unionism and orangeism in northern ireland since 1945 – by henry patterson and eric kaufmann

REVIEWS

The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623. Edited by AlexanderSamson. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. ix, 243 pp. £55.00. ISBN 0754640876.

Prince Charles’s incognito overland journey to Madrid in 1623 was the dramaticculmination of hopes of an Anglo-Spanish marriage that went back almost to thebeginning of James VI and I’s English reign. They had been revived by James’s parlousfinancial situation after the failure of the Addled Parliament of 1614. Many historianshave argued that they were given new urgency by the need to find some way of helpingJames’s son-in-law Frederick V, whose Lower Palatinate lands were occupied by Spanishforces in 1620, though Glyn Redworth has questioned this view in his recent accountof the Spanish match.1 Charles embarked on an ill-judged and reckless romantic escapadein the mistaken belief that his presence in Madrid would be decisive. He followed theexample of his father and great-grandfather in thus going abroad to fetch his bride inperson, albeit in more unorthodox fashion. His arrival was most unwelcome to KingPhilip IV and his favourite Olivares, who resorted to delaying tactics. Charles’s andJames’s sworn promises of toleration for English catholics, extraordinarily risky thoughthey were, proved insufficient to bring about an immediate marriage. Facing the prospectof having to wait in Spain several more months before the match could be consum-mated, Charles finally left for home and broke the negotiations. Deeply frustrated, he andthe favourite Buckingham returned to England ready to jettison James’s pacific policyand embark on war with Spain.

The present volume, fruit of a conference held in 2003, complements GlynRedworth’s study. It concentrates on cultural aspects of the journey to Madrid and onthe ways in which it was represented in contemporary accounts, rather than on thepolitics of the venture, or its parliamentary aftermath.The first three essays underline thefact that what was initially conceived as a whirlwind courtship soon developed into asojourn colossally expensive for both courts as Charles’s enforced stay in Madridgradually lengthened and he was joined by a growing number of English gentlemen.David Sánchez Cano analyses the splendid royal entry Philip IV accorded Charles, andthe subsequent round of costly entertainments laid on for the English guests. Some of thereligious festivities celebrated during Charles’s stay were especially lavish. His respectfuldemeanour, and especially his reported kneeling at the passage of the sacrament on thefeast of Corpus Christi, strengthened the impression that he was ready to turn catholic.Charles ‘dressed to impress’, as Lesley Ellis Miller shows, and wore clothes appropriate tovarious different occasions. Enormous sums were spent in both London and Madrid tofit him out in suitably varied and gorgeous attire. Charles also acquired in Spain, bypurchase or royal gift, several important works of art, notably various pictures by Titian.Jerry Brotton suggests that the erotic charge of some of these pictures strongly attracted

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the frustrated royal suitor.There were few Titians in England, though Brotton emphasizesthat English connoisseurs such as Arundel, Buckingham, and Charles himself had alreadydeveloped a taste for Italian renaissance art. (Most of this volume’s well-chosen 20illustrations, several of them in colour, illustrate these first three essays.)

Henry Ettinghausen and Jeremy Robbins address different Spanish responses toCharles’s visit. Both the journalist Almansa y Mendoza, whose newsletters are analysedby Ettinghausen, and the poets discussed by Robbins, felt it necessary to account forCharles’s foolhardiness in undertaking so dangerous a journey. Poets attributed it toextraordinary gallantry, and gently made fun of Charles’s amorous ardour. Almansa,uncovering what he thought were its secret motives, attributed it to James’s determi-nation to guard against supposed dangers to England from the Palatine connection bymarrying his only surviving son to the daughter of a king who could act as a powerfulprotector.The outward harmony between Spanish king and English prince, and the gracewith which Charles responded to Philip’s magnificent hospitality, deeply impressedSpanish observers at the time. A play written with the benefit of hindsight, Francisco deQuevedo’s How the Favourite should Behave (1629), celebrated the skill of a very thinlydisguised Olivares in thwarting a fundamentally inappropriate match. Relief at what waswidely seen as England’s narrow escape from a highly undesirable entanglement wasmost exuberantly expressed in Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624), interestinglyseen by Trudi L. Darby as ‘the last event in a prolonged English anti-festival’, a negativecounterpart of the Madrid festivities of 1623. The foiled villain, the ‘Black Knight’Gondomar, Spanish ambassador in England (who might be seen as a sort of counterpartof Quevedo’s hero), is, Darby points out, by far the most interesting character in theplay. (An appendix by Roberta Anderson contains an extremely useful list of all theHabsburg rulers’ diplomatic representatives at James’s court.) Claire Jowitt sees in PhilipMassinger’s The Renegado (1624) further reflections of the religious problems raised bythe Spanish match. That play, however, happily resolves the difficulties involved in acourtship of partners of different faiths by having the sultan’s niece, Donusa, embracechristianity before marrying the Venetian merchant Vitelli.

Charles swiftly sought an alternative French match after the Madrid fiasco.The almostcertainly groundless but highly convenient and attractive notion that Charles’s alacritywas due to the fact that he had already been smitten by Henrietta Maria’s beauty duringhis brief stay in Paris on the way to Madrid was subsequently mentioned by a fewwriters, and most fully developed in Abraham Rémy’s allegorical romance La Galatée(1626), discussed by Marie-Claude Canova-Green.Various scholars have already noticedthe influence of Rémy’s work upon Walter Montagu’s pastoral play The Shepherds’Paradise (c.1633), sponsored by Henrietta Maria. Karen Britland further explores thatinfluence, and the theme of help for a dispossessed prince (signifying Frederick or – by1633 – his son) in both novel and play.

Alexander Samson, a specialist in Spanish literature of the golden age, the volume’seditor, supplies a useful introduction. His own chapter surveys the numerous Englishtranslations of Spanish texts that were published in 1623, including newsletters aboutCharles’s visit, language learning material, religious books, and literary works.The noiseof English protestant hostility towards the Spanish match has, in Samson’s view, tendedto obscure for historians ‘the latent hispanophilia of a significant sector of the culturalelite’.The influence of the Hispanic world on English Renaissance culture was clearer to

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contemporaries, he points out, than the significance of the publication of the first folioof Shakespeare’s plays in 1623. A comprehensive new study of that influence is overdue.Perhaps this interesting collection will help to encourage the production of such a work.

RALPH HOULBROOKEUniversity of Reading

1 Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: The Cultural Politics of the Spanish Match (New Haven, 2003).

‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution. By Andrew Hopper.Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2007. 262 pp. £16.99.ISBN 9780719071096.

While the industry for studies of the parliamentary movement remains buoyant,ThomasFairfax has been singularly unfortunate in his scholarly neglect. Indeed, the reputation ofthe New Model Army’s commander-in-chief is not best served by the fact that one ofthe few authors to attempt a biography – the Victorian travel writer Sir ClementsMarkham – is better known as a would-be vindicator of Richard III.The result of thisomission, as Andrew Hopper argues, is a reputation caught in the middle of 19th-centurynonconformist hagiography and contemporary royalist philippics. Fairfax is dismissedmore commonly as a character ‘lacking in either interest or acumen for politics’ reducedto silence by the pace of events he had helped to unleash.

As Hopper’s new biography concedes, the attempt to release Thomas Fairfax from thecondescension of posterity entails overturning the subject’s own ‘tired and troubled’verdict on his foray into public life. Fairfax’s ‘Short Memorials’ were penned after theRestoration to present himself as just another passive victim of republican circumstances,when the times had moved in a decidedly hostile direction. In aiming to overcome theseobstacles, Hopper argues convincingly that new research on the life of Fairfax offersmore for early modern scholarship than yet another biography of Oliver Cromwell. Heenlarges his case with fresh insights into the culture of the puritan gentry, the dynamicsof popular politics, and the contested memory of the Civil War.Whether he succeeds inrehabilitating Fairfax as a national politician is, however, more open to doubt.

Fairfax’s presence in English politics was shaped by the northern war zone in the earlyyears of civil conflict. Never naturally prepossessing in the civilian estate, ‘Black Tom’came alive on the field of action, through ten battles, three skirmishes and 11 sieges. Indramatising these events, Hopper is at his best, his flair for integrating local instabilityinto national politics illustrated by previous research on the Farnley Wood plot of 1663.He reconstructs the series of breaks with gentry neighbours that pushed the Fairfaxfaction towards the clubmen of the west Yorkshire cloth towns, building an army ofzealots that included the future quaker preacher James Nayler. Fairfax forged his move-ment through strident godly rhetoric: preachers and pamphleteers saluted a stirring oflost plebeian liberties by humble ‘Followers of the Lamb’ in a time when ‘the Kings,captains, merchants and wise men, give all their strength to the beast’. It was unsurprisingthat Fairfax himself excised much of this background from the ‘Short Memorials’. Thewillingness of the ‘rough brutish general’, as he appeared to Charles I, to identify himself

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with a royalist nightmare – ‘popularity’ – undermines the picture of the thwartedfollower of his king, outwitted by radical Machiavellians. His use of the parliamentaryprocess to prosecute enmities against Yorkshire royalists displayed few traces of theyearning for consensus pleaded in subsequent testimony. The subsequent fashioning ofan image as the lost leader of national moderation is shown to be precisely that –Restoration self-fashioning.

Yet the years of armed action had forced Fairfax onto a platform where everyfragment of his world – from his code as a soldier to his authority as a husband – wouldgain exposure to the unremitting heat of pamphlet polemic. For this challenge, he wasseemingly unready. Declaring himself stricken by illness, Fairfax was little more than asymbolic presence through the crucial consultations of 1647, and was cast to the sidelinesagain after the second Civil War. Fairfax’s silence through the king’s trial, followed by afailure to resign his commission for 18 months after the regicide, may, as his biographersuggests, indicate a greater inclination towards the 1649 settlement than is widelyassumed. However, a man reported ‘much distracted in his mind’, who ‘changed purposesoften every day’, proved unable to withstand the caricature of a stranded, obsolete Pilatefigure that was waiting for him in royalist tracts. Fairfax’s retreat into the pastoral solitudeof Nun Appleton, followed by the marriage of his daughter to the duke of Buckingham,hardly presented signs of confidence in the republic he had done so much to create.Humiliated by a royalist resurgence at the Yorkshire elections of 1661, his commonplacereflections offered the only hint of a tender conscience taking refuge in stoicism. If theCivil War had opened up a new theatre for radical politics and religion, the actor hadfailed to command the stage.

