beasts, the unreformed electoral system. Yet in O'Gorman's hands, that bete noire of T. H. B. Oldfield and subsequent propagandists and historians appears remarkably civil, despite exhibiting inevitable crankiness of age. O'Gorman sets out "to rescue the unreformed electorate from the Whig interpretation of English history" (p. 10), which saw pre-Reform politics as bastions of corruption and venality. Instead, O'Gorman argues that the electorate demonstrated impressive independence and political vi- tality. Although the proportion of adult males who could vote fell from 23.9 percent to 14.4 percent between 1734 and 1832, and bribery, corruption and electoral venality flourished, the culture of accountability

1 Such as the move to recover the social and cultural contexts of politics inaugurated by Edward Thompson and John Brewer: see Edward Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 382-405, "Eighteenth Century English Society: Class-Struggle without Class?" Social History 3 (1978): 133-65, and Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1977); John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), and "Commercialization and Politics," in The Birth of a Consumer Society, ed. John Brewer, Neil McKendrick, and J. H. Plumb (London, 1982), pp. 197-262.







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with which the electoral system was imbricated and through which the dramas of elections themselves were enacted ensured that the unreformed system was not a sham but had life, energy, and some claim to political representativeness.

O'Gorman begins by examining the formal structures and processes of electoral politics, from the types and organization of constituencies to the ordering of the canvas and campaign. He convincingly demonstrates that the culture of patronage had its limitations and that aristocratic "influence," far from being the automatic auxiliary of land and power, was a hard-won if many-splendored thing, a result of careful management that both nurtured and negotiated the desires, interests, and political pretensions of the voters. O'Gorman goes on to analyze the social contours of electoral politics, where he confirms the earlier findings of John Phillips in Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England (Princeton, N.J., 1982) that formal participation in the political nation filtered far down the social scale and that craftsmen and artisans made up by far the greatest proportion of the voters, outnum- bering retailers by a ratio of at least two and sometimes four to one. In this context, his efforts to recover the meanings of electoral politics for the majority of its participants form the most innovative sections of his book. O'Gorman provides a wealth of evidence that the theaters of aristocratic and gentry control were rivaled by what he calls the "rituals of social inversion" (p. 91) but which could as accurately be described as the "theaters of accountability" enacted through elections. The canvass, the processions, electoral treating, and chairing could all exert a sort of reverse hegemony on condescending aristocratic candidates that forced them to acknowledge (and treat with elab- orate respect) the humbles' crucial role in their political future. Voters clearly saw themselves as political subjects, with rights, liberties, and opinions that had to be attended to and which were neglected by the candidates at the latter's peril, and they took their septennial duties very seriously indeed. Electoral treating and entertainments were in- terpreted by them as their entitlement, to which their social superiors had to defer. Along with the canvassing, processions, and chairing of successful candidates-activities which frequently involved entire communities, electors and nonelectors, rich and poor, male and female alike-such treating provided implicit recognition of the potential political power of the voters, just as the entire electoral drama played out the myth of popular consent while endowing the English ruling classes with legitimacy.

Yet ironically one of O'Gorman's weaknesses is that he does not plumb the evidence he presents about the mental worlds of the voters as fully, nor takes them as seriously, as he should. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, he inexplicably dismisses voter attitudes as "a primitive layer of political consciousness . . . predicated upon a repudiation of the politics of oligarchy" (p. 259), which only the magic







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bullets of party discipline and rationality, outlined in his final chapter, would be able to transform into a more modern form in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, in his apotheosizing of nineteenth-century party behavior as the ultimate expression of genuine politicization lay O'Gorman's main claim to Whiggishness (defined in this instance as anachronism), and it presents the most problematic argument of the book. The electorate's "politicization" and their iden- tification of local and national grievances and blessings had been evident since the early decades of the century and were not likely to be disrupted by the political and imperial developments that dominated thereafter, from succession crisis and invasion to war, rebellion, and revolution. Even further, the larger discursive contexts in which "party" indentities were produced and consumed ensured that elites were never capable of defining and containing political meaning or the form and content of individuals' larger political consciousness. Politicization clearly lay in the eye of the beholder. A top-down party interpretation of electoral behavior misses a great deal of the texture and significance of those politics as experienced by the majority of people. Nevertheless, O'Gorman's fine study demonstrates that the unreformed electoral system, and the opportunities it afforded ordinary men and women to participate in the greatest legitimating ritual of the state, could serve to support an ideology of "independency" that was a cornerstone of radical activism. By re-presenting the formal aspects of political life in their broader social and cultural contexts, O'Gorman restores electoral politics to its rightful place as a crucial component of popular political culture in eighteenth-century England.

