When Jefferson was born, on April 13, 1743, the Church of England was the established church in colonial Virginia, and Jefferson’s early religious upbringing was relatively conventional. He was baptized, married, and buried in the Anglican or Episcopal Church. Anglican ministers provided his early education, and, as was common for a member of the gentry, he was elected as a young man to an Anglican vestry, both a civil and religious post in pre-revolutionary Virginia.
While attending the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg (1760–1762), Jefferson began to question traditional religion. Studying under William Small, a Scottish Enlightenment professor and the only member of the faculty who was not an Anglican minister, Jefferson developed an affinity for John Locke, Viscount Bolingbroke, and other Enlightenment thinkers who did not profess standard religious doctrine.
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This month marks 300 years since Robert Walpole (1676–1745) became Britain’s first ‘Prime Minister’. The title was not a formal one; it still exists only through political convention. However, with the positions he attained in April 1721 – First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer – Walpole was able to amass power to a degree previously unprecedented, as the right-hand man of Britain’s newly imported Hanoverian monarchs. The period of his ascendency, popularly dubbed the ‘Robinocracy’, lasted for nearly 21 years and, for sheer duration, remains unbeaten. Under Walpole, the Whig government’s priorities were an obsessive and often unpopular avoidance of foreign wars, dramatic reductions in the land tax and, above all, the consolidation of Hanoverian rule under George I and his son George II.
Alfred the Great: The Most Perfect Man in History?
Barbara Yorke considers the reputation of King Alfred the Great, and the enduring cult around his life and legend.
King Alfred of Wessex (r.871-99) is probably the best known of all Anglo-Saxon rulers, even if the first thing to come into many people’s minds in connection with him is something to do with burnt confectionery. This year saw the 1100th anniversary of his death on 26 October 899, at the age of about 50. The occasion is being marked with conferences and exhibitions in Winchester, Southampton and London, but the scale of celebrations will be modest compared with those which commemorated his millenary, and culminated in the unveiling by Lord Rosebery of his statue in Winchester.
Trump’s ‘march on Rome’
The current US republic is heading towards an eventual downfall, contends Daniel Lazare
Certain pseudo-left circles seem to think that the January 6 assault on the US Capitol was no big deal.
Radical journalist John Pilger, for instance, tweeted that “the made-for-media theatrics on Capitol Hill were not an attempted ‘coup’. Coups are what the CIA stages all over the world. Neither was ‘democracy’ in peril. What democracy?”
Over at Sidecar, a blog site recently unveiled by the
New Left Review, the editors airily dismissed the “hysteria over the Capitol Hill occupation”. “Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy - oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc - constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy,” wrote Mike Davis, a member of