20 J. Rushworth, Historical Collections (London, 1682), 1: 138, quoted in Lockyer, The Early Stuarts, p. 50.
21 Quoted in T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–40: A County’s Government During the “Personal Rule” (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 258.
22 Because he had it printed without a statute number and with his earlier exceptions to it, it is the “Petition” and not the Act of Right.
23 Letters of King James VI and I, ed. G. P. V. Akrigg (London, 1984), p. 207, quoted in Lockyer, The Early Stuarts, p. 191.
24 February 24, 1629, quoted in Smith, The Stuart Parliaments, p. 118.
25 William Prynne quoted in R. Cust, Charles I: a Political Life (Harlow, 2005), p. 144.
26 Of course, all early modern sovereigns, excepting possibly Edward VI, ruled “personally,” by taking an active role in formulating government policy and, often, in executing it. What was thought to be new was the attempt to do so without any parliamentary advice or assistance.
27 The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England (London, 1763), 5: 178, quoted in Coward, Stuart Age, 2nd ed., p. 137.
28 Quoted in Coward, Stuart Age, 2nd ed., p. 195.
29 Quoted in A. Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 164.
30 Quoted in M. Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. 146.
31 Quoted in A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 213, upon which this paragraph relies.
8 Civil War, Revolution, and the Search for Stability, 1642–1660
1 “Cavaliers,” from the Spanish caballero or horseman. It was originally a pejorative name for the courtly gallants, often of magnificent appearance but little money, who rallied to the king’s side.
2 “Roundheads” was a pejorative reference to London apprentices who protested the king’s policies in 1641. Apprentices, like all working people in England, tended, for practicality’s sake, to cut their hair short – hence “roundheads” – in contrast to courtiers who had the time and assistance of servants to dress long hair.
3 Quoted in J. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648, 2nd ed. (London, 1999), p. 124.
4 Sir William Paston (ca. 1610-63), quoted in Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, p. 79.
5 Quoted in Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces, p. 75.
6 And the second bloodiest, after Edward IV’s victory at Towton Moor in 1461, ever fought on English soil.
7 Quoted in Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution, 1640–1658, ed. D. L. Smith (Cambridge, 1991), p. 51.
8 Quoted in ibid., pp. 17–18.
9 “On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament” (ca. 1647), in Poems, &c. upon Several Occasions (London, 1673), 69.
10 Quoted in G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? England, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1986), p. 77.
11 S. R. Gardiner, The Great Civil War (London, 1898), 2: 287, quoted in C. Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509–1660 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 360–1.
12 A Declaration, or Representation from His Excellency Sir Thomas Fairfax, and of the army under his command, Humbly tendered to the Parliament … 14 June 1647, in The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon (Cambridge, 1966), p. 296.
13 Quoted in Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England, ed. D. Wootton (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 286–90.
14 Act Erecting a High Court of Justice, January 6, 1649, reprinted in The Trial of Charles I: A Documentary History,ed. D. Iagomarsino and C. J. Wood (Hanover, N. H., 1989), p. 25.
15 Quoted in Iagomarsino and Wood, eds., Trial of Charles I, p. 64.
16 Quoted in A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625—1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 431.
17 Quoted in R. Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (Harlow, 2005), p. 456.
18 Quoted in Cust, Charles I, p. 410.
19 The eldest, Princes Charles (1630–85) and James (1633–1701), had been sent out of the country for their protection and to prevent various rebel factions from putting either forward as king.
20 Quoted in Iagomarsino and Wood, eds., Trial of Charles I, pp. 143–4.
21 He did so silently, omitting the traditional words “Behold the head of a traitor!” Presumably, he did not want to give away his identity by speaking.
22 J. Lilburne, England’s New Chains Discovered (London, 1649), printed in G. E. Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca, N. Y., 1975), p. 146.
23 A Fiery Flying Roll (London, 1649), reprinted (Exeter, 1973), p. 8.
24 L. Clarkson, A Single Eye all Light (London, 1650), pp. 8–12, 16, quoted in C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972), p. 215.
25 September 17, 1649, in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, ed.T. Carlyle (London, 1907), 2: 152.
26 Quoted in C. Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York, 1970), pp. 121–2.
27 Quoted in D. Hirst, England in Conflict, 1603–1660: Kingdom, Community, Commonwealth (London, 1999), p. 268.
28 Quoted in B. Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 1.
29 Quoted in Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 132.
30 Quoted in Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 33.
31 Many Royalist lands were bought by sympathetic trustees, who sold them back to the original owners at the Restoration.
32 J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn,ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford, 1955), 3: 234.
33 Evelyn, Diary, 3: 246.
9 Restoration and Revolution, 1660–1689
1 Restoration Scotland and Ireland will be discussed in chap. 10.
2 G. S. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660–1722 (London, 1993), p. 84.
3 They remained there for 20 years. Eventually, after blowing down in a storm and changing hands several times, Cromwell’s head was given to his alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. There, it was respectfully interred in a location undisclosed – lest some latter-day Royalists seek even now to vent their anger upon it!
4 Gaston-Jean-Baptiste de Cominges to Louis XIV, January 25, 1664, in A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II, ed. J. J. Jusserand (London, 1892), p. 91.
