Passion is intrinsic to political identity. A recent scientific study found that when political views are challenged, the regions in the brain associated with personal identity, threat response and emotions, become activated. The psychologist, Jonas Kaplan suggested that this is because political beliefs are important to identity and are part of our ‘social selves’ and when the brain considers something to be part of itself, it offers protection.1 Whilst the neurological explanations of the connections between passion and politics are relatively recent, the study of the role of emotions in politics has had a long trajectory. The key thinkers of western political thought including Aristotle, Plato, Hobbes and Kant argued it was important to understand emotion in order to ascertain the nature of government. These views influenced Alexander Hamilton, the US constitutionalist, who asked rhetorically, ‘Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.’2 For Kant, passions were ‘illnesses of mind’ and ‘cancerous sores’, incurable because the sick person does not want to be cured.3 In contrast, Cheryl Hall has a far more positive interpretation of Rousseau's views on the role of passion in politics suggesting that it was crucial for a democratic polity and should not be constrained by reason or the law, as Hamilton later argued.4 This volume will provide an insight into the various ways in which passion and politics intersected between the 16th and 20th centuries as well as proposing the potential for new perspectives on parliamentary history. The emerging literature on the history of emotions has largely focused on aspects such as feeling, the body, identity and technology but has been more reticent on the emotion attached to and embodied within institutions such as parliament. However, as the collected articles demonstrate, parliament, parliamentarians and parliamentary politics offer fertile ground for exploring emotions such as passion (as well as others including anger, jealousy, fear and happiness). The articles employ differing interpretations and new and often interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical approaches including visual, spatial and material culture, physiological and culturally constructed responses, performativity and intersectionality. The authors draw upon a rich and diverse source base encompassing architecture, personal testimony, petitions and declarations, satire, music, sound, architecture and objects. The culmination of this research provides exciting and novel ways to interpret the history of parliament and parliamentary politics. But notwithstanding this, 'tis certain, that when we wou'd govern a man, and push him to any action, 'twill commonly be better policy to work upon the violent than the calm passions, and rather take him by his inclination, than what is vulgarly call'd his reason.5 Thus for Hume, in order to influence people, the most effective strategy is to agitate, to stir up fervour, rather than to appeal to reason. Hegel amplified this argument by stating that ‘nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.’6 Hegel's definition of passion was any activity regulated by self-interest because that was the main driver of change. These ideas have been developed by modern political scientists, most notably, George Marcus who has argued that passionate communication and the arousal of emotions are the essence of modern democratic politics. In his seminal work, The Sentimental Citizen: Emotion in Democratic Politics, he argued that passion is a prerequisite for the exercise of democratic reason.7 These methodological approaches have also been utilised by historians studying the impact of emotion on institutions and on public opinion. Feeling Political: Emotions and Institutions since 1789 considers how political bodies as diverse as the parliaments, criminal courts, military cemeteries and even football clubs were shaped and transformed by emotions.8 Women are creatures of impulse and emotion and did not decide questions on the ground of reason as men did… What did one find when one got into the company of women and talked politics? They were soon asked to stop talking silly politics, and yet that was the type of people to whom we were invited to hand over the destinies of the country.9 If, however, it be true that men have some advantage over women mentally, is there nothing to place on the other side of the account? Have not women more control over their passions? Do they not lead more regular lives? Are they not more sober?12 he believed that Irishmen would live together as amicably as it was possible for Irishmen to do if they were only left alone by those interested demagogues who lived by exciting the cupidity of the people and ministering to their worst passions… Government might play the Ultramontane part of disestablishing the Church of Ireland, they would not succeed thereby in inspiring the Irish peasantry with any feeling of order, loyalty, and respect for the laws. They were only swayed by their own passions and interests. The difference between the native Irishman and the Saxon was this—that Irishmen always allowed their interests to be injured by giving way to their passions, whilst the others always made their passions subordinate to their interests.13 Thus passion was a term that could be applied pejoratively to ostracise and diminish the political contributions of those on the margins of political life, whilst being used positively by those in power. John Bright and William Gladstone were both eulogised as demagogues for their ability to touch people emotionally, with their meetings and rallies often likened to religious occasions. Belchem and Epstein in their assessment of the ‘gentlemanly’ political leader, echo Rousseau, seeing the Liberal platform as