In January, 1649, James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, signed a treaty with the Catholic Confederacy, not knowing that the king on whose behalf he spoke was on trial in London. On January 30, 1649, Charles is executed, and a week later England became a republic, having a nonmonarchical form of government. A Council of State was created, and John Milton was appointed its “Secretary of Foreign Tongues.” The Council charged Milton to write observations on Ormond’s peace treaty and other recent documents from Ireland. The most geographically interesting reflection on Ireland to involve Milton’s work the resulting Articles of Peace offers a map of Ireland, a cultural and political geography overlaid on the ancient provinces of the island, to which Milton adds complicated interisland tensions, on the eve of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland. Articles reflects the complexity of the situation in Ireland, ramified by English management: A Protestant Royalist signs an extraordinarily generous Peace Treaty with Irish Catholics; the Parliamentary representative in Dublin complains of English influence; the Ulster-Scots make the case for a Protestant Church in Ireland that is neither Anglican nor Episcopalian.

Days after the execution of Charles I, Eikon Basilike, a book purported to be written by the king, was published posthumously. Parliament commissioned Milton to write a response. With chapters on Wentworth’s execution and the Irish Rising of the early 1640s, Ireland is threaded throughout Charles’ Eikon Basilike and Milton’s response, Eikonoklastes. When Milton began writing Eikonoklastes, Cromwell was preparing to invade Ireland. By the time Eikonoklastes was published, in October of 1649, Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland had been underway for two months. Its most infamous battles, the siege of Drogheda had already taken place. In 1650, Milton publishes a revised second edition of Eikonoklastes, in which he hits upon the term “pluralist,” and invokes it scornfully against his opponents in Ireland. Milton is now up against a principle: pluralism, which Milton implies is built into the cultural and political map of Ireland. As Milton confronts in Ireland a different way of thinking about government, administration, and policy, the Stuart idea of Great Britain must be defeated in Ireland, because it threatens a century-old project of centralization.

This chapter addresses the paradox, present both in the scholarly literature and in contemporary discourse, where Laudianism was often seen as both a revolutionary and a largely conservative or even reactionary movement; bent on root-and-branch reform and on the preservation of the moderate ‘Anglican’ status quo. This chapter shows that the Laudians presented themselves both as agents of change, pushing for the radical reformation of a church corrupted by decades of puritan corruption, and as conservatives, returning that church to its essential and original condition. What enabled both cases to be made was the extent of puritan influence over, and penetration of, the social and ideological fabric of the church. It was this that necessitated the reformation, which was designed to return the church to the condition it was in before the puritans ‘ruined’ it. That ideal state was variously located in either the Elizabethan or the early Edwardian reformations, and when such precedents were found insufficient to validate certain parts of the Laudian agenda, in the church of the apostles and the fathers. The result was once again a minimum and a maximum case for Laudian reformation, credit for which was variously attributed to Charles I, Archbishop Laud or the bishops more generally construed.

In 1824, Mary Russell Mitford’s historical tragedy, Charles the First, was banned by the new Examiner of Plays, George Colman. In 1737, William Havard’s play, King Charles I was performed at the Theatre Royal in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just before the 1737 Licensing Act established legislative State censorship of the British theatre. There is an intriguing timeline here: in 1737 a play about Charles I ran for several months at a Theatre Royal, and was subsequently played throughout Britain for the next fifty years; in 1824 another play about Charles I was banned before it reached the stage. These events bookend the period covered by this book, and this chapter works between them to explore aspects of the cultural memory of Charles I in the English theatre, and the impact of censorship not only on Mitford’s career but also the broader question of women’s participation in the theatre in the early nineteenth century. Mitford’s playwriting career spanned the end of John Larpent’s time and the start of George Colman’s tenure as Examiner of Plays, and her experience points to the increasing constraints on women playwrights’ agency and confidence in the period.

Explores the pervasive contemporary discourse that described playbooks as the “remains” or “relics” of the dead theatrical past. Argues that this metaphor captures English printed drama’s cultural elevation in the wake of the theatre closures. Shows how the marketing of printed plays that flopped onstage (consumed exclusively by literate audiences) prefigured the marketing of plays after the theatre closures, with similar consequences for drama’s perceived value. Describes the royalist analogy between the regicide and the theatrical prohibition, where King Charles I and English theatre were both murdered by the same political opponent. Much like the martyrdom of the late Charles I, the fact and threat of dramatic destruction similarly accorded new status to both dramatic texts and the absent theatre. The playbook staved off further loss and acquired new respectability through its ties with a longed-for medium. Theatre’s absence added to the cultural cachet of English drama: the playbook was physically separated from the absent theatre but drew ever closer to the idealized theatre of the nostalgic imagination. As the living fragments of a dead practice, printed relics perpetuate the essence of the theatre for eternity, producing an English literary drama equally rooted in the theatrical and the material.

