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21594 results in Regional history after 1500

Page 253 of 1080

  • 19 - Lauria's Last Great Campaign (Summer 1299–Spring 1300)

  • Charles D. Stanton
  • Book:
    Roger of Lauria (c.1250–1305)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 271-288

  • Summary

    DESPITE THE DEPARTURE OF KING JAMES of Aragon after the Battle of Capo d'Orlando, the Angevin reconquest of Sicily seemed to proceed apace, at first. Within three weeks of the victory, Pietro Salvacoscia, one of Frederick's most effective fleet commanders, went over to the Angevins and delivered the islands of Ischia, Capri and Procida to King Charles, who promptly made him protontino (vice admiral) – second only to Roger of Lauria. Roger, himself, quickly reclaimed several of his previous possessions in the Val Demone (northeastern Sicily): Castiglione, Rocella and Placa (Map 6). Niccolo Speciale insisted that Francavilla would have also returned to the admiral's allegiance had it not been dominated by the castle enfeoffed to Corrado Doria, his opposite number. Duke Robert of Calabria, whom his father (King Charles II) had appointed as his Vicar-General for the island on 24 July 1299, made slower progress. Marching towards the east coast, he stopped to besiege Randazzo, one of the most densely populated towns on Sicily at the time, but its fiercely independent citizenry steadfastly resisted. Robert eventually accepted Roger's advice and moved on to more fruitful, obliging objectives on the south side of Mount Etna, with Catania as the ultimate objective.

    The Angevin army was, thus, able to occupy with ease Adernò (modern Adrano), on the southwestern foot of the volcano. Robert soon laid siege to Paternò, a city a mere 14 miles (22.5 km) northwest of Catania. The local lord, Manfred Maletta, surrendered it on the second day. Maletta was then induced to also give up Buccheri, another small city under his control in the Val di Noto (southeastern Sicily) about 30 miles (50 km) west of Syracuse (Map 6). From there, Roger took a detachment of troops to nearby Vizzini, which he cajoled into submission through the persuasion (presumably at sword point) of a certain Giovanni Callaro, a favourite son of the city whom Lauria had captured at Capo d'Orlando. Afterwards, Roger rejoined Robert at Palagonia and the two of them marched south beyond Vizzini to Chiaramonte, about 10 miles (16 km) north of Ragusa. Chiaramonte was a fief of the eponymous noble family, one of the most powerful on Sicily and staunchly loyal to Frederick, so its citizens refused to yield without a fight. It was a terrible mistake, for which most of them paid with their lives in ghastly fashion.

  • 2 - Teaching Political Thought in the Restoration Divinity Faculty: Avant-Garde Episcopacy, the Two Kingdoms and Christian Liberty

    • By Dmitri Levitin, educated at Cambridge University and has held posts in Cambridge (Trinity College; the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) and Edinburgh.
  • Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, John Marshall
  • Book:
    Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 39-58

  • Summary

    No one has done more than Mark Goldie to shape our understanding of the relationship between English political and religious thought in the Restoration and Revolutionary periods. If J. N. Figgis was the real founder of the so-called ‘Cambridge School of the History of Political Thought’, then Goldie is surely his most natural successor. But there is one area that not even Goldie, nor his many research students, nor – for that matter – anyone else has ever investigated: the political thought being taught in the universities of seventeenth-century England, and specifically that being taught to fledgling clerics in the divinity faculty. And yet, what could be more important for enhancing our knowledge of the way in which the boundaries of political conformity were policed in the period? By the seventeenth century, the English priesthood was a graduate profession. A university divinity professor thus had unparalleled power over the intellectual formation of a generation or more of clerics. Those clerics in turn were often the first (if not only) avenue by which the laity were introduced to political ideas – ideas that were not always as supinely deferential as one might assume. More generally, the long seventeenth century was – in England as in Europe – a golden age for universities, in terms of student numbers and resource allocation. In view of all this, the absence of a concerted study of university theological pedagogy is one of the great lacunae of seventeenth-century English religious and intellectual history.

