Melinda S. Zook

Early Whig Ideology, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Reverend Samuel Johnson

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnsons works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnsons single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnsons style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridges comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put. Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnsons political thinking was not always appreciated by Englands political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnsons political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnsons fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century. Johnsons career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.

“The Bloody Assizes:” Whig Martyrdom and Memory after the Glorious Revolution *

Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that Englands still lacks.

C. V. Wedgwood: The Historian and the World

The British historian of early modern England and Europe C. V. Wedgwood was one of the most decorated, prolific, and popular writers of the twentieth-century Anglophone world. Wedgwood wrote scholarly history for anyone interested in learning about the past. She kept her audience firmly in mind: the world of educated men and women, interested in politics, art, theater, fiction, and poetry. This was a world beyond the academy and epitomized by fashionable London society before, during, and immediately after World War II. Wedgwood believed that the “first duty” of the historian was to an audience: to educate, illuminate and tell a story. Nor was drawing morals problematic, for “if the accurate, judicious and highly trained fail to do so, the unscrupulous and unqualified will do it for them.” This essay focuses on Wedgwood’s career as a public intellectual, surveying her concerns to educate and influence men and women outside of the academy. Wedgwood saw history as far too important to be imparted only within schools and universities. The historian needed to be in the world, serving humanity.

Sanctified Sisters: Aphra Behn and the Culture of Nonconformity

Unlike the “religious Mrs. Mary Speke,”2 who sought out conventicles in her native Somerset, the cosmopolitan poet and playwright in London, Aphra Behn was unlikely to have ever attended or observed a Dissenting meeting. Her poem, “On a Conventicle,” derives, it seems, from her own fertile imagination as well as from the rich stock of satiric images of Puritans that harkened back to the time of Elizabeth I. Behn’s poetic pairing of Dissent with treason and civil strife was, of course, very much an outgrowth of the Civil Wars when religious dissidents in large numbers sided with Parliament against the King. Sour memories of the violence and chaos of those years were still fresh during the Restoration and, as we have seen, oppositional politics and religious nonconformity were still intertwined in the years following Charles II’s return. While this linkage was exaggerated in royalist propaganda, it existed nonetheless, and in the very heady years of the 1680s, the visibility of Dissenting politicians and preachers involved in Whig politics, often in its most radical forms, was right before all eyes. Parliamentary politics, street demonstrations, coffee house and tavern talk as well as the press, the pulpit, the court room, and the stage were all filled with the noise of partisan politics.

A Dangerous Woman: Mary Speke, her Family, and the Puritan Gentry

The Bishop of Bath and Wells, Peter Mews, kept a careful watch over the Speke family of Whitelackington in Somerset. A thorough-going royalist, Mews was no friend to the many Puritan gentry families in the West Country about whose activities he made regular reports to the authorities in London. But of all the wealthy nonconformist families within his diocese, the Spekes rankled him the most. In early July 1683, Mews informed Secretary Leoline Jenkins that “Mrs. Speak, the wife of Mr. Speak of Whitelackington in this county is now in London and hath been there for some time. There is not a more dangerous woman in the West, and what her sons are I need not tell you.” A couple weeks later, the Bishop wrote to Jenkins again, imploring him to have Whitelackington house searched for arms and papers. “I need give no character of their family. I suppose it is sufficiently known how actively of late years they have all appeared against his Majesty’s interest, especially the mother and her son, Hugh ….”2

An Incomparable Queen: Mary II, the Protestant International, and the Church of England

On the day that Prince William launched his expedition to England, Mary, Princess of Orange, rose early and spent several hours in prayer and meditation. She then attended services at an English church, a French church, and those at several Dutch congregations. At one of the services, a Presbyterian minister addressed the Princess directly from the pulpit, speaking to the opportunities she should have in England to “serve Lord Jesus Christ and his people” throughout the world. At the hearing of this address, Mary “stood up and let fall a flood of tears.”2 The Princess rose and accepted her task: to ensure the survival of the reformed religion in Europe and beyond. In short, it was the future Queen’s mission to save the Protestant International.

