Although the central concern of this essay is with early and mid-Victorian matters, it would be well to begin by stepping back into a longer historical prospective. Robert Burns' “The Cotter's Saturday Night,” contains an enduring literary image derived from a prevailing late eighteenth century tradition of self-conscious moral sentiment. This poem, with echoes of Thomas Gray's “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” and Oliver Goldsmith's “The Deserted Village,” celebrates the homely joys and Presbyterian virtues of Scottish peasants, their pastoral lives a reproach to readers of rank and fortune. It contains a rhetorical digression filled with a curious anxiety over the possible fall of the cotter's young daughter: Is there in human form, asks the poet

We glimpse here, on the periphery of our literary consciousness, the houseless, shivering unfortunate of Goldsmith's “Deserted Village” (1770). In that case, the maid, led by idleness and ambition, had left her modest cottage: “Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,/Near her betrayer's door she lays her head.”

The Burns passage, the poem in fact, is earnest and evangelical in tone, commending itself to Victorian propriety in a way which dialect songs inspired by sweet hours among the lasses do not. Let us, in kindness, refrain from close questions about the folk mores of the 18th century Scotland; or how it was that, in the case of Jane Armour at least, one Robert Burns was permitted to make an honest woman out of a girl who had given scandal by the birth of a child before marriage. What matters here is the remarkable force of the larger myth within which the ruined maid functions as a recurring archetype, an image related to, but discontinuous with, the social realities of particular times that color it. We know instinctively that within the cultural tradition involved the potential villain is not Jenny's shy local suitor (who is courting with her parents' approval), but some gentleman with a taste for poor but honest girls. And there will be no way back. The hopelessly ruined maid, having stooped to folly and been left without a ring, will seek in vain for art to wash her scarlet mark away. She is fated to pregnancy, prostitution in city streets, a speedy death, or any combination of these. Something very much like this seems indeed to have been part of the early – and high-Victorian orthodoxy designed to preserve the purity of middle class homes and minds. Obviously these respectable readers, on whose behalf Charles Edward Mudie so long exercised power to exclude books from his lending library, were involved in such a social myth; and even if papa might have known better, he did have the ubiquitous “young person” to think of.

In a letter to Oliver Cromwell in April 1653, John Rogers wrote that his soul was “boiling over into earnest prayers to the Great Jehovah for wisdom, counsel, and courage for you … the great deliverer of His people. …” Rogers perceived in the person of Cromwell another Moses, charged with the duty of liberating the saints of “the Commonwealth of Israel.” Yet in a face-to-face confrontation with Cromwell in February 1655, Rogers warned him, “in the name of the Lord Jehovah,” that his condition was “very desperate,” and that “the next Vial which is to be poured out … the scorching hot one … must fall upon him … [for having] forsaken and betrayed the Cause of Christ.” In less than two years, Rogers had gradually slipped from a summit of hopeful expectation into an abyss of bitter disillusionment, as he watched the man in whom he had placed all trust take for himself the crown that had been reserved for the Lord Jesus.

Born in 1627 at Messing, Essex, John Rogers was the second son of Nehemiah and Margaret Rogers. Nehemiah Rogers, an Anglican clergyman and a firm advocate of the policies of Archbishop William Laud, endeavored to educate his son in a manner that would fit him for service in the Church of England. Early in life, under the tutelage first of his father and later of two Puritan clergymen — William Fenner and Stephen Marshall, John Rogers became acutely aware of contemporary theological controversies and intensely preoccupied with his own religious condition. Later as a minister in Ireland, Rogers recounted various childhood experiences in his quest for some assurance of salvation:

Despite the considerable amount of attention devoted to the Revolution of 1688 by serious scholar, constitutional panegyrist, and antiquary alike, no completely satisfactory account of the overthrow of James II has been put forward. Recent research has led to additional insights and a better understanding of the complexity of the event; it has also partially discredited the traditional Whig thesis. However, there is as yet no generally accepted new interpretation of the Revolution, and many questions remain concerning the causes, course, and consequences of this phenomenon. Analysis of the rising at Nottingham provides a valuable fresh perspective on the English contribution to what, a generation ago, was essentially regarded as England's Revolution. It also provides a useful opportunity for defining the crucial role played by the nobility, while at the same time demonstrating the importance of an event neglected by most historians.

At the outset it should be recognized that the Revolution in the North, and more specifically the rising at Nottingham, were not by-products of special circumstances pertaining to the region. Careful investigation of the situation in the counties of Derby and Nottingham reveals little that is exceptional in terms of the patterns which existed in the country as a whole. It is true that the earl of Danby and others of the seven signatories of the invitation stressed the general disaffection in the North as a significant factor in favor of the prince's launching his invasion there, and certainly the rising at Nottingham and its counterpart at York would never have occurred had the environment been totally hostile to the Williamite cause. But while the impact of James II's policies varied somewhat according to local factors, county or regional boundaries were largely meaningless in this context.