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333 Pages·2014·1.67 MB·English

by  Anne Carter

Clashing Legacies:
Narratives of Continuity and Rupture in Restoration Britain's
Ideological Constructions of the Past

A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Daniel M Paltzer

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Anna Clark

November 2014
© Daniel M Paltzer 2014
Acknowledgements

This scholarship would not have been possible without the assistance of historians and
other scholars of the early modern era at the University of Minnesota. I would
particularly like to thank my excellent committee and adviser, Anna Clark, for the helpful
feedback and critique they provided. My readers, Anna, JB Shank, and John Watkins, all
read and formulated very helpful comments on partial drafts of the dissertation. I would
also like to thank several of my graduate student colleagues. The workshop of modern
British history graduate students who Anna also advises read and critiqued several
chunks of the text, and the members of the Medieval and Early Modern Interdisciplinary
Graduate Workshop helped focus and improve the sections on Bishop Barlow and
debates over proper sources.

Outside of the University of Minnesota early modern community, I would like to thank
Steven Matthews and Noro Andriamanalina for the opportunity to work and teach at the
University of Minnesota-Duluth with the Pre-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship I held there
in 2013-14. Furthermore, Amanda Saville and the staff at the Queen’s College Library in
Oxford (Lynette, Tessa, and Rory) for their assistance and hospitality while I was
working with Barlow’s manuscripts.

On a more personal level, I would like to thank my parents for their years of enthusiasm
and indulgence for my historical interests. Without the family stops at museums and
battlefields growing up and their more recent encouragement for my educational
aspirations, I might never had built up the interest in history that has led me to this career.
Finally, I would like to thank my fiancée Heidi for the overwhelming positivity and
optimism she brings to my life both within and outside of academia, especially during the
final stages of finishing this work.
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Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the textual and argumentative strategies used to debate
the meaning of the past in an attempt to influence the present and future in seventeenth-
century British polemic. I focus on two pamphlet wars occurring between 1678 and 1685.
The first concerned whether bishops had the right to participate in the trial of one of
Charles II's most important ministers. The second arose between a Scottish lawyer and
two English clerics when one of the Englishmen tried to debunk the traditional Scottish
narrative that their kingdom and royal dynasty had been founded in 330 B.C. I draw upon
the well-developed scholarly literature on political and religious ideology for this time
period to help explain the conceptual vocabulary used in the arguments and the political
theory underlying those ideas. I expand the analysis through a more explicit attention to
how writers used histories of certain important institutions to define ideological positions.
The role of historical narratives about institutions is an important element of ideological
argument, which allows me to develop insights about the role of the past in how a society
defined itself and tried to solve its problems. Specific examples examine how discourses
appealed to national myths, defended entrenched institutional interests in a tightly woven
social fabric, or defined the interaction between religion and politics.
ii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. i
Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii
Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1
Institutional history as a dominant form of ideological discourse .............................. 3
Historiography and the political culture of Restoration England ............................. 12
Summary of the two cases ........................................................................................ 18
Chapter 1: The Social and Historical Fabric of Interconnected Institutions ..................... 31
Thomas Hunt and Tory Fears of Renewed Civil War ............................................... 39
Two Replies to Hunt ................................................................................................. 51
Replies to the Bishop of Lincoln .............................................................................. 68
An Ecclesiastical Debate Turns into a Nationalist Debate........................................ 82
The Second Round of Debate on Scottish Antiquities ............................................ 103
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................119
Part II: Historical Trajectories in Ideological Argument ................................................. 125
Chapter 2: Struggles to Define and Control the Terms of Debate and Acceptable
Sources ........................................................................................................................ 128
Defining the Debate to Tie it to Their Profession ................................................... 131
Defining the Debate In Order to Exclude Certain Sources ..................................... 145
Renaissance Humanism in the Realm of Scottish Antiquities ................................ 162
Highlighting Opponents’ Biases ............................................................................. 172
Resurrecting and Editing a Pamphlet from the Civil War ...................................... 180
Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 187
Chapter 3: Moments of Religious Rupture and Refounding ...................................... 189
The Problem of Argumentation in a Multi-layered Religious History ................... 200
The Medieval Distortion of the Pure Church .......................................................... 204
Early Church History as Polemical Material .......................................................... 213
The Troubled Religious Legacy of the Sixteenth Century...................................... 222
Using the Common Law in a Competition within the Church of England ............. 228
The Religious Legacy of the Civil War .................................................................. 245
Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 250
Chapter 4: Maintaining Continuity in Space and Time .............................................. 258
Geography in the Common Law Tradition ............................................................. 260
iii
Contesting the Foreign Location of Founding Moments ........................................ 272
Local Knowledge Preventing the Foreign Erasure of History ................................ 287
Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 297
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 299
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 317
Index ............................................................................................................................... 323

