Politics of the Period

Friends Until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution James Grant Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company

Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 12, 2025

Print length ‏ : ‎ 496 pages

ISBN: ‎ 9780393542103

A lively dual biography of the two great English orators of the eighteenth century, who cultivated a friendship across their political differences.

In eighteenth-century Britain, Edmund Burke and Charles Fox made common political cause for twenty-five years. They supported the rebellious American colonies, attacked the British slave trade, defended religious liberty, and attempted to shield Britain’s public credit from the crisis-prone East India Company. The two men did not share social position, a way of life, a political legacy, or even a generation―but improbably, they were friends. The hard-drinking, mistress-collecting Fox loved and admired Burke, feelings that the clean-living political philosopher and statesman warmly reciprocated.

I have recently come across an account, by a British frigate captain off Toulon in December 1809, of a supposed attempt to release Spain's deposed King, Charles IV, from his comfortable captivity at Marseilles, presumably in order to use him as a figurehead for the Spanish uprising. Apparently Collingwood was dubious about the bona fides of the plotters (as was the captain they had contacted), and nothing came of it. Does anyone know if this was a real attempt to 'free' the King, or was it a French ruse de guerre to obtain intelligence about the British fleet, as the naval officers seemed to suspect?

“Britain Now Your Voices Join”: The Legacy of Peterloo in Song

Alison Morgan, PeteCoe, Brian Peters, & Laura Smyth

Romanticism on the Net #74-75 (Spring-Fall 2020)

Abstract

Whilst the study of song is beginning to appear in work within the field of Romanticism, its performative nature is still largely unchartered territory, in large part due to the challenges in recovering information on the authors, singers and reception of these songs. Published as ephemeral broadsides, songsters, chapbooks or in radical journals, these songs occupy the hinterland between oral and print culture. Through the Road to Peterloo project, in which three renowned musicians from the North West recorded and performed a selection of songs published in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the rightful return to orality of these songs requires reconsideration. Three Peterloo songs are considered in this essay, both in text and perf…

The Georgians: The Deeds and Misdeeds of 18th Century Britain

Penelope J. Corfield

Format:Hardback

Publication date:25 Jan 2022

Yale University Press

ISBN: 9780300253573