Imagining the King's Death
Book description
It is high treason in British law to 'imagine' the king's death. But after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, everyone in Britain must have found themselves imagining that the same fate might befall George III. How easy was it to distinguish between fantasising about the death of George…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Imagining the King's Death as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Poor George III: ridiculed in caricatures and the object of attempted assassinations!
This enormous book is a real page-turner. Its aim is to show that the changing meanings of words had a huge impact on the politics of the 1790s in Britain. The fourteenth-century statute of treason listed among its crimes that of ‘imagining the king’s death.’
In the reign of Edward III, that meant actually planning the death of the monarch, but by the 1790s, the word ‘imagine’ had taken on the modern definition of ‘envisaging’ or ‘fantasising.’ This much wider definition of ‘imagining’ had dire consequences for reformers…
From Emma's list on British political debate in the age of revolutions.
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