being the means by which ‘the people triumphed over injustice, felt their own sense of empowerment and found a place within the political world as citizens.’14 This volume celebrates interdisciplinarity and its contributions draw on a range of approaches and methodologies; however, the history of emotions, one of the fastest growing fields of historical research, features predominantly. Its diverse application to an assortment of topics, periods, and primary sources in the articles by Berry-Waite, Hanley-Smith, Kilfoyle, Love, and Stewart demonstrate the field's versatility and its potential to shed new light on political and parliamentary culture. Historians of emotion generally agree that emotions are historically and culturally determined rather than ‘biological universal[s]’, and therefore different groups have named and experienced them in their own distinctive ways.15 What remains a constant is that emotions play important roles in social interactions, as they are ‘performed’ both through linguistic and written expression, and/or through physical gestures and appearance. Moreover, these performances (intentionally and unintentionally) stimulate bodily and psychological activity in their audience.16 Several articles in this special issue demonstrate contemporary attempts to harness and manipulate emotions to achieve political objectives, whether in person, in personal/private correspondence, in publications and newspapers, or through the use of objects. Emotions clearly provide a particularly fruitful lens through which various types of historical communication can be analysed and allow scholars to explore the connections between everyday interactions, objects, experiences, and culturally determined power and gendered dynamics. The field is renowned for its preference for theoretical frameworks, as its pioneers developed and coined concepts that scholars regularly draw on to make sense of this often chaotic and unsystematic world of feeling, including among others, ‘emotional communities’, ‘regimes’ and ‘refuges’, ‘styles’, ‘strategies’, ‘practices’, and, most recently, ‘templates’.17 Due to the plethora of appropriate source material, the history of emotions has been most readily used by scholars investigating topics such as familial and social relationships, gender, and the body. That said, it has been very effectively employed by some to better understand significant political shifts and events, including wars and revolutions.18 In his influential study, The Navigation of Feeling, William Reddy uses his concept of the ‘emotional regime’, to explain how emotion was integral to the overthrow of the French monarchy.19 For Reddy, the stability of a political system depends in part on its ability to shape and regulate the emotions of the people it governs, to engender the emotions that sustain it, and to prohibit those that do not. He argues that the strict expectations and regulation of emotional expression in Ancien Régime France, which peaked during the reign of Louis XIV, led to the development of a counterculture that celebrated sincerity and passion, and eventually became widespread enough to enable certain groups to critique and challenge the establishment. The injustice of their situation inspired real passion in the people and drove them to act and overhaul their oppressive political (and emotional) system. Several of the articles in this issue similarly reveal that political passion inspired a range of historical actors to critique and condemn the status quo, to imagine and design new systems, and in some cases, to take drastic action. Despite a strong historiographical interest in the relationship between politics and emotion, parliament as an institution has received markedly little attention from historians of emotion. And yet research on other legislative and governing institutions has proved that a focus on emotions can significantly improve our understanding of their norms of conduct, their underlying dynamics, and their position within the broader socio-political sphere.20 As Ute Frevert and Kerstin Pahl have recently argued, institutions are important sites that provide ‘guidelines for their members on how to feel and navigate emotions’, and teach ‘them which to express and which to eschew, at what intensity and through which kinds of behaviour’.21 Moreover, a range of institutions enable and encourage ‘political participation’.22 Parliament, then, as arguably the most important political institution in Britain, deserves its turn under the emotional lens. Did the emotional culture of parliament experience any significant shifts in line with the growing enfranchisement of the British people in the 19th and 20th centuries? What sort of emotional expressions were expected, encouraged, and eschewed by MPs? Did they vary depending on which House they were expressed in? How did the regulation of emotions affect parliament's gendered, class, and racial dynamics? Not all of these questions can be answered in this volume, however, Hanley-Smith's article demonstrates how aristocratic mistresses might have influenced the emotional culture of parliament by advising young MPs on how they should present themselves when addressing the House, while Berry-Waite's piece reveals that concerns about women's supposedly passionate tempers and emotional sensibilities were central to 19th-century debates about their suitability as MPs. Broadening out our investigation beyond parliament itself to explore the roles that emotions played in extra-parliamentary discussions about citizenship, ongoing debates and reform, reveals that many contemporaries who never set foot in the Palace of Westminster were extremely passionate about the business that went on in there. This issue seeks to redefine parliamentary history, by focusing on the people