The Environmental Policy of Charles I: Coal Smoke and the English Monarchy, 1624–40

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Cavert
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Environmental Concern ◽  
The Real ◽  
Modern Variety ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Personal Rule

AbstractEarly modern London burned quantities of dirty coal that were unparalleled anywhere in Europe before industrialization, and the consequent smoky air was a matter of more serious and sustained concern than has been appreciated by either early modern or environmental historians. During the 1620s and 1630s, King Charles I and his government sought to remove smoky industries, above all large brewhouses, from the vicinity of the court in Westminster. This was part of a broader campaign for order and beauty that has been described by other scholars, but a focus on smoke highlights the very partial successes achieved by attempts to reform the real spaces of royal government. The improvement of Westminster's air during Charles's personal rule displays an early modern variety of environmental concern that was expressed through courtly display, hierarchy, distinction, and exclusion.

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhan Keenan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–1642 is the first book-length study of the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the progresses, public processions, and royal entries of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king’s progresses and progress entertainments than currently exists, this study throws new light on one of the most vexed topics in early Stuart historiography—the question of Charles I’s accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles’s overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practised by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king’s accessibility and engagement with his subjects further through case studies of Charles’s ‘great’ progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles’s royal entry on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his people or able to deploy the power of public display to curry support for his policies as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.

Contexts and Contours

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koji Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Historical Inquiry ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Combining Data ◽  
Personal Rule ◽  
Two Peaks ◽  
Patented Inventions

This chapter sketches the contours of projecting as a discourse and the concrete activities during the period covered by the book. Combining data drawn from patents for inventions and the English Short Title Catalogue, it identifies two peaks of projecting, first in the 1630s and 1640s, and then from the end of the seventeenth century. The first is related to monopolies and fiscal exactions authorized by prerogative during the Personal Rule of Charles I, the second to joint-stock companies and patented inventions in the age of the financial revolution. Existing accounts have tended to treat them separately. Projects across these evolving circumstances, however, display certain commonalities if we set them against medieval antecedents. This chapter thereby establishes projecting in early modern England as a tangible subject for historical inquiry. It concludes by juxtaposing English and European trajectories.

‘SO HARD A TEXT’? IMAGES OF CHARLES I, 1612–1700

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
KEVIN SHARPE
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Personal Rule ◽  
Text Images

Historians have tended to discuss the image (in the singular) of the monarch in early modern England. In the case of Charles I, the Eikon basilike, literally ‘the royal image’, presented a picture of the king that claimed to be stable and authoritative. This article argues rather that royal images were the product of multiple influences, and shifted through changing circumstances, rendering all images unstable and open to differing interpretations. Charles, as well as being the son of the Rex Pacificus, inherited the martial expectations associated with the image of his brother; and images of the prince and his early years as king in the 1620s continued alongside the changed representations of personal rule. Though the Eikon for a time seemed to fix Charles's image, its very authority meant that it was, after 1660, even after 1688, appropriated by all – whigs and tories as well as Jacobites. Most importantly, through the 30 January sermons, Charles's memory became a text which all parties needed and sought to claim, a text both shared and contested in the political culture.

Affectionate sister, most faithful friend

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-191
Author(s):  
Michele L. Frederick
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Court Culture ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Large Painting

In May of 1630, the exiled Queen of Bohemia, Elizabeth Stuart, sent a large painting to her brother, King Charles I of England. The work, a now-lost family portrait known since 1966 as Seladon and Astraea, was completed by the Dutch artist Gerrit van Honthorst. That this painting took Honoré d’Urfé’s pastoral romance L’Astrée as its source material has been proposed since the 1960s. This article argues for L’Astrée as an important part of Elizabeth and her husband’s self-identity in exile, and for Honthorst’s painting as a vital and overlooked token of friendship between both Elizabeth and her husband and Elizabeth and her brother. Drawing on early modern and ancient theorizations of friendship, kinship, and marriage as well as Elizabeth, Charles, and her husband Frederick’s letters, this article places Honthorst’s painting at the center of a complex network of reciprocal affection, political machinations, and court culture in the seventeenth century.

Ambiguous Authority: Juan de Frías and the Audiencia of Santo Domingo Confront the Conquistador Antonio Sedeño (1537)

2017 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-455
Author(s):  
Michael Perri
Keyword(s):  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
The Real ◽  
Royal Authority ◽  
Charles V ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Large Party ◽  
The Will

On May 19, 1537, in a region of the Pearl Coast, two armed factions of Spaniards challenged one another on the banks of the Unare River in what would become eastern Venezuela (see Figure 1). Licenciado Juan de Frías and his smaller force of about 80 men confronted a large party under the command of the conquistador Antonio Sedeño. Frías professed to represent the crown by charge of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, which had bestowed on him a vara del rey (staff of the king, symbolizing royal authority) and sent him off to arrest Sedeño. Sedeño likewise maintained that he had royal authority, citing his capitulación (contract of conquest) for the nearby island of Trinidad and letters from Empress Isabel, wife of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (King Charles I of Spain) and regent of Spain from 1529–32 and 1535–39. In their confrontation, both Frías and Sedeño claimed to represent the will of the king.

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