A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660 Read online

  Steven G. Ellis’s thesis was set out most clearly in Tudor Ireland (Longman, 1985); ‘Economic Problems of the Church’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1990); and ‘The Collapse of the Gaelic World, 1450–1650’, Irish Historical Studies (1999). A huge number of recent monographs have been synthesized in S. J. Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (Oxford University Press, 2007). Of slightly older work, Bruce Lenman, Engand’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688 (Longman, 2001), and Alan Ford and John MacCafferty (eds), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2005), retain distinction, to which should now be added David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Four Courts, 2007).

  Chapter 7 – Post-Reformation Britain

  The classic textbooks of early modern English social history are Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (Hutchinson, 1982); Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (Longman, 1998); and J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England, 2nd edn (Arnold, 1997). For religious and magical belief, the canonical work is Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (last reprinted by Weidenfeld, 1997). There are no real equivalents for Scotland and Wales, the nearest being T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (Collins, 1969); R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales c. 1415–1642 (Oxford University Press, 1987).

  Interest in popular rioting and protest burgeoned among historians after 1968, when contemporaries in the Western world took up the same activities on a large scale. Especially relevant to the present book are Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority (University of California Press, 1979); Keith Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (Heinemann, 1982); K. J. Lindley, ‘Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1983); David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion (Oxford University Press, 1985); Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (eds), Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Roger Manning, Village Revolts (Oxford University Press, 1988). During the 2000s, interest revived in the topic, this time influenced by anthropology and represented by Alison Wall, Power and Protest in England 1525–1640 (Arnold, 2000); Andy Wood’s Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, mentioned earlier; Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500 and 1640 (Palgrave, 2001); and John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2006). It was allied to a growing interest by historians in the nature of governance, typified in this context by Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability (Cambridge University Press, 1991); Paul Griffths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Macmillan, 1996); Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England c. 1550–1640 (Macmillan, 2000); Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Michael J. Braddick and John Walter (eds), Negotiating Power in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  The classic textbook on crime is J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 2nd edn (Longman, 1999). Alan Macfarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale (Blackwell, 1984) was very influential in its time and still matters, and other important works on the subject include Lawrence Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300–1980’, Past and Present (1983); Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000); and K. J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The major publications on the place of alehouses are Peter Clark, The English Alehouse (Longman, 1983) and Keith Wrightson’s essay in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914 (Harvester, 1982). A. L. Beier, Masterless Men (Methuen, 1985) is the staple work on vagrancy, and Paul Slack is the main historian of poor relief, in Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman, 1988) and From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 1999). Knowledge of the poor law has been greatly extended by Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2004). To the information in these can be added Richard M. Smith (ed.), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge University Press, 1984); A. L. Beier et al. (eds), The First Modern Society (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ian D. Archer, ‘The Charity of Early Modern Londoners’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2002); and Paul A. Fideler, Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England (Palgrave, 2006). The groundbreaking study of Scottish feuding was Keith Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573–1625 (John Donald, 1986).

  Research into crisis mortality has languished since 1995, so we depend still upon the famous studies made before then: Andrew B. Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Liverpool University Press, 1978); John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge University Press, 1989); E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871 (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1990); David Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, 2nd edn (Longman, 1992); and R. A. Houston, The Population History of Britain and Ireland 1500–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  Popular religion is treated in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism (Macmillan, 1996); Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixeteenth-Century England (Macmillan, 1998); John Spurr, The Post Reformation (Pearson, 2006); and Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford University Press, 2007). My thoughts on the impact of the English Reformation were worked out in various conversations with Jack Scarisbrick. The famous Scottish equivalent to the English cultural histories is Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (Yale University Press, 2002), though Michael Lynch’s essay in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism 1559–1638 (Oxford University Press, 1985) is still a useful overall survey.