In the face of this evidence, Hopper is ultimately compelled to restate the disjuncturebetween the decisive general and the statesman who became more inert and uncertainthe higher he ascended into national politics. Perhaps because of this unsatisfactorydenouement, he allows the biographical narrative to take up less than half of the book,and devotes the second phase to throwing open Fairfax’s career to the wider politicalculture of his age. Interweaving well with recent scholarship, Hopper finds the ideo-logical tensions in the parliamentary movement prefigured in the competing influencesthat the general took from his grandfather and namesake, laid down in poetry and privatecommentary. The irenic, Erasmian strain to the life of the puritan Yorkshire gentry wastestified in a household library stocked with protestant and catholic works alike, and afamily dream of raising new universities in the north to inculcate the sober virtue of thegodly magistrate. By contrast, the radical heart beat with memories of family service onthe continent against the Spanish: the perception of a crisis of European protestantismconvincing the first Sir Thomas Fairfax that ‘nothing can quench the Jesuits’ fire butbloud’, and kindling the critique of ‘tyrannous kings, whose wills be ther lawes andpolicies ther Religions’. Religious anxieties, Elizabethan nostalgia and the martial codeof honour came together in 1642, when popish tyranny seemed to have reached the verydoors of the Yorkshire gentry, provoking a reaction that would ‘run like wildfire in theExample through all the Counties of England’, as one Fairfax adversary predicted.

Perhaps even more than Cromwell, Fairfax failed to straddle the divide between thecontested identities within the English puritan inheritance. By the end of his life, theoblique ruminations of the ‘Short Memorials’ carried an emotional authenticity, even ifits narrative was clouded by self-denial. Latterly, Fairfax’s reputation was shaped by the

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way that others wished to see him. For Marvell and Milton, he would remain amasculine servant of the public good, enjoying ‘that most delightful and glorious rest’reserved for ‘the ancient heroes after wars’. In the suppressed piety of dissenting York-shire, the young Fairfax lingered on as the ‘Rider of the White Horse’ from the Book ofRevelations: England’s answer to Gustavus Adolphus. For the Fairfax family, in parallelwith so many godly contemporaries, the general was recast as a quintessential whigpatriot for the 1690s: his unease at army power accentuated, and his providentialist pietycarefully cleansed from public view. Political circumstances stifled the voice of the rebels,but in their efforts to bury troubled memories, they left an image malleable enough toendure for centuries beyond the moment of defeat.

While his contribution to the decades of conflict remains riddled with enigmas, thisnuanced and fair-minded biography is unlikely to represent a closing verdict on ThomasFairfax. The general’s seemingly dysfunctional relationship with his wife stands outamong the teasing themes that a book of relative brevity is able to approach but not fullyresolve. However, in highlighting a variety of new ways in which to explore the northernparliamentary movement especially, Hopper has certainly done a service for his subjectthat Fairfax’s own reflections seemed determined to prevent.

GABRIEL GLICKMANHertford College, Oxford

Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars. Edited by Jason McElligottand David L. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2007. xiv, 252 pp.£55.00. ISBN 9780521870078.

The essays collected by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith in Royalists and Royalismduring the English Civil Wars cover a great deal of ground, addressing issues as wide-ranging as court intrigue and the politics of access, the ideological principles of thosewho sided with the royalist cause, and royalist poetry and propaganda. This workoriginated in a 2004 conference on ‘Royalists and Royalism: Politics, Religion andCulture, 1640–1660’ at Clare College, Cambridge. The essays in this volume makecompelling contributions to scholarship on the Civil Wars, complementing key works onroyalism such as Ronald Hutton’s The Royalist War Effort and David Underdown’sRoyalist Conspiracy in England.

Contingency and pragmatism are central themes in this collection. Barbara Donagan’s‘Varieties of Royalism’ focuses on the complicated factors that informed the decision totake a side in the conflict. Whereas many men chose or rejected royalism based onprinciple, many others were forced into taking sides based on specific short-termcontexts or self-interest. David Scott’s essay explores similar issues by focusing on thebedchamber politics of the Oxford court. Scott finds evidence of a significant realign-ment of court factions as events during the war caused allies of the crown to re-examineand reframe their allegiances. Rachel Foxley addresses pragmatism from a very differentangle, focusing on the sensibilities of those Independents who expressed fears of parlia-mentary tyranny in 1647 and seem to have been willing to set aside their mistrust of

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Charles I. On the eve of the regicide, pragmatism also informed a gradual melting awayof Charles I’s allies, as Sean Kelsey demonstrates in his essay on responses to negotiationsover the treaty of Newport. Fearful that the treaty would spare the man, Charles Stuart,at the cost of sacrificing both the monarchy and the church, Kelsey finds that key playersin the cause began to shift their allegiance to the prince of Wales.

A number of the essays in Royalists and Royalism also underscore the significantdiversity within the royalist camp, particularly clashes between ‘swordsmen’ and ‘consti-tutionalists’. The former, Malcolm Smuts argues, rose to prominence during the armyplot. Drawing from continental political theory, they argued for a rigorous defence ofcrown authority by violence if necessary. Constitutionalists like Edward Hyde, on theother hand, claimed that Charles should commit to a peaceful solution, demonstrate hisrespect for the law, and draw on the good affections of his subjects.The influence of theconstitutionalists can also be seen in Michael Mendle’s essay on the Answer to the XIXPropositions. Speaking on behalf of the crown, the authors of the Answer claimed that theissue facing the nation was not crown tyranny, but rather a dangerous seizure of executivepower by radicals in the parliament who sought to unbalance the constitution. As the1640s progressed, David Scott finds continued evidence of cleavages within royalism. Inthis later context the key divisions centred on whether to secure a political solution tothe war through negotiation or to pursue victory at all costs.The latter camp embraced‘Machiavellian’ or ‘Tacitist’ ideas about politics, and advocated internationalising theconflict by bringing catholic troops from France or Ireland into England.

As might be expected, evaluations of Charles I stand at the centre of many of theseessays. Mark Kishlansky’s essay on the Short Parliament puts forward the most sympa-thetic account of the king’s conduct. Kishlansky argues that, in 1640, Charles demon-strated a remarkable willingness to work with parliament in the context of a nationalemergency and made wholesale concessions to his political opponents over ship moneyand other key issues.The problem was not Charles’s inflexibility, but rather an outrageousgrab for power by John Pym and his allies. Sarah Poynting’s analysis of Charles I’spersonal correspondence makes a related point, concluding that the pains Charles took‘to be rightly understood’ in his letters suggests his willingness to build consensus.At theother extreme, however, Kelsey’s essay draws attention to the duplicity and bad faith innegotiations that characterised the crown’s actions in 1648.

Although Ian Roy’s ‘Royalist Reputations’ addresses supply difficulties and relationsbetween soldiers and noncombatants, this collection does not include much social history.Most of the essays also focus on royalism at the court to the exclusion of other contexts.McElligott and Smith acknowledge this in their introduction, but given the inclusive titleof the book and the amount of recent quality scholarship on allegiance, popular politics,and local experiences during the Civil Wars, this seems a significant omission. Several ofthe essays, notably those by Donagan, Scott, and Kelsey, address religious issues. However,the collection as a whole does not engage very deeply with recent scholarship thatelaborates John Morrill’s characterisation of the Stuart conflicts as ‘wars of religion’. Inparticular, a discussion of the difficulties that the royalist cause had in distancing itself fromaccusations of popery would have been valuable.As the title suggests, this volume framesthe study of royalism in an English context and thus has a limited perspective on thearchipelagic contexts of the English conflict. Although a number of essays, particularlythose by Kishlansky, Smuts, Scott, and Kelsey, explore how events in Ireland and Scotland

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helped shape royalist agendas and debates in England, other components of the archipe-lagic context – for example, the clashes between different players in a three-kingdomscontext who asserted royalist sensibilities and the evolution of Irish and Scottish royalismin response to events in England – are not addressed.

As McElligott and Smith note in their introduction, royalism has received significantlyless scholarly attention than parliamentarianism. In underscoring tensions and debateswithin the royalist ranks and drawing attention to the heterogeneity of royalists, thiscollection uncovers a great deal of nuance and complexity. Many of these essays revealmen who agonised over the place of principle and key ambiguities in the Englishconstitution. By drawing attention to these issues, Royalists and Royalism makes animportant contribution to the study of the Civil War era.

JOSEPH COPEState University of New York – Geneseo

Restoration and Revolution in Britain: A Political History of the Era of Charles II andthe Glorious Revolution. By Gary S. De Krey. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.2007. xiv, 359 pp. Hardback £60.00; paperback £20.99. ISBN 0333651030;0333651049.

This new history of the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, despite being pitchedat a level suitable for undergraduates, offers a fresh and revisionist take on English politicsin the late 17th century. Gary De Krey’s previous work on London politics has left himwell placed to bridge the gap between the older histories of the Restoration with theirfocus on parliament and the newer literature on Restoration politics with its focus onthe public sphere. Both parliament and the public sphere had their physical base in thecapital. De Krey’s mastery of the London sources enables him to integrate the populaceinto his analysis of high politics without assuming that the people somehow spoke withone voice; they were as much divided as the statesmen.The principal divide was betweenchurch-and-king anglican loyalists on the one hand and protestants of reformed heritageon the other, the latter group including both religious dissenters and their allies in theestablished church. De Krey carefully avoids designating as ‘popular’ only one side inthese debates. The public sphere was not merely a whiggish space but one in whichtories also engaged with considerable success.

De Krey’s theme is settlement; indeed, his volume could easily have been subtitled ‘thesearch for settlement’. For De Krey the central problem of the Restoration settlementwas how to cope with religious diversity, and the only way to solve that problem wasthrough toleration. He turns his attention from England to Scotland and Ireland, mainlyto assess changing patterns of religious persecution in those countries. He consistentlyapplauds any moves towards a broader settlement in any of the three kingdoms. For thisreason both Charles II, who periodically favoured a broad religious settlement, and JamesII, who reached out to nonconformists, are treated favourably in this account. Thetragedy of the Restoration was the failure to concede toleration in 1661, and the royalbrothers are not to be blamed for the continuing failure to concede it, as they made

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several attempts to do so. The year 1689 serves as the climax of this narrative, as it wasthen that the anglican majority finally enacted a toleration, having become aware thatfailure to do so might plunge the nation into a jacobite-inspired civil war.

By ‘settlement’, De Krey means ‘liberty of conscience’ – the two for him areinextricable. He is unwilling to concede that alternative modes of settlement might havebeen viable. He doubts that the English nation could have been stabilised by a crack-down on dissent coupled with a populist anti-French foreign policy, the twin tacticspursued by the earl of Danby in his period as chief minister in the 1670s.This reasoningagain leads De Krey to a more positive assessment of Charles and James than is typical.He cannot blame them for failing to take full advantage of the alliance between thecrown and the high-church anglicans, for he does not consider this alliance to have beenstrong enough to bear the weight of settling the kingdom. This thought-provokingargument takes fully into account the political power of dissenters, especially in London.The weakness of the argument is that it relies on an overestimate of dissenting numbersin England as a whole.

