The Influence of Edmund Plowden's Succession Treatise

Abstract

the risk he took. John Hales (who had opened the pamphlet succession controversy in 1563 with his arguments for the claim of Catherine Grey and his attack on the foreign birth of the queen of Scots) had been imprisoned, even though his tract had not apparently been printed. Plowden did not have his own treatise printed; for this reason the work, whose surviving sixteenth-century copies bear no contemporary ascription, is little known today and has only recently been rediscovered and identified.' Plowden's treatise is a uniquely important legal document and is, as I shall argue, more influential than has recently been supposed. Plowden's treatise is concerned with theoretical legal problems raised by the succession controversy and is couched in specialized legal terminology. The work, as its title in the British Museum Cotton catalog indicates, is a locus classicus, unrecognized by Ernst Kantorowicz, for the theory of the king's two bodies.2 It is therefore of particular significance in demonstrating a link between the use of the theory in judicial cases relating to the crown, recorded in Plowden's Reports (1571), and in the more popular ambiance of the Elizabethan succession polemics. Mortimer Levine discusses Plowden's treatise in his excellent book, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question. Levine has assumed, however, that Plowden was not the first common lawyer to write a defense of the Scottish title. He follows Sir John Neale in supposing that Sir 'Rodney Fisher of Clare College has kindly shared with me his rediscovery of the longmissing copy of Plowden's treatise prepared in 16o3 by Plowden's son, Francis, described by Thomas Winnington in Notes and Queries, X (i866), p. 353. Until this MS was relocated one had relied on three anonymous MSS; of these B.M. Cotton Caligula B IV, fols. 1-94, (loes not contain the prologues or section on the will of Henry VIII to be found in B.M.