The Republican Discourse on Religious Liberty during the Exclusion Crisis

Summary

Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ‘false religions’, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad.     

The Hornby Castle Estates: Agrarian change from the 1582 Survey to the 1751 Sederunt

Abstract

English Catholicism has generally been ignored by mainstream historiography. In the last decade work on the early seventeenth century has shown that English Catholics actively engaged in ensuring their own survival and played a prominent part in national politics. Catholicism in the latter half of the century has received no such attention. Using a case study of the Lancashire Catholic, William Blundell, from the Civil War period to his death in 1698, it will be argued that by manipulating existing power structures and creating networks of both Protestants and Catholics who protected him, he was able to avoid the extremes of the penal laws and assert an influence on local and national affairs. Despite his professions of loyalty, many of his activities in support of English Catholicism and religious houses abroad posed a direct threat to the Protestant regimes under which he lived.     

Patriot Graves: American national identity and the Civil War dead

The Civil War was America’s defining conflict, the war that made the nation and the fulcrum for the development of American national identity in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet the role that the Civil War dead played in this process has only begun to be explored. Although the monuments raised to honor the dead, along with the battlefields on which they fought, attract considerable interest, the cemeteries constructed to inter them have been integrated into the landscape – literal and figurative – of the American nation so fully that the need they answered, the manner of their development, the form they took, and their longer‐term symbolic message has been relatively neglected. Yet the Civil War dead were a crucial – indeed, the crucial – component in the construction of American national identity. Although scholars interpret American attitudes toward the Civil War dead within the context of the mourning rituals of the antebellum era, the war required, and produced, a different approach to death, for which antebellum precedent had ill‐prepared Americans. Removed from its antebellum religious and societal framework, death in the Civil War acquired a new and more potent national meaning that not only validated American nationalism through warfare, but anticipated the response to fallen soldiers in future European conflicts.     

The Cross or the Double-Cross: Roman Catholicism,Anti-Communism,and the Political Theology of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

The Venerable and Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen was an advocate of American Catholic patriotism and opponent to the spread of totalitarianism, especially communism. He grounded the two positions in what I call the “ecclesial foundation” in which he defined American citizenship in terms of membership in religious institutions. In Sheen's view, religious institutions provided the ultimate, spiritual ends for humankind. Therefore, the American government had to protect, above all, religious liberties at home and abroad. Totalitarian regimes, which Sheen believed sought to replace spiritual with material ends of the state, violently deprived their subjects of religious liberty and, therefore, embodied the spirit of the anti-Christ. Only the Vatican had the spiritual and moral authority to identify this spirit, and—especially after the Second World War—only America had the military and economic power to confront it. Ironically, this argument was an appropriation of the old Nativist arguments against the Vatican itself. The Nativist argument was that religious liberty of Protestant churches was the source for political authority of the American state to use against the absolute, arbitrary, foreign dictator in Rome. Sheen's appropriation and redeployment of the old narrative persuaded millions of Americans to oppose totalitarian ideologies and view, after centuries of distrust, American Catholics as loyal citizens.     

Accounts of early Christian history in the thought of François Guizot,Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël 1800–c.1833

This article compares different historical accounts of early Christianity written by François Guizot, Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël and shows that they played a significant role in the construction of their ideas about religious tolerance and political liberty in ancient and modern states. In his 1812 translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Guizot used his editorial footnotes to oppose Gibbon’s sceptical representation of the early Church and to assert that the development of Christianity had been crucial in condemning slavery, establishing religious toleration and fostering individual liberty. Benjamin Constant also opposed Gibbon’s representation of early Church history but he argued in his posthumously published Du polythéisme romain (1833) that the key achievement of the early Christians had been to revive the idea of individual religious sentiment against the anti-individualist Roman state. As Guizot developed his historical research in the 1820s he rejected this view and came to see the early Christians as demonstrating the inherently social nature of all religious practice. Some of these ideas were anticipated by Madame de Staël in De la littérature (1800), but all three thinkers sought to reintegrate religion into their ideas of modern liberty in ways that merit greater attention.     

