This final chapter examines the early Stuart period in the years leading to the Civil War. This ending point, though necessarily arbitrary, has been chosen because of the entwinement between centralised royal power and the origins of the common law described in previous chapters means that it can be said that the common law had reached a level of maturity when it was able to survive for an extended period of time without a monarch. The Civil War further provides an appropriate conclusion to our survey given that it was the culmination of the conflicts between the king and his advisers, which date back centuries to Magna Carta and beyond. The chapter explores this final time period by exploring the work, behaviour and legacy of Sir Edward Coke, who has been likened to the Shakespeare of the law, and who is often seen as the bridge between the medieval and the modern laws.

The Stewarts ruled Scotland from 1371 and England from 1603 and experienced magical threats to their rule from the fifteenth century onwards. King James VI and I’s historical reputation as a demonologist obsessed with witchcraft conceals what was a subtle approach to magic and witchcraft, to which James responded with an equal mixture of fascination and scepticism. Attacked by witches in his homeland, James’s accession to the English crown in 1603 saw James became conspicuously more circumspect in his dealings with supernatural claims south of the border. Whatever his personal views, magical scandals at James’s court and at the court of his successor Charles I inflicted immense reputational damage on the Stuart monarchy between 1613 and 1628. Beginning with the Overbury Plot, these scandals culminated in the accusations levelled against the duke of Buckingham and his ‘wizard’, John Lambe and ultimately undermined the credibility of the monarchy as a guardian of godliness in the nation. The outbreak of Civil War in England in 1642 unleashed pent-up anxieties about the political use of magic in the form of lurid allegations from both sides that their enemies were making use of sorcery and witchcraft to influence the outcome of the conflict.

The early Stuarts had a difficult and uncomfortable relationship with counsel. Whereas both James VI/I and Charles I increasingly relied heavily on close favourites to advise them, this mode of counsel was, in a sense, outdated and seen to be suspicious. In response, counsel was increasingly vested in the parliament over and above the Privy Council, encroaching upon kingly authority. If one accepts the Machiavellian/reason of state assumption that all counsellors are self-interested, and that this conflicted with advice-giving in the interests of the state, then – many reasoned – the obvious solution was to rest the responsibility of giving counsel in an institution wherein self-interest was synonymous with the interests of the state. The Stuarts, however, resisted this conclusion, seeing themselves as the state, and the choice of counsellors solely resting with themselves. This debate had the effect of reinforcing a focus on sovereignty: parliamentarians made the argument that the central conciliar institution was in fact a locus of sovereignty; royalists sought to reduce the power and relevance of counsel. For this reason, the English Civil War sees the end of the ‘monarchy of counsel’ and the turn to a politics focused on theories and expressions of sovereignty.