This essay employs social network analysis to examine the means by which Admiral Horatio Nelson built up a wide range of contacts throughout his career and the ways in which he used the resulting social networks. Nelson's career provides ample evidence for such analysis, not least because the Royal Navy was the largest organisation of its day and a huge network in its own right. Not only did Nelson operate within and rely on this network, he was also one of its major actors whose activities were of major public, and now historical, importance. Moreover, sources which reveal his contacts to people both within and outside the navy are numerous and comparatively accessible.

Nelson's letters form the source base for this analysis. A number of subsequent printed collections supplement Nicolas's seven-volume edition of Nelson's correspondence published in the 1840s. These include three nineteenth-century editions containing Nelson's letters to Lady Hamilton; Naish's edition of Nelson's Letters to His Wife and Other Documents; several specialised editions covering particular aspects of his career; and the result of White's lengthy and intercontinental search for undiscovered letters. Each of these works added new material to the impressive 3,774 letters that Nicolas had managed to release into print. In total, 4,838 printed letters have been entered into a database that formed the basis for the analysis contained in this essay.

Nevertheless, this database, though thorough, is necessarily incomplete. During the early years of Nelson's career those to whom he wrote often did not feel any need for or interest in keeping his letters. This started to change gradually when Nelson was posted to the Mediterranean in 1794 and more dramatically when he became famous at the end of 1798, after the battle of the Nile. Even during the campaign leading to the battle of Trafalgar, however, not all of the letters Nelson wrote survived. This is evident from an examination of sources at the National Maritime Museum: a mere sample of forty letters to Nelson in the period 1803 to 1805 from the British ambassador at Madrid (John Holkham Frere), the British consul at Cadiz (James Duff) and the acting governor of Gibraltar (Thomas Trigge) indicates that quite a few of his letters are missing.

Among the most momentous insights in the modern history of fundamental rights is Georg Jellinek's thesis that individualism in religious matters was the real beginning of the Western understanding of freedom. He went on to argue that the demand for freedom of conscience necessarily brought with it a call for further freedoms. Ernst Troeltsch pushed this further and arrived at the view that ‘the demand for religious freedom … tore up democratic constitutional guarantees’. Jellinek's and Troeltsch's work must be seen in the context of attempts around 1900 to explore the relationship between religion and ‘modernity’ associated, above all, with Max Weber's name. Although the generalising nature of Jellinek's and Troetsch's theses makes them problematic, they have retained a degree of plausibility and relevance. Most recently, Justin Champion – unaware of this older tradition – has written of the early modern world: ‘The simple claim […] will be that the relationship between citizenship and conscience was the critical starting point for definitions of libertas.’ At the same time, he laments that ‘the study of the history of civil liberty (as an aspect of the broader history of political thought) and the history of religious liberty (conceived of as the rise of the ‘liberty of conscience’ and ideas of toleration and persecution)’ are still frequently treated separately.

This essay may be read as an attempt to overcome the dislocation noted by Champion. Specifically, it deals with the liberty of the press. Historians so far have not failed to notice that early modern authors created a close connection between the principles of independent, rational knowledge of God and free public reasoning, freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Jellinek had already commented: ‘The struggle for another freedom, that of expression in general, is closely connected with that for the recognition of religious freedom. The history of the idea of freedom of the press points clearly to its religious origins.’ The classic example of this is Milton's Areopagitica (1644), which Nigel Smith, with good reason, has described as ‘that most elusive of pleas for liberty of conscience and freedom of the press’. Other seventeenth-century authors argued in a similar vein to Milton. Here Charles Blount's A Just Vindication of Learning (1679), William Denton's Apology for the Liberty of the Press (1681) and Edmund Hickeringhill's A Speech without Doors (1689) could be mentioned.

This anonymous ballad recites the names of the thirty-one Scottish commissioners for the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland. The commissioners met their English counterparts in June 1706 and, after heated discussions, they succeeded in making a framework for the Union. But did the so-called ‘bryd’ named ‘Scotland’ really live a happy married life? Even before the ratification of the Union, Scotland's approach to the nuptials was fraught with numerous challenges, one of which was the Scottish peerage question. In 1719 the Whig ministry expected that a Peerage Bill would answer it, by turning the notorious system of representative peers into one based on heredity, but the government failed to pass the legislation. Even before this, however, there had been numerous controversies around the Scots peers in the House of Lords. This essay aims to reconstruct these controversies, which involved ongoing questions surrounding the Union negotiations of 1706–7 and provided a crucial and instructive prelude to the crisis around the Peerage Bills in 1718–19.

