Browse results
Abstract
In this article, the relationship between Dutch Reformatorian youth’ religious characteristics and their personality traits (measured with the Big Five) is at the centre. It is based on research in which 1568 Reformatorian youth participated, who had enrolled as first-year students in a Reformatorian Vocational Training College. These prospective students have filled in a standard assessment questionnaire, which included the Big Five personality questionnaire; to this, the researchers had added an extra questionnaire regarding their religious characteristics. The conclusions from this study are that among these students a limited number of indications was found for a relationship between religious characteristics and the Big Five personality traits (FFM). By and large, moderate, positive relationships were shown between variables of the Religion List and the personality traits of openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness, whereas there were no relationships between religious variables and emotional stability and small relationships between religious variables and extraversion. Rather than orthodox religious views, it was the salience of faith (being intrinsically religious and using religion as a coping strategy) that showed relationships with the personality traits.
Abstract
The emergence of a Jacobite concept of monarchy in the wake of the Glorious Revolution has been a subject of confusion and neglect. It is a commonplace that the Revolution of 1688 was due in part to James II and VI’s failure to respect civil liberties, his persecution of critics and his extension of Crown prerogative beyond limits that were acceptable to newly wealthy classes. Historians have tended to maintain that Jacobites sustained principles similar to those which led to James’s demise. But this essay demonstrates how, on the contrary, a range of Jacobite conceptions of monarchy emerged from a frustration with the Stuarts’ flawed use of the powers of the Crown. While Irish Jacobites did indeed tend to sustain absolutist principles, Archbishop Fénelon, watching the fall-out of the Glorious Revolution, encouraged Jacobite exiles in France to moderate their absolutist tendencies, and advised James Francis Stuart, the Old Pretender, that the Crown’s prerogative should be kept for promoting the common good. Andrew Michael Ramsay, Fénelon’s student and one-time tutor to Charles Edward Stuart, took this patriotic doctrine to the Jacobite court in Rome. Meanwhile, the Jacobite strategist and historian Sir James Steuart, exiled in Germany, wrote in his notes on the history of England that the Stuarts’ consistent failure to develop their idea of royal prerogative led the dynasty to the brink of a precipice, from which it toppled in the Civil War, then limped on until the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Whereas early modern historians have tended to assume continuity between Stuart absolutism and Jacobite ideas of royal prerogative, this essay reassesses the Jacobites’ historical understanding of the demise of the James II and VI and the decline of monarchic power.
Abstract
The English monarchy came to an abrupt end in 1649. King Charles I had lost the English Civil Wars and was put on trial for treason by radical elements of his parliament. Found guilty of levying war against his people, he was executed in January 1648/9. His execution was followed an act of parliament that abolished the English monarchy and replaced it with a Commonwealth, indicating the formal end to the rule of the Stuarts in England. It marked a symbolic conclusion to a kingly tradition unbroken from the Norman Conquest of 1066 and pushed the country into unchartered waters. This essay examines how the opinion-makers of the day – newsbook writers, astrologers and writers of instant histories – attempted to provide clarity during this turbulent time. Their narratives of denial, inevitability and natural change helped provide clarity and meaning to a disruptive event like the regicide. Despite their varied conclusions about the future of monarchy, these writers were united in their conservative responses to the regicide. These narratives gave not only direction and meaning but also comfort and reassurance in a time when the longstanding intuition of monarchy disappeared.