    In this short essay I shall endeavour to offer what is – I think – the first ever study of political thought in seventeenth-century English university theological pedagogy. I shall do so on the basis of a rather remarkable set of primary sources: the manuscript record of the theology disputations presided over by Joseph Beaumont during his tenure as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge between 1674 and his death in 1699. What is particularly valuable about this evidence is that we possess not only the titles of the 376 disputed questions, but also the full text of Beaumont's ‘Determinations’ (i.e. judgements) upon them. This evidence offers us perhaps the best insight into the political indoctrination of the Restoration clergy. Moreover, that insight is of some historiographical significance.

  • 7 - Southampton

  • from Part II - Urban
  • Dan Spencer
  • Book:
    Royal and Urban Gunpowder Weapons in Late Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 170-184

  • Summary

    IT IS DIFFICULT TO trace the development of gunpowder weapons in most individual towns due to the fragmentary nature of the extant evidence and a lack of inventories. Fortunately, it is possible to carry out an in-depth study of the use of guns by the town governors of Southampton, due to a relative abundance of surviving sources. This chapter demonstrates that the town's experience of firearms, whilst sharing some similarities with other coastal settlements, was unique. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Southampton had become one of the most prosperous towns in England, largely as the result of having secured two staples, wool and metals, which were exported from the town by Italian merchants. This trade declined in the later years of the fifteenth century, with a fall in custom revenues in the early years of the reign of Edward IV, but it revived and reached a peak under the reign of Henry VII. The period also saw significant changes to the government of the community, with a charter of incorporation in 1445 and the creation of the county of the town of Southampton in 1447. These charters, and later ones, established the right of the town to self-governance and freedom from the interference of the county of Southampton or of the sheriff.

    The town was also important due to its military role in the late medieval period. It operated as a point of embarkation for many English armies transported to France and provided ships for naval expeditions. This meant that it was vulnerable to attack, as was demonstrated on 5 October 1388, when a French fleet attacked and burnt the town. Later, in 1457, the inhabitants were successful in repelling another French raid, in part due to the strength of their defences and artillery. The town was also embroiled in the factional conflict of the Wars of the Roses, as can be seen from a commission of array granted to the aldermen of the town on 28 April 1460, to resist the Yorkist lords and to ‘fortify the walls and make defences called “loupes” thereon, and to appoint watches, scouts and keepers of the gates day and night’. The inhabitants also participated in the military operations of the crown, such as in 1470, when soldiers were sent for the king's expedition to the north.

  • 17 - Switching Sides (December 1293–April 1297)

  • Charles D. Stanton
  • Book:
    Roger of Lauria (c.1250–1305)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 236-255

  • Summary

    IF THE ADMIRAL OF ARAGON had, in fact, intended to intimidate the Angevins with his actions in the summer of 1292, he succeeded admirably. Shortly after Roger's return from the raid on ‘Romania’ in the early autumn, rumours reached Charles II of Naples that Lauria was planning an ambitious assault on the Amalfi coast, ostensibly to punish Positano and other nearby ports for the harassment of Sicilian shipping. At least forty vessels and 2,000 almugavars as well as an equal number of Messinese mariners were reported to be involved. The ultimate objective, however, was the occupation of Monte Sant'Angelo a Tre Pizzi (just above Positano) – the highest summit in the Lattari Mountains, which formed the spine of the Sorrento Peninsula. This deeply concerned Charles because he knew that, from this vantage point, Lauria's almugavars could ravage the entire region and Angevin cavalry would be helpless to hamper them in the rugged terrain. It was an alarming threat to the heart of the Regno. The feared incursion never actually materialized. Nonetheless, the mere possibility frightened Charles into fortifying not just the mountaintop in question, but the entire Amalfi coast.

