Religion, politics and patronage in the late Hanoverian navy, c.1780–c.1820†
Sir Charles Middleton, Lord Barham (1726–1813), occupies a pivotal place in naval history. His evangelical religiosity is well known, but while considerable attention has been given to how this shaped his administrative reforms, his manipulation of patronage to promote his co-religionists has, until now, been ignored or brushed under the carpet. This article uses contemporary correspondence, diaries and printed works to reconstruct for the first time a powerful nexus that bound Pittite politicians to Wilberforce and his circle, one that spanned parliament, the church, naval administration and the seagoing officer corps. In doing so it throws new light on how evangelicals gained such a strong foothold in late Hanoverian public affairs.
CHRISTIAN IDEALS OF MANLINESS IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES*
ABSTRACT Christian ideals of manliness were articulated by writers across the religious spectrum throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At their heart was the shared ideal of the imitation of Christ, an all-encompassing Christian ideal of personhood. Whilst non-partisanship was itself an important ideal, theological differences and disagreements over the strictness of ideals led to accusations that some Christians, attacked as ‘moralists’ or ‘enthusiasts’, undermined or neglected ideals of manliness. At the same time, there were attempts to associate Christian ideals of manliness exclusively with the emerging ‘Evangelical’ party. In the historiography of masculinity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Christian ideals have often been marginalized, and, when considered, they have tended to be misconstrued by the adoption of church-party approaches. This review offers a detailed critique of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's account of Evangelical ideals of manliness in Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 (1987; rev. edn, 2002). Their notion of distinctive ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness does not withstand scrutiny, and the key concepts associated with them, including ‘domesticity’, ‘the calling’, ‘the world’, ‘public’, and ‘private’, demand revision. At the same time, they gave insufficient consideration to ‘solitude’ and ‘charity’.
Aristocratic Century: The sinews of power: political
In his excellent book on the Secretaries of State, Mark Thomson offered ‘the paradox of continuing domination of the aristocracy and the simultaneous insignificance of the House of Lords, per se ’. It is true that, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the supremacy of the House of Commons in financial matters was a wellestablished convention. The claims of the Commons to an undisputed control over money matters, which had been urged before the Civil War, were resumed immediately after the Restoration and a protracted dispute with the House of Lords began. In 1661 the Lords resolved that there were no precedents in history for this new claim by the House of Commons. In 1671, the Commons retorted that taxation ought not to be questioned by the Lords and in 1678 they reiterated that supply was ‘the undoubted and sole right of the Commons’ and ‘ought not to be changed or altered by the House of Lords’. The Lords' attempt in 1692 to assess their own taxes was also abandoned, though they retired under cover of a rather insubstantial smoke-screen that they maintained their power of amendment to be a ‘fundamental, inherent and undoubted right from which their lordships can never depart’. That established, they departed. Geoffrey Holmes quotes a nice example from 1702 when the bishop of Carlisle found himself the only peer answering to a money bill, ‘no other lord in the House regarded what was doing, this being only (pro forma) to preserve a seeming right to dissent from, or amend, any part of a money bill’.