The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England - Hardcover

Zaller, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804755043 ISBN 13: 9780804755047

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England is a study of the structures of authority in England between the beginning of the English Reformation in 1529 and the outbreak of the Civil War of the 1640s. These structures, both secular and sacred, were profoundly affected by the creation of a national Protestant church governed by the crown; by the emerging sense of national consciousness and providential destiny that followed in its wake; by the development of a legal culture that defined and sometimes contested the parameters of authority; by an urban state that articulated a new civic culture and reflected broad political, social, and religious tensions; and by the growing sophistication and assertiveness of Parliament, the capstone both of elite interest and popular legitimacy, and ultimately the site of resistance to claims of unfettered royal and ecclesiastical power. Together, these elements constituted the discourse of legitimacy through which the daily transactions of power in Tudor and early Stuart England were disputed, mediated, and sometimes resisted. They both expressed and contained the tensions of a rapidly changing society, and were finally the theaters on which its irreconcilable conflicts were enacted as social and political consensus broke down. The Discourse of Legitimacy presents a wide-ranging, synoptic view of England's political culture and its conflicts in the crucial period between its two greatest revolutions.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University. He is the author of The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict (1971) and the co-editor of A Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century(1983)

From the Back Cover

Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England is a study of the structures of authority in England between the beginning of the English Reformation in 1529 and the outbreak of the Civil War of the 1640s. These structures, both secular and sacred, were profoundly affected by the creation of a national Protestant church governed by the crown; by the emerging sense of national consciousness and providential destiny that followed in its wake; by the development of a legal culture that defined and sometimes contested the parameters of authority; by an urban state that articulated a new civic culture and reflected broad political, social, and religious tensions; and by the growing sophistication and assertiveness of Parliament, the capstone both of elite interest and popular legitimacy, and ultimately the site of resistance to claims of unfettered royal and ecclesiastical power. Together, these elements constituted the discourse of legitimacy through which the daily transactions of power in Tudor and early Stuart England were disputed, mediated, and sometimes resisted. They both expressed and contained the tensions of a rapidly changing society, and were finally the theaters on which its irreconcilable conflicts were enacted as social and political consensus broke down. The Discourse of Legitimacy presents a wide-ranging, synoptic view of England's political culture and its conflicts in the crucial period between its two greatest revolutions.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England

By ROBERT ZALLER

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5504-7

Contents

Preface...........................................................................ixIntroduction......................................................................11. The Discourse of Monarchy......................................................62. Sacred Discourse...............................................................513. The Discourse of the Realm.....................................................2234. The Discourse of the Law.......................................................2675. The Discourse of the Stage.....................................................3556. The Discourse of Parliament: The Reformation of Parliament.....................4737. Stuart Parliaments and the Crisis of Legitimacy................................563Reference Matter..................................................................707Abbreviations.....................................................................709Notes.............................................................................713Index.............................................................................799

Chapter One

The Discourse of Monarchy

High authoritie is alwaye in perylle.

The society of early modern England was both hierarchical and dynamic, and its modes of discourse reflected this instability. In part this resulted from groups that claimed greater inclusion for themselves (or demanded the exclusion of others), but in part it was the effect of pressure from the state for more and more elaborate tokens of acknowledgment and respect and the imposition of ever-wider and more prescriptive codes of conduct. The notion of a Tudor despotism has long gone by the boards, and Tudor government is now seen as resting on the cooperation of elites. It is worth recalling, however, the extent to which the Tudors and their parliaments felt justified in ordering the most intimate aspects of their subjects' lives. The wearing of a silk or velvet bonnet, of a proscribed hide on one's shoulders or hose on one's legs, could result in fines, imprisonment, or a trip to the stocks. Diet, work, and wages were regulated no less than dress, as well as a host of activities ranging from the length of wood one could cut to the size of horses one could breed. Such regulations tended to fall more heavily as one descended the social scale, but the extraordinary mortality rate among the leading families of the realm-the Staffords, Seymours, Courtenays, Howards, and Greys-suggested the singular disadvantages of proximity to the royal bloodline or to royal favor; only under James I did it become the norm to lose one's place without forfeiting one's head.

