scholarly journals Sir Edward Hyde and the Problem of Counsel in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Royalist Thought

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Rose
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Good And Evil

Arguments about good and evil counsel were central to political argument in England on the eve of Civil War. This chapter explores counsel’s continuing significance for one genre of royalists who continued to use it after 1642 both to depress parliament’s claim to sovereignty and to refute calls from their own side for Catholic or Presbyterian–Covenanting alliances. Men like Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, wanted a prestigious privy council, yet consistently gave counsel outside it owing to their emphasis on the conciliar oath to provide secret, morally sound, advice. They complained about malign advisers, but also criticised monarchs for bad decisions. Seeking moral rather than institutional restraints on monarchy, they demonstrate how, in the mid-seventeenth century, institutional councils were less important than counsel —a diffuse element of friendship and sociability as well as a quotidian political activity.

Charles I, the Privy Council, and the Forced Loan

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 208-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Cust
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Reflex Action ◽  
Government Decision ◽  
High Road

The Forced Loan of 1626–27 has traditionally been regarded as one of the milestones of early seventeenth-century politics. The great nineteenth-century Whig historian S. R. Gardiner saw it as the product of “new counsels” by which Charles I came increasingly to rely on the royal prerogative, and he depicted the opposition to this as a principled defense of Englishmen's liberties. Others writing in the same tradition have generally echoed these views. Thus the loan has been presented as the climax to a first stage of struggle between “Court” and “Country” or as a staging post on the “high road to Civil War.” Latterly, however, this verdict has come into question.With the work of “localist” and “revisionist” historians we have come to appreciate more clearly the extent of attachment to the local community and the continual striving toward consensus in relations between king and subject. This has led to a general revaluation of what have traditionally been regarded as clashes of principle. Local historians have stressed that opposition to taxes generally owed far more to backsliding and provincial inertia than to any concern for constitutional propriety. And a greater understanding of the problems of administration—particularly in wartime—has led to a recognition that government decision making was often a reflex action, prompted by the immediate need to make ends meet. These insights have been incorporated into the work of Conrad Russell, who has provided the most recent assessment of the loan.

Hobbes's Behemoth and the Argument for Absolutism

1982 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 837-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Kraynak
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Science ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Human Choice ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Hobbes's history of the English Civil War, The Behemoth, has been neglected by contemporary scholars, yet it provides the clearest statement of the problem that Hobbes's political science is designed to solve. In Behemoth, Hobbes shows that societies such as seventeenth century England inevitably degenerate into civil war because they are founded on authoritative opinion. The claim that there is a single, authoritative definition of Tightness or truth which is not an arbitrary human choice is an illusion of “intellectual vainglory,” a feeling of pride in the superiority of one's opinions which causes persecution and civil strife. By presenting Hobbes's historical and psychological analysis of this problem, I illuminate his argument for absolutism and show that Hobbes is not a precursor of totalitarianism but a founder of liberalism.

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.

Compromise in Early Stuart Parliaments: The Case of the Short Parliament of 1640

1977 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Esther S. Cope
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Commons

King Charles I's dissolution of the Short Parliament, 5 May 1640, proved politically disastrous. Six months later he was forced to call another Parliament, which immediately launched an attack on his councillor, the early of Strafford. Within two years civil war had broken out. The dissolution of the Short Parliament came only the day after Charles had sent to the Commons a message, apparently offering a compromise in the dispute whether his supply or their grievances should be handled first. The Commons discussed the King's offer all day and finally adjourned, requesting permission to resume their debate the next morning, thus making it possible for negotiations to continue. His Majesty, however, closed the door to further discussion and ended the Parliament. No compromise was concluded.The idea of compromise, or “the arrangement of a dispute by concessions on both sides,” was not foreign to the Englishmen of the early seventeenth century. The words, compromise, mediate, compound and its substantive composition, all appear in the O.E.D. with sixteenth or early seventeenth-century dates. Nor were they divorced from the context of Parliament. When early seventeenth-century Englishmen thought of Parliament, they thought of an assembly where King, Lords, and Commons met and together served the interests of both King and subject. Although ideally these interests were not supposed to conflict, procedures existed to facilitate agreement within Parliament. The King might communicate with the two Houses through his councillors, while the Commons used their Speaker and the Lords relied upon various of their own number to voice concerns to his Majesty.

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.

Godly Pastors and their Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century London

Church Life ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Elliot Vernon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Lord's Supper ◽  
Lay Leaders ◽  
Parish Community ◽  
Church Life ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

This chapter examines the relationship between pastor and congregation in the London parishes during the Interregnum. It addresses how godly ministers, called on by Parliament at the outbreak of the Civil War to reform parochial discipline and prevent the ‘promiscuous multitude’ from polluting the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in England’s parish churches, negotiated issues of authority, changes to worship and liturgy, and the already contentious issues of patronage and finance. These factors forced ministers to look to the lay leaders of the parish, whether as elders or vestrymen, making them subject to factional struggles within the church life of the parish community. This chapter assesses the establishment and operation of Presbyterianism in London’s parishes during the 1640s and 1650s, as well as the practical difficulties, economic and administrative, that godly pastors experienced at the parochial level as a result of the dismantling of the Church of England.

‘Marpesia cautes’

2018 ◽  
pp. 361-376
Author(s):  
Deana Rankin
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The Public

Amazons have long made their presence felt in epics of love, empire, and war; and from early antiquity to the present day, it is both at generically rocky impasses and geographically distinct interstices that they make themselves known. This chapter explores these ideas with respect to the performance of the Amazon on the English and Irish stage across the first half of the seventeenth century. It focuses on a particular moment in early 1640, on the verge of the outbreak of civil war across the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, when, in London, Sir William Davenant’s Salamanca Spolia is performed at court and, in Dublin, Henry Burnell’s play Landgartha is performed at the public theatre in Werburgh Street. It locates these coinciding performances in the context of two evolving and competing English literary embodiments of the figure of the Amazon.

Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case, 1704–1743

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Bryan Yirush
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Privy Council

In 1773, with the empire on the brink of revolt, the Privy Council gave the final ruling in the case of the Mohegan Indians versus the colony of Connecticut. Thus ended what one eighteenth-century lawyer called “the greatest cause that ever was heard at the Council Board.” After a decades-long battle for their rights, involving several appeals to the Crown, three royal commissions, and the highest court in the empire, the Mohegans' case against Connecticut was dismissed. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (~20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Crown for redress. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.

Народные волнения XVII века и русское крестьянство

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Денис Александрович Ляпин
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Russian Society ◽  
Soviet Ideology ◽  
Modern Russian

In the essay the author considers Russian peasants’ participation in public tumults during the seventeenth century. According to his findings, Russian peasants did not seem to display much political activity and the theory about peasant wars in Russia appears to be the myth of Soviet ideology. The author comes to the conclusion that peasant unrest was usually minor, taking the form of robbery and plundering. That phenomenon was a reflection of the specific political culture of early modern Russian society.

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