The crowned republic? monarchy and anti-monarchy in Britain, 1760–1901

Historical Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 167-185

  Craig, David M ^a  

^a DURHAM UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85014182425     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X02002893     Document Type: Article

References (231)

1. Julie Burchill used the phrase in the Modern Review in 1992.
2. See Anthony Barnett, This time: our constitutional revolution (London, 1997), p. 118 and ch. 5 generally.
3. Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the people: the inside story of New Labour (London, 2000), pp. 59–71.
4. Also, Mandy Merck, ed., After Diana: irreverent elegies (London, 1998), esp.
5. Ross McKibbin, ‘Mass observation in the Mall’, pp. 15–24.
6. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1983)
7. Tom Nairn, The enchanted glass: Britain and its monarchy (London, 1988). These writings may be located within the wider historiography of patriotism.
8. See Hugh Cunningham, ‘The language of patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), pp. 8–33
9. Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism: the making and unmaking of British national identity (3 vols., London, 1989)
10. Miles Taylor, ‘Patriotism, history and the left in twentieth-century Britain’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 971–987.
11. Stephen Haseler, The end of the house of Windsor: birth of a British republic (London, 1993)
12. Anthony Barnett, ed., The power and the throne: the monarchy debate (London, 1994)
13. Jonathan Freedland, Bring home the revolution: how Britain can live the American dream (London, 1998).
14. For a defence of the modern constitutional monarchy see Vernon Bogdanor, The monarchy and the constitution (Oxford, 1995)
15. and from a more historical point of view, John Cannon, ‘The survival of the British monarchy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 36 (1986), pp. 143–164.
16. Richard Williams, The contentious crown: public discussion of the British monarchy in the reign of Queen Victoria (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 120, 244
17. Miles Taylor, ‘Introduction’ to Walter Bagehot, The English constitution (Oxford, 2001), p. xxi
18. Paul Smith, ‘Introduction’ to the same work (Cambridge, 2001), p. xiv.
19. The impact of Bagehot is evident in Peter Hennessy, The hidden wiring: unearthing the British constitution (London, 1995)
20. Bogdanor, The monarchy and the constitution
21. Brian Harrison, The transformation of British politics (Oxford, 1996), chs. 1, 12.
22. Bagehot, English constitution, ed. Taylor, p. 48.
23. The first edition of the English constitution was moderate in its defence of ‘show’. English constitution., pp. 49–50.
24. Compare ‘The income of the prince of Wales’, Economist, 10 Oct. 1874
25. in Norman St John Stevas, ed., The collected works of Walter Bagehot (15 vols., London, 1965–1986), V, p. 418.
26. Bagehot, English constitution, ed. Taylor, p. 40.
27. English constitution., p. 44.
28. Also idem, ‘Sir Charles Dilke on the civil list’, Economist, 10 Jan. 1874
29. idem, ‘The thanksgiving’, Economist, 25 Feb. 1872
30. in Stevas, ed., Collected works, V, pp. 417, 439.
31. On the mystical powers of the monarchy see Kingsley Martin, The magic of monarchy (London, 1937), chs. 1, 4–5
32. Frank Prochaska, Royal bounty: the making of a welfare monarchy (New Haven, 1995), p. 111
33. Ross McKibbin, Class and cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), p. 14.
34. Bagehot elaborated on these ideas in ‘Sir Charles Dilke’
35. idem, ‘English republicanism’, Economist, 15 Apr. 1873
36. idem, ‘Mr Bright on republicanism’, Economist, 17 May 1873
37. in Stevas, ed., Collected works, V, pp. 417, 424–9.
38. Bagehot, English constitution, ed. Taylor, p. 51.
39. See David Spring, ‘Walter Bagehot and deference’, American Historical Review, 81 (1976), pp. 524–531
40. John Burrow, ‘Sense and circumstances: Bagehot and the nature of political understanding’, in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and John Burrow, That noble science of politics: a study in nineteenth-century intellectual history (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 171–175
41. Mark Francis and John Morrow, A history of political thought in the nineteenth century (New York, 1994), pp. 241–246
42. William M. Kuhn, Democratic royalism: the transformation of the British monarchy, 1861–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996), ch. 1.
