Quaker Schoolmasters, Toleration and the Law, 1689–1714

The 1689 Toleration Act allowed Protestant dissenters freedom to worship in public, but it was only a limited toleration and dissenters continued to suffer discrimination. This article examines the experience of Quakers in one important area, the Anglican monopoly in teaching. Although the prosecution of unlicensed teachers was patchy, localised, and dependent upon the hostility and zeal of particular individuals, few dissenters escaped harassment. Moreover, Friends appear to have suffered more severely because of the particular dislike that they still provoked and their unwillingness to compromise which often led to imprisonment. The growth in High Church feeling during Anne's reign led to a more rigorous enforcement of the existing statutes and the passing of the Schism Act (1714). The consequences of an Anglican educational monopoly have not been properly considered by historians largely from the assumption that the Schism Act was fatally compromised by the death of Queen Anne, and because little attention has been paid to the continued harassment of dissenters after toleration who attempted to teach. The Schism Act was repealed in 1719, but freedom for Quakers and other dissenters to teach had already been achieved largely through the courts.     

The Speaker in the Age of Party, 1672–1715

The discussion by King Charles II and his senior advisors in 1672 of the choice of a new Speaker for the forthcoming parliamentary session reveals both the way in which the appointment was prepared and the government's considerations in the appointment. Prominent among them was the Speaker's personal influence, and his personal views on the great issue to be debated, the Declaration of Indulgence. The choice of Sir Job Charlton, and the behaviour of his successor, Sir Edward Seymour, in the chair, mark a new phase in the history of the speakership, in which Speakers are less likely to be lawyers, for whom the office was a step on the road to high legal office, and more likely to be significant political leaders with their own influence and following. After the 1688 revolution, the tendency for Speakers to be party political leaders became still more marked. Nevertheless, the country ideology espoused by several of them, including Paul Foley, Robert Harley and the tory, Sir Thomas Hanmer, provides a pedigree for the model of the impartial speakership whose invention is often attributed to Arthur Onslow.     

"Unworthy Servants": The Rhetoric of Resignation at Canterbury, 1070–1170

Medieval attempts to resign episcopal office hold many complexities: legal issues, religious ramifications, and the personal motivations behind such acts. Taken at face value, appeals to resign appear direct and explicit; bishops desire release from an office they feel unworthy to hold, or in which they feel they have accomplished little. On closer scrutiny, however, many of these texts reveal purposes quite apart from resignation. Indeed, the attempts of three archbishops of Canterbury to resign office in the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveal strikingly similar rhetorical devices that indicate less a desire to leave office than to bolster the archbishops' spiritual authority. The requests of Lanfranc, Anselm, and Thomas Becket employ language designed to reinforce episcopal centrality at times when kings and even popes dis-regarded its importance, at least in the eyes of these archbishops. Despite the differ-ing circumstances that gave rise to each appeal for resignation, the stylized discourse in all of them suggests a need to make specific points that would rouse support for or bolster the perception of the requestor's episcopal status. All three archbishops, as well as their chroniclers or biographers, saw issues of Canterbury's leadership in the spiritual life of England at stake, and resignation became the means to pro-mote and advance the episcopal cause. By bringing repeated phrases of unworthiness or lack of accomplishment into their appeals for resignation, each man sought a response that would reassure him of his worthiness and ability to lead Canterbury.