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Charles I has received a bad press from imperial historians. If anything, he has been blamed for the rapid growth in colonial population, much of which stemmed from religious discontent and economic dislocation for which he bore some responsibility. Those who organized colonizing ventures did so on their own initiative. Such credit as Charles has won is for allowing this to
69 Chapter 3 Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history in The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) and Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660) Marissa Nicosia T Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) is the first dramatic account of the defeat and execution of King Charles I.1 It is neither a conventional history play representing the King’s exploits nor a masque allegorising monarchical power, but rather a play pamphlet, a short, polemical play printed in the same pamphlet format as contemporary news. Like other play pamphlets from this era, The Famous
14 Hospitality and hauteur: tourism, cross-cultural space, and ethics in Irish poetry Charles I. Armstrong Tourism tends to be observed as an indispensable but regrettable epiphenomenon. For many states it provides a major source of income, facilitating commerce and jobs that make up an important part of the national economy. At the same time, there is a tendency to see tourism as involving a pernicious commodification of space, culture, and people’s lives in general. Common conceptions of tourism tend to circle around cliché and stereotype. In an increasingly
This book aims to revisit the county study as a way into understanding the dynamics of the English civil war during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a ‘county community’. It investigates the responses of the county’s governing elite and puritan religious establishment to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I’s Personal Rule. The second half of the book provides a rich and detailed analysis of the petitioning movements and side-taking in Cheshire during 1641-42. This important contribution to understanding the local origins and outbreak of civil war in England will be of interest to all students and scholars studying the English Revolution.
Staging the Revolution offers a reassessment of drama that was produced during the commonwealth and the first decade of the Restoration. It complements the focus of recent studies, which have addressed textual exchange and royalist and republican discourse. Not all parliamentarians were opposed to the theatre, and not all theatre was illegal under the commonwealth regimes. Equally, not all theatrical experience was royalist in focus. Staging the Revolution builds upon these findings to examine ways in which drama negotiated the political moment to explore the way in which drama was appropriated as a means of responding to the civil wars and reinventing the recent past and how drama was also reinvented as a consequence of theatre closure. The often cited notion that 1660 marked the return to monarchical government and the rebirth of many cultural practices that were banned under an austere, Puritan, regime was a product of the 1650s and 1660s and it was fostered in some of the dramatic output of the period. The very presence of these dramas and their textual transmission challenges the notion that all holiday pastimes were forbidden. Covering some of the work of John Dryden and William Davenant as well as lesser-known, anonymous and non-canonical writers, the book examines contemporary dramatic responses to the civil war period to show that, far from marking a new beginning, the Restoration is focused upon the previous thirty years.
The English Revolution was a catastrophic experience for the royalist clergy. Over the course of two tumultuous decades, they saw their king defeated and publicly executed, with his successor forced into exile. Meanwhile, the liturgy and government of their Church were systematically dismantled by parliament. Many found themselves silenced, ejected and even imprisoned at the hands of their enemies. This book examines one crucial way in which these conservative clergymen responded to the challenges posed by revolution: the preaching and printing of sermons. It argues that the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s forced royalists to reassess earlier assumptions and practices in relation to sermon culture. Preaching was now recognised as an especially vital means of defending, shaping and propagating the king’s cause. As the nation descended into civil war, the clergy sought to influence both popular allegiance and elite decision making from the pulpit. But sermons were also particularly well suited to negotiating the conditions of censorship and persecution with which royalists were confronted as their opponents began to gain the ascendancy. The Lord’s Battle thus provides a valuable new perspective on Civil War preaching, which has traditionally been depicted as the sole preserve of parliamentarians and puritans. At the same time, it represents a significant contribution to understandings of royalist politics, religion and print culture during the seventeenth century.
Twelve friends of the late Mark Kishlansky reconsider the meanings of England’s mid-seventeenth-century revolution. Their essays range widely: from shipboard to urban conflicts; from court sermons to local finances; from debates over hairstyles to debates over the meanings of regicide; from courtrooms to pamphlet wars; and from religious rights to human rights. Taken together, these essays indicate how we might improve our understanding of a turbulent epoch in political history by approaching it more modestly and quietly than historians of recent decades have often done.
Essex’s faction at Westminster. For his part, Essex needed the financial, political and potential military influence of the city, and the Scottish covenanter army, to counterbalance his rivals in Parliament. It is important to recognise that for all but a small minority of parliamentarians, politics after the first civil war aimed at finding a way back to a form of royal government. 19 The dynamics of such politics required not only limiting Charles I’s room to manoeuvre until the terms of settlement could be reached, but also
Christ The failure of the political presbyterians to seize control of the peace process in the summer of 1647 left the now dominant political Independent grandees, described by the radical printer John Harris as ‘the royal Independents’, in a position to impose a settlement on Charles I. 3 The grandees laid the groundwork for their settlement, including proposals for the church, in October 1647. These would form the basis of the religious propositions included with the ‘four bills’, which were sent to the king in
providence’. 2 Independents had disagreed with Presbyterians over the interpretation of God’s and scipture’s signs concerning conduct towards the Crown. Charles I had been executed and the kingly office abolished when ‘the providence of God has laid this title aside’. 3 A similar case has to be made for salus populi . The protection of people’s safety had required opposition to the king