James E. Bradley's book qualifies, revives, and, to a degree, vin- dicates an argument of that quintessential Whig historian, G. M. Tre- velyan (that ironically has recently been taken up by "revisionist" historians of the period, such as J. C. D. Clark): namely, that religion was at the heart of political divisions in the second half of the eighteenth century. Specifically, he argues that Protestant Nonconformists provided the radical ideology and leadership necessary to galvanize political consciousness among middling and artisanal groups in a num- ber of boroughs. He examines the legal position of Dissenters in local and national political structures, the political theology sketched out in five provincial dissenting ministers' sermons, and the socioeconomic and religious contours of the divisions evinced in ten boroughs during contested parliamentary elections and the 1775 petitions over the American war. What he discovers by bringing together these various analyses is that the "progressive" (p. 190) political ideology of Dissent and socioeconomic status interacted during the 1770s to produce a strong middling- and artisanal-based radicalism that found expression at the polls and in petitions.

Bradley has provided us with the first major study of Dissenting political ideas in over three decades, as well as with the first effort to










locate these political ideas in a social context wider than that of the dissenting communities themselves.2 On both counts, he does an admi- rable job. His chapters on the dissenting pulpit provide informative summaries of the relations between locally prominent ministers and the interplay between their perceptions of themselves as part of a legally marginalized minority, their theologies, and their politics. He also makes a very good case for the attractiveness of ideas about independence, individual liberty, and political recognition to middling and artisanal urban classes who had ample reason to be alienated from the oligarchic structures of power in the state and locality during the period of the American war.

However, his emphasis on Dissent as a vanguard of a distinctive, proto-class-conscious radicalism is not only Whiggish (teleological and linear) but also not finally convincing. Bradley is clearly passionate and sincere in his belief that Dissenters were the spearhead of progressive forces within the polity, taking their programs to "a larger audi- ence of Anglican and some secularized shopkeepers and artisans" who "were well-prepared for the message of liberty" (p. 411). But although many dissenters certainly embraced radical ideas about consent, accountability, and the delegatory nature of political power, they were scarcely alone or original in doing so. Jacobites in George I's reign, "country-party" Tories under Sir Robert Walpole, and the London patriots under Pitt the Elder all wielded versions of some or all of these ideas in political battles and appeals to the people out-of-doors; the new emphasis on resistance theory among political dissidents in the 1760s and 1770s is better attributed to a convergence of social, ideological, and political developments in national political culture than to the charismatic power of a handful of nonconformist leaders. Further, such a one-note reading of disssenting ideology ignores the underside of the libertarianism that they, and other radicals, espoused. Chauvinistic, imperialistic, acquisitive, and desirous, the discourses of radicalism inscribed highly particularized and normative definitions of class, citizenship, and gender into their "alternative vision" (p. 418) of the polity. Although various members of the dissenting elite could be as liberal-minded as Bradley envisions, rank-and-file dissent was not necessarily more tolerant of diversity (or colonial rebellion, as Bradley acknowledges) than their Anglican brethren. Anti-Catholi- cism, for example, which Bradley strangely exempts from his study, was strong among dissenters in most regions of the country, and in Newcastle itself, one of Bradley's case studies, many of the participants in the radical and antiwar campaigns were also signers of the

2 Since the seminal studies of Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763-1800 (Cambridge, 1983); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); and Michael Watts, The Dis- senters (Oxford, 1978).










massive Protestant Association petition of 1780 circulated in the re- gion. And luminaries like Richard Price and Joseph Priestly were well- known for their desire to circumscribe formal political liberties to those well-off and educated enough to handle them. Such patterns must com- plicate any interpretation of Dissent as the relay team on the road to liberty.