43. David Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition” c. 1820–1977’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds., The invention of tradition, pp. 101–164
44. David Cannadine, The pleasures of the past (London, 1989), pp. 9–10
45. Linda Colley, ‘The apotheosis of George III: loyalty, royalty and the British nation, 1760–1820’, Past and Present, 102 (1984), pp. 94–129
46. idem, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), ch. 5.
47. Ian Gilmour, cited in Cannadine, ‘The context’, p. 102.
48. David Cannadine, ‘Introduction: divine rites of kings’, in idem and Simon Price, eds., Rituals of royalty: power and ceremonial in traditional societies (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 11, 15–16.
49. This argument is made in Elizabeth Hammerton and David Cannadine, ‘Conflict and consensus on a ceremonial occasion: the diamond jubilee in Cambridge in 1897’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), pp. 113, 145. This article, however, achieves its aims with more success than does Cannadine, ‘The context’.
50. Cannadine, ‘The context’, pp. 120–132.
51. Also, Jeffrey L. Lant, Insubstantial pageant: ceremony and confusion at Queen Victoria's court (London, 1979)
52. Freda Harcourt, ‘Gladstone, monarchism and the “new imperialism”, 1868–1874’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 14 (1985), pp. 20–51
53. Thomas Richards, ‘The image of Victoria in the year of jubilee’, Victorian Studies, 31 (1987), pp. 7–32
54. Walter L. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee’, American Scholar, 66 (1997), pp. 591–597
55. Peter Hinchliff, ‘Frederick Temple, Randall Davidson and the coronationof Edward VII’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), pp. 71–99
56. John Wolffe, Great deaths: grieving, religion, and nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford, 2000), chs. 7–8.
57. Kuhn, Democratic royalism, pp. 1–14.
58. Also Walter L. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria opens parliament: the disinvention of tradition’, Historical Research, 113 (1990), pp. 178–194.
59. Kuhn, Democratic royalism, pp. 52, 72.
60. Democratic royalism., pp. 65, 72, 94, 113.
61. Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: the woman, the monarchy, and the people (London, 1990), pp. 132–136.
62. Marilyn Morris, The British monarchy and the French revolution (New Haven, 1998), pp. 142–145
63. Colley, ‘The apotheosis of George III’, pp. 108–110.
64. idem, Britons, pp. 215–216.
65. Cited in Colley, Britons, p. 218.
66. Britons., p. 227
67. Morris, British monarchy, p. 149.
68. But see Prochaska, Royal bounty, ch. 2.
69. Williams, Contentious crown, pp. 230–1 and ch. 8 generally.
70. Also, John Plunkett,‘Queen Victoria: the monarchy and the media, 1837–1867’ (PhD thesis, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2000), ch. 1.
71. Kuhn, Democratic royalism, pp. 41–42.
72. See also Walter L. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria and religion’, in Gail Malmgreen, ed., Religion in the lives of English women, 1760–1930 (Bloomington, 1986), pp. 88–128
73. idem, ‘Queen Victoria and the challenge of Roman Catholicism’, Historian, 58 (1996), pp. 295–314.
74. Williams, Contentious crown, pp. 233–235.
75. See Stephen C. Behrendt, Royal mourning and Regency culture: elegies and memorials of Princess Charlotte (London, 1997).
76. Prochaska, Royal bounty, pp. 103–5, and chs. 3–4 generally.
77. Adrienne Munich, Queen Victoria's secrets (New York, 1996)
78. Margaret Homans, Royal representations: Queen Victoria and British culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago, 1998)
79. Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich, eds., Remaking Queen Victoria (Cambridge, 1997)
80. Plunkett, ‘Queen Victoria’.
81. See also Regenia Garnier's review article, ‘Locating the Victorians’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), pp. 113–124.
