Ann Hughes

Political Eclipse, Administrative Change and Social Tension: The Gells of Hopton and Lichfield Dean and Chapter Property during the Interregnum and Restoration

Abstract This article analyses the complications arising from the sale of the property of the dean and chapter of Lichfield after the English Civil War in so far as they involved the Gells of Hopton in Derbyshire, long-standing tenants and collectors for the chapter. It argues that political and administrative change challenged pre-existing social hierarchies as officials gained authority from their relationship to a newly powerful state, and from ideological commitment to parliamentary regimes, and shows how Civil War divisions interacted in complex fashion with tense pre-existing relationships. The power of the Gells was somewhat eclipsed, although their energetic defence of their interests enabled them to survive the strains of the Interregnum and the resurgence of the Episcopal church at the Restoration.

Introduction to the Second Edition

Historians trying to understand the causes of the civil war, one of the most complex and contested issues in English historiography, face dilemmas inevitable in any historical analysis, but here particularly pressing. The desire for clarity and intelligibility comes into conflict with the need to offer a subtle, nuanced account, taking account of a potentially enormous range of relevant material from structural constraints and collective habits to individual actions, both willed and inadvertent. The most sophisticated analyses indeed would need to be sceptical of the possibility of distinguishing individual perceptions and decisions from general or structural frameworks. One of the ways we make the past explicable is by making it familiar, relevant to our own preoccupations. The seventeenth century is probably the most studied period in English history and the period that arouses most passion and controversy beyond as well as within academic circles. The civil war, in particular, still matters to us. We take sides and the views we take of the nature and origins of the civil war are often connected to our stances in the modern world. The first edition of this book was written under the influence of the contrasting celebrations of the anniversaries of 1688 in Britain and 1789 in France, and in part in response to the consciously right-wing revisionism of J. C. D. Clark.1 This ‘present-centredness’ is both a strength and a weakness. As Jonathon Scott has noted, we risk missing, or lacking respect for the ‘strangeness’ of the past; specifically for the seventeenth century, we may be led to assume that religious beliefs are always a ‘cloak’ for other interests, or that desires for unity are always disingenuous.2 On the other hand, it is clear that modern concerns have often stimulated productive new approaches to understanding the civil war. A variety of present-day anxieties about the integrity and autonomy of the nation state have helped to inspire the current stress on British and European contexts for the civil war: the instability of the ‘United Kingdom’, most obviously in Ulster but revealed also in the resurgence of nationalist movements in Wales and Scotland; the resentments and ambiguities in Britain’s links with continental Europe; the constraints on national governments within a global economy and the tragedies of national conflict in central and eastern Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, a New Zealander, has written of how Britain’s entry into the European Community, which seemed unilaterally to deny the Britishness of the old commonwealth, helped prompt his influential reflections on the British and Atlantic dimensions to English developments.3

Manhood and the English Revolution

This chapter demonstrates how the links between proper manliness and political legitimacy were challenged and debated during a bitter civil war and Revolution. Male political identities were contested at all levels, from attacks on the inadequate masculinity of King Charles I, to rival claims for political agency on the part of humbler men, that rejected or transformed previous commonplaces about the relationship between household headship and political power. Debates centred on the unmanliness of political rivals, often focusing on their inability to control ‘their’ women, a compelling argument during a period when women were very active in religious and political struggles. The English Revolution prompted intimate, personal divisions as well as formal political differences, and unsettled the gendered contrast between private and public worlds.

Shakespeare’s Money. How much did he make and what did this mean?

This important, meticulously-researched book addresses the deceptively simple question of how William Shakespeare made his money; answers it convincingly and assesses the implications of Shakespear...

A Moderate Puritan Preacher Negotiates Religious Change

This article is based on the sermons of the moderate Puritan minister Richard Culverwell, preached in his parish of St Margaret Moses, London, from the mid-1620s to the early 1630s, and recorded in detail by one of his leading parishioners, the fishmonger John Harper. It uses this material to discuss the reception of demanding Calvinist divinity, and to contribute to scholarly debates on the nature and impact of the Laudian regime in London. Although Culverwell continued to preach a Calvinist message, his sermons show a process of adaptation to changing times, and reveal the constraints and tensions that he was facing.

Gerrard Winstanley, News Culture, and Law Reform in the Early 1650s

This article identifies the reprintings, without attribution, of extracts from Gerrard Winstanleys last publication, The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652) in a variety of news-books and topical pamphlets. It explores the domestication and misrepresentations of Winstanleys views as editors and publishers cut and paraphrased his texts and juxtaposed them with more conventional proposals for law reform. The crucial context for the excerpting of The Law of Freedom was the broad movement for law reform associated with radical and army pressure on the Rump parliament in 1651–1652. Winstanley texts were associated with the working of the Hale commission set up by the parliament to discuss law reform and modified to present the army and Cromwell in a positive and optimistic light. Winstanleys social and spiritual vision was underplayed. The Law of Freedom was clearly read by news publishers and some of his proposals were made available to a wide readership, but in a muted form. Finally the article considers what these uses of the passages from The Law of Freedom suggest about the Winstanleys place within radical parliamentarianism, identifying themes shared with other radicals, as well as his distinctive positions.

Diggers, True Levellers and the Crisis of the English Revolution

It might be predicted that the Levellers and the Agreements of the People influenced Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers.1 Both contemporaries and later historians have explained the Diggers as a radicalised extension of the Levellers, and they seem, indeed, to have identified themselves as ‘True Levellers’. The first ‘Digger’ pamphlet, in which William Everard, Winstanley and others explained ‘our Reasons, why we have begun to dig upon George hill in Surrey’, proclaimed itself in one version as The True Levellers Standard Advanced.2 Opponents certainly conflated Diggers and Levellers. The political theorist Anthony Ascham, writing to encourage support of the new republic in 1649, condemned those who ‘by a new Art of levelling, thinke nothing can be rightly mended or reformed, unlesse the whole piece ravell out to the very end, and that all intermediate greatnesse betwixt Kings and them, should be crumbled even to dust, where all lying levell together as in the first Chaos’.3 The journalist Marchamont Nedham offered a more extended analysis. On his account, the original Levellers wilfully misinterpreted parliament’s own declarations:

Gender, Exile and The Hague Courts of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia and Mary, Princess of Orange in the 1650s

In 1655, Constantine Huygens, the eminent Dutch poet, musician and official, wrote to an old friend, Lady Mary Stafford, the widow of Sir Robert Killigrew, who was considering where to settle in the Netherlands. One possibility was Maastricht where Mary’s son, the courtier and playwright Thomas Killigrew, lived but Huygens promoted the advantages of The Hague. Maastricht was: In an excellent air indeed, but as far from the Queen of Bohemia as The Hague from thence, and no such conversation there, nor such pictures, nor such performs, nor such music as we are able to afford you here. To be short Madam, if your Ladyship do us the honour to pass the seas, we will endeavour to make you pass your time in such a manner, that the good old days of Lothbury house will sometimes come back into your memory.1 Huygens’s central place in Anglo-Dutch interactions through much of the seventeenth century has been brilliantly demonstrated by Lisa Jardine