S. Weir Mitchell’s Prose and Poetry on the American Civil War

The prose and poetry of S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914) – related to the American Civil War – encompass a very significant portion of his non-medical writings. The Civil War, more than any other single event, shaped his future career as one of the founders of American neurology. Indeed, it should not be surprising how the war was also such a driving force in his non-medical writings. His novels, once widely read, now are scarcely noted. His accounts of the social, political and economic events of the Civil War are of historical interest to students of the period. Neuroscientists as a group, like others, are apt to be unfamiliar with these writings, with the possible exception of “The Case of George Dedlow.” A major purpose of this essay is to introduce readers, especially neuroscientists, to Weir Mitchell’s fictional works in which neurological cases so often appear. One appreciates more the medical aspects of his novels, written as they were by a first-hand observer. His non-medical writings, poetry and prose, are to a large extent timeless and can be appreciated by today’s readers.     

Loyalty and Liturgy: Union Occupation and Religious Liberty in Wilmington,North Carolina, 1865

Examining the controversy surrounding the Union army's 1865 seizure of St James Episcopal Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, this article explores the role of churches as symbols of loyalty during the final days of the American Civil War. The Wilmington episode shows that Union commanders who targeted southern churches exposed themselves to complaints of violating shared principles of church–state separation. Commanders saw expressions of loyalty from the pulpit as essential to establishing Union authority, but the southern clergy vehemently opposed interference in church affairs. Perceiving an opportunity to reaffirm their claims to moral leadership, southern religious leaders tacitly defended the honor of the southern cause by associating it with the cause of religious liberty. In so doing, they laid the experiential and rhetorical groundwork for the discourse of southern “redemption” that played such an important role in the defeat of Reconstruction.     

The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Experience of the Australian Churches

The decade of the 1960s in North America and Europe is generally seen by historians and sociologists as a time of sudden and unexpected religious upheaval. But was this the case in Australia? This article examines the changes in belief and behaviour within Australia’s major churches during the ‘remembered sixties’ from c. 1964 to c. 1972, in relation to the cultural and social context, and the extent to which these amounted to a religious turnaround or crisis. Areas examined include the impact of radical theology, symbolized by the book Honest to God, and the ‘new morality’; the changes in Australian Catholicism initiated by the Second Vatican Council; the debate among Catholics over birth control and the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae; the decline in weekly church attendance, Sunday school enrolments and the membership of church youth organizations; the ‘crisis’ in the ordained ministry; changing attitudes in the churches towards social issues; and the responses of the churches to the Vietnam War. The religious unsettlement that occurred in Australia during this period was very similar to North America and Europe, though there were distinctive local emphases. The central issues in debate were common to all major denominations: the relevance and authority of traditional institutions and formulations of belief.     

The 1864 Sully Expedition and the Death of Captain John Feilner

This article addresses an area of nineteenth century American history that is often ignored in history textbooks. While a great deal of emphasis is often placed on the Civil War era (1861–65), it is also important to realize that other notable events occurred during the same time on the northern plains of the United States. As a result of the 1862 Minnesota Uprising by the Santee Sioux, the United States military began an aggressive campaign to break the will of the Sioux Indian nation. General Alfred Sully’s first retaliatory campaign in 1863, which resulted in the disgraceful events at Whitestone Hill, and his follow‐up campaign of 1864, in which Captain John Feilner was killed, reflect the attitudes and hostilities that existed during the 1860s. This article addresses the situation on the northern plains as whites continued to move westward.     

Abstracts of Articles

ANDREW BREEZE, ‘Arthur’s Battles and the Volcanic Winter of 536–37’. A mega-eruption of 535 in the Americas produced a volcanic winter in 536-37, with crop failure throughout the Northern Hemisphere. It thus reveals a Welsh annal for 537 on 'mortality in Britain and in Ireland’ as referring to famine, not plague. Mention in the same annal of Arthur’s final battle at Camlan, located at Castlesteads on Hadrian’s Wall, will further point to a campaign by starving North Britons under Arthur's leadership to seize food-supplies from their neighbours. The extreme weather phenomena of 536-37 also suggest that Gildas wrote his De Excidio in the summer of 536 (as implied by David Woods of Cork), because in chapter 93 of that work he alludes to a ‘thick mist and black night’ sitting ‘upon the whole island’ of Britain, but says nothing on the harvest failure which it led to. We may infer as well that the Britons defeated the Saxons at ‘Mount Badon’ in north Wiltshire in early 493, because Gildas declares that the battle was won at the time of his birth, forty-three years and a month before he was writing.’