that we do not conventionally associate with the formal business of parliament, but who were clearly engaged with and participated in parliamentary culture in a myriad of ways. This includes the disenfranchised, women from all ranks of society, and working-class men, as well as political journalists and commentators, leading radicals, and campaigners. Despite their physical distance from the mechanisms of power, this diverse array of subjects still aspired to affect change and promote political reform: some restrained and channelled their passions in a way that could not be deemed threatening by the establishment, while others, such as the Cato Street conspirators, who are examined in this issue by Caitlin Kitchener, allowed their fury to carry them to revolutionary action. The articles are arranged broadly chronologically and cover a period spanning from the early 17th century up to the early 20th century. All take the concept of ‘passion’ as their starting point to study a range of topics that can be broadly categorised into three themes with some overlap: the various roles and opportunities for female engagement in the political and parliamentary worlds, the full spectrum of political radicalism, and the forms and spaces in which (extra-)parliamentary debate and discussions occurred. As one might expect, this broad range of subjects highlights the diverse source material that political historians are able to draw upon to engage with the history of parliament and political participation, including architecture, personal correspondence, petitions, publications, satire, and objects. This volume begins with an examination of a long-drawn out dispute that occurred between parliamentary officials and rumbled on for almost 40 years. Kirsty Wright's article recontextualises the late 16th-century ‘War in the Receipt’ by placing the dispute over administrative practices within its physical context in the Palace of Westminster; she argues that the feud was not solely personal but was political. The exchequer is not often viewed as a site of political activity, yet as Wright demonstrates, it was fundamentally tied to the mechanisms of the government. She analyses a range of material, including exchequer documentation, architectural records, and the personal papers of a number of the quarrellers, which enables her to demonstrate the agency of otherwise unknown individuals in influencing institutional reform. Her subjects, including Chidiock Wardour, clerk of the pells, and the auditor of the Receipt, Robert Petre, expressed strong opinions about how their offices should function, and they passionately challenged any rulings that they did not agree with. Her article gives us a fascinating insight into the intimate and ‘messy realities’ of everyday administration that was undertaken by mid-ranking government officials. It demonstrates the importance of space in shaping working relationships and reveals how the architecture of the Palace of Westminster, the locations and layouts of its office spaces, could inspire passionate feeling: space orchestrated interactions, exposed hierarchies, and created opportunities for surveillance and accusations of corruption. Wright's article thus demonstrates how passionate arguments between parliamentary officials, which can often be disregarded, had big implications for patronage, office holding, power and influence. Amy Galvin's article propels the volume forwards into the late 18th century by examining the evolution of women's writings on citizenship over a century. Galvin draws on the published works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Harriet Taylor, and Frances Power Cobbe, among others, to support her argument that a distinctly female understanding of citizenship developed over the course of the long 19th century and predated the official women's suffrage movement considerably. The idea of a political female identity was controversial, and many of these women faced criticism and hostility for publicising their opinions, however their passionate conviction that their words might have the power to ameliorate the legal and social status of their sex encouraged them to ‘pick up their pens’ and be bold and defiant. This ‘female’ concept of citizenship was not merely theoretical; writers emphasised its tangibility by centring it on (female) notions and experiences of honour, marriage, education, employment, local and municipal politics, and, of course, parliamentary representation and the franchise. Moreover, Galvin demonstrates the centrality of the space of parliament to discussions of female citizenship by examining how women lobbied parliament with formal petitions, and how they conceived of its power over their lives, which was manifested by its role as the place where the laws that were imposed on them were made and the social and cultural institutions that shaped their lives was upheld. Natalie Hanley-Smith's article continues to look at women's engagement with parliament but in ways that were more subtle, and as a result, have often been overlooked. She examines the letters that Lady Henrietta Ponsonby, Countess Bessborough sent to her lover, Lord Granville Leveson Gower, to gain insights into the connections between parliamentary politics, aristocratic society, and intimacy in the late Georgian period. Drawing on methodologies from the history of emotions, Hanley-Smith explores the versatile role of the political mistress, a position fulfilled by several aristocratic women in the late Georgian period, who simultaneously held the titles of wife and mistress to different MPs. The case study is of particular interest because of the unconventional dynamics that existed between the two lovers: by time their affair began in the mid-1790s, the countess had been embroiled in Whig party operations