    The king of Naples knew, however, that such preventive measures were only palliative and did not deal with the underlying problem: Aragon's supremacy at sea under the supervision of its gifted admiral. Desperate to counter it, Charles again dispatched envoys to Genoa in December 1292 to propose a mutual military aid pact that would provide the Regno the required sea power. To entice the Genoese into an alliance, the Angevin ambassadors offered them the one commodity that they needed the most: the grain of the Mezzogiorno. Without the wheat of southern Italy and Sicily, Genoa would all but starve. In order to acquire it, Genoese merchants were compelled to pay the onerous dazio d'uscita (‘export tax’). The Angevins promised total exemption from the dazio d'uscita on the first 30,000 salme (1 Sicilian salma = 275 litres) from Sicily per year and a reduction of more than half on the next 30,000 salme extracted per annum – once the island was conquered for the Regno. Until such time, the Genoese were to be permitted to export 200,000 ‘measures’ (presumably roughly equivalent to the Sicilian salme) from the ports of Provence, free from duty.

  • 1 - Battle of Benevento (26 February 1266)

  • Charles D. Stanton
  • Book:
    Roger of Lauria (c.1250–1305)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 9-24

  • Summary

    WHEN CHARLES, COUNT OF ANJOU and brother of King Louis IX of France, emerged with his assembled forces from the Samnite Apennines to arrive on the east shoulder of Monte San Vitale just above the fortified city of Benevento on the afternoon of 25 February 1266, his heart must have sunk. There, camped beneath the walls of the city on the south side of the swollen River Calore, was the entire army of his archenemy: Manfred, King of Sicily. He had not expected him to be there.

    Charles had just marched his army from Rome, where on the day of the Epiphany (6 January) he had been anointed by the papacy to assume Manfred's crown. His objective was Naples, Manfred's residence and unofficial capital. So he had taken the Via Latina, an old Roman road that ran through Frosinone and Anagni. He faced little resistance as he crossed the River Liri at Ceprano. On 10 February his invading army had even captured the seemingly impregnable castle of Cassino (called San Germano at the time) from a detachment of 2,000 Saracens sent by Manfred to hold the pass. But there he learned that Manfred was waiting in force behind a heavily fortified bridge on the Volturno River near Capua, which blocked the main access route into the Regno (the medieval appellation for the Kingdom of Sicily – from the Italian word regno, meaning ‘kingdom’). Deciding that the most prudent course of action was to flank Manfred to the east, Charles diverted his legions eastward past Telese into the rugged Taburno Camposauro Mountains and through the narrow defile of Vitulano just west of Benevento. It was a horrific miscalculation. The track made for an arduous trek in the dead of winter. Seasonal downpours had turned mountain streams into raging torrents. Most of his supply wagons had to be abandoned. By the time his men stumbled out into the Calore Valley, they had devoured most of their beasts of burden and even some of their destriers (the costly warhorses of the knights). It was a drained and dispirited force that now faced a well-rested and well-fed adversary, protected by a nearly impassable river in the shadow of a well-defended city.

  • 4 - Aragonese Expansion (1229–1282)

  • Charles D. Stanton
  • Book:
    Roger of Lauria (c.1250–1305)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 48-65

  • Summary

    IT WAS, IRONICALLY, Charles of Anjou's conquest of the Kingdom of Sicily that put him on a collision course with another emerging Mediterranean power: the Crown of Aragon. At precisely the moment that Anjou was establishing a dominant position in the centre of the Middle Sea, Aragon was in the process of an aggressive eastward expansion that would eventually foist it into direct conflict with Angevin interests and introduce Anjou to the admiral who would ultimately end his aspirations of empire.

