By Christopher Thompson
Jared van Duinen’s essay, which first appeared in the
Australian journal, Parergon, in 2011, addresses two main themes. The first of
these is an historiographical one covering the analysis of the ‘Personal Rule’
of King Charles I between 1629 and 1640 by historianslargely since the
appearance of ‘revisionisim’ in the 1970s. The second involves a call to
current and future historians to focus their research on the personal networks
of Puritan association that linked together the King’s opponents in the period
before the summoning of the Short and Long Parliaments. It is thus a review of
relatively recent work and a programme for new work. It is always helpful for a
field of historical research to be reassessed, especially by a young scholar
reflecting on his own recent experiences.
This exercise begins with some observations on the
concentration of much historical work in the twentieth century on the politics
of the centre in England with its focus on Parliament in particular. Whigs and
Marxists as well as the ‘revisionists’ of the 1970s and 1980s inevitably sought
to explain the dissent faced by James VI and I and by Charles I in their
Parliaments from 1604 until 1629 but were less interested in the hidden facets
of dissent in the 1630s when no Parliaments were held. Van Duinen was critical
of Kevin Sharpe’s book, The Personal Rule of Charles I, published in 1992 for
this reason. It emphasized the intrinsically deferential, hierarchical and
unrevolutionary nature of politics and society in the 1630s when England
experience a period of relative calm and stability.
Sharpe’s view was reinforced by the studies of royal
patronage of the arts, of masques, etc., in the same decade, which threw
welcome new light on Court politics and the role of Henrietta Maria as Queen.
Similarly, the debates over the nature of the Caroline Church and the role of
Laudianism served to reinforce the central perspective on the period of
‘Personal Rule’. He was not critical of this work in itself but he thought that it needed to be balanced by a
new concentration on local and regional spheres of activity to discover how
dissident activity was decentralized and diffused when there was no forum in
Parliament to give it focus.
A decentralized research strategy would, in his view,
help to show how national and local concerns about Caroline rule intersected:
the cultural, familial and intellectual milieus of contemporaries as well as
the impact on their political, religious and social links could thus be
explored. Some of this work had already been done. Kenneth Fincham had shown
how sophisticated a grasp the Kentish gentry had on national issues while
figures like Ann Hughes, Jason Peacey and Tom Webster had been able to
investigate important networks of clerical and lay association. Case studies of
the careers and lives of Samuel Rogers and Robert Woodford were equally
rewarding.
The Feoffees of
Impropriations and the two colonizing ventures, the Masachusetts Bay Company
and the Providence Island Company,
demonstrated how such networks of association drew opponents of the King
together. Indeed, the Providence Island Company offered future leaders of the
Long Parliament valuable grounding in business administration and experience of
committee work. Laudianism, moreover, with its pursuit, sometimes persecution,
of religious opponents helped to construct a “more pronounced or significant
puritan opposition than had hitherto existed”, hence the need for a new
research strategy.
This is, I hope, a fair account of Jared van Duinen’s
argument. It is not, however, one that can be enthusiastically endorsed partly
because the strategy for which he calls has been one I have pursued ever since
I was a postgraduate decades ago. The survival of much of the estate archives
of the Rich family, Earls of Warwick, from 1617, of comparable material from
the estate of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Say and Sele, of the 4th Earl of
Bedford’s commonplace books and of his letters, and of the colonial manuscripts
covering the Massachusetts Bay, Providence Island and Saybrook companies have
permitted the extensive reconstruction of the attitudes and ideas of those
Jared van Duinen’s own thesis described as the ‘Junto’ from the mid-1620s into
the 1640s.
The colonial material is especially helpful in revealing the views of these men on forms of
government in Church and State alike. How these connections were constituted
and exercised their covert influence in the 1630s is much better understood
than he appreciated. Similarly, the patronage of the Earls of Bedford and Essex
and Warwick, of Viscount Say and Sele and Lord Brooke and of their allies, men
like Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Sir Thomas Barrington and Richard Knightley has been
comprehensively explored in local government and in the Church. The new
strategy for which Dr van Duinen has called was already out of date when it was
issued.
