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the kinds of sermons that this book has discussed were read, heard, circulated, recycled and remembered by audiences. It focuses on several cases studies of individual hearers and readers, both lay – like Evelyn and Sir John Gibson – and clerical, like Thomas Plume and William Sancroft. Specifically, it tries to ascertain how important the ‘royalist’ and ‘episcopalian’ dimensions of
parliament’s policies were believed to have unleashed. Although the size of the royalist army was still being derided in the London press in August, the laughter soon rang hollow as parliament met stern resistance at Edgehill in October and was then forced to orchestrate a panicked rear-guard defence of the city as the king advanced as far as Turnham Green. 1 For the king, however, the problems associated
taxation imposed by Charles I but the riotous behaviour of his troops. As the war progressed, fissures also began to open up between those advisors closest to the king. Certain questions of strategy and ideology served as pressure points for royalists well into the late 1640s and beyond: should the king push for outright victory or seek a compromise peace with parliament? What constituted acceptable terms in any
This is a full-length study of one of the most prolific and controversial polemical authors of the seventeenth century. It provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which Laudian and royalist polemical literature was created, tracing continuities and changes in a single corpus of writings from 1621 through to 1662. In the process, the author presents new perspectives on the origins and development of Laudianism and ‘Anglicanism’, and on the tensions within royalist thought. The book is neither a conventional biography nor simply a study of printed works, but instead constructs an integrated account of Peter Heylyn's career and writings in order to provide the key to understanding a profoundly polemical author. Throughout the book, Heylyn's shifting views and fortunes prompt a reassessment of the relative coherence and stability of royalism and Laudianism.
This article seeks to provide an account of the political biases at stake in the conceptualisation of medieval English history in Ethelwina, Or The House of Fitz-Auburne (1799), the first fiction of the prolific Gothic romancer-turned-Royal Body Guard T. J. Horsley, Curties. Having considered Curties‘s portrayal of the reign of King Edward III in the narrative in relation to formal historiographies of the period, the article turns to address the politics of Curties‘s appropriation of Shakespeare‘s Hamlet.
The Puritan Revolution of mid-seventeenth-century England produced an explosion of new and important political thinking. In addition to most famous thinkers, Thomas Hobbes, Sir Robert Filmer and the Levellers, there are other important figures who have been relatively neglected, of whom Anthony Ascham is one. This book is the first full-scale study of Ascham's political thought. Ascham's works were intended to convince lay Presbyterians and royalists to adhere to the policy of national pacification implemented from 1648 by the Independent 'party' within Parliament. From 1648 to 1650 Ascham's propaganda primarily dealt with the issue of the validity of oaths, and insisted on the reciprocal relation between obedience and protection. The first part of Ascham's Discourse focused on 'what things, and how farre a man may lawfully conform to the power and commands of those who hold a kingdome divided by civill warre'. Ascham adopted a twofold line of argument: in the first, he sought to demonstrate that war was consistent with natural law and scripture. Secondly, not all types of war were consistent with the Christian religion and the natural law of self-preservation, only the defensive war. Ascham's natural law theory, which he drew from Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes and John Selden, had therefore both civil and religious implications. Ascham proposed a synthesis between Grotius and Niccolò Machiavelli, underlining the priority of state order over political participation, and justifying war as a means of accessing power only to confirm the necessity of re-establishing order.
Early modern England was marked by profound changes in economy, society, politics and religion. It is widely believed that the poverty and discontent which these changes often caused resulted in major rebellion and frequent 'riots'. This book argues for the inherently political nature of popular protest through a series of studies of acts of collective protest, up to and including the English Revolution. Authority was always the first historian of popular protest. Explaining the complex relationship between the poor and their governors, the book overviews popular attitudes to the law and the proper exercise of authority in early modern England. A detailed reconstruction of events centring on grain riots in the Essex port of Maldon in the crisis of 1629 is then presented. Urbanisation, regional specialisation and market integration were the larger changes against which disorder was directed between 1585 and 1649. The book discusses the 'four Ps', population growth, price rise, poverty and protest, explaining their connection with population explosion to poverty and protest. The major European revolts of the so-called 'Oxfordshire rising' are then analysed. Popular politics might deploy 'weapons of the weak' in a form of everyday politics that was less dramatic but more continuous than 'riot'. On the very eve of the Civil War, large crowds, with underemployed clothworkers, attacked and plundered the houses of local Catholics and proto-royalists among the nobility and gentry. In a culture that proscribed protest and prescribed obedience, public transcripts could be used to legitimise a popular political agency.
recrimination within government itself, I argue that hard-line Royalists saw oblivion as a dangerous capitulation to ‘fanaticism’, the political and religious impulse that, by their estimation, had resulted in ‘rebellion’ and ‘usurpation’ in the early 1640s.3 I suggest that the election of the Cavalier Parliament in early 1661 provided these Royalists with an opportunity to alleviate such anxieties by effectively seizing the authority to speak for the past from Charles II and those who had supported a conciliatory settlement a year earlier. This took the form of legislation
serve as ‘a warning to us hereafter’. 4 The mixed emotions of these two churchmen in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration are understandable. The previous two decades had been a profoundly dark and disorientating time for clergymen who shared their royalist and episcopalian sympathies. They had watched in horror as parliament resisted, defeated and finally executed the king, while at the same time