    Like the Kingdom of Sicily, the Crown of Aragon (as it was commonly known) was a relatively new realm (Map 5). As fortune would have it, they were both established at about the same time – in the early twelfth century. The former was founded on 27 September 1130 when Pope Anacletus II issued a papal bull recognizing Roger II de Hauteville as king of Sicily, and the latter was effectively born on 11 August 1137 with the betrothal of Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona to the Infanta Petronilla of Aragon. And both were destined to become sea powers – Sicily because it was an island kingdom and the Crown of Aragon because its Catalonian component was centred on the vibrant port city of Barcelona. But the two kingdoms did not clash in any significant manner prior to the thirteenth century, largely owing to the fact that Catalonian maritime expansion was impeded by Moorish-held Majorca (Mallorca) and Menorca (Minorca) in the Balearics, which stood astride the trade routes to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. All that changed shortly after the accession of James I to the throne of Aragon on 12 September 1213.

    CONQUEST OF MAJORCA BY JAMES I (1229–1231)

    Prior to James's coronation, Aragon had been dominated by twelve noble families whose primary ambition comprised extending their power southward into the Muslim-controlled portion of the Iberian peninsula – particularly the kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia. This served as an additional brake on Catalonia maritime penetration into the Mediterranean. But James and his successors realized that the Crown of Aragon's inherent lack of resources severely restricted its potential for aggrandizement at the expense of its Muslim neighbours.

  • 11 - Battle of Malta (8 June 1283)

  • Charles D. Stanton
  • Book:
    Roger of Lauria (c.1250–1305)
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 147-159

  • Summary

    ON 1 JUNE 1283, FOR A BRIEF SPAN of time the struggle for the Kingdom of Sicily shifted to the outskirts of Bordeaux, then a possession of Edward I ‘Longshanks’ of England. It was there that a set of lists had been set up just outside the city walls, where the two sovereigns and their entourages of royal champions were to fight for the fate of Sicily. And, indeed, the two kings arrived at the appointed place on the appointed day, but it was all a chivalric charade. Neither side had intended for the issue to be settled in the lists.

    The Catalan chronicles describing the affair – those by Ramon Muntaner and Bernat Desclot – are remarkably similar. Charles of Anjou had come by way of Rome, where he had petitioned Pope Martin for additional funding and urged him to declare a crusade against Aragon. Martin inveighed strenuously against the ‘duel’ and even dispatched a letter to Edward forbidding him to act as ‘marshal of the field’ for the tournament. (Edward's neutrality could also have been in question, since his daughter Eleanor was betrothed to Peter's eldest son Alfonso at the time.) Ultimately, however, the pontiff complied with Anjou's request and formally declared Peter deposed as king of Aragon on 21 March 1283. Charles then went on to Paris, where he had sought the support of his nephew, King Philip III of France. The latter had not only agreed to supply his uncle with sixty of the hundred knights who were to be his champions (the other forty were to come from Provence), but also to accompany him to Bordeaux with his own retinue of knights – 8,000 according to Desclot; 12,000 by Muntaner's estimate. Clearly the aim here was an ambush, under the dubious dodge that the king of France was not a signatory to the duel's stipulated conditions.

    Peter of Aragon, for his part, was no fool. He must have suspected treachery all along, because he was circumspect to the point of being outright clandestine in his journey to Bordeaux. Before departing Messina, he had tasked Roger of Lauria, his newly appointed admiral, with secretly outfitting four galleys crewed only by Catalans.

  • Conclusion

  • Dan Spencer
  • Book:
    Royal and Urban Gunpowder Weapons in Late Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 201-208

  • Summary

    MULTIPLE FACTORS WERE RESPONSIBLE for the adoption and development of firearms by the English crown and urban communities. The initial spread of guns was aided by the ease of their manufacture, with traditional techniques employed by metal workers utilised for the construction of these new weapons. In addition, the evidence provided by both royal and town records show that gunpowder weapons were often acquired as a response to external threats. This can be clearly seen in the case of the Calais garrison, where increases in the number of guns possessed by the garrison often took place during periods of tensions, such as in 1385–6, 1436 and 1450–1. Similarly, many towns acquired guns when they were threatened with attack, particularly in the 1450s and 1480s. As Chapter 7 on Southampton demonstrates, though, some settlements were more willing to invest in the new technology than others. Developments in artillery fortifications generally followed a similar pattern, with the decision to build bulwarks only being undertaken by the aldermen of some English towns in the second half of the fifteenth century, despite the construction of a bulwark near Southampton during the reign of Henry V. Likewise, investment in the defences of the Pale of Calais tended to be significantly increased when the territory was threatened with attack. This meant that there was often a delay between technological developments and the adoption of new gun types or fortifications.

