Harnessing Conscience for the King: Charles I, the Forced Loan Sermons, and Matters of Conscience

Abstract

When military fiascos and financial crises drove Charles I to implement the Forced Loan at the beginning of his reign, he encouraged clerics to preach obedience to his authority through the rhetoric of conscience. Robert Sibthorpe, Isaac Bargrave, Matthew Wren, and Roger Maynwaring responded to the King’s call, delivering sermons between February and July 1627 that tied disobedience to misguided conscience. Their efforts represented a larger effort to harness individual conscience and condemn the conscience rooted in individual whims rather than in the King as a moral, religious, or political anchor. However, the Forced Loan also incited those who argued that resorting to individual conscience was necessary in cases where the King’s actions violated the rule of law. As all parties exploited conscience’s efficacy as an argumentative device, conscience lost its privileged status above the secular fray and was instead made into a matter of political contention. Ironically, in manipulating conscience as a means of unifying the nation behind royal authority, Charles and his clerics simply contributed to conscience’s fragmentation. My essay explores this exaggeration not only of conscience but also of political difference, as contemporaries deployed conscience to prepare the argumentative ground for the positions they wished to espouse.