82. Homans, Royal representations, pp. xix-xxxvii.
83. Royal representations., pp. 1–33
84. Munich, Queen Victoria's secrets, pp. 8–9, 42–4, 62–3
85. Stanley Weintraub, Albert: uncrowned king (London, 1997), pp. 128–9, 144, 165–7, 295–6, 337–9, 356
86. Plunkett, ‘Queen Victoria’, ch. 1.
87. Thompson, Queen Victoria, ch. 4.
88. Munich, Queen Victoria's secrets, pp. 105–109.
89. Munich, Queen Victoria's secrets, pp. 59, 71, and 71–8 more generally.
90. Queen Victoria's secrets., chs. 2–3.
91. Homans, Royal representations, ch. 1.
92. Plunkett, ‘Queen Victoria’, chs. 2–3.
93. For a critical approach to Albert see Cannadine, Pleasures of the past, pp. 12–21.
94. These images may not bear much relation to reality. See David Cannadine, ‘The last Hanoverian sovereign? The Victorian monarchy in historical perspective, 1688–1988’, in A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim, eds., The first modern society: essays in English history in honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 146–151
95. Weintraub, Albert, pp. 284–286.
96. Williams, Contentious crown, pp. 204, 215.
97. See also Wolffe, Great deaths, pp. 194–200, 203–8, 222–42.
98. Joanna Lewis, ‘The death of David Livingstone: laying to rest a Victorian myth’, paper given to Locating the Victorians conference, 12–15 July 2001.
99. Munich, Queen Victoria's secrets, ch. 4.
100. Queen Victoria's secrets., pp. 76–77.
101. Bogdanor, The monarchy and the constitution.
102. Hennessy, The hidden wiring, ch. 2. Also Frank Hardie, The political influence of the British monarchy, 1868–1952 (London, 1970).
103. Vernon Bogdanor, ‘1931 revisited: the constitutional aspects’
104. Philip Williamson, ‘1931 revisited: the political realities’
105. Bogdanor, ‘1931 revisited: reply to Philip Williamson’, Twentieth Century British History, 2 (1991), pp. 1–25, 328–43
106. Simon Heffer, Power and place: the political consequences of King Edward VII (London, 1998).
107. Robert Rhodes James, A spirit undaunted: the political role of George VI (London, 1998).
108. James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution: new narratives in the political history of England's long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1996).
109. See J. C. D. Clark, English society, 1688–1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien regime (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 201–216
110. James E. Bradley, ‘The Anglican pulpit, the social order, and the resurgence of toryism during the American revolution’
111. John A. Phillips, ‘The social calculus: deference and defiance in later Georgian England’.
112. J. C. D. Clark, ‘England's ancien regime as a confessional state’, Albion, 21 (1989), pp. 361–88, 426–49, 450–74.
113. More recently, Clark, English society, 1660–1832: religion, ideology and politics during the ancien regime (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 239–256.
114. David Eastwood, ‘John Reeves and the contested idea of the constitution’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 16 (1993), pp. 197–212.
115. A. V. Beedell, ‘John Reeves's prosecution for a seditious libel, 1795–1796: a study in political cynicism’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 799–824.
116. Morris, British monarchy, pp. 64–5, 75–7.
117. John Barrell, Imagining the king's death: figurative treason, fantasies of regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 622–642.
118. James J. Sack, From Jacobite to conservative: reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 123–124.
119. But see Colley, Britons, p. 207.
120. Also David Armitage, ‘A patriot for whom? The afterlives of Bolingbroke's patriot king’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997), pp. 397–418.
121. Warren M. Elofson, ‘The Rockingham whigs and the country tradition’, Parliamentary History, 8 (1989), pp. 90–115
122. Philip Harling, The waning of ‘Old Corruption’: the politics of economical reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996), chs. 3–5.
123. Peter Jupp, British politics on the eve of reform: the duke of Wellington's administration, 1828–1830 (Basingstoke, 1998), ch. 1.
124. For the former position, see Clark, English society, 1660–1832, pp. 253–256
125. for the latter Jonathan Parry, The rise and fall of liberal government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1993), pp. 73–78.
126. Cited in Clark, English society, 1660–1832, p. 552.
127. G. H. L. Le May, The Victorian constitution (London, 1979), pp. 35–40.
128. The Victorian constitution., ch. 3
129. Cannadine, ‘The last Hanoverian sovereign?’, pp. 139–146.
130. Cited in Williams, Contentious crown, p. 97.
131. Cited in Contentious crown.
132. Contentious crown., pp. 120, 128–33
133. Miles Taylor, ‘The old radicalism and the new: David Urquhart and the politics of opposition, 1832–1867’, in Eugenio F. Biagini and Alistair J. Reid, eds., Currents of radicalism: popular radicalism, organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 23–43
134. Plunkett, ‘Queen Victoria’, pp. 158–168.
135. Homans, Royal representations, pp. 131–146.
136. Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury's world (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 73–6, 159–64.
