Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University. He is the author of The Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflict (1971) and the co-editor of A Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century(1983)

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The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface...........................................................................ixIntroduction......................................................................11. The Discourse of Monarchy......................................................62. Sacred Discourse...............................................................513. The Discourse of the Realm.....................................................2234. The Discourse of the Law.......................................................2675. The Discourse of the Stage.....................................................3556. The Discourse of Parliament: The Reformation of Parliament.....................4737. Stuart Parliaments and the Crisis of Legitimacy................................563Reference Matter..................................................................707Abbreviations.....................................................................709Notes.............................................................................713Index.............................................................................799

Chapter One

High authoritie is alwaye in perylle.

The society of early modern England was both hierarchical and dynamic, and its modes of discourse reflected this instability. In part this resulted from groups that claimed greater inclusion for themselves (or demanded the exclusion of others), but in part it was the effect of pressure from the state for more and more elaborate tokens of acknowledgment and respect and the imposition of ever-wider and more prescriptive codes of conduct. The notion of a Tudor despotism has long gone by the boards, and Tudor government is now seen as resting on the cooperation of elites. It is worth recalling, however, the extent to which the Tudors and their parliaments felt justified in ordering the most intimate aspects of their subjects' lives. The wearing of a silk or velvet bonnet, of a proscribed hide on one's shoulders or hose on one's legs, could result in fines, imprisonment, or a trip to the stocks. Diet, work, and wages were regulated no less than dress, as well as a host of activities ranging from the length of wood one could cut to the size of horses one could breed. Such regulations tended to fall more heavily as one descended the social scale, but the extraordinary mortality rate among the leading families of the realm-the Staffords, Seymours, Courtenays, Howards, and Greys-suggested the singular disadvantages of proximity to the royal bloodline or to royal favor; only under James I did it become the norm to lose one's place without forfeiting one's head.

Altogether, the range and scope of the Tudor state's intrusion into everyday life and the zest for control which it exhibited toward the most mundane social functions and activities would have made all but the severest of present-day authoritarian regimes blush. Had its reach equaled its grasp, it would have been a truly Orwellian commonwealth, Elizabeth I's famous remark about not making windows into men's souls notwithstanding. Of course, the Tudors were not notably more obtrusive than other comparably developed sixteenth-century monarchies; the tendency they represented was a general one. It is true as well that sumptuary laws and labor controls had a long late-medieval history. What was novel in the Tudors was their assiduity, and their success in suppressing sources of countervailing power and incorporating them into the state apparatus. The chivalric tradition-to which Henry VIII alone of the Tudor sovereigns was anachronistically attached-had been, as practiced in the days of Edward III and Henry V, a camaraderie of freebooters led by the sovereign as primus inter pares, both reflecting and perpetuating a rough-and-ready power sharing between the crown and the baronial elite. If this tradition affirmed the majesty of the crown it also limited it, and the quite deliberate glorification of majesty, its identification with a fixed (although frequently peripatetic) Court, its elevation above the peerage (partly accomplished by leveling down: for fifty years England had no dukes), and its vigorous exercise through proclamation and statute, was the hallmark of the Tudor experiment. At the same time the Tudors reduced their chief rivals in the peerage, they promoted the gentry, making them the custodians of local government and linking them through county magnates with a Court-based system of patronage policed by justices dispatched from Westminster and by the slow, studied royal progresses by which the Tudors personally surveyed their realm.

The most important authority annexed by the Tudor state was that of ecclesiastical governance. By disavowing the church of Rome, Henry VIII at once removed what remained of a major rival and possessed himself of its temporal wealth-a process not unlike his father's policy of attainder, but on a vastly larger scale. At the same time he incorporated its sacerdotal power as Supreme Head of his own creation, the Church of England, thus becoming the first monarch in Christendom to reign supreme over both the temporal and spiritual dimensions of his realm. This was an incalculable gain to monarchy, imparting to it not only control over an activity that vitally penetrated all aspects of English life but enhancing and in a crucial sense transforming its institutional charisma. As with other areas of government, the crown did not entirely monopolize the church; as it shared the monastic endowment with gentry purchasers so too it did lay patronage, while the Anglican bishops, capitalizing on the Elizabethan compromise, were able to assert doctrinal controls and jure divino claims. Nonetheless, the episcopal bench was a bulwark of the throne, a counterweight to the peerage in the House of Lords, and the enforcing arm of a disciplinary apparatus that reached into every parish in the land.

Control of the church gave the crown direct access to the most important medium of information and propaganda in early modern England, the pulpit. By law, every Englishman and woman was required to attend an Anglican service each Sunday, there to receive such instruction and guidance as was good for the soul and expedient to the state. Travelers, merchants, itinerant peddlers, strolling players, publicans, priests in mufti, country correspondents, and others with access to informal networks had alternative means of information, and Dame Rumor, as ever, traveled wide; but until the development of newsletters in the seventeenth century there was no comparable avenue of news. Understandably, the Tudors were anxious both to exploit this potent medium and-rather more difficult than anticipated-to control it. A malleable pulpit was only one aspect of the crown's effort to manage discourse, a problem greatly complicated by the rise of print literature and the popular stage. Through licensing, censorship, and by hireling pens of its own, the state took up the Sisyphean task of shaping discourse in the midst of an unfolding communications revolution. Its right to do so was sometimes sharply contested. Godly ministers claimed the warrant of Scripture for their prophesyings, scholastic disputants guarded their privileges in the universities, and members of Parliament asserted their right to speak freely on public matters in high terms....