However many dissenters there were in London, and here the estimates vary, they werealmost certainly less than 10% of the entire English population. De Krey is eager to inflatethis number, suggesting that we should give some credit to contemporary estimates, whichplaced dissenting numbers at up to 50% of the general population, in spite of the fact thatthese estimates were offered by the dissenters themselves in polemical contexts. He alsosuggests that when partial conformists are added to the number of nonconformists, thetotal number could reach or surpass 20% of the population.The most puzzling phrase inthe volume is his contention that historians writing about England in the 1680s havetended to ‘maximize the Anglican commitments of ordinary people’ (p. 244).These claimsare difficult to credit without evidence, and not much evidence is provided here. De Kreyrightly points to flaws in the Compton census of 1676,which undercounted the dissenters,but he fails to note the more reliable Evans list of 1715–18,which placed the nonconform-ists at between 6% and 7% of the English population.What we do learn from this work isthat roughly 1,600 dissenting congregations applied for licences to hold meetings underthe 1672 Declaration of Indulgence and over 1,200 applied for new licences in 1689. In aland of some five million people, and estimating the average size of a dissenting congrega-tion at no more than 300, these figures would suggest a dissenting minority of under 10%,certainly a sizeable group but not enough to serve as an immovable obstacle to anglicanhegemony, had the anglicans been determined enough.

By focusing so much of this volume on the dissenters and the experience of life inLondon, De Krey has left other stories untold.While London is frequently brought in tothe narrative as a case study to test the success of government initiatives, events takingplace in the shires tend to receive mention only insofar as they were noticed andcommented on by London-based observers. The weakness of this approach is that theexperiences of Londoners too often are taken as representative. De Krey’s narrative rarelytouches on the experience of life outside the capital, which was life as 90% of theEnglish population lived it. Fuller attention to the diversity of their experiences wouldhave made this already rich book an even more satisfying one.

SCOTT SOWERBYHarvard University

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Cities Divided: Politics and Religion in English Provincial Towns, 1660–1722. By JohnMiller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. xvi, 328 pp. £60.00. ISBN9780199288397.

John Miller established himself in the field of Restoration political history in the early1970s with the publication of his first monograph, a study of English anti-catholicism.1

Since then he has become one of the most prolific of Restoration historians, authoringbiographies of both Charles II and James II and studies of the Restoration and of theGlorious Revolution intended for specialists and for students.2 He has also producednumerous articles of note, including essays about absolutism, about the crown andparliament, and about the borough charters under Charles II.3 All his work is charac-terised by meticulous research with the manuscript sources. In the meantime, Restora-tion political historiography has been transformed by a number of scholarly impulses: arejection of whig templates, attention to ordinary people and to the public sphere ofpolitical print and discourse, an emphasis upon religious and political ideas, and analysisof English affairs in broader British and European contexts. Miller’s most importantcontributions to this enlarged field include his insistence that Charles II had limitedintentions, his denial that James II was an absolutist at heart, and his suggestion that theremodelling of the boroughs in the 1680s was prompted more by local tory initiativethan by any royal effort at greater control of the localities.

Each of these arguments is further developed in this study of politics and religion inEnglish towns from the restoration of Charles II through the post-1715 whig ‘triumph’.Norwich, Bristol, Oxford, Portsmouth,Winchester, Hull, and Leicester are central to thebook, but Miller draws upon local sources for evidence from many other boroughs aswell. He intends to integrate both the study of urban governance with that of popularpolitics and the study of local politics with that of religious division. He thoroughlyanalyses the structures of local politics as well as the connections between the boroughsand parliamentary affairs, a critical focus, considering that five out of six MPs werechosen in the boroughs. However, his marginalising of political and religious ideas,especially during the Restoration, and his misconceptions about the nature of earlynonconformity will limit the impact of the study. The concluding chapters about whigand tory divisions in local politics after 1689, which are outside the usual chronologicalparameters of Miller’s work, are actually stronger than his account of the origins of thosedivisions before 1689.

Miller begins with useful examinations of borough government and of how localgovernors and town populations interacted politically.The first four chapters also contrib-ute to the current broadening of the sphere of early modern English politics to includepopular participation in county, town, and parish structures as well as popular appropria-tion of legal processes. Urban forms of governance varied enormously; but a strong senseof corporate identity, a concern to maintain order, and the bonds of shared civic ritualsfrequently assisted magistrates and lesser townsmen in negotiating their differences.Common interests often prevailed over the impact of potentially disruptive ideas.

Miller is, in fact, rather suspicious of ‘ideology’ as a source of political division,especially in the localities. According to him, the much-studied conflicts that disturbedEnglish parliamentary affairs after 1679 – and that were attended by a war of words andideas – afflicted the politics of many English towns some of the time, but certainly not

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of all the towns most of the time. Even the factiousness of Bristol, the one town towhich Miller devotes chapter-length treatment, was driven, in his judgment, as much bypersonal quarrels as by partisanship or ideology. Elsewhere, contests in parliamentary andlocal elections could be construed as damaging to the smooth functioning of localcommunities, while the involvement of landed patrons could either discourage orencourage partisanship. Contests were sometimes avoided by civic leaders who preferredto compromise differences about national affairs, even during the ‘rage of party’ thatembroiled early 18th-century politics. Miller’s work on the towns corrects a scholarlypropensity to focus too exclusively on partisan divisions, and it complements PaulHalliday’s earlier study.4 But Miller’s scepticism about the divisive impact of ideas is, inpart, a function of his failure to work seriously with the printed literature of late Stuartpolitical and religious controversy. Oxford, certainly, and arguably Norwich and Bristolwere towns in which ideas mattered.

Some Restoration historians have found, in the division between anglicans andprotestant nonconformists, a powerful conflict that affected politics from the parliamen-tary to the local levels. Despite his subtitle and some of his own evidence, Miller doesnot, however, share this perspective. Largely following the Compton census of 1676, anddespite making allowances for partial or occasional conformity, he insists that dissenterswere a ‘relatively small minority’ of the population (pp. 132–9, 166, 220, 244). He drawsupon early 18th-century sources in support of this characterisation; but those sources failto capture the porous boundaries of dissenting and ‘anglican’ communities in the earlystages of formation and separation in the 1660s and 1670s. John Locke, among others,then thought ‘the fanatics, taken all together, being numerous’ might ‘possibly’ be ‘morethan the hearty friends to the state religion’.5 While sectarian, anglican loyalist, andclerical identities firmed up quickly after 1660, many lay people – especially in the towns– displayed more ambiguous sympathies and more tentative allegiances. Hostility to thecoercive practices pursued by the religious establishment and its ‘hearty friends’ couldreinforce ties between moderates within the church and dissenters without the churchwho shared common puritan antecedents. Indeed, the persecution of protestant non-conformists could polarise communities between those who supported the churchmen’shostility to ‘schism’ and those who, instead, believed that ‘liberty of conscience’ requireda comprehensive church and the toleration of some protestants outside it. But Millerrejects the evidence and the arguments of several historians about the centrality ofpersecution to Restoration politics and to Restoration political argument. He is tooquick to encase Restoration dissenters in the forms of 18th-century denominationalismand to replace the division between anglicans and dissenters with the division betweenhigh church and low church.6

Miller’s approach to political ideas and religious dissatisfaction takes much of thepassion out of Restoration politics, but he puts an ‘ideological edge’ (p. 251) back inplace in his treatment of the partisan quarrels that resumed after 1689 and that climaxedin Anne’s reign. Town politics as well as parliamentary politics were impacted byhigh-church fears that toleration was spawning ‘atheism’ and indifference, by whig andtory quarrels about the political meaning of the Glorious Revolution, and by legalconfusion in some boroughs about the status of charters and electoral rights. Few townsdisplayed more unity than partisanship in the furore touched off by the 1710 whigimpeachment of the high-church divine, Dr Henry Sacheverell. And despite the whig

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triumph in parliament by 1722, the tories remained competitive in the towns. Milleradds to the evidence and arguments of other early Hanoverian historians who havefound a resilient subscription to tory principles and anglican beliefs at the popularlevel.

GARY DE KREYSt Olaf College

1 John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973).

2 Especially John Miller, Charles II (1991); Miller, James II: A Study in Kingship (Hove, 1978); Miller, James II(New Haven, 2000); Miller, The Glorious Revolution (1983): Miller, Restoration England:The Reign of Charles II(1985); Miller, After the Civil Wars: English Politics and Government in the Reign of Charles II (Harlow, 2000).

3 John Miller, ‘The Potential for “Absolutism” in later Stuart England’, History, lxix (1984), 187–207; Miller,‘Charles II and his Parliaments’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., xxxii (1982), 1–23; Miller,‘The Crown and the Borough Charters in the Reign of Charles II’, EHR, c (1985), 53–84.

4 Paul D.Halliday,Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’sTowns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge, 1998).

5 John Locke, ‘An Essay on Toleration’ (1667), in John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge,1997), 156.

6 But also see his more nuanced treatment in After the Civil Wars, 126–52.

The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–5. By Grant Tapsell. (Studies in EarlyModern Cultural, Political and Social History, 5.) Woodbridge: The BoydellPress. 2007. xiii, 235 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9781843833055.

Grant Tapsell pitches his book as an account of the partisan political culture of Britainbetween 1681 and 1685. Neither primarily a narrative, nor a problem-centred mono-graph (although making valuable contributions in both areas), this is a richly-documented panorama of whig and tory animosities in the last years of Charles II.Drawing upon a wide variety of printed sources and what appears to be a comprehensivetrawl of archives and record offices,Tapsell is able to illuminate this partisan culture froma variety of angles and to offer his readers fresh and vivid details – even occasionally toshow the limits of partisanship, as in Ben Rokeby’s confession that ‘I only minde myowne businesse which is not to meddle with the Pollitickes, I wish Every one else didsoe, I fancy it would bee better for the publike affaires in generall’ (p. 101). Tapsellorganises his material thematically around office-holding and local government, theChurch of England and religious persecution, news and rumour, pamphleteering andpolemic, and Charles’s ‘other kingdoms’ of Scotland and Ireland. At first sight the early1680s has an historical coherence – whether viewed as an era of ‘tory reaction’ or moresimply as one of non-parliamentary rule – but, rather strangely, we have lacked a lucidand balanced modern account. Tapsell’s book neatly fills that gap and does so in aninteresting way. Although he is not immune to speculation about what makes the later17th century distinctive (he suggests the memory of Civil War, the expansion of the

