The Culture of Equity in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Britain and America by Mark Fortier (review)

The present volume continues work begun with the author’s The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006). In the earlier study, Mark Fortier considered that England’s social upheavals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were related to a culture of equity. He gave a range of contemporary examples of equity: taken not just from the major philosophers, theorists, playwrights, and poets of the time, but also from the writings of women, Native Americans, and the Irish, as well as the radical writings of the 1640s and 1650s. In this new study, Fortier perceives that the culture of equity was not limited to the legal sphere but embedded in many aspects of early modern life, such as religion, politics, poetry, and revolution. While ‘equity’ has a singular meaning, it is also a collection of ideas, and Fortier maintains that it is a key element of Western culture and society, its meaning and significance evolving over time.

During the Restoration in England, notions of equity – as they appeared in political polemic and religious discourse – were bound up with the law and the justness of God’s rules. Following the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, equity became the vocabulary and rhetoric of the Royalist forces. The General Pardon, offered to George Monk by Charles II as part of the Restoration negotiations, was seen as a great liberation from tyranny. However, not all were convinced. Edward Burrough stated ‘God’s purpose is to try him, if he rules in righteousness and truth, in equity and justice, he may be blessed; but if otherwise he govern, and walk not in the reference to the Lord and spare his people: the God of heavens shall rebuke him, and deliver his people another way’ (p. 30). Charles II’s Pardon and equity extended neither to the regicides nor to dissenters and Burrough was imprisoned. Although there was a veneer of equity over the legal system and Parliament, its reach had limits.

Similar double standards were also evident in regard to equity and religion in this period. With the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, God’s justice and equity became hot topics of discussion: some saw the ultimate equity as the complete purging of wickedness from the earth, while others considered God’s justice as righteous, reasonable, merciful, and full of equity. Toleration of the individual Christian conscience was an important element of Restoration Equity, the subject of Chapter 1. Toleration of the Quakers and their right to express their religious views was not only explicit in law; it was also implicit in the concept of salus populi (the safety of the people), the highest law and a key concept of contemporary equity and politics. People like the Quakers were peaceful, sober, and righteous and ‘whatever is enacted against them cannot unite with the body of the rule’ (p. 47).

The second of the two large chapters, ‘Rights and Revolutions’, considers common equity in the context of the revolutionary atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Fortier presents a comprehensive examination of many key writers, philosophers, and poets on justice and equity, for both America and Britain, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Notions of equity in religion and legal justice in the British Revolution and the American War of Independence (1775–83) were strongly invoked by many writers of the period. By contrast, discussions of the slave trade were bereft of notions of justice and equity, providing an interesting parallel to the revolutionaries’ zeal seen in the previous chapter. Attacks on the inequity of the slave trade did appear during the period, but were confined mostly to Britain and show considerable difference in their use of rhetoric, compared with those of the revolutionary discussions of equity. Fortier’s discussion of equity and women shows a similar tendency: contemporary discussions of equity for...