Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658–1727

Edward Vallance

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780719097034
• eBook ISBN: 9781526117915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere'. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically aware public by mapping shifts in the national 'mood'. Covering addressing campaigns from the late-Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, the book explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. It argues that beneath partisan attacks on the credibility of loyal addresses lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a 'political public' but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy. They constituted a political form perfectly suited to a fundamentally unequal society in which political life continued to be centered on the monarchy.

Chapter 1

Petitions, oaths and addresses: subscriptional activity during the civil wars

… all these petitions for a translation, both of Church and State, with so little fear of the Halter, that they would thinke themselves neglected, if they had not thanks for their care for the Re-publicke; only he that desires the ratification of an old Law, or of a long setled Eccelsiastick Government, looked as if the Halter were his share.¹

This Royalist commentary on the Parliamentarian petitioning of 1640–2 in support of first ‘Root and Branch’ reform of the church and then the Protestation of 1641 and Grand Remonstrance, explicitly connected this activity with revolutionary change. Recent scholarly treatments of petitioning and oath-taking during the 1640s have drawn similar conclusions: the subscriptional texts that proliferated during this period have been seen as fostering a democratic political culture, making public opinion ‘the ultimate ground of legitimacy for a legislative agenda’;² devices such as the Protestation ‘offered agency to an active citizenry and authority to the Parliament’;³ and the incorporation of subscribers normally excluded from political processes on the grounds of social status or gender pointed to a radical expansion of the boundaries of the political nation.⁴ These transformations were underwritten by technological change (especially the growth of printed petitions), leading to fundamental shifts in political practice which, it is argued, were not reversed by the restoration of monarchy in 1660.⁵

This chapter places loyal addressing within the context of these broader developments in English subscriptional culture. Beginning with a discussion of the historiography of popular petitioning, it moves on to consider mass oath-taking during the civil war. Loyal addresses certainly shared a number of features with these other subscriptional texts: print was critical to the practice of addressing and to the impact of addresses upon contemporary understandings of the ‘public’. Many loyal addresses were also subscribed (or reputed to be subscribed) in very large numbers and, as with petitions, mass subscription was used as evidence that these texts were representative of public opinion. As with petitions, however, claims to representativeness were in tension with contemporary understandings of who could exercise political agency. Yet, as both petitions and addresses could generate cross- or counter-texts, subscriptional activity also generated an awareness of political and religious difference, while encouraging the audience for these texts to adjudicate between rival claims. These subscriptional texts were also far from ephemeral: oath-taking, petitioning and addressing, as critical, popular forms of political activity, all generated a public memory of political loyalty and mass grievance. Print facilitated this memorialising process for both petitions and addresses, enabling the creation of compendia or catalogues of texts directed at delivering the sense of national public opinion at particular moments. This same aspect of subscriptional texts also meant that they were often included within both manuscript and printed histories.

Given these similarities and the common contemporary practice of treating ‘petitions’ and ‘addresses’ as synonymous (noted above), this book will not attempt to maintain a hard and fast division between addressing and other forms of subscriptional activity. In this and subsequent chapters, however, it will also be argued that a number of particular features of addressing activity set it apart from other types of subscriptional texts and made addresses critical to the development of an awareness of public opinion.

Foremost among these was the primary purpose of the address in displaying collective public loyalty before authority. This emphasis on collective loyalty was important for two reasons: first, because it lessened the stress on individual agency and second, because it suggested texts should be evaluated on the basis of the loyalty of the subscribers. Claims were made on the basis of an emotionally laden language of loyalty, rather than on the grounds of rights and responsibilities which invited rational adjudication.

The relationship between addresses and print was also distinct from that in petitioning. Whereas print might be used as part of discreet lobbying strategies, in addressing activity, print was almost exclusively employed to publicise the loyalty of the addressers (and by extension, the level of public support enjoyed by the regime in question). These connections between addressing, printing, publicity and central authority meant that addressing was a peculiarly mnemonic genre. Prompted by events such as the succession of a new ruler, the birth of royal heirs and military victories, the content of addresses ostensibly tackled national history in a relatively homogenous fashion. This in turn readily enabled the anthologising and historicising of these texts, embedding addressing activity in public memory. Histories and anthologies of addressing activity provided testimony of the growing importance of public opinion as an authoritative force in early modern politics. The nature of addressing activity, however, meant that the acknowledgement of public opinion did not involve an acknowledgement either that the scope of the political nation had been fundamentally transformed or that participation in this kind of popular political activity conferred the characteristics of citizens upon the participants. While the ‘sense of the nation’ was now critical to legitimating authority, the rise of public opinion, it is argued, should be separated from notions of emergent liberal democracy or expanding understandings of citizenship.

