John Bramhall and The Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
British History ◽  
English History ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Conscious Level

It is a truism that the most distinctive features of the peculiarly English genius in politics are moderation and compromise. The sources of this spirit must be sought throughout the whole fabric of English history, but it should be easier to examine some of the stages by which it emerged onto the conscious level of political thought. How long have Englishmen spoken of political moderation as a good in itself? Herbert Butterfield awards to the Whigs the honor of contributing to modern British history their instinct for compromise. Locke has often been thought of as doing the same. But Toryism has come in for its share of the credit, and a student of John Dryden's thought has suggested that the Tory Dryden well illustrates the tradition of avoiding political extremes and reconciling liberty and authority. This is a fruitful suggestion, and it may be carried further by seeking evidence of this tradition in the predecessors of the Tories, the royalists of the Civil War period. These latter, far from being diehards or extremists, were the advocates of a political mean, and tried to defend at once the king's authority and the subject's liberty. In some degree, this is now widely conceded, but the significance of this moderation is not as clear as it ought to be, because its nature is not understood. When it is understood, it will be possible to say that the most important characteristic of seventeenth-century English royalism was not its defense of the king, but its defense of political moderation and limited government.

Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ian Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
English History ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Social ◽  
Civil War Soldiers ◽  
Parish Registers

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.

Could Charles I Be Trusted? The Royalist Case, 1642-1646

1966 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
General Public ◽  
Veto Power ◽  
English History ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Constitutional Analysis

The followers of King Charles I in the Civil War, long among the whipping boys of English history, have been receiving better treatment since the Whig interpretation of the seventeenth century lost its pristine vigour. This is particularly true of their constitutional position as set forth in the great outpouring of manifestoes and pamphlets during the war. Edward Hyde, perhaps the key figure in this aspect of royalism, has recently profited from a capable defence of his opinions and policy. Similarly, pamphleteers such as Henry Ferne, Dudley Digges, and John Bramhall are now fairly well known, thanks largely to J. W. Allen's pioneering study of their writings. From work like this it is clear that the royalist spokesmen accepted the increased importance of Parliament, the end of prerogative courts and nonparliamentary taxation, and the supremacy of common and statute law. Like their armies in the field, they were defending the monarchy as overhauled in 1641, not as the Tudors left it, much less as James I may have conceived it. Indeed the classical doctrine of the mixed or balanced constitution, glorified by Blackstone and widely accepted until nearly 1830, is now credited, not to Philip Hunton, but to the royalists. Such rehabilitation has done much to remove the patronizing label of “wrong but romantic,” which was once the best which they could hope for from historians or the general public.Allen and those who followed him naturally concentrated on the legal and constitutional analysis of the origins of authority, the veto power, sovereignty, nonresistance, and so forth.

scholarly journals Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish: Civil War and Enemy Commiseration

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Yousef Deikna
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Human Life ◽  
British History ◽  
Margaret Cavendish ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
Difficult Times

Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681) and Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), prolific writers from the seventeenth century, came of age in one of the most difficult times in British history. Blair Worden, an eminent historian, writes, “The political upheaval of the mid-seventeenth century has no parallel in English history,” and none of the previous conflicts “has been so far-reaching, or has disrupted so many lives for so long, or has so imprinted itself on the nation’s memory” (2009, p. 1). Hutchinson and her husband, John, were on the side of the parliamentarians in the Civil War while Cavendish and her husband, William, were stout royalists. Instead of showing aggressive stances against their enemies, Hutchinson and Cavendish engaged expansively in a language of empathizing with the enemy in order to lessen the extreme partisanship of that period. Focusing specifically on Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, and Cavendish’s Sociable Letters, among other writings, I argue that during the political impasse which characterized the English Civil War writings, the perspectives advanced by Hutchinson and Cavendish highlight the valuation of human life regardless of political allegiance, augmenting the odds for peaceful co-existence, in which empathy is foregrounded over, and at times alongside, loss and agony as a result of the Civil War aftermath. Suzanne Keen’s groundbreaking research in Empathy and The Novel draws upon examples from the Victorian period to illustrate her understanding of empathy, but she also states that “I feel sure they also pertain to the hopes of authors in earlier periods as well” (2007, p. 142), which is a position taken wholeheartedly in this article. Using a cognitive literary approach where authorial empathic constructions are analyzed, Hutchinson’s and Cavendish’s closely read texts portray an undeniable level of commiseration with the enemy with the goal of abating violence and increasing cooperation and understanding.

The Last English Civil War

Daedalus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Fukuyama
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Normative Factors ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This essay examines why England experienced a civil war every fifty years from the Norman Conquest up until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, and was completely stable after that point. The reasons had to do with, first, the slow accumulation of law and respect for the law that had occurred by the seventeenth century, and second, with the emergence of a strong English state and sense of national identity by the end of the Tudor period. This suggests that normative factors are very important in creating stable settlements. Rational choice explanations for such outcomes assert that stalemated conflicts will lead parties to accept second- or third-best outcomes, but English history, as well as more recent experiences, suggests that stability requires normative change as well.

Philemon Holland’s Livy and Sir Francis Nethersole’s Problemes

2020 ◽  
pp. 142-163
Author(s):  
John-Mark Philo
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
The Government ◽  
Formed Part

Chapter 6 turns to Philemon Holland’s (1552–1637) enormous Romane Historie (1600), the first full-scale translation of Livy into English, completed in the final years of the sixteenth century. This chapter examines the use to which Francis Nethersole (bap. 1587, d. 1659) put Holland’s Tudor translation at the height of the English Civil War. Nethersole’s appeal to Livy in 1648 formed part of an ever-intensifying engagement with the AUC in the mid-seventeenth century. Nethersole harnessed sections from Books 8 and 9 of the AUC to a contemporary debate among the Parliamentarians concerning the punishment of Delinquents. These selections from Holland’s Livy are located in the wider context of the intense engagement with Livy’s history in the mid-seventeenth century, from Leveller pamphlets celebrating the expulsion of kings to royalist defences of absolute monarchy. With his account of Rome’s transition from monarchy to a consular republic, Livy was readily exploited in debates concerning the government and constitution of England, serving as one of the most prominent authorities of political thought during the English Civil War.

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