The deists figured prominently in the turbulent theological politics during 1709–19, contributing to the discourses that analysed contemporary politics along with other observers. Political controversies such as the Bangorian Controversy, the ending of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the split of the Whigs in the House of Commons inspired deists' publications. The second decade of the eighteenth century saw Anthony Collins begin to emerge as the most visible deist in England. The same years brought Thomas Chubb and Thomas Morgan on to the political and theological stage. The politics advanced by all the deists during this period was Whig. Deist fortunes seemed on the rise in 1718 when the Whig ministry of Stanhope and Sunderland introduced a bill repealing the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts. While Parliament debated the implications of ending the ban on occasional conformity, the deists continued their attempts to describe the natural world.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about one of the most extraordinary national transformations in European history. It tries to place the Scottish Reformation on the wider stage of the European Reformation. The book aims to present a new synthesis of ideas on the origins of the Scottish Reformation, building on this recent scholarship but also suggesting some new directions. It describes the regime of James V which was ambiguous towards the reformers. The book assesses the impact of the first arrival of Protestant ideas in the 1520s. It also tries to reconnect religion and politics, and to trace their interaction. The book emphasises how acts or threats of violence drove political processes and shaped religious culture. It concludes by looking at the dubious process by which that Church was established in law in August 1560.

This chapter provides essential background for those unfamiliar with the histories of British Nonconformity and Wesleyan Methodism in the eighteenth century. It briefly describes female preaching in the seventeenth-century Civil War period, the Clarendon Code and the creation of Nonconformity in the Restoration, and the conditions favouring the emergence of Methodism. After outlining Methodism's early years and describing its organization, the chapter suggests its attractions for women and the unique opportunities Methodism offered for female religious leadership. Finally, the chapter deals with Wesley's eventual recognition of some women's exceptional call to preach, and how one of the female preachers, Mary Bosanquet, justified female evangelism.

This chapter focuses on prohibitionist temperance reform ideology and women's municipal enfranchisement in the early 1880s that worked to incorporate acts of democratic citizenship into the feminine public sphere. Temperance reform, and more specifically prohibition, created space for British women in local electoral democracy. Female temperance reformers' involvement in prohibition presented a greater challenge to gender roles than moral suasion. While moral suasion was related to the idea of women's ‘complementary nature’, where prohibition's stress on a legislative means of temperance reform highlighted the limits of women's public role. The paucity of work on both female temperance reform and the women's movement in Scotland makes it difficult to evaluate the relative importance of prohibition for the politicisation of middle-class women in Scotland. Furthermore, an examination of the British Women's Temperance Association Scottish Christian Union (BWTASCU's) participation in the suffrage campaign demonstrates that constitutional suffragism was composed of a more diverse range of organisations than that which has been acknowledged.

Catholic and Protestant chroniclers of early 1559 agree that Mary of Guise's exclusion of Scots from her patronage was a source of profound resentment. The rebellion was rising both against the Catholic establishment and against perceived French oppression. If a religious revolt was unexpected, perhaps anti-French feeling was more apparent. In the 1540s the English polemicist Nicholas Bodrugan deplored the alliance as a 'bloody league' which led to Scotland's being laid waste and the Scots slaughtered as cannon fodder for the French. For those Scots who suspected that the French alliance was eroding their liberties, the most sensitive subject of all was that of patronage. The involvement of Frenchmen in the administration of Scotland edged Scottish nobles out of one of their traditional roles. Even in the early months of 1559, few observers of Scottish affairs showed signs of suspecting that a religious revolt was imminent.

The reformist agenda that had evolved through the 1960s was being overtaken by the demands of the Catholic masses. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) was formed after six months of secretive negotiations, and John Hume was clearly the key factor in bringing it together. The SDLP was more explicit in its appeal to the Protestant community. Bloody Sunday represented the culmination of a process of radicalisation of the minority that began with the first attacks on civil rights marches in 1968. Hume claimed that ‘the achievement of full justice and equality in the North would produce a radical change among those in the North traditionally opposed to the state’. His focus on Westminster's position on the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, and his emphasis of the need for the British government's support for Irish unity would be recurring themes in his political discourse.

This chapter describes how the ‘Jewish question’ and its ‘solution’ were defined in Catholic publications. The call to strengthen Christian values in the modern age and the call to convert the Jews were the most common solutions offered in English Catholic newspapers. The Tablet, the Catholic Times and the Catholic Herald did not change their view that the Jews brought their fate upon themselves, despite anger at the brutality of the pogrom. The Gelben Hefte did not share the self-restraint that the papers of political Catholicism tried to practise. National Socialism could tap into a stream of antisemitic stereotypes that were popular and common since the First World War. Most literature on Catholic antisemitism asserts that racial antisemitism was firmly rejected by Catholics. Generally, this discussion shows the nature of anti-Jewish prejudices and times and occasions when the intensity of antisemitic articles was specifically high.

John Hume's Foreign Affairs made numerous references to the practical help and support that could be provided in the search for peace in Northern Ireland. Hume was able to put forward a resolution calling for an investigation into the ways that the European Community (EC) could help the Northern Ireland economy. He viewed the United States in similar terms to the EC, as a source of both economic and political support in his efforts to resolve the Northern Ireland problem, and saw the potential of the Four Horsemen speaking to Irish America with one voice. By the end of the 1970s, it seemed that Hume's internationalisation strategy had begun to pay dividends – a fact which he tentatively recognised in his Foreign Affairs article. Hume was also in a position to begin mobilising an international coalition behind the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).

This chapter is comprised of annotated and translatedsource texts on the memory of Joan of Arc.

This chapter presents conclusions to Part II, covering Chapters 7–9. As trade unions grew from small local clubs into large national organisations they moved away from a simple, direct democracy, in which everyone had an equal voice and offices were held in rotation, towards an increasing differentiation between ordinary members and full-time officials. Through the delegation of responsibilities, usually accompanied by a growing passivity on the part of the majority, there emerged a group of more specialised functionaries. Although these members were in principle still in the position of delegates, it soon became difficult for the others to exercise close supervision over all of their activities: the full-time officials were therefore obliged to act increasingly on their own responsibility and gradually to acquire some of the characteristics of autonomous leadership. Good leadership of a craft union was a combination of discriminating risk-taking, prudent financial stewardship, strategic innovation and effective public relations.