Finally, Bradley's psephological and sociological analyses, de- ploying the most advanced methods of computer-assisted record link- age, are indeed impressive, and he provides what will surely be the best guide to the social contours of radical and Dissenting politics for some time to come. But the carefully constructed tables tell us both more and less than he thinks. Bradley argues, first, that analysis of the signers of petitions opposing British policy in America and of loyalist addressers to the crown demonstrate conclusively the artisanal and middling basis of radical politics and, second, that the patterns of dissenting and Anglican political allegiance showed a "political coherence grounded in religious affiliation" (p. 109). Certainly the preponderance of artisans and traders among the signers of the conciliatory petitions is striking: in five of the six boroughs he analyzes, they made up between two-thirds to three-fourths of the signatories (proportions that were roughly consonant with those groups' representation in the local elec- torates). But support for oppositionist politics among this social milieu had been in evidence long before the 1770s;3 and Bradley's figures (tables 10.1-10.4) suggest that loyalist politics had a similar social base in Liverpool, Nottingham, and Coventry. (Indeed, in Newcastle, which showed the greatest disparity in the social contours of petition- ers and addressers, the progovernment address was not widely circulated among the public and thus is not the best gauge of the strength or contours of popular loyalism in the town.) Second, the relationship of religious affiliation per se to political position appears more compli- cated than we are led to believe. Bradley demonstrates that the Angli- can clergy and dissenters were the groups least likely to be divided over the war, thus confirming a trend for these groups to vote en bloc that had been evident since at least 1715.4 Yet religion as conceptual- ized here (where it often seems to be used as a synonym for dissent) cannot account for the breaches among the lay Anglicans who made up the vast majority of the political nation and who were, by his own evidence, divided remarkably evenly between the two parties in midcentury (table 3.1) and numerically the most divided over the war in 1775 (table 10.4). Indeed, if one takes a longer-term view of the social

3 Gary De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party (Oxford, 1985); for Rogers, see below.

4 As noted by W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies (London, 1970), pp. 24-25, and confirmed by De Krey in A Fractured Society, chaps. 3 and 4.












and religious configurations of politics, what is most striking about the American war was the ruptures in long-standing alliances that it wrought, to the degree that dissenters among the upper two social categories were themselves at loggerheads in 1775. The range of con- tending political positions on the American crisis were produced by complexes of values and attitudes about the nature, legitimacy, and limitations of state power as well as the status of empire and colonies in Britain's international ascendancy and domestic political health. These divisions were political and, consequently, are not easily explained by or reducible to religion or class, although both could clearly play important roles in their mediation and articulation. Bradley's ideological analysis thus explains more in the end than his sociological one about the various ways in which the colonial crisis was constructed and understood by contemporaries.

Nicholas Rogers's long-awaited study, which provides the first published account of the urban opposition to the Whig state under the first two Georges, neatly avoids most of these pitfalls. His goal is to demonstrate and explain the urban nature of resistance to Walpolean oligarchy, and in doing so he takes seriously a range of communicative and political practices in which its middling and plebeian participants engaged. Keeping at center stage the changing relationships between the formal and informal political worlds, Rogers has produced a lively and coherent narrative of politics in London and the larger provincial towns that significantly illuminates their social contours and local and national contexts.

Rogers begins his account in the riven, partisan milieu of Anne's reign and ends it in the equally tumultuous, if more complex, world of emergent Wilkite radicalism. In between, he chronicles the vicissitudes and contingencies of the urban campaign against Walpole that in many ways anticipated the arguments and practices of its successors in the 1760s. Arguing that "the financial revolution was a crucial determinant of political allegiance" (p. 6), Rogers asserts that the traditional issues dividing the Whig and Tory parties-particularly the Church and the succession-were displaced by a new dichotomy that emanated from the fiscal policies of the Whig state-trade versus high finance. Given ideological form by opposition weeklies such as the Freeholder's Jour- nal and the Craftsman, this dichotomy became a rallying point of opposition politicians and journalists, Tory and dissident Whig alike, and their critique of the "monied interest" soon expanded into an indictment of the full range of Walpole's domestic, fiscal, and pacific foreign policies. In this guise, the opposition campaign mobilized widespread support among urban populations resentful of the circumscription of their liberties and among independent merchants and traders aggra- vated at the ministry's apparent disregard for the interests and exten- sion of commerce, liberty, and empire. Although ultimately tamed by the upsurge of loyalism attendant upon the '45 as well as by the