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Introduction

This is a study of the ways in which assumptions about history, the flow of time,
and the development of political and social institutions appear in early modern British
ideological arguments. Two pamphlet debates occurring in the wake of the Popish Plot
and Exclusion Crisis during the early 1680’s will provide examples of the specific ways
British subjects in England and Scotland thought about ideological issues in a historical
light. The complex, ideologically charged debates occurring around the 1680s provoked
a large series of argumentative pamphlets which concerned religion, the powers of the
monarchy, national identity, and law as well as the interconnections between these
various issues. These sources provide the perfect setting for examining the complex
interplay between the past and ongoing conflicts.
My analysis of these elements reveals a society which used an ideological
discourse and historical evidence to define itself in the attempt to resolve internal
conflicts. Their struggle for self-definition occurred through detailed arguments about a
complex series of historical interactions and developments. Pamphleteers developed
sophisticated discursive strategies which attempted to create a sense of continuity with
the past for their favored position in a dispute. They simultaneously worked to show that
their opponents either misunderstood the legacy of the past or were seeking to distort it
into a dubious innovation. The most important actors within these narratives were the
great institutions of England and Scotland: the monarchy, laws, and church.
1
The central contentions I will be developing address the extent and origins of
ideological conflict over history as well as how this framework shaped the strategies
which pamphleteers used to make historically based arguments. First, all of the writers in
these debates understood institutional history and its relevance to contemporary questions
in a nearly identical light. The discursive patterns which were used in British debates
during the 1680s will reveal the ways in which writers understood religious and political
norms in terms of continuity within established communal or institutional narratives. I
refer to this nexus of historical claims and assumptions about contemporary society as
“institutional history”, because the major protagonists within these narratives were
institutions which fulfill important but bounded roles within the well-balanced, traditional
constitution.
In order to understand the ideologies, arguments, and fears experienced by late
seventeenth-century Britons, we need to more closely examine the discursive links
between the past and their contemporary condition. This is not to say that this study will
be looking for a theory of historical knowledge which caused pamphleteers to interpret
ideological issues in a similar manner. Instead, this study uses a synchronic approach
which attempts to create a snapshot of ideological arguments at a particular moment in
time in order to identify why the past mattered to the Restoration Britons who
participated as writers in the great crises of church and state between 1679 and 1685.
These polemics heavily emphasized the interconnected histories of the important
social, legal, religious, and political institutions which composed the kingdom. The focus
on the importance of institutions and their histories allows two conclusions to emerge.
2
First, these pamphlets illuminate the shared framework within which these English and
Scottish writers imagined their community as composed of a series of historically co-
dependent institutions. Second, identifying the shared assumptions helps explain the
particular strategies for historical and ideological debate which could be developed
within this framework.
Institutional history as a dominant form of ideological discourse
The Restoration, particularly the conflicts of the Popish Plot, Exclusion Crisis,
and Glorious Revolution (1678-1689), offers a fertile setting for illustrating how
historical arguments were bound to far reaching sets of ideological and institutional
commitments.1 Locating the study in this particular slice of time allows me to address
both general and specific arguments about the role of history within political and
religious argument. Perhaps the most important point to be taken out of this analysis is
how differently evidence about the past and its relation to contemporary events was used
in seventeenth-century Britain. In the wake of the upheavals of the Civil War and
Interregnum periods, the English and Scottish pamphleteers who I studied agreed upon a
backwards-looking view of history which sought to establish and maintain continuity
with the past. This understanding of history and the ideological importance of the past in

1 Mark Knights summarizes the historical debate about how to characterize the Exclusion Crisis and
concludes that the conflicts wracking Britain between 1678-81 were not simply about court factions
developing the machinery of political parties to help their side prevail as had long been accepted
opinion. Instead, Knights suggests that there was a much lower degree of centralized and cohesive
planning (as one would expect from a party) and most action came out of ad hoc and temporary
cooperation which was in turn driven by the complex interactions between religious, organizational, and
social concerns. With the old focus on party emergence debunked, scholars have begun (but not yet
finished) the task of charting the interconnections between political bargaining, ideology, factions,
religious fears, and the appeal to public opinion. Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 5-15.
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their own day characterized all the polemical writings produced to intervene in these two
controversies, and it amounted to a strong central framework for historical analysis which
recurred in pamphlet after pamphlet in both debates. The differences between this
analytical and ideological framework and our current frameworks for history highlight
the underlying social assumptions that led the polemicists to conceive of their society and
its history in terms of co-dependent and historically linked institutions.
In general terms, many ideologies contain an implicit understanding of the
trajectory of history which provides context or points of comparison through which
notions of progress or degeneration can be described. In the early modern period,
Renaissance reflections on classical precursors served as examples which educated and
shaped the behaviors and interactions of the educated political elite. More recently,
political discourse has frequently focused on the existence of universal human rights, but
judgments about progress across time crop up even in this set of ideas about supposedly
timeless principles.2 These ideas about the flow of time contain both descriptive and
normative content which simultaneously allows the society to define itself as well as

2 For instance, much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century liberal political thought operates under the
ahistorical assumption that there are universal human rights and responsibilities that exist as part of the
human condition even independently of their recognition in a given culture. For one of the most famous
twentieth-century examples of this type of thinking, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 2nd ed
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). However, even this ahistorically derived set of norms
leads to a particular vision of teleological history where progress is implicitly measured by how far a
society goes in recognizing and protecting the battery of universal human rights. Rawls himself was
accused of failing to recognize the importance of changing ideological and social conditions and how
they influenced the available options for establishing these rights politically (particularly in how
religious motivations played a huge role in bringing about the British and American abolition
movements and in helping African Americans organize the civil rights movement). Rawls attempted to
rectify the problem in a second work, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), where he argued that religious or ideological ideas from a specific tradition could be used as
arguments in public debate so long as they were being used to bring about a society which defended or
advanced the necessary foundational human rights. See Leif Wenar, "John Rawls", The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition),
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/rawls/
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