Martin Butler and Jonathan Dollimore have recently documented the importance of drama in English political life before 1642. Such scholarship, however, has stopped cold at the great divide of 1642. Except for Lois Potter in “‘True Tragicomedies’ of the Civil War and Interregnum,” no one has considered the relationship between politics and theater while the theaters were officially closed. Scholars have thereby missed a seminal question in understanding the discourse and complex political maneuvering enveloping the act of regicide in 1649. What is the relationship between the theatrical tradition and the execution of Charles I?

Even though historians frequently comment on the “tragic” nature of the execution of Charles I, thus far neither historian nor literary person has bothered to examine the immediate and popular reactions to the act of regicide. This is understandable. An odd mix of imaginative projection and verifiable fact enshrines the execution of Charles, and documentation is admittedly difficult. The available assortment of primary literature, however, indicates that many Englishmen responded to the execution as theater, more specifically, the dramatic genre of tragedy. A 1649 sermon (attributed to the Royalist Robert Brown) exemplifies both the tragic response to the act of regicide and the mid-century employment of the theatrical tradition: Brown describes the execution as “the first act of that tragicall woe which is to be presented upon the Theater of this Kingdome, likely to continue longer then the now living Spectators.”

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.

It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”

There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.

The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.