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press, religious pluralism, and, above all, a divided and partisan society), Tapsell is mostat home with the detail and with conveying the political uncertainty that dogged thesefebrile years. An excellent chapter on the unpredictability of political life develops someof the points he made in an article in this journal (2003) about expectations of anotherparliament after 1681. It is only with hindsight that the Oxford parliament looks like awatershed. Hopes (and fears) of another meeting of parliament were raised on severaloccasions in the early 1680s and these were one important way in which whig and toryidentities were kept alive through the period. A similar alertness to the local and thecontingent informs his picture of religious hatreds and persecution: while recording theseverity of the campaign against dissent, he also describes the neighbourly compromisesand connivances which could alleviate the rigour of persecution and the conforming‘anglican’ clergymen who did not subscribe to the values of the tory reaction. OnTapsell’s reading of the evidence, religious persecution was at its sharpest when andwhere conflict between local whigs and tories was at its most intense. He also findsmore evidence of whig and tory identities in the print culture of the early eighties.Neglected for too long by scholars who have assumed that while repressive toryismruled the roost and no parliaments met there could be little of interest coming from theprinting presses, the news and pamphlet wars demonstrate a real battle between the twoparties for control of public opinion. This, of course, is a point also made recently byTim Harris who has connected the tory propaganda campaign after 1681 with Charles’sdeliberate and successful effort to build up royal authority.Tapsell demonstrates the sheerscale of printed polemic – pamphlets, periodicals and sermons – in these years and hedistils the libels, allusions, innuendos and insults of the polemicists, the religious self-images and caricatures, and the constitutional postures into a clear and convincingdiscussion. The final chapter candidly admits that ‘it is not possible to describe wide-spread whig and tory politics in Ireland and Scotland in the “English” sense that hasbeen the main focus of this book’ (p. 161), because the ideas, institutions and experienceof Charles II’s other kingdoms were just too different from those of England. Never-theless this chapter is no damp squib, but an enlightening survey of the views of thepolitical decision makers and of what we might deduce about popular pan-Britishconsciousness from the circulation of print and news. Tapsell argues that the labels of‘whig’ and ‘tory’ in their new partisan ‘English’ sense were being exported back to theirbirthplaces. Overall this is a book with all of the advantages and few of the defectsassociated with such a tightly-defined subject. Inevitably some themes get lost along theway: for example, the ‘personal rule’ of Charles II rather drops out of sight as the bookgets into its stride. Perhaps a little too eager to extend the breadth of the coverage, theauthor does not always pause to spell out the implications of his material or to develophis points (such as the interesting reflections on the ‘middle ground’ of the trimmers).Yet Tapsell’s close attention to these four years of British history subverts some of theeasy assumptions made by hindsight or in broader surveys. It shows that whig and toryidentities were very much alive and were spread across the provinces. It makes acompelling case that England was a deeply partisan society and polity on the eve ofJames II’s accession.

JOHN SPURRSwansea University

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Scottish Presbyterians and the Act of Union 1707. By Jeffrey Stephen. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press. 2007. vi, 274 pp. £50.00. ISBN 9780748625055.

The tri-centenary of the union of 1707 in 2007 was accompanied by the publication ofseveral books and articles on the topic. Some rehashed old fare, but others have shed newlight on what has always been a controversial subject, especially for Scottish historians.Arguments that support in the Scottish parliament for union was largely due to courtparty ‘management’ – bribery, promises of posts and pensions – supplemented by Englishbullying, and even the threat of invasion, have taken a pounding. Religion, and confes-sional preference, for the past four decades or so portrayed by post-Namierite historiansas a cloak of convenience adopted by cynical politicians at will, have been revived as keyconsiderations. Strong parliamentary support has been identified amongst moderatepresbyterians (and a few episcopalians), who sought through incorporation to bolster therevolution settlement in Scotland, and feared for the future of protestantism in Europein the light of French ambition and a resurgent catholic church.

As Dr Stephen points out, historians have long assumed that the church played acrucial role in securing the union, offering strong opposition until the position of thekirk was secured by a separate act of November 1706.Without this ‘master stroke’ on thepart of the Queensberry-led court party, proposals for union might have foundered. Onthis, Dr Stephen takes issue. Court politicians, he argues, had failed to recognize howimportant the security of the church was to presbyterians in Scotland; prominentamongst the mounting opposition to the proposed union that swept large parts oflowland Scotland in the autumn of 1706 were impassioned churchmen – and evenangrier women. By failing to raise the issue of the kirk during their negotiations withtheir English counterparts in the early summer of 1706, Queensberry and the Scottishcommissioners had made a near-fatal misjudgment.The court, therefore, had little optionbut to push through the kirk’s Act of Security on 14 November 1706. Again, contraryto what has often been understood (and whilst much of the fiercest public opposition tothe union was contained by the act), elements within the kirk were far from placated.From mid November, through almost to the point that the articles of union wereapproved by the Scottish parliament later in January 1707, the commission of the generalassembly of the church – working through what was termed the committee for publicaffairs – continued to lobby parliament with a series of addresses for further measuresdesigned to safeguard the church.Various fears were expressed, including: the spread ofcatholicism in the north; episcopalian resurgence under Jacobite and Church of Englandencouragement; royal supremacy over the Church of Scotland; and the sacramental test.Little was achieved, but the union offered some security for the church; the alternativewas civil strife and the risk this and the return of a popish pretender posed for what mostpresbyterians believed was truly a glorious revolution.

Not all were prepared to compromise, however. Some rejected union on any terms,on the grounds that it was contrary to their principles and covenants – a Britishparliament dominated by English anglicans was bad enough, but a house of lords thatincluded 26 bishops was positively sinful. Others were convinced that Scotland had beenpreserved by the providence of God for almost 2,000 years, and that no nation hadexperienced such a comprehensive reformation; union would be to betray God’spurpose. Agreement was possible on the Hanoverian succession, but not union. But this

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was only one option, amongst many mooted.A particular strength of Dr Stephen’s bookis the way he has untangled the several strands of opinion on union amongst thepresbyterian community. He unpicks the catch-all term of the Cameronians, in south-west Scotland, who stood outside the church, and rejected as sovereigns William andMary, and Anne, as they had failed to renew the covenants and were sworn to prelacy inEngland. Distinct and different in their stance were the Hebronites – also committed tothe covenants, but more moderate and preferring to be critical of the church fromwithin. Even so, it was the Hebronites (under their leader John Hepburn) rather than theCameronians who were responsible for the well-known anti-union demonstration inDumfries late in November 1706, in which the protesters carried arms and burned thearticles at the market cross. Both groupings proposed alternative constitutional modelsbased on the principles enshrined in the Solemn League and Covenant.

Yet what Stephen also suggests is that opposition to union from inside the kirk mayhave been less substantial than has commonly been assumed. Some ministers were infavour, and preached sermons accordingly; others – perhaps most – steered clear of thesubject, as it was a civil matter. Notwithstanding the zealousness of those who did arguethe kirk’s corner, only three presbyteries (from a complement of 68) addressed parlia-ment; there were large swathes of the country from which there were few or noaddresses, even from parishes. Demonstrating a sophisticated awareness of how best tomaintain its authority, the church itself, in the shape of its general assembly and thecommission, was careful to avoid siding with either court or country party, and confinedthe content of addresses to matters relating to the kirk rather than expressing an opinionfor or against union. But for steering this politically neutral course Stephen credits notthe moderate William Carstares, whose importance he suggests is overstated, but ratherthe wily game perhaps being played by the kirk’s anti-unionists. If despite the commis-sion’s best efforts the church could not be fully secured, by default attention would turnto – and against – the proposed union.

Dr Stephen’s book does not make for easy reading. It is driven by a dense narrative,interspersed with short analytic summations. But it is an important piece of research,which challenges old assumptions and confirms and supplements other recent revisionistwork on the union. It is also compelling in its demonstration that in 1706–7 there wasreally nowhere else for presbyterian Scots to go; ultimately they embraced it.

CHRISTOPHER A. WHATLEYUniversity of Dundee

Palmerston Studies I. Edited by David Brown and Miles Taylor. Southampton:Hartley Institute. 2007. x, 202pp. £10.00. ISBN 0845328513.

Palmerston Studies II. Edited by David Brown and Miles Taylor. Southampton:Hartley Institute. 2007. x, 215pp. £10.00. ISBN 0845328521.

A central figure in the mid-Victorian age of equipoise, Henry John Temple, 3rdViscountPalmerston (1784–1865) also stands out as an enigmatic politician whose long career

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provided contemporaries and historians alike with much to dispute. Any politicianclosely attuned to the public temper risks charges of inconsistency, but critics describedPalmerston as paradoxical on many levels. Broadly liberal views on foreign matters seemat odds with Palmerston’s settled opinion by the 1840s, that political reform at home hadgone far enough.A long career raised questions about the degree to which the formativeexperiences of his early life and career guided him amidst the very different world of themid 19th century. Was Palmerston a holdover from the Regency or an archetype ofVictorian liberalism?

An international conference on Palmerston in July 2003 held at the University ofSouthampton’s Hartley Institute provided the occasion for the papers in these twovolumes. The first volume examines aspects of Palmerston’s long career in domesticpolitics, while the second focuses on his role in foreign policy. Chapters generally takea thematic focus, though several narrow their discussion to key periods in his politicallife. David Brown notes, in a chapter on Palmerston and the 1850s, that while generallyregarded as central to political life, ‘his particular place within it was open to almostconstant debate’ (Palmerston Studies I, p. 63).The paradoxes highlighted by that debate runthrough both volumes.

Volume one begins with a chapter by Stephen Lee tracing Palmerston’s connectionwith George Canning. Despite its superficial plausibility, the idea of Palmerston as an heirto Canning’s liberal instincts requires considerable qualifications.The two men had fewties during Palmerston’s early career, and Lee argues that ‘it would be very late in the daythat Palmerston emerged as anything approximate to a Canningite’ (Palmerston Studies I,p. 3). Palmerston aligned with William Huskisson after Canning’s death, and, like othertories who favoured reform, found the need to explain that position in the light ofCanning’s notorious opposition to it. The context within which both men acted atdifferent times explains more about their similarities than a purported continuity. Otherchapters highlight the way in which Palmerston’s political views and tactics developed inresponse to shifting conditions. John Wolffe describes Palmerston as lacking deep theo-logical views, but nonetheless having a commitment to the church. His opposition toreligious disqualifications in the 1820s reflected preference for toleration over exclusionon non-anglicans, and suspicion toward Roman catholicism later in life followed from anobjection to politicised religion and not catholic teaching as such. Palmerston dislikedtheological controversy, especially when it had political repercussions at home or abroad.Joseph Meisel’s discussion of Palmerston as a public speaker highlights the challenges ofhandling public opinion after the 1832 Reform Act. If Palmerston came of age duringa period where parliamentary oratory reached a zenith in the rivalry between WilliamPitt and Charles James Fox, his own reputation developed later during the period from1829 to 1851 when he gave the largest number of his own speeches. Effectiveness inexplaining policy or responding to questions outweighed oratory, and the ability toconvey ‘abundant knowledge in an apt, logical, and convincing form’ (Palmerston StudiesI, p. 49) served Palmerston well. Rhetoric from the 1830s increasingly aimed at anaudience beyond the house chamber itself, and Palmerston’s platform oratory provides agood example of the pattern. Palmerston cultivated the press effectively, and also spoketo popular audiences outside Westminster. Following Canning’s earlier lead and preced-ing the later efforts of William Gladstone and John Bright, Palmerston used speeches tobypass parliament and make a direct case for policies.The style he adopted fits a different

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purpose from 18th-century oratory and Meisel argues that it contributed to newpatterns of political communication.

