THE intent of this book is to draw out and sketch some of the features of state formation in Britain during the period after 1815. So, it is a study of political history. However, it goes beyond politics as narrowly conceived. That is, its purpose is to describe a framework in which political behavior fits. Therefore, it touches on the background of administrative history, but seeks to go deeper than the study of institutions and examines the ways political processes fit into the political culture of the period. So rather than political or social structures, the superficial features of politics, this study turns to what de Tocqueville called “habits of the heart and mind.” “Habits,” “hearts,” “minds,” seem elusive and intangible but they are the sinews of the soul of state formation. There is a chronology here, but its chronology does not seek to explain its central elements. Complexity, context, comparison: these elements defy chronology and simple linearity. Its central elements lie in the ways individuals and their concepts about civic life interacted with the institutions to which they belonged and the institutions they would dissolve and re-form.

No research is wholly independent nor is it conducted in isolation. We are like galley slaves without a Slave Master. We each of us pull our oars individually but we have to learn from others and the institutions to which we belong how to coordinate and correct our sweeps in order to leave Gibraltar and finally end up in Constantinople. So, I wish to record here my gratitude. First, I owe much to Dr. Michael Middeke for his encouragement and guidance in this work and in others I have written for the Boydell Press. Much of the research for this book and others I have written was gestated in Wolfson College, Cambridge. I want to express my thanks to the Presidents, Fellows, and Staffs for their kindness and hospitality. The North American Conference on British Studies meetings have been the sites for the discussion of such issues as this book raises. In particular I want to thank Professor Michael J. Turner, Professor of History at Appalachian State University, who organized a panel on religion and politics in 2017 and subsequently edited a collection of essays from that meeting for publication in which I was able to give a preliminary sketch of some my ideas.