Could Charles I Be Trusted? The Royalist Case, 1642-1646

1966 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
General Public ◽  
Veto Power ◽  
English History ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Constitutional Analysis

The followers of King Charles I in the Civil War, long among the whipping boys of English history, have been receiving better treatment since the Whig interpretation of the seventeenth century lost its pristine vigour. This is particularly true of their constitutional position as set forth in the great outpouring of manifestoes and pamphlets during the war. Edward Hyde, perhaps the key figure in this aspect of royalism, has recently profited from a capable defence of his opinions and policy. Similarly, pamphleteers such as Henry Ferne, Dudley Digges, and John Bramhall are now fairly well known, thanks largely to J. W. Allen's pioneering study of their writings. From work like this it is clear that the royalist spokesmen accepted the increased importance of Parliament, the end of prerogative courts and nonparliamentary taxation, and the supremacy of common and statute law. Like their armies in the field, they were defending the monarchy as overhauled in 1641, not as the Tudors left it, much less as James I may have conceived it. Indeed the classical doctrine of the mixed or balanced constitution, glorified by Blackstone and widely accepted until nearly 1830, is now credited, not to Philip Hunton, but to the royalists. Such rehabilitation has done much to remove the patronizing label of “wrong but romantic,” which was once the best which they could hope for from historians or the general public.Allen and those who followed him naturally concentrated on the legal and constitutional analysis of the origins of authority, the veto power, sovereignty, nonresistance, and so forth.

‘An old and faithful servand’: A Pair of Early Seventeenth-Century Gauntlet Gloves given by King Charles I to Sir Henry Wardlaw

Costume ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
High Status ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Social ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
The University ◽  
Design And Manufacture ◽  
Private Collections

A pair of embroidered seventeenth-century gauntlet gloves, reputedly presented by King Charles I to his courtier Sir Henry Wardlaw, was donated to the University of St Andrews in 2001. This article sets out to uncover the truth behind this nearly four-hundred-year-old family legend by investigating Sir Henry’s royal connections and the social significance of the gauntlet gloves as a high-status, luxury clothing accessory. Based on the study of historic gloves in museum and private collections, it endeavours to date the gloves by discussing their design and manufacture within the context of seventeenth-century clothing fashion. This article also explores the symbolism behind the gauntlet gloves’ decorative scheme by unravelling some of the hidden messages that are conveyed about cultural, religious, political and technological developments and perspectives through seventeenth-century embroidery.

“The Fittest Subject for A King's Quarrel”: An Essay on the Militia Controversy 1641-1642

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
King Charles I

The struggle between King and Parliament in 1641-42 for command of the militia was to King Charles I “the Fittest Subject for a King's Quarrel.” As the King himself and a group of pamphleteers, preachers and members of Parliament realized, the controversy was not just a contest for control of military power. The fundamental issue was a change in England's government, a shift in sovereignty from King or King-in-Parliament to Parliament alone. As Charles explained, “Kingly Power is but a shadow” without command of the militia. His contemporaries, representing various political allegiances, also testified to the significance of the contest over the militia. They described it as the “avowed foundation” of the Civil War, “the greatest concernment” ever faced by the House of Commons, and the “great quarrel” between the King and his critics. To some men it was this dispute over military authority and the implications for government which were inherent in it, rather than disagreements about religion, taxes or foreign policy, that made civil war unavoidable.Concern about military authority first erupted in the fall of 1641 in response to a series of events – rumors of plots involving the King, the presence in London of disbanded soldiers who had returned from the war with Scotland, the “Incident” in Scotland, and above all the rebellion in Ireland which required the levying of an army to subdue those rebels.

John Bramhall and The Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
British History ◽  
English History ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Conscious Level

It is a truism that the most distinctive features of the peculiarly English genius in politics are moderation and compromise. The sources of this spirit must be sought throughout the whole fabric of English history, but it should be easier to examine some of the stages by which it emerged onto the conscious level of political thought. How long have Englishmen spoken of political moderation as a good in itself? Herbert Butterfield awards to the Whigs the honor of contributing to modern British history their instinct for compromise. Locke has often been thought of as doing the same. But Toryism has come in for its share of the credit, and a student of John Dryden's thought has suggested that the Tory Dryden well illustrates the tradition of avoiding political extremes and reconciling liberty and authority. This is a fruitful suggestion, and it may be carried further by seeking evidence of this tradition in the predecessors of the Tories, the royalists of the Civil War period. These latter, far from being diehards or extremists, were the advocates of a political mean, and tried to defend at once the king's authority and the subject's liberty. In some degree, this is now widely conceded, but the significance of this moderation is not as clear as it ought to be, because its nature is not understood. When it is understood, it will be possible to say that the most important characteristic of seventeenth-century English royalism was not its defense of the king, but its defense of political moderation and limited government.

Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ian Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
English History ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Social ◽  
Civil War Soldiers ◽  
Parish Registers

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.

