The Baronial Context of the English Civil War

1990 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 93-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. S. A. Adamson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Richard Ii ◽  
Legal Procedure ◽  
Henry Vii ◽  
First Time

WHEN rebellion broke out in England in 1642, the political nation had been, for over a decade, obsessed with medieval precedent and its gothic past. Practices and institutions which had seemed defunct revived, during the 1630s, into new and sometimes controversial life. Trial by combat was reintroduced in appeal of treason in 1631, and confirmed by the judges in 1637 as a legitimate legal procedure even in disputes of property; in 1636 a bishop was appointed to the Lord Treasurership for the first time since the reign of Edward IV; in 1639 England went to war without the summons of a Parliament for the first time since 1323; and the following year the Great Council of Peers met, for the first time since the reign of Henry VIII, to deal with a revolt of the Scottish nobility. At Court, the king was encouraging a gentleman of his Privy Chamber, Sir Francis Biondi, in his labours on a massive survey of the baronial struggles in England from Richard II to Henry VII—a work which, when it appeared in 1641 as The Civill Warres of England, was shortly to be endowed with a profoundly ironic topicality.

The New Model Army and the problems of siege warfare, 1648–51

1990 ◽  
Vol 27 (105) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Burke
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The South ◽  
New Model ◽  
Siege Warfare

The destruction of the Royalist field armies at Naseby and Langport in 1645 did not end the English Civil War. Althought the king had suffered irreversible military defeats, Parliament was unable to govern effectively while politically important towns and fortresses remained in enemy hands. To ensure political stability Parliament’s army was forced to besiege and reduce a large number of strongholds in England, Ireland and Scotland, a task that was not finally completed until the surrender of Galway in 1652. In particular the war in Ireland was to test the army’s siege-making capacity more severely than any previous campaign. To complete the political conquest of Britain and Ireland the army and its generals were compelled increasingly to practise an aspect of warfare that had been traditionally neglected by English soldiers. In contrast, siege warfare was an area in which their continental counterparts had excelled.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European wars produced few set-piece battles. Conflicts were more frequently resolved by the assault and defence of fortified cities and towns. Consequently the art of siege warfare evolved rapidly. England’s political and military insularity during this period detached the country from advances in siege technology that had transformed the conduct of European warfare. No major siege had been undertaken by an English army since Henry VIII had invested Boulogne in 1544, and as there had been no siege of English towns or fortresses since medieval times, there had been little innovation in defensive fortifications. What improvements did occur were sporadic and unco-ordinated. In the sixteenth century a great fortress was built at Berwick-on-Tweed to counter Scottish infiltration and a number of coastal towns in the south-east were refortified against the threat of Spanish invasion. However, by the outbreak of civil war in 1642, even these were obsolete by contemporary continental standards.

THE CURSE OF MEROZ AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORDAN S. DOWNS
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Printed Text ◽  
Irish Rebellion ◽  
Charles Ii

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to uncover the political significance of the Old Testament verse Judges 5:23, ‘the curse of Meroz’, during the English Civil War. Historians who have commented on the printed text of Meroz have done so primarily in reference to a single edition of the parliamentarian fast-day preacher Stephen Marshall's 1642Meroz cursedsermon. Usage of the curse, however, as shown in more than seventy unique sermons, tracts, histories, libels, and songs considered here, demonstrates that the verse was far more widespread and politically significant than has been previously assumed. Analysing Meroz in its political and polemical roles, from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and through the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, sheds new light on the ways in which providentialism functioned during the Civil Wars, and serves, more specifically, to illustrate some of the important means by which ministers and polemicists sought to mobilize citizens and construct party identities.

scholarly journals Thomas Willis, the Restoration and the First Works of Neurology

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Caron
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Neural Anatomy ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Brain

This article provides a new consideration of how Thomas Willis (1621–75) came to write the first works of ‘neurology’, which was in its time a novel use of cerebral and neural anatomy to defend philosophical claims about the mind. Willis’s neurology was shaped by the immediate political and religious contexts of the English Civil War and Restoration. Accordingly, the majority of this paper is devoted to uncovering the political necessities Willis faced during the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, with particular focus on the significance of Willis’s dedication of his neurology and natural philosophy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon. Because the Restoration of Charles II brought only a semblance of order and peace, Willis and his allies understood the need for a coherent defense of the authority of the English church and its liturgy. Of particular importance to Sheldon and Willis (and to others in Sheldon’s circle) were the specific ceremonies described in theBook of Common Prayer, a manual that directed the congregation to assume various postures during public worship. This article demonstrates that Willis’s neurology should be read as an intervention in these debates, that his neurology would have been read at the time as an attempt to ground orthodox worship in the structure of the brain and nerves. The political necessities that helped to shape Willis’s project also help us to better understand Willis’s innovative insistence that philosophical statements about the mind should be formulated only after a comprehensive anatomical investigation of the brain and nerves.

Independents and Revolutionaries

1968 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Yule
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Westminster Assembly

Who were the Independents? This is one of the unsolved puzzles of the English Civil War. Contemporaries gave differing answers. To some they were the godly; to others they were “the godly gang.” They were both a Puritan group and a political segment of the Long Parliament. S. R. Gardiner and the Whig historians tended to make a clear connection. Religious Independency was for toleration, and the political Independents were, simpliciter, the party of toleration opposed to the intolerant Presbyterians. This view was broadly accepted until 1938 when it was permanently shattered by J. H. Hexter, whose penetrating article showed that many political Independents (and for this purpose he defined them as the Regicides and those who survived Pride's Purge) were elders in the established church which after the Westminster Assembly had a Presbyterian form of government. He therefore urged that the term Independent was really a label for the most ardent political Puritans applied to them by the more conservative.Then in 1953 H. R. Trevor-Roper in his brilliant essay on “the Gentry” introduced a new approach by equating the Independents with the lesser and declining gentry who had been shut out from the spoils of court office and therefore pursued a policy of decentralization.It was at this stage that I wrote an introductory study on the problem of the Independents that questioned in part the suggestions put forward in both these works. Against Hexter I urged that the term Independent had a greater religious content that he allowed, for many of his “Independent” Presbyterian elders in fact became Independents in religion or certainly veered in that direction.

