II. The Decline of Parliamentary Government under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts

1957 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. W. K. Hinton
Keyword(s):  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Parliamentary Government ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Image Position ◽  
William Iii

Parliament governs by means of acts of parliament. When the number of acts of parliament increases over a period we may speak of a rise of parliamentary government, and when it decreases, of a decline. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts parliamentary government declined. Taking into account the length of their reigns, Elizabeth and James I passed fewer acts than either Henry VIII, Edward VI or Mary. Charles I passed fewer again. Under Charles II, however, the number increased, and under William III it was much higher than ever before. Thus:

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
James I ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

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....

Locke the Plotter? Ashcraft's Revolutionary Politics Reconsidered

Locke Studies ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 51-110
Author(s):  
Philip Milton
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Overwhelming Majority ◽  
Primary Interest ◽  
Political Biography ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
William Iii

In the twenty years since it was published, Richard Ashcraft’s Revolutionary Politics and Locke’ s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ has become established as a major contribution to Locke scholarship. Ashcraft’s primary interest was in political theory, and though he emphasized that he was not writing a political biography he did insist that Locke’s political thought ‘cannot be grasped in any way other than on the basis of biographical evidence’. One of his main aims was to dispel what he called the ‘myth of Locke’s political innocence’ and he sought to portray him as a committed political activist, not a ‘detached philosopher’. ‘We have become accustomed’, he wrote, ‘to seeing a tapestry in which Locke is pictured alongside Newton or Boyle. The historical Locke, however, was more often in the company of Ferguson or Wildman or some obscure tradesmen.’ The comparison is a striking one. Robert Ferguson has gone down in history as Ferguson the Plotter, and John Wildman was someone who, in the words of his biographer, was ‘plotter alike against Charles I, Cromwell, Charles II, James II and William III’. Both were involved in the Rye House plot and Monmouth’s rebellion, though Wildman preferred to leave the risks to others. If Ashcraft is to be believed, Locke was similarly involved, and so too were most of his friends: ‘The fact is that the majority of Locke’s friends were political activists, and of these, the overwhelming majority had been members of the Green Ribbon Club and were participants in the Rye House conspiracy’.

King Charles II, Fundator et Patronus (1630-1685)

1960 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-45 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Royal Society ◽  
General Character ◽  
James I ◽  
Interest In Science ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Charles Ii

Charles II ranks as founder of the Royal Society because he granted to it the charter which incorporated it and gave it its name. Its arms declare their origin; if not devised or proposed by him, at least they were consciously granted by him. The mace, which is placed before the President of the Society at all meetings of the Society and of Council, was also given to the Society by Charles as its founder. These (and other) benefactions were due not so much to any profound interest in science on Charles’s part as to his general character and to the tendencies of his time, and more especially to his friendship with some of the royalists among the founding members of the Society. He was born on 29 May 1630, the son of Charles I, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, and of his French queen, Henrietta Maria; his grandparents were James I, ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’, Anne of Denmark, who was almost a nonentity, Henri IV, one of the most genial of men and the ablest of kings, and Marie de Medicis, at all times a source of trouble.

THE PURITAN PARADIGM OF ENGLISH POLITICS, 1558–1642

2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-550 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS TYACKE
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Church Reform ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
English Politics

ABSTRACTTraditionally puritanism has been treated as a religious phenomenon that only impinged on the world of that ‘secular’ politics to a limited extent and mainly in relation to church reform. Such an approach, however, is to employ a misleadingly narrow definition which ignores the existence of a much more all-embracing puritan political vision traceable from the mid-sixteenth century. First clearly articulated by some of the Marian exiles, this way of thinking interpreted the Bible as a manifesto against tyranny whether in church or state. Under the successive regimes of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, puritans can be found who continued to judge the actions of government by the same biblical criterion, which also helps to explain among other things their prominence in opposing unparliamentary taxation. Puritan ideology itself was transmitted down the generations partly via a complex of family alliances, underpinned by teaching and preaching, and this in turn provided a basis for political organization. Moreover, the undiminished radical potential of puritanism is evident from responses to the assassination of Buckingham in 1628. Given these antecedents the subsequent resort to Civil War appears less surprising than historians often claim.

