The Attempt on the Seven Londoners*

2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (574) ◽  
pp. 541-571
Author(s):  
Jordan Downs
Keyword(s):  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
War Effort ◽  
One Year ◽  
Politically Active

Abstract Historians of the English Revolution are well aware of the infamous events of 4 January 1642, when Charles I tried to arrest one peer and five Members of Parliament on charges of treason. The failed plan, later known as ‘the attempt on the Five Members’, led to an uproar in both Houses of Parliament and days of rioting in London that drove the king and his family to flee for their safety under the cover of night. Scholars are, however, less aware—perhaps even entirely unaware—of the events of January 1643, exactly one year later, when the king made a fateful attempt to arrest seven politically active Londoners for treason: Isaac Pennington, John Fowke, John Venn, Randall Mainwaring, Richard Browne, Edmund Harvey and Robert Tichborne. This article looks closely at the politics surrounding the king’s ‘second mistake’, and the ways in which City militants and the war party in Parliament manipulated events surrounding the affair in order to escalate the conflict. Much more than simply suggesting that Charles I was at best incorrigible, a king incapable of learning from his mistakes, the attempt on the seven Londoners reveals the significance of the struggle for popular mobilisation in the war-torn metropolis, and indeed the degree to which London had, by early 1643, become a cornerstone of Parliament’s war effort.

Fatal Adulteries: Sexual Politics in the English Revolution

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Samuel Fullerton
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Oliver Cromwell ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Sexual Histories ◽  
Charles Ii

Abstract This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.

“The Fittest Subject for A King's Quarrel”: An Essay on the Militia Controversy 1641-1642

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lois G. Schwoerer
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Military Power ◽  
Fundamental Issue ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
King Charles I

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.

Blackout: How Long, O Lord, How Long?

2012 ◽  
pp. 419-440
Author(s):  
Maurice N. Eisendrath
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
The Third ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
War Effort ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
One Year

This chapter presents a sermon by Maurice N. Eisendrath, delivered on the third Rosh Hashanah of the war. The situation of Canadian rabbis was precariously positioned between those of American preachers to the south and British preachers to the east. Canada, as part of the British Commonwealth, had long been part of the war effort, so the debate over whether or not to enter the war was not an issue, as it still was for colleagues in the United States. On the other hand, Canada was not directly affected by the war as was Britain, where one year earlier London had suffered a sustained air attack unprecedented in its devastation (a situation that certainly affected the mood in Toronto on the previous Rosh Hashanah, as the preacher reminds his listeners). Now, although the battles on the recently opened Eastern Front were of almost unimaginable ferocity, to many Canadians the war seemed distant; life at home seemed almost normal, as it did to many in the United States. This was precisely the mindset that Eisendrath set out to censure.

George Fox, Millenarian

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Larry Ingle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Small Step ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Widespread Interest

“Friends, take heed of setting up that which God will throw down, lest you be found fighters against God.”The nearly two decades comprising the period of the English Revolution were marked by a widespread interest in the timely appearance of the millennium, the thousand year period of Christ's promised earthly reign. From scholarly biblical studies of Daniel and Revelation to omens such as total eclipses of the sun and rumors of a Nottingham girl returning from the dead to warn a sinful world of approaching destruction, people in revolutionary England were bombarded with “evidence” of divine intervention and the expected arrival of the new kingdom. Parliament's victory in the English civil wars and its execution of Charles I in 1649 dramatically blew away the aura of divinity surrounding the monarchy and promised a new and glorious age. As they read prophecies in Revelation about a New Jerusalem where God would dry all tears and banish death, sorrow, and pain, enthusiasts of the seventeenth century anxiously looked for the Christ who promised, “Behold, I come quickly.” So prevalent were such notions that, as one authority has stressed, popular millenarianism seemed only a small step beyond received orthodoxy.

Charles I and the End of Conciliar Government in Scotland

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Lee
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Recent Survey ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Complex Problems ◽  
Ground Stone ◽  
The Government

That complex problems like the causes of the English civil war are constantly subject to reinterpretation is an obvious truism. Twenty years ago we were all embroiled in the gentry controversy; now it is the fashion to lay more stress on the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Lawrence Stone's recent survey is a case in point. Though his title, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, promises a long running start, this quondam disciple of R. H. Tawney places a surprising amount of emphasis on what he calls precipitants and triggers, which, it turns out, are the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Among these is the mishandling of the situation in Scotland. It is well known, of course, that the attempt to impose the new service book in 1637 touched off the chain of events which led to the Long Parliament, but historians have pointed out that this was by no means the first of Charles's errors there. At the very beginning of his reign came the act of revocation, which among other things rescinded “all grants made of crown property since 1540, … all disposition of ecclesiastical property and the erections of such property into temporal lordships.” No such sweeping change came about, of course, but in the view of most scholars this act, though in some sense successful, since it achieved the purpose both of increasing clerical stipends and of providing a machinery for their continuing adjustment, made the Scottish landed classes so mistrustful and fearful for their property that Charles could never gain their confidence. The comment of Sir James Balfour is always quoted: the act “in effect was the ground stone of all the mischief that followed after.”