Gentry Honor and Royalism in Early Stuart England

1973 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerrilyn Greene Marston
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Civil Service ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Choices ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Right

You have the satisfaction in your conscience that you are in the right; that the King ought not to grant what is required of him …. but for my part, I do not like the quarrel and do heartily wish that the King would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and gratitude to follow my master.In this way Sir Edmund Verney, the patriarch of an old Buckinghamshire gentry family, explained his decision to side with the King in the Civil War, a choice which cost him his life at the battle of Edgehill. In 1642, many English gentlemen were confronted with a similar choice. It is significant that Verney attributed his choice of King over Parliament to “honour and gratitude.” In Sir Edmund's explanation we may find the basis on which many English gentlemen supported the King in 1642.The political behavior of the Royalist gentlemen in the 1640s is part of a problem which has long plagued historians of the English Civil War. The economic interpretations proposed by both R. H. Tawney and H. Trevor-Roper stimulated much interest because they seemed to provide what had long been sought — a theory that could consistently account for the political choices of upper class gentlemen in the 1640s. When tested, however, neither theory proved satisfactory. Careful studies of key institutional bodies like the Civil Service and the Long Parliament revealed no significant social or economic differences between Royalists and Parliamentarians.

II. Legal Sovereignty in the Brady Controversy

1972 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-431 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corinne Comstock Weston
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Characteristic Function ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
High Court ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Law Making

A Major source of difficulty in interpreting the political thought of Dr Robert Brady, the high tory historian who imparted a new dimension to the political quarrels of late Stuart England, arises out of a limitation that he imposed upon himself in writing history. He deliberately included very little political reflection in his writings, observing that he would not ‘inlarge further upon the great Use and Advantage Those that read Old Historians may make of these Discourses, but leave that to the Judgment of Understanding Readers’. This limitation may be offset, it is suggested here, by placing Brady securely within the intellectual framework created by the contemporary theories of legal sovereignty mat had originated during the English civil war and were fast becoming tradition by the late years of Charles II. When Brady made his researches public, almost all the elements were present that were required for fashioning a theory of legal sovereignty on the lines made famous in Blackstone. Englishmen were reading Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Edward Coke on the uncontrollable authority that resided in parliament for making, confirming, repealing, and expounding laws; and many of them were by this time accustomed to associating the legislative power, itself a new expression, with sovereignty in the state. They had also learned during the civil war years to recognize law-making as the characteristic function of their high court of parliament. All that remained for the whole to fall

Office under Queen Elizabeth: the Case of Lord Hunsdon and the Lord Chamberlainship in 1585

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Stone
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Political Evolution ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Advancement ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Similar Letter

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the role played by the Court and government office in the social and political evolution of Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Professor Trevor-Roper has treated office under the Crown as a smooth highroad to economic advancement, one of the principal causes of such rise of the gentry as may have occurred. According to this view, the political antecedents of the English Civil War are best interpreted in terms of the polarities of Court and Country: it was reaction against an overgrown and corruptly lucrative Court that inspired the opposition in 1640; it was desire to dismantle the whole centralizing apparatus which inspired the policy of the Independents in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Others, including Professor Aylmer and myself, have subjected officialdom to detailed inspection and have concluded that its rewards were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth and Charles I, its personnel was restricted in numbers, and its more spectacular beneficiaries were a very small minority. The recently published letter of Sir Edward Stanhope to Thomas Viscount Wentworth, advising him to refuse the Deputyship of Ireland in 1631, has cast a flood of light on contemporary attitudes towards the acceptance of at least one high office. Forty-six years before, when Henry Carey, 1st Earl of Hunsdon, was offered the Lord Chamberlainship of the Royal Household, he received a similar letter of warning from a close follower.

The Political Education and Enlightenment of Thomas Hobbes

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 97-144
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Educational Policy ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Educational Design ◽  
The Core ◽  
Modern Era

As one of the first political thinkers of the modern era, Thomas Hobbes relied on his analysis of the Civil War in England to reach the conclusion that the sovereign should empower its delegates to implement a special educational policy designed to inculcate the nobility and lower classes with allegiance to the state. One of the main features of Hobbes’s program was that the sovereign power should oversee the institutions of knowledge to make sure they would not disseminate ideas that might subvert the authority of the sovereign. An equally important aspect of Hobbes’s educational design was the control of secular sovereignty over ecclesiastical institutions to ensure their loyalty to the sovereign. Hobbes assigns a special role to the English universities in his recommendations. In his historical treatise Behemoth or the Long Parliament, Hobbes places the lion’s share of the blame for the English Civil War on the universities, which he said “have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.” That is why the new sovereign power after winning the Civil War needed to encourage civil peace by reforming the universities, which were “the core of rebellion.” Hobbes regarded the political doctrine of the secular sovereign’s unlimited power that he expounded in detail in Leviathan as the absolutely necessary foundation for reform. According to Hobbes, this educational policy was indispensable for indoctrinating citizens so that they would be loyal to the sovereign power in order to preserve peace in England.

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