  The pioneering study of witch trials and beliefs in England was Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, (2nd edn (Routledge, 1999), and the Scottish equivalent was Christina Larner, Enemies of God (reprinted by John Donald, 2000). James Sharpe subsequently became the leading expert on the English material, with Instruments of Darkness (Hamilton, 1996) and Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Longman, 2001), while Malcolm Gaskill provided a full-length study of the Matthew Hopkins episode in Witchfinders (John Murray, 2005). Larner’s work has been followed up most productively to date by the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft project, with its website and two collections of essays, Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (Manchester University Press, 2002) and Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  Family and gender history is well considered in some of the works listed above, but much augmented by Roy Porter and Sylvana Tomaselli (eds), Rape (Blackwell, 1986); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Early Modern England’, History Workshop (1990); Amy Louise Erikson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1993); Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1750 (Weidenfeld, 1994); Ilana Kraussman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (Yale University Press, 1994); Amanda Shephard, Gender and Authority in Sixteenth-Century England (Keele University Press, 1994); Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds), Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England (University College London Press, 1994); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (Yale University Press,
1995); Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2003).

  Kenneth R. Andrew has been the great authority on Elizabethan seafaring and the foundation of the First British Empire, in a series of books stretching from Elizabethan Privateering (Cambridge University Press, 1964) to Trade, Plunder and Settlement (Cambridge University Press, 1984). To these need to be added N. A. M. Rodger on the navy, in The Safeguard of the Sea (HarperCollins, 2004), and Susan Ronald, The Pirate Queen (HarperCollins, 2007), who is very good on the Elizabethan explorers and privateers, though more shaky in understanding their general context. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (University of Chicago Press, 1992) is a fine all-round, though excessively optimistic, assessment of the Elizabethan cultural achievement. For the impact of print and plays, especially in London, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Lake and Questier, The AntiChrist’s Lewd Hat; and Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies (2006).

  The ‘British Problem’ was formulated and examined in 1990 in a series of collections of essays: Ronald Asch (ed.), Three Nations: A Common History? (Arbeitskreis Deutsche England-Forschung, 1993); Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber (eds), Conquest and Union: Fashioning a British State (Longman, 1995); Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (Routledge, 1995); Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem c. 1534–1707 (Macmillan, 1996); Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts (eds), British Consciousness and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History (Tauris, 1999). The last of these was Allan Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Four Courts, 2002). Steven Ellis’s ideas have been most recently summed up in his survey work written with Christopher Maginn, The Making of the British Isles (Pearson Longman, 2007).

  Chapter 8 – The Early Stuarts

  Four different textbooks complement each other in covering English political history in the period. In an ideal world, newcomers should start with Barry Coward, The Stuart Age, 3rd edn (Pearson, 2003), which covers the years 1603 to 1714 and provides the basic facts with a balanced historiographical perspective. Then should come Derek Hirst, England in Conflict (Arnold, 1999), providing a more detailed narrative and analysis of the events of 1603 to 1660 from a post-revisionist viewpoint. This can be compared, where they overlap, with Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002), a dense narrative study of the period from 1625 to 1660. Finally, there is Jonathan Scott’s England’s Troubles (Cambridge University Press, 2000), which is a clever maverick reinterpretation of the Stuart age, 1603 to 1714, best read by those who are familiar with the period. Important essays by John Morrill and Conrad Russell were published in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1994). David Underdown’s lectures, A Freeborn People (Oxford University Press, 1996), cover popular politics in the early to mid-seventeenth century, and Kevin Sharpe, Representations and Revolutions (Yale University Press, 2009) the way in which regimes portrayed themselves, in print and visual image, during the same period.

  Jenny Wormald’s pioneering revisionist essay on King James was ‘James VI and 1: Two Kings or One?’, History (1983), and this can be compared with her more measured assessment in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004). Maurice Lee’s view is summed up in Great Britain’s Solomon (University of Illinois Press, 1990), and Pauline Croft’s in King James (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In addition the 400th anniversary of his accession produced Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wyther and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession of James I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Diane Newton, The Making of the Jacobean Regime (Boydell Press, 2005), followed by Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I (Ashgate, 2006). Particular aspects of the king’s rulership are covered in W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Michael Young, James VI and I and the History of Homosexuality (Macmillan, 2000).

