In 1882, the eldest sons of the Prince of Wales visited Palestine and Syria as they neared the end of a voyage around the globe. This chapter uses the written record of their journey on board HMS Bacchante to argue that it signalled important changes in the religious profile of the British monarchy. John Neale Dalton, the tutor to the princes, misrepresented his unintellectual pupils as keen students of the religions of the world in his voluminous two-volume journal of their tour. As British monarchs now headed an empire which its admirers argued was unprecedented in its extent, they prepared to rule it by travelling to encounter the many religions of their future subjects. Dalton’s princes journeyed through time as well as space, capitalising on British power and their royal standing to meet philologists and archaeologists who explained to them the ancient faiths of Japan, China and Egypt. In this global context, their visit to the Holy Land was no longer just a pilgrimage to the origins of Christianity and of elite culture, but a journey of discovery which connected the biblical to other, hitherto alien pasts.

This essay focuses on a programme of a Shakespearean revue entitled ‘This Sceptred Isle’ (1941) in the possession of the Wolfson Centre for Archival Research, Library of Birmingham. Billed as a ‘Dramatisation of Shakespeare’s Call to Great Britain in Time of War’, the show was a brainchild of eminent Shakespeare scholar G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) and featured such warlike set pieces as ‘This England never did, nor never shall, / Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror’ (King John) and John of Gaunt’s ‘this sceptred isle’ oration (Richard II). Knight performed all the main roles. He was convinced of Britain’s imperial destiny and of the central importance of Shakespeare (‘a national prophet’) in it. Indeed, Knight’s interpretation of the playwright informed his wartime assertion about Britain’s imperial mission and the significance of the monarchy. ‘This Sceptred Isle’ was, however, hardly a typical piece of British wartime propaganda, considering that its creator was an admirer of Nietzsche, whose ideas were appropriated by Nazism. This essay aims to explore Knight’s idiosyncratic thinking underlying the programme of ‘This Sceptred Isle’ in order to clarify how the admirer of Nietzsche and Nazism created a polemics of British patriotism with recourse to Shakespeare.

Even before the century had ended, battle was commenced over how its momentous events would be remembered. During the years 1698–1700 a series of Roundhead memoirs and treatises – the ‘Whig canon’ – were printed. They were devoted to ‘attacking the maintenance of standing armies by the state, inveighing against priestcraft, and asserting the primacy of the ancient constitution’.1 The publisher responsible for the project was John Danby, working closely with the radical intellectual John Toland. For Danby and Toland, these works demonstrated that the revolutionary events of the century had been validated by and were a vindication of England’s ancient constitution (which now needed protection against the encroachments of William III). Fire was quickly returned by the Tory press, which began publishing Royalist memoirs and the like. It was in the midst of this that the first publication of Clarendon’s great History of the Rebellion commenced, with the first volume appearing in 1702. Clarendon’s son, Laurence Hyde, commended his father’s role ‘in preserving the constitution of our government entire’. English government repudiated political violence: ‘the nature of our excellent government hath provided, in the constitution of it, other remedies, in a Parliamentary way’ to preserve the Crown’s prerogative and the liberties of the people. In particular – and this was a topical subject given the rise of politics out of doors in the later Stuart period – the Whig habit of ‘appealing to the people out of Parliament as it were to a fourth estate of the realm’ was shown to be ‘just another way of undermining the ancient and true constitution’.2

Chapter 2 examines a constitution written for the princely state of Mysore in 1923. It interprets the constitution as an early expression of anti-parliamentary model of popular government.

Daniel Defoe lived through multiple controversies surrounding the monarchy: what was it? How should succession work? Who should sit on the throne? What does a monarch do? This chapter outlines both the history and the theory of the monarchy during Defoe’s lifetime, and analyses Defoe’s idiosyncratic analysis of this important national political office.

This chapter examines Defoe’s various responses to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and how his published works attempt to reconcile support for James II’s removal from the throne with contempt for at least some of the event’s chief instigators. In texts such as The True-Born Englishman (1701) and Jure Divino (1706), Defoe demonstrates his ideological commitment to ‘revolution principles’ while also experimenting with awkward sympathies and rhetorical opportunities. The chapter considers Defoe’s attachment to one particularly provocative analogy between James’s downfall and Charles I’s execution, and asks to what extent he intends his readers to feel genuine pity for the exiled monarch. Ultimately, we can see in Defoe’s attitude towards 1688 the same mixture of conviction and contrarianism that typifies much of his literary career. He was greatly indebted to the Glorious Revolution in many respects, but cannot resist interrogating its motives and its consequences, fixating on the ingratitude of its other beneficiaries.

