August 22, 2021
THE SECOND EARL OF WARWICK AND THE CONTEXTS OF THE ‘DOUBLE CRISIS’ OF POLITICS IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND IN THE WRITINGS OF CHRISTOPHER THOMPSON PUBLISHED BETWEEN 1971 AND 2012
Note: articles printed in refereed journals and chapters published in books are referenced by their date, noted in bold, e.g. [1976]. Other non-refereed articles and papers, held by the British Library, are referenced similarly by date, but prefaced with the letters [BLP], for ‘British Library Paper’. A chronological list of all publications, together with a list of these supplementary British Library Papers by date, is to be found at the end of this Preface.
The Contexts of this Doctoral Submission
A century ago, the dramatic events of the seventeenth century in England in particular and in the British Isles more generally, especially the revolutions of the 1640s and of 1688-9, were explained and understood in a predominantly Whig perspective.[1] The great historians of the nineteenth century, notably T. B. Macaulay and S. R. Gardiner, looked at the societies of their own times in which the supremacy of Parliament, the rule of law, the freedom of the press, the existence of political parties and religious toleration were firmly entrenched and then looked back to those whose efforts they considered to have made these benign constitutional conditions possible, in other words, to the political and religious opponents of the Stuart monarchs in the seventeenth century whose radical actions had secured their freedoms.[2] These struggles for the subject’s liberties and against monarchical tyranny provided the themes around which their grand narratives were written. Macaulay’s political enthusiasm for the Glorious Revolution was too obvious to be of enduring influence but, in Gardiner's case, his apparent repudiation of such bias, his strict adherence to chronological order in his analysis and his mastery of a wide range of sources gave him scholarly authority long after his death in 1902. Decades later, his narrative account, which had been carried forward by C. H. Firth, and his interpretation of the Puritan Revolution, which had been sustained by G. M. Trevelyan, was believed to need no more than minor emendations.[3]
Within little more than a generation after the end of the Victorian era, however, these events — these revolutions, in fact - had come to be significantly reinterpreted. Under the influence of Marx and Weber respectively, they were no longer seen as the result of political and religious opposition to the Stuarts but rather as the consequence of economic and social upheavals set in motion during the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century. R. H. Tawney, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone maintained that the internal conflicts of this period were essentially the result of profound economic and social changes, particularly of the redistribution, for example, of landed property away from the church and the crown after the dissolution of the monasteries and from the peerage as a consequence of profligate expenditure and old-fashioned methods of estate management in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean periods. The gentry, by contrast, whose members were generally neither profligate nor old-fashioned in managing their estates, were the chief beneficiaries. But there were other factors at work too — the spread of Protestantism and the corrosive impact of Puritanism on older cultural and social values; higher standards of education and literacy amongst an expanding and increasingly prosperous ‘middle sort’ ; and the desire for freedom from antique commercial and industrial restrictions — that together made the existing institutions of church and state increasingly inappropriate for their time and place.[4] From this progressive perspective, just as in the Whig interpretation of political history, the mercantile bourgeoisie and their allies, the ‘rising’ gentry, were seen as contributing positively to the emergence of a characteristically ‘modern’ society, i.e. towards the fundamental transformation which was the necessary prelude to the industrial revolution and Britain’s commercial dominance from the late eighteenth century onwards: other groups — the defenders, for example, of divine right monarchy, of the established church and the landed aristocracy — appeared to have hindered this process of modernization. Inevitably, they had to give way before it and were left, if not on the rubbish heap, then on the sidelines of historical research.[5]
It seemed as if political and religious history had been satisfactorily explained in this more fundamental way. The older Whig interpretation had thus become subordinate to — or, perhaps, subsumed within — a Marxist form of explanation. Admittedly, this new orthodoxy had its critics, notably Hugh Trevor-Roper in the early-1950s, but his alternative explanation for the English Civil Wars was predicated upon a decline of the lesser or mere gentry and a struggle for lucrative offices in the tiny bureaucracy of early modern England, in the law and at court from which rural landowners were excluded. His approach, however, was just as materialist in nature as those of Tawney and Stone. When Perez Zagorin defined the priorities for future research a decade later, he thought in terms of resolving the issues arising from the ‘storm over the gentry’ and of exploring in greater detail the conflict between Court and Country postulated by Trevor-Roper. The evolution of the House of Commons as an institution and the formation of an opposition movement also found space on his agenda.[6] Of course, there were other issues, notably in county history where ideas about Court-Country conflicts and of inward-looking gentry communities were being advocated, but this was the broad context in which my advanced research began.
In due course, these predominantly materialist interpretations came under attack from a number of scholars who, from the early 1970s, rejected the reductionist and teleological elements in both Whig and Marxist accounts. Their alternative, revised view emphasized elements of consensus rather than conflict in English society; the absence of class struggles in the Marxist or Tawneyite senses; the importance of the problems the Stuarts faced in ruling multiple kingdoms — especially in the sphere of religious policy; and, critically, the significance of contingency and the law of unintended consequences in determining the outcome of events. Narrative accounts returned to prominence. In its turn, this revisionist approach has come under criticism from so-called post-revisionists and the debate has moved on to matters of culture, literature and the public sphere.[7] How the latter interacted with political developments is now the subject of intense academic scrutiny.
The focus of historical debate has thus changed profoundly during my career. Fifty years ago, the emphasis of enquiry was on the gentry in their counties; on the struggles of the ‘country’ they were believed to represent against the royal ‘court’ and its centralizing policies; on the Puritan artisans, merchants and ministers whose ability to mobilize support for the Long Parliament against Charles I in the 1640s proved to be so important; and on the cultural and intellectual developments undermining the beliefs and values upon which the ancien régime rested. Progressive economic and social changes mattered; radical politics and religion were significant, royalism was not. As pillars of the old order, peers were regarded as natural conservatives, allies of the crown and church and thus destined to be swept aside on the battlefields of the civil war and then into political oblivion after the execution of the king in 1649 and the abolition of the House of Lords. They were impediments and obstacles to necessary, indeed inevitable, changes. But these simple, not to say simple-minded, assumptions obscured the role of those peers who opposed the crown well before and during the civil wars in England and, in effect, ruled out the possibility that the aristocracy might have maintained or even enhanced its authority during the period. Indeed, it had become all too easy to hold that they played only a minor role in the parliamentary politics of this time and that the significance of their colonising ventures in the Caribbean and New England had either been comprehensively covered already or was likely to be of little importance in the new agendas for historical research in the early to mid-seventeenth century period. Yet this dismissive view of the nobility’s role in the early Stuart period was not that of most contemporaries. Acute observers, particularly Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, had been more impressed by the ‘great contrivers’ — the nobles and their allies who led the Long Parliament in its deliberations in the early 1640s and who stimulated armed resistance to the king in the first Civil War — and more interested in them than mid-twentieth century historians. Naturally enough, Hyde’s assessment and the questions about the peerage that appeared already to have been settled, let alone those that, perhaps, remained to be answered, attracted my attention.[8]
Trajectories
The primary focus of my research and writing has been on the life and political career of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick (c.1587/88-1658),[9] and the links which his career reveals between the twin crises of the reign of King Charles I: the crisis experienced in England in the late-1620s [BLP 1986a] during which England came close to domestic violence and the more severe, revolutionary crisis of the 1640s which ended in Civil Wars and the abolition of the institutions of the monarchy, the Church of England and the House of Lords.
He was born in 1587 (or, just possibly in 1588), the first child of the marriage of the 3rd Lord Rich, who owned the largest estate in the county of Essex, and his first wife, Penelope, the sister of Queen Elizabeth’s last favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex.[10] They were probably a temperamentally incompatible couple whose match had been promoted by the 3rd Earl of Huntingdon, a Puritan peer who shared the Calvinist convictions of Lord Rich.[11] These convictions were evidently inherited by Lord Rich’s eldest son whose earliest surviving letter was composed in French and sent to his uncle, the Earl of Essex, with his reflections upon the sufferings of the Israelites in their Egyptian captivity. From his mother, he derived an interest in the social activities of the Jacobean court, the taste for which he retained well into the 1630s long after he had been alienated from Charles I’s regime.[12] (His younger brother, Henry, later Earl of Holland, enjoyed a highly successful career at Court until 1640.) Their parents were, however, eventually divorced on the grounds of her adultery in 1605. As a convinced Calvinist and very intermittent attender at court, Warwick developed a deceptive capacity to appear to look in two directions at once, and thus to seem to be Janus-faced. This characteristic may have escaped Warwick’s steward, Arthur Wilson, or have been overlooked by him, when he composed his history of James I’s reign late in the 1640s but it did attract the attention and criticism of the royalist, Edward Hyde, when he looked back on the events of the ‘Great Rebellion’ as he termed it. He berated Warwick for hypocrisy and for profiting from the rebellion.[13] Whether right or wrong, his verdict raises questions that need to be answered in any study of Warwick’s career. No less clearly in an age of family connections and personal patronage, his links with his brother; with his slightly younger cousin, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex; with his second cousin and man-of-affairs, Sir Nathaniel Rich, who acted in the same capacity for the Earl of Holland;[14] with his step-mother, Frances Wray and her Lincolnshire connections; with his three wives and through the marriages of his siblings and children, all require careful attention.
Warwick was certainly a great landowner with an estate of approximately twenty thousand acres — most of it lying in northern central and south eastern Essex centred on the great houses at Leez Priory and Rochford Hall, with outlying properties in Norfolk and Northamptonshire [2010].[15] This concentration of a peer’s estate within a single county was relatively unusual by contemporary standards. His landed income of just over £8,000 a year by the 1630s was considerably greater than that of any other peerage or gentry family, including the Petres, in the county; and this affluence put him in an income bracket more than double, perhaps three times, that of his major allies, the Barrington family of Hatfield Broad Oak.[16] Around him there was, by the 1620s, a group of recognizably Puritan families, including the Barringtons, the Mashams of Otes, the Grimstons of Bardfield, the Cheekes of Pyrgo, the Everards of Great Waltham and a host of lesser families, many of them tenants on his estate and closely related to one another. Warwick was also the patron of just over thirty church livings, mainly in Essex, to which he presented predominantly Puritan ministers,[17] many of them important figures in the ranks of the godly, particularly after 1640. Edmund Calamy and John Gauden fall into this category; and other ministers like Thomas Hooker, Jeremiah Burroughes and Stephen Marshall enjoyed Warwick’s protection during the 1620s and 1630s. On the basis of his landed estate, family connections and clerical patronage, Warwick came to dominate the affairs and politics of his native county between 1620 and 1640 and would emerge openly after 1640 as one of the leading opponents of the Caroline regime. As an electoral patron in the 1620s — just conceivably (if Sir John Eliot was right) as a manager of resistance to the crown by the end of that decade[18] — and again in 1640, the earl was a major figure in the parliamentary struggles of the late Jacobean and early Caroline periods: he was certainly the man who, more than any other, led the county of Essex into the first Civil War on the side of the Long Parliament. [BLP 1999] Contemporaries regarded him as the ‘king’ of Essex or as the ‘rebellious Earl of a more rebellious county’[19] and inevitably described him as one of the ‘great contrivers’ behind the conflicts of the 1640s, a verdict that more recent studies by John Adamson and Richard Cust have supported.
Warwick’s ‘contrivances’ took a number of forms. He was probably unique amongst his contemporaries in the amount of time he devoted to nurturing English trade and colonial settlement in the New World. His colonial interests stretched from the plantation of Virginia during James I’s reign, to the colonization of Bermuda (with which he was involved throughout his adult life); from participation in the affairs of New England in the late-1620s and early-1630s to playing a leading role in the Providence Island Company, with its colony and privateering base in the Bay of Honduras in the 1630s.[20] Perhaps his most ambitious colonial venture was his attempt in the late-1630s and early-1640s to carve out a private empire spanning Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago and Guiana.[21] This range of activities took him from the joint-stock companies of the reign of James I to the Puritan commonwealths and proprietary colonization of the reign of Charles I and beyond to the Long Parliament’s attempts to assert its authority in the Caribbean and North America. His surviving personal correspondence throws a revealing light on his treatment of his tenants and on his search for profitable staple commodities to sell in England.[22] Alongside these colonising activities ran a series of privateering voyages (mainly directed against the Spanish) which began in the second decade of the seventeenth century and ended in the 1650s.[23] There is evidence of careful strategic thinking in his circle about how any war against Spain and the Catholic Habsburgs should be fought — mainly at sea.[24] His buccaneering expertise and godly credentials made him a logical choice to serve as the Lord Parliament’s admiral (and later lord high admiral of England) in the 1640s.
Warwick’s interests and influence inevitably converged in the first crisis with which I have been concerned, that of the late-1620s; a crisis that had its origins in the disputes between Calvinists and Arminians over the nature of beliefs and forms of worship in the Church of England, and in quarrels over the liberties and rights of subjects in relation to the powers of the crown: a convergence which I examine in my essay ‘The Origins of the Politics of the parliamentary Middle Group 1625-1629’ [1972b]. This essay announced what was to be one of the major themes in my published work over the following decades: the continuities of personnel and ideology that link the political crisis in the English state during the 1620s with the crisis of the 1640s — earlier linkages than hitherto supposed which, until that the publication of my first essay on this theme in 1972, had not been examined in detail.
Of course, the English domestic crisis of the 1620s was made more acute by external wars — notably the European conflicts that came to be known as the Thirty Years’ War — and the profound problems which these created for the activities of central and local government in England and elsewhere in the British Isles. King James was, by the early-1620s, resentful of criticisms of England’s apparent passivity in the continental struggle which had cost his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and her husband, the Elector Palatine, not only Bohemia but also the Elector’s ancestral lands on the Rhine. James was determined, if he could, to regain their territories by diplomatic means, perhaps, by the marriage of his son, Charles, to a Spanish Infanta even if that meant a degree of toleration for Catholicism in England. (The constraints on James’s room to manoeuvre in these negotiations, imposed by the House of Commons’ anti-Catholicism, I explore in a paper on the 1621 Parliament published in 2012 [BLP 2012]). To those of his subjects brought up on tales of Elizabethan victories against ‘Popery’ and Spain and committed to confessional struggles between Protestants and Catholics, this strategy was anathema. By 1624, it had failed and James’s heir, Prince Charles, along with the old king’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, were committed to military intervention on the continent even though this did not prove practicable until after James had died in March 1625.
These changes created new political opportunities for men such as Warwick, and much of my work has been devoted to examining the cogency of his (and others’) plans for an English (or British) naval and military offensive in the brief period when such ideas received the support of Prince (later King) Charles — from 1624 to early 1626 — and the impact upon this anti-Habsburg grouping of the withdrawal of royal support in 1626. Notoriously, Charles chose to impede the prosecution of his favourite, Buckingham, in the Parliament of 1626, rather than to prosecute the ‘godly’ war against the Habsburgs; and both the origins and the political consequences of this decision are examined in my two essays, ‘Court Politics and parliamentary Conflict in 1625’ [1989] and ‘The Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629’ [1978].
In Warwick’s case, he was clearly sympathetic to aiding Elizabeth of Bohemia[25][JA1] . His younger brother, the Earl of Holland, was deeply involved in negotiating Charles I’s marriage to Louis XIII’s sister, Henriette Marie, and an alliance with the French king that, it was hoped, would provide a military bridgehead for Britain on the continent. Unfortunately, that alliance soon broke down, and, by 1627, had turned into open hostilities — a conflict in which the youngest Rich brother, Sir Charles Rich, later lost his life at the Ile de Rhé.