Book reviews: Spider-man at work

1993 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-145 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Field Trips ◽  
German Translation ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Four Books ◽  
King Charles I

Martin Lister’s English Spiders 1678 . Translated by Malcolm Davies & Basil Harley. Edited by John Parker & Basil Harley. Colchester, Harley Books, 1992. Pp. xv + 208, £49.95. ISBN 0-946589-27-5 Martin Lister (1638/9-1712) was one of the outstanding zoologists of the later seventeenth century. Cambridge-educated, amply-propertied, well connected - a great-uncle had been Physician in Ordinary to King Charles I and his niece was Sarah Jennings, the wife of Marlborough - he practised medicine for some years in his native Yorkshire before moving to London in 1683. Long keenly interested in natural history and already an F. R. S. of twelve years’ standing, he thereupon became active in the Society’s affairs and was elected Vice-President in 1685. Three years later the Society did him the honour of publishing the first of what were to be his four books, the Historiae Animalium Angliae. This was divided into three parts, devoted respectively to land and freshwater mollusca, marine mollusca, and spiders (broadly conceived). The last of these, the Tractatus deAraneis, has never received its proper due, as a result of remaining till now untranslated into English (a German translation did appear, but even that was as long ago as 1778). Through the initiative of a leading present-day amateur arachnologist, John R. Parker, who has also provided an excellent introduction, this deficiency has at last been repaired. The resulting volume, produced to the fine standard we have come to expect of Harley Books, has received inputs from a scholarly team almost on the scale of that which went to work on the comparable 1972 translation of Thomas Johnson’s two seventeenth-century accounts of his botanical field trips out of London.

BEYOND THE PALE: JOHN CUSACKE AND THE LANGUAGE OF ABSOLUTISM IN EARLY STUART BRITAIN

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA LEVY PECK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
Colonial Government

John Cusacke, an Irish gentleman who was educated on the continent and worked on the fringes of the court of wards, constructed a striking re-reading of kingship, law, colonial government, and parliament in a series of tracts written between 1615 and 1647. His writings provide insight both into seventeenth-century colonial theory and early Stuart political thought. Shaped in the cauldron of Irish land struggles and continental political thought, Cusacke rejected Old English constitutionalism, arguing instead that Ireland was a colonial dependency of England. Further, to gain royal favour for various projects, Cusacke recast contemporary conceptions of parliament and common law, rejecting the centrality of custom, insisting that the king was the law maker and vigorously attacking Sir Edward Coke. Cusacke's writings reached the libraries of James I and Charles I, and their officials Sir Robert Naunton, master of the court of wards, and attorney-general Sir Robert Bankes. Cusacke's tracts graphically demonstrate the existence of an absolutist political discourse in early Stuart Britain applied not to issues of theology or of international law but to domestic politics.

‘The More Posed and Wise Advice’: The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the English Civil Wars

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-829 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Over Time

‘To me he was always the embodiment of Cavalier romance.’ Thus Vita Sackville-West on her seventeenth-century ancestor, Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset. Such labelling indicates the problems which still bedevil any study of Civil War royalism. Brian Wormald'sClarendonbrilliantly revealed that the men who joined Charles I in 1642 represented a broad range of opinion. Above all, he made us aware of a coherent group of moderate (‘constitutional’) royalists who throughout sought accommodation. There was a palpable difference of strategy between these people, who favoured royal concessions in order to prevent further military initiatives, and others who favoured military initiatives in order to prevent further royal concessions. Within these two basic matrices, there were further subtle inflections of attitude between individuals and within the same individual over time. But many such inflections remain murky. Wormald's lead was never followed through. Charles's supporters have consistently received less attention than those who remained with parliament; and among the royalists, moderates have attracted fewer studies than ‘cavaliers’ and ‘swordsmen’. There is thus an urgent need to clarify different varieties of royalism and especially to bring the constitutional royalists into sharper focus. However, before we can assess their wider aims and impact, we must first identify them; and here the inappropriate labels bestowed on so many of Charles's supporters create real problems. Anne Sumner has recently ‘de-mythologized’ John Digby, first earl of Bristol, revealing him as more complex and less intemperate than the ‘hawk’ of legend.

The Royal Plays at Christ Church in 1636: A New Document

1985 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Elliott ◽  
John Buttrey
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Charles I ◽  
University Of Oxford ◽  
Floating Island ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
In Christ ◽  
The University

On 29 August 1636, King Charles I and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, paid a royal visit to the University of Oxford at the invitation of Archbishop Laud, Chancellor of the University. They lodged in Christ Church, a royal foundation and the largest of the Oxford colleges, which was to become the seat of their court during the Civil War. During the two days they spent in Oxford on this occasion, the King and Queen and their entourage were entertained with three plays: William Strode's The Floating Island, in Christ Church hall on the night of 29 August; George Wilde's Love's Hospital, in St. John's College hall on the afternoon of 30 August; and William Cartwright's The Royal Slave, again in Christ Church hall on the night of 30 August.

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