The Origins of the Petition of Right Reconsidered

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Guy

Whatever their differing interpretations of the prehistory of the Civil War, historians of early Stuart England have long recognized the unsolved problems raised by the parliament of 1628. Did Charles I abuse the legal procedures of King's Bench in the five knights’ case in order to defy the spirit of English ‘due process’ legislation? In starting the chain of events which led to the petition, who were the innovators? Why did the house of commons pass resolutions which were an absolute denial of Charles I's right of discretionary imprisonment in any circumstances? And why did M.P.s endure the ugliest parliamentary scenes before 1640 in their desire to secure an explanatory document in the spirit of their resolutions? In view of the wealth of literature on the petition, it is perhaps surprising that these issues have never been satisfactorily addressed.

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer

The struggle between King and Parliament in 1641-42 for command of the militia was to King Charles I “the Fittest Subject for a King's Quarrel.” As the King himself and a group of pamphleteers, preachers and members of Parliament realized, the controversy was not just a contest for control of military power. The fundamental issue was a change in England's government, a shift in sovereignty from King or King-in-Parliament to Parliament alone. As Charles explained, “Kingly Power is but a shadow” without command of the militia. His contemporaries, representing various political allegiances, also testified to the significance of the contest over the militia. They described it as the “avowed foundation” of the Civil War, “the greatest concernment” ever faced by the House of Commons, and the “great quarrel” between the King and his critics. To some men it was this dispute over military authority and the implications for government which were inherent in it, rather than disagreements about religion, taxes or foreign policy, that made civil war unavoidable.Concern about military authority first erupted in the fall of 1641 in response to a series of events – rumors of plots involving the King, the presence in London of disbanded soldiers who had returned from the war with Scotland, the “Incident” in Scotland, and above all the rebellion in Ireland which required the levying of an army to subdue those rebels.


1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Stone

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the role played by the Court and government office in the social and political evolution of Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Professor Trevor-Roper has treated office under the Crown as a smooth highroad to economic advancement, one of the principal causes of such rise of the gentry as may have occurred. According to this view, the political antecedents of the English Civil War are best interpreted in terms of the polarities of Court and Country: it was reaction against an overgrown and corruptly lucrative Court that inspired the opposition in 1640; it was desire to dismantle the whole centralizing apparatus which inspired the policy of the Independents in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Others, including Professor Aylmer and myself, have subjected officialdom to detailed inspection and have concluded that its rewards were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth and Charles I, its personnel was restricted in numbers, and its more spectacular beneficiaries were a very small minority. The recently published letter of Sir Edward Stanhope to Thomas Viscount Wentworth, advising him to refuse the Deputyship of Ireland in 1631, has cast a flood of light on contemporary attitudes towards the acceptance of at least one high office. Forty-six years before, when Henry Carey, 1st Earl of Hunsdon, was offered the Lord Chamberlainship of the Royal Household, he received a similar letter of warning from a close follower.


1976 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Michael Smart

Edward Gee, rector at Eccleston, near Chorley in Lancashire, from 1643 until 1660, was born in 1612 or 1613, at Banbury (Oxon.). During the years following the reorganisation of the Church in Lancashire along Presbyterian lines in 1646, he achieved recognition as a leading member of the clergy in that county. In 1650 he was said to possess the parsonage-house and glebe at Eccleston, with tithes and a water cornmill. Although he had agreed with the parliamentary cause in the Civil War, he opposed the more revolutionary changes carried out in 1648 and 1649, years in which the House of Commons was purged by the army, king Charles I executed, and the monarchy and the House of Lords abolished. The decision of the new republican Commonwealth regime to exact a promise of allegiance, known as the Engagement (first, in 1649 from a number of important Englishmen, and then in 1650 from all adult males in England) provoked a major pamphlet debate. This Engagement Controversy was the occasion of a lengdiy and detailed exchange of opinions and interpretations concerning the whole problem of how the subject should in conscience behave with respect to a drastic change of government, or, as many would have it, a usurpation of civil authority.


