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The chapter examines the emergence of the form of the loyal address during the Cromwell Protectorate. It focuses in particular on the addresses sent to the second Lord Protector, Richard Cromwell. The chapter argues that these addresses formed part of a national Cromwellian ‘succession crisis.’ Though these texts did not help Richard Cromwell remain in power, their political utility was recognised by the restored monarchy which employed them to secure public acknowledgment of Charles II’s rule.
This chapter employs corpus analysis software to chart the changing meaning of loyalty across the 17th and 18th century. Through an examination of the contents of collections of address from the 1650s to the 1750s, it charts how loyalty came to be associated with concepts and institutions rather than the person of the monarch. Nonetheless, it argues that this language of loyalty continued to be framed in emotional terms.
This chapter examines the loyal address in the context of historiographical debates concerning the emergence of a public sphere in early modern England. It explores both the classical, Habermasian presentation of the public sphere and recent historical revisions of the concept. It argues for an approach combining a recognition of the public sphere as ‘virtual object’ with an examination of how political practice informs the development of the concept. Employing insights from scholars of modern ‘publics’, especially Michael Warner, it argues that the development of the loyal address was critical to a developing awareness of public opinion.
Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727 makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over the emergence of an early modern ‘public sphere’. Focusing on the petition-like form of the loyal address, it argues that these texts helped to foster a politically-aware public through mapping shifts in the national ‘mood’. Covering addressing campaigns from the late Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, it explores the production, presentation, subscription and publication of these texts. Through an in-depth examination of the social background of subscribers and the geography of subscription, it argues that addressing activity provided opportunities to develop political coalitions. By exploring the ritual of drafting and presenting an address, it demonstrates how this form was used strategically by both addressers and government. Both the act of subscribing and the act of presenting an address imprinted this activity in both local and national public memory. The memory of addressing activity in turn shaped the understanding of public loyalty. The volume employs corpus analysis techniques to demonstrate how the meaning of loyalty was transformed over the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. The shifts in public loyalty, however, did not, as some contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe claimed, make these professions of fidelity meaningless. Instead, Loyalty, memory and public opinion argues for that beneath partisan attacks on addressing lay a broad consensus about the validity of this political practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a broad ‘political public’ but did so in a way which fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy
The act of presenting an address was critical to its political value. It was the act of presenting the text at Court that provided addressers with vital political access. A well-received address could not only benefit the presenters themselves (who were sometimes honoured or treated by authority) but could also secure important concessions from authority. The performance of addressing was therefore often highly strategic. Both Charles II and James II used the ritual of addressing to manage power relations but, in the case of James II, this management became clumsier and less sensitive the established protocols around who could approach the Crown.
This chapter places the address in the context of other ‘subcriptional genres’: petitions and oaths of loyalty. It acknowledges the common features of these genres, especially the similarities between petitions and addresses. However, it argues that unique features of addresses: their initiation by the political centre, their public nature and their connection to national political events made them a particularly mnemonic genre. This in turn encouraged an awareness of changes in public opinion over time.
This chapter focuses on surviving manuscript addresses. Exploring one address in detail, the address from Leicestershire to Richard Cromwell, created in 1658, it engages in a detailed exploration of the geography of subscription and the social, political and religious background of subscribers. This analysis reveals that the subscribers were far more varied than the language of the ‘well-affected’ suggested. This in turn suggests that value of addresses as devices for building political coalitions.
This chapter provides an overview of how women’s growing presence in the workforce was understood by contemporaries. It demonstrates that female workers, trade unions, social scientists and WLM activists were increasingly drawing public attention to the poor conditions and inequalities that working-class women were likely to experience in the workplace. At the same time, there was a growing commitment from policy makers and the main political parties to understanding and addressing gender inequality as a political issue. This chapter argues that the growing politicisation of gender inequality in the workplace was part of a broader transition in public understandings of gender roles taking place in post-war Britain. It concludes that women’s workplace activism should be understood within this context.
Chapter 2 provides an original account of the Ford sewing machinists’ fight for skill recognition in 1968. The strike is widely understood as a crucial turning point that led to the Equal Pay Act in 1970. The strike occupies a key position in the histories of the labour movement and the WLM. The idea that the strike was a decisive victory in women’s fight for equal pay was popularised by 2010 feature film Made in Dagenham, which has been adapted into a West End musical. The subsequent publicity generated by the film has proceeded to weave the place of the dispute firmly within public memory of the strike as a turning point in societal attitudes towards women’s right to equal pay. However, the triumphant narrative of the strike as a victory has served to disguise the fact that the women at Ford went on strike because they wanted the skilled nature of their work recognised. This chapter offers a new account of the strike from the perspective of the women involved. It is original because it locates the strike within participants’ life stories; it foregrounds their own understanding of why they engaged in the strike and their judgements of its outcome.