Warwick’s emergence during the mid-1620s as a figure of major political importance had been relatively little noticed before I began my researches in the 1960s and pursued them in the 1970s and 1980s. As this work demonstrated, his centrality to English, and later to British, politics — and, in particular, to the political manoeuvres of Charles I’s critics — derived from a number of causes. As a nobleman with extensive continental links to the supporters of the Protestant cause in the 1620s, a strong strategic preference for a naval war against the Habsburgs, and a county leader with responsibility in 1625-6 for preparing Essex to resist invasion, Warwick reacted critically to the failures of the wars undertaken against France and Spain after Charles I’s accession [1972b and 2010]. By the time the Parliament of 1626 met early in that year, Warwick and his allies were determined to secure the removal of Buckingham by means of parliamentary impeachment. The king’s obvious preference, moreover, for what were widely perceived as ‘popish’ church practices and Arminian clerics (graphically illustrated at his coronation) served to widen this gulf with Warwick, the friend and ally of the Puritan divine, John Preston: he was not only a supporter of doctrinal Calvinism but also came to be recognised as one of the main protectors of Puritan ministers later persecuted by Archbishop Laud and Bishop Wren.
A further major theme to emerge from my research was the continuity — both of personnel and of religious and political concerns — that characterized the crown’s politically active critics in the late 1620s and the early 1640s; a conclusion that struck at one of the principal pillars of the ‘Revisionism’ of the 1980s (especially in the form adopted by Conrad Russell) which had instead stressed the unrelatedness of these two crises, and, in consequence, the essentially short-term origins of the governmental breakdown of 1640-42. As the research presented in this doctoral submission has demonstrated, per contra, the connections created among the crown’s critics during the crisis of the late-1620s proved highly durable. Warwick himself, his Essex allies, men such as Sir Francis Barrington and Sir William Masham, his fellow peers, Viscount Saye and Sele and Saye’s son-in-law, the 4th Earl of Lincoln, all resisted the collection of the Forced Loan that the king and his advisers attempted to collect in lieu of parliamentary subsidies in the late 1620s.[26] Warwick even tried and failed to intercept the Spanish plate fleet off the Azores in the summer of 1627. When a new Parliament had to be summoned to meet early in 1628, they were prominent in mobilising electoral opposition to the crown and in trying to limit the king’s powers over arbitrary imprisonment, unparliamentary fiscal levies, martial law and billeting. Their failure to secure Buckingham’s removal was only temporary — later in the summer an assassin effected what parliamentary impeachment could not. As early as 1629, they were ready to seek the proscription of Arminian doctrines on free will and forms of worship in return for granting traditional supplies of Tonnage and Poundage [1978]. It was a potential bargain Charles had no intention of accepting. Neither these concerns, nor this political grouping around Warwick that were galvanized to political action by them, went away in the course of the 1630s; and, with the progressive breakdown in royal authority from middle of 1640, Warwick and his political allies were once again in the forefront of the campaign to change the king’s counsellors, to re-establish the subject’s rights on securer legal foundations, and to oust Arminians from the control of the church. These conclusions have received independent confirmation in the recent work of Richard Cust and John Adamson.
One major consequence of my study of Warwick’s career has been revise the received listing of the dramatis personae of early Stuart England. Much of my work has thus focused on examining how the varied aspects of his career — county, parliamentary and colonial — combined to offer a challenge to Caroline rule that was significantly more far-reaching than previously appreciated. During the decade of the 1620s a powerful alliance was formed between a group of peers — Warwick prominent among them — together with like-minded members of the gentry and godly ministers, based upon friendship and common political and religious (often Calvinist) convictions, that would sustain opposition to the Caroline regime after 1629 [2011 and BLP 2005b]. They certainly acted together to foster resistance to the levying of Ship Money at the behest of the crown [BLP 1996]. The colonising and political projects that these men sponsored in the 1630s subverted arrangements in the English church and state as approved by the crown and, critically, revealed a willingness in principle to resist the king by force of arms well before 1640 or 1642. These experiences clearly influenced the aims and practices of the Junto and, later, the Independent grandees in the Long Parliament.[Add footnote to your own and other writer’s works that affirms this point.]
This argument for a double crisis — the formation of a distinctive, proto-revolutionary opposition in the 1620s that would provide much of the impetus and leadership for full-scale revolution after 1640 — offers a new, ‘medium-term’ explanation for the events of the 1640s; one that challenges the emphasis on contingency and short-term factors favoured by Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, and other revisionist historians. It also raises major questions as to the relative importance of, and proper causal relationship between, the sequence of crises in the three Stuart kingdoms from 1637 that has figured so prominently in recent historiography of the civil-war period.
The published essays that constitute this doctoral submission illustrate four major themes in early Stuart history, each of which bears directly or indirectly on the wider understanding of the connections between these various crises. These are: first: the position of the peerage in English society up to 1641; second: the parliamentary history of the early Stuart period and the importance of the development of enduring bicameral groups; third: the significance of the surviving documentary material on English colonisation and its implications for a proper understanding of English domestic history; and fourth: the growth of the second Earl of Warwick’s power and influence in Essex, and nationally, from the 1620s to the early-1640s.
Each of the essays contained in this submission throws important light on these issues from a variety of angles. Collectively, they support — arguably, indeed, sustain — the hypothesis that there was a ‘double crisis’ affecting English political life in the late-1620s and the decade after 1640; and that it is only by seeing the connections and continuities between the two that the gravity of the first crisis and the causes of the latter can be fully understood.
1. The Early Stuart Peerage and its Historiography
The starting point of the historical writing presented here, and point of departure for the more specific arguments about the influence of the Earl of Warwick and his circle, was a critical engagement with the work of Lawrence Stone — and, in particular, with his argument that the political influence of the English peerage was in a state of almost terminal decline in the first decades of the seventeenth century [Cite reference to your articles which do this]. Stone’s highly influential book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641, published in 1965 embodied many of the dominant themes of historical explanation at that time.[27] As is now well known, he argued that, over the first half of this period, the peerage lost much of its landed wealth, its military power and social prestige and that its recovery in the early seventeenth century was due, in part, to royal largesse and to harsher, socially divisive, methods of estate management. A combination of conspicuous consumption and the crown’s inflation of honours served to discredit the holders of noble titles while the greater gentry, which was largely free from these debilitating vices, grew in authority and influence. The consequent crisis of confidence within the peerage made the upheavals of the 1640s — the abolition of the monarchy, of the established church, and of the House of Lords — possible.[28] The chief beneficiaries of this transformation were the gentry, large as well as small, who could now rise as far as their abilities and good fortune would take them without hindrance, and the godly, who could now worship as they pleased once the old order had collapsed. This powerfully argued and comprehensively illustrated case drew on the works of Marx, Weber and Tawney, and on the more modern analytical resources offered by anthropology, psychology and sociology. Statistics gave the book its bony skeleton without which it would have been merely an inert lump of amorphous flesh. Altogether it was a seductive mixture placed in front of academic historians and casual readers alike for their consumption. Comments like ‘remarkable’, ‘a major historical contribution’, ‘a mammoth and marvellous book’, ‘a landmark in the history of seventeenth century England’ flowed from the pens and typewriters of reviewers.[29] Comparisons were, indeed, made with the works of Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and the Annales School of French historians.[30]
The book was consciously conceived as an introduction to, and explanation of, political history. Stone, nonetheless, decided to exclude discussion of the role of the House of Lords in the shaping of national affairs and not to deal with political history as such. But this self-denying ordinance could not be entirely observed. The importance of the peers in the Tudor legislative process after the Reformation was openly admitted, as was the significance of the patronage of Puritan lords and Privy Councillors in the late-Elizabethan campaigns for reform of the Church of England. But these factors largely disappeared once Stone came to consider the first decades of Stuart rule. He maintained that the divisions in the upper House in the 1620s were due more to animosities between the holders of longer-established titles and those of more recent creation than to any other cause. Too few offices were available, in any case, for all the peers to fill, hence, in part, the animosity towards the court of those disappointed in their searches for preferment. Furthermore, he argued, the House of Commons was increasingly convinced that it was more important and representative than the House of Lords, a view that struck a responsive chord outside Westminster and Whitehall. Attempts, moreover, by the peerage to mount an aristocratic counter-attack proved unproductive even with the support of the king after 1629. Antiquarian and legal interest in the revival of the procedure of impeachment (in which the members of the House of Lords sat as judges on charges presented by the House of Commons) proved of little benefit. The peers, whatever their reservations about Charles I’s political and religious policies by 1640-2, were being used by the crown’s gentry opponents in the early-1640s as both a battering-ram and shield against his regime. Divided and uncertain in their allegiance, the peerage split when the first Civil War came and was ground to pieces between the upper and nether millstones of the king and the Commons. Those peers who supported the Long Parliament lent social respectability in the early stages to the rebellion against the crown, church and court but they rapidly lost their usefulness thereafter and gained nothing. The end inevitably came for them as it did for the monarchy and the church in 1649.[31]
The structure of this argument was thus predicated upon the primacy of economic and material factors. Landed wealth and income were the principal sources of power and influence. Losing such property and rents meant, or implied, the loss of both. At the start of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the peerage had been, according to Stone, in a situation of status equilibrium: in other words, status and wealth, rank and power were generally in accord with one another. But, during the ensuing forty years, these attributes had diverged as the peerage lost manors and real income;[32] and, by 1601, there was an economic crisis in their affairs which was only remedied by the adoption of new methods of estate management and through the prodigal largesse of the new Stuart rulers. Even so, Stone contended, the peerage had not recovered its old dominance and landed pre-eminence by 1641. The peerage’s apparent eclipse in the 1640s reflected such economic and social changes: they had to do so given Stone’s preconceptions, a series of received Tawneyite orthodoxies about the relation between economic and political powers which he shared with almost an entire generation of early modern historians. It was almost an act of heresy to question such claims — hence, in part, the widespread acceptance of much, if not all, of his argument. Naturally enough, some features of the book attracted more praise than other parts. His analysis of the inflation of honours and the participation of peers in business activities were generally welcomed. However, Stone’s central argument that the peerage experienced a sharp fall in its real income and landed possessions in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the figures he deployed to support these contentions persuaded some scholars but did not convince all historians. G. E. Aylmer, J. H. Hexter and D. H. Pennington were broadly favourable to Stone’s analysis although each had reservations.[33] Robert Ashton, D. C. Coleman and J. P. Cooper, on the other hand, were much more critical and skeptical.[34] But, throughout the ensuing exchanges, Stone maintained the validity of his calculations on the land-holdings and wealth of the peerage and the value of his methods of quantification in determining these vital questions. On these points and on an issue central to his entire argument, he did not move.
This impasse over his statistics was the starting point for my first article on the subject of the economic crisis allegedly affecting the fortunes of the peerage before and after 1600.[1972a] If his contentions about the validity of his manorial samples (which implied that large changes in his estimates of the total manorial holdings of the peerage — and of groups within its ranks — might be used to track changes in their overall ownership of property and their real incomes), and the accuracy of his calculations for the manorial holdings of the entire peerage in 1558, 1602 and 1641 and of his estimates of the income of the families in its ranks in 1559, 1602 and 1641 could be shown to be contradictory or unsound, then this central pillar of his entire case would fall in pieces. That is why, for the purposes of analysis, all Stone’s working assumptions about his figures — on the validity of his manorial samples, on the margin of error of plus or minus 10 per cent to which his manorial counts for the peerage were subject, and on the broad accuracy of his estimates of the peerage’s landed income in its different forms — were accepted. His estimates for the manorial holdings of the entire peerage in 1558, 1602 and 1641 were subject to this margin of error of plus or minus 10 per cent. So, too, were his manorial estimates for the 41 peerage families extant from 1558 to 1602 and for the 33 families extant from 1558 to 1602 and to 1641. If an appropriate method of estimating the landed incomes (i.e. of their gross rentals plus casualties in 1558/1559 and 1602 but excluding casualties in 1641) of these 41 and 33 families could be found, then the average annual values of the manors they held could be calculated and, by a simple process of subtraction and division, compared with the average annual values of manors held by the rest of the peerage at these three dates.
It is important to make clear here (and as I did in 1972) that, in estimating the gross rentals of the 41 families I was concerned with between 1558/59 and 1602 and the 33 families for which I made similar calculations in 1558/59, 1602 and 1641, I divided the total gross rental of the group into which Stone had placed them by the number of families in that group. The Rich family, for example, was one of the ten families in Stone’s Group V in 1602:[Cite footnote] the total gross rental of these ten families was put at £43,000. In my calculations, a figure of £4,300 — i.e. £43,000 divided by 10 — was, therefore, attributed to the Rich family in 1602. In technical, statistical terms, this is called calculating the mean of this income group. Using this method ensured that any bunching within income groups towards the top or bottom of the range would be reflected in my overall estimates. That was and remains the appropriate method to adopt in this exercise. There were other factors, too, to be taken into account in estimating the landed income received by peerage families. Entry fines for leases, profits from manorial courts, and wood sales were enduring elements in the peerage’s income from land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Stone had warned that, by 1641, commercial and industrial profits, income from Irish estates and drained fenlands also had to be taken into account. For that reason, I explicitly excluded a calculation for income from casualties from my comparative table for 1641: if such casualties had to be included, the relevant information was included in a footnote in my article. There was thus no lack of clarity about the methods used to prepare my estimates of the gross rentals of the 41 and 33 families for which Stone had provided figures for their manorial holdings at the relevant dates. Nor was there any doubt that casualties had been excluded from my main table for 1641. (I had described the procedures I had adopted in making these calculations when I supplied Professor Stone with my figures in 1968 privately, and again in my published article.) The results of my analysis showed that the two key props of Stone’s central argument, his manorial calculations and his estimates of the peerage’s gross rentals and landed income, were incompatible with one another. There were large discrepancies between the average annual values of manors held by different groups within the peerage in 1558/1559, 1602 and 1641. (Even if Stone had doubled the margin of error for his estimates of the manorial holdings of the peerage as a whole and for the 41 and 33 families, he would only have saved his case in one of the five cases analysed in my tables.) This meant that large changes in the ownership of manors were no guide to changes in real income. His bony skeleton — and the broader arguments about the economic (and hence political) standing of the peerage that depended on this — had been reduced to statistical jelly.
Stone, for the first time in the context of the wider debate on his book, moved significantly in response. He did so by misrepresenting the procedures I had followed. Stone claimed that, for the 41 and 33 families in my tables, I had calculated their gross rentals from the median of the income groups into which he had placed them. This would, had it been true, have meant that my figures would not have reflected any bunching within such income groups. He followed this false assertion by arguing that I had erroneously included and mysteriously excluded casualties from my calculations for 1641. In order to eliminate the discrepancies he admitted that I had revealed between the average annual values of manors held by different groups of peers, he asked his readers to assume that those outside the ranks of the 41 or 33 families were more poorly documented than those within their numbers — a procedure that was highly inappropriate because both were subject to an identical margin of error of plus or minus 10 per cent — and to agree that the average annual values of manors held by those outside the 41 or 33 families should be ‘approximated’ to the average annual values of those within the 41 or 33 families. This involved simply assuming no such discrepancies existed. The adjustment to the overall manorial holdings of the peerage was irrelevant to this assumption that no discrepancies existed. Stone then congratulated himself on his refutation of the criticisms I had made. To add insult to this grotesque demonstration of intellectual dishonesty, he secured a commitment that I should not be allowed to reply to his preposterous claims.[35] It was an object lesson in statistical sleight of hand and the exercise of academic influence. Even so, further work on this issue on my part showed that his contentions on the matter of manorial counts and the landed incomes of the peerage, whether made in 1965 or 1972, were untenable [1972a; BLP 1990a and 2005a].