5 S. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews (Berkeley, 1971), 4: 366.
6 Charles II’s mother, Henrietta Maria, was the sister of Louis XIV’s father, Louis XIII. Recent continental scholarship has argued that Louis’s power was, in fact far more circumscribed by tradition and the institutions of local government than used to be thought. But seventeenth-century English men and women were in no doubt of the French king’s power.
7 Quoted in J. Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge, 2000), p. 176.
8 The Protestant Netherlands (as opposed to the Spanish Netherlands to the south), also known as the Dutch republic but more properly known as the United Provinces, was a confederation of seven individual states which had rebelled against Spain in 1568, formally seceded from Spanish control in 1581, and was finally and officially recognized as an independent state in 1648. Executive authority was usually lodged in a stadholder, always the current prince of Orange, whose powers were minimal in peacetime, extensive in wartime.
9 Henceforward, where the foreign relations and resources of all three Stuart kingdoms were involved, they shall be referred to, collectively, as Britain.
10 For example, in 1671 the Treasury Commission abandoned the practice of farming the Customs (see chap. 9). From this point, the government began to collect these revenues on its own.
11 A. Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (London, 1677), quoted in B. Coward, The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714, 2nd ed. (London, 1994), p. 325.
12 J. Scott, “En
gland’s Troubles 1603-1702,” in The Stuart Court & Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. R. M. Smuts (Cambridge, 1996), p. 30.
13 Herbert Aubrey (ca. 1635–91), June 27, 1687, BL Add. MS. 28,876, fols. 13–14.
14 Quoted in J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (London, 1972), p. 232.
15 Quoted in P. Dillon, The Last Revolution: 1688 and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2006), p. 164.
16 Quoted in Western, Monarchy and Revolution, p. 280.
17 S. B. Baxter, William III and the Defense of European Liberty, 1650–1702 (New York, 1966), p. 247.
18 Socinians, i.e., Dissenters who denied the Trinity (Unitarians), were excluded entirely from its protections as were, initially, Quakers.
19 BL Add. MS. 5540.
10 War and Politics, 1689–1714
1 As in previous chapters, the terms “Britain” and “British” apply to the combined efforts of England, Scotland, and Ireland when engaged together in war or other foreign policy initiatives.
2 Quoted in M. Zook, “The Propagation of Queen Mary II,” in Women and Sovereignty, ed. L. O. Fradenburg (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 187.
3 Quoted in J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), p. 144.
4 D. Defoe, The Two Great Questions Consider’d (London, 1700).
5 Admittedly, Pepys was too closely associated with James II’s administration to remain in office following the Revolution.
6 J. Swift, Examiner 14 (1710).
7 Quoted in W. Durant and A. Durant, The Age of Louis XIV: A History of European Civilization, 1648–1715 (New York, 1963), p. 702. The Spanish ambassador’s words have been retranslated by the authors.
8 Quoted in T. B. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (London, 1895), 2: 766.
9 G. S. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660–1722 (London, 1993), p. 325.
10 Quoted in G. Williams and J. Ramsden, Ruling Britannia: A Political History of Britain, 1688–1988 (London, 1990), pp. 43–4.
11 The Parliamentary History of England 1702–1714, ed. W. Cobbett (London, 1810), 6: 25.
12 The British were still using the Julian calendar. According to the more accurate Gregorian calendar in use on the continent, the date was August 13. The British would not adopt the Gregorian calendar until the middle of the eighteenth century.
13 John, duke of Marlborough to Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, August 2, 1704, in The Marlborough–Godolphin Correspondence, ed. H. L. Snyder (Oxford, 1975), 1: 349.
14 Thomas Coke to John, duke of Marlborough, June 20, 1704, in HMC Twelfth Report (Cowper MSS.) (London, 1889), 2: 37–8.
15 Quoted in W. A. Speck, A Concise History of Britain, 1707–1975 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 22.
16 Quoted in E. Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven, 1980), p. 289.
17 H. Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren in Church and State (London, 1709).
18 Quoted in Gregg, Queen Anne, p. 303.
19 M. Prior, History of His Own Time, ed. A. Drift, 2nd edn. (London, 1740), p. 42
20 Erasmus Lewis to Jonathan Swift, July 27, 1714, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Williams (Oxford, 1963), 2: 86.
21 Quoted in H. L. Snyder, “The Last Days of Queen Anne: The Account of Sir John Evelyn Examined,” Huntington Library Quarterly 343 (1971): 271.
Conclusion: Augustan Polity, Society, and Culture, ca. 1714
1 As with Mary I, Elizabeth I, and Charles I, he would have been known to his subjects simply as “King George,” not “George I,” until the accession of his son, George II, in 1727.
2 The previous Whig administration had allowed the South Sea Company to take over three-fifths of the national debt in return for certain trading privileges. The promise of these privileges resulted in a run on South Sea stock, which rose in value by nearly 1,000 percent in the summer of 1720. When it became clear that the Company was not making a profit (having engaged in almost no actual South Sea trade), the stock price collapsed, ruining many holders and discrediting the government, some of whose officials had been bribed to support the scheme. The ministry fell and Walpole persuaded the Bank of England and the East India Company to assume much of the loss, thus saving the government’s finances.
