Edward Alford and the Making of Country Radicalism

Abstract

Resentment of monopoly and purveyance, weariness with the burdens of a long war, and the fears and hopes attendant upon the accession of a new and foreign dynasty were all focussed by the meeting of James I's first parliament in 1604. If there was nothing entirely new in these elements, there was novelty and danger in the concurrence of so many grievances at a time when the sense of external crisis which had unified the country for the preceding quarter century was at last relaxed. The new political climate, parochial, isolationist, and hostile to government intrusion whether of church or state, was soon associated with the term Country.1 In one sense, this climate was merely a moderate intensification of perennial English localism, and as such devoid of ideological implication. But allied with the persistent failures of the early Stuart administration, particularly in dealing with parliament, it became a medium in which genuine political opposition began to develop. By 1629, the term implied not merely distance from the court but estrangement; no longer a mere cultural style, it was now a political stance. To be sure, gentlemen were still the crown's representatives at the local level, a receiver general like John Pym or a deputy lieutenant like Sir Robert Phelips. Yet, just as Puritan ministers had learned to distinguish between their calling and the condition of the church in which it was exercised, between pastoral care and bureaucratic subordination, so the gentlemen came gradually in the years before 1640 to distinguish between the services they performed in their communities and the government which licensed them. If Country attitudes in themselves constituted little more than a climate of disaffection, parliament was the crucible where such attitudes were hardened into substantive criticism and dissent. The early Stuart parliaments have received generous attention lately. Of the seven parliaments between 1604 and 1629, the first four have been treated in monographs, while the latter five have been the subject of a general