Politics during the 1850s made visible what David Brown calls ‘the many faces ofPalmerston’ (Palmerston Studies I, p. 60), not least by highlighting the contrast betweenhim and Lord John Russell.Arguably, Palmerston crafted a liberal third way between thePeelite legacy of economy and good administration and Russell’s emphasis on consti-tutional and religious issues in which his liberal instincts proved compatible with anessential conservatism. As home secretary, Palmerston responded to a range of specificproblems, including education and prison reform, with tailored reforms shaped by thesense that wider political reform had gone far enough. His foreign policy combinedpromotion of liberal principles with protecting national interests to engage broad popularsupport even where the political class deemed it reckless. Jonathan Parry’s comparisonof Palmerston and Russell develops the theme further, noting how Palmerston’s flex-ibility proved crucial to success, while being tied to the whig legacy of an earliergeneration constrained Russell. Palmerston also marginalised Prince Albert in scenes thatrecall Lord Liverpool’s earlier dealings with George IV; for all his abilities and advan-tages, Albert found himself forced to work on Palmerston’s terms rather than set themhimself.

Albert’s position as a German prince with family connections throughout Europeturns attention to Palmerston’s foreign policy, the topic of volume two. Foreign policybolstered Palmerston’s liberal bona fides while helping him connect with public sentimentin Britain at a time during which he believed political reform at home had reachedlimits. Foreigners predictably found him belligerent and uncompromising. A Germansaying from 1849 held that ‘if the devil has a son, his name is surely Palmerston’(Palmerston Studies I, p. 128). Frank Lorenz Müller’s discussion of Palmerston’s Germanpolicy during that period after the 1848 revolutions, however, presents a more nuancedview. Palmerston had a consistent vision of a European system beneficial to Britishinterests in which Austria had a leading role. A weak Austria threatened the balance ofpower, but the possibility that Austria might dominate Germany also posed a threat, andPalmerston backed Prussian efforts to seize victory out of revolutionary unrest. Whiledeclining to support liberal movements within the Habsburg monarchy, or acknowledgeHungary as anything but a component part of it, Palmerston cheerfully thwartedSchwartzensberg’s efforts to enhance Austria’s position in Germany. Saho Matsumoto-Best describes the need to contain political instability as a constant refrain in Palmer-ston’s Italian policy from his becoming foreign secretary in 1830. As with Germany,Italy’s importance for Palmerston derived from its place in sustaining a European balanceof power. Policy shifted as he sought a power in the peninsula that could maintain order,but Palmerston consistently viewed Austrian involvement in Italy as destabilising becauseit threatened to draw France into a rivalry there. The erosion of the papacy’s politicalstrength rather than liberal sentiment brought Palmerston to rely instead on Piedmont asa stabilising force. Fabrice Benison’s chapter on Palmertson, the July Monarchy and theFrench Second Republic, sets its subject within the context of his broader outlooktowards France. Shared interests at certain times and a liberal alliance faced the counter-current of entrenched Anglo-French rivalry and colonial disputes. Overcoming mistrustproved too much, and Benison concludes that Palmerston well understood that ‘even ifpeace was in their interest, there could be no real, lasting partnership’ (Palmerston Studies

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II, p. 76). The entente cordiale would not emerge until 1902 when circumstances hadbecome more favourable.

Chapters in the second volume reflect the range of Palmerston’s focus; overseasissues mattered as much for British statesmen as European ones. John Oldfielddescribes how opposition to the slave trade connected with Palmerston’s political aimsand his wider view of Britain’s role in the world. Suppressing the slave trade provideda vehicle for ending slavery that could draw broader support than abolition itself, andtreaties with European and American states along with the rulers of African politiesbecame the means to that end. Pragmatism balanced ruthlessness, and Palmerston’sacceptance of an apprenticeship programme in the West Indies and recognition ofConfederate belligerency during the American Civil War offer examples. DuncanAndrew Campbell challenges traditional interpretations of Palmerston’s Americanpolicy in the 1860s that depict him as following a lead set by Russell and WilliamGladstone. Palmerston had coped with Anglo-American friction throughout his career,not least over resistance to British efforts at curtailing the slave trade in which heconsidered the American government complicit. While lacking sympathy for theLincoln administration or the United States, Palmerston saw little advantage to inter-vening as a mediator. Unwelcome intervention could spark war, and that considerationled him to hold back colleagues more willing to take sides in the conflict. Sea powermade possible Britain’s global reach while making it a force in Europe, and AndrewLambert explores how it shaped Palmerston’s thinking. Avoiding a Franco-Russiancombination that would challenge British naval superiority became an importantgoal. Good relations with the admiralty’s professional and political heads aided hiswork as foreign secretary by providing a range of deterrent options. Sea powerprovided an essential faction in expanding British commercial and political influence,and Palmerston took a lead in pursuing that aim beyond Europe. Little work hasbeen done, as Douglas Peers notes, on Palmerston’s views on India, but that followsfrom the fact that he had little interest in it. Peers concludes that Palmerston viewedIndia as secondary to wider interest, a position reflecting ‘an almost pre-Victorianimperialism’ focused upon the balance of power (Palmerston Studies II, p. 138). Palm-erston’s early political career is also less remarked upon, but his service as secretaryat war from 1809 to 1828 provided a valuable political apprenticeship that MichaelPartridge describes in the opening chapter of volume two. The final chapter byAnthony Howe compares Palmerston with Richard Cobden as two faces of Britishpower.

Essays in both volumes hold together well, and give an engaging and clearly writtenoverview of Palmerston’s long career. They leave a sense that although Palmerstoncarried from his early years many sentiments associated with the long 18th century, headapted to the assumptions of mid-Victorian Britain’s liberal ascendancy. More prag-matic than many of his colleagues, and also willing to play to an audience beyond themetropolitan political elite, Palmerston remains a complex figure whose outlook thesevolumes bring more clearly into focus.

WILLIAM ANTHONY HAYMississippi State University

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Church, Chapel and Party: Religious Dissent and Political Modernization in Nineteenth-Century England. By Richard D. Floyd. (Studies in Modern History.) Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan. 2008. xvi, 295 pp. £50.00. ISBN 9780230525405.

Richard D. Floyd’s Church, Chapel and Party: Religious Dissent and Political Modernizationin Nineteenth-Century England is a study of voting patterns and campaign themes inparliamentary elections with reference to religion. Despite the book’s deceptively broadsubtitle, the chronology is confined to 1832 through 1847. Geographically, the book’sfocus is five well-chosen local case studies: Durham, Nottingham, Ipswich, Bedford, andExeter.Within the parameters of the project, the research and analysis is extraordinarilythorough. Church, Chapel and Party abounds with information-crammed tables andappendices. Floyd also has an endearing habit of acknowledging whenever a source wasincomplete or illegible, which reassures the reader that all this material is scrupulouslyreliable.To take a delightful example of the mathematical energy on display, at one pointFloyd uses chi-squared analysis to demonstrate that the odds of a certain voting patternhappening randomly are ‘roughly 1 in 7.7 sextillion’ (p. 164).

For those not so statistically inclined, Floyd also offers sprinklings of local colour.This includes a long, hilarious distillation of a speech by a Conservative candidate inDurham, Captain Sir David Edward Wood, which begins: ‘In what reads almost like aparody of incoherence and cant, he spoke of Napoleon and Hindus . . .’ (pp. 47–8).Ipswich’s religious divide was so pervasive that there was one bank serving the financialneeds of dissenters and another for anglicans. Or, to take another example, this is theway that an MP for Exeter, James Wentworth Buller, is put in context: ‘no fewer than16 Bullers (as well as a Buller-Elphinstone and a Buller-Yarde-Buller) sat for constitu-encies’ (p. 106). The result of all of Floyd’s meticulous labours is to demonstratecompellingly ‘a clear connection between dissenting religion and liberal politics, and anonly slightly weaker association between Anglicanism and conservatism’ (p. 9). With somany historical monographs straining to be revisionist these days, it is positivelyrefreshing to have one carefully, systematically, and unapologetically confirm what wethought we knew.

Not that Floyd’s methodical spade-work uncovers no surprises. As someone who hasmade much in my own writings about distinguishing the wesleyans from old dissent,I must give full credit to this study for demonstrating that this cleavage cannot befound, even this early in the century, when it comes to voting patterns on the ground.Church, Chapel, and Party is not without its limitations, however. In particular, theminutia of local primary source evidence is examined at the expense of the widercontext, whether of primary or secondary sources. Even Lord John Russell is quotedvia a PhD thesis on ‘Nonconformist Congregations in Bedfordshire’. Floyd does notengage with any dissenting or denominational publications or sources which mighthelp to interpret what these communities were actually trying to achieve politically andwhy. He quips that the religious divide he has uncovered is ‘a little more instructivethan Vincent’s findings, confirmed by others, that butchers supported conservatives andgrocers support liberals!’ (p. 156). Alas, this is not as funny as it ought to be becauseFloyd is so reluctant to enter into a conversation regarding the contours and meaningof the divide he has discovered that dissenters versus anglicans do not come off in thisstudy as significantly different in kind from butchers versus grocers. Feargus O’Connor’s

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candidacy is approached by simply coolly listing his stated positions on political issuesof particular interest to dissent with no sense at all of what it would take or mean fora real coalition to develop between chapel-goers and the fiery chartist. Appendix Bgives the raw data on dissenting voting by denomination, but it raises interpretativequestions that are left unanswered. For example, ‘methodist circuit’ congregations arecarefully distinguished from ‘wesleyan methodist’ ones but, if there is a substantive basisfor this distinction, I, for one, do not know what it is. On the other hand, there is a‘presbyterian’ category but no ‘unitarian’ one, and the reader ought very much to wantto know which congregations, if any, placed in the former category also belong in thelatter. There are no quaker congregations at all, underlying a need for wider dissentingsources to compensate for local limitations. As to wider secondary sources, a particu-larly glaring omission (even from the bibliography) is Eileen Groth Lyon, Politicians inthe Pulpit: Christian Radicalism in Britain from the Fall of the Bastille to the Disintegrationof Chartism (1999), a volume with an overlapping chronological focus. Floyd alsogestures at studies done on later periods, but misses D.W. Bebbington, The NonconformistConscience: Chapel and Politics, 1870–1914 (1982). Curiously, in my study, Friends ofReligious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England (1999), I concentratedon 1847 through 1867 precisely because Bebbington had already done the later period.Floyd now, in turn, justifies his chronology on the grounds of my study having treatedmatters back to 1847, thus positively inviting some graduate student to take the nextstep back and pursue a study of English dissenting politics with 1832 as the terminusad quem.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Church, Chapel and Party is the way that it exposesthe centrality of religion in these elections. Floyd convincingly argues that ‘the weightreligion carried in inspiring public opinion regularly trumped other issues’ (p. 9).Repeatedly he shows that while the official story – both in the party politics of the timeand in subsequent scholarship – might be that a specific parliamentary election was aboutsome other issue such as the poor law or free trade, in fact, what animated it at a locallevel was explicitly religious questions. A Nottingham handbill even tried to bolster thecourage of electors who were afraid of the consequences of their voting decision in thesedays before the secret ballot by reminding them that what they really ought to fear iswhat will be recorded in ‘the Book of GOD’s Remembrance’ (p. 173). Richard D. Floydhas written a useful first book. I look forward with pleasure and high hopes for hissecond.

