Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

Dismembering THE BODY Politic: PARTISAN Politics IN England's TOWNS, 1650-1730. By Philip Halliday. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 393. £ 45.00. The central theme of Philip Halliday's study is the paradox that in the attempt to eliminate partisan politics from the borough corporations, conflict was perpetuated. Purges prolonged enmities, and in the pursuit of restoring unity the very institutional structures were created which facilitated the continued conduct of partisan politics under an apparently stable political order. Stable it might have been, but not inert, and Halliday contributes to the new orthodoxy in arguing for the vitality and dynamism of the political culture of English boroughs throughout the era of supposed political stability. His story begins in the 1660s, when partisan loyalties were deeply rooted in religious differences, following the passage of the Corporations Act which sought to exclude all Dissenters from cor- porations. At this stage, there were no clear signs of a royal policy towards the boroughs. Halliday joins the growing number of historians who stress the extent to which royal or parliamentary policy was essentially responsive to pressure from below. The legislation was in reality a response to the anxieties of Tory gentry rather than an effort to assert royal will over recalcitrant corporations. Such legislation could not effect a clean sweep of the corporations however, and the divisions inherited from the Civil War and Interregnum continued to fester in boroughs across the country, to such an extent that the only means by which the situation could be resolved was by appealing to the king for a new charter under which the personnel of the corporation would effectively be purged. There was, Halliday argues, no indication that Charles II had a policy of wholesale re- chartering of the boroughs. He made little use of his right to nominate officers under the terms of the new charters which were granted at this stage. It was only in the aftermath of the crises of 1680 that the crown began to take a more sustained interest in the composition of boroughs, but even here the changes enforced were essentially in compliance with local Tory initiative and should not be seen as the actions of a would-be absolutist. The re-charterings under quo warranto evoked very little opposition until Charles was succeeded by his politically less astute brother, James II, who deployed exactly the same means to achieve opposite ends. The story of the quo warranto proceedings against the boroughs is a familiar one, but Halliday elucidates it from the local perspective with sustained rigour and detail. Less well covered in other historiography is the fate of boroughs in the years after 1689: Halliday demonstrates that they did