This scepticism about Stone’s arguments fed into later work [add anything published; BLP 1986c, 1990a, 2005a] on the position of the peerage as landowners in English society from 1534 to 1641. Examining some of his other contentions suggested that there was nothing new, for example, in the phenomenon of peers who were dependent on income from offices.[36] Similarly, his claims about the demilitarization of the peerage after 1600 — another alleged reason for its political decline — were also shown to be defective.[37] Late-medieval methods of raising troops were already being phased out by the time of Queen Elizabeth’s accession, and the early Stuart peerage was much more militarily experienced than Stone had supposed. The political and parliamentary evidence from the 1620s onwards suggested, moreover, that the peerage’s influence was growing, not diminishing. On the sea of uncertainty on which Stone had set sail, a better compass and improved navigational instruments than he could provide were required. All the issues that Stone had appeared to have settled to the satisfaction of many contemporary historians from the mid-1960s had, by the early-1970s, been shown to be still open and unresolved.
My main aim in 1972 had been to demonstrate that Stone’s calculations, conclusions and methodology were fundamentally flawed. Some of my subsequent work bears directly on these epistemological problems. Few early modern estate archives have survived entirely intact. But many families have left catalogues of deeds or auditors’ accounts and copies of rentals, collections of leases or lease-books. This material often contains gaps, but these can sometimes be filled in, given enough in the way of source material. Thus it has been possible to reconstruct some of the estate accounts of the Rich family in the sixteenth century, and — to a much more considerable extent — those for the 2nd Earl of Warwick between 1619 and 1658.[38] This work, which has been touched upon in my comments on Stone’s statistics [BLP 1986c and 2005a] and in my essays upon Warwick’s role in Essex in the 1620s and again in 1642-3 [1972a, 2010], has revealed important changes in leasing policies, a high degree of continuity amongst the earl’s tenantry (with implications for the degree of support he could rely upon and mobilise within his own county), and has offered new insights into the balance of economic advantage between landlords and tenants in the mid-seventeenth century. It has also illuminated some previously unappreciated problems relating to the accounting methods used on such estates — for example, in highlighting the differences between real and nominal arrears. These discoveries and insights have considerable implications for the analysis of aristocratic estates and the study of networks of landowners and tenants more generally.
This reassessment of the role of the peerage, and its potential for exerting effective influence in Parliament and beyond, was to have major significance for the understanding of politics during the 1620s and beyond — implications which I explored in detail in a series of related essays beginning with my Alexander Prize Essay published in 1972 [1972b] which helped to foster the far-reaching re-writing of the history of the nobility in the reign of Charles I undertaken by John Adamson and Richard Cust.
2. Parliament in the 1620s: the Double Crisis, Part 1
In order to give proper account of the emphases and points of polemical engagement contained in the aspects of this doctoral submission, it is necessary first to give a short account of the historiographical environment from which these works first arose. The dominant figure in the study of the early Stuart Parliaments in the mid-twentieth century was the American historian, Wallace Notestein. He was an avowed defender and supporter of the scholarly achievements and interpretative conclusions of the great late-Victorian historian, S. R. Gardiner.[39] Like Gardiner, he was an advocate of a broadly Whig interpretation of the period and a gifted editor of the sources covering the proceedings of the House of Commons under Kings James VI and I and Charles I.[40] Unlike Gardiner, his published works were relatively few in number and often separated by many years.
Notestein’s most famous work was his British Academy lecture, The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons, originally delivered and published in 1924.[41] In this long essay, which began with a survey of Tudor practices and procedures in the passage of legislation, Notestein argued that, after the accession of King James in 1603, control of the business of the House of Commons passed gradually from the hands of the sovereign’s Privy Councillors into those of men without any official connection to the government and with no shared ties save those of the feelings and opinions of English country gentlemen. By the 1620s, a new leadership had come into being, one able to control the policy and procedures of the House of Commons and to bring forward most legislative measures for the House’s consideration. The development of the Committee of the Whole House, which deprived the Speaker of his power to determine the business of the Commons, in 1607, and of other Committees of the Whole House, as well as of specialised Select Committees facilitated this process. A failure on the part of King James to give sufficient attention to elections and to keep enough men of sufficient ability as Privy Councillors in the lower House diminished the capacity of the crown to retain influence there. The old nobility in the House of Lords was alienated enough to move towards co-operation with ‘the Opposition’ in the Commons whilst newer creations lacked electoral influence in the boroughs and counties. A better-educated group of M.P.s of higher status, supported by an influx of common lawyers and by the researches of antiquarians, a House whose leaders — men like Sir Edward Coke, John Glanville, George Hakewill, Sir Robert Phelips, John Selden, John Pym and Sir Edwin Sandys — had a secure majority and considerable public opinion in the country behind them, was able to catch the reins of policy and to initiate laws. No one could then tell where this process would end. But, with the benefit of hindsight, Notestein did: the terminus was the Bill of Rights of 1689, ‘the point at which the legislative supremacy of Parliament was established’. Once the House of Commons had gained control of its own procedures, more advanced positions came within its range. The early Stuart Parliaments had created ‘in politics a new kind of Commons that was by and by to make inevitable a new constitution’.[42]
Admittedly, that was not Notestein’s last word on the subject. In 1954, he published a rather different account of ‘the Opposition’ in Elizabethan Parliaments. stressing its continuity from 1566 onwards and the influence that experience in local government had on the legislative remedies favoured by early Stuart M.P.s. He stated that most of the work of the Commons was done by sixty or eighty men, twenty or so of whom were its leaders and four or five of whom were its bellwethers.[43] The attention of the House might change from Parliament to Parliament or from session to session. The quarrels, for example, between the king and the Commons over the issue of impositions in 1610 and 1614 were not replicated in 1621 or 1624 although the matter was not forgotten. The battle over free speech was longer; but, even though members were sometimes punished after sessions or Parliaments had ended, inside the House speech was becoming freer and franker. Similarly, on taxation without the consent of Parliament, the king seemed to have the best of it but this appearance was only that, an appearance. Notestein recognised too that the lower House could frame legislation but not necessarily secure its appearance on the Statute book.[44] On the House of Lords, he changed his position by arguing that it became less important in public estimation as the House of Commons gained power and prestige: opposition to the crown in the upper chamber became less important as new peers were created.[45] But he remained convinced that the efforts of the leaders of the Commons to hold the ministers of the Stuart kings to account, to win freedom of speech for themselves, to bargain with the crown over supplies in return for the redress of grievances and to protect the rights of subjects against royal encroachments and exactions contributed fundamentally to the achievement of the supremacy of Parliament after the Revolution of 1688-9.
By the time Notestein formulated this later argument, his contentions about the rise of the House of Commons and of its constituent gentry had been given substantial support by D. H. Willson’s book, The Privy Councillors in the House of Commons 1604-1629, published in 1940.[46] Willson had given chapter and verse for the loss of influence by Privy Councillors in the Commons, for their increasing inability to prepare acceptable business and legislation for the House, or to defend royal policies adequately and to secure the subsidies that James and Charles both sought. It was not surprising that Harold Hulme’s biography of Sir John Eliot, who was one of the most prominent figures in the House of Commons after 1624 and until 1629, was composed within the parameters of this Whig tradition deriving from Gardiner and Notestein. As late as 1972, Theodore Rabb could write of Notestein as the master of this historical edifice, as the man who had provided the ‘organizing principle for a history of the House of Commons under James I and Charles I’: no new studies of particular sessions of the Commons could be expected for a generation. All that remained was to integrate parliamentary and political history of the kind written by Gardiner and Notestein with the economic and social insights of Lawrence Stone.[47]
This account of the historiography of early Stuart Parliaments at the time when I commenced research is not, however, entirely complete. Notestein’s analysis differed fundamentally from that published by S. R. Gardiner’s severest critic, R. G. Usher, in the same year that Notestein gave his British Academy lecture — 1924.[48] Usher and Notestein had quarrelled openly over Gardiner’s legacy in the preceding decade. Notestein, moreover, was unlikely to have been pleased to hear Usher’s proposals for arranging the publication of the sources for parliamentary debates in the early Stuart period when they were set out in 1915. He never referred to Usher’s work again, and his friend, J. E. Neale, made only one slighting comment upon it[49] even though Usher supervised several dozen theses on Tudor and Stuart Parliaments [BLP 2007]. In fact, Notestein and Usher shared a keen common interest in the development of procedure in the House of Commons in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, but their verdicts differed sharply. Usher argued that, after the record of Sir Edward Coke as Speaker in 1592, when he exercised a rigid control over the lower House’s conduct of its business, Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Councillors chose in 1597 to reduce the role of the Speaker to that of a mere presiding officer. It was King James who, from 1604, diminished the role of Privy Councillors in the Commons. By 1621, a body of leaders — who were not prominent contributors to debates on the floor of the House — had control of its business and committees. The key changes had thus taken place between 1597 and 1604. There was, Usher argued, no evidence of ‘the existence of anything deserving the name of an opposition, formally organized and definitely conscious of itself’ nor, indeed, of a party of supporters of the king.[50] The nation, as he had observed in his criticisms of Gardiner’s works, was not yet politically conscious in the modern sense and most M.P.s’ relationships with their constituencies were feudal and medieval: the House was ahead of its electors and striving to drag them along. It was the collapse of the feudal system of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries along with active dissent from the measures proposed by James and Charles that lay behind the quarrels of the first decades of the seventeenth century. In this perspective, there was no conspiracy or plot against the crown any more than there was a struggle to defend the liberties of the subject against royal tyranny. Sadly, Notestein and his allies chose to ignore these objections to a Whig interpretation and Usher’s writings — which anticipate many aspects of the Revisionist critique of Gardiner and the ‘Whig interpretation’ by nearly half a century — were largely overlooked by later scholars.[51]
But Usher’s scepticism was articulated elsewhere. J. N. Ball completed a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis in 1953 on Sir John Eliot’s parliamentary career between 1624 and 1629. It was composed outside the Whig tradition and demonstrated convincingly for the first time the existence of distinct groups based on patronage or region within the House of Commons and threw important new light on the connections between the politics and proceedings of the two houses of Parliament.[52] Most important of all, J. H. Hexter had outlined an entirely novel approach to the parliamentary politics of the period in 1961. Hexter explicitly denied that the House of Commons had attempted to win control or direction over the government or sovereign authority over the king. Its members did not act or talk like would-be rulers of the realm and went through elaborate manoeuvres to avoid discussing issues of present power by making arguments based on ancient and traditional rights. They were attempting, in fact, to define the conditions and terms under which the supreme authority of the crown might be exercised. Admittedly, the gentry in the House of Commons shared the wider interest of Englishmen in freedom from arbitrary arrests and fiscal exactions, in the rule of law and the survival of the country’s representative institution. But, if M.P.s were uncertain about what they wanted for themselves, they knew very well what they did not want for their kings in the way of power. Older claims about a struggle for sovereignty and about a struggle between the government and an opposition had, by then, ceased to be plausible. The key points of what was later to be described as ‘Revisionism’ had clearly been made by 1961 [BLP 2008].[53] Hexter’s perspective and insights also profoundly influenced my own work.
I began by trying to trace the origins of the Providence Island Company’s connexion, which, since the work of A. P. Newton, has often been taken to be a surrogate for opposition to the Caroline regime in the 1630s.[54] This research drew on a combination of sources — correspondence and memoirs, estate papers, and records of debates in the House of Lords and the House of Commons — to trace the emergence during the 1620s of a bicameral group of peers and Commons-men concerned to protect the liberties of the subject against the threat of fiscal and prerogative encroachments by the crown and to defend the Calvinist credentials of the Church of England against the rise of ‘Arminian’ prelacy. This group, which included the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Viscount Saye and Sele, Sir Nathaniel Rich, and John Pym, championed the so-called ‘blue-water’ strategy for military engagement against the perceived enemies of England and Protestantism. This entailed not only aiding resistance to Habsburg power on the continent, preferably in alliance with the Dutch, but also a privateering campaign against Spanish interests in the Caribbean, which was to be conducted beyond royal or conciliar control [1972b].
Although this aggressively Protestant agenda had wide appeal within the nation at large, it was being actually set by men linked by shared political and religious convictions in both Houses of Parliament. Unlike those acting in conjunction with the 3rd Earl of Pembroke in 1625-6,[55] the Warwick-Saye-Pym group had influence beyond Westminster and the grouping was to have an after-life stretching well beyond 1629. Pembroke’s concerns focused principally on the court, on issues arising from foreign policy, and the incompetence of the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. When Buckingham evaded impeachment, Pembroke, who kept his place at court, was content to accept a truce. For Warwick, Saye and Sele and their allies, however, more fundamental issues — the fate of the Protestant religion in Europe, and defence of English liberties, and the roles they believed they were entitled to play in local and national politics — were at stake. At local level, they were certainly prepared to resist royal exactions and to help godly clergymen to escape proscription and punishment for their opposition to Arminianism.[56] This was much further than Pembroke and his circle were prepared to go.
The discovery of this major parliamentary grouping and the identification of its members [1972b] had much wider implications for our understanding of political affairs in the early Stuart Parliaments. Hitherto, the activities of the respective Houses of Parliament had tended to be considered in isolation from one another, with most attention being given to the House of Commons. The revelation that the Earl of Warwick and his allies effectively concerted their activities across the two Houses, and indeed in the localities, not only challenged post-Stone assumptions about the relative unimportance of the House of Lords, but also cut across later ‘Revisionist’ claims in the 1970s for the absence of profound ideological divisions — that is, disagreements concerning the fundamental organising principles of state and church — in pre-Civil War England.
The development of this argument prompted a more ambitious analysis of divisions amongst the leaders in the House of Commons in 1629 over the redress of religious grievances and the collection of Tonnage and Poundage [1978]. This essay required a different, more rigorous approach to the sources involving the construction of a day-by-day calendar of proceedings in the House, drawn from the Commons’ Journal and from the debates recorded in other sources and edited by Notestein and F. H. Relf.[57] The order of business and the sequence of speeches as well as the editorial work of their authors and the identification of omissions in their records thus became central to my work. (It was a procedure subsequently used for my later essays on proceedings in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1625. [1997 and 1989]) It is a radically different approach to that of relying on one major source supplemented by selections from other diaries and documents, one that is unquestionably more time-consuming, but not vulnerable to the temptations — to which much of the earlier writing on the House of Commons had often succumbed — of adopting the views of a single M.P. in part or as a whole.[58]
Until the publication of my work on parliamentary history [especially 1978, 1989, and 1997], it had often been assumed that the proceedings in the last parliamentary session of the 1620s and their dramatic denouement in March 1629 — when summary resolutions, passed by the lower House (denouncing innovations in religion, and the collection of Tonnage and Poundage, and treating those abetting or advising such actions as capital enemies of the kingdom), precipitated Parliament’s dissolution — reflected no more than temporary and intemperate opposition to Charles I; and that, in the absence of a significant body of correspondence, the dynamics of internal Commons’ politics were beyond re-construction.
