Introduction

This chapter explains how the political changes of early Stuart England can be usefully examined from a cognitive perspective, with questions of authority and sovereignty being determined not just by what individuals or institutions do but also by how they are understood and expected to think, and in particular how they were expected to come to decisions. In doing so, it links early modern and contemporary understandings of state formation in seventeenth-century England to processes of decision-making and counsel, as well as the management of personal and public opinion, thereby explicating the mental mechanics of early modern governance. More than being simply a form of political thought or doctrine, intellection is presented as a shared attention to cognitive processes amidst historical moments in which we can see particular patterns of thinking—and attention to them as politics—begin to emerge.

Equivocation, Donne, and the Political Interior

As a tactic that sought to enable individuals to answer judicial interrogatories while simultaneously disguising the full substance and meaning of their answers, the Catholic doctrine of equivocation responded to the precarious position of Catholics in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. In providing a highly contested model for the shielding of one’s thoughts, equivocation also demonstrates the centrality of human cognition to the religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century. Writers such as John Donne (Ignatius His Conclave) and Francis Bacon (Essays) evidence a similarly deep concern with the mind and its deliberative processes as marking boundaries for political citizenship and royal power. Viewed in these terms, mental reservation and equivocation become less a matter of theology than one of statecraft.

Conclusion

Concerns over equivocation, captured letters, and religious division continued to attend the relationship between thought, expression, and political obedience throughout the Restoration. The concern in early Stuart England for political intellection was thus not simply a product of its immediate moment but the catalyst for a more fundamental recognition of deliberation and other forms of individual and institutional thought as being arenas for political action. In looking backward, then, we might recognize the early Stuart era’s continual attention to the means by which monarchs and subjects alike thought through their political dilemmas to be something of a precursor to a more modern interest in political decision-making, and the extent to which processes of the mind remain integral to the operation—proper or otherwise—of contemporary democracies.

Deliberation, Tyranny, and Time in Early Caroline England

This chapter explores how, with growing royal demands for the expeditious provision of financial and military support, time increasingly became an index of power in Caroline England. It begins with how in 1625 and 1626 disputes over royal finances became increasingly subsumed into a structural conflict between king and the Commons over deliberative prerogatives. This political conflict is modeled in Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor, which uses disputes over the temporal dimensions of political intellection to detail the limits of both theatrical efficacy and royal authority in Caroline England. The result is a play that rejects the immediacy of tyrannical authority in favor of a conceptualization of both theatrical and political power whose emphasis on delay yields a dynamic that is fundamentally collaborative rather than imperial.

Composition, Counsel, and the Prerogatives of Deliberation

During the Jacobean era, disputes over the cognitive processes structuring both manuscript and print helped establish and bound state authority. The chapter examines the collapse of the 1614 Addled Parliament and then a conflict between James I, Francis Bacon, and Sir Edward Coke that arose in the aftermath of the session upon the arrest of Edmund Peacham for a hostile but undelivered sermon. The ensuing debate centered on the nature of Peacham’s offense and the textual evidence that revealed it, as well as the king’s right to consult with his judges prior to trial. When read together, the debates over Peacham’s manuscript and subsequent disputes over Coke’s own Reports present an ideal case study in how early modern conflicts over the processes of writing—the distillation of thought, its production on the page, and its circulation—illumine the period’s much larger struggle over the mechanisms of individual and corporate thought.

Naseby, Milton, and the Politics of Marital Intimacy

This chapter uses the relationship between King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria to examine how perceptions of marital intimacies informed debates over political intellection in the mid-seventeenth century. Royalist defenses of the king and queen’s correspondence emphasize the necessary intimacy of a couple’s mutual thoughts as foundational to any healthy marriage, arguments that had their roots in long-standing cultural expectations regarding the equality that should attend marital decision-making. While supportive of conversational intimacy, John Milton’s ambivalence toward this argument’s political implications would lead him to emphasize masculine headship in ways more consonant with Parliament’s presumptive position as the primary source of deliberative authority within the nation. Milton’s depiction in Paradise Lost of a world in which individuals cannot fully control the reception and distribution of their inner thoughts seems deliberately calibrated to rebut royalist claims regarding the king and queen’s marriage advanced in the aftermath of the Naseby debacle.

The Politics and Genre of Captured Correspondence

During the civil war, the publication of captured correspondence developed into a literary and political genre of its own, one in which interception and revelation became essential components of that material’s polemical effect and helped inform the publication and reception of more elevated correspondence. Early controversies regarding the capture and review of royal and royalist correspondence by Parliament established interpretative paradigms regarding personal and institutional liberty that would subsequently inform the famous controversy over the publication of royal letters captured at the Battle of Naseby. In particular, the publication of intercepted letters offered Parliament opportunities to reassert both its conciliar prerogatives and its traditional role as guarantor of the nation’s liberties. In response, Charles and his advisors sought instead to align interpretative authority with authorial intent, binding the meaning of a letter’s content to its individual origins rather than submitting to more public and potentially variable processes of reading.

The Moderation of Oath-Taking in Jacobean England

In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot Jacobean authorities imposed the Oath of Allegiance as a means to secure the realm against not just its foreign enemies but also those who might undermine it from within. Highly coercive in its effects, the Oath generated repeated attempts by English Catholics to manage its theological and cognitive demands. Responding to these maneuvers was John Donne, who develops in Pseudo-Martyr a compelling and cognitively focused case for the Oath and royal power. As a close reading of his later sermon on the Book of Esther then reveals, Donne’s consideration of the intersection between thought, conscience, and monarchical authority importantly represents not just a response to the immediate catalyst of the Gunpowder Plot but an initial theorization of political authority that could encompass Catholics and Protestants alike.