137. See also Hardie, Political influence, chs. 2–3.
138. Cited in Homans, Royal representations, p. 128.
139. Le May, Victorian constitution, pp. 58–60.
140. Cited in Morris, British monarchy, p. 75.
141. Steve Poole, The politics of regicide, 1760–1850: troublesome subjects (Manchester, 2000).
142. Barrell, Imagining the king's death.
143. Poole, Politics of regicide, p. 27 and ch. 2 more generally.
144. Politics of regicide., pp. 69, 90–1, 169–70.
145. Peter Fraser, ‘Public petitioning and parliament before 1832’, History, 46 (1961), pp. 200–201.
146. Also Colin Leys, ‘Petitioning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Political Studies, 3 (1955), pp. 45–64.
147. James E. Bradley, Popular politics and the American revolution in England: petitions, the crown and public opinion (Macon, 1986).
148. Morris, British monarchy, pp. 88–95.
149. Poole, Politics of regicide, pp. 100–102.
150. Barrell, Imagining the king's death, passim.
151. Poole, Politics of regicide, ch. 7.
152. Imagining the king's death., pp. 179, 198–200.
153. Thompson, Queen Victoria, pp. 94–96.
154. Frank Prochaska, The republic of Britain, 1760–2000 (London, 2000), pp. 67–70.
155. Cited in Poole, Politics of regicide, p. 189.
156. Cited in Politics of regicide., p. 17.
157. Politics of regicide., p. 201.
158. See also James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 319–320.
159. Antony Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’: British anti-monarchism and debates about royalty since 1790 (London, 1999), p. 11–19
160. See also idem, ‘Reynold's Newspaper, opposition to monarchy and the radical anti-jubilee: Britain's anti-monarchist tradition reconsidered’, Historical Research, 68 (1995), pp. 318–337.
161. idem, ‘Republicanism reappraised: anti-monarchism and the English radical tradition, 1850–1872’, in Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution, pp. 154–178
162. Antony Taylor, ‘Medium and messages: republicanism's traditions and preoccupations’ and “‘The nauseating cult of the crown”: republicanism, anti-monarchism and post-Chartist politics 1870–5’, in David Nash and Antony Taylor, eds., Republicanism in Victorian society (Stroud, 2000), pp. 1–11, 51–70.
163. Williams, Contentious crown, pp. 159–166
164. Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’, pp. 26, 38, 68–9.
165. Sack, From Jacobite to conservative, pp. 132–3, 137–8.
166. Williams, Contentious crown, p. 34.
167. Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’, pp. 113–14. The prince of Wales did cultivate a more accessible and human style than his mother.
168. See Lucy Brown, Victorian news and newspapers (Oxford, 1985), pp. 135–137.
169. Prochaska, Royal bounty, pp. 119–124
170. Heffer, Power and place, passim.
171. Williams, Contentious crown, pp. 11–13, 19, 33.
172. Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’, p. 47.
173. For examples see Prochaska, Republic of Britain, pp. 73–6, 83–4, 99–101.
174. Also Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria opens parliament’
175. William M. Kuhn, ‘Ceremony and politics: the British monarchy, 1871–1872’ Journal of British Studies, 26 (1987), pp. 133–162.
176. idem, ‘Queen Victoria's civil list: what did she do with it?’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 645–665.
177. Cited in Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’, p. 93.
178. Down with the crown., p. 91.
179. Williams, Contentious crown, pp. 43–44.
180. Cited in David Wootton, ‘The republican tradition: from commonwealth to common sense’, in idem, ed., Republicanism, liberty and commercial society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994), p. 1
181. Gordon S. Wood, The creation of the American republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), p. 48.
182. Quentin Skinner, Liberty before liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 22 n. 67, 54 n. 174, 55 n. 176.
183. Liberty before liberalism., pp. 36–57.
184. Also Richard Tuck, Philosophy and government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 221–253
185. Caroline Robbins, The eighteenth-century commonwealthman: studies in the transmission, development, and circumstance of English liberal thought from the restoration of Charles II until the war with the thirteen colonies (Cambridge, MA, 1959)
186. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, 1975).