Devoted Daughters of the Church: Elizabeth Burnet and Mary Astell

Mary II had attracted many admirers. Her gentle ways and cheerful demeanor; her extraordinary generosity; her devotion to her faith and moderation towards nonconforming Protestants; and her ardent belief in her husband and the Protestant Cause certainly recommended her to those of like-minded sensibility. Among her biggest fans was the Bishop of Salisbury, Gilbert Burnet, who was utterly heartbroken by her sudden death. Years later, in 1700, he married a woman whose values were remarkably similar to his own and whose virtues resembled those of the Queen. Yet Burnet’s third wife, Elizabeth (formerly, Berkeley) Burnet (1661–1709) was hardly a tabula rasa on which the bishop might inscribe his convictions. Gilbert was Elizabeth’s second husband. She had been a widow for seven years and was already something of a known entity among the political and cultural elite of London. Prior to the Revolution, she had met Gilbert Burnet, along with other English and Scottish refugees, in the United Provinces. She was acquainted with the Prince and Princess of Orange whose invasion of England she warmly supported. On her return to England after the Revolution, she became a frequent guest at the palace of Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, a place where she was renowned for her piety and charity. She was also friendly with Stillingfleet’s philosophical combatant, John Locke; and by 1701, she was an intimate of Sarah Churchill, later Duchess of Marlborough, with whom she shared a zeal for the success of the Whig agenda in Parliament.

Conclusion Stuart Women and Political Culture

Let us consider the following event. Sometime in 1694, Archbishop Tillotson presented Bridget Bendish to Queen Mary II. Bendish was granted a pension, presumably for circulating pro-Williamite propaganda prior to the Prince’s invasion in 1688, thereby supporting the Revolution.1 Bendish seems to have had contacts in the Netherlands among the large Whig and Dissenting refugee communities there. Perhaps she was another “nursing mother.” But Bendish was also special for another reason; one that might have prevented her meeting with the Stuart queen, but did not. Bridget Bendish was the granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell and from all accounts, his spitting image. Still further, her father was Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s close associate as well as a leading parliamentary officer and regicide. Her exchange of pleasantries with the Queen, whose grandfather, Charles I, Bendish’s father and grandfather had brought to the scaffold, provides us with an intriguing, even poignant, image. It certainly has much to say about Mary II, much that John Tillotson already knew. First, that the presence of this living image of Cromwell, she whose ancestors were rebels and regicides, would not unsettle the Queen; and secondly, that the presence of this Dissenting woman, who worshipped with Independents and practiced the kind of enthusiastic religiosity that moderates like Mary and Tillotson found troubling, would not faze her.

Nursing Mothers: Dissenting Women and Opposition Politics

Between 1663 and 1665, informants to Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson, reported on one Mrs. Holmes, living at St. Lawrence Lane, London. Jane Holmes was reputed to be a “great patroness of the worst sort of people.” She consorted with regicides and Rump MPs. She frequented prisons and encouraged those that were in “greatest opposition to the government.” A widow of “great estate,” she spent her money liberally among “those that lie in wait to disturb the peace of the kingdom … and gains with her money from the Church daily and under the pretense of charity corrupts many and wanting people.”2 She was hardly alone. Spy reports in the 1660s are filled with stories about women of various social groups who were thought to be aiding and abetting political opposition to the government. How so? What exactly were these women doing and what made them so dangerous that the government paid informants to spy on their travels, haunts, friends, and neighbors? Not surprisingly, they were doing what women in persecutory societies have often done throughout Western history. They were nurturing the faith and fortifying the faithful by acting as missionaries and organizers, working for the reprieve and release of political and religious prisoners, publishing and distributing sectarian literature, patronizing preachers, supporting nonconformist families in trouble, and more.

Introduction Nursing Mothers and Sanctified Sisters: Women’s Political Behavior after the Restoration

After many weeks of listening to the “strong opinions” of Tabitha Smith, an Oxford glover named Richard Crutch decided to go to the authorities. In February 1686, he traveled to London and out of his “duty to his majesty” accused Smith of treasonable activity. She had come from the West Country to live with Richard and his wife, Katherine, about a month ago. Loquacious and opinionated, Smith had told them a fraught tale of daring and escape. Her husband, James, had joined the rebel leader, the Duke of Monmouth, at Lyme and had sent word to her in Taunton that she and their servants should prepare to provide horses and provisions for the rebellion. Tabitha Smith joined Monmouth’s army and saw action at Phillips-Norton where she herself commanded a company of horse. After the rebels’ defeat at Sedgemoor, Smith escaped back to Taunton “wearing men’s clothes” to secure what goods she had left. Colonel Kirke’s regiment came “speedily after.” Smith hid what she could, borrowed money from a shopkeeper in Bristol and made it to Oxford. Since Smith practiced the same trade as the Crutches, they had taken her into their home. But her bold talk soon made Richard apprehensive, and he regretted it. Smith swore that the Duke of Monmouth was still alive and would come again with 40,000 men. She boasted of having been entertained by a kinsman of the Earl of Derby’s in Lancashire, where they were raising money in preparation for Monmouth’s return.1