Such assumptions were overly pessimistic. In fact, as my essay on ‘The Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629’ [1978] revealed it was feasible to recover in great detail the processes which preceded, and ultimately caused, the dramatic failure of that parliamentary session. As I argue in this essay, it was possible to demonstrate how the bargaining strategy of Sir Nathaniel Rich and John Pym, which offered the grant of Tonnage and Poundage by the Commons in return for what amounted to a ban on Arminian teachings and practices in the church, overlapped with an even more ambitious strategy pursued by Sir John Eliot and John Selden, who sought nothing less than the proscription and punishment of the king’s advisers on matters of politics and religion. (The essay proved influential, and the concept of a Caroline ‘political court’ under attack passed into wider historiographical currency — most notably through Thomas Cogswell’s book The Blessed Revolution.)[59] Ultimately, neither of these gambits proved successful, for their proponents had not appreciated was that the king was no longer willing — indeed, if he had ever been willing — to tolerate such an assault on his inner circle of advisers. Parliamentary defiance of his prerogative power, as spearheaded by Warwick and his allies, prompted Charles to abandon traditional forms of political compromise in favour of ‘new counsels’ and the establishment of the Personal Rule that followed the precipitate dissolution of the 1628-9 Parliament.
The rising tide of ‘Revisionism’ from the mid-1970s onwards clearly affected my subsequent work in the area of parliamentary history. Conrad Russell, the principal figure in this process, in particular, emphasized the weaknesses of early Stuart parliaments, which he characterised more as ‘events’ than as assemblies in an institutional sense. He denied that the House of Commons had wide-ranging constitutional aims or that M.P.s made any systematic attempts to ensure that supply was conditional on the redress of the subject’s grievances. And because (as he contended) there were no clear court or government policies in the 1620s; because, indeed, of the breadth of the court’s political and religious patronage, it was ideologically and institutionally impossible for there to have been a ‘court’ versus ‘country’, or ‘government’ versus ‘opposition’, struggle. It was merely the fiscal ignorance and resolute localism of M.P.s that made them reluctant to relieve the crown’s financial difficulties or to fund the king’s European wars adequately. Parliament was thus neither powerful nor the vehicle for a formed and purposeful ‘opposition’. On the contrary, by 1629 it was under threat of extinction.[60]
To those in university history departments only marginally engaged with the parliamentary politics of the period; to undergraduates, schoolmasters and sixth form students, this approach seemed novel and shocking. Naturally enough, it provoked a furious reaction from those wedded to a more conservative and traditional historiography. Longer-term explanations, particularly those focused on major economic and social changes, gave way to short-term contingent interpretations in which the unpredictable course of events took first place. This rebellion against the long-established Whig-Marxist synthesis had the appeal of striking originality to which historians (like the practitioners of other disciplines) were sympathetic, perhaps even vulnerable: being in the mainstream of an emerging interpretative river in revolt against an old orthodoxy naturally attracted followers amongst young scholars and older ones alike, particularly when the defenders of the antique explanation under attack were out of touch with recent research in this area.
But the novelty of these ideas was, in many respects, illusory. Russell’s account of the state of parliamentary historiography in the mid-1970s was itself erroneous. The Whig interpretation, based on a struggle between government and opposition was already moribund, indeed, almost certainly dead by the time his claims appeared, even though a Coroner’s inquest had yet to be held. The earliest and most important of the proponents of an alternative Court-Country hypothesis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, had warned explicitly against assuming these analytical tools were fixed entities[61] — a reservation shared by J. P. Cooper[62] although not by Perez Zagorin.[63] Other historians had also anticipated later ‘revisionist’ claims over M.P.s’ attitudes to impositions and parliamentary supply, as well as to Whig teleology. The subject had already moved a long way forward before the arguments of Gardiner, Notestein and their followers were assaulted by Russell, Sharpe and others.[Footnote required.]
My subsequent work on the 1620s Parliaments offered an alternative analysis, in which it is argued that the two Houses were self-conscious institutions with distinct archives, evolving procedures, and an important degree of continuity in their memberships. They were perfectly prepared to defend their privileges vigorously: in the case of the Commons, over freedom of speech in February 1621 [BLP 1985a], and over the imprisonment of Sir Edwin Sandys later in that year [1997]; and in that of the Lords, over the Arundel and Bristol cases in 1626 [BLP 1986]. The Commons was, moreover, willing to bargain over supply — for example, in the negotiations over the Great Contract in 1610, over impositions, and over Tonnage and Poundage in 1629. It was even ready, on occasion, to delay consideration of supply in the hope of eliciting concessions or to offer interim supply towards a war — as in November 1621 [BLP 2012] — provided Bills were also passed by way of a quid pro quo. In other words, national political issues were often more important in inhibiting parliamentary supply than were ‘structural’ problems such as localism [1989]. Until 1640, moreover, the crown had other potential sources of revenue in the sale of lands and titles, in the exploitation of its feudal and prerogative rights, and in levies on imports and exports in default of parliamentary supply. Monarchs thus had room to manoeuvre around their parliamentary opponents. James and Charles expected supply on their terms, and were ultimately willing to forego it if it was not forthcoming [BLP 1986].
The differences between Russell’s approach to the parliamentary politics of the 1620s and my own can be seen most clearly in our respective discussions of proceedings in the House of Commons in 1625 [1989]. Russell argued that the problems Charles I encountered in the first Parliament of his reign could be explained by the circumstances in which it met. Overtures to France for an alliance against Habsburg Spain and for a bride for Charles necessarily entailed concessions to Louis XIII over the treatment of English Catholics, concessions which Charles had previously promised not to make. Alarm over the relaxation of the recusancy laws at French insistence were compounded by fears over the promotion of Arminian clerics and the spread of Arminian doctrines within the Church of England. Members of the House of Commons were deeply apprehensive about the spread of the plague during their successive meetings in London and at Oxford. They found themselves divided too in their loyalties to the king and to their counties. The one necessary ingredient for an explosive Parliament, an openly divided court, was, according to Russell, missing: the Duke of Buckingham, he contended, was probably more dominant at court between the spring and autumn of 1625 than at any time before or after. Potential critics of the duke — men like the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke — were too thankful at finding themselves still in favour to be willing to risk their positions by any premature attack on the favourite. In any case, the duke’s continuing support for war kept its advocates amongst his remaining allies at this stage.[64]
My essay took issue with these claims, particularly the contention that court divisions were in abeyance in the early months of Charles’s reign [1989]. There was direct evidence in the case of the Earl of Arundel of hostility towards the duke at the first Privy Council meeting of the new reign and of reservations on the part of the Earl of Pembroke about Buckingham’s willingness to make concessions to the French shortly thereafter. The Lord Keeper, Bishop Williams, was clearly living on the political equivalent of borrowed time already as far as the king and duke were concerned. Once proceedings belatedly got under way in the House of Commons in June 1625, a willingness to obstruct the king’s wishes over supply and to elaborate religious grievances became evident. Only two subsidies and a limited offer of Tonnage and Poundage for a single year were forthcoming: an attempt sponsored by Buckingham to secure an enlarged grant exposed conciliar divisions and failed miserably. The adjournment of the two Houses to Oxford proved no more successful: the Privy Council was divided on how far to go in pressing for supply and, even when the king himself did so, the reaction of members of the House of Commons was unenthusiastic at best, highly hostile at worst. The intermediaries to whom Buckingham turned, including Warwick’s man-of-affairs, Sir Nathaniel Rich, and his relative by marriage, Sir Henry Mildmay, on 6 August were undone by the duke’s ill-judged decision to make a new demand for supply two days later. Arundel and Pembroke along with other Privy Councillors were clearly opposed to the subsequent decision to dissolve the Parliament. Differences within the Privy Council were one of the main reasons for the Parliament’s outcome. The king was already coming to the view that there was a conspiracy amongst the critics of his regime to undermine the foundations of his monarchy and was willing to consider ‘new counsels’ to uphold his authority. Within a year, there was to be a far more determined attack on Buckingham in the Parliament of 1626 from a combination of his former allies and critics, including Arundel, Pembroke and Warwick and their Commons’ associates, leading to a loss of royal control over proceedings not just in the lower House but also, in part, in the House of Lords.[65] Far from court politics having been suspended in 1625, they were actively operating and had far-reaching consequences in the following year.
The course of this growing estrangement between Buckingham and his court critics has been traced in a number of studies [by whom? By you – or by others? Your meaning is unclear]. Hostile members of the House of Commons had the help, often the covert help, of peers and Privy Councillors in formulating charges against the duke in the spring of 1626.[66] This happened despite the strenuous efforts of Charles and Buckingham to halt the process or to inhibit it altogether. Yet Russell and other ‘Revisionists’ were at pains to minimize the degree to which this split between the duke and his critics was related to ideas about the proper direction of royal government. It was only when formal impeachment charges were on the point of being laid by the Commons before the House of Lords, very early in May 1626, for example, that Conrad Russell considered that a compromise between Buckingham and his accusers (notably the Earl of Pembroke) might have been possible. Buckingham’s defenders certainly preferred his ‘reformation’ to impeachment proceedings on 2 May 1626. If Buckingham had been willing to give up his patronage of Catholic recusants and of Arminianism, if he had surrendered his post as Lord Admiral to the Earl of Warwick and made other changes amongst the holders of office — so the argument ran — then there was no ideological reason why a deal between Pembroke and John Pym on one side and the king and the duke on the other might not have been done.[67]
This ingenious hypothesis was supported by an appeal to the proposals — made in the expectation of the duke’s immediate or eventual support — for a West India Company to bear the main burden of a naval war against Spanish interests presented to the House of Commons in mid-April 1626. Much more recently, Thomas Cogswell has elaborated on this argument claiming to have found supporting evidence for this potential negotiated settlement in a document preserved in the Huntington Library setting out a scheme formulated by Sir Dudley Digges, one of Archbishop Abbot’s allies, and Sir Nathaniel Rich for a private company to raise the funds necessary to pursue a naval strategy designed to end English anxieties over attacks on shipping in home waters and to gain the prospective rewards of large-scale privateering and raids in the Spanish Caribbean. It might, if adopted, have provided a soft political landing for Buckingham and his allies. Of course, in the event it did not; but the possibility — it was argued — had at least existed, and, for however short a time the possibility was current, it nevertheless demonstrated that there was nothing unbridgeable about the gulf between Buckingham and his parliamentary opponents.[68]
Both historians cited my work on this subject [1972b], along with that of others, in support of their contentions. Both, it is noticeable, move backwards and forwards in their analyses in ways that render a chronological understanding difficult to achieve. Both, however, err in their interpretations of these West Indian and anti-Spanish initiatives. Of course, it is perfectly true that ideas about the formation of a West India Company were discussed inside and outside the House of Commons in the 1620s: Sir Nathaniel Rich had drawn up just such a scheme in 1624. But when Digges raised the matter in the Commons on 14 March 1626 and a Select Committee was appointed to consider it, Sir Nathaniel Rich was conspicuously not amongst its members.[69] My account of the subsequent debate on the subject on 14 April made it clear that two quite different schemes were discussed then, with one of these — the more radical — being eventually embodied in a draft Bill from Rich [1972b]. Rich’s notes on his speech on that day survive and make it absolutely clear that he had not consulted Digges on the Bill which he then offered to the House.[70] Digges evidently did not know beforehand that Rich’s scheme precluded any payments of the tenths of prizes traditionally due to the Lord Admiral — a move that was directed directly against Buckingham, as incumbent of that office.[71] This, in turn, reflects a hardening in Rich’s attitudes (and those of his backers) against the duke. In 1624, Rich had been prepared to envisage Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham sitting on the ruling Council of a prospective West India Company:[72] in 1626, there was no such prospect in his mind. There was thus no Digges-Rich plan: on the contrary, Rich’s scheme had no place for either the king or his favourite and was, by implication, designed to exclude them from participation in the company’s affairs. After 14 April 1626, it left no further trace in the parliamentary records — the victim of its own radicalism and of the implacable nature of its hostility to the duke. So the idea that the Commons was united in its willingness to do business with Buckingham, and to envisage a future in which he was still the prime mover of naval and military affairs, was demonstrated to be illusory. Buckingham, in any case, as the Venetian Ambassador later explained, was unwilling to contemplate a scheme that threatened his perquisites as Lord Admiral. There are, moreover, no grounds for considering that Warwick was being proposed in 1626 as a prospective Lord Admiral in succession to Buckingham: it was only after his failed expedition to the Azores to intercept the Spanish plate fleet that the first speculative remarks about his qualifications for this post can be found.[73]
As my work has argued, there were also other reasons for thinking that this presumed ‘unanimity’ in the Commons (and Parliament more generally) in 1626 — the empirical observation that in turn supported the Revisionist claim that Parliament was innocent of ideological division — was profoundly mistaken. Of the discussions suggested by Russell and Cogswell between Buckingham and his allies on the one side and his court and Commons’ critics on the other about Arminianism and recusancy, offices and strategy, there is no trace in the documents. Buckingham was unwell between 14th and 23rd April 1626, but, in both Houses, his enemies were engaged in pursuing their attack: in the Lords, Saye and Sele and a majority of the peers were demanding the release of the Earl of Arundel — Buckingham’s bête noire — from the Tower, and were reading a petition from Buckingham’s foe, the Earl of Bristol, over his own treatment; in the Commons, formal charges against the duke were in hand from 20th April and, four days later, it was resolved that Buckingham was guilty of the evils from which the kingdom was suffering. Digges himself — allegedly the bridge-builder between the duke and the Commons — was directly involved in this process. The lower House then went further still by agreeing to investigate claims that Buckingham was responsible for administering noxious, perhaps poisonous, medicines to King James in his last illness: part of this evidence touched on the benefits of the plaster Warwick’s own physician, Dr Remington, had administered to the Earl and to the Duke and which was recommended to the king. Had the king actually been poisoned by Buckingham or anyone else, this would have been an act of treason.[74] The fact that such claims were made testifies to the gulf that had developed between Warwick and Buckingham in little more than eight months.
Of course, one reason why the claims for bridge-building in 1626 between the Commons (led by Digges) and the duke are implausible is because, even if the Commons had begun to construct their half of the span, Buckingham lacked the means to build anything from the other side. The duke was hardly free to negotiate over the promotion of Arminian clergy and doctrines or over the toleration being allowed in practice to Catholics: these were all matters upon which Charles had decided. Nor is it true to say that Buckingham still had control over the House of Lords — one of the assumptions upon which the claim that Buckingham had the means to bridge-building of his own depended: in fact, royal obduracy over the incarceration of the Earl of Arundel and interference with the damaging charges brought by the Earl of Bristol against Buckingham produced what was tantamount to a noble go-slow in its proceedings.[75] Those about whom there was speculation of engaging in a deal to save Buckingham in April or early in May 1626 were in fact his overt enemies at this time. It was only when Parliament was dissolved in mid-June 1626 — probably to prevent Buckingham’s conviction by the House of Lords in the impeachment proceedings brought by the Commons — that Pembroke appreciated that he could not unseat Buckingham in the king’s favour: he was then ready for a truce in hostilities within the arena of court politics; but Pembroke was the exception. The duke’s more ideological enemies chose a different course.