Mass petitions during the civil wars

Petitioning, both at the time and subsequently, has been seen as critical to the political history of the 1640s. Edward Husbands’ highly influential An Exact Collection of Parliament’s declarations and votes included both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary petitions as part of its anthology of the key texts produced from 1640–2.⁶ Since the 1980s at least, historians, though they may differ over the precise significance of petitioning the 1640s, have rejected the older assumption that this activity was purely the product of elite orchestration and manipulation.⁷ For Anthony Fletcher, petitions instead deserved ‘recognition as an authentic expression of deeply felt local opinion’. Far from being ‘parrot petitions’, cooked up at the political centre, the similarities between petitions could be explained by the process of local communities acting ‘one after another as they heard what friends and neighbours were doing’.⁸ Similar processes, as we will see, can be observed in the case of loyal addresses.

In contrast to addressing, of course, petitioning was anything but a new or uniquely English practice. Studies of petitioning range from ancient Egypt to Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.⁹ Some of the earliest handwritten texts in Britain take a petitionary form: the seventy-eight ‘curse tablets’ discovered by the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe beneath the Roman springs at Bath are petitions to the Gods etched in lead, calling on them to exact vengeance against those who had wronged the supplicants.¹⁰ Early modern England might be described as a petitioning society: very large numbers of manuscript petitions survive both centrally (in parliamentary archives or State papers for example) and in local record offices; petitions survive from individuals across the social scale and from women as well as men; petitioning activity was woven into the administration of manorial estates and advice on constructing petitions was a key element of epistolary manuals; and while the costs of producing a written petition meant that this form of the activity was not open to everyone, the degree of participation in petitionary activity was extensive.¹¹ Petitioning, as Brodie Waddell has described it, was a political form well-suited to a society which valued equity but not equality.¹² One volume of Protectoral State papers held at Yale captures their variety: from a petition from the well-affected of York in 1648 calling on Parliament to execute justice especially against ‘such as are guilty of polluting a land with blood’, to petitions to the Protector from the widows and wives of Royalists seeking to compound for their estates, to petitions against the schoolmaster and anti-Trinitarian John Biddle.¹³

The sheer variety and ubiquity of petitioning activity poses its own problems for historians. As David Zaret has observed, the fact that women and even slaves could petition, indicates that the right to petition was not a ‘right in the modern sense but related instead to medieval conceptions of liberty’. It was a privilege, granting (under certain conditions) the freedom to communicate with and make requests to social and political superiors.¹⁴ This ‘right’ consequently was not a badge of citizenship. The appropriate content and tenor of petitions to Parliament by the seventeenth century was well-defined: petitions were to be couched in deferential terms and it was widely agreed that petitions should not attempt to dictate terms to Parliament. As Lord Digby commented in response to the London ‘Root and Branch’ petition: ‘What can there be of greater presumption, than for a multitude to teach a parliament what and what is not government according to God’s word.’¹⁵

The creation of a petition was supposed to be a spontaneous act, driven by immediate experience of a pressing issue or problem, not a deliberative (and thereby more political) public reflection on a particular grievance. Matters of broader public concernment were, in any case, to be left to petitions from the relevant institutions of local government and private individuals were to restrict themselves to matters that directly concerned them so as to avoid accusations of conspiratorial or factional activity.¹⁶ The norms that surrounded petitioning have led Amanda Whiting to argue that most petitions, deferential and submissive in tone, and limited in scope, tended to make use of a ‘feminine speaking position’. In this sense, women’s use of petitioning was only slightly more constrained than that of other petitioners.¹⁷

Identifying a particular, unmediated ‘voice’ through petitions is also problematised by their formulaic and uniform nature. Petitions have been identified as vital source for exploring the social as well as the political imaginary. The vast majority of ‘pauper pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: addressing, petitioning and the public
• Chapter 1 Petitions, oaths and addresses: subscriptional activity during the civil wars
• Chapter 2 Cromwell’s trunks: the origins of the loyal address, 1658–61
• Chapter 3 Addresses, abhorrences and associations: subscriptional culture and memory in the 1680s
• Chapter 4 Adversarial addressing, 1701–10
• Chapter 5 Who were the ‘public’? Identifying the addressers
• Chapter 6 The performance of loyalty: ritual in loyal addressing
• Chapter 7 From subjects to objects: the language of loyalty
• Conclusion
• Bibliography of archival and manuscript material consulted
• Index