TIMOTHY LARSENWheaton College

Popular Conservatism in Imperial London 1868–1906. By Alex Windscheffel.(Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series, 57.) Woodbridge: TheBoydell Press for the Royal Historical Society. 2007. xii, 260 pp. £50.00. ISBN0861932889.

Narratives of transformation have dominated historical accounts of the changing elec-toral fortunes of the late-Victorian Conservative Party, and nowhere more so than in

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relation to London.The story of how the tory party progressed from holding no seats in1865 to capturing 51 of the 59 available seats in the 1900 ‘Khaki’ election has never beenproperly told. This is the purpose of Windscheffel’s important new study. There areseveral reasons why historians have not devoted serious attention to metropolitanConservatism. One is that, until quite recently, historians of Victorian popular politicspaid very little attention to London, focusing on popular movements which had theirepicentres in the provincial manufacturing towns. Another reason is that late-VictorianLondon, as a Conservative Party stronghold, did not fit with the dominant historio-graphical focus on left-wing political movements. Perhaps the most important reasonthough, is that the rise to prominence of sociological models of voting behaviour afterthe Second World War precluded the need to analyse the popular politics of thelate-Victorian metropolis in any great detail.As Windscheffel notes: ‘it is widely assumedthat the metropolis was an avatar of the transition to the modern, class-based politicalsystem’ (p. 19). In this reading, the transformation of late-Victorian Conservatism wasunremarkable, attributable to the rise of what Lord Salisbury termed ‘villa toryism’.Originally intended as a derisive phrase that mocked the pretensions of the suburbanmiddle class, many historians have elevated villa toryism into a shorthand term todescribe the processes by which the Conservative Party (accidentally) consolidated itshold over the suburban middle class which was sufficiently concentrated to dominatemany of the new metropolitan residential constituencies created by the RedistributionAct of 1885.

Windscheffel’s book is a sustained and largely convincing demolition of this socio-logical model of voting behaviour. Based on an impressive amount of research rangingacross the area covered by the London County Council (LCC),Windscheffel shows thatthere is little evidence to suggest that metropolitan Conservatives regarded themselvesas the mouthpieces of villa toryism, which, in any case, was neither a self-mobilising nora self-sufficient constituency of electoral support. There was also a great deal of ‘villaliberalism’, itself a reflection of the political and social diversity of metropolitan suburbia.This leads Windscheffel to reject the notion that the Conservative Party was the passivebeneficiary of pre-existing social cleavages (notably class). Rather, he shows how thetories were actively involved in defining and mobilising cross-class constituencies ofelectoral support at parliamentary level by fashioning an image of London as an imperialmetropolis that linked the empire with the quotidian concerns of London citizens, andby positioning themselves as the patriotic, harmonious and relaxed political alternative tosectional, selfish and puritanical Liberalism.

Further, Windscheffel demonstrates that the metropolitan Conservative Party was agenuinely populist force that did not resort to anti-democratic tactics as a means toavoid the mass electorate. In this respect his book reinforces the challenge to the‘negative interpretation’ of the late-Victorian Conservative electoral ascendancy, whichassumed that the tory party’s success was based on low turnout at general electionsand restricting the size of the electorate (assumptions that are convincingly refuted inthe statistical analysis contained in Appendix 2) along with benefiting more generallyfrom the manifold weaknesses of the late-Victorian Liberal Party. As Windscheffel is atpains to emphasize, metropolitan Liberalism was not an impoverished force, as theelectoral dominance of the progressives (the municipal Liberals) on the LCC between1889 and 1907 illustrates. Windscheffel presents this disjuncture between Conservative

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success in parliamentary elections and failure in LCC elections as evidence that thesuburban middle class was not innately Conservative, and also to demonstrate thecontingent, shifting character of late-Victorian party politics along with the fluidity ofvoter loyalties. As this attention to contingency implies, Windscheffel’s study does notexaggerate or over-explain the successes of late-Victorian popular Conservatism. Thisjudiciousness colours his analysis of Conservative Party organisation where he bringsout some of the tensions which have been obscured in traditional accounts that haveexaggerated the role, unity and inclusiveness of the party’s organisations at grass-rootslevel. Even when it came to the supposedly ‘top-trump’ cards of patriotism and impe-rialism, Windscheffel shows that the tories did not have a monopoly on these conceptsas the defeat of the Unionist candidature of Henry Morton Stanley at Lambeth Northin 1892 illustrates.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this study is the attention paid to the dynamicinterplay of local, national and imperial identities. Far from witnessing the inexorable riseof a class-based political system organised along national lines, Windscheffel argues thatthe ‘politics of place’ – which he defines as ‘a contestable concept, a process as well as ageographical or physical space’ – made for a ‘highly context-specific’ political culture (pp.25–6). One of the tensions to emerge from this dynamic interplay was that at municipallevel the tories were the victims of their own success at parliamentary level in presentingLondon as an imperial metropolis. The party’s insistence that Londoners prioritisenational and imperial concerns was part cause and consequence of the inability of themoderates (the municipal tories) on the LCC to construct a municipal programme torival that of the progressives.Windscheffel notes that there was a refusal by metropolitanConservatives to envisage London as a unitary whole during this period, which led sometories – though by no means all – to question the desirability of a centralised municipalauthority. In this respect metropolitan Conservatives were hoisted by their own ideo-logical petard: after all, Conservatism was an ideology that stressed the organic, inter-connectedness of communities.This exposed the moderates to the charge that they werelittle more than the voice of the City Corporation (one of the last vestiges of ‘oldcorruption’) and the selfish ratepayer.

Windscheffel has written a subtle and nuanced account of London Conservatismwhich makes an important contribution to the revisionist historiographies on popularConservatism, Victorian popular politics and the cultural history of London, especiallythe burgeoning literature on ‘Imperial London’. Given the importance that Windscheffelrightly attaches to the politics of imperialism, the chronological range of his study couldhave been wider. Detailed treatment of imperial politics is effectively limited to HenryMorton Stanley, supplemented with walk-on parts for London’s ‘Indian’ MPs –Bhownagree and Naoroji – and to the ‘Khaki’ election of 1900. In terms of thedisjuncture between the metropolitan Conservative Party’s successes at parliamentarylevel and their failures at municipal level, a more extended analysis of the reversal of thisstate of affairs in the Edwardian years would have completed the story.The chronologicalspan of this book ought really to have been extended to 1910.

What, if anything, remains of Lord Salisbury’s villa tories? It is not entirely clear fromWindscheffel’s book whether a distinctly suburban Conservatism existed in (or morespecifically around) the metropolis. To reduce tory party election victories to innatesuburban conservatism is clearly no longer tenable. Yet the fact remains, even after the

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justifiable downsizing of villa toryism, that the gentlemanly capitalists and their suburbanarmy of Mr Pooters were a core element in the late-Victorian Conservative Party’s poolof supporters.

MATTHEW ROBERTSSheffield Hallam University

The Strange Survival of Liberal England: Political Leaders, MoralValues and the Receptionof Economic Debate. Edited by E.H.H. Green and D.M. Tanner. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. 2007. xiii, 313 pp. £50.00. ISBN 9780521881678.

This volume seems to have had a tortured, indeed tragic, history. Originally the idea ofEwen Green, then tutorial fellow in modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, itplainly took the form of a Festschrift for Peter Clarke and all the contributions still carrythe mark of that origin. But the premature death of Green, who had been desperatelyill though the preparation of the volume and who cruelly died before its appearance, mayhave played a role in producing a book that should stand in memoriam of him as well asin praise of Clarke. Perhaps for that reason, perhaps because Clarke did not want aconventional Festschrift, perhaps because the press wanted a different format, the bookappeared simply with a dedication to its honorand. It will become known in commonrooms, all the same, without reference to what the editors wanted, as the Clarke Festschriftand that appellation best conveys the spirit of the enterprise.

The title does not. Indeed the title is bewildering. Its reference to George Danger-field’s Strange Death of Liberal England leaves one supposing that the essays collected herewill somehow confute its thrust and demonstrate that liberal (if not Liberal) valuespersisted long after the demise of the parliamentary party – perhaps along the lines ofMichael Freeden’s work on liberal ideology. But that is not what the editors intend.Theycertainly want to confute something but their target is not a proposal about the surviv-ability of liberalism, however defined, but rather a reductionist understanding of Britishpoliticians that makes them passive recipients of economic ideas and moral positionsrather than active contributors to their deployment. The book is about the strangesurvival of human nature in politics (which would have made a far better title) and haslittle to do with liberal England except for its concentration on receptions of JohnMaynard Keynes.

There are nine essays, too small a number to split into sections very easily and thethree attempted here – ‘Economic Ideas and Political Leaders’, ‘Keynes and his Inter-preters’, ‘Economic Forces and their Significance’ distribute the pieces in an asymmetri-cal 4–3–2 formation whose clunkiness the editors must have noticed and lamented. Butthey faced a difficulty because the contributions do, indeed, go in different directions andtalk about very different things. Two are so different as to raise issues about theirinclusion, though both are, in themselves, excellent essays from accomplished scholars.The friction generated by Eugenio Biagini’s essay on Italian receptions of Keynes restssimply on its geography when it sits in the same section as pieces on Conservative andLabour receptions in Britain, while Stefan Collini’s essay, aimed centrally at reifications

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of the ‘economic’ in interwar values, feels ill-at-ease in the volume as a whole. Whatbrings them on board, presumably, is the very wide angle sought by the editors for theircollection:

In the essays presented here, politicians and the institutions they inhabit are not passiveagencies through which intellectual ideas [sic] freely pass. Rather, they add to or filterideas. Political or cultural leaders give ideas credence . . . All the essay are concernedwith real or imagined economic ideas and economic influences; but all question thedirect and linear role of economic ideas, conflicts over economic ideology, or ‘blind’economic forces as a sufficient explanation of policy differences or of conflictingpolitical orientations.

The gossamer glints pleasingly but one wonders how much weight it can take and at anumber of points in this collection it seemingly snaps.

Inevitably, the editors tie down their own contributions most tightly since they, atleast, know what the book is supposed to do. Duncan Tanner is magisterial in makingthe second Labour government a tissue of human courage, folly and inherited night-mares within which economic diagnosis, its commentators and prophets had to findwhatever path they could. Ewen Green makes very effective use, as do other con-tributors, of Peter Clarke’s distinction between ‘Keynesianism’ as a plural construct inpost-war Britain and ‘the historical Keynes’ as a sort of echt essence. But he turns itinto a chopper with which to split logs in the pre-Thatcherite Conservative Party –not much Liberal England here – to show the confusions and contradictions in torymanipulations of a Keynesian usable past. Boyd Hilton, meanwhile, demonstrates thatthe differences in economic policy between Robert Lowe and his leader, Gladstone,had very little to do with economic policy and a great deal to do with a Foxiteheritage to which one subscribed and the other did not: a sharp, crystalline discussionfrom an authority on his period. He joins James Thompson on the discourse about aminimum wage and John Thompson on economic ideas surrounding American entryinto the First World War in the first section of the book which Tanner brings to aconclusion. In the next two sections the pace becomes more uneven and Barry Sup-ple’s attempt to sum and rationalise the previous pieces in his own survey of moralchoice in British political economy only partially succeeds in bringing the argumentstogether.

