Month: July 2025

7. Kishlansky, Monarchy Transformed (26 April 2025)

by kurto

The long Stuart century resolved the central problems of James I’s era – religion, finance, and Scotland – albeit unexpectedly. The Anglican settlement held, though Dissent proliferated. Royal finance became the people’s responsibility to fund government. Scotland was unified if not integrated with England. Ultimately monarchy became the king-in-parliament.

Towns increasingly crossed transitioned from agricultural centers to exchange economies, most home to approximately 1,000 residents. Norwich, Bristol, York, and Exter ranged from 10,000 – 30,000. London was a world of its own. Despite decline of the traditional cloth trade, by century’s end, England had passed Holland in transshipping from the Atlantic colonies and East Indies to the European continent; cloth fell to below half, while re-export went from 0 to 33 percent.
The constitution was not only unwritten but could not be reduced to writing. The best decisions were seen to result from unanimity; Commons generally deferred to the Lords, local officers (e.g., JPs) to the lords lieutenants. Polls for the Commons were a last resort. Thus were Catholics and Puritans (ideally) excluded from politics.

The king was a singulas major universalis major, according to developing ideas of resisting the (Catholic) sovereign. Among the 20-30 privy counselors, the 3 most important offices were the lord treasurer (of the Exchequer), the chancellor (legal officer), and secretary of state. Charles I sought to reform the lord lieutenancy but the position became a life tenancy of appointed peers; peerage grew from 55 to 170 by the time of William III, James I having dispensed tithes for cash, Charles for loyalty.

In 1610 the Lord Treasurer Earl of Salisbury proposed Parliament should adopt the Great Contract, a one-time subsidy to pay off the royal debt and to commute some prerogative rights to an annual land tax. The Commons balked, wanting the specifics of transforming wardship, purveyance, and trade impositions. The failure led to retailing of titles, royal land, and an increase in royal rents. Salisbury won a legal case (the Bates case) re import tax but squandered the mystique of the king’s wisdom (i.e., the rationale of the prerogative).

In 1621 James couldn’t find a diplomatic solution to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, in which the Spanish Habsburgs claimed the Lower Palatinate, erstwhile ruled by his nephew Frederick V (the ‘Winter King’), and could not prevent the Commons petitioning for war and a Protestant marriage for Charles. In 1627 came the Five Knights Case, followed by the Petition of Right (including habeus corpus, prohibition on supra-Parliamentary taxation, the billeting of troops in peacetime, martial law). Oddly, the 1630s were remember as peaceful, in contrast to the continent, despite the slide toward civil war including religious ferment: 10,000 Catholic priests were active in the country. Meanwhile, Laud, backed by the Duke of Buckingham, was enforcing high church policy – alienating moderates and Catholics, and prompting the first wave of Puritans to leave for New England.

The Civil War effectively commenced in 1637 with enforcement of the Anglican prayer book in Scotland and consequent formation of the Covenanters; the second Bishops’ War was the formal start, leading to Scottish occupation of Newcastle. In 1641, Parliamentary attacks on Charles’ ministers were tantamount to impeaching the king. The Grand Remonstrance polarized the Commons, calling for rights to approve the King’s ministers as well as the Anglican hierarchy, thereby exacerbating Anglican-Presbyterian tensions. As events quickened, the political class faced stark choices among otherwise shared values (e.g., private property, royal prerogative). Generally, the north and west were royalist, the south and east Parliamentarian. When war was actually declared, each side enlisted 20,000. Following the failure of 1645’s Uxbridge Proposition, Parliament’s military leaders sketched plans the ‘new model’ army, combining three field forces into one, while stripping peers (lords lieutenant) of automatic command. So long as Charles was represented by Laud, Parliament focused on reforming the episcopacy, though Presbyterians were willing to sacrifice liberty to license, and the Independents to tolerate license for liberty of conscience.

The second phase of the war, commencing winter 1648, saw Charles’ English supporters join the Scots in opposing the New Model Army’s intervention in politics. Though the army was broadly disliked, Parliament retained better resources and organization. Having debated amongst itself at Putney, the army then purged Parliament and imprisoned Charles.