    By contrast, royal influence played a more active role in encouraging the acquisition and development of firearms. This stemmed in part from the direct interest of most English kings in gunpowder weapons, with even the unwarlike Henry VI being witness to the testing fire of guns. The larger types of firearms, particularly the bombards, were prestigious and expensive weapons, often named after the king or other important individuals, and they were sometimes mentioned by name in chronicles. This meant that the deployment of royal guns became a symbol and expression of a sovereign's wealth, power and prestige, whether to impress rival rulers, as with Edward IV's expedition to France in 1475, or domestic rebels, such as with the Cornish rising of 1497.

  • Introduction: Mark Goldie – An Appreciation

    • By Tim Harris, BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University, Justin Champion, completing undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Churchill College., John Marshall, Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore., John Coffey, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester.
  • Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, John Marshall
  • Book:
    Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    This volume is a tribute to Mark Adrian Goldie, from friends and former students, to mark his retirement from the Cambridge History Faculty in September 2019. It is intended to honour both his own scholarly contribution to the field and his role as a teacher and a mentor. Mark's interests have been broad and have grown broader over the course of his career. He is at once an historian of ideas, political historian and historian of religion, while some of his publications have branched into social and cultural history. Although Mark's geographical and chronological focus has been on England under the later Stuarts – the period from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to the Hanoverian succession of 1714 – he has also written about Scotland and Ireland, continental Europe and colonial North America, and published pieces that go back to the sixteenth century or push forward into the late eighteenth. On his Cambridge University website, Mark describes his research interests broadly as ‘British intellectual, political, and religious history, c. 1650–c. 1800’, a claim vindicated not only by his own publication record but also by the wide variety of topics his graduate students have pursued. Mark has supervised thirty PhD theses to date. Limitations of space meant that we were unable to ask all Mark's former students to contribute to this volume. We endeavoured, however, to solicit contributions that would reflect the breadth of Mark's scholarly endeavours and also the various generational cohorts he has inspired. Contributors were asked to write pieces that in some way engaged with Mark's work and publications. We hope that what is offered here does justice to the man, his scholarship and his mentorship.

    Given the range of Mark's interests, we puzzled over how best to write the introduction to this volume. We could highlight some of Mark's landmark articles, essays, edited volumes and books, but which ones? The four editors all have quite discrete interests and scholarly foci, albeit overlapping to some degree, and we each have our own lists of favourites – and they are long! We decided, instead, that each editor should write his own reflection, albeit with briefs to focus on particular areas so as to lend the introduction overall coverage and coherence.

  • 14 - The Surprising Lineage of Useful Knowledge

  • Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, John Marshall
  • Book:
    Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 277-292

  • Summary

    Great citizen of Albion! thee

    Heroic valour still attends

    And useful science pleas'd to see

    How art her studious toil extends.

    Mark Akenside, Ode VIII ‘On Leaving Holland’, 1788

    In 1744, the physician and poet Mark Akenside (1721–70) penned an ode celebrating the British national character. Chief among the features of British life which Akenside lauded was the dedicated pursuit of useful knowledge. A practical and sensible people, the British were concerned with improving themselves and the world. The tenor of Akenside's ‘Ode’ resonated in the mid-eighteenth century, amid the proliferation of societies and clubs devoted to the improvement of various aspects of society, from agriculture to literacy. The common feature of these organisations was their focus on knowledge which was ‘useful’, in the sense that it was applied to the requirements and conveniences of daily life. Yet despite the popularity of ideas about useful knowledge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the phenomenon remains inadequately understood. For the most part, scholars have assumed that useful knowledge developed as a feature of the popular education movements of liberal reformers. On this account, useful knowledge emerged in the nineteenth century and had little to do with religion; it was a hallmark of the secular traditions within liberal and radical politics.