DAVID M. YORATH, ‘Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windemere, c. 1441–99’. To date, researchers have little cared for Sir Christopher Moresby of Scaleby and Windermere (c. 1441–99), Member of Parliament for Westmorland, conservator of the peace with Scotland, escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland and steward of Penrith. There exists no ODNB article or source-based examination of his career — only a brief, error-strewn note in J. B. Wedgwood’s ‘Biographies of the Members of the Commons House 1439-1509’. This is unfitting, for it is clear there was a mastery of technique about Moresby — something that not only ensured his survival during one of the most turbulent periods in English history, but also made him an indispensable political figure, regardless of regime. What follows is an examination of his hitherto unstudied career, with some remarks on wider developments pertinent to the history of the North West.

VICTORIA SPENCE, ‘Adapting to the Elizabethan Settlement: Religious Faith and the Drive towards Conformity in Craven, 1559 to 1579’. This article explores the reception in Craven to Elizabethan religious reform. Until the 1569 Rebellion the interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement was broad, pragmatic and accommodating. Following Elizabeth’s excommunication and the stringent enforcement of conformity, Catholics, supported by Marian and seminary priests, resorted to recusancy and a separate Catholic identity. Archbishops Grindal and Sandys installed university-educated preaching clerics to establish and promote conformity in the northern diocese. Many were Puritan nonconformists who felt reform was incomplete, and opposed a hierarchical Church with surviving Catholic rituals. Increasingly confessional identities diverged, although eventually the majority of the Craven laity adapted and conformed.

IMOGEN PECK, ‘The Great Unknown: The Negotiation and Narration of Death by English War Widows, 1647–60’. The truism that death is life’s only certainty may have seemed far from obvious to the women of mid seventeenth-century England. For the conditions of the British Civil Wars, in addition to causing significant physical destruction, also brought much uncertainty to the lives of the civilian population, who could struggle to ascertain whether men serving in the wars were alive or dead. Drawing on the relief petitions of war widows and court depositions from the northern counties of England, this article explores the impact this uncertainty had on the wives of Civil War soldiers. In particular, it focuses on the strategies women used when navigating the problem of how they could know, or prove, that their husbands were dead, the ways they narrated and interpreted the loss of a spouse, and the predicaments faced by ‘phantom widows’: those women who believed their husbands to have been killed in the wars, only for them to return home alive sometime later. In doing so, it illuminates a little-studied dimension of female experience during the revolutionary period, while also contributing to our understanding of early modern mentalities more broadly, and, in particular, attitudes to death and civil war.

CONOR O’BRIEN, ‘Attitudes to St Cuthbert’s Body during the Nineteenth Century’.

St Cuthbert’s tomb in Durham Cathedral was opened in 1827, occasioning the start of a cycle of polemic and counter-polemic between Protestant and Roman Catholic writers throughout the rest of the century. The excavation of 1827 aimed to disprove the medieval legends about the incorruption of Cuthbert’s body, but it (and the many texts which debated its findings throughout the course of the nineteenth century) must be understood in the light of local religious controversy as much as of Victorian antiquarianism. The texts which addressed the issue of Cuthbert’s body in the years which followed were concerned with religious, as well as historical, truth and reveal shifting attitudes in both the Anglican and Catholic communities to the role of saints, miracles and relics within their own forms of Christianity. While this paper mainly concerns a comparatively small element of Victorian religious debate, one focused upon issues of local interest and identity, it problematises some of the traditional paradigms used to understand nineteenth-century scholarship. Not the increasing secularisation of historical practice and antiquarianism, but the continuing, albeit changing, importance of Durham’s patron saint, is the most striking feature of the dispute.

EDWARD M. SPIERS, ‘Yorkshire and the First Day of the Somme’. Given the prominence of the First Day on the Somme in the UK’s collective memory of the First World War, it is timely to reconsider the impact of that disastrous battle upon Yorkshire, a county that contributed more fighting units (c. 20 per cent), and suffered more casualties, than any other county in the United Kingdom. The fighting experiences of Yorkshire units ranged from utter disaster (not even reaching their own front line), and suffering the largest proportion of casualties of any unit in the British army, to making the largest gains of ground on the day. The spread of bereavement, however, was far from uniform, and so partly on account of the units engaged, and their recruiting whether pre-war (where regular) or wartime (in the case of Kitchener’s Service battalions), losses were concentrated within the West Riding. Moreover, despite the heavy losses within the “Pals” battalions, the legendary burden of bereavement within local communities did not apply uniformly because some units in 1916 were nothing like the “Pals” of 1914. The process of releasing details about deaths over days and weeks, with a huge ‘missing’ sub-group, robbed the First Day of anything like the significance it now holds. The dominant Press narrative, supported by letters from the front, remained overwhelmingly positive about the battle, the role of Yorkshire units and the prospects for the war itself. Political, military and religious elites reinforced this narrative at the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of the war, which coupled with the reception of the film, ‘Battle of the Somme’, assisted in sustaining the coping mechanisms within the country.     

