In recent years historians have significantly broadened the parameters of popular politics in the eighteenth century to include the ceremonial and associational aspects of political life, what might be aptly described as popular political culture. Whereas the subject of popular politics was conventionally confined to the programmatic campaigns of post-1760 radicals and to the crucial but episodic phenomenon of popular disturbance, historians have become increasingly attentive to the anniversaries, thanksgivings, processions, and parades—to the realm of symbolism and ritual—that were very much a part of Georgian society. This cultural perspective has radically revised our notion of the “popular,” which can no longer be consigned unproblematically to the actions and aspirations of the subaltern classes but to the complex interplay of all groups that had a stake in the extraparliamentary terrain. It has also broadened our notion of the “political” beyond the confines of Parliament, the hustings, and even the press to include the theater of the street and the marketplace with their balladry, pageantry, and iconography, both ribald and solemn.

Within this context, the theme of the admiral-as-hero in Georgian society will be explored by focusing on Admiral Edward Vernon, the most popular admiral of the mid-eighteenth century, and Horatio Nelson, whose feats and flamboyance are better known. Of particular interest is the way in which their popularity was ideologically constructed and exploited at home. This might seem an unorthodox position to take. Naval biographers have assumed that the popularity of admirals flowed naturally and spontaneously from their spectacular victories and exemplary feats of valor. This may be taken as a truism. But it does not entirely explain their appeal.

The relative quiescence of British working-class radicalism during much of the two decades after 1848, so central to the foundations of mid-Victorian stability, has been the subject of many explanations. Though Chartism did not expire finally until the late 1850s, its mainstream strategy of constitutionalist organization, huge meetings, enormous parliamentary petitions, and the tacit threat of violent intimidation seemed exploded after the debacle of Kennington Common and the failed march on Parliament in April 1848. But other factors also contributed to undermine the zeal for reform. Alleviating the pressures of distress, emigration carried off many activists to America and elsewhere. Relative economic prosperity rendered the economic ends of reform less pressing, and proposals like the Chartist Land Plan less appealing. The popularity of various self-help doctrines, including consumer cooperation, also militated against collectivist political action. “Labour aristocrats” and trade union leaders, moreover, preferred local and sectional economic improvement to the risks and expense of political campaigning.

Accounts of mid-Victorian political stability have had little to say, however, about the impact of European radicalism on the British working-class movement after 1848. That the failure of the continental revolutions brought thousands of refugees to Britain is well known. But although useful studies exist of the internationalist dimensions of Chartism prior to 1849—and of some of the refugee groups generally in this period—the effects of the exiled continental radicals on British working-class politics in the early 1850s have remained largely unconsidered.

If liberal England died strangely, no moment in its passing was more bizarre than the close encounter it experienced between the army and a political system from which the military had been banished since the seventeenth century. Habitually all but invisible at home, confining its exploits to lands without the law, and maintaining a political silence equal—though in easier circumstances—to that of the neighboring grande muette, the British army moved to the center of the public stage. It obtained a popular following. This was not merely the result of Britain's involvement in world war. Manifestations of popular militarism, albeit sporadic or marginal, were evident in the later nineteenth century. The second Boer War accelerated a shift in social attitudes. Hostility to “pro-Boers,” if not beginning to resemble the hysteria of 1914, adumbrated the response of a shaken community temporarily recovering cohesion through warlike solidarity. Most public energy was expended in mafficking, but vocal groups continued to campaign for national efficiency and universal military service. The scout movement was the precipitant of a considerable mass sentiment, solidarized by suspicion of Germany and giving back a faint but clear echo of the leagues formed to support the expansion of the German army and navy.

Yet if a novel enthusiasm was eroding traditional aversion to the army, it was scarcely capable of creating a public tolerance for its involvement in domestic affairs. Unlike the navy, whose nature more or less precluded its domestic employment, the army was a suspect weapon. The cultivation of nonpolitical professionalism represented in part a functional response to such public suspicion. Modern major generals would not think of doing what their Cromwellian predecessors had done.