    This essay puts forward an alternative genealogy. I argue that useful knowledge has a much older lineage, which can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Far from having secular origins, the usefulness of knowledge arose from a concerted attempt by natural philosophers in the Baconian tradition to use the theology of Christian charity to describe natural philosophy's role in the ‘relief of mankind's estate’, as Bacon put it. In short, the new natural philosophy defined itself as a project of transforming the world, and it therefore required knowledge that was useful to improve human life. This essay traces the way that, over the course of the eighteenth century, useful knowledge underwent a secularising process. Gradually, the vocabulary of useful knowledge was separated from its theological underpinnings, and was harnessed instead to a burgeoning culture of public associations, central to which were the ideals of the public good and civic peace.

  • Appendix F - Extracts from the Accounts of John Hampton 1430–2 – Purchases

  • from Appendices
  • Dan Spencer
  • Book:
    Royal and Urban Gunpowder Weapons in Late Medieval England
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 March 2020
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 219-220

  • Summary

    Purchased in diverse locations in England and France by command of the king for his aforesaid war within the time of the accounts (1430–2):

  • • Three large guns of iron, of which one called Henry, one called Hampton and one called Crown

  • • Sixteen guns of iron called fowlers, with thirty-three moveable chambers, not fixed or stocked

  • • Four guns of bronze called fowlers, with eight moveable chambers, not fixed or stocked

  • • 2,128lbs of iron worked

  • • 6,000lbs of iron not worked

  • • Twenty chaulders of sea coal

  • • Four large carts of iron and wood for moving guns, large guns and other things, each with one pair of wheels called trokels

  • • Four long carts of iron and wood made for use in the country of Picardy

  • • 1,550 gunstones

  • • Fifty chains

  • • Forty staples

  • • Forty pairs of hooks

  • • Forty plates of iron for moving oxen

  • • Eighty collars

  • • Twenty-five double oxbows containing 300 pieces

  • • 100 ‘pykeys’

  • • Fifty axes

  • • 200 shovels

  • • 200 spades

  • • Forty-two ‘scoops’

  • • Twelve ‘crowes’ of iron

  • • One axle beam of iron

  • • Seven weights of lead

  • • 996 hammers of lead

  • • Seven big pieces of lead weighing 3,525lbs

  • • One pair of bellows for smiths

  • • 800 shafts called spear shafts

  • • 710 lance heads

  • • 391 chests for arrows and bows

  • • 1,204lbs of gunpowder

  • • 5,164lbs of saltpetre liquid not dry or pestled in powder

  • • 5,200lbs of sulphur rough not dry in powder

  • • 280lbs of charcoal

  • • One stock to hold saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal

  • • 100 long pavises

  • • Five short pavises

  • • Three cords of hemp called hankers

  • • Eighteen stocks of wood and iron not bound for guns called fowlers

  • • Forty-two empty vessels

  • • Eight hogsheads

  • • Fourteen barrels

  • • Six ‘wassell’ of metal

  • • Three saddles called ‘lymour’ saddles

  • • Three cruppers for ‘lymour’ saddles

  • • Three backs (dosers) for the same

  • • Two collars of rope for cart horses

  • • Four ‘crebis of crunbz’ for great ordnance

    • £2,072 4s. 8½d.

  • 1 - Constitutional Royalism Reconsidered: Myth or Reality?