Localizing the Reynolds case: a comparison of two American military atrocities in the Far East in Cold War 1957

ABSTRACT

This paper’s main focus is the case of the killing of Chinese citizen Liu Ziran by the American soldier Robert G. Reynolds in Taipei on March 20, 1957. Following this unfortunate event, a United States court-martial was inappropriately held in Taiwan. Reynolds’ acquittal provoked a violent response from the Chinese people. The riot on May 24, 1957, is best interpreted within a framework of nationalism rather than Cold War discourse. That same year, in the Girard case, another American soldier killed a Japanese woman in Japan. Due to the unequal positions of Taiwan and Japan in US Cold War strategy, these two killings were handled differently and led to dissimilar reactions. Washington viewed Taipei as somewhat of a troublemaker rather than a reliable ally and expressed great suspicion of Chiang Kai-shek and his eldest son, Chiang Ching-kuo. The US government had already declined to support Chiang Kai-shek’s plan for parachute raids in China. Meanwhile, Chiang’s authoritarian regime created a hotbed for the outbreak of nationalism. The people of Taiwan experienced a “pawn complex” and, in the Reynolds case, gave vent to accumulated ideological and social pressures.     

Subjectivity and representation in descartes: The origins of modernity

Although ‘Burke and Irish history’ is a theme which has long been known to modern commentators, it has not necessarily been addressed sufficiently. This essay seeks to put forward a more comprehensive account of Burke's views on Irish history than has previously been offered by scholars. According to Burke, the protection of Christianity had brought flourishing science to seventh- and eighth-century Ireland. Nevertheless, the nation was plunged into a barbarous state after the invasions of the Danes and other northern tribes. Burke's sympathy with the Brehon law was possibly unique, although he was not uncritical of it. Unlike the Irish patriots, his chief concern with historical Ireland was not the origins of the Irish legislature. He was rather most interested in the religious affairs which had continued to plague the nation during history. Throughout his career, Burke considered the Irish Rebellion of 1641 to have been ‘provoked’, and continuously endeavoured to remove the penal laws imposed on the Roman Catholics after the Williamite Conquest of 1689–1691. In his view, despite the substantial increase in prosperity after 1688/9, the series of religious persecutions, as well as other oppressive policies, had still obstructed the further progress of Irish society.     

Corruption European Style: The 1861 Frémont Scandal and Popular Fears in the Civil War North

Union General John C. Frémont excited considerable controversy during the Civil War, and not just due to his dubious military competence and early advocacy of emancipation. Many republican‐influenced citizens suspected Frémont of the corrupt misuse of power, and undermining the essential moral basis of the republic. While ultimately his ineffectual generalship might have reassured Northerners that “the Pathfinder” was hardly likely to succeed in his suspected schemes, it is striking that even during the war for national survival, citizens remained deeply concerned with the possible threat of power (particularly in the hands of corrupt, designing men) to liberty.     

美国史学界关于内战记忆研究述评

书写内战史有助于美国人内战记忆的形成,记忆的调整又推动着内战叙事的演变。通过南部老兵与妇女的努力,“失去的事业”从一种地方记忆上升为民族记忆。从20世纪开始,这种南部记忆主导了美国史学界对内战史的书写。直到越战后期,学界才从社会文化与政治需要的角度剖析“失去的事业”记忆的兴起及其影响,其研究对象主要为群体记忆、英雄记忆,以战场旧址、军事公墓及其纪念碑为中心的有形记忆场。因服务于国家重聚与民族和解之需,存在多种面相的“联邦事业”记忆被美国人长时期遗忘。直到20世纪80年代末,为突出黑人对美国历史的贡献,学界开始重新评析这一强调联邦统一与解放黑人的内战记忆。总之,美国学界对内战记忆的探究总体遵循“失去的事业”与“联邦事业”这两种叙事路径,但其研究并未完全摆脱意识形态的干扰。从21世纪开始,内战记忆史的研究逐步走向了多元社会化的发展方向。     