The strength of the volume, then, lies in the strength of most of its contributors.Theweakness of the book is that it is not a book. Each of the pieces could travel under itsown flag without damage to coherence but it is hard to find coherence when they areall brought between the same covers.We are left, nonetheless, with a collection to whichscholars will go for an excellent introductory essay on the domain it considers, apersuasive rebuttal of the idea that politicians have no ambitions beyond desiccatedcalculation, a welcome acknowledgment of Peter Clarke’s achievements in developingthat idea through a career of significant writing, and a reminder, were one needed, ofwhat we have lost in the premature death of Ewen Green.

MICHAEL BENTLEYUniversity of St Andrews

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Changing Parties: An Anthropology of British Political Party Conferences. By FlorenceFaucher-King. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. ix, 315 pp.£55.00. ISBN 1403904626.

This book is about the changing role of party conferences in the three mainstreamBritish political parties, and the Green Party. Effectively however, the subject is Labour,the Conservative and Liberal/Liberal Democrat conferences never having carried asignificance in their parties’ power structures comparable to the Labour Party confer-ence, and the Green Party being too culturally and electorally marginal to warrantcomparison with the others. Until the 1990s, Labour’s conference was claimed to be ‘theparliament of the party’, with the party leadership anxious to avoid defeats in debate andin elections to the National Executive Committee.The history of the party was repletewith fratricidal strife played out in the conference arena. Thus in 1935 came Bevin’ssavaging of Lansbury as one of those ‘hawking their consciences around on their sleeves’;in 1952 the miners’ union leader,Will Lawther’s, succinct advice to a heckling delegateto ‘Shut your gob!’; in 1957 Bevan’s dismissal of his own Bevanite disciples’ ‘emotionalspasm’ in ‘sending a British foreign secretary naked into the conference chamber’; in1960 Gaitskell’s defiant promise to ‘fight, fight and fight again’ against the desertingunion barons; in 1976 Healey’s shouting to be heard – as chancellor – in defence ofIMF-imposed spending cuts; and in 1986 Kinnock’s disruptive confrontation withMilitant.

The electoral price paid for such (by the sixties) televised civil war in a party of protestwas stark, with long periods of Conservative government characterising the yearsbetween 1951 and 1997. During the 1990s the Labour leadership, in an effort to createa party of government, made a ruthless assault on the power of the conference to reflectactivist dissent, converting it into a de-ideologised loyal rally on the pattern of thetraditional Conservative Party conference, with dissent, by 2005, isolated to a loneoctogenarian heckling from a gallery until evicted by stewards. Emptied of any policy-making role the conference became an occasion largely for personal networking amongstambitious would-be professional politicians, and by 2007 so hollowed-out was it thatstewards had to trawl the bars to encourage anyone to take seats in the arena in orderto make the leader/prime minister’s speech look good on television. Political scientistsdignified all this as evidence of parties adapting to the ‘electoral professional’ model, itselfa reflection of societal trends of professionalisation and managerialism.This – if withoutthe richness of historical allusion – is the essential story of this book, albeit with a notentirely helpful harnessing of anthropological analysis to the task. The author sees theparty conference as traditionally reflecting an ‘imagined community’ amongst partymembers, who are moved as much by collective incentives as by individual rationalchoice, and attracted to such abstractions as (presumably, though not invoked) ‘theLabour Movement’, and exemplified in the – eventually discarded – ritual singing of‘The Red Flag’. A full repertoire of Labour movement anthems used to be publishedin The Labour Party Songbook, a copy of which was purchased by this reviewer at theScarborough conference of 1967. Electoral necessity required the conference to bestripped of all such cultural symbolism and rendered into a stage-managed, media-drivenvehicle for a dominant leadership, with policy formulation removed to ‘forums’ designedto endorse leadership-imposed consensus. Even the conference fringe, which for a while

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seemed to offer resistance to the sanitising of conference debates, became with theLabour Party in government, a forum for business lobbyists, think-tank apparatchiks andprofessional political careerists to liaise with each other.

In the book’s conclusion, such institutional and cultural change is ascribed inter alia tomedia saturation, marketisation and corporate branding of political parties, and ‘indi-vidualisation’, the latter involving destruction of ‘community’ and of the means of‘mobilising citizens for the common good’. The author perceives ‘an unacknowledgedneed for drama’ that is not satisfied by the bland electoral competition for which thedeconstructed Labour conference is designed.Writing this review in early 2008, with theprospect of a not-too-distant eviction of Labour from government office and doubts overthe sustainability of limitless consumerism, it seemed prudent to suspend judgment aboutthe permanence of the electoral professionalism and the individualisation of which theauthor clearly disapproves. The book is a useful sequel to the now-dated but standardworks of Robert McKenzie and Lewis Minkin, but would have been improved if shornof the distracting affectation of use throughout of the feminine in place of the masculinepronoun, and the mis-spelling of Clement Attlee’s name.

BYRON CRIDDLEUniversity of Aberdeen

Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64. ByBen Jackson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2007. x, 259 pp. £60.00.ISBN 9780719070369.

‘Socialism is about equality.A passion for equality is the one thing that links all socialists;on all others they are divided.’ So stated Arthur Lewis in his 1949 treatise, Principles ofEconomic Planning. But while socialism may be about equality, Ben Jackson’s survey of theintellectual history of Equality and the British Left is not primarily about socialism. Itsfocus is the role of equality within British progressive thought more generally, and asmuch attention is devoted to the thinking of L.T. Hobhouse as that of AnthonyCrosland. Jackson justifies his extended discussion of New Liberal thought in the firstsection of the book on the grounds that it is ‘of crucial importance for understanding thegenesis and subsequent development of the British Left’s egalitarianism, and in particularfor exploring the relationship between the egalitarian thought of left liberals andsocialists’ (p. 3). This is certainly true, and early British socialists’ engagement with theideas of Hobhouse, J.A. Hobson, B.S. Rowntree, Leo Chiozza Money and others werecrucial to the development of the Labour Party’s own ideology.

The influence of these early progressives was particularly important in the develop-ment of the idea of a basic civic minimum to which all men and women were entitled,provided they fulfilled their reciprocal obligations as productive members of economicand civil society, and the concept of the ‘social theory of value’, which emphasized thefailure of the market mechanism to apportion rewards in accordance with the socialcontribution of an individual’s labour. Here, however, liberal and ‘social democratic’ (asJackson tends, misleadingly, to refer to all left-wing non-Marxists) thought began to

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diverge. Liberals were broadly in favour of a combination of progressive taxation toameliorate the differentials between rich and poor and meritocratic reforms whichwould allow for substantial continued inequalities provided the structural biases whichpre-determined that certain members of society should be worse off than others wereremoved. Social democrats, in contrast, believed that even such a reformed system wouldremain fundamentally unjust, and instead championed the creation of a new societyfounded on principles of moral and social equality.

How exactly this equality should be defined, and how it would be achieved, however,proved to be tricky questions. One definition offered by George Bernard Shaw was astrict egalitarianism in which each would receive the same amount as each, regardless oftheir situation or profession. Yet, this idea found few advocates amongst the British left,not even, arguably, Shaw himself, who may well have put forth his egalitarian solutionmerely as a polemical stunt. Another was that formulated by Marx in 1875: ‘From eachaccording to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ Theoretically, at least, this wasthe definition embraced by most on the political left from the inter-war period onwards.Practically, however, defining the individual needs of each citizen was an insupportablycomplex task. ‘As [Harold] Laski pointed out, it allowed too much scope for expensivetastes:“we could not proffer a clerk a reward which enabled him to purchase the quartosof Shakespeare, however urgently he demanded their possession” ’ (p. 67). Further,limiting the rewards for talented individuals might lead them to withdraw their socially-valuable labour, thus it would arguably be necessary to remunerate some more thanothers in order to ensure their contribution to the social weal. Given these limitations,Jackson argues that inter-war leftists were forced to endorse a pragmatic programme notdissimilar to that put forth by their liberal colleagues – though the inter-war Labourprogramme placed a greater emphasis on ensuring a civic minimum which would allowcitizens not only to meet their material needs but to realize the ‘enjoyment of education,culture, refinement and leisure’ (p. 69). Such a distinction privileged the importance ofsocial as well as economic equality, and the goal of forging a new, more communitarian,Britain which Jackson rightly identifies as an important strand in ‘social democratic’discourse throughout the 20th century.

But the inter-war Labour programme also, crucially, advocated the socialisation of themeans of production as an essential step towards the achievement of a more egalitariansociety, and the greatest weakness of the book is Jackson’s failure to engage more directlywith this aspect of the left’s developing egalitarian philosophy. He states that theassumption of the early Labour Party, and indeed of many Labour activists and politiciansup through the 1980s, was ‘that the definitive route to equality was the socialisationof the economy coupled with economic planning’, and that ‘this assumption was onlythoroughly scrutinised in later [1950s and 1960s] debates about egalitarian strategy’(p. 125).The British Labour Party held more tightly to the belief in nationalisation thanany other non-Marxist party in the modern world. In its foundational policy document,Labour and the New Social Order, the party explicitly identified ‘the individualist system ofcapitalist production, based on private ownership and competitive administration of landand capital’ with ‘the utmost possible inequality of riches’, and the overthrow of thatsystem with the achievement of ‘a healthy equality of material circumstances for everyperson born into the world’. The Labour economist and politician Evan Durbin, whileemphasizing the importance of maintaining liberty even in the pursuit of equality,

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nonetheless advocated a Labour programme of mandatory nationalisation of privateenterprise as a fundamental step on the path to a more just society – a distinction whichmade him, in his own terms, a ‘democratic socialist’ and not, as Jackson describes him,a social democrat. An observer in the 1930s and 1940s could not be faulted forconcluding that ‘socialism is about nationalization’. Why nearly all members of theBritish Labour Party were so convinced of the necessary relationship between nation-alisation and social equality remains one of the underexplored areas of the history of leftpolitical thought. While Part III of Equality offers a lucid analysis of the revisionistarguments for a definition of social justice de-linked from the shibboleth of nationali-sation, it would have been fascinating to read more about how and why that linkage hadinitially been forged and nurtured.

LAURA BEERSUniversity of Cambridge

Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945. By Henry Patterson andEric Kaufmann. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2007. xii, 288 pp.£55.00. ISBN 9780719074967.