Chapter 1 shows that the discussions which dominated intellectual and public life in the years immediately preceding the publication of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right revolved around the constitutional question as the central and definitive element of political discourse in Germany. It argues that Hegel consciously entered this constitutional debate and that his book constituted a timely intervention in the politics of the immediate post-Napoleonic period. By demonstrating the pan-German and European dimensions of contemporary constitutional concerns, Hegel’s political thought is at the same time lifted out of the exclusively Prussian context to which it has so often been confined.

In a hereditary monarchy, kinship mattered; yet, royal family members are too often relegated to the background in contemporary scholarship on the princely states. This chapter shows that royal family members could muster significant social, political, cultural, and economic capital in support of their various personal and political projects, and often figured prominently in the records as the Resident’s greatest allies, or greatest foes. Residents developed a range of strategies for co-opting or side-lining younger brothers, uncles, and nephews, who, despite being useful informants, were also destabilizing forces in regional politics, and a drain on the Company’s time and resources. Women played an even more important role at court, one that has been obscured in previous accounts of the Residencies. This chapter shows not only how the Resident sought to mobilize royal women for his purposes, but also how royal women themselves laid a claim on the Resident’s services through the idiom of kinship and protection, often with significant consequences for the Resident’s political strategy at court. Rather than simplifying their job, the Residents need to work through royal families in fact introduced significant complications.

This chapter explains the council and king’s ratification of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. It outlines the pathways through which vassals of all social backgrounds suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council’s overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions’ vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a multistep archival methodology, this chapter demonstrates how scholars can match vassals’ petitions to decrees, then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire’s agenda from the ground up. It considers the lawmaking royal signature, as well as some vassals’ dangerous decision to attempt its forgery. Lastly, it reflects on the nature of the de partes/de oficio divide in decree production, the number of gobierno royal decrees, and the costs of their production for vassals.

This chapter argues that Thucydides’ History provides for its readers an opportunity to assess the limits and opportunities of diverse political regimes, particularly democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. In doing so, he offers insights not only into the specific characteristics of the cities that employ those regimes (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes), but also into what is distinctive about those regime types, understood in categorical terms. The chapter focuses on Thucydides’ presentation of democracy in Athens and in Syracuse, arguing that Thucydides, although alert to the weaknesses of democracy, was also an admirer of the attainments and ambitions of this form of governance.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.

Public petitions to the Commons were part of a broader subscriptional culture. This chapter examines the nature and extent of petitions to other authorities to reassess the evolution of the UK state during the nineteenth century. During this period, petitions were transformed from being generic requests to power to their more modern meaning as expressive and participatory practices linked to representative institutions. Accordingly, other types of petitions to Parliament concerning contested elections and private bills were hived off into specialised processes. Petitions to the House of Lords, though smaller in scale than the Commons, reinforced the upper house’s authority during an era of democratisation and allowed peers to claim popular backing for their veto power. Addresses to the monarchy were a major form of interaction between monarch and subjects, and called upon the monarch to exercise their political supremacy over the other branches of state. Memorials to government provided a discrete mechanism for interest groups to lobby ministers and officials, and were increasingly adopted by pressure groups. The relationship between the state and the people was recast through petitionary interactions that underpinned and renewed the legitimacy of different branches of the state even in the absence of electoral or institutional reforms.

This chapter considers the importance of royal heirs in the process of militarising the monarchies of nineteenth-century Europe. It gauges the significance of the crowns’ military performance for their attempts to generate loyalty and popular endorsement. Royal heirs, and crown princes in particular, had a significant part to play within this context – if only as military actors, but even more so if they could demonstrate real military achievements. The chapter culminates in an assessment of the experiences and contributions of three royal heirs who assumed military roles during the First World War.

This chapter investigates the political effects and means of royal heirs in constitutional systems. It asks how they contributed politically to the process of monarchical persistence in the Long Nineteenth Century and concentrates in particular on instances where they were opposed to the course championed by their predecessors and on the process of generating ‘soft power’ for their dynasties by committing themselves to visibility, mobility and ‘civic publicness’.

The introduction engages the reader with the central question of the survival of monarchies within an age of dramatic change and makes a case for exploring succession as an important political resource available to monarchical systems under pressure.