for around 15 years. In contrast, Leveson Gower, who came from a Tory family, was just beginning his parliamentary career, and gave his maiden speech in 1798. The countess was more experienced in (extra-)parliamentary culture than her lover, which invested her with a limited degree of authority that allowed her to advise him on how to present himself in the house of commons and how to manage his in the early of his parliamentary She was also very passionate about politics and held very different opinions to Leveson on many that were in parliament in the late and her discussions of their demonstrate her and the range of she had at her to navigate Hanley-Smith reveals that Bessborough a of and loyalty, that was used by aristocratic to her political and present it in a to Leveson Caitlin examines the that the Cato Street and the public of its in by their for the of the a of a to the Lord and to his while they were at The was because the had from the Street who the where the were to their article explores how both the and the were in culture for a range of who were all of the most unconventional to in this volume, draws on to interpret this in history and argues that the culture the Cato Street allowed the public to engage with radicalism, and in a but in They reveal that the was a site of public and became a for but that it was also with were between the as a place where men had to political and to that to be for the of the and parliament This idea of the as the site of an parliament is in George which provides an for the cover of this with a of of the bodies of the radicals, which they as for the which not to that the bodies themselves might act as for at a time when they felt it was crucial to The about the threat of also in article about the that were to members of the in the to the other of the spectrum than that by subjects, examines how material culture was used effectively by the to regulate and to it into forms of She on the of which several in and explores how they part of a culture that the used to a of to support and support for the The in their being made in and in order to within the while giving a sense of and a to its argues that the as a of the politics of the and its leader, views on political were more than one might The were to in their working-class members a particular type of one that was and and that they could was of the full of article provides a significant to the field of and working-class politics, which is often in from the history of parliament. The focus shifts from the working to expressions of political and in article on the She examines that were published in and how (extra-)parliamentary discussions were beyond journalists were far from the and of the and they their with the of social and political reform. passion was and inspired and their at the and of the political them to up their to their In of this, their political has often been in the because of their as played important roles in contemporary political and allowed authors to in a that their and writings were and were to political and in their the importance of passion in not only did emotion her subjects into action, but their upon their ability to inspire emotional in their In many journalists to Galvin's female they were to to the of their political and their publications them with the to their article also the political power of she examines the Irish a that was by women who were on their as and A place in at the time as the in the which was by the British government in The women's emphasised their to support their which has led scholars to the as a that women's roles as to In contrast, Stewart argues that the lens of passion reveals that the was a and and demonstrates that the women were political in their own to the movement encouraged women to and and them a way to express their Moreover, their to the the of Irish women in the early 20th century. Stewart that the act of their made these women political but many to about their to the of their Love, Stewart also considers the of her source and how its diverse engaged with it and constructed She that many Irish women were more invested in the than they were in the for women's and that their members of the women's suffrage including the as they believed the women's subordinate and position in the of politics. Berry-Waite's also highlights within the women's Her which this volume, examines debates and of women MPs the of was in was to allow women to in parliament, the for women's however, the idea was in parliament in the late 19th century. Drawing on a range of primary sources by and both the suffrage and argues that women's supposedly passionate nature was used to their political and to their and physical to She ‘passion’ at its sense and considers how gendered discussions of a range of emotions, including and anger, were employed to opinions about women's or to in parliament. She explores the issue by the parliamentary of as a case Taylor, who was the of Harriet as the for in the Her did from both the and the suffrage a controversial, and to her on the of a legal and her discussions about the of female representation in parliament. Hanley-Smith's countess expressed her political passions but the countess she had more to own her political just under a century she had to in a where women were only to be The of Women a point for a volume that has emphasised the and of women's in political and parliamentary culture in that was to and to the passionate of a social are of gendered and in the of the articles we and which we have historically are to both of these concerns because we feel it is the to are by the work of the on gender, and article from all and encourage people from This is an by the of and this special issue is to their to to
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