In the mid 1990s the historian Alvin Jackson dryly observed that the historiographicalcondition of Ulster Unionism suggested that the ganglands of loyalist paramilitaries weremore accessible to scholars than the suburban heartland of the Unionist vote. Since thenthere has been a significant amount of published work on the political history andcontemporary problems of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP); this important book on theperiod from the end of the Second World War to the electoral eclipse of the UUP bythe Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) provides further proof of a flourishing subjectarea.

What primarily distinguishes this study is the extent to which it is based on anunprecedented level of access to the archives of the UUP’s governing body, the UlsterUnionist Council (UUC). This resource is used to effect throughout, especially in therevealing, and telling, chapters on the politics of the 1970s. In addition, the book drawson another archive hitherto off-limits to historians, that of the Orange Order, a bodyaffiliated to the UUC from 1905 until the link was severed a century later. As a resultof access to these records, the book is able to get substantially beyond the perspectivesof much of the scholarship in the area which has, as the authors point out, beenpreoccupied with Unionist governments. This is a work informed by, and informativeabout, the concerns and grievances of the UUP and Orange Order grassroots, and thepressures to which Unionist leaders were constantly subjected.

The authors make clear from the start that the UUP was, in effect, what the NorthernIreland Premier James Chichester-Clark in 1969 called ‘a multiplicity of separate Union-ist parties throughout the country’. Its structure was Byzantine and its constituencyassociations enjoyed far more autonomy than was healthy for the party’s broader needsand aims.When, as in the case of associations near the border, membership was high andinsecurity and suspicion of the leadership intense, the result was political trouble. This

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was the case whether the issues at stake were housing, parades, local government reform,the military threat of the IRA, or the demographic phenomenon of rising catholic andnationalist numbers. For these ‘Border Unionists’ the UUP was in government to honourthe sacrifices made to save the six-county north from the clutches of Dublin: no furthererosion of their constitutional position could be entertained. Such an outlook seemslikely to have been fortified by those Unionists who had moved across the border toavoid being part of the new Irish Free State in the wake of the settlement of 1921–2.As a Londonderry Unionist MP bluntly put it in the 1950s, discrimination was not tobe condemned when practised against those who would destroy the constitution.

Patterson and Kaufmann rightly highlight that central to such views was theconcern with the upsetting of the electoral balance. The pressure of ‘Border Unionism’is credited with having a decisive effect on the Unionist government’s refusal tomodernise the local government franchise in the post-war period along the lines ofthe rest of the UK. The political fall-out from this some 20 years later, in the formof the challenge served by the civil rights movement, would shatter Unionism, if notentirely disable the UUP.

The implacability of the brand of Unionism in evidence in the border areas, and inworking-class constituencies of Belfast, was also blind to the opposite pressures onUnionist leaders from London governments. The UUP was, in this respect, caughtbetween the reassurances it constantly gave to supporters to trust their interests to itssafekeeping, and the illusions these supporters increasingly entertained about the powersand indestructibility of the local parliament at Stormont in Belfast. Stormont may haverepresented, in Patterson and Kaufmann’s words, ‘a part-time and amateurish parliamen-tary culture’, yet it also became a powerful symbol of Unionist resolve to remain withinthe UK.The Ireland Act of 1949 had stated clearly that no change to the constitutionalposition of Northern Ireland would come about save by the decision of the Stormontparliament. Unionists came to see ‘the house on the hill’ as the guarantee of theirposition. Hence the traumatic effects of the parliament’s suspension in 1972 and thedisarray which characterised Unionist politics and the pressure-group activities of theOrange Order.This book is the most detailed and cogent account to date of the twistsand turns of Unionist parties and factions, and the competing claims made for theleadership of the Unionist community as a whole by such figures as William Craig, IanPaisley and Brian Faulkner.We are reminded, especially, of the dramatic impact made byCraig’s Vanguard movement with its febrile rhetoric about ‘betrayal’ by London and itswillingness to countenance the last political resort of an independent Ulster. It wasindicative of how the stresses of the times clouded sensible thinking that Vanguard’sanswer to the question of the province’s economic future centred on the launch of anUlster airline with the expected financial backing of the industrialist Cyril Lord!

Patterson and Kaufmann’s portrayal of a community on the back foot after theimposition of direct rule inclines, arguably correctly, to a view of knee-jerk ‘zero-sum’responses determining political positioning and posturing.This was much more a case ofa community fearing that the traditional enemy would wipe them out while an uncaringBritish government prepared to cut them off, than a defence of so-called privilege orsupposed superiority. In Ulster politics the stakes were always sky high, doomsday wasalways very possibly tomorrow, and the colour of the alert was always, at least, Orange– appropriately.

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The book is less strong the closer it comes to the present day. The last chapter lacksthe narrative flow of the earlier ones and leaves much under-examined, for example theconundrum of the border areas becoming relatively more supportive of the peace processof the 1990s. The ideological influence on Unionism of the equal citizenship andelectoral integration campaign led by Robert McCartney in the aftermath of theAnglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 is insufficiently explored. Finally, the book lacks asatisfactory conclusion drawing together the main arguments and themes.

Overall, however, this is a major contribution to the field and it will be a key text forstudents of Northern Ireland politics for years to come.

GRAHAM WALKERThe Queen’s University of Belfast

The British General Election of 2005. By Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. xii, 275 pp. Hardback £55.00; paperback£18.99. ISBN 1403942528; 1403944261.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005. Edited by Andrew Geddes andJonathan Tonge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. xv, 311 pp. Hardback£55.00; paperback £18.99. ISBN 1403946566; 1403946574.

The year 2005 may not have had the most boring election in Britain for over 100 years,but it came pretty close. The electorate seems to have been slightly less bored than in2001 (turnout was up from 59.4% to 61.2%), though that is hardly a resounding tributeto the bouncing good health of democracy. But each of the two studies of the electionreveals why, though relatively uneventful, the election was important.

There are, in effect, two books in the Kavanagh and Butler volume.The first is madeup of 13 chapters, ten by the two principal authors on the main parties and the variousaspects of the campaign and one each by Martin Harrison on broadcasting, MargaretScammel and Martin Harrop on the press, and Byron Criddle on MPs and candidates.The second part is a 20-page appendix where the results are analysed by John Curtice,Stephen Fisher, and Michael Steed. The authors of the appendix are modest in theiraccount, but have things to say of profound importance for an understanding of politicsin the United Kingdom in the first quarter of the 21st century.Their analysis is hiddenin an appendix, just as electoral swing was hidden at the end of the 1950 election studyby the, then, little known David Butler. Curtice, Fisher and Steed point out that the twoleading parties gained a smaller proportion of the votes than at any time since 1923,whilst 7.9% of voters chose parties other than any of the main three, the highestminority support since 1918.This observation draws attention to the difference betweenthe bulk of the book and the appendix. Whilst Kavanagh and Butler dismissively writeof Respect that it ‘sought to win over the votes of the old left, far left and anti-warprotestors’, but that its 1.5% of the vote meant it trailed both the BNP and the GreenParty, Curtice, Fisher and Steed comment that not only did Respect win a seat, but‘posed the most significant far-left challenge since 1945’.

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This is more than a difference of emphasis about one small party. Whilst the authorsof the main book and those of the appendix each recognize the continuing prominenceof socio-demographic correlations in voter allegiances, for Kavanagh and Butler there isstill a sense of living in the land of national swing, whereas for Curtice, Fisher and Steed,the electoral world of Britain is one where significant fragmentations and correlationswith students or religious groups can determine the results in constituencies whoseoutcomes differ markedly from one another. Whilst Kavanagh and Butler say that thedifferences in voting between constituencies was ‘around as much as has been the normin the recent past’, Curtice, Fisher and Steed point out that the results in 2005 show that‘the country did not move as one’.

The Geddes and Tonge volume starts, after a brief introduction by the editors, wherethe Kavanagh and Butler volume finishes, with an analysis, in this case by David Denver,of the results. Denver’s account accommodates the perspective of both the first and thesecond parts of Kavanagh’s and Butler’s volume.There is an insistence on the continuingsignificance of socio-demographic voting correlations and of local and issue-specificfactors in determining actual results. There follow 15 more chapters plus an editors’conclusion so that, like the Kavanagh and Butler volume, Geddes and Tonge provide acollection of essays and reflections on various aspects of the election, plus an analysis ofthe results. They spread a little more widely than Kavanagh and Butler, and theircontributors’ essays fall into four sets: the campaigns of each of the three major parties;then, because that way of slicing things up no longer, if it ever did, gives an adequateaccount of a kingdom with four nations, chapters on each of Scotland, Wales, andNorthern Ireland; studies of various dimensions or aspects of the election as a whole –gender, the media, the internet, campaign finance; and finally studies of election issues –the economy, public services, foreign policy, immigration.And there is one more chapter,which stands alone, since it is the only one which gives a sense of what, in a constitu-ency, campaigning can be like, a chapter by Tony Wright on his election in CannockChase. It is a sharp jolt to move from the view from the heights of political science tothe coal-face with a candidate who says that being busy with electioneering left him notime for either the press or his own party’s voluminous stream of election material, andthat the soothing effects of Radio 3 took precedence over the informative contributionof Radio 4.

Each of these two books has moments which read like a sports commentary, which ispartly what election commentary has become. ‘Never before has a governing party beenreturned with such a small percentage of the vote’ is in the same family as ‘Never beforehave Raith Rovers won three consecutive matches with so few goals’, and potentially asinsignificant.

There are advantages and disadvantages in getting collections such as these out swiftlyafter the events they describe. Kavanagh’s and Butler’s opening chapter looks ratherhasty, chronicle linking narrative, and references are not always provided. It can some-times be better to wait a little while before making confident predictions, or not to makethem at all.A week is a long time in politics, and the peril for the authors of such booksis that prediction rests on little more than hunches.When Geddes and Tonge write thatBlair’s anti-terrorism proposals were unlikely to suffer as a result of the election result,exactly that was to happen six months later, and only weeks after their book waspublished.

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A question provoked by the material presented in both books is how accurate it is,as both titles do, to collectivise the voters as either ‘Britain’ or ‘the UK’? The muslimcorrelation and the invasion of Iraq, the student constituency and top-up fees, areinstances of what Curtice, Fisher and Steed refer to when they say the country did not‘move as one’. Neither was in itself transforming or dominant, but the fact that theycould be significant is evidence of a wider change in UK politics since the 20th century.Social and demographic correlations are neither as simple nor as narrow as are classcorrelations, and while they may provide a background for voting, they do not deter-mine a uniform set of events. The voters described in each of these books havefragmented and varied identities and are citizens of a state with a range of cultures.Theimportance of that in 2005, however small, may make the election, in retrospect, far lessuneventful than it seemed at the time, and at the very least, a marker of how things maybe changing from the two-party class politics of the previous century.

RODNEY BARKERLondon School of Economics and Political Science

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unionism and orangeism in northern ireland since 1945 – by henry patterson and eric kaufmann

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