These researches [1972b, 1978] — offered as part of this doctoral submission — have pointed to other lacunae in our understanding of early Stuart politics. The politics of the early Caroline court remain to be explored in detail.[Cite the examples, which exist, of works which at least begin this task — Neil Cuddy, for example.] Yet they are actually vital for understanding the parliamentary politics of the period, especially because court politics were intertwined with the fortunes of Parliament on a longer-term basis. My own research has made it clear that Jacobean and early Stuart Parliaments, moreover, were more than just events but key episodes in a wider political narrative. It was because the composition of the king’s inner circle of advisers had narrowed so sharply in the early months of Charles’s reign, and because the objectives of this ‘political court’ seemed to threaten the subject’s liberties and the traditional Calvinist consensus in the church [1989], that ideological conflict became rooted in the one national institution capable of effectively challenging royal policies, namely Parliament. Demands for supply in and after 1626 became more formulaic, and often fell foul of the machinations of bicameral parliamentary groups led by the 3rd Earl of Pembroke (in 1626) and by Warwick and Saye and Sele, that aimed to use their leverage at Westminster to secure political and religious aims contrary to those of Charles I. By thus employing Parliament to resist the perceived spread of ‘popery’ and Arminianism in the church and at court, and the fiscal exactions of the crown and its threats to English liberties, the legitimacy of the Caroline regime was called into question on a national basis. The godly divine and associate of Warwick, John Preston, for example, began hinting in 1626 about rebellion against ungodly rulers;[76] whilst other members of Warwick’s circle, notably the godly peer the 4th Earl of Lincoln, the leading ‘patriot’ Sir John Eliot, and the colonial pioneer John Winthrop, began contemplating different forms of government in church and state. [1996b] All of them were to be involved in one way or another in the establishment of Puritan colonies in New England beyond the reach of the king and Privy Council.
This critique of Revisionism — and of Russell’s contentions in particular — was further developed in my work on the Parliament of 1628-9: the point at which the connections between the twin crises of the late 1620s and early 1640s are perhaps most clearly evident. Pace those historians who have argued that England lacked occasions for ideologically informed divisions, contemporaries were acutely aware of the tensions deriving from such sources that England was experiencing by the late-winter and early spring of 1629. Charles I and his critics were both locked into conspiratorial explanations for their respective difficulties. The claim by Russell, Sharpe and others [give examples] that 1629 did not mark a major watershed in English politics is all the more puzzling because of the long tradition in English historiography that had contended precisely the opposite. Whether incidentally or in a more considered fashion, many historians of the dissolution of the last Parliament of the 1620s had noticed its potentially far-reaching implications. G. M. Trevelyan, for example, described the M.P.s leaving St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster on 2 March 1629 as ‘freemen still and already almost rebels’, which clearly implied serious disaffection from the Caroline regime.[77] L. J. Reeve and Austin Woolrych have both written about the wide-ranging, potentially revolutionary connotations of the resolutions approved by the House of Commons on that day for the idea of treason against the whole commonwealth.[78] J. H. Hexter traced the covert resistance that ensued amongst the veterans of the struggles of the 1620s in colonial and other enterprises in the following decade and their prominent appearance amongst the supporters of the Long Parliament in the early stages of the first Civil War in 1642-3.[79] Indeed, it was the experiences of the late-1620s that led the future leaders of the Long Parliament, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, to organise themselves in country houses, Puritan societies and trading companies for the revenge they were determined after 1640 to take.[80] The idea of a link between the two crises — of the late-1620s and the early-1640s — was hinted at, if not fully developed.
A further hint — again, one that failed to be taken up — was provided by J. H. Hexter in the late 1960s. In the course of reviewing Stone’s Crisis, Hexter argued that relations between the royal court and the more amorphous remainder of the body politic, the ‘country’, broke down after 1618 and had already reached ‘crisis level’ by the end of the next decade. ‘Court’ and ‘country’ had ceased to speak the same language and the House of Commons had by then constructed a view of the court as its palpable enemy. The Puritan clergy and gentry were full of rage at the impotence of English policy abroad and deeply feared the inroads made by popery at home. Hexter thus foreshadowed a theory of successive crises, one in the 1620s and of a second in the early-1640s, leading to civil war and revolution.[81] In a vague and reluctant form, this chronology and concept was apparently accepted by Stone himself.[82] Why this argument was never pursued is an intriguing question: perhaps, its use of the terms ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ was already intellectually old-fashioned or it required too radical a reassessment of the dominant narrative articulated by Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone at that time; it may have been due to the reluctance of historians specialising in the study of early Stuart parliaments to the terminus of 1629 or of the period up to 1640 to carry their researches beyond those dates; alternatively, the impact of Lawrence Stone’s studies of the peerage may have diminished the willingness of scholars to consider the importance of the roles of peers like Warwick or Viscount Say and Sele or the 4th Earl of Bedford across the period of Charles’s rule. Whatever the reasons, Hexter’s hypothesis remained dormant until my own work in the 1980s. It has taken the work of John Adamson on the peerage in the politics of the 1640s to release a wider group of historians from these self-imposed inhibitions.[83]
My work on the parliaments of the 1620s is important in charting the emergence of a new and potent form of aristocratic constitutionalism, centred upon bicameral groups at Westminster with connections in the provinces, and in explaining how these political networks survived into the period of personal rule after 1630. It is not identical with the arguments of Hexter and Trevor-Roper but it traverses the period between 1629 and 1640 and beyond in ways distinct from their reasoning. Or, to put the point another way, my exploration of the parliamentary crisis of the 1620s has made a valuable contribution to the re-evaluation of political organisation and ideas, especially of the influence of the peerage, that has figured so prominently in recent studies of the 1640s.
3. Colonial Enterprises
There was an equally important and revealing shift in aristocratic interests in the early Stuart period that has also figured prominently in my work, and thus constitutes one element in this doctoral submission [1996a, 1996b, 2011]. Large joint-stock companies had been the instrument through which the resources of the peerage, the gentry and of merchants, large and small, had been tapped for colonising enterprises at the start of the seventeenth century. The best-known of these was the Virginia Company of London, formally established in 1606, and its later offshoot, the Bermuda or Somers Island Company, founded as a separate (but overlapping) entity in 1612. Both were under the control of great London merchants like Sir Thomas Smith, Alderman Robert Johnson and their allies as part of the network of East India and Levant companies’ interests until 1619 and 1620 respectively. Sir Robert Rich (as he was until 1617 when he became Lord Rich and, two years later, 2nd Earl of Warwick) and his second cousin, Nathaniel Rich, who was knighted in 1617, had shares in both companies and important interests in their fledgling colonies.[84] In the case of Virginia, there is some limited but partisan evidence to suggest that their client, Sir Samuel Argall, who was acting governor from 1617 to 1619, tried to extend his control over the plantation and its settlements in his and, presumably, their interests. But this ploy proved counter-productive, and he had to be hurriedly extracted from Virginia before his replacement, Sir George Yeardley, could arrive. Bermuda, where Warwick and Sir Nathaniel Rich had much more extensive shares in land, was even more important to them, particularly in terms of tobacco production by the early-1620s, hence their efforts to protect their position by intervening in the choice of the company’s officers in England and of its governor in the colony.[85]
By the spring of 1619, the Rich family was engaged in a three-cornered struggle with Smith and his supporters on one side and the supporters of Sir Edwin Sandys, the most prominent, perhaps, of King James’s House of Commons’ critics in his early Parliaments, and the small shareholders on the other for control of the two companies: Sandys and his allies won control of the Virginia Company in the spring of 1619 and of the Bermuda Company a year later. Smith and the larger merchants were defeated by Sandys and his partisans while Warwick and Rich retreated from the Virginia enterprise under criticism for their privateering activities from Sandys’s group. An ambitious programme to increase the population of Virginia and to decrease its dependence on tobacco production was set in train by the new regime in London. It was not until after the massacre of English colonists by the native inhabitants in Virginia in March 1622 and the abject failure of Sandys’s attempts to diversify the production of staple commodities had led ineluctably to the negotiation of a contract with the crown covering the importation of tobacco by both companies late in the same year that the great merchants, now allied to Warwick and Rich, returned to the companies’ courts to resume their contests with Sandys and his supporters. Complaints about the terms of the tobacco contract and the ‘exorbitant’ salaries to be paid to Sandys and his chief allies opened up further grievances about the state of the English settlement in Virginia in particular and the management of both colonies in general. Sir Nathaniel Rich’s examination of the Virginia Company’s correspondence with its settlers exposed the gap between their difficulties and sufferings on the one hand and the accounts being offered to the adventurers in London on the other. His dissection of the tobacco contract was equally incisive and won him the confidence of the Lord Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex. The commissioners who investigated these matters in the middle of 1623 condemned Sandys and his allies for their mendacity and mismanagement. Despite efforts to appeal to the House of Commons in the 1624 Parliament, the Virginia Company was legally dissolved in May 1624 and its colony’s affairs placed under royal and conciliar supervision.
This struggle showed how well connected in the City — and how well integrated in the politics of the court — Warwick and Sir Nathaniel Rich then were. It is copiously documented in the Records of the Virginia Company of London edited by S. M. Kingsbury and in the archives of Bermuda printed by J. H. Lefroy.[86] It was the subject of my first major piece of research and writing [What happened to this? Was it left unpublished?]. Some — but only some — of its arguments were adopted and deployed by Theodore Rabb in his biography of Sir Edwin Sandys eventually published in 1998.[87] But my demonstration, in the footsteps of W. R. Scott, that the Court Books of the Virginia Company were highly partisan documents, produced and shaped by Sandys’s supporters, was passed over in silence. Rabb relied to a very large degree on the contents of the Court Books for his favourable depiction of the management of the Virginia Company between 1619 and 1624.[88] Similarly, Sir Nathaniel Rich’s ruthless evisceration of the claims made by Sir Edwin Sandys, by his closest allies in the management of the two companies, John and Nicholas Ferrar, and their patron, the Privy Councillor, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, elicited barely a mention. The correspondence of this latter group, which had come into Sir Nathaniel’s possession, provided invaluable testimony of their falsehoods and incompetence, testimony which Rich used to good effect before the Commissioners and with the Lord Treasurer.
The world of early seventeenth-century entrepreneurial activities, my researches revealed, was another forum in which the interplay of aristocratic influence, political organization, and ideas about England’s proper role in world affairs could be observed in close-up — and where these phenomena had been given less attention than they should have had as in the case of Parliament. Professor Rabb, for example, was certainly mistaken in maintaining in his 1998 biography of Sir Edwin Sandys that the Earl of Warwick, unlike Sandys or the Earl of Southampton, ‘was not involved in the management of public, large-scale undertakings’ and that ‘until the Providence Island project, his ventures were mainly private quests for personal profits.’[89] This ignores Warwick’s role in the affairs of the short-lived Guiana Company as well as his participation in the formal Courts and proceedings of the Virginia and Bermuda Companies not to mention his participation from 1622 in the work of the Council for New England.[90] Had Rabb had access to the Rich family’s colonial papers available in the former Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London until they were withdrawn for sale in 1969, he would have noted the enduring interests of Warwick and Sir Nathaniel Rich in the government of the Virginia and Bermuda companies’ settlements, in the provision of support for their ministers and the management of their public lands. Both men were committed to agricultural productivity, commodity production and ensuring that supplies reached their tenants. By the mid-1620s, Warwick and Sir Nathaniel Rich had come to the view that such companies should be overseen by their larger shareholders and that their colonies should be directed by local governors and councils sympathetic to their interests.[91] These conclusions had significant consequences for their later ventures in the Providence Island Company (with its deliberately restricted membership) and, perhaps, in making proprietary colonization in Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago more attractive [BLP 1987]. (It is worth pointing out that this preference for the control of the public affairs of colonial enterprises and their settlements by a restricted group of adventurers has clear analogies with the political aims of the Junto in the Long Parliament in the 1640s.)
The broad outlines and verdicts of my early research on the affairs of the Virginia and Somers Island Companies are still tenable [What publications are these?]. The archival context has, however, changed dramatically. When S. M. Kingsbury edited the last two volumes of the Records of the Virginia Company of London, she was aware of the existence of the Ferrar family’s collection of papers in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, but only reproduced seventy-eight of its 515 relevant documents. Moreover, the recovery of photostatic copies of the Rich family’s colonial archive in 2012 has shown that Kingsbury’s transcriptions were not entirely accurate or complete. W. F. Craven, who produced the standard work on the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1932, and some valuable subsequent articles on the history of Bermuda in this period, also knew of this additional material; but, without citing it explicitly, referred to it so obliquely that its existence was easily overlooked.[Footnote] David Ransome’s recent work in transcribing these documents has demonstrated how valuable they are.[Footnote] But evidential problems remain. The edition of the Rich papers from Bermuda edited by Vernon A. Ive, which were part of the Rich family’s archive deposited in the former Public Record Office and which are now to be found in Bermuda’s Archive Office, and published in 1984, is also beset with errors of transcription.[92] New transcriptions of both the Virginia and Bermuda Company archives will have to be undertaken before new research on the two companies and their settlements in the early seventeenth century can be advanced.
Reassessing these two themes in my historical research — the parliamentary-political and the commercial-colonial — in the context of this doctoral submission, it is possible to see a point of convergence in the 1620s, whereby the experience of Warwick and his circle in the one context heightened their concerns and reinforced their resolve in the other, and vice versa. For the breakdown and dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624 marked a turning point in Warwick’s colonial career, specifically, and in the processes of English colonization more generally. Warwick’s interest in Virginia and its tobacco crop diminished sharply after 1624, as Professor Cogswell’s work has confirmed.[93] His principal interests lay further south in the Caribbean, the Bay of Honduras and Guiana thereafter. In any case, from the mid-1620s onwards, English colonising ventures were mainly undertaken either under the form of proprietary patents held by peers (the Earls of Carlisle and Pembroke, for example), or as efforts to found Puritan commonwealths of the kind created in New England. (The wider alliance of the Crown’s critics with the great merchants of the East India and Levant companies in resisting royal exactions on trade in the late-1620s apparently broke down when those merchants retreated in March 1629 from their previous stance of opposition to non-parliamentary royal exactions. This realignment provides an additional dimension to the idea of a severe crisis in the latter part of the decade and, if Robert Brenner is right, opened up the ground for conflict between those merchants and Warwick, Say and Sele and Lord Brooke.)[94] In Warwick’s circle, the discovery of islands in the Bay of Honduras led to the formation in 1629-30 of the joint-stock Providence Island Company, which operated both as a commercial-colonial venture and as a putative front for opposition to the Personal Rule and Charles’s Hispanophile foreign policy — especially after the formal rapprochement between Britain and Spain negotiated by Peter Paul Rubens over the winter of 1629-30.