compromises and venalities of its leaders, the urban opposition to Wal- pole that mobilized under the "country" banner produced the first organized campaign for parliamentary reform of the century.

If the narrative is familiar-largely on the basis of Rogers's, as well as other historians', earlier efforts-its execution is noteworthy. Rogers pursues his themes in a variety of geographical and social lo- cales: in London, Westminster, Middlesex, Surrey, Bristol, and Nor- wich; among haute bourgeois and middling and artisanal groups; and within the demotic consciousness of the crowd. Rogers's analyses of the social configurations of politics is judicious and incisive, demonstrating that opposition support among the independent merchants, traders, and artisans of the City was not necessarily duplicated in other urban milieus, such as Westminster, where the dense webs of court and aristocratic clientage transecting the luxury economy prevented many of the bourgeoisie and traders from acting independently in political affairs. Although he has important insights into provincial urban politics, London is the hero of the piece: it was the "urban vanguard" (p. 402), "the principal open constituency and port . . . the center of extraparliamentary opinion, the critical source and springboard of nationwide campaigns" (p. 6). Arguably, Rogers accepts rather uncriti- cally London's own claims to political leadership and singularity- claims that were contested by provincial urban publics resentful of metropolitan hegemony and eager to claim their own stake in national affairs-but there is no disputing his mastery in charting the tortuous course of City politics in the first six decades of the century.

Two criticisms must be ventured. Despite his rich conceptualiza- tion of the sites of political activity to include the streets, clubs, tav- erns, and press as well as elections, Rogers deploys a resolutely mate- rialist interpretation of politics that is often at odds with other aspects of his argument. The appeal of London Toryism was never "narrowly political" (p. 21), he assures us, but drew its strength "from important social and economic developments" (pp. 21-22). Similarly, his chapters on the social configurations of politics in the metropolis begin with the claim that socioeconomic change provided "the foundations upon which successive [political] campaigns were built" (p. 133), while the subaltern status he attributes to the crowd seems to rest ultimately on its participants' lack of socioeconomic power. Yet such a hierarchy of determinants is incompatible with any recognition of the political as an authentic realm in its own right, the values, ideologies, and practices of which were not derivatives of socioeconomic structures but rather helped produce the latter's contemporary meanings. Recognizing the relative autonomy of politics would add to the interpretation of clientage, for example, which was never considered to be primarily an economic issue in the mid-eighteenth century (although it was clearly rec- ognized to have material results); rather, it was consistently seen by the middling sorts as a political problem, one that stemmed from the inequitable configurations of power in the state and society and which










political (or legal) solutions could best ameliorate. Perhaps not surpris- ingly, at such junctures the reader feels the lurking specter of "class politics" (p. 218) that haunts the book as the modern and progressive form of the political which eighteenth-century urban politics either struggled towards or failed to achieve. This marxisant-Whiggish per- spective discourages any effort to recover the ways in which ordinary English people perceived themselves as political subjects despite clientage, economically subaltern status, lack of formal political rights, and so on.

