2. “The Nursery of Beggary”: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-47
Author(s):  
William C. Carroll
Keyword(s):  

This book intends to provide a comprehensive reappraisal of the work of the Renaissance poet and politician Sir Fulke Greville, whose political career stretched from the heyday of the Elizabethan age into the Stuart period. While Greville’s literary achievements have traditionally been overshadowed by those of his more famous friend Sir Philip Sidney, his oeuvre comprises a highly diverse range of works of striking force and originality, comprising a sonnet sequence, a biography of Sir Philip Sidney, a series of philosophical treatises, and two closet dramas set in the Ottoman Empire. The essays gathered in this volume investigate the intersections between poetics, poetic form, and political and religious thought in Greville’s work, arguing how they participate in all of the most important debates of the post-Reformation period, such as the nature of grace and the status of evil; the exercise of sovereignty and scope and limits of political power; and the nature of civil and religious idolatry. They examine Greville’s career as a courtier and patron, and foreground both his own concerns with the posthumous life of authors and their works, and his continuing importance during the Interregnum and Restoration periods.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL QUESTIER

The relationship between Arminianism and Roman Catholicism in the early Stuart period has long been a source of historiographical controversy. Many contemporaries were in no doubt that such an affinity did exist and that it was politically significant. This article will consider how far there was ideological sympathy and even rhetorical collaboration between Caroline Catholics and those members of the Church of England whom both contemporaries and modern scholars have tended to describe as Arminians and Laudians. It will suggest that certain members of the English Catholic community actively tried to use the changes which they claimed to observe in the government of the Church of England in order to establish a rapport with the Caroline regime. In particular they enthused about what they perceived as a strongly anti-puritan trend in royal policy. Some of them argued that a similar style of governance should be exercised by a bishop over Catholics in England. This was something which they believed would correct the factional divisions within their community and align it more effectively with the Stuart dynasty.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Raquel Sánchez Ruiz

This paper analyses evaluative adjectives in George Ridpath’s political writings during the War of the Spanish Succession (1710-1713), in a corpus which comprises two journals, four years and 291 numbers, with the purpose of examining how this author used language as a weapon to shape and manipulate Great Britain’s public opinion during the Stuart period. For that, I have employed Wilson’s approach to Political Discourse Analysis (2001) and van Dijk’s polarisation (1999) as well as Allan and Burridge’s understanding of euphemism and dysphemism (1991). The results permit to value Ridpath’s contribution as a very influential but controversial pamphleteer who wrote about the War of the Spanish Succession within Great Britain’s context.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Stephen Hampton

This Introduction opens with an account of the consecration of Exeter College Chapel in 1624 and explains why the ceremony cannot accurately be described as either ‘Laudian’ or ‘Puritan,’ since it reflects theological emphases associated with both groups. It goes on to establish that the historiography of the Early Stuart period has generally acknowledged the presence of English clergy who were committed to both an orthodox Reformed understanding of grace and the established polity of the Church, although no dedicated analysis of their religious tradition has been undertaken before the present study. The ten significant Reformed Conformist theologians who will be the focus of the study are then introduced, and the personal links between them set out.


1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. Young

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.”


1998 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 625-651 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANTHONY MILTON

This article engages with recent work on the nature of religious censorship in the early Stuart period that has emphasized that the government possessed neither the power nor the will to control systematically what was written. It is argued here, instead, that there is evidence of attempts to control the presses' output of religious materials during the Laudian period and earlier, by all parties within the Church of England. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revive a simplistic view of government ‘control’, but rather to study the means by which licensers could exert an influence over what would be printed with an aura of mainstream legitimacy. Texts were often interfered with by official licensers with a variety of motives. Interference might sometimes be essentially ‘benign’, conferring legitimacy on marginal works by massaging their contents, or texts might be modified in order to make their authors appear to endorse the views of their opponents. The issue of whether it was practically possible to publish work clandestinely is here seen to be something of a red herring, since by publishing in this illicit fashion authors were effectively resigning their right to be considered as spokesmen of the orthodox mainstream. It is the control and manipulation of the licensing process which emerges as one important means by which the religious middle ground was defined and controlled in the early Stuart period.


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