Altogether, the range and scope of the Tudor state's intrusion into everyday life and the zest for control which it exhibited toward the most mundane social functions and activities would have made all but the severest of present-day authoritarian regimes blush. Had its reach equaled its grasp, it would have been a truly Orwellian commonwealth, Elizabeth I's famous remark about not making windows into men's souls notwithstanding. Of course, the Tudors were not notably more obtrusive than other comparably developed sixteenth-century monarchies; the tendency they represented was a general one. It is true as well that sumptuary laws and labor controls had a long late-medieval history. What was novel in the Tudors was their assiduity, and their success in suppressing sources of countervailing power and incorporating them into the state apparatus. The chivalric tradition-to which Henry VIII alone of the Tudor sovereigns was anachronistically attached-had been, as practiced in the days of Edward III and Henry V, a camaraderie of freebooters led by the sovereign as primus inter pares, both reflecting and perpetuating a rough-and-ready power sharing between the crown and the baronial elite. If this tradition affirmed the majesty of the crown it also limited it, and the quite deliberate glorification of majesty, its identification with a fixed (although frequently peripatetic) Court, its elevation above the peerage (partly accomplished by leveling down: for fifty years England had no dukes), and its vigorous exercise through proclamation and statute, was the hallmark of the Tudor experiment. At the same time the Tudors reduced their chief rivals in the peerage, they promoted the gentry, making them the custodians of local government and linking them through county magnates with a Court-based system of patronage policed by justices dispatched from Westminster and by the slow, studied royal progresses by which the Tudors personally surveyed their realm.

The most important authority annexed by the Tudor state was that of ecclesiastical governance. By disavowing the church of Rome, Henry VIII at once removed what remained of a major rival and possessed himself of its temporal wealth-a process not unlike his father's policy of attainder, but on a vastly larger scale. At the same time he incorporated its sacerdotal power as Supreme Head of his own creation, the Church of England, thus becoming the first monarch in Christendom to reign supreme over both the temporal and spiritual dimensions of his realm. This was an incalculable gain to monarchy, imparting to it not only control over an activity that vitally penetrated all aspects of English life but enhancing and in a crucial sense transforming its institutional charisma. As with other areas of government, the crown did not entirely monopolize the church; as it shared the monastic endowment with gentry purchasers so too it did lay patronage, while the Anglican bishops, capitalizing on the Elizabethan compromise, were able to assert doctrinal controls and jure divino claims. Nonetheless, the episcopal bench was a bulwark of the throne, a counterweight to the peerage in the House of Lords, and the enforcing arm of a disciplinary apparatus that reached into every parish in the land.

Control of the church gave the crown direct access to the most important medium of information and propaganda in early modern England, the pulpit. By law, every Englishman and woman was required to attend an Anglican service each Sunday, there to receive such instruction and guidance as was good for the soul and expedient to the state. Travelers, merchants, itinerant peddlers, strolling players, publicans, priests in mufti, country correspondents, and others with access to informal networks had alternative means of information, and Dame Rumor, as ever, traveled wide; but until the development of newsletters in the seventeenth century there was no comparable avenue of news. Understandably, the Tudors were anxious both to exploit this potent medium and-rather more difficult than anticipated-to control it. A malleable pulpit was only one aspect of the crown's effort to manage discourse, a problem greatly complicated by the rise of print literature and the popular stage. Through licensing, censorship, and by hireling pens of its own, the state took up the Sisyphean task of shaping discourse in the midst of an unfolding communications revolution. Its right to do so was sometimes sharply contested. Godly ministers claimed the warrant of Scripture for their prophesyings, scholastic disputants guarded their privileges in the universities, and members of Parliament asserted their right to speak freely on public matters in high terms. Often they did so under the sponsorship and protection of great men. Often as well, censorship and repression produced a backlash of sympathy and defiance. Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which achieved canonical status in Elizabethan England, was a work that celebrated heroic acts of resistance against the state; such a message, even if useful and necessary in clearing the ground for the restored Anglican church, was double-edged at best. A subtler problem, entwined with the Reformation in general and the divagations of Tudor religious policy in particular, was the rise of skepticism. Like a great deal of repressed speech, it crept out in the portrayal of stage villains, and tainted the reputation of playwrights such as Marlowe.