Robert Sanderson (1587–1663)

2022 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-86
Author(s):  
Norman Doe
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Jeremy Taylor ◽  
Personal Rule

Over the course of the reigns of the last two Tudors and first three Stuarts – just in excess of a century – the national established Church of England was disestablished twice and re-established twice. Following the return to Rome under Mary, Elizabeth's settlement re-established the English Church under the royal supremacy, set down church doctrine and liturgy, embarked on a reform of canon law and so consolidated an ecclesial polity which many today see as an Anglican via media between papal Rome and Calvinist Geneva. However, as a compromise, the settlement contained in itself seeds of discord: it outlawed Roman reconciliation and recusancy; it extended lay and clerical discipline by the use of ecclesiastical commissioners; and it drove Puritans to agitate for reform on Presbyterian lines. While James I continued Elizabeth's policy, disappointing both Puritans and Papists, Charles I married a Roman Catholic, sought to impose a prayer book on Calvinist Scotland, asserted divine-right monarchy, engaged in an 11-year personal rule without Parliament and favoured Arminian clergy. With these and other disputes between Crown and Parliament, civil war ensued, a directory of worship replaced the prayer book, episcopacy and monarchy were abolished and a Puritan-style republic was instituted. The republic failed, and in 1660 monarchy was restored, the Church of England was re-established and a limited form of religious toleration was introduced under the Clarendon Code. In all these upheavals, understandings of the nature, source and authority of human law, civil and ecclesiastical, were the subject of claim and counter-claim. Enter Robert Sanderson: a life begun under Elizabeth and ended under Charles II, a protagonist who felt the burdens and benefits of the age, Professor of Divinity at Oxford and later Bishop of Lincoln, and a clerical-jurist who thought deeply on the nature of human law and its place in a cosmic legal order – so much so, he may be compared with three of his great contemporaries: the lawyer Matthew Hale (1609–1676), the cleric Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1678).

Welcoming the King

2018 ◽  
pp. 186-204
Author(s):  
Andrew McRae
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
James I ◽  
Political Literature ◽  
Dynamic Form ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
William Iii

The seventeenth century was the great age of English panegyric, and no events stimulated writers of this genre more than royal successions. This chapter considers panegyric as a dynamic form of political expression: poems, at their best, engaged with contemporary debates about the authority of the monarchy and relations between subjects and their rulers. The chapter focuses on panegyrics produced for the three Stuart reigns that began with monarchs arriving in England from elsewhere: those of James I in 1603, Charles II in 1660, and William III and Mary II in 1688–9. The chapter argues that the century’s manifold political changes placed intense strains on panegyric, and concludes by considering two poets who, under conditions of intense personal pressure, openly rejected it. Despite their different politics, George Wither and Aphra Behn both reflect valuably upon the limitations of this vital genre of political literature.

Arnold Quellin's Statues at Glamis Castle

1984 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. R. Apted
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Trafalgar Square ◽  
New Evidence

SummaryOn 23rd December 1685 Arnold Quellin, Carver, signed an agreement with Patrick, Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, to provide statues of the four Stuart kings and a bust of the Earl himself, to be completed by 1st June the following year for a fee of £160. Although Quellin died in September 1686, the contract was evidently completed since all four statues and the bust are recorded at Glamis Castle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two of the statues, the James I and Charles I, as well as the bust are still at the castle today. Of the missing statues, one, the James II, is known from an engraving to resemble closely the James attributed to Grinling Gibbons which now stands in front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, itself one of a series of statues of monarchs depicted as Roman conquerors. The other, the Charles II, may possibly have been similar to the Quellin Charles now at the Guildhall.The document and statues provide new evidence of a sculptor popular in his day, whose reputation has been largely obscured by the fame of his master, Grinling Gibbons.

The Local Structure of Power

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-147
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Local Structure ◽  
Geographic Area ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
The Law ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

The Stuart kings, Charles I and James I, had sought to rationalize and centralize power in England’s colonial empire, but the Glorious Revolution put an end to their efforts. The new monarch, William III, had a different objective—to protect Protestantism and defeat the ambitions of France’s king, Louis XIV. As long as colonies supported that objective, William was willing to allow them substantial self-government. As a result, power became localized as juries in some colonies and local judges in others were given control over the law. Pennsylvania was the only colony in which a central court exercised power over a broad geographic area.

Buckingham the Masquer

1998 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean MacIntyre
Keyword(s):  
James I ◽  
Charles I

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), favorite of James I and of Charles I as both prince and king, used skill in dancing, especially in masques, to compete for and retain royal favor. Masques in which he danced and masques he commissioned displayed his power with the rulers he ostensibly served. His example and teaching taught Prince Charles that through masque dancing he might win his father's favor, and probably made Charles believe that his appearance in court masques of the 1630s would similarly win his subjects' favor.

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