Politics, Patronage, and Piety in Early Modern Britain: A Special Issue in Honour of Paul Christianson

Abstract

The essays in this issue derive from a conference held to mark the occasion of Professor Paul Christianson's retirement from active duties at Queen's University. A group of historians and literary scholars drawn from Canada, Great Britain, and America convened at Dalhousie University on May 2 and 3, 2003, to honour a colleague noteworthy for both his teaching and his scholarship. Daniel Woolfs introduction, the text of his conference address, pays homage to his mentor's long and distinguished career. In their range of subject matter and approaches, the papers given at Dalhousie also testified to the breadth of Professor Christianson's impact. The papers included here are merely a selection of those that seemed to cohere best around common themes. Most are sensitive pieces of intellectual history, while a couple offer detailed empirical research. The first four essays all discuss, in one fashion or another, the fraught issue of sovereignty. Alan Orr proposes that the works of Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies on the subjugation of Ireland represented not two installments of the same plan, but opposing positions in a debate about how best to proceed. Whereas Spenser favoured martial law as a civilizing agent, Davies insisted on the necessity of the English common law to cultivate civility and a recognition of English sovereignty. Ken MacMillan also looks at the role of law in England's colonial endeavours. He demonstrates that the well-known reliance on common law as a guarantor of colonial possession operated in conjunction with, rather than to the exclusion of, civil law precedents. As an international code, civil law offered a better means to have other European powers recognize or at least understand English claims to sovereignty. Its clauses and terms peppered the letters patent with which English monarchs empowered their colonial agents. Arguments from history always figured in debates about the relative roles of different bodies of law; no less did they shape discussions of religious conformity. Charles Prior examines the work of Thomas Bell, highlighting a tradition of historical interpretation that focused on the Church of England's claims to an ancient status. Bell sought to demonstrate that the monarch's sovereignty over the national church enjoyed the imprimatur of age. A recognition of the king's right to control the Church was key to his temporal sovereignty, and to unifying religious factionalism. Simon Healey studies a crucial dimension of sovereignty-in-action: taxation. A mark of any sovereign power was its right to tax. How successfully did the early Smart kings manage to enforce this right? Not very, it seems. Healey meticulously demonstrates that the payment of demanded funds showed a remarkable responsiveness to events in parliament. He argues that the faltering tax yields from 1624-29 show that the English did not, in fact, support the wars against Catholic Spain and France despite their protestations to the contrary. Political sentiments manifested themselves materially, with devastating consequences. The following papers take us into the civil war years. Ian Gentles examines the crowds that agitated for peace in 1642-43. Londoners, he demonstrates, exhibited far less support for parliament's war against the king than most accounts of the civil war suggest. The activities of counter-revolutionary crowds, which came to be dominated by women, ensured the failure of such initiatives as the Committee for the General Rising and forced parliament to offer peace proposals to the king, even if the offer was disingenuous. Popular opinion manifested itself more visibly here than it did against the wars of the 1620s. Ultimately, however, parliament's ability to conscript men and money, and its support from the Scots, defeated the peace movement. Yet, conflicts over ways and means were not easily ended. The Scottish aid that allowed parliament victory over the peace movement came at the price of a Presbyterian settlement, and this provoked fears among some staunch parliamentarians that one tyranny was about to be replaced with another. …