On 29 July 1797, the London Evening Post reported on the tragic events of a suicide that had taken place four days earlier. The victim was John Atwood, a baker from Upper Bristol Road in Bath, who had attempted to hang himself in the previous month but was prevented by the rope breaking. However, on the fateful day there was to be no redemption. During the course of that day, Atwood ‘had ran after his wife with a knife, swearing he would kill her’, but she was able to pacify him and eventually left him ‘tolerably quiet’ before attending to business in town. While she was away, Atwood ‘shut the maid out of doors, and tied himself up’ to a rafter in his house. During the Coroners’ examination, the maid – Elizabeth Batchelor – provided a witness statement, noting how she ‘perceived frequent symptoms of insanity’ in Atwood for the three months prior to his death and how she believed the victim ‘was at the time of his so hanging himself … not of sound mind but lunatic and distracted’. The Coroners’ jury agreed and it was ultimately decided that Atwood's suicide was the consequence of him ‘not being of sane mind, memory or understanding’. Some newspapers, however, added a twist to this tragedy. The Oracle and Public Advertiser, for instance, declared Atwood had been reading Thomas Paine's Age of Reason on the morning he committed suicide. The victim's desperation was said to be the result of the ‘fumes of intoxication working upon a mind rendered callous by having imbibed such abominable principles’. According to this report, the ‘unhappy derangement of mind’ experienced by Atwood ‘had been occasioned by the fatal impressions made by the perusal of Paine's pernicious doctrine’.

As a trans-Atlantic figure, it seems the capacity for Paine to transfix the minds of men and lead them to perform horrid acts with dreadful endings was not confined to Britain. In Delaware, a physician named Theodore Wilson was allegedly bewitched by Paine in a similar way to Atwood. Wilson was married with two children, but he ‘was infected with the most shameful and uneasy of all diseases, an incurable lust after strange women’.

‘While the governments of most countries in Europe are perfectly despotic, and while those which are not actually such, appear to be verging fast towards it, the government of America is making rapid strides towards perfection …’ So wrote William Winterbotham (1763–1829), the Plymouth Baptist preacher, from Newgate prison where he had been jailed for four years (1793–7) and fined £200 for allegedly seditious content in two sermons he preached in November 1792. The government of America, he continued, perhaps with some feeling, ‘being contrary to all the old governments, in the hands of the people, they have exploded those principles by the operation of which civil and religious disqualifications and oppressions have been inflicted on mankind …’ While Winterbotham was confined, and in order to help meet some of the expenses of his conviction, he entered into various publishing ventures with his fellow political prisoners, the publishers James Ridgway, Daniel Holt and Henry D. Symonds. His most ambitious work was An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States, which was published in four volumes in 1795, and from which the opening quotation is taken – no small achievement for a journeyman silversmith, the son of a fuller, who had had little formal education.

It is not surprising that British radicals – about whose thinking and activities Harry Dickinson has written so perceptively and so humanely – continued to admire and be fascinated by the American political example after American independence, especially during the oppressive 1790s. They had sympathised with the colonial case against British government policy in the decade before the war and they had applied these arguments to the British situation, making the case for reform at home as well as independence for America. They had opposed the British war against the revolutionary Americans and they now found in the new United States of America a totem, an inspiration and, in some cases, an asylum from the increasingly politically repressive Britain of the 1790s.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6, Parliament passed a series of measures designed to end forever the Jacobite threat to the Hanoverian state. The accepted association of the Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlands with Jacobitism made the Gàidhealtachd the explicit target of these measures. Not satisfied with the apocalyptic violence that accompanied the pacification of the region, the Hanoverian regime believed that only by purging the Gael from the culture map of Great Britain would there be any end to the Stuart challenge. A tradition of local autonomy, the supposedly ‘savage’ nature of the Gael, and the ‘slavish servitudes’ of the people toward the clan elites were supposed to have created the conditions for the rebellion and were to be removed root and branch. Changes were to be made to Highland landholding, cultural traditions, religious persuasions and language. As ‘Justus’ reported in the Scots Magazine in 1746, ‘The name of Highlanders would, by this means, in another century scarcely exist’.

Historians have long been convinced of the importance of the post- Culloden acts in undermining the political and cultural autonomy of the Gàidhealtachd. Since the emergence of the cultural turn in historical studies and J. G. A. Pocock's crucial 1975 plea for a new subject, we have become increasingly aware of the cultural dimensions of ‘four nations’ British history. The post-Culloden acts are situated not only as political measures, but also as reflections of the ethnic hostility of the Englishspeaking world. In many studies, either implicitly or explicitly, the acts served as the agent of change in the Gaelic world and had considerable successes in oppressing the culture of Gaelic Scotland. Recent contributions to the history of the Highlands by literary scholars have further added to our understanding of the colonisation of the Gàidhealtachd and the devaluing of Gaelic culture which accompanied it.