The colonial evidence analysed in my work is thus critical in illuminating the aims of the king’s opponents. The establishment of colonies required their founding fathers to formulate and defend their ideas on the economic and social organisation of their settlements and on their preferred forms of government in church and state. The New England Company was established in 1628 ostensibly with the aim of forming an English colony that would engage in farming, fishing and trade with the native inhabitants. But the company, which was transformed by a new charter into the Massachusetts Bay Company early in 1629, was dominated by peers, gentlemen, and divines hostile to Charles I’s domestic policies. Influenced by the 4th Earl of Lincoln, who was Saye and Sele’s son-in-law and an old friend of Warwick, this new group of colonisers aimed to erect a Puritan commonwealth in Massachusetts free from the Church of England’s forms of worship and from royal regulation.[95] It was probably Lincoln who persuaded Warwick to facilitate the grant the 1629 patent transforming the New England Company into that of Massachusetts Bay and freeing its government from the requirement to be located in England. Clergymen within the patronage of the two earls were amongst the earliest migrants to New England. John Winthrop, an old acquaintance of Warwick [1996a], and the man apparently chosen to lead the migration to Massachusetts in a meeting at Lincoln’s house in Sempringham in 1629, produced a severe indictment that summer of the failings of the Caroline regime [1996b]. Yet although fearful of the rising tide of Habsburg power in Europe, he believed that if the godly were prepared to depart for New England, and to share the hardship of founding a new church and commonwealth, then the punishment awaiting England for straying from the paths of righteousness might be avoided, and a new bulwark erected against the popish Antichrist. This detailed charge sheet against the Caroline regime spread along the network of aristocratic, clerical and gentry contacts established around Warwick, Lincoln, and their friends, and may well have influenced the thinking of the 4th Earl of Bedford and Oliver St John, both of whom were to be major figures in the Junto of the early 1640s. With the material support and counsel of Warwick’s circle, the Massachusetts Bay Company resisted attempts to deprive it of its patent until 1634, when their opponents won this argument before the Privy Council [BLP 2005b and 2011] — largely because the king and his councillors had become aware of the nature of the godly experiment being conducted in New England and were preparing to use force to suppress it.[96]
The Massachusetts Bay Company’s defiance of royal authority was more than matched, however, by that of its colonial cousin, the Saybrook Company. My essay on the company [2011; and cf. 1971] traced its origins to the 1632 grant of land in present-day Connecticut made by Warwick to a combination of his friends and relatives — to Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke, and the future parliamentarian leaders John Hampden and John Pym, as well as Richard Knightley. Hampden was a friend of Sir John Eliot — the parliamentary martyr of 1629 — and was to be the major protagonist in the Ship Money case of 1637, when Oliver St John argued on his behalf that the levy was illegal. Knightley was Hampden’s son-in-law and the man at the centre of a Puritan network in Northamptonshire with links to Saye and Brooke; while Pym was the Earl of Bedford’s man of affairs and a close friend of Sir Nathaniel Rich. The settlement of Saybrook was undertaken in the mid-1630s by a group of adventurers that included another future parliamentarian grandee, Sir Arthur Hesilrige (Brooke’s brother-in-law), and Henry Lawrence, who would serve as president of the Cromwellian Council of State during the 1650s. The company’s plans envisaged a new unified colony covering Connecticut and Massachusetts, with arrangements to entrench the rights of gentlemen to political authority in perpetuity and to ensure lay supremacy over the churches of New England; propositions which the leaders of among the Massachusetts colonists proved unwilling to contemplate. My research has uncovered the deadly seriousness of the company’s intentions [BLP 2005b], for the fort that it constructed at the mouth of the Connecticut River was built, in part, at least, for the purpose of resisting an anticipated expeditionary force to be sent by the crown to end the life of Massachusetts as an independent Commonwealth, and to reduce all of New England to royal authority.[97] The fort was refurbished in 1639 — as I have since discovered — as a prospective refuge for members of Warwick’s circle if their treasonable dealings with the Scottish Covenanters either came to light or came to nothing [BLP 2005b].[98] The fact that the colonists, with the support of Warwick’s circle, were planning to resist the king’s government, if necessary by force of arms, is a critical discovery [2011; cf. BLP 1985, 2005b], for it dramatically undercuts the contentions both of contemporaries (notably, Edward Hyde) and of more recent Revisionist historians that the Personal Rule was stable and enjoyed widespread acceptance among the English elite. The frequently repeated assertion that no one envisaged armed resistance to King Charles before 1642 is thus demonstrably inaccurate. His most determined opponents on both sides of the north Atlantic were envisaging precisely that scenario. This evidence also calls into question the argument that short-term miscalculations, personal mistakes, and mere contingency alone satisfactorily explain the outbreak of the wars of the 1640s.
The colonial material discussed in my work also sheds light on important differences in outlook among Charles’s leading critics during the 1630s [add something published; cf. BLP 1987]. The leading migrants to Massachusetts during the 1630s intended to create a Puritan commonwealth with a congregational form of church government free from lay control. The latter aim was clearly unacceptable to Saye and Brooke in the mid-1630s, long before the disputes between the Independents and Presbyterians in England a decade later. The Providence Island Company’s adventurers were, in theory, more accommodating of the Church of England, and, initially, more interested in communal plantation — although the colony later evolved into a settlement with private plantations, a vigorous privateering economy, and deep religious divisions. The changing composition of the company during the 1630s, with its tiny membership from which merchants came to be barred, suggests that the putative alliance between aristocratic figures and radical merchants postulated by Robert Brenner in the pre-Civil War period requires re-evaluation. My own work in this area [BLP 1987] has revealed how the development of Providence and its sister colony of Association, in the Bay of Honduras, reflected the differing views of Warwick and those of Saye and Brooke.[99] Warwick was interested in the production of profitable staple commodities, privateering, and, from 1638, in the creation of his own Caribbean empire by taking over the Pembroke patent for Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago. Saye and Brooke, on the other hand, saw the Providence Island Company’s settlements as havens for separatists and as colonial rivals to Massachusetts, from which they hoped to attract godly migrants.
The colonial material and its analysis in my work are vital in linking the events of the 1620s and 1640s. It offers an insight into the aims of the king’s foremost critics and of the differences between them. It cuts across the contentions of recent historiography about the lack of evidence for resistance to Charles I’s regime before 1640 advanced by Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe;[Footnote] and treats colonists, particularly in the North Atlantic, as English people in exile, not as Americans in embryo. The exodus of this fissile human material was testimony to the dangerous tensions in English society and politics during the 1620s and 1630s, and in the relationship between powerful sections of the English elite and the crown.
4. The Earl of Warwick and the County of Essex: the Double Crisis, Part II
The writings presented in this doctoral submission thus offer reassessments of two centrally important contexts of English political life in the early seventeenth century: the parliamentary and the colonial. However, the nature of the double crisis I have postulated cannot be understood without an enquiry into a third, and equally significant, context: the world of the county. Here, too, the interconnections between this local dimension and the other two emerge revealingly in my studies of the county of Essex, and of the local influence and power of the man who stood at its very centre (or centres), the 2nd Earl of Warwick. His father, the 3rd Lord Rich, was a man of powerful personality, pronounced Puritan views, and was married to the sister of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, the court favourite of the 1590s, military adventurer and, at the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, rebel against her regime. Despite this relationship, Lord Rich was shrewd enough not to get caught up in his brother-in-law’s treason in 1601. Ministers with radical religious views certainly enjoyed Rich’s patronage, and he supported the Presbyterian campaigns for reform of the Church of England in the 1580s and again in 1604 [1979 and BLP 1995].[100] By then, his accounts and rentals show that he was already engaged in the process of modernising the management of his estate by moving away from the imposition of ‘provision rents’ alongside relatively small ‘money rents’ to a system of leases based almost entirely on money rents.[101] It was this prudent approach and some re-leasing of properties, probably in the south east of Essex, that later enabled him to purchase the earldom of Warwick two years before his death.[102] But his attempts to prevail in the electoral struggles for the county seats in the 1588 and 1604 parliamentary elections came to nothing, despite, in the latter case, his use of his extensive network of contacts in the boroughs and amongst the county’s leading families to campaign for his candidates. He was outmanoeuvred on this occasion as a result of a degree of wavering by his principal ally, Sir Francis Barrington of Hatfield Broad Oak, the forceful intervention of the Privy Council and the partly covert machinations of a hostile county sheriff. It was decidedly not an example of parliamentary selection for Lord Rich was willing to sustain a contest and had barely concealed disdain for the intervention of the Privy Council at his opponents’ behest. As a patron of Puritan ministers, he was equally hostile to Archbishop Whitgift who had done so much to frustrate the Presbyterian campaigns of the 1580s [1979 and BLP 1995].
This episode provides a revealing contrast with the success of his son, the 2nd Earl of Warwick, in extending his influence in Essex. My research has revealed how the earl’s electoral patronage grew in the 1620s to cover the county and borough seats [1988, 2010]. For the county elections for the period from 1620 to 1626, for example, the sheriff’s court at which county elections were determined was moved to Braintree, a town where Warwick was the dominant manorial landowner, rather than being held at its traditional location in the county town of Chelmsford; and the boroughs — first Harwich, then Maldon and, finally, Colchester — came under his patronage. Warwick’s brief period, moreover, as joint Lord Lieutenant in 1625-6, when an invasion from the continent had been feared, gave the county the experience of a kind of determined leadership it had not seen in decades. The financial burdens of this military effort had been borne. But his and his allies’ ejection from their offices as Lord and Deputy Lieutenants in the early autumn of 1626 left the county’s landed hierarchy divided between his ousted supporters and those willing to sustain the policies of Charles I and the Duke of Buckingham in church and state. Warwick was amongst those against the practice of royal authoritarianism in secular matters and opposed to Arminianism in the church of England. He was one of a number of peers who openly declined to pay the Forced loan which the king and his Privy Council had decided to levy to raise funds in default of parliamentary supplies. His local allies, notably Sir Francis Barrington and Barrington’s son-in-law, Sir William Masham, went further and found themselves imprisoned as a result. There was enough opposition in Warwick’s areas of influence and sufficient popular resistance in Essex to make collection a difficult and slow process, as Richard Cust has shown.[Footnote] The situation was complicated still further by the billeting of Irish troops, the use of impressment and of martial law in Essex. The upshot was that, when another Parliament was called. Warwick’s candidates were victorious in the tumultuous county elections in 1628, despite efforts by the court and the sheriff, to hold a surprise contest and then to instruct the freeholders to vote as the Justices of the Peace directed. Warwick’s patronage was just as effectively applied in the boroughs. The level of popular support that Warwick was able to mobilise — between ten and fifteen thousand men at the county poll according to his former client, John Pory — offers a compelling example of aristocratic influence being asserted against the crown [2010].[103] This example would have been almost inconceivable to Marxists like Brian Manning in the 1950s or to Lawrence Stone in 1965. But it is what the surviving evidence shows and corroborates the case advanced by John Adamson since 1990 about the growing importance of nobles’ influence in politics in this period.
In the 1630s, Warwick was again one of Essex’s joint Lord Lieutenants: first of all in harness with the Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Portland, whose duties in London and the movement of his household to Hampshire, made him a largely absentee figure; and then, after Portland’s death in 1635, with William, Lord Maynard of Little Easton, a man of bureaucratic inclinations, Arminian sympathies in religion, and a willingness to act in support of royal policies in church and state alike.[104] Warwick was just as assiduous as Maynard in performing his administrative duties as Lord Lieutenant, but more successful in winning support within the county. He was thus able to draw almost all the significant landowners of Essex into an organised campaign to resist the extension of the boundaries of the royal forest in Essex to cover most of the county.[105] Warwick’s own account of this episode relates how the king’s Attorney General, Sir John Finch, described him as fighting ‘close like a man of Warr att my locke’ at the critical meeting of the Forest Court early in October 1634.[106] The verdict, despite a subsequent appeal, went against Warwick and the county, although relatively little money was actually raised for the crown as a result.
On the much more important issue of the levying of Ship Money in Essex from the autumn of 1634 onwards, Warwick had less support amongst the county’s landed élite, but was significantly more obdurate in opposing this fiscal exaction. He and his allies reduced the sheriff responsible for collecting it in 1636, Sir Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury, if not to tears, then to deep alarm. Warwick himself apparently told Charles I in January 1637 that he and his tenants were unwilling to sign away their liberties or to submit to such prejudicial treatment: if the king wanted to wage war against the Habsburgs for the recovery of the Palatinate or to maintain control of the seas, he was ready to promise that Parliament would supply his financial needs. Charles, however, did not move in response to this overture: he expected obedience from Warwick and his allies, who were already suspected of holding secret meetings to plan resistance to the king’s regime.[107] It is difficult to believe that Charles failed to recognise the depths of Warwick’s opposition to his regime [1972b, 1978, 2010; BLP 1996]. In the face of Archbishop Laud’s efforts to discipline his godly critics and the support of the king for anti-Calvinist clerics, Warwick’s clergymen with hardly any exceptions remained defiantly Puritan in their beliefs and practices while the earl himself assisted those most severely persecuted in finding refuge in England or abroad. Morevoer, there is some evidence to suggest that a number of these clergymen were discussing resistance to the king in and after 1638.[108] In any case, Warwick’s high-profile opposition to royal policies in church and state and his (rather then Lord Maynard’s) control over the militia of Essex enabled him to mobilise popular support, some of it of very humble status, for his candidates in the elections of 1640 to the Short and Long Parliaments. By that time, Warwick, like the other leading peers and their gentry allies amongst the ‘Junto’ comprising Charles I’s principal opponents, was engaged in promoting treasonable resistance to the king in conjunction with the Scots’ covenanters and had apparently drawn his local supporters into this exercise as well.[Footnote] To all intents and purposes, he was, by the autumn of 1640, the de facto master of the county of Essex.
This development needs to be placed in a broader chronological context. No one had occupied such a position in the county of Essex since the ascendancy of the 13th Earl of Oxford in the reign of Henry VII. But Oxford had achieved his supremacy with Henry VII’s help and support. In contrast, it was a combination of personality and power, of contingent circumstances and royal mistakes skilfully exploited that had brought Warwick to a comparable position against the intentions or wishes of the monarch. Charles I feared — perhaps rightly — that Warwick and his allies planned to reduce him to the figurehead role of a Doge of Venice and to secure appointment through nomination by Parliament to the great offices of state.[109] This was an outcome the king was increasingly determined to resist, if necessary, by force of arms, with the result that civil war became inevitable by the summer of 1642. I have argued that Warwick played a critical role in that summer and in the autumn of 1642 in mobilising the county’s militia on national grounds in support of the Long Parliament’s war effort. His ‘running army’, raised, in part, through his local influence and prestige, in part, too, because of enthusiasm for the cause, in Essex, London and the surrounding counties, helped to defend the capital against royalist attack after the inconclusive battle of Edgehill in the autumn of 1642. This example of inter-county co-operation helped to stimulate the formation of the Eastern Association in December of that year [a theme explored in 2000]. Essex had a special place in the Long Parliament’s calculations because of Warwick’s influence there. The county’s trained bands were a key component in the main parliamentary army serving in the Thames valley under the command of Warwick’s cousin, the 3rd Earl of Essex, in the spring and summer of 1643. As a secure reservoir of manpower under the control of Warwick’s local gentry allies, the county of Essex also contributed men and money to the forces of the Eastern Association and was ordered to find men, money and munitions for the supplementary army raised in mid-1643 under Sir William Waller in reaction to the perceived failings of the Earl of Essex as Lord General [BLP 1999]. It was a heavy set of burdens to bear as a consequence of Warwick’s pre-eminence.
