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Noah Millstone Chapter 8 The politic history of early Stuart parliaments Noah Millstone T he second session of the 1621 parliament ended in acrimony. Over December, communications between King James and his House of Commons became increasingly hostile, culminating in a scene of symbolic violence, as James ripped the lower House’s final protest from their Journal. What, exactly, had gone wrong? Robert Zaller and Conrad Russell, the two most prominent modern students of the session, trace the dispute to a series of misunderstandings leading to a clash of
Christmas Day 1600 to warn James VI that his title to the throne was imperilled. As a covert response, Essex suggested that James write a breezy reply enquiring after ‘Stowes Chronicle which I heare is newly reprinted and enlarged’. 17 Essex’s scholarly associates have also been linked to the development of ‘politic history’ or ‘civic’ history (the latter Francis
This book approaches the rich and diverse figure of the earl by looking at a wealth of diverse visual and textual manifestations of Essex produced during the sixteenth century and up to the present day. It resituates his life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural and political milieu. Included in the discussion are not just those texts of which Essex is the subject, such as poems, portraits or films, but also those texts produced by Essex himself, including private letters, poems and entertainments. The book first offers important insights into the composition and ethos of the Essex circle. It then provides an important intervention in the debate about the relationship between Essex and the theatre and Essex and Shakespeare, considering his role as a patron of a company of players. The book also explains Essex's use of non-professional theatrical entertainments at court in 1595 to promote an agenda he had shared with Sidney by campaigning for an increased level of English involvement in international affairs. It deals with a frequently neglected entertainment called the device of the Indian Prince, referred to here as Seeing Love as it dramatises the story of the blind Indian prince. Finally, the book offers a detailed examination of Essex's relationship with another dangerously public discourse, 'politic history', by tracing the influence of a range of competing texts.
ambivalent relationship with providentialism than that displayed by most chroniclers, underplaying the governing hand of God over human affairs. When borrowing from Vergil for his continuation of the Chronicle of John Hardyng (1543), Richard Grafton imposed a clearer eschatological framework that reflected his evangelical priorities.41 In inclining to emphasise the human, rather than the divine, movers of events, Vergil anticipated the emergence of another species of historical writing: the politic history (a recent, rather than contemporary, coinage) was distinguished
Jason Peacey Chapter 9 ‘That memorable parliament’: medieval history in parliamentarian polemic, 1641–42 Jason Peacey I n 1647, Edward Chamberlayne professed that ‘The most probable way to know what will be, is to observe what hath beene’, adding that ‘The historian, by running backe to ages past, and then forward to present Affaires, comparing one with the other, can give a verdict of the State, well neer Prophetick’.1 Such sentiments were unremarkable in an age drawn to politic history, and scholars have done much to analyse the work of poets and writers
were not only the endless cycle of mutual excoriation generated by warring conspiracy theories but also a mode of politic analysis that could be applied just as well to the parliament as to the wider political scene. On Millstone’s account, Sir John Eliot’s Negotium posterorum was but part of what was projected as a politic history of parliament since Elizabeth’s reign, an account intended to explicate the nature of the current conjuncture and what to do about it, as well as provide an apologia for Eliot’s own conduct and present predicament. Nor were such activities
with critical censure whenever Drayton played fast and loose with the facts and perpetuated myths.32 The fact that antiquarians concerned themselves with the ‘small things’ for which Camden found little room in his Annales makes our second paradox. Insofar as ‘us’ is not Sir Geoffrey Elton, the early modern springs and roots of history as we know it are to be found almost anywhere but in history as ‘politic history’. There is potentially more history in Britannia than in the Annales, and certainly more social and economic history.33 Arthur B. Ferguson has argued that
demonstrates the ways in which the ciphers deployed by Penelope in her letters provide examples of the ways in which royal iconography was re-appropriated in order to critique the queen. Lastly in this group Alexandra Gajda offers a detailed examination in Chapter 10 of Essex’s relationship with another dangerously public discourse, ‘politic history’, by tracing the influence of a range of competing texts
records that the Egintons were paid as much as £12,000 for their work at Fonthill Abbey, but the source of this information is unclear. 13 For details of this commission see Baylis, ‘Glass-Painting in Britain’, pp. 132–137. 14 For gothic politic history see Brooks, The
and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, CS 42 (4th series, 1991), esp. pp. 17–33. 2 See, S. L. Goldberg, ‘Sir John Hayward, “Politic Historian”’, Review of English Studies, NS 6 (1955), 233–54; F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), pp. 259–69 and ‘Hayward, Daniel and the beginnings of politic history in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 50 (1987), 1–34; D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, 1990), pp. 106–15; and Lisa Richardson, ‘Sir John Hayward and Elizabethan