Noble Preoccupations

2021 ◽  
pp. 285-310
Author(s):  
Christine Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Adult Children ◽  
County Government ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Country House ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Active Involvement

The accession of Charles I exacerbated the tensions experienced between monarch and Parliament under James I and Herbert’s courtly career gradually faded following the deaths of the duke of Buckingham and earl of Pembroke. Chapter 13 examines Herbert’s attempts, after his return from France, to secure noble title, appointment to the Privy Council, and payment of his long-overdue allowances. It explores his efforts, as old age approached, to retain a place for himself among the rising stars at court, carve out a role for himself as a member of the Council of War, avoid active involvement in parliamentary criticism of the royal prerogative, offer occasional (unsolicited) advice to the king, and reassert his authority in county government in Montgomeryshire and Shropshire. It looks at his extensive remodelling of Montgomery Castle to provide a fashionable country house appropriate to his rank, his use of prestigious rental properties in London, and his efforts to increase the income derived from his neglected estates in England, Wales, and Ireland. It charts his difficult relationship with his wife and adult children and neglect of his patriarchal responsibilities, including his failure to marry his daughter and his longstanding dispute with his eldest son, Richard, over his allowance, debts, and inheritance of his mother’s estates. It briefly probes Herbert’s unsuccessful attempt to remarry in the late 1630s.

Archbishop John Spottiswoode: Chancellor of Scotland, 1635–1638

1970 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen B. Birchler
Keyword(s):  
Final Analysis ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
General Acceptance ◽  
Early Stages

Charles I, King of England and Scotland, appointed John Spottiswoode Chancellor of Scotland on December 23, 1634. This position was the last and highest bestowed upon a man who had served the crown faithfully for over three decades. Spottiswoode was ordained a minister in the Scottish Reformed (Presbyterian?) Church in 1583. In 1604 James named him Archbishop of Glasgow; in 1605, appointed him to the Privy Council; and in 1615, translated him to the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. In this position it fell to Spottiswoode to implement the Scottish ecclesiastical policy of James I, which consisted of an attempt to make the Scottish Kirk more episcopal in form. In the early stages of the transfromation which dealt with structure Spottiswoode was successful. However, in the final analysis, he failed because, even though the Five Articles of Perth which contained the liturgical changes were ratified by the Perth General Asembly of 1616 and by Parliament in 1621, they did not receive general acceptance. Nothing that Spottiswoode did quieted the vocal opposition among the clergy and laity.1 These groups became the nucleus of the opposition to Charles in the 1630s.

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.

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....

BEYOND THE PALE: JOHN CUSACKE AND THE LANGUAGE OF ABSOLUTISM IN EARLY STUART BRITAIN

1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA LEVY PECK
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
Colonial Government

John Cusacke, an Irish gentleman who was educated on the continent and worked on the fringes of the court of wards, constructed a striking re-reading of kingship, law, colonial government, and parliament in a series of tracts written between 1615 and 1647. His writings provide insight both into seventeenth-century colonial theory and early Stuart political thought. Shaped in the cauldron of Irish land struggles and continental political thought, Cusacke rejected Old English constitutionalism, arguing instead that Ireland was a colonial dependency of England. Further, to gain royal favour for various projects, Cusacke recast contemporary conceptions of parliament and common law, rejecting the centrality of custom, insisting that the king was the law maker and vigorously attacking Sir Edward Coke. Cusacke's writings reached the libraries of James I and Charles I, and their officials Sir Robert Naunton, master of the court of wards, and attorney-general Sir Robert Bankes. Cusacke's tracts graphically demonstrate the existence of an absolutist political discourse in early Stuart Britain applied not to issues of theology or of international law but to domestic politics.

Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625–1628

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Young
Keyword(s):  
James I ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

In contrast to their predecessors, who emphasized constitutional conflict and opposition in the parliaments of early Stuart England, revisionists emphasized harmony and cooperation. There was a problem with this new, anti-Whig orthodoxy from the outset, however, and that was the problem of trust. Defying the revisionist model of harmonious relations between Crown and Parliament, the M.P.s of early Stuart England perversely refused to trust James I and Charles I. Revisionists adopted two strategies to deal with this problem of trust. Conrad Russell exemplified the one strategy: he acknowledged the existence of distrust but treated it as a deep mystery requiring ingenious explanations. Surveying the reign of James I, Russell discovered “profound distrust, but it is hard to show how this distrust was implanted.” Perplexed by this enigma, Russell observed, “One of the most crucial, and one of the most difficult, questions of the early Stuart period is why this distrust developed.” For Russell, then, it was not natural for M.P.s to distrust the king. It was, instead, an unnatural attitude that had to be “implanted” or “developed.” In time, of course, Russell solved the mystery of distrust by providing a series of explanations: distrust resulted from the pressures of war, friction between the localities and the center, the functional breakdown of an inadequately financed government, court factionalism, and the growth of Arminianism. In Russell's view, the underlying problems that gave rise to distrust had more to do with circumstances and structures than with people, least of all James I and Charles I. A second strategy for dealing with the problem of trust is best exemplified by Kevin Sharpe: he solves the problem neatly by denying its existence. Steadfastly adhering to the revisionist model of harmony and cooperation, Sharpe claims that M.P.s did in fact behave the way that model predicts they should have. “In the early Stuart period,” writes Sharpe, “compromises between king and parliaments…were common because fundamental beliefs were shared and there was an atmosphere of trust.” Sharpe admits that there was an “erosion of trust” in the latter part of Charles's reign. “But,” he insists, “there is little evidence that it unfolds in the parliaments of early Stuart England.”

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