Historians of the ‘county community’ school in the mid-1960s and early-1970s, notably Alan Everitt and Clive Holmes, argued that local communities put their own priorities before those of central government and that this explains both the tensions with the Caroline regime before 1640 and those communities’ reluctance to comply with the demands of the king and of the Long Parliament during the Civil War.[110] The material from Essex in general (and that relating specifically to the Earl of Warwick’s career) runs against this ‘localist’ hypothesis. When the traditional bargaining mechanisms between the crown and its subjects broke down in the crisis of the late-1620s, Warwick and his gentry allies were able to provide leadership in the county. This was done in defence of the liberties of the subject and in support of what were, by then, traditional forms of religious doctrine and worship. In electoral terms, they were successful but, in parliamentary and political terms, their achievement in securing the acceptance of the Petition of Right by the king in 1628 was transient. By the 1630s when Charles I’s ‘Personal Rule’ meant the extension of forest boundaries, the imposition of ship money and the persecution of Puritan ministers at the instigation of the king and Archbishop Laud, these men had begun to think of alternative forms of government in church and state. The struggle for popular support, at least within the county of Essex, was decisively won by Warwick and his supporters. Once the king’s rule faltered in 1640, they were able to seize local control. As a result, Warwick and his allies were able to mobilise Essex against the king during the Civil War — and to a degree that most historians of the second half of the twentieth century would have regarded as impossible.
Conclusion
The writings offered in this doctoral submission thus illuminate three overlapping and interconnected spheres of early Stuart government: the world of central politics, Parliament and royal government; the partially London-administered and partially autonomous worlds of the new Caribbean and American colonies; and, closer to home, the microcosm of county politics, parochial rivalries, and local power. Connecting each of these several dimensions of early seventeenth-century experience, to a greater or lesser extent, is the charismatic and — at times — vauntingly ambitious figure of Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick. My work on Warwick, his allies and their political networks, and their impact on domestic and colonial affairs in the early seventeenth century is at once more closely contextualised and more detailed than that undertaken on any other peer of the early Stuart period. Vernon F. Snow’s biography of the 3rd Earl of Essex lacks the range of coverage and detail offered in my essays.[111] There are other piecemeal studies available on, for example, aspects of the career of Viscount Saye and Sele. But the theses of American scholars such as N. P. Bard and J. B. Blankenfeld on Saye’s career in the 1620s and in connection with the Oxfordshire town of Banbury are not sufficiently broad-ranging to allow significant connections to be made between his activities at local and national level and his importance in the period after 1640.[112] Similarly, the 4th Earl of Bedford’s architectural interests and his political role in 1640-1 have been studied, but his estate management, his intellectual, political and religious concerns, and his role as a crown officer and landed magnate in the West of England and in Bedfordshire, await systematic investigation. Only in Northamptonshire has the work of John Fielding and Peter Lake begun to reveal comparable networks of belief, kinship and patronage in politics and religion.[113] [You need to cite, inter alia, Cogswell’s work on Leicestershire and the Earl of Stamford; and Anne Hughes’s on Warwickshire and the second Lord Brooke — your catalogue of comparisons otherwise has a decidedly antique look.] In the case of the 2nd Earl of Warwick, much more progress has been made, and we are considerably closer to understanding how his power was exercised in its local and national contexts. My work has thus contributed significantly to the development of the sophisticated and wide-ranging analyses of early Stuart aristocratic power that we are beginning to see today.
Of course, there is more to be done, particularly in completing a full-scale study of Warwick’s life and career. The context as well as the details require painstaking and sensitive re-construction at every level — hence my doubts, which have been a consistent theme in my writings since the 1970s, about the conclusions of earlier historians influenced by ideas of economic and social determinism, and my scepticism concerning the (no less agenda-driven) revisionism of Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe in the 1980s and 1990s. The studies I have undertaken transcend the boundaries — once sharply drawn — between local and national history, and between colonial and parliamentary history, to offer the first really detailed and integrated insight into the aims and connections, influence and patronage, of one of Charles I’s principal opponents throughout his reign. Warwick, like those he was associated with, was careful to hide his tracks, but enough material survives to make possible a coherent analysis of his political career and connections.
The turning point for Warwick and his circle came gradually, in the mid-1620s, when the king’s embrace of the new, ceremonialist divinity, and the exercise of royal authoritarianism in the state, became increasingly apparent. The crises over war funding, arbitrary imprisonment, billeting, and martial law brought the English polity close to breakdown. The establishment of the Personal Rule brought no more than temporary respite, for Caroline policies in church and state were profoundly offensive to the godly, and to Warwick and his influential circle in particular. They were prepared to resist the king at home, and even more forcefully in the colonies, in support of the Protestant cause in Europe and the defence of English liberties. When, in the late-1630s, Charles faced open opposition in Scotland, such men were already on the edge — and some of them over the precipice — of treason. The two crises were thus intimately linked, with the figure of the Earl of Warwick providing one of the strongest cords, though not the only one, that connected the two events.
The essays and chapters that constitute this submission have taken their shape over more than four decades — a period during which the historiographical context of their writing has been an ever-changing one. To some extent, inevitably, these works engage with, and reflect, that evolving historiographical context. But they nevertheless manifest a consistency of approach and of thematic focus, as they have explored the parallel, but interrelated, worlds of centre, colonies, and county. In important respects, moreover, they can claim to have anticipated — and also to have influenced — some of the most important aspects of the current historiography of the early Stuart age: methodologically, in the emphasis on the interconnectedness of national and local politics, and the consequent need for the historian to be master of both sets of archives; and interpretatively, in the recovery of the peerage — or at least of major figures within this social group — as agents for the development of new ideas, policies, and political stratagems that were intended to modify, and eventually to transform, the conduct of government in both New and Old England.
List of Publications included in this Submission
I. List of Principal Publications
I.A Articles in Academic Journals
1. The Counting of Manors Reconsidered, The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 25 (1972a), 124-31
2. The Origins of the Politics of the Parliamentary Middle Group 1625-1629, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 22 (1972b), 71-86 (The Alexander Prize Essay)
3. Maximilian Petty and the Putney Debate on the Franchise, Past and Present, 88 (1980), 63-9
4. The Reaction of the House of Commons in November and December 1621 to the Confinement of Sir Edwin Sandys, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 779-86
5. Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick and the Government of Essex 1619-1629, The Essex Society for Archaeology and History, 1 (2010), 274-83
6. The ‘Old Patent’ of Connecticut Re-considered, Connecticut History, 50 (2011), 182-8
I.B Chapters in Books
7. The Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629, in Faction and Parliament. Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 45-84
8. Court Politics and Parliamentary Conflict in 1625, in Conflict in Stuart England, Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London and New York: Longman, 1989), 168-92
I.C Articles in Local History Journals
9. The Pilgrim Fathers, Essex Journal, 6 (1971), 7-13
10. The 3rd Lord Rich and the Essex Election of 1604, Essex Journal, 14 (1979), 2-6
11. New Light on the Suffolk Elections to the Parliament of 1628, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 10 (1988), 18-24
12. New Evidence on John Winthrop of Groton’s Essex Connections and the Colonisation of Massachusetts, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 26 (1996a), 25-8
13. John Winthrop of Groton’s Decision to Emigrate to Massachusetts: a Reconsideration of his ‘General Conclusions and Particular Considerations’, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 27 (1996b), 19-23
14. (with Frank Grace), Samuel Duncon of Ipswich’s Proposal for an Association of Counties in November, 1642, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 34 (2000), 31-4
II. A Chronological Listing of all Articles and Chapters listed in I.A, I.B, and I.C, above
The Pilgrim Fathers, Essex Journal, 6 (1971), 7-13
The Counting of Manors Reconsidered, The Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 25 (1972a), 124-31
The Origins of the Politics of the Parliamentary Middle Group 1625-1629, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 22 (1972b), 71-86 (The Alexander Prize Essay)
The Divided Leadership of the House of Commons in 1629, in Faction and Parliament. Essays on Early Stuart History, ed. Kevin Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 45-84
The 3rd Lord Rich and the Essex Election of 1604, Essex Journal, 14 (1979), 2-6
Maximilian Petty and the Putney Debate on the Franchise, Past and Present, 88 (1980), 63-9
New Light on the Suffolk Elections to the Parliament of 1628, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 10 (1988), 18-24
Court Politics and Parliamentary Conflict in 1625, in Conflict in Stuart England, Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London and New York: Longman, 1989), 168-92
New Evidence on John Winthrop of Groton’s Essex Connections and the Colonisation of Massachusetts, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 26 (1996a), 25-8
The Reaction of the House of Commons in November and December 1621 to the Confinement of Sir Edwin Sandys, The Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 779-86
(With Frank Grace), Samuel Duncon of Ipswich’s Proposal for an Association of Counties in November, 1642, The Suffolk Review, n.s., 34 (2000), 31-4
Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick and the Government of Essex 1619-1629, The Essex Society for Archaeology and History, 1 (2010), 274-83
The ‘Old Patent’ of Connecticut Re-considered, Connecticut History, 50 (2011), 182-8
III. Other publications, recorded in the British Library Catalogue, and included in this submission (BLP)
The Debate on Freedom of Speech in the House of Commons in February, 1621. February, 1985a (ISBN 0 948206 00 4)
The Holles Account of Proceedings in the House of Commons in 1624. July, 1985b (ISBN 0 948206 05 5)
Sir Nathaniel Rich’s Diary of Proceedings in the House of Commons in 1624. October, 1985c (ISBN 0 948206 10 1)
Parliamentary History in the 1620s: in or out of Perspective? January, 1986a (ISBN 0 948206 15 2)
Walter Yonge’s Diary of Proceedings in the House of Commons 1642-1645. Volume 1. 19th September, 1642 — 7th March, 1643. August, 1986b (ISBN 0 948206 20 9)
The Framework of the Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641. October, 1986c (ISBN 0 48206 25 X)
Two Puritan Commonwealths: Providence and New England. February, 1987 (ISBN 0 948206 30 6)
Sir John Borough’s Notes of Proceedings in Committees of the House of Commons 27 February — 23 March, 1626. June, 1988a (ISBN 0 948206 50 0)
The Civil War Papers of Sir Thomas Barrington. Part 1. 26th May — 30th August, 1643. December, 1988b (ISBN 0 948206 55 1)
The Counting of Manors: Professor Stone’s Reply Refuted. August, 1990a (ISBN 0 948206 35 7)
Obseruatyones of the proceedings in the ple=mente held at Westeminster Ano primoe et Secundo Jacobi Regis etc (British Library. Cotton Ms. Titus F.IV). October, 1990b (ISBN 0 948206 40 3)
Parliamentary Selection and the Essex Election of 1604. December, 1995 (ISBN 0948206 60 8)
Martin Lumley’s Shrievalty in Essex, Ship Money and Star Chamber Proceedings 1639-1640. November, 1996 (ISBN 0 948206 65 9)
The Earl of Warwick’s ‘Running Army’, the County of Essex and the Eastern Association 1642-1643. November, 1999 (ISBN 0 948206 01 2)
Lawrence Stone’s Manorial Samples and their Implications for the Landed Income of the Peerage between 1534 and 1641. March, 2005a (Orchard Press)
The Saybrook Company and the Significance of its Colonizing Venture. May, 2005b (Orchard Press)
A Provisional List of Theses on Early Stuart Parliamentary History. October, 2007a (Orchard Press)
A Preliminary List of Theses on the Tudor and Stuart Peerage. November, 2007b (Orchard Press)
Early Stuart Parliamentary History before the rise of Revisionism. February, 2008 (Orchard Press)
Anti-Spanish Sentiment in the House of Commons in November 1621. March, 2012 (ISBN 0 948206 95 0)
________________________________________
[1] For a recent survey of the relevant historiography, see John Adamson, ‘Introduction: High Roads and Blind Alleys — The English Civil War and its Historiography’ in The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640-49, ed. John Adamson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1-35.
[2] John Kenyon, The History Men. The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1983), pp. 214-24. Cf. R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 91-6.
[3] Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, Caulfield East and Baltimore: Edward Arnold, 1981), p. viii.
[4] Geoff Kennedy, ‘Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution’ in History and Revolution. Refuting Revisionism, ed. Mike Hayes and Jim Wolfreys (London and New York: Verso Books, 2007), pp. 25-49.
[5] H. R. Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change and other essays (London, Melbourne and Toronto: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 193-4.
[6] Perez Zagorin, ‘English History, 1558-1640: A Bibliographical Survey’ in The American Historical Review, 68 (1963), 364-84.
[7] See Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, ‘Introduction: after Revisionism’ in Conflict in Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642, ed. Cust and Hughes (London and New York: Longman, 1989), pp. 1-46.
[8] Hugh Trevor-Roper suggested a study of the career of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick to me in October, 1965.
[9] John Louis Beatty, Warwick and Holland, being the lives of Robert and Henry Rich (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1965). Cf. Wesley Frank Craven, ‘The Life of Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick to 1642’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cornell University, 1928); Barbara Lynn Donagan, ‘Robert Rich: Second Earl of Warwick (unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Minnesota, 1961).
[10] Her life has been the subject of many studies of varying quality. See, for example, Poor Penelope. Lady Penelope Rich. An Elizabethan Woman (Bourne End: The Kensal press, 1983)
[11] British Library, London, Lansdowne MS 31, fol. 105r.
[12] J. L. Beatty, op. cit., pp. 11, 22-3, 26-8; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 741-2.
[13] Christopher Thompson, ‘Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick and the Government of Essex, 1619-1629’ in The Essex Society for Archaeology and History, n.s. 1 (2010), 274, 278. Cf. Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England begun in the year 1641, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1858), I, p. 242.
[14] Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon), dd M32 Bundle 11 unfoliated for his account book for 1623-4. Cf. The National Archives (henceforward TNA), E 214/ 40, 141, 554-556, 746-747, 905, 992.
[15] Warwick’s estate archive can now be found divided between (1) the Barrington family’s papers in the British Library and the Essex Record Office; (2) the manuscripts of the Earls (later Dukes) of Manchester in the Huntingdon branch of the Cambridgeshire Record Office and the Guy’s Hospital papers in the Essex Record Office; and (3) the papers of the Finch and Finch Hatton families in the Leicestershire and Northamptonshire
Record Offices respectively. Sir Nathaniel Rich’s papers are now scattered between the Bermuda Archive Office; the Tracy W. Mcgregor Library in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; the National Library of the Republic of Ireland; the Huntingdon branch of the Cambridgeshire Record Office; and the parliamentary Archives in the Palace of Westminster. Sir Nathaniel Rich’s and, subsequently, the 2nd Earl of Warwick’s servant, William Jessop, had a large collection of Rich family papers, which are now divided between the Lancashire Record Office and the British Library. Because of their chronological range from c.1600 to c.1670, it is likely that the Rich papers now in the possession of the Dukes of Northumberland at Alnwick derive from the papers of Sir Nathaniel Rich and William Jessop, although how they got there is still unclear. There is no substantial body of correspondence for the 2nd Earl before his letters on naval matters during the 1640s, hence my reliance on colonial and parliamentary evidence.