A crucial point, however, has been neglected. How were these measures received and evaluated within the region? To what extent was cultural colonisation transferred from the pages of Anglophone parliamentary proceedings and political pamphlets into the Highlands and Islands? By considering the difficulty of translating political thought into political action, this essay re-evaluates the impact of the post-Culloden acts of Parliament.

One of the most infamous phrases of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ‘war of ideas’ was Edmund Burke's characterisation of the people as a ‘swinish multitude’. It was an insult so revealingly contemptuous that those opposed to Burke's views seized on it with glee: men like Thomas Spence, whose periodical One Penny Worth of Pig's Meat: Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (1793–5) cast Burke's insult back in his face. Spence's reputation has oscillated dramatically in the two hundred years since his death in 1814. Having been so influential that an Act of Parliament was passed specifically prohibiting ‘All societies or clubs calling themselves Spencean or Spencean Philanthropists’, and influencing a long line of radicals including the Chartist leaders and Karl Marx, Spence came to be regarded as an eccentric extremist.

It was Harry Dickinson (like Spence, a scion of the North-east of England) who, by producing the first modern edition of Spence's political works in 1982, enabled and perhaps obliged historians to take Spence's ideas seriously. As Dickinson's edition shows, Spence repeatedly deployed Burke's scornful epithet to reveal the inherent self-interest of the landlord class, the object of Spence's ire since his first political writings in the mid- 1770s. What is often forgotten, however, is that Burke's infamous ‘swinish multitude’ barb was used in the context of scholarship and education. ‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians,’ Burke had written, ‘learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ In this essay, I want to argue that Spence would have found this particularly provocative. A teacher himself, Spence recognised how important children's education was to social and political renewal. Further, the claim I want to advance here is that his understanding of education's potential was inspired at least in part by his exposure, before his move from Newcastle to London in around 1787, to a surprisingly radical children's literature.

Dickinson's edition included the first modern reprinting of one of Spence's more unusual works, A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, Being the History of Crusonia, or Robinson Crusoe's Island, Down to the Present Time, published in Newcastle by Thomas Saint in 1782.

As the graph in Figure 3.1 shows, attempts by Parliament to improve the Church of England's performance of its pastoral functions ceased following the Hanoverian accession, but resumed in the later eighteenth century, first tentatively, and then from 1800 in a more determined and focused way. During the intervening period – as Figures 3.2 and 3.3 demonstrate – Parliament passed increasing numbers of acts relating to individual parishes or churches and also many acts adjusting or revising rules relating to merely tolerated religious sects, but by contrast left the established church in charge of its own pastoral operations. In the opening years of the eighteenth century, Convocation provided a forum for clerics to promote their own ideas about how to improve pastoral efficacy. The Hanoverian muting of Convocation discouraged such initiatives; it is not surprising that legislation then fell away. Why and how interest and activity revived at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are issues that have not received much attention. This essay seeks to illuminate these matters through a close study of the ways in which relevant legislative proposals came to Parliament and were dealt with there.

Some of the background circumstances which shaped interest in legislating have been well studied by historians, with particular emphasis on the effects of the French Revolution on the relation between Church and Dissent, and on the character of Dissent itself, as changing structures of authority and the chiliastic atmosphere of the later 1790s set the scene for the dramatic rise of evangelical itinerancy. Responses to these developments were shaped by a slowly unfolding movement for religious renewal within the Church (which still deserves more study than it has received) and by discussions associated with Pitt and his cousin Grenville's attempt to develop an ‘Ecclesiastical Plan’ – the lineaments of which only came clearly into view with the arrival of Grenville's papers at the British Library. Pitt's fall in 1801 sent this project up in smoke, though not, as we shall see, without leaving some residue.

The immediate stimulus to action following Pitt's fall was provided by a worried William Dickinson, MP for Somerset.

Dick Gaughan's defiant rendition of Adam McNaughton's song, with its repeated injunction to ‘Remember Thomas Muir’, is a starkly commemorative act. In presenting a narrative of its subject's life, it plays a consciously didactic role. Like all attempts to recover and reanimate ‘hidden’ or ‘forgotten’ pasts, its message rests in part on the idea that there is a likely or existing failure to remember its subject appropriately or with a due sense of his significance. That Muir's life was ‘historically significant’ has been commemorated in another sense, by his inclusion in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in a typically lucid essay by Harry Dickinson. This rendering of Muir's life sits neatly within Dickinson's own extensive work on the 1790s. It highlighted the interactions of constitutionalism and the universalism of the French Revolution within the context provided by an increasingly militant loyalism and sought to examine the relationship between political ideas and political actions:

As Dickinson's essay also made clear, the contemporary sources for the life of Muir are limited. Biographies (including a recent and very thoroughly researched biographical novel) have rested on government reports and the account of Muir's trial, a smattering of letters, pamphlets, travel accounts, and French and Spanish records.

