"No Standing Armies!"

Originally published in 1974. In her study of primary materials in England and the United States, Schwoerer traces the origin, development, and articulation in both Parliament and in the popular press of the attitude opposing standing armies in seventeenth-century England and the American colonies. Central to the criticism of armies at that time was the conviction that ultimate military power should be vested in Parliament, not the Crown. Schwoerer shows how the many diverse elements of England's antimilitarism, including political principle, propaganda, parliamentary tactics, parochialism, and partisanship, hardened with every confrontation between the Crown or Protector and Parliament. The author finds a general predisposition to distrust professional soldiers early in the century, and from the 1620s onward she notes opposition to a standing army in times of peace. Highlighting the growth of the antimilitary tradition, Schwoerer traces the development of this attitude from the Petition of Right in 1628 to the 1641–1642 crisis over the Militia Bill/Ordinance, the military settlements of 1660 and 1689, and the climactic events of 1667–1699. Schwoerer shows how the anti-standing-army ideology affected the constitutional thinking of the American colonists and manifested itself in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. She addresses timeless questions of how to provide for a nation's defense while preserving individual liberty, citizen responsibility for military service, and the relationship of executive and legislative authority over the army

To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective

This Article discusses the English background to the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and undertakes to contest the prevailing opinion that the old medieval English duty of service in the militia, imposed theoretically on all males between the age of sixteen and sixty, was transformed at the time of England\u27s Glorious Revolution in 1688–89 into the right of the individual to keep and bear arms. The author of that thesis, Professor Joyce Malcolm of Bentley College in Massachusetts, maintains that Article VII of the Declaration of Rights, 1689 (better known as the Bill of Rights, its statutory form) secured that right and bequeathed it to the American colonists who, when drafting the Second Amendment, broadened that legacy, sweeping aside limitations and forbidding any infringement upon the individual right to possess arms. This Article, however, argues that this thesis is unacceptable and offers a reading of the evidence and of the nature of late-seventeenth-century England society and thought that is different from that of Professor Malcolm. This Article maintains that throughout its long history, the English government, for reasons that changed over time, took steps to limit and/or supervise the possession of guns. At no time did majority opinion hold that there was either a natural law right or a constitutional right of all individuals, not even all Protestant individuals, to have arms. There was no unrestricted English right of the individual to possess guns for the colonists to inherit

Lady Rachel Russell

Originally published in 1987. Lady Rachel Russell (1637–1723) was regarded as "one of the best women" by many of the most powerful people of her time. Wife of Lord William Russell, the prominent Whig opponent of King Charles II who was executed for treason in 1683, Lady Russell emerged as a political figure in her own right during the Glorious Revolution and throughout her forty-year widowhood. Award-winning historian Lois G. Schwoerer has written a biography that illuminates both the political life and the lives of women in late Stuart England. Lady Russell's interest in politics and religion blossomed during her marriage to Lord Russell and after his death: "as William became a Whig martyr, Rachel became a Whig saint." Her wealth, contacts, and role as her husband's surrogate gave her considerable influence to intercede in high government appointments, lend support in elections, and exchange favors with her friend Mary of Orange. In her domestic life she similarly took steps usually reserved to men, managing large estates in London and Hampshire and negotiating favorable marriage contracts for each of her three children. Although Lady Russell was unusual for her time, she was by no means unique. Other notable women shared her concerns and traits, although to differing degrees and effects. Schwoerer suggests that the horizons of women's lives in the seventeenth century may have extended farther than is often supposed

To Hold and Bear Arms: The English Perspective

This Article discusses the English background to the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States and undertakes to contest the prevailing opinion that the old medieval English duty of service in the militia, imposed theoretically on all males between the age of sixteen and sixty, was transformed at the time of England\u27s Glorious Revolution in 1688–89 into the right of the individual to keep and bear arms. The author of that thesis, Professor Joyce Malcolm of Bentley College in Massachusetts, maintains that Article VII of the Declaration of Rights, 1689 (better known as the Bill of Rights, its statutory form) secured that right and bequeathed it to the American colonists who, when drafting the Second Amendment, broadened that legacy, sweeping aside limitations and forbidding any infringement upon the individual right to possess arms. This Article, however, argues that this thesis is unacceptable and offers a reading of the evidence and of the nature of late-seventeenth-century England society and thought that is different from that of Professor Malcolm. This Article maintains that throughout its long history, the English government, for reasons that changed over time, took steps to limit and/or supervise the possession of guns. At no time did majority opinion hold that there was either a natural law right or a constitutional right of all individuals, not even all Protestant individuals, to have arms. There was no unrestricted English right of the individual to possess guns for the colonists to inherit

The Bill of Rights: ‘Icons’ of Liberty and Law in the Early Twenty-First Century

What sort of text is a Bill of Rights? The desire for a new foundational law manifested by the major political parties in the UK in the first decade of the 21st century expressed a crisis in Britain's identity as a land of liberty grounded in a distinctive national system of unwritten law. This historically uncharacteristic faith in the capacity of written law to advance freedom draws attention to the symbolic value that can be seen to attach to texts when they are themselves visible images of what they are held to represent, and which is invoked in contemporary parlance by the term 'iconic'. How, then, does an 'iconic' legal text ask to be read? As the term itself suggests, the question of relations between writing and the visual raises that of the relations between law and religion. This is especially relevant, moreover, when the latter is central to the crisis in national identity that the Bill of Rights seeks to resolve. The second part of the article therefore conducts a reading of two early 21st-century cases in the US Supreme Court dealing with challenges to the first article of the American Bill of Rights caused by displays of the Ten Commandments. The article concludes by returning to the iconicity of religion and law on this side of the Atlantic to address the regime of visibility implied by the ideals of the iconic law