Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727 / Edward Vallance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vallance, Edward, 1975- author.

Series:

Politics, culture, and society in early modern Britain.

Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Public opinion--England--History--17th century.

Public opinion.

Public opinion--England--History--18th century.

Great Britain--History--1660-1714.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--History--1714-1837.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 224 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2019.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727 makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern 'public sphere'. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically-aware public through mapping shifts in the national 'mood'. Covering addressing campaigns from the late Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, it explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. Through an in-depth examination of the social background of subscribers and the geography of subscription, it argues that addressing activity provided opportunities to develop political coalitions. By exploring the ritual of drafting and presenting an address, it demonstrates how this form was used strategically by both addressers and government. Both the act of subscribing and the act of presenting an address imprinted this activity in both local and national public memory. The memory of addressing activity in turn shaped the understanding of public loyalty. The volume employs corpus analysis techniques to demonstrate how the meaning of loyalty was transformed over the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. The shifts in public loyalty, however, did not, as some contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe claimed, make these professions of fidelity meaningless. Instead, Loyalty, memory and public opinion argues for that beneath partisan attacks on addressing lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a broad 'political public' but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy

Contents:

Introduction

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

2. Cromwell's trunks: the origins of the loyal address, 1658-61

3. Addresses, abhorrences and associations: subscriptional culture and memory in the 1680s

4. Adversarial addressing, 1701-10

5. Who were the 'public'? Identifying the addressers

6. The performance of loyalty: ritual in loyal addressing

7. From subjects to objects: the language of loyalty

Conclusion

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 06 Mar 2026).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781526160232

1526160234

9781526117908

1526117908

OCLC:

1101100812