[16] Alnwick XII. 7 Box 1; Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon), dd M32 Bundle 10 (Unnumbered MS). The summary rental formerly in the PRO 30/15 collection in what was then the Public Record Office was in Sir Nathaniel Rich’s hand and can be dated to 1632-1633, the one year in which Warwick had to pay his step-mother £1,000 for her jointure and his newly married eldest son and his wife £1,500. Sir Thomas Barrington’s estate was worth about £3,000 a year in the 1630s. See Barrington Family Letters 1628-1632, ed. Arthur Searle (Camden Society, 4th Series, 1983), p. 6. Cf. Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (London and Ronceverte: The Hambledon Press, 1990), p. xii.
[17] Barbara Donagan, ‘The Clerical Patronage of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, 1619-1642’ in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (1976), 388-419.
[18]De Jure Maiestatis: or Political Treatise of Government (1628-30) and the Letter Book of Sir John Eliot (1625-1632), ed. A. B. Grosart (London: Privately printed, 1882), II, pp. 29-30.
[19] Plume Library, Maldon. Plume Ms 5 unfoliated. Cf. William Hunt, The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 287.
[20] Wesley Frank Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company. The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932); Henry C. Wilkinson, The Adventurers of Bermuda. A history of the island from its discovery until the dissolution of the Somers Island Company in 1684, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1958); Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols The Settlements (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964), I, pp. 295, 356-8, 366-8, 401-4; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630-1641. The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), passim.
[21] James A. Williamson, The Caribbee Islands under the Proprietary Patents (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 109-11; British Library, Sloane MS 3662, fols. 61v-58v (reverse foliation); Stowe MS 184 fols. 124-7.
[22] The material formerly in PRO 30/15/205-426 can now be found in photostatic copies in The Library of Congress, William Drogo Montagu, Duke of Manchester Papers, 1616-1647, xerox copies of which are in my possession; British Library, Additional MS 10615. Mr Perrin’s transcripts of the latter, now in British Library, Additional MS 63854B, are not in the correct order.
[23] Wesley Frank Craven, ‘The Earl of Warwick, a Speculator in Piracy’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 10 (1930), 457-79.
[24] British Library, Additional MS 41616, fols. 25-35; Egerton MS 2543, fols. 125-8; Harleian MS 6866, fols. 73-81. Cf. Nathaniel Boteler, War Practically Performd’d: Shewing All The Requisites Belonging To A Land-Army, In Marches, Battels, and Sieges. Deduced From Ancient and Modern Discipline By The Experience of Capt. Nath. Boteler (London, 1672).
[25] British Library, Additional MS 36446, fol. 149r; Harleian MS 389, fol. 354r; TNA, SP14/117/98, 105; SP 14/118/28.
[26] Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626-1628 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 229-33, 269-71.
[27] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). The book was in many ways the coda to the ‘gentry controversy’.
[28] For this summary, see Lawrence Stone, Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 (London: Longmans, 1970), p. xiv.
[29] For the relevant reviews of The Crisis using its full title, see Harold Hulme, The American Historical Review, 71 (1965), 173-4 (p. 173); W. K. Jordan, The Journal of Modern History, 38 (1966), 428-9 (p. 428); Mildred Campbell, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 24 (1967), 302-4 (p. 304); Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Political Science Quarterly, 81 (1966), 306-7 (p. 306).
[30] Perez Zagorin, ‘The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641’, The Journal of Economic History, 26 (1966), 135-7 (p. 135).
[31] Stone, Crisis, pp. 9, 11, 55, 57, 60, 123, 201, 501, 735, 745, 749-52.
[32] Ibid., pp. 58, 153 for contrasting claims about the peerage’s position in 1558.
[33] G. E. Aylmer, ‘Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 by Lawrence Stone’, Past and Present, 32 (1965), 113-25 (pp. 119, 122-3); J. H. Hexter, ‘The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 8 (1968), 22-78 (pp. 39-43); D. H. Pennington, ‘The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 by Lawrence Stone’, The English Historical Review, 81 (1966), 562-5 (pp. 563-4).
[34] Robert Ashton, ‘The Aristocracy in Transition’, The Economic History Review, n.s., 22 (1969), 308-22 (p. 311); D. C. Coleman, ‘The ‘Gentry Controversy’ and the Aristocracy in Crisis’, History, 51 (1966), 165-78. Cf. J. P. Cooper, ‘Back to the Sources’, The Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966, pp. 285, 287-8, and his letter in The Times Literary Supplement, 12 May 1966, p. 407.
[35] I was informed that the Board of The Economic History Society, the publisher of the Economic History Review in which my critique of Stone appeared, had decided at Stone’s request not to allow me to reply. One of the Board members involved in this decision, D. C. Coleman, apologised to me for this in 1990.
[36] Helen Miller, ‘The Early Tudor Peerage’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of London, 1950), pp. 126-31.
[37] John Jeremy Goring, ‘The Military Obligations of the English people 1511-1558’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1955). Cf. Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 17-19.
[38] On his rentals drawn from Alnwick, the Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon), and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, see Essex Record Office, T/A 708/1.
[39] Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the year 1916 in Two Volumes (Washington: no publisher, 1916) I, pp. 391-9.
[40] Albert Beebe White and Wallace Notestein, Source Problems in English History (New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1918), pp. 171-6, 181-5.
[41] Wallace Notestein, The Winning of the Initiative by the House of Commons (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
[42] Ibid., p. 53.
[43] Wallace Notestein, The English People on the Eve of Colonization 1603-1630 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1954), pp. 185-201.
[44] Ibid., pp. 190, 198.
[45] Ibid., p. 201. Cf. Notestein, Initiative, p.26 for his earlier view of the peers moving towards co-operation with the House of Commons.
[46] D. H. Willson, The Privy Councillors in the House of Commons 1604-1629 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1940).
[47] Theodore K. Rabb, ‘Parliament and Society in Early Stuart England: The Legacy of Wallace Notestein’, in The American Historical Review, 77 (1972), 709-12, 714.
[48] Roland G. Usher, The Institutional History of the House of Commons 1547-1641 (Washington University Studies, XI, no.2., April 1924).
[49] See J. E. Neale’s review of The Rise of the Revolutionary Party in the English House of Commons by Williams M.Mitchell, The English Historical Review, 74 (1959), 528.
[50] Usher, op.cit., pp. 227, 236.
[51] For one example of Usher’s work being noticed, see R. W. K. Hinton’s review of ‘The Rise of the Revolutionary Party in the English House of Commons 1603-1629 by Williams M. Mitchell’ and of ‘The Addled Parliament of 1614 by Thomas L. Moir’, in The Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 185-6. According to Nicholas Tyacke, Conrad Russsell was aware of Usher’s 1924 work when they were teaching their special subject course at the University of London in the 1970s.
[52] John N. Ball, ‘The parliamentary Career of Sir John Eliot 1604-1629’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1953). Sadly, only fragments of this work ever appeared in print.
[53] J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (London: Longmans, 1961), pp. 135-8.
[54] A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans. The Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1914).
[55] For Pembroke, see Brian O’Farrell, Shakespeare’s Patron. William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke 1580-1630. Politics, Patronage and Power ( London and New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 158-71, 177-80.
[56] See, e.g., Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England. The Caroline Puritan Movement c.1620-1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 153-154. The man who stood bond for Thomas Hooker was John Nashe, one of Warwick’s tenants in Great Waltham, Essex, hence the utility of identifying the Earl’s tenants.
[57] Commons Debates for 1629, ed. Wallace Notestein and Frances Helen Relf (Minneapolis: Research Publications of the University of Minnesota, 1921).
[58] Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (Oxford: Clarendon Press. Oxford 1979), pp. xvii-xxi for some cautionary remarks. [Give examples of the single-author dependent writing to which you allude.]
[59] Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution. English politics and the coming of war, 1621-1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 319-20.
[60] Russell, Parliaments 1621-1629, passim, and Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (London and Ronceverte:The Hambledon Press, 1990), pp. xiii-xix, 31-88.
[61] Hugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, p. 74. His point about ‘revolutionary situations’ not necessarily leading to revolutions is an important one.
[62] J. P. Cooper, ed., The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume IV. The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years’ war 1609-1648/59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 541; J. P. Cooper, Land, Men and Beliefs. Studies in Early Modern History, ed. G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983), pp.143-6. Cf. Menna Prestwich, Cranfield. Politics and Profit under the Early Stuarts. The Career of Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. xvi.
[63] Perez Zagorin, The court and the Country. The Beginning of the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 33-9.
[64] Russell, Parliaments 1621-1629, pp. 204-59.
[65] John Talbot Price, ‘The House of Lords 1625-1629’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nottingham, 1975), pp. 47-230. Cf. Jessie L. Stoddart, ‘Constitutional Crisis and the House of Lords’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1966), pp. 270-319.
[66] J. N. Ball thesis, pp. 164-5, 170-7.
[67] Russell, Parliaments 1621-1629, pp. 293-303.
[68] Thomas Cogswell, ‘‘The Warre of the Commons for the honour of King Charles’: the parliament men and the reformation of the lord admiral in 1626’, Historical Research, 84 (2011), 619-35. The document in question is San Marino, Huntington Library, Ellesmere MS 7004, which I examined in January, 1997.
[69] William B. Bidwell and Maija Jansson, ed., Proceedings in Parliament 1626, 4 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), II, pp. 279-80.
[70] Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon), dd M32/9/6.
[71] Proceedings in Parliament 1626, II, p. 441.
[72] A photostatic copy of the document of 1624 formerly amongst the Duke of Manchester’s papers in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London until 1969 as PRO 30/15/426 can be found in The Library of Congress, William Drogo Montagu, Duke of Manchester Papers 1616-1647. I possess a xerox copy of this photostat.
[73] W. Dunn Macray, ed., Letters Relating to the Family of Beaumont of Whitley, Yorkshire from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries (London: Nichols and Son, 1884), p. 61.
[74] Roger Lockyer, Buckingham. The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham 1592-1628 (London and New York: Longman, 1981), pp. 318-21.
[75] J. L. Price thesis, pp. 97-101; J. L. Stoddart thesis, pp. 303-4.
[76] See Christopher Hill, ‘The Political Sermons of John Preston’ in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution. Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Mercury Books, 1962), p. 253.
[77] G. M. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts , 20th edn (London: Methuen and Co., 1949), p. 128.
[78] L .J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 91-106; Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 60-1.
[79] J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 77-88.
[80] Hugh Trevor-Roper, Historical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 191-2.
[81] Hexter, Journal of British Studies, Volume 8 No.1 (November, 1968), pp. 63-4, 66-7, 69-70.
[82] Lawrence Stone, ‘Postscript to Eight Hundred and Forty Pages’, Journal of British Studies, 8 (1968), 78-85 (p. 80).
[83] John Adamson, The Noble Revolt. The Overthrow of Charles I (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007).
[84] W. F. Craven, Dissolution of the Virginia Company, passim.
[85] On the Rich family’s interests in Bermuda, see Wesley Frank Craven, ‘An Introduction to the History of Bermuda’, William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd Series, 17 (1937), 176-215, 317-62, 437-65; 18 (1938), 13-63. On the profits made from tobacco by the Earl of Warwick and Sir Nathaniel Rich in the early-1620s, see Cambridgeshire Record Office (Huntingdon), dd M32 Bundle 11, unfol.
[86] See Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company of London, 4 vols (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1906 and 1935), III and IV passim for her transcripts from the Manchester Papers formerly in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London as PRO 30/15/205-426.
[87] Theodore K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman. Sir Edwin Sandys 1561-1629, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 330-6, 344-81.
[88] Ibid., pp. 354-6.
[89] Ibid., p. 322, n. 7.
[90] British Library, Harleian MS 1583, fol. 81r; TNA, CO 1, fols. 48r-109r. Extracts from the missing archives of the Somers Island or Bermuda Company can be found in the Saumarez papers in the Suffolk Record Office.
[91] Kingsbury, op.cit., IV, pp. 211-14; British Library, Egerton MS 2543, fols. 125r-128r.
[92] Vernon A.Ive, The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda 1615-1646. Eyewitness Accounts Sent by the Early Colonists to Sir Nathaniel Rich (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984).
[93] Thomas Cogswell, ‘In the Power of the state: Mr Anys’s Project and the Tobacco Colonies, 1626-1628’, The English Historical Review, 123 ( 2008), 35-64.
[94] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 273-5.
[95] Frances Rose-Troup, The Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2002) is inadequate. The Earls of Warwick and Lincoln were both allies of John Preston, the Cambridge divine, and the patrons of Francis Bright and Samuel Skelton, two of the first three ministers sent to Massachusetts. Simon Bradstreet, Lincoln’s putative Steward in the late-1620s, was supposed to have acted as a companion to Warwick’s eldest son, Lord Rich, when he went up to Cambridge University. Lord Rich did not go but Bradstreet apparently became Steward to Warwick’s step-mother, the dowager Countess of Warwick, before emigrating.
[96] The Journal of John Winthrop 1630-1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage and Laetitia Yeandle, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1996), i, p. 123.
[97] British Library, Egerton MS 2648, fols.1r-2r. See The Winthrop Papers, 7 vols (Boston, MA: Massachusetts History Society, 1928-1947), III, ed. Stewart Mitchell (1943), p. 230. Cf. Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop. America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 232-8.
[98] See note 97 above.
[99] For the quarrels between Nathaniel Butler, Warwick’s client, and Saye and Sele’s dependents, Halhead and Lane, in the late-1630s, see British Library, Sloane MS 758; Kupperman, op.cit., pp. 284-6.
[100] Brett Usher, ‘Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick’,. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[101] Alnwick XII. 7. Box 2b.
[102] See, for example, Essex Record Office, D/DU 560/45/3, 4. A significant number of new leases were granted in the mid to late-1630s in this part of Essex: this suggests that they had previously been let for twenty one year terms in c.1616-17.
[103] See Holmes, op.cit., pp. 21-2 for the complaints of Henry Neville of Cressing Temple and William, Lord Maynard over the popular support Warwick’s candidates enjoyed in the county elections to the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640.
[104] Brian W.Quintrell, The Maynard Lieutenancy Book, 1608-1639, 2 vols (Chelmsford: Essex Record Office, 1993), I, pp. lv-lvi.
[105] TNA, C 115 M36/8438.
[106] TNA, SP 16/275/21.
[107] Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1636-1639, pp. 124-6.
[108] Essex Record Office, T/B 211/1 no. 39.
[109] Adamson, Noble Revolt, pp. 225, 266, 311.
[110] Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-1660 (Bristol: Leicester University Press, 1966) is the classic expression of the argument for gentry groups within counties as largely autonomous communities. Clive Holmes initially sympathised with this view in the late-1960s and early-1970s but had abandoned it by c.1980.
[111] Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel. The Life of Robert Devereux, the Third Earl of Essex 1591-1646 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).
[112] J. B. Blankenfeld, ‘Puritans in the Provinces: Banbury, Oxford shire, 1554-1660’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Yale University, 1985); Nelson Parker Bard, ‘William Fiennes, First Viscount Saye and Sele: A Study in the Politics of Opposition’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Virginia, 1973). Saye and Sele’s surviving estate catalogue in Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D.892 is less informative than those for Warwick.
[113] See John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: The Diary of Robert Woodford’, The Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 769-88; The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637-1641, ed. Fielding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Peter Lake, ‘The ‘Court’, the ‘Country’ and the Northamptonshire Connection: Watching the ‘Puritan Opposition’ Think (Historically) about Politics on the Eve of the English Civil War’, Midland History, 35 (2010), 28-70.
________________________________________
Copyright: Christopher Thompson