Equally, in his rewarding chapter on the crowd, which provides a suitable climax to his influential articles on the crowd in Hanoverian London and popular Jacobitism, Rogers successfully qualifies the "es- sentialist" (p. 388) readings of eighteenth-century crowds as defensive and customary (a la Edward Thompson) or protoradical (George Rude). The crowd was intrinsically neither, Rogers argues, and its meaning and significance must be recovered contextually, within the "theater of politics" (p. 387) in which ceremonial and popular festival were integral parts. Nevertheless, Rogers substitutes his own essen- tialist definitions of the crowd for those of his predecessors, so that "the crowd" (p. 361 and passim) is presented as invariably "plebeian" (p. 361 ff.), "profane, sacrilegious" (p. 388), "strongly nativist" (p. 388), and infinitely susceptible to manipulation from above. Yet surely such a characterization is contestable. Crowds were events, not things, protean episodes in the street culture of politics in which all classes had a stake. Not only were eighteenth-century crowds frequently so- cially heterogeneous, but their animating political concerns, whether loyalist or oppositionist, were shared by a broad social spectrum (indeed, English chauvinism was never confined to the meaner sorts). As such, assumptions of crowds' invariably plebeian composition, as well as assessments of their status as either "autonomous" (p. 367) or "orchestrated from above" (p. 369), does not fully capture their complex roles within a political culture where, as Rogers stresses, "decades of party strife . . . had broadened the boundaries of politics to encompass petty artisans, servants and laborers" (p. 367). Crowds could indeed stake out political and ideological positions that were "the people's own" (p. 388) by articulating the expectations, grievances, and aspirations of their participants, as well as ordinary English people's strong sense of entitlement to cashier their governors and protest bad guardianship or bad laws. Such criticisms, it must be stressed, should be seen as testimony to Rogers's fruitful scholarship, which appropriately raises as many questions as it answers. In its themes and subject, his study is a fitting culmination to the tradition inaugurated by Edward Thompson and Rude-distinguished company indeed.

Arguably, all of the above books could have paid more attention to the discursive contexts of politics as well as to the politics of discourse. Paul Monod's brilliant study of Jacobite poltical culture does











just that. His point of departure is to consider Jacobitism as part of "late seventeenth and eighteenth century cultural systems" (p. 12) that privileged hereditary legitimacy and unity over diversity and individualism, and he traces its organizing principles, values, and practices through an array of discursive mediums, from art, artifacts, poetry, and riot to drinking clubs and masonic lodges. In doing so, he succeeds in re-creating the highly charged ideological and symbolic contexts of politics and authority in the Hanoverian decades, when a gesture, a flower, a slogan could signal a whole universe of subcultural identities and provoke terroristic responses from the government.

Monod's treatment of Jacobitism is the most original and erudite to yet appear. He resurrects with panache a world long disdained by historians and many eighteenth-century contemporaries alike as fanati- cal and marginal, convincingly locating it within a larger culture of conservatism and demonstrating its purchase across complex social and political spectrums. Jacobitism was a viable political position, the product of both James II's exclusion from the throne and the political consequences of that exclusion. Monod demonstrates that its cultural ramifications were far-reaching, embracing the most quotidian, as well as the most extraordinary, aspects of life. Jacobitism's distinctive char- acteristic-adherence to the sacrosanct nature of hereditary monarchy as the moral and legitimate foundation of government-was articulated in political argument, modes of worship, forms of sociability, fashion, smuggling, and drinking songs, as well as armed rebellion. Both devout and irreverent, Jacobitism was "the preeminent product of early modern English politics," "perfectly suited to the High Church mentality of its age" (p. 232). It provided for its rich and poor adherents alike a myth of social inclusiveness in which king was exalted "as a guarantee of unity" (p. 350).

Monod's simultaneously cultural and political reading of Jacobit- ism is the first to render comprehensible the Jacobite position within Protestant English society without overemphasizing its pervasiveness or importance. While eschewing the notion that Jacobitism proffered the only position available to post-1714 Tories, he makes clear that its existence within a minority of the Tory party as well as among a broader sector of the population enabled other forms of protest and opposition to flourish. His attention to the ideological content and changing contexts of Jacobite political argument is refreshing. The ideological framework for the attachment to the exiled Stuarts evolved from divine right in William's reign to a variant of country rhetoric in George I's, whereby "Whiggish Jacobites" railed against court Whig encroachments on popular liberties, the dangers of standing armies, and corruption in the state in order to argue that only the return of the lawful king-by popular insurgence, if necessary-could right the moral chaos that threatened to engulf the polity. A thriving underworld of Jacobite publishing carried this message to people throughout the nation. In the context of the new constellations of power after 1714,







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Jacobitism clearly had viability as a species of resistance to Whiggery that could appeal at various times to other members of the opposition, country gentlemen and urban radicals alike, and made a distinctive contribution to the complex tapestry of oppositionist thought inherited by radicals in the 1760s and 1770s. And both Jacobite protest and its savage treatment at the hands of the government was able to confound the Whig rulers' myths about their own legitimacy and render manifest the contradictions of their "defence" of English liberties.