187. Bridget Hill, The republican virago: the life and times of Catharine Macaulay, historian (Oxford, 1992), ch. 8.
188. Richard Whatmore, Republicanism and the French revolution: an intellectual history of Jean-Baptiste Say's political economy (Oxford, 2000), pp. 18–31.
189. Richard Whatmore, “‘A gigantic manliness”: Paine's republicanism in the 1790s’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, eds., Economy, polity and society: British intellectual history, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 135–157
190. See also Greogry Claeys, Thomas Paine: social and political thought (London, 1989)
191. Mark Philp, Paine (Oxford, 1989)
192. D. M. Craig, ‘Republicanism becoming conservative: Robert Southey and political argument in Britain, 1789–1817’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge, 2000), pp. 8–29.
193. Whatmore, ‘Paine's republicanism’, pp. 140–1, 151
194. Paine's republicanism., p. 150.
195. Paine's republicanism., p. 152.
196. Also Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The invention of the modern republic (Cambridge, 1994)
197. F. D. Cartwright, ed., The life and correspondence of Major Cartwright (2 vols., London, 1826), I, p. 192.
198. Prochaska, Republic of Britain, pp. 43–44.
199. Republic of Britain., pp. 57–58.
200. Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform: popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 1
201. Margot Finn, After Chartism: class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993)
202. Miles Taylor, The decline of British radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995).
203. Taylor, Decline of British radicalism, pp. 113–114
204. Malcolm Chase, The people's farm: English radical agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988).
205. Prochaska, Republic of Britain, pp. 87–89.
206. Norbert J. Gossman, ‘Republicanism in nineteenth century England’, International Review of Social History, 7 (1962), p. 59
207. See also Edward Royle, Radicals, secularists and republicans: popular freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester, 1980), pp. 198–206.
208. Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform, pp. 61–83
209. Finn, After Chartism, ch. 7.
210. There was also a wider interest in how empire related to traditions of self-government. See Miles Taylor, ‘Republics versus empires: Charles Dilke's republicanism reconsidered’.
211. David Nash, ‘Charles Bradlaugh, India and the many chameleon destinations of republicanism’,in Nash and Taylor, eds., Republicanism in Victorian society, pp. 25–34, 106–24
212. Also Mark Francis, ‘Review article: histories of Australian republicanism’, History of Political Thought, 22 (2001), pp. 351–362
213. Prochaska, Republic of Britain, p. 126
214. Fergus A. D'Arcy, ‘Charles Bradlaugh and the English republican movement, 1868–1878’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), pp. 369–70, 381–2.
215. Prochaska, Republic of Britain, pp. 123–4, 137.
216. Cited in Mark Bevir, ‘Republicanism, socialism and democracy’, in Nash and Taylor, eds., Republicanism in Victorian society, p. 81.
217. Republicanism, socialism and democracy., p. 86.
218. Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic ideas and the British labour movement, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 176–7 and chs. 1–2 generally.
219. Also Andrew Chadwick, Augmenting democracy: political movements and constitutional reform during the rise of Labour, 1900–1924 (Aldershot, 1999)
220. Ian Christopher Fletcher, “‘Some interesting survivals of a historic past?”: republicanism, monarchism and the militant Edwardian left’, in Nash and Taylor, eds., Republicanism in Victorian society, p. 91
221. Taylor, ‘Down with the crown’, pp. 203–204
222. Prochaska, Republic of Britain, p. 151
223. See also Ross McKibbin,‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’,English Historical Review,99(1984), pp. 311–313
224. On Labour's political and constitutional thought see Jose Harris,‘Labour's political and social thought’
225. Miles Taylor, ‘Labour and the constitution’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane, and Nick Tiratsoo, eds., Labour's first century (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 8–45, 151–80
226. Nairn, Enchanted glass, ch. 1.
227. Robert Blake, ‘The crown and politics in the twentieth century’, in J. Murray-Brown, ed., The monarchy and its future (London, 1969), pp. 11–12.
228. Taylor, ‘Patriotism, history and the left’.
229. Julia Stapleton, ‘Political thought, elites, and the state in modern Britain’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), pp. 251–268
230. idem, ‘Political thought and national identity in Britain, 1850–1950’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore, and Brian Young, eds., History, religion, and culture: British intellectual history, 1750–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 245–269
231. Raymond Geuss, History and illusion in politics (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 10–12.