The king’s execution made England an outlaw nation, its people sullenly accepting the Commonwealth – prompting Hobbes to write Leviathan asserting state authority was preferable to universal civil war. The gentry withdrew from local government, leaving novices in their stead; the Commons was dependent on the army. The revolution was internally inconsistent: Puritan enthusiasm catalyzed events in the interest of conscience, the gentry’s fundamental constitutionalism acted as a check. Ireland, whose religious revolt had fairly united all sides of England, took three years to subdue, the revolutionary theorist Henry Ireton passing in the fighting. Nonetheless, the Commonwealth’s greatest successes were militaristic, notably the comprehensive union of the three Stuart realms and defeat of the Dutch navy in 1652 by result of a better (if politicized) military. The country fell further into debt. The Rump was expelled in 1653 because the populace would have voted royalist. The Instrument of Government (1653) established Cromwell as protector, contained elements on the New Model Army as well as Leveler proposals but looked like monarchy to its opponents. Cromwell ruled for the people’s good – not what pleased them but what he thought they needed. The regime was held together in his person, displaying a contradictory longing for stable constitution and hope of a millenarian vision.

The Protectorate had retained three armies, one led by Monck, who catalyzed the Commonwealth’s fall after Cromwell’s passing. Amid the Restoration, the Convention was careful to pay for disbanding soldiers, though prejudice against a standing army would last more than 100 years. Tasked with indemnity, land holdings, religious settlement, it finished its business in a rapid 5 months. The Restoration converted monarchy to a popular form of government, with the Church of England positioned as a compromise between Catholics and Puritans (later Dissenters), and the Commons as a recognized branch of government. But the Irish settlement chose Parliamentary owner-occupiers (in order not to reopen English debts) and the Scottish resolution was status quo ante bellum (i.e., control of a subordinated Parliament, control by royal privy council, and restoration of disliked episcopacy).

The Earl of Clarendon’s 1667 fall marked a return to personal rule. Fiscal problems prompted 1670’s secret Treaty of Dover: a personal subsidy and a share of the Dutch empire in exchange for a naval attack on the Netherlands and suspension of anti-Catholic laws. Anglicans and Dissenters were united by 1672. Titus Oates’ conspiratorial Popish Plot transpired over 1678-81, ironically against Charles in order to replace him with the Catholic James II, the subject of the Exclusion Crisis. Based on his past record, Charles was widely expected to relent to 1680’s Exclusion Bill but stiffened, dissolving Commons, purging judges and local officials, arresting the Earl of Shaftesbury, and persecuting Dissenters.

In issuing 1687’s Declaration of Indulgence, James set aside penalties for Catholics and Dissenters. The Anglican hierarchy refused to read it in church, protesting this was to suspend the common law, and went into opposition; six bishops went to the Tower. But Catholics and Dissenters didn’t amount to necessary support. Meanwhile, William of Orange, actively trying to prevent England from siding with France, accepted an invitation to visit England, panicking James into the fleeing the country. Parliament resolved the crisis of William and Mary’s claim in a brisk two weeks, determining the throne had been abdicated, a deliberately ambiguous view. The opposing camps then agreed the Declaration of Right, formalizing the Commons’ role, again prohibiting standing armies, requiring free elections as well as Commons’ consent if the public were to be taxed. It established the appearance of a constitutional monarchy.

An assassination attempt promoted the Oath of Association, declaring William the lawful, rightful king, driving a wedge into the Tories, who left local office. In power, William’s warfare created the need for efficient fiscal administration, leading to the creation of national (not royal) debt, and reorienting London around finance instead of commerce. In war, the security of funded debt was preferable to the risks to overseas trade. The Act of Settlement (1701) pre-established the transition from Anne Stuart to the Hanovers, also restricting government to English citizens and severing judges from royal appointment and other country prejudices. Country opposition cut across Whig and Tory: the country favored constitutional checks on monarchy and the standing army as well as fiscal restraint. William stumbled badly in Scotland, where the ‘Club’ made itself a loyal opposition and the Highlands were essentially ungoverned. James’ passing helped prompt the War of Spanish Succession, driving William away from a tilt toward Robert Harley and back to the Whigs; but soon the Dutchman passed from a riding accident.

Anne, who had acted to channel Puritan sympathies into a national reform of manners, saw her reign dominated by European war, and mostly continued William’s policies. Her administration was led by Godolphin’s treasury and Churchill’s army; Tory policy favored the Anglican church, the blue water navy, and fiscal prudence. Franco-Spanish alliance threatened trade and hence finance. The Failure of the Scottish colony at Darien – which had absorbed an estimated ¼ of Scotland’s liquid capital – drove home the country’s exposure to English trade. The Act of Settlement had not been adopted in Scotland; it approved an Act of Security for an independent choice of monarch, raising Jacobite possibilities. The English Alien Act of 1705 then established that unless the succession of the Hanovers were accepted, Scotland would be treated a foreign nation and trade with France interdicted, thereby catalyzing the 1707 Act of Union.