Monod does not shirk from the analysis of the high political consequences of Jacobitism. The exclusion of the Catholic Stuarts was the aim of the Revolution and the Succession, and as such it "determined the development of the English State in the seventy years after the Revolution" (p. 11), influencing foreign policy and domestic legisla- tion. Jacobitism, as the response to this aim, was thus largely responsi- ble for the "growth of centralized state power" as well as for the creation of "a framework for extra-Parliamentary radicalism" (p. 346). But even if one wants to quibble with these claims, one can still appreciate the methodological and intepretive originality of this wide- ranging study, which breaks down many of the established dichotomies used to make sense of the complex and highly nuanced world of eighteenth-century political culture. For example, his analysis of Jacobite practices highlights the inadequacies of the "high" and "low" typolo- gies deployed by many historians, and his treatment of "Jacobite un- derworlds" and protest, which take equally seriously seditious slogans and armed rebellion as articulations of treason, demonstrates both the materiality of discourse and the subjectivity of socioeconomic position. In his skillful hands, Jacobitism emerges for the first time as an intelligible, if iconoclastic, political position that circulated through complex social terrains, drawing together in one allegiance gentry, tradesmen and artisans, and sometimes the laboring poor.

In a provocative conclusion, Monod declaims against the "Whig historiography" that has become "rooted in English national consciousness" (p. 347) and that for a long time prevented Jacobitism from being taken seriously by historians. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the reader can imagine Monod himself as one of the "Whiggish Jacobites" of his own text, railing against the antilibertarian and intol- erant measures of George I and his ministers, and of contemporary historians, with equal force and championing the sensibilities that ani- mated his Jacobite subjects-and Jacobite historians?-for moral reform and unity. The ease of this slippage is perhaps the best testimony to the wit, insightfulness, and erudition of this study.

II

About the time that Butterfield penned his strictures against Whig history, Walter Benjamin powerfully argued that history was as much




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a product of the present as vice versa, "the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now."5 History is bound to the present by the chains of its own evanescence, and the four books under review demonstrate the force and value of this connection. All four make important contri- butions to the recovery of radicalisms and their meanings for a variety of groups in eighteenth-century Britain, most of whom had reason to be dissatisfied with dominant constellations of power and authority within the state and polity. That each preserves a variant of Whiggery to live another day may be inevitable, not a cause for concern. What is important is to redefine continually our historical project and its methodology so that the links between past and present are not broken: to problematize our ways of entry into the past and to recognize ar- chives themselves as historical and ideological formations, to acknowledge the limitations of our inquiries, and to appreciate that rupture and contradiction can tell us as much as continuity and coherence. In these respects, the books by O'Gorman, Bradley, and Rogers represent the culmination of some of the most fruitful trends in eighteenth- century historical scholarship in the past two decades; that by Monod breaks ground for new departures.

KATHLEEN WILSON

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Moving Pictures? Cinema and Society in Britain

Culture in Britain since 1945. By ARTHUR MARWICK. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1991. Pp. xiv+206. $19.95.

British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930-1960. By MARCIA LANDY.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii+553. $65.00.

Realism and Tinsel: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1939-1949. By ROB- ERT MURPHY. New York: Routledge, 1992. Pp. xiii+ 278. $16.95.

Sixties British Cinema. By ROBERT MURPHY. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1992. Pp. ix + 354. $59.95.


KATHLEEN WILSON









KATHLEEN WILSON








5 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 261. 5 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 261. 5 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1968), p. 261.




whiggery assailed and triumphant: popular radicalisms in hanoverian england

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