This essay examines Edmund Burke's attitude towards Protestant Dissenters, notably the more radical or rational Dissenters who were prominent in the late eighteenth century, as a way of understanding his changing attitude towards Church and state. The Dissenters who attracted Burke's attention were those who were interested in extending the terms of toleration both for ministers and for their laity. Initially Burke supported their aspirations, but from about 1780 things began to change. It would, however, take another ten years before his opposition to Dissenters became open and virulent.

In the 1770s a group of Latitudinarian clergymen, led by Rev. Theophilus Lindsey, petitioned Parliament for relaxation of the requirement that clergy should subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. The debate in the House of Commons on the Feathers Tavern Petition, as it was known, revealed that the government was against such a change but would not oppose a relaxation of the existing requirement that Dissenting ministers, tutors or schoolmasters subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Thirty-Nine Articles. The Dissenters proceeded to petition for such change. There were, however, divisions within the petitioning camp, with some Dissenters being prepared to accept an alternative subscription requirement and others believing that the state had no right to demand any religious test at all. Burke favoured change, believing that a profession of faith should replace the existing requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles. At this time, Dissenters regarded him as an advocate of toleration. Even Theophilus Lindsey, who was critical of Burke's opposition to the Feathers Tavern Petition, wrote of Burke speaking in favour of ‘the most unbounded toleration to Dissenters’. In the early 1770s, one might have thought that was indeed Burke's stance. In a speech on the Protestant Dissenters Relief Bill on 7 March 1773, which he made soon after he had visited France, he spoke in favour of toleration even for Deists. One may see this in part as a reaction to the atheism which he had found prevalent among the philosophes. After stating his strong preference for revealed religion and even more so for the Church of England, which he wanted to see so powerful that it could ‘crush the giant powers of rebellious darkness’, he conceded that ‘episcopacy may fail and religion exist’.

This essay will attempt to identify the extent to which the political thought of Thomas Spence (1750–1814) was influenced by the works of James Harrington (1611–77). In his introduction to The Political Works of Thomas Spence, Harry Dickinson noted that Spence ‘was much influenced not only by the Bible, but by the idealised societies of Thomas More's Utopia and James Harrington's Oceana’, and ‘accepted James Harrington's thesis that political power was derived from the possession of property, especially landed property’. Other scholars have also identified the influence of Harrington, although they have been divided over its extent. Malcolm Chase argued that ‘much of the distinctiveness of Spence's thought was derived … from … James Harrington’, most particularly in his ‘concern to isolate property in land as the key to political power’. Chase, in addition, noted that both Spence and Harrington also:

As further evidence of this ‘special affinity’, Chase highlighted the similarity between the names of the ‘allegorical societies’ that the two authors imagined (Oceana and Crusonia/Spensonia), noted that Spence read from Harrington's work at his trial in 1801, and reminded the reader that in Pig's Meat – Spence's weekly journal that ran from 1793 to 1795 and consisted largely of extracts from other writers – the writer most often quoted was Harrington. Earlier work had drawn similar connections, and G. I. Gallop stated that ‘James Harrington was a major influence on Spence’, while Olive Rudkin identified ‘one writer who had a real influence upon Spence, and he is James Harrington’. Thomas R. Knox, however, was more cautious and, while he conceded that Harrington is the only writer towards whom Spence might possibly display a ‘hint of a significant debt’, he argued that in general Spence used a somewhat limited knowledge of English political theorists ‘to legitimate, not to inspire’ his own ideas.

On 13 January 1794, Maurice Margarot of the London Corresponding Society stood before the bar at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh charged with the crime of sedition. Margarot was one of the very few English delegates who had been present at the so-called British Convention, organised by the Scottish branch of the radical society the Friends of the People, and held in Edinburgh in November and the beginning of December 1793. Together with his fellow Englishman Joseph Gerrald, and William Skirving of the Edinburgh Friends of the People, Margarot had taken on a leading role at the Convention. It was for this that he had been put on trial. In the opening stages of the trial, Margarot presented a challenge to the judges and the prosecution which initiated a discussion about sedition as a crime under Scots law both in his trial and those of other Convention delegates. Margarot stated:

In the trial, Margarot's challenge was understood to raise a question: which statute under Scots law made sedition a crime in Scotland? Margarot's focus was thus on written law, and his view seemed to be that if no such statute could be produced, then sedition should not be accepted as a crime in Scotland and the case would have to be abandoned. Certainly, when seen from the point of view of an Englishman such as Margarot, the situation in Scotland must have appeared rather odd. Whereas English law provided for the possibility of charging a defendant with ‘seditious libel’, it had been made clear by the time of Margarot's trial that there was no statute under Scots law which used the term ‘sedition’.