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Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne . Joseph Hone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi+209.

2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 116; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/700685

1545-6951

James A. Winn,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLiterature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne. Joseph Hone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi+209.James A. WinnJames A. WinnBoston University (emeritus) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis short but dense monograph is an impressive debut by a promising young scholar, whose dogged research has uncovered primary documents never before discussed in modern scholarship, and whose engagement with the existing scholarship is serious and thorough. Hone achieves his depth by a severe limitation of chronology: the five episodes he discusses—the death of William III, the coronation of Queen Anne, the new queen’s progress to Oxford and Bath, the opening battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, and the first parliamentary elections under Anne’s reign—all took place between March and December of 1702. His fundamental revisionist claim is that Anne’s accession, normally described as devoid of controversy, was in fact a locus of debate. Drawing on “poems, polemics, sermons, histories, newspapers, entertainments, and correspondence,” he argues that “the precise nature of Anne’s right to the throne was a hotly contested topic” (2). Whigs, according to this reading, considered her a monarch “by statue,” succeeding to the throne as stipulated by the Act of Settlement (1701), while Tories clung to the belief that she was a monarch by birthright as the daughter of James II, a belief that could shade over into the hope that her half brother, James Francis Edward, would succeed her, or even that she might abdicate in his favor when she had “a better opportunity of Restoring him.”1 Although he correctly labels this last belief “a fantasy” (6), Hone believes that “Jacobitism was both more widespread and more potent at the start of the eighteenth century than either literary scholars or historians have generally assumed” (9); he finds Jacobitical hints and implications in many of the texts he chooses to analyze. He even claims that “the most useful and accurate way of conceptualizing party politics is through contemporary arguments about dynasty, allegiance, and royal legitimacy” (10)—a claim likely to be disputed by parliamentary historians, who have seen religion and the conduct of the war as the principal issues at stake in the five contested elections during Anne’s reign.Although he sometimes undermines his argument by misleading statements, such as the puzzling assertion that “Dryden … commemorated the Williamite revolution of 1689 in verse” (1), Hone’s fundamental procedure is to read all the literature generated by a particular episode, describing it fully and choosing particular texts for closer analysis. In his first chapter, for example, he informs us that “we have at least fifteen extant broadside elegies produced after William’s death, representing a full third of the surviving printed elegies on this occasion” (17). We have never had such a thorough account of occasional publications in this period, and Hone provides a useful appendix listing all such texts, with their publication dates and prices. Anyone who wishes to dispute his reading of the episodes he discusses will need to read all of those ephemeral publications and mount a counterargument emphasizing texts and passages unlike those Hone chooses to foreground.The chapter on the succession amply demonstrates that poems on the death of William were often polemical, and that the debate on how this controversial monarch should be remembered was intense. In a useful departure from his self-imposed chronological limits, Hone digresses to discuss poems on the death of James II (1701), which provide a useful contrast to those on the death of William. His discussion of Daniel Defoe’s The Mock Mourners (1702), arguing that “Defoe deviated from both parties by praising the queen as a steward of the succession, a monarch with an active part to play in the settlement of the throne” (46), provides a useful conclusion, though he does not mention the fact that Defoe’s pamphlet of 1701, The Succession to the Crown of England, Consider’d, described here as advocating “a Protestant succession” (44), had actually proposed that William be succeeded by James Scott, Earl of Dalkeith, son of the executed Duke of Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II. Defoe thus arrived at his praise for Anne only after abandoning the notion that the nation might turn to Dalkeith. Jacobites were not alone in harboring fantasies.Hone’s chapter on the coronation is grounded on similarly thorough research. He turns up fascinating details about the expenses incurred, the sermon preached by John Sharp, Archbishop of York, the medals struck to commemorate the event, and the poems written to celebrate it, concluding with a trenchant analysis of The Golden Age, an anonymous poem “embodying the constitutional stresses and strains of Anne’s accession rather than a straightforward promotion of any party line” (82). In discussing a crude broadside picturing the coronation procession, however, Hone complains that it shows the queen “walking under the canopy rather than carried on her sedan,” and thus “fails to record what actually took place” (65). But Celia Fiennes, whose eyewitness account Hone quotes selectively, tells us that the queen, despite the lameness that led her to ride in her chair from Westminster Hall to the Abbey, alighted when she reached the church: “the Chaire she Left at the Abby doore.” Although walking down the aisle was doubtless painful, Anne’s sense of occasion was powerful, and Fiennes reports that at the end of the ceremony, “the Queen walked to the doore of the abby with obligeing Lookes and bows to all that Saluted her and were spectatours.”2As this small error suggests, Hone is more interested in the way partisan writers portrayed Anne than in the queen’s own actions and opinions. After a splendid chapter on the royal progress to Oxford, Bath, and Bristol, his account of the opening phase of the war focuses mainly on the sinking of the Spanish treasure fleet at Vigo, a partial success at the end of a disappointing campaign marred by rape and pillage committed by English forces. Although he provides much detail about Tory publications praising this action, which accorded with the Tory preference for a “blue water” policy, he does not inform us that Anne told her parliament that she had had “such a Representation of Disorders and Abuses committed at Port St. Mary’s, as hath obliged Me to give Directions for the Strictest Examination of that Matter.”3 Nor does he make it clear that the queen’s emphasis at the end of 1702 fell on the land war, in which John Churchill, Earl of Marlborough had captured three fortresses along the river Meuse, concluding his campaign by taking the city of Liège. Downplaying the action at Vigo, after which the Spaniards salvaged most of their silver, Anne made Marlborough a duke and wrote frankly to his wife Sarah: “I never looked upon the Sea fight as a victory, and I think what has bin said upon it, as rediculous as any body can do.”4 In his chapter on the parliamentary elections, Hone argues persuasively that the publication of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702–4), in an edition prepared by Anne’s uncle Laurence Hyde, was designed to influence the election. He might usefully have reminded us that Anne poked fun at Hyde’s preface to his second volume, addressed to her,5 and that she eventually removed him from her Privy Council because of his opposition to her war policies.Although I could wish that Anne herself was more of a presence in this book, Hone has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the first year of her reign. His concluding account of Defoe’s The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702), a complex text much discussed in recent scholarship, is fresh, original, and persuasive, and virtually every page of this monograph features strong, well-informed readings of poems from 1702—some of them well known, many of them unfamiliar to literary scholars. Hone has not only argued his case with spirit and tenacity; he has provided other scholars with much new material to ponder.Notes1. Hone quotes this passage from the Royal Archives, Stuart Papers, 4/52.2. Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle (London, 1888), 256, 258, normalizing abbreviations.3. London Gazette, October 19–22, 1702.4. GB-Lbl Add. MS 61416, fol. 192. On the disputed dating of this letter, see James A. Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford University Press, 2014), 701 n. 23.5. “Sir B. Bathurst sent me Ld Clarendons history last week, but haveing not quite made an end of the first part, I did not unpack it, but I shall have the Curiosity to see this extraordinary dedication, which I should never have looked for in the Second part of a book, and methinks it is very wonderful, that people that dont want sense in some things, should be soe rediculous as to shew theire vanity” (GB-Lbl Add. MS 61416, fol. 141r–v, editorially dated [Oct. 21, 1703]). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 3February 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700685HistoryPublished online October 09, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.