Although the heterogeneity of topics in Natures Pictures has discouraged discussion of the volume as a whole, one salient topic throughout is Cavendish’s experience of the English Civil Wars – explicitly treated in her poem, “A Description of the Civil Warrs,” and recounted in “A True Relation” – as it relates to her interest in political theory in the tales. Despite the prevailing assumption that Cavendish was an unequivocal royalist, her explicit statements of royalism in “The She-Anchoret” and “A True Relation” coexist with – but also place under erasure – the more veiled critique of Charles I in “The Moral Fable of the Ant and the Bee” and the complex political analysis concerning the monarch’s relationship to the subject in “The Contract” and “Assaulted and Pursued Chastity.” The contrast between the discursive on the one hand, and the literary or fictive on the other, enables Cavendish to hew to her expected royalist position in the former while exploring oppositional political perspectives in the latter.

This chapter examines the influence of Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta and several later medieval sources set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. Magna Carta inspired sixteenth-century Puritan dissenters in Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Puritan pamphleteers like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the Charter. Magna Carta also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, including notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, and many of the rights provisions in the American Declaration of Independence, the original state constitutions, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This chapter examines the influence of Magna Carta on the development of rights and liberties in the Anglo-American common law tradition. Originally issued by King John of England in 1215, Magna Carta and several later medieval sources set forth numerous prototypical rights and liberties that helped to shape subsequent legal developments in England, America, and the broader Commonwealth. Magna Carta inspired sixteenth-century Puritan dissenters in Elizabethan England and seventeenth-century English jurists like Sir Edward Coke and Puritan pamphleteers like John Lilburne, who advocated sweeping new rights reforms on the strength of the Charter. Magna Carta also inspired more directly the new bills of rights and liberties of several American colonies, including notably the expansive 1641 Body of Liberties of Massachusetts crafted by Nathaniel Ward, and many of the rights provisions in the American Declaration of Independence, the original state constitutions, and the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.B1:L8

Chapter 6 traces the place of religion in negotiations for a settlement between Charles I and his opponents from 1642 up to the regicide. Often dismissed as irrelevant and futile gestures by two sides with irreconcilable positions who negotiated in bad faith, it is argued here that these negotiations nevertheless provide intriguing sets of potential reformation settlements that could have reshaped the Church of England in significant ways, and useful indications of where creative compromises might be made. The chapter demonstrates the official royalist commitment to upholding the reforms of 1640-41, and readiness to offer further reforms curbing the power of episcopacy, offering toleration to ‘tender consciences’, and the calling of a national synod to debate further religious reforms. The parliamentarian side in negotiations was significantly hamstrung by the restrictions of the Solemn League and Covenant’s condemnation of ‘prelacy’ and the uniting of the British churches. The chapter traces the arguments through various peace negotiations, noting in particular the new opportunities opened up by the army’s intervention and the offers of the Heads of the Proposals. It is noted that the concessions offered by Charles – however insincere – would enjoy a significant after-life in his published works and future reform proposals.

This chapter examines a group of closely related pamphlets published in the late 1650s around the time of Oliver Cromwell’s death that stage a dramatic dialogue in the crypt of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, between the ghosts of Henry VIII and the freshly interred Charles I. A Messenger from the dead (to give these anonymous English and Latin texts a collective title) advances the extraordinary claim that the recent civil wars, the regicide and the nation’s descent into political turmoil represent God’s delayed punishment for Henry VIII’s alleged crimes against the Catholic Church several generations earlier. I argue that this unorthodox thesis is not unique to Messenger but enjoyed a wider circulation in seventeenth-century culture. In asking who promoted and stood to benefit from such an explanation of recent events, I explore the significant differences among the various texts of the pamphlets, including their place of publication and ideological motivation.

Chapter 17 deals with the continuing development of the doctrine of justification in England during the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, as seen in the writings of the leading Anglican thinkers generally referred to as ‘the Caroline Divines’. Although Protestant approaches to justification stressed that this was to be seen as a graceful transformation effected by God, the English social and cultural context led to emphasis being placed on the link between justification and appropriate moral behaviour. Many later Caroline divines interpreted justification in an Augustinian sense as a ‘making righteous’, and hence as securing a theological framework for moral propriety. It is possible that the new directions within the Anglican theology of justification may have arisen as a conscious reaction against the Puritanism of the Westminster divines, which became the position of the Puritan religious establishment following the execution of Charles I, and the establishment of the Puritan commonwealth.