Towards the end of the 1563 Parliamentary session, John Hales, Clerk of the Hanaper and an M.P. sitting for the Borough of Lancaster, wrote and circulated a tract entitled, A Declaration of the Succession of the Crowne Imperiall of Ingland. In this work, Hales argued that until such time as Queen Elizabeth married and produced an heir, the law clearly designated a successor—Catherine Grey, the leading Protestant claimant and heir according to the terms of Henry VIII’s will, which had been enacted into law. The leading Catholic claimant, and heir by strict hereditary descent, Mary Stuart, was, Hales contended, legally ineligible to succeed to the throne. Crucially, Hales concluded that in the face of inadequate governance by a female monarch wherein the queen violated the law regarding the succession, Parliament would become the rightful body to exercise the queen’s governing power for the good of the people.

In an October 1861 letter to Charles Sumner, the prominent Republican Senator from Massachusetts, William Howard Russell, The Times’ correspondent in America, explained England’s attitude toward the American Civil War: “In England we are threatened with Americanization which to our islands would be anarchy & ruin, & the troubles in America afford our politicians & writers easy means of dealing deadly blows at Brightism which is often attacked under the guise of war & the troubles in America.” Indeed, as Russell claimed, the conflict allowed those who identified the radicalism of John Bright with Americanization and disorder to present a plausible case to the English public. Americans, so this argument went, were but Englishmen transformed by Americanization, a social and political process that fostered a licentious individualism and a pernicious egalitarianism. This transformation had not only precipitated disorder in America, but the deterioration of civilization. England could also succumb to Americanization if it allowed Brightism to achieve dominance by extending the suffrage and introducing a radical, middle-class Parliament. The consequent implementation of free trade and destruction of privilege would lead to political and social democracy, making Americans of the English in England. From this perspective, Bright was an American in the most pejorative sense of the word.