Crossroads of Identities in Women Religious in Spain. Catholicism,Society and Second Vatican Council (1953–69)*

This article examines the evolution and transformation of female religious life in Spain under Franco's regime, which began after the Spanish Civil War in 1939 and ended with the dictator's death in 1975. During the dictatorship, the public stance towards Catholicism made consecrated religious life one of the potential social undertakings for women at that time. The Concordat of 1953 corroborated National Catholicism, and women religious abided by a heritage sanctioned by this ideology. The Second Vatican Council parted ways with this tradition, and some women religious reassessed their role as females and consecrated women in their society. This article analyses how the renewal doctrine of the Council was received in Spain, particularly regarding female religious life, revealing the commonalities and differences of opinions and practices resulting from the break with National Catholic schematism, as well as the first manifestations of renewal among women religious.     

Class,Religion and the Foundation of the Australian Party System: A Revisionist Interpretation

The Australian party system's historic affiliation between religious identification and party support has generally been explained in terms of overlapping cleavages, with the coincidence of Catholicism and working-class socio-economic status given greatest agency. The evidence, however, is inconclusive for working-class predominance amongst Catholics at the time of Fusion. The accepted explanation fails to recognise the power and agency of religion and so overlooks the role of Protestant values and beliefs in the Deakinite Liberals' response to Labor's organisational demands for the subordination of individual judgement to party discipline, and in the subsequent rhetoric of the nonlabour parties. Nonlabour's easy slippage between the vices of Labor and those of the Roman Catholic Church explains why Catholics preferred Labor more convincingly than does the accepted class-based explanation.     

Barack Obama's Political Theology: Pluralism,Deliberative Democracy,and the Christian Faith

Abstract

Obama won the 2008 election precisely because he crafted a political theology that enabled him to create a truly progressive Democratic Party religious and racial-ethnic minority platform that welcomed pro-choice and pro-life social-justice leaning Catholics and Evangelicals into a new coalition. His political theology was directly influenced by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright and the black church civil rights tradition, white liberal Protestantism, his mother Ann Dunham's skepticism and free spirit, and Evangelical and Catholic leaders, advisors and opponents. Obama's best and most comprehensive statement on his political theology is his chapter on "Faith" in his New York Times No.1 best-selling autobiography The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). Obama contends that religiously motivated people must learn the art of compromise, proportion, and how to find shared values. They must translate their religious concerns and vision for America into universal rather than religion-specific values, which must be subject to debate, amenable to reason, and applicable to people of all lifestyles and faiths or no faith at all. They should also be willing to sublimate their ultimate theological and religious convictions for the common collective good. Secular people likewise must adopt a similar approach towards religious people and activists.     

British Catholics’ commercial strategies in times of international warfare (1688–1705)

This article investigates the British Catholic merchants’ commercial strategies during the Nine Years War (1689–1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713). By focusing on the tactics deployed by John Aylward and his partners in France and England, I argue that Catholicism fundamentally sustained Aylward’s trade by ensuring access to various markets and safer commercial plans. Catholicism had not only an economic dimension and Catholics in trade proved non-communal, working with co-religionists, family but also with non-Catholics in order to pursue profits. This article tells us how Catholicism, despite being a political and social impairment, was the key to success in commerce. It contributes to recent scholarship on religious minorities in trade and on how commerce functioned in the English Channel and in European waters at times of warfare.     

France - History and Story

Although the career of Thierry de Martel, one of France's most illustrious neurosurgeons, would seem primarily of interest to historians of medicine, his life and self‐inflicted death can be inscribed into different contexts. De Martel can be considered representative of what Jean Touchard calls ‘l'esprit des années trente’, a spirit both of malaise and revolt which prompted many among the First World War generation to seek new political and intellectual alternatives to replace what they deemed the morally bankrupt ones of the Third Republic. Both because of his connections with Parisian literary and political circles, and the paradoxical nature of his ideological itinerary between the wars (encompassing both proto‐fascism and Germanophobia), de Martel's case is particularly interesting. This biographical portrait of a previously unstudied ‘nonconformist’ in turn serves as a prism through which to view the ferment of the interwar period.