The Tudor regime, like any expansionist state, was in fact embarked upon an inherently ambiguous enterprise. As it widened the scope of governmental activities and therefore of legitimacy claims, it enlarged the boundaries of discourse it was seeking to contain. As it demanded more of loyalty and obedience, so more was demanded of it by way of performance. If the number of justices of the peace increased, so too did the expectation that they would keep order, relieve dearth, and reconcile conflicting interests. Petitions for services ranging from repair of the roads to the suppression of pirates streamed up toward Whitehall and Westminster, particularly in time of Parliament. Merchants, too, drawn into the web of franchises, concessions, and monopolies by which the crown sought to promote, regulate, and skim revenue from trade, made vigorous claims on the state, competing for favor (which meant gaining access to Court through the increasingly elaborate system of patronage) or protesting the advantages of those who had already gained it, and demanding secure coasts and an aggressive policy toward foreign competitors, a stable coinage, and an expanded money supply. Many of these claims spilled over into the law courts, which were already strained beyond capacity in the sixteenth century.

The Tudors were not in any case dealing with a static society. The population of England more than doubled between 1500 and 1640, raising it to the highest levels in its history. This put great pressure on land and food supply, both of which were further affected by enclosure and other devices to ensure elite resource control. Proprietors strove to break customary leases which, in an age of rising prices, inhibited the growth of land value. Even the condemnation of relatively unexploited church lands provided only a temporary sop, and by the seventeenth century the acuteness of the land crisis was evident in the Irish and New World plantations, the pace of deforestation, and the draining of the fens. All of these expedients involved the displacement of existing populations, which led to protest and sometimes insurrection, as in the case of Kett's Rebellion in 1549 and the West Country risings of 1629-1631. The most severe-and unfortunately timed-of these rebellions came in Ireland in 1641, creating a wave of political reaction that helped topple England itself into revolution in 1642.

The challenge of these demographic changes-which were compounded by climatic ones beginning in the late sixteenth century that made for less temperate weather over most of the next century, and after 1618, by the economic dislocations of the Thirty Years War-have had too little attention from many recent historians, who have been at pains to construct static paradigms that have made it exceedingly difficult for them to address even gross upheavals in the political order, let alone to gauge the subtler strains and divisions in the fabric of English society. These strains were becoming acute in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods. For the five hundred years between the Norman Conquest and the accession of Elizabeth, the proportion of English peasants working in whole or part for wage hire fluctuated between a range of two and twelve per cent; by the first decade of Stuart rule that proportion had risen to more than one-third (including those subsisting on relief), and by the end of the seventeenth century it exceeded one-half. Concomitantly, there was a significant rise in vagrancy and begging. The enhanced powers of local justices and the succession of acts dealing with vagrancy and apprenticeship may be seen in large part as a response to this radically new situation. Its consequences included a drastic shrinkage in crown income that, coupled with the rising costs of government and especially of armament and the tight control over extraordinary revenues exercised by Parliament, had made the definitive activity of the state-waging war-an almost prohibitively expensive one for the English monarchy by the 1620s. When those plain facts of the case collided with ideological imperatives to ride to the rescue of international Calvinism in the period between 1620 and 1640, intense strains arose at the local and national political levels. A good deal of the nostalgia for order that pervaded the Court of Charles I, including the new Arminian piety whose adoption helped relieve the pressure to assist a beleaguered Christendom, can be seen as a retreat by the crown from demands that had become systemically unanswerable.