3 J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Régime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000).
4 P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989); and Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991).
5 Quoted in K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, 2000), p. 335
6 The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone, ed. A. L. Beier, D. Cannadine, and J. M. Rosenheim (Cambridge, 1989).
7 H. Fielding, “A Modern Glossary,” Covent Garden Journal 4 (January 14, 1752).
8 Estimates derived from G. S. Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660–1722 (London, 1993), tables B.1, p. 403, B.3, p. 408.
9 The following relies heavily on J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760, 2nd ed. (London, 1997), pp. 38–41, 49–53.
10 The following relies heavily on J. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England, 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), esp. pp. 242–77, 313–82.
11 This list is based on Holmes, Making of a Great Power, p. 67.
12 Lorenzo Magalotti at the Court of Charles II, ed. W. E. K. Middleton (Waterloo, Ontario, 1980), p. 114.
13 The estimates of size for various social groups in England are based, roughly, on the figures given by Gregory King in his famous “Scheme of the Income and Expense of the several families of England, calculated for the Year 1688,” printed in C. Davenant, Essay Upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (London, 1699). We have added King’s categories of baronets, knights, esquires, and gentlemen to arrive at the estimate of the size of the landed gentry. Using Guy Miege’s definition of a gentleman as “any one that … has either a liberal or genteel Education, that looks gentleman-like (whether he be so or not)” (G. Miege, The New State of England Under Our Present Monarch K. William III, 4th ed., 1702, 2: 154), one might possibly include other categories, such as eminent clergymen, persons in greater offices, persons in liberal arts and sciences, and naval and military officers. This would bring the total to nearly 50,000.
14 J. Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S.De Beer (Oxford, 1955), 4: 6.
15 Quoted in M. Foss, The Age of Patronage: The Arts in England, 1660–1750 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1972), p. 78.
16 Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage, Occasioned by the Duke and Dutchess of Mazarine’s Case (London, 1700), Preface.
17 Quoted in Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, p. 289.
18 Adding, for the substantial merchants, King’s categories “Eminent Merchants and Traders by Sea” to “Lesser Merchants and Traders by Sea”; for the manufacturers, artisans, and tradesmen adding “Shopkeepers and Tradesmen” to “Artizans and Handicrafts.”
19 This number conflates King’s categories of persons in greater and lesser offices, persons in the law, eminent and lesser clergymen, persons in liberal arts and sciences, and naval and military officers.
20 H. Misson, Memoirs and Observations in His Travels Over England (London, 1719), p. 36, quoted in Hoppit, Land of Liberty?, p. 212.
21 William Pitt the elder (1708–78; prime minister 1756–61; 1766–8), from 1766 earl of Chatham; his son William the younger (1759–1806; prime minister 1783–1801; 1804–6).
22 T. de Laune, Angliae Metropolis: or, the Present State of London (London, 1690), p. 298, quoted in Hoppit, Land of Liberty?, p. 426.
23 Nathaniel Harley to Edward Harley, September 6, 1712, in HMC Thirteenth Report, Appendix, Part II (Portland MSS.) (London, 1893), 2: 254–5.
24 We have conflated King’s categorie
s of freeholders, better sort; freeholders, lesser sort; and farmers.
25 Quoted in Holmes, Making of a Great Power, p. 391.
26 The next two paragraphs are based on R. B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London, 1998); and A. Laurence, Women in England, 1500–1760: A Social History (New York, 1994).
27 M. Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. 342.
28 W. S. Churchill, radio broadcast, February 9, 1941.
Glossary
Cross-references to further definitions in the glossary are given in bold.
Acts See first word of Act (for example, Appeals, Act in Restraint of)
Advowson Right of the local landlord to choose the parish priest.
Affinity Entourage of a late medieval magnate, which formed the basis of a political/military retinue. Its nucleus was often related to the magnate by blood or marriage, but it also included clients, retainers, household servants, and tenants, many of whom wore his livery.
Anabaptists For England, see Baptists
Anglicans Technically, all members of the Church of England. Used to denote conservative or “High Church” members of the Church of England favoring Church government by bishops. Theologically, favorably disposed toward elaborate ritual and ceremony (see Arminians). The dominant strain of the Church of England after the Restoration, the term is anachronistic but useful for explaining tendencies before then.
Annates Also known as First Fruits and Tenths, first year’s revenue of an ecclesiastical office paid to the papacy. Limited by the Act in Restraint of Annates (1532), and assumed by the Crown in 1534.
Appeals, Act in Restraint of, 1533 Statute which forbade appeals in legal cases to jurisdictions beyond that of the king of England (such as Rome). It not only made Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon possible; some historians believe it established a modern conception of royal and national sovereignty in England.
Arminians Those English and Scottish Anglicans, named for Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius, who believed that good works and efficacious rituals might play a role in salvation (opposed to Calvinists). They emphasized “the beauty of holiness” via elaborate church decor and ceremonial. Led by Archbishop Laud, Arminian clergy became influential under Charles I.
Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History Page 64