This article integrates the concept of sovereignty with religious perceptions of misrule in the years leading up to the English Civil War. Existing revisionist narratives have emphasized the consensual nature of early Stuart political culture, especially the central role of the 'common law mind' in determining the proper place of potentially rival political vocabularies of natural law, civil law and absolutism. This article argues alternatively that the concept of sovereignty and in particular the contested relationship of sovereignty to ecclesiastical governance stood at the centre of the emerging conflict. The primary mode of 'opposition' to the policies of Charles I's personal rule (1629-40) was erastian: it presumed that control over the doctrine and discipline of the established church was for all intents and purposes a mark or right of sovereignty in the same manner as power of war and peace, power of appointing magistrates, or coinage. Seen in this light the ecclesiastical innovations of the personal rule constituted a treasonable attempt on the part of the Laudian episcopate to erect an ecclesiastical state within a state. The English Civil War was a war of religion in the sense that a significant number of those who waged it operated under the assumption that religion was the rightful provenance of the civil magistracy of king in parliament.
This article is a comparative analysis of Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and Sir John Davies A’Discovery of the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued ... until the Beginning of His Majestys Happy Reign. Over the past two decades, Nicholas Canny has argued for the centrality of Spenser’s View to the British colonial enterprise in Ireland during the seventeenth century, suggesting that Davies Discovery adhered closely to the ideas of Spenser on Irish affairs. These ideas were marked by an unabashed advocacy of military and judicial violence and a deep scepticism as to the effectiveness of the English common law, its procedures and values, in the settling of Irish affairs. This article challenges the interpretation of Canny arguing alternatively that these two texts offer, not only rival views on the efficacy of the English law in Ireland as an agent of cultural change, but also competing narrative models for writing the history of early modern Ireland, one ethnological deriving from Spenser’s View and one sovereignty-centered deriving from Davies Discovery.
This study traces the transition of treason from a personal crime against the monarch to a modern crime against the impersonal state. It consists of four highly detailed case studies of major state treason trials in England beginning with that of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, in the spring of 1641 and ending with that of Charles Stuart, King of England, in January 1649. The book examines how these trials constituted practical contexts in which ideas of statehood and public authority legitimated courses of political action that might ordinarily be considered unlawful - or at least not within the compass of the foundational statute of Edward III. The ensuing narrative reveals how the events of the 1640s in England challenged existing conceptions of treason as a personal crime against the king, his family and his servants, and pushed the ascendant parliamentarian faction towards embracing an impersonal conception of the state that perceived public authority as completely independent of any individual or group.
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