The early modern English state was thus both a locus of power and a focus of aspiration and demand. If from one perspective the Tudor regime seemed aggressively intrusive, from another it was only responding to the exigent needs of an emerging market economy, itself the product of demographic and monetary pressures. There is no simple answer to the chicken-and-egg question of whether the state was opportunistically expanding its powers or anxiously servicing increased social demand; no doubt both propositions were variably correct at any given time. As the crown appropriated new functions or discharged old ones with greater zeal, its internal bureaucracy developed and expanded, its ties to local elites became more ramified, and its claims to general authority waxed broader and more autocratic. Divine right absolutism was the logical (if not necessary) culmination of this process, with its claim of final and ultimately unquestionable responsibility for the general welfare. As the career of the Long Parliament was to show, such a claim could be reversed with devastating effect.

Whether considered as aggrandizing or reactive, the early modern English state sought in a great variety of ways to shape and control the discourse of legitimacy. As the state's predicament worsened, as the gap between demand and performance widened in a society subjected to increased demographic and social strain, the control of symbolic or ideologically weighted discourse became all the more urgent. Elizabeth managed this problem with legendary skill if not always assured results; James I, more waywardly attentive, projected a less consistent image; Charles I compounded his very real problems with a public style so disastrous that it brought monarchy itself into disrepute. Under Charles, the range of warrantable opinion was steadily narrowed and dissent was zealously suppressed; at the same time, as the crown disengaged itself more and more from the political community, the articulation of command became hollow and peremptory. As the Caroline monarchy was increasingly isolated, it retreated into a self-validating world of fantasy that collapsed abruptly in 1640.

Ritual and Ceremony

The natural focus of monarchy was the prince's own person. As Ernst Kantorowicz noted, the royal person was both corporal and corporate, a dual entity that was simultaneously the most public of property and the most forbidden of objects. The royal person was in short sacred. Formally, the sacralization of the royal person occurred in the act of anointment during the coronation ceremony, but popular sentiment held the ruler to be sacred from the moment of his accession, if not before. A widespread belief in royal stigmata dated back to the thirteenth century, and it was believed that James I had borne on his body since infancy the insignia of a lion, a crown, and in some versions a sword as well.

The nature and significance of the coronation process was a continually evolving one. A long medieval tradition held that the anointment of the monarch conferred on him a share in the sacerdotium of the priesthood, though whether beside or beneath the papacy was a subject of protracted controversy. It was in any case unwise for the ruler to lay too much emphasis on the point, for it not only invited clerical pretension to powers of investiture but raised uncomfortable questions about the status of an uncrowned king. A similar consideration arose with regard to the communal aspects of investiture, particularly the coronation oath. In the ceremony devolved from the fourteenth century, the king offered promises to the community through answers to set questions, a form which signified election rather than mere approbation. At Henry VII's coronation, which followed as speedily on Bosworth Field as decorum and adequate preparation would allow, he was acknowledged by right of conquest, heredity, and election-"elected, chosen and required by all three estates of this same land," as the formula had it. Henry VIII was also represented as king by inheritance and election, but that passionate reviser undertook a number of emendations to the oath in his own hand to reflect his conception of the subordinate role of church and Parliament. These revisions were incorporated in spirit if not in letter into Edward VI's coronation oath, probably by Thomas Cranmer. Edward assumed the crown by inheritance alone, and promised only to maintain the laws according to their right meaning, of which he was the final interpreter. Cranmer, who of course performed the ceremony and preached the sermon of investiture, glossed it in a manner that eviscerated both its consensual and sacerdotal elements:

The solemn rites of coronation have their ends and utility, yet neither direct force nor necessity. They be good admonitions to put kings in mind of their dignity; for they be God's anointed, not in respect of the oil which the bishop useth, but in consideration of their power, which is ordained, of their sword, which is authorised, of their persons, which are elected by God, and indued with the gifts of his Spirit for the better ruling and guiding of this people. The oil, if added, is but a ceremony; if it be wanting, that king is yet a perfect monarch notwithstanding, and God's anointed, as well as if he was inoiled.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern Englandby ROBERT ZALLER Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804755043
• ISBN 13: 9780804755047
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 832