The deconstruction of what is termed “the public sphere” in recent decades has resulted in an important shift in scholarly attention towards networks and forms of association. This article explores how greater sensitivity to the unstable and ephemeral nature of “publics,” combined with a stronger awareness of the role of cultural exchange, has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of early modern politics. Some analytical precision has, nonetheless, been lost. A justifiable emphasis on the artificiality of the territorial borders that have defined units of enquiry has occurred at the expense of deeper consideration of the cultural boundaries that dictated the terms on which people could participate in and shape public discourse. Study of the British archipelago can offer new ways of thinking about these problems. Linguistic and ethnic differences, the search for religious concord as well as the reality of confessional division, institutional variation, and the consequences of London's increasing dominance of the archipelago, are key facets of the reassessments undertaken here. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactions between varieties of “public” and other forms of association can nuance our understanding of early modern state formation.

This article explores where the people fit in to British history and whether there was such a thing as British public opinion in the seventeenth century. It argues that given the nature of the Stuart multiple monarchy, and the way the power structures of that monarchy impinged upon Ireland, Scotland, and England, the Stuarts' political authority was at times publicly negotiated on a Britannic level. People across Britain were engaged with British affairs: there was public opinion about British politics, in other words, albeit not British public opinion, since the people were bitterly divided at this time. However, because the crisis that brought down Charles I had been a three-kingdoms crisis, which in turn had helped spark the growth of a more sophisticated British news culture, the Restoration monarchy became increasingly sensitive to the need to try to keep public opinion across the Britannic archipelago on its side. In response to the challenge of the Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis, Charles II and his Tory allies sought to rally public support across England, Scotland, and Ireland and thus to represent “British public opinion” as being in favor of the hereditary succession. It was a representation, however, that remained contested.

This article examines how early modern publics were shaped partly by dynamics of linguistic difference and physical distance. Taking Wales as its focus, it argues that barriers to communication have yet to be considered sufficiently in a literature which presents English language metropolitan discourses as normative. Particularist publics that drew upon different cultural heritages and employed different communicative practices to those prevailing in and around London deserve greater attention. This is illustrated principally by the vernacularizing impulses of Protestant reform in sixteenth-century Wales and the responses these elicited from Catholic interests, and also the attempts to construct political publics in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s. Early modern Welsh public culture was characterized by a degree of isolation from the genres and sites of critical opinion (such as newsbooks and coffeehouses); print production was underdeveloped; and there were logistical barriers to the spread of news. Conceptualizing early modern Wales as a “particularist public” can help enrich our understanding of center-locality relationships in other parts of the English (and subsequently British) realm.

A consideration of political participation in early Stuart Ireland suggests modifications to the prospectus outlined by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus in “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England.” By investigating the structures that facilitated public debates about politics in Ireland, as well as the factors that complicated it, this article challenges the periodization of the public sphere offered by Lake and Pincus and suggests that there is a clear need to integrate a transnational perspective. Unlike England, Scotland, and Wales, the majority of Ireland's population was Catholic. The flow of post-Tridentine Catholic ideas from the Continent and Anglo-Britannic political culture meant that competing ideas of what constituted the common good circulated widely in Ireland and led to debates about the nature of authority in the early modern Irish state. These divisions in Irish society created a distinctive kind of politics that created particularly unstable publics. Thus, Ireland's experience of the early modern public sphere differed considerably from concurrent developments in the wider archipelago.

This article examines popular political participation in early modern Scotland. In Scotland, some of the preconditions of public politics identified by recent scholars were less obviously present than in England or France. There was no culturally dominant metropolis or royal court; the volume of printed publications, though rising across the period, remained comparatively small. Because of these characteristics, historians of popular involvement in Scottish politics should pay particular attention to the traditional means of participation inherited from the medieval and Reformation periods. The article explores three forms of extra-institutional participation, each of which evolved out of formal, institutional political practices, but were deployed by ordinary Scots seeking to express their views. Protestations––formal statements of dissent from a statute or decision––developed in the courts, but were used in extramural contexts in the seventeenth century. Crowd demonstrations in towns took the place of traditional means of consultation, as urban government became increasingly oligarchical. And after congregational involvement in the appointment of parish ministers was legally instituted in 1690, significant numbers of small landowners and the landless poor claimed to have a say in the choice of their minister.

Based upon the idea that debates regarding the “public sphere” have paid insufficient attention to the notion of multiple publics and the movement of texts across state borders, this article explores how print culture provided ways of promoting transterritorial publics. It does so by revisiting the vexed notion of the “British problem” in the seventeenth century and relations between Scottish Covenanters and English parliamentarians, and by emphasizing the need to consider print culture in tandem with state formation. It demonstrates that a significant volume of printed material––produced both in England and Scotland, and sometimes collaboratively––reflected and promoted cross-border cooperation, thereby fostering a nascent Anglo-Scottish public. It also emphasizes that the practices involved were intimately linked to attempts to establish federal political institutions that both responded to the existence of a “British” public and necessitated its further development. Ultimately, however, the need to address and maintain such a public led to printed texts being used to navigate tensions between Covenanters and parliamentarians, to the point where Anglo-Scottish interests gave way to national interests, where resistance grew to the legitimacy of using print as a cross-border device, and where print helped to undermine cross-border cooperation.

This article responds to the pieces collected in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies, all of which seek to take some notion of the politics of the public sphere and either apply it to, or break it upon the wheel of, various versions of British history during the post-Reformation period. It seeks to bring the other articles into conversation both with one another as well as with existing work on the topic.