Charles I and Local Government: The Draining of the East and West Fens

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
East And West

“The dissolution of this government,” suggested James Harrington, “caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government.” This dictum has recently received favorable attention not only from a historian who sought the causes of the English Revolution in the great social and economic changes of the sixteenth century, but also from one who described the Civil War as the product of the financial weakness of the Stuart monarchy. The agreement, in at least this one respect, of two such disparate interpreters is heartening. If Professors Stone and Russell are correct in their assessment of Harrington, then the task of the historian of the Civil War is that much simpler. In order to understand the outbreak of armed conflict in 1642 the historian must first understand the collapse of government in 1640.Many explanations for this collapse have already been advanced. What is interesting from a historiographical perspect is the limited number of variables considered. Whether regarding them as merely precipitants or as major casual factors, historians have concentrated almost exclusively on the great programs of Charles's government: the Book of Orders, the perfect militia, Laudianism, extraparliamentary taxation. This fixation remains largely unaffected even by the recent outpouring of local studies.

scholarly journals The Meanings of “Malignancy”: The Language of Enmity and the Construction of the Parliamentarian Cause in the English Revolution

2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-858 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Leng
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
New Model ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
War Effort

AbstractThis article deconstructs a character that was ubiquitous within parliamentarian pamphlet literature in the English civil war: the “malignant,” whose “party” had been identified in the Grand Remonstrance of December 1641 as conspiring to destroy parliament and the true religion. Thereafter, the existence of this party became central to parliamentarian justifications of the war effort and to the activities of radical extra-parliamentary activists. The malignant thus became bound up in contests within the parliamentarian coalition, something reflected by the issuing of new remonstrances by London's Presbyterians, Levellers, and the New Model Army, each of which hinged on the identification of a new enemy. Despite these efforts, the specter of the malignant continued to haunt parliamentarian discourse after the regicide, although its meaning became increasingly ambiguous, symptomatic of the challenges facing the post-regicidal regimes as they sought to transcend the ideological parameters of the civil war in the name of “settlement.”

The First “Royal”: Charles I as Celebrity

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 912-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Fourth Part ◽  
Famous Person

The seventeenth-century royalist book Eikon Basiliké (1649), probably the most successful political tract of the English revolution, was unlike any other royalist work published in the period. Its unique qualities suggest that it did something genuinely new. Those qualities may be best appreciated from the perspective of celebrity. While celebrity is ordinarily considered a modern phenomenon, the reception of Eikon Basiliké shows that the idea of celebrity arises in the early modern period, when a new relation between text and audience presented a commodified image of a famous person, an image that was consumed by its audience in a democratized marketplace. Ironically, Eikon Basiliké achieved commodification by relying on the traditional techniques of the art of memory—the fourth part of rhetoric—to create the illusion of closeness between king and subject that converted the king into a celebrity.

The Scottish Convention of Estates of 1630

2014 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-239
Author(s):  
Julian Goodare
Keyword(s):  
House Of Commons ◽  
Government Action ◽  
Charles I ◽  
One Year

Charles I summoned his Scottish estates three times before the Scottish revolution of 1638: in 1625, 1630 and 1633. This article examines the convention of estates of 1630, held one year after Charles had suspended his English parliament. Members of the convention agreed to renew the regular parliamentary taxation (though they refused to vote it for a longer period) and proved surprisingly co-operative over Charles's controversial revocation. However, there was a major explosion of opposition on religious grounds. Two presbyterian petitions attempted to sabotage the enforcement of the five articles of Perth, the crown's flagship liturgical policy; the petitions seemed likely to attract the support of a majority of the estates but were suppressed by high-handed government action. A resolution by the estates against the five articles of Perth might have had a similar effect to the House of Commons' resolutions of 1629 that led to the suspension of the English parliament. The article examines what is known about the dissidents and argues that continuity can be identified both with previous opponents of royal policy (notably in 1621) and with subsequent support for the National Covenant after 1638.

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