  The early Stuart royal courts are treated in two essays in David Starkey (ed.), The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (Longman, 1987), and three in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (eds), Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press, 1993). The court of James is the subject of Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge University Press, 1991), Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Unwin Hyman, 1990), and Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2002). The key biographies of Jacobean ministers are Roger Lockyer, Buckingham (Longman, 1981) and Linda Levy Peck, Northampton (Allen and Unwin, 1982).

  The best overall textbooks on early Stuart English religion are Susan Doran and Christopher Durston, Princes, Pastors and People (Routledge, 1991), and Andrew Foster, The Church of England 1570–1640 (Longman, 1994), while with a lighter touch Peter Marshall, Reformation England is as good on that period as he is on the Tudors. Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored (Oxford University Press, 2007) is a detailed survey of worship in the established Church from 1547 to 1700. Key works upon the early Stuart Church of England are Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford University Press, 1987); Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church (Macmillan, 1993); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge University Press, 1998). To these should be added Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds), The Culture of English Puritanism 1500–1700 (Macmillan, 1996); John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Macmillan, 1998) and The Post Reformation (Pearson Longman, 2006); Darren Oldridge, Religion and Society in Early Stuart England (Ashgate, 1998); Peter Lake and Michael Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Boydell Press, 2000); and Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester University Press, 2001). For James’s Church, there are Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor (Oxford University Press, 1990); Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court (Cambridge University Press, 1998); James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (Brewer, 2000); and Charles Prior, Defining the Jacobean Church (Cambridge University Press, 2005). For Charles’s, there are Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford University Press, 1992); and Kenneth Fincham, ‘William Laud and the Exercise of Caroline Ecclesiastical Patronage’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2000).

  The whole debate between revisionists of early Stuart political history and their opponents and successors is told in the first chapter of Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Those who want to follow some of their more recent manifestations should read Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford University Press, 1979), Unrevolutionary England (Hambledon, 1990) and The Addled Parliament of 1614 (University of Reading, 1992); Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics (Oxford University Press, 1987); Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1989); L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Longman, 1989); Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Macmillan, 1992) and Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (Yale University Press, 1996); Kevin Sharpe’s essay in Robert Smith and John S. Moore (eds), The House of Commons (Manorial Soc
iety, 1996); the discussion in the Journal of British Studies (1996); Paul Christianson, Discourse on History, Law and Governance in the Public Career of John Selden (University of Toronto Press, 1997); J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots (Longman, 1999); Alan Cromartie, ‘The Constitutionalist Revolution’, Past and Present (1999); Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Chris Kyle (ed.), Parliaments, Politics and Elections 1604–1648 (Camden Society, 2001); D. Alan Orr, ‘Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of the English Civil War’, History (2002); Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c. 1590–1720 (Manchester University Press, 2007). Significant recent studies of early Stuart politics and political culture include Pauline Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research (1995); Adam Fox, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal (1997); Stephen Lucas and Rosalind Davies (eds), The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament (Ashgate, 2003); Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta (Yale University Press, 2003).

  There is no full-length, properly researched biography of Charles I in print. Important shorter studies of the king in recent years have been provided by Brian Quintrell, Charles I 1625–1640 (Longman, 1993); Michael B. Young, Charles 1 (Macmillan, 1997); Christopher Durston, Charles I (Routledge, 1998); and (especially) Richard Cust, Charles I (Pearson Longman, 2005). All these are more or less hostile. Kevin Sharpe’s works, listed above and below, are kinder, and for many years Mark Kishlansky has been working towards a full biography which is likely to be the most favourable of modern times. Milestones on the way to that are his articles ‘Tyranny Denied’, in the Historical Journal (1999), and ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, in Past and Present (2005).