    • By Tim Harris, BA, MA and PhD from Cambridge University
  • Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, John Marshall
  • Book:
    Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 19-38

  • Summary

    Charles I built up support for his position on the eve of the English civil war, we have long been told, by representing himself as a constitutional monarch committed to upholding the rule of law. According to James Daly, royalist writers of the civil war were ‘at pains to claim that the king's powers were legally limited’: they sought to defend Charles I ‘in his new coat of limited monarchy’, which was ‘the monarchy as overhauled in 1641’. For Conrad Russell, the civil war royalists were not ‘absolutists’ but as ‘attached to the principles of the rule of law’ as their parliamentarian opponents. David Smith, in his book-length study of constitutional royalism, while acknowledging that some civil war royalists remained quite absolutist, pointed to the existence of a significant and influential group – politicians such as Edward Hyde, Viscount Falkland, Sir John Culpepper and the earls of Dorset and Southampton, and pamphleteers such as Dudley Digges, Henry Ferne, John Bramhall and Robert Sheringham – who ‘were united in seeing England as a limited monarchy where royal government operated within the rule of law’. Such views have not gone unchallenged. Paul Seaward, Glenn Burgess, David Scott and Johann Sommerville have all warned against positing too stark a dichotomy between alleged constitutionalists and absolutists, suggesting that the former's constitutionalist credentials can often be found suspect, while even supposed absolutists believed that the English monarchy was in some way limited. Nevertheless, the idea that Charles I repositioned himself as a constitutional monarch from 1642 onwards, and that those who fought for him embraced a vision of monarchy that was limited by law and by the constitution, continues to hold considerable traction. As Richard Cust has recently put it, Charles I on the eve of the civil war ‘set out to present himself as the constitutional monarch par excellence’. Alan Cromartie has written of ‘the royalism invented in 1642’.

    From the later-Stuart perspective, however, the political thought of the supposed constitutional royalists does not appear particularly constitutionalist. John Locke, in his Second Treatise, famously complained of ‘a generation of men’ who flattered princes that they had ‘a divine right to absolute power’, endorsed Bodinian notions of indivisible sovereignty and insisted that there were ‘no jurisdictional limitations upon the Crown’.

  • 15 - The Vicissitudes of Innovation: Confessional Politics, the State and Philosophy in Early Modern England

    • By Conal Condren, Honorary Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland
  • Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris, John Marshall
  • Book:
    Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 October 2019
    Print publication:
    18 October 2019, pp 293-310

  • Summary

    In a sustained programme of research, Mark Goldie has explored the interrelationships between politics, philosophy and religion in early modern England. His arguments have been insightful and often seminal in charting unexpected alliances, the centrality of intolerance in the Restoration period and the unintended consequences of sectarian commitments. I propose to cover similar terrain, with reference to a small sector of the polemical and conceptual vocabulary of English gathered around notions of innovation.

    We take words in the ambit of innovation presumptively as intellectual virtues, not least in academia, where paradigm shifts, ruptures and revolutions are endemic to idioms of disciplinary self-promotion, and the isolation of points of innovation is vital to genealogical narration. Yet the vocabulary of innovation had diverging patterns of employment in early modern England. Predominantly condemned in confessional politics, innovation was increasingly lauded in natural philosophy and poetry. These domains of discourse were hardly self-contained, and so usage characteristic of one might have resonance for another. The mutually dependent friends William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle and Thomas Hobbes will be taken to illustrate something of the vicissitudes that I shall trace into the early nineteenth century.

    First, however, brief comment on the early modern vocabulary of innovation may be helpful. The word new could, as now, simply signify an addition to a series; yet typically in political discourse, novelty suggestive of, or virtually synonymous with innovation, was regarded with hostility. This was conveyed though a clustering of cognate expressions: newness, new models, new Utopias, new schemes and plots, singularity and the new-fangled, specifically condemned in The Book of Common Prayer. Legitimate newness was apt to be located only in the distant, authoritative world of the New Testament. Benoît Godin has even claimed, albeit with some qualification, that from the Reformation to the nineteenth century, there was an ‘episteme of prohibition’ concerning innovation. Given the prejudicial nature of this concentration of vocabulary, more anodyne descriptors such as change and alteration might be risked to avoid contamination with innovation; but by a ‘domino effect’ they were easily collapsed into being mere euphemisms. Reformation or renovation might also be urged, but usually as antidotes to established innovations.

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