Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727

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Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, 1658-1727 makes an important contribution to the 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'. The book covers addressing campaigns from the late Cromwellian to the early Georgian period, exploring the production, presentation, subscription and publication of the texts. It demonstrates that addressing activity provided opportunities to develop political coalitions, and reveals how the form was used strategically by both addressers and government. The acts of subscribing and of presenting an address imprinted the activity in both local and national public memory. The memory of addressing activity in turn shaped the understanding of public loyalty. But while the meaning of loyalty was transformed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shifts in public loyalty did not make these professions of fidelity meaningless, as contemporaries such as Daniel Defoe claimed.Instead, the book argues that beneath partisan attacks on addressing lay a broad consensus about the validity of the practice. Ultimately, loyal addresses acknowledged the existence of a 'political public', but in a way that fundamentally conceded the legitimacy of the social and political hierarchy.