To Clarendon, the English Civil War was an exercise in folly, pride, and the tragic corruption of the species. Since then, many a thesis has been advanced to explain the Great Rebellion, only to fall before fresh generations of skeptics, each demolishing a predecessor's orthodoxy to set up their own. But old notions die hard. They linger in the words and concepts that once expressed them, which remain impregnated with the old meaning even when the nominal definitions have changed. Such a concept is that of the “Opposition” in early Stuart England. Its history is virtually coextensive with the historiography of the English Revolution, and it remains today at the center of the debate on the origins and meaning of the Revolution.

The concept of an Opposition in prerevolutionary England can be traced back to the eighteenth century. David Hume, writing of the 1620s, saw party conflict as an inherent and fundamentally progressive element in the clash between privilege and prerogative. The “wise and moderate,” he asserted, “regarded the very rise of parties as a happy prognostic of the establishment of liberty.” Here already is the germ of the Whig interpretation, which emerges full-blown a century later in Macaulay:

In January, 1696, Parliament passed an act to reform the procedure used in treason trials. The consequences of this act were immense. It immediately changed the complexion of treason trials from that of conciliar hearings aimed at eliminating the government's enemies to that of actual trials which sought to establish guilt or innocence. Moreover, Parliament subsequently extended some of the key provisions of this act to criminal law proceedings, thus giving the 1696 statute a claim to being one of the well-springs of legal reform in modern England. Most important of all, however, was the effect the act had on politics. It helped to bring to a close an age in which politicians frequently attacked their opponents with charges of treason, and it thus played a part in opening a new age, one where less violent practices were employed in the political struggle.

It is not the least of ironies in English history that an act as important as the Treason Trials Act of 1696 should have received so little scholarly attention. The only historian to give the act more than a few pages is Samuel Rezneck in an article written in 1930. Most historians who work on the period follow the practice of such scholars as G. M. Trevelyan, David Ogg, and Sir Keith Feiling, and either fail to mention the act or note its passage in a sentence or two. Many scholars, especially those of an earlier generation, seem to assume that the act was a natural, perhaps inevitable, reaction to Stuart tyranny—that it was part of the light brought in by William and Mary at the end of a dark century—and, hence, that there is little need to discuss it.

In matters of public controversy the eighteenth-century Englishman displayed a cast of mind that was legalistic and unpragmatic. The first question he tended to ask was not what the benefits of a policy might be but whether anyone possessed the right to implement it. Public debate was legitimist in emphasis. There were few disputes where the issue of jurisdiction was ignored; very often jurisdiction was the only issue in contention. The great example of this is to be found in the debate over American taxation. The question was not whether the taxes had been voted for some improper purpose or whether the colonies could afford to pay. The argument turned on the issue of authority: did Parliament have the right to tax the colonies for any purpose whatever regardless of their ability to pay? The same emphasis on jurisdiction is to be found in the debate over the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. This act restricted the right of members of the royal family to marry whom they pleased. Opponents of the act condemned it not in terms of policy but in terms of right and jurisdiction. It was “repugnant to the natural rights of mankind.” It was “null and invalid.” Parliament possessed no authority to legislate such a measure, and it could be submitted to “only as the effect of power.” This eighteenth-century pre-occupation with legitimacy is evident even in the writings of its most radical and eccentric thinkers. Thomas Paine's chief complaint against the ancien régime in England was not that it governed badly but that it governed without legitimate authority. Whether it governed well or ill, it remained by Paine's standards an usurpation. Paine's zeal for democratic legitimacy may have been peculiar, but his method of debate was not.

Throughout the nineteenth century, auto-eroticism was viewed as a great evil, a threat to the individual and to society. At one time or another, nearly every disease which nineteenth-century doctors could not cure was blamed on self-abuse. Summing up the relationship between masturbation and illness, French doctor Eugene Beckland wrote in 1842, “Many physicians of high authority have maintained that two-thirds of the diseases to which the human race is liable have had their origins in certain solitary practices ….” As to the impact of masturbation on society, Dr. Révéillé Parisé observed in 1828,

Since 1953, when René Spitz published his important article on the subject, a number of scholars have tried to explain the intense concern with masturbation in the nineteenth century. Spitz argued that the heightened interest in self-abuse reflected the shift to Protestant culture with its emphasis on individual responsibility for sin. More recently, John and Robin Haller used similar arguments to explain it. Other writers such as E. H. Hare and Edward Shorter have argued that one reason why fear of masturbation increased was that people began indulging in the solitary vice to a greater extent than ever before. Men and women were masturbating more—and if they read medical journals on the subject—enjoying it less. Hare speculated that this was because of fear of venereal disease caused by intercourse, a great concern in the nineteenth century. Masturbation was safer. Shorter, who saw masturbation as part of a general increase in sexual appetite, asserted that it was “unlikely that masturbation … was practiced on a wide scale before the premarital sexual revolution.” It is not likely that historians will uncover reliable data on incidence of self-abuse to prove or disprove this hypothesis.