1956 ◽  
Vol 10 (37) ◽  
pp. 21-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.R. MacCormack

When the Irish rebellion broke out in October 1641, Charles I was in Scotland, where, closely watched by agents of his dissident English parliament, he was attempting, by a policy of tardy retreats and unwonted largesse, to make of the Scottish kirk a pillar of the throne, and to transform wily old enemies like Argyle, Hamilton and Leslie into trusty retainers. Accordingly, when the Scottish estates—then in close liason with Westminster—suggested that the English parliament be entrusted with the management of the Irish war, Charles quickly agreed and sent a message to that effect to London.In the house of commons, on November 1, the radicals, aware that Ireland formed a common focus of interest for the Scots, the London merchants and many of their supporters in the house, received the news of the rising with ‘smooth brows’. The well-known London interest in Ulster had long been shared by the Scots who had, indeed, attempted to supplant the Londoners in 1638. Hamilton himself appears to have fancied himself as Strafford’s successor.


Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....


2002 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 727-754 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEAN KELSEY

By the winter of 1648–9, demands for retributive justice on Charles I and his supporters had built to a crescendo. But regicide was generally regarded as an extremely bad idea, and the king's trial was contrived as a final bid for peaceful settlement, not a prelude to king-killing. In return for a place at the heart of a new constitutional order, Charles I was required to abdicate his negative voice by pleading to charges brought on the sole authority of the House of Commons. This was a high-risk strategy inspired and justified by the weakening of opposition to the trial in the House of Lords, the city of London and at Edinburgh, and by some of the encouraging signals emanating from deep within the royalist camp itself. However, in their anxiety to avoid having their ultimate sanction forced upon them, the commissioners of the high court of justice gave the king rather more opportunities to plead to the charges against him than was consistent with the maintenance of their own authority. Rather than persuading him to give in, they encouraged him to stand firm, with fatal consequences. Far from being a providential act of vengeance, or indeed the inexorable fate of a man predestined to martyrdom, the execution of Charles I was a highly adventitious occurrence – predictable, perhaps, yet contingent on a wide range of unpredictable circumstances.


2021 ◽  

The civil war between Charles I and his parliament broke out in England in 1642; rebellions were already underway in Scotland from 1637, and in Ireland from 1641. The conflict culminated with the trial and execution of the king in 1649. Through the 1650s Britain was governed as a republic, then as a Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell from 1653. But the regime unraveled after Cromwell’s death in 1658, ultimately leading to the Restoration of monarchy under Charles II in 1660. The civil wars were fought on the page as intensely as on the battlefield, producing an outpouring of rich and diverse literature, including (to barely scratch the surface): the poetry and prose of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, the cavalier poets, Katherine Philips, Margaret Cavendish, Lucy Hutchinson, Gerrard Winstanley, Thomas Hobbes, the Earl of Clarendon, Marchamont Nedham. This vibrant and important body of writing was, for much of the 20th century, neglected and poorly understood. The closure of the theaters in 1642, the collapse of royal court culture, and a critical fashion that dismissed writing sullied by political engagement: these factors all produced the illusion of a hiatus in the literary tradition, a “cavalier winter.” These misplaced assumptions, however, have been overturned since the 1980s by a new wave of scholarly interest, galvanized by a renewed recognition of the value and excitement of politically engaged writing. Scholarship informed by different branches of historicism, combining literary criticism variously with New Historicism, with the history of political thought, with social history, and with book history, have all transformed our appreciation of civil war literature. As such, work by historicist critics—and by historians—is inescapably central to this bibliography, and fundamental to our understanding of the period’s literature. But, as will become apparent, plenty of space remains for a diversity of approaches including gender studies, queer studies, critical theory, reception studies, and formalism. This bibliography is organized thematically, rather than around major individual authors, of whom there are many, most of whom appear in multiple sections. For this reason, no attempt has been made to include scholarly editions, though reader-friendly anthologies are listed, many of which make valuable scholarly contributions. Key studies on politics and literature appear in Literature and Politics: Essential Studies, followed by more focused sections on royalism, cavalier poetry, republicanism, and Cromwellian writing. Other sections cover scholarship on printing and pamphleteering, on radicalism, on women’s writing, on gender and sexuality, on drama, and on international and colonial contexts.


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