This chapter sets out the historical and contemporary context of the Orange Order. It starts with a discussion of the status of historical knowledge, arguing that an understanding of Scottish Orangeism should not seek to elicit unchallengeable fact-based historical truth, but should reflect on Orange uses of history. What this chapter opens with, then, is not just historical context, but an ethnography of historical context. Next, the chapter offers a deliberately selective history of the conflict between James II and William III who stand as the anti-hero and hero of Orangeism. The chapter explains the emergence of early Orangeism in Ireland, both in relation to Freemasonry, and in relation to the agrarian disputes between Catholics and Protestants in mid-Ulster in the eighteenth century in the context of the Penal Laws. Moving to Scotland, the chapter outlines how Orangeism came to Glasgow and spread east during industrialisation and migration from Ulster. The chapter also considers how the Troubles in Northern Ireland have profoundly shaped Scottish Orangeism, and how this influence continues to produce tensions between grass-roots Orangemen and the Orange hierarchy who remain divided over the value of gaining wider political and social acceptance within Scottish society.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Church of England fused Reformed Protestant doctrine and liturgy with an ecclesial structure and church court system that was more in continuity with pre-Reformation norms. This chapter introduces the complex nature of the early modern English Church’s Reformed identity, and how this informed or was reflected in recurring contests across the vicissitudes of England’s ‘long Reformation’. It traverses religious and political history from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Hanoverian Succession (1559–1714), illustrating the continual way in which questions of the English Church’s Reformed identity invaded both secular and spiritual spheres, whether at a personal, local, or national level. It situates the present volume within existing historical scholarship, emphasising that while conformity has previously been examined as a prime leitmotif through which to appraise the ramifications of England’s ‘long Reformation’, it was a commitment to Reformed Protestantism in particular, however that was interpreted and practised, which especially drove wider perceptions of conformity or nonconformity across both civil and ecclesiastical spheres. This volume therefore contributes two emerging findings in keeping with recent scholarship, one which impresses the provisional nature of the Tudor settlements of religion, in rejection of the ‘Anglican’ via media myth and in reconsideration of pre-Civil War puritan nonconformity as both moderate and mainstream, and one which establishes the abiding Reformed identity of the English Church, which continued to shape understandings of conformity in the Caroline and later Stuart Churches, against previous scholarly notions that by then the English Church’s earlier Reformed identity had largely disappeared.

This chapter examines the attitude of Reformed churchmen – both conformist and puritan – towards cathedrals during the reign of Elizabeth. Although various historians, following Patrick Collinson, have demonstrated the strength of a Reformed position on episcopacy in this period, there has been little interest in Reformed engagement with cathedrals. Current scholarship on Elizabethan cathedrals, although highlighting a Protestant cathedral ideal, unwittingly propagates an older view of religious identity, which pits conformist churchmen against puritan opponents. This chapter approaches these Elizabethan debates through a specifically Reformed lens in order to nuance this conformist/puritan dichotomy and demonstrate the Reformed paradigm in which these debates took place. While acknowledging differences, this chapter focuses on this shared Reformed tradition to draw out similarities between conformist churchmen and their puritan counterparts in their engagement with cathedrals; and how such similarities arose from shared Reformed priorities: the centrality of preaching and teaching, godly church government, and a learned ministry. Using John Whitgift’s contributions to the Elizabethan Admonition Controversy in the 1570s as a starting point, it explores how his arguments in defence of cathedrals permeated English Reformed culture more broadly, including in puritan petitions to parliament in the mid-1580s.

This chapter argues that historians have misinterpreted the context and ramifications of Sir Francis Hastings’s Privy Council punishment after the celebrated 1605 Northamptonshire petition to King and Council which requested a moderation in the ‘extremitie’ of the 1604 decrees for subscription and conformity. The nature and significance of Hastings’s leadership of the puritan parliamentary cause 1604–10 are re-examined, contributing to Nicholas Tyacke’s call for a more realistic appreciation of the ‘puritan paradigm’ in parliamentary politics. Revealing that Sir Francis Hastings’s puritan parliamentary politics constituted deliberate nonconformity to the attempted Jacobean Religious Settlement, the chapter argues for a reassessment of alleged moderate lay puritan conformity in Jacobean Britain. Historiographical analyses of ecclesiastical politics 1603–10 have been too clerically focused (with emphasis upon clerical subscription and ceremonial conformity), falling into the trap of accepting King James’s definition of his Royal Supremacy in Religion: that it was his prerogative to determine policy, and then delegate implementation through his episcopal bench. This chapter draws attention to the consistent parliamentary challenge to this attempted Religious Settlement, as Hastings co-ordinated a sustained campaign of House of Commons Petitions demanding religious reform. Through a detailed analysis of parliamentary speeches, procedures, and petitions, this chapter not only exposes the extraordinary and overlooked puritan majority in the House of Commons but also highlights that they were no mere mouthpiece for puritan clerical dissent. They in fact articulated a philosophy of temporal and spiritual governance at variance to King James’s own philosophy of monarchical rule.

This chapter reassesses Elizabethan puritan arguments against subscription and ecclesiastical oath-taking, paying particular attention to the political fallout attended by Archbishop John Whitgift’s introduction of a new threefold test in October 1583. It challenges previous historiographical narratives of Elizabethan puritan nonconformity which have exalted the agency of the puritan conscience in eschewing popish rites and ceremonies, or else have attributed the phenomenon of puritan nonconformity to the staying power of proto-presbyterian platforms following the Admonition Controversy (1572–78). These explanations have served to portray Elizabethan puritans as intrinsically at odds with a more magisterial and Erastian interpretation of the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion (1559). However, through close analysis of the mainstream Elizabethan puritan response to Whitgift’s extra-parliamentary reforms, particularly against the revived use of ex officio proceedings in church courts, spearheaded by the leading English civilian thinkers William Stoughton and Robert Beale, this chapter reveals a conservative, juridical, and long-standing intellectual movement, which placed pivotal significance on adherence to, and proper implementation of, a truly lay and civil form of national ecclesiastical government. Stoughton and Beale were inspired by the wider European ius commune tradition as much as by English statute and common law, envisioning a more thoroughly Erastian reconstitution of English church government. Whitgift’s extra-parliamentary subscription test, emerging from an exclusively episcopal model of the royal supremacy, proved anathema to this jurisdictionalist approach to church governance, and provides a stark contrast by which to better understand the true nature of Elizabethan puritan nonconformity.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the chapters of this book. The book explores the literary text as a site of struggle between competing and unequal discourses, and as an object of struggle in disputes between the intelligentsia and some British Muslims. In view of the humanistic, bourgeois heritage of the novel, and in the light of the New Atheist understanding of the novel as emblematising 'free speech', 'individuality' and 'rationality' in opposition to an intolerant, oppressive Islam, it examines the extent to which contemporary fiction authored by writers of South Asian Muslim heritage pushes beyond liberal secularist parameters in its representation of British Muslims and multiculturalism. By combining detailed readings of texts with a sustained engagement with their social context, the book demonstrates the significant contribution that literature can make to our understanding of multicultural Britain and the place of Muslim citizens within it.