The Whiggish Junto, which had predominated William’s ministry, fell during Anne’s, in part by prosecuting the high Anglican Sacheverell, though Harley supplanting Godolphin, and by the Marlboroughs’ fall from favor. Harley’s courtier-like behavior supplement a ‘government above’ party message. He sought peace in the Spanish Succession war (contra Marlborough), which meant ending the peninsular war and seeking English diplomatic prizes (repudiating the Junto’s aims). The UK thus acquired Newfoundland, retained Gibraltar, and St Kitts in the Peach of Utrecht (1711), taking pole position among naval powers plus a 30-year monopoly on the Asiento.
Kishlansky overstates the formation of political parties and Whiggishly elides events into harbingers: the foreshadowing chapter’s contents is questionable. No footnotes.

8. Smith, Government of Elizabethan England (27 April 2025)

by kurto

A primer on policymaking and public administration during the second half of the 16th century. Many early-modern forms of government began taking root, though the more obvious milestones came with Stuart rule and the succeeding century’s transition to Parliamentary preeminence.

Government turned on the sovereign’s cultivated mystique. Most criticism was oral, at court, whereas the vast majority of administration was written. By economy of government, Elizabeth avoided bankruptcy; by moderate religious policy, she staved off civil war. But by the 1590s she was seen as highly conservative. The Privacy council, as a duty, followed Elizabeth around – she never went north of the midlands – undertaking an increasing workload because of private suits, the war with Spain, and the growing ties of London to local government.

Parliament was called during crises or for money, as in the 1583 Throckmorton plot, the Spanish war, or for anti-Catholic measures, though the gentry who filled Parliament expected to discuss broader issues. The Lords were more subservient, used by Elizabeth to influence the Commons via patronage. Not more than 2,500 were estimated to be active in politics, so patronage was quite manageable. Approximately 40 percent of this class held profitable office under the crown.

The main objective of government budget and expense was the defense of England against foreign powers, the preservation of law and order, and paternalism by statute. Legal administration was taking shape: the Star Chamber was for criminal justice, the Chancery for equity and to a lesser degree common law. One of the more prominent roles was the principal secretary, whose potential was exploited by the two Cecils, Lord Burghley and Walsingham, men who made the office. Essex, succeeding Leicester, lacked Burghley’s moderation, an important shortcoming in his bid to challenge the younger Cecil.

From 1572, Justices of the Peach levied a fixed tax for the upkeep of the poor. Distribution was ill-defined: another twenty years passed before the law separated those unable to work from those who were unemployed or vagrants (i.e., those who would not work). The 1563 statute of artificers sough to install high standards of workmanship, requiring apprenticeship. Taken together, these were not economic policy so much as a coherent, paternalistic view of managing social economy.

Locally, the era’s main features were the extended roles of the lords lieutenant and the introduction of (often informal) deputy lieutenants subject to lords; the expansion of the JPs, and the establishment of parish authorities. Lieutenancy was oriented around defense; often informal, the deputies were also charged with collection of forced loans to the crown, making it more prominent than patronage. The JPs displaced the medieval sheriff as local adjudicators of common law. The parish, which came into formal status during Elizabeth’s reign, was a site of factional struggle and the locus of poor law administration, the organization of roads, and of common law.

Elizabethan government was fundamentally by consent because it lacked institutional enforcement, contrasting with the command-and-control regime of faltering Spain. The era marks the beginning of transition from medieval to early modern, with control passing from the crown to its ministers and local administrators, from rudimentary numerology to more sophisticated statisticians. It also saw the beginnings of the Stuart era struggle between common law and prerogative courts (i.e., Star Chamber), and in the struggle between Essex and Cecil, the first failings of political morality that was to result in the corruption of Buckingham in the 1620s.

10. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (28 May 2025)

by kurto

Charles I undermined English common law by misusing the rhetoric of monarchical prerogative where custom or sometimes theology normally prevailed, thus calling into question the ‘ancient constitution’ and precipitating the Civil War.

Enshrined by common law, the ancient constitution preserved continuity, but had to account for the Saxon and Norman invasions. It defined the English realm, establishing a balance between prescriptive rights and royal prerogative, and separating England from written, promulgated Roman law. Common lawyers viewed the constitution as deeply historical, holding moral lessons; however, unlike French, Scottish, and Dutch constitutionalists who were more Protestant rebels than traditionalists, the English were evolutionary.

Aquinas had held some human laws are formal, demonstrative conclusions of natural laws, a conclusion shared by Christopher St German and Sir John Doddridge among others. Custom as law is acceptable so long as not contrary to natural law, a choice among possibilities left open, or reason applied to circumstance. ‘Artificial reason’ supports law as embodying rationality superior to positive rule (in a person), in that no one can claim higher authority; and unites custom and reason. Some Stuart thinkers emphasized more custom, some more reason. Either way, the artificial reason of lawyers largely consisted of discerning the rational core of custom.

There had never been an ancient constitution as it was in the 17th century, but its elements were demonstrable, as in John Selden’s identifying positive laws from Saxon times, land tenure after the Normal conquest, and legal officers over various dynasties had persisted in England. He assumed government was to serve its ends via accepted institutions, that long use made for the best fit – custom. Many common lawyers, notably Coke, were disquieted about changing laws, preferring to accept imperfection rather than introduce new defects, a residue of the Aristotelian view shared by Aquinas, Bodin, Machiavelli, Bacon. Custom did not have conservative overtones, however, for it was but a tool for explaining how positive law could be rational yet independent of any person or institution, drawn from natural reason alone. Common lawyers followed St German, active in the 1520s (save for Coke, who tended toward John Fortescue’s unchanging simplicity). Bacon did not go so far as Doddridge in uniting law and reason, but held common law contained laws of reason (i.e., nature), making it sufficient to rule out common law’s subordination to higher law or authorities (save common lawyers). The central tenets of Hooker’s ecclesiology, marked by Aristotelian possibilities actuating to identity, followed suit: custom provided rationality, change is best when evolutionary, circumspect of deliberate alteration, using articifical reason to elucidate matters.

During the first Stuart era, the rhetoric of the common law was one of three ‘master languages’ in England. The others were civil law, drawn from European politics and trade and focused on sovereignty (i.e., the monarch); and canon law or theology, originating in natural law but playing a lesser role following Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries. Civil law was associated with absolutism, though not only for ideological reasons, for it tended to compare itself to natural law be more highly abstract than common law. Whereas theology comprised statements of moral duty, based on theory of natural order and millenarian, and so tending to be politically unspecific. The working of these languages required users to know the time and place for employing idiom.

The problem of the right to resist in the ancient constitution required the king to be subject to common law, but not contract theory and natural rights; nor was it opposed to absolutism. In this era, monarchy was agreed to possess a ‘duplex’ character, comprising participation in the common law and simultaneously enjoying an ill-defined prerogative: the duplex conjoined the three languages. Common law was first among equals while civil law and theology were more attuned to prerogative. Hence the 17th-century elaboration of prerogative did not make it absolutist. James never asserted he could simply override the common law, even as king-in-parliament. But Charles misused the common-law rhetoric, causing distrust at the same time Laudian rhetoric was rising and the Calvinist declining. In the five Knights case, Attorney General Sir Robert Health argued the king could use prerogative to deprive habeus corpus, conflating common law powers and prerogative. Forced loans were also justified outside the common law. Ship money was not a question of absolutism versus constitutionalism but dishonest use of prerogative in the common law context.

The Petition of Right shows the common law under threat early in Charles I’s reign. His spokesmen were not advocating political ideology but using prerogative where it was unwelcome, thereby questioning the adequacy of its application to the king himself. Hence the Commons rejected the Lords’ attempt to introduce ‘sovereign power’, Coke observing it would place prerogative above the common law because the term was undefined and could not be defined according to the law: the Petition was about the liberties of the English subject, not the monarch’s reserved power. When ship money came to the courts, the judge rightly observed there were no bounds against an ‘unruly king’; but it was broken idiom which had raised the public’s fears. This was a crisis for the common law, and when the Civil War came, it was because Parliament has been taught by Charles the common law was not reliable. Charles I had been exploiting ambiguities which were better left so. The problem of the un-idiomatic speaker is not that he can’t be understood but that he loses control of the mood and nuance.

Ironically, royalists and Parliamentarians didn’t divide according to common law view; they had to choose because religious views (high church versus Protestant conscience) created another fissure. The law had turned to questions of religious liberty, and the un-idiomatic king had played his hand so badly as to lose control. ‘Legal’ no longer meant guided by custom but justified by prerogative in the interest of public welfare.

Burgess draws heavily on JGA Poock’s contention that contemporary thought is explanatory in its own right, versus a tool for understanding. Ironically, he criticizes Pocock for overstating the role of Coke, who had tried to graft Fortescue’s unchanging simplicity onto the common law, contending John Selden was closer to the majority view. In making Coke primes inter pares, Pocock underestimated the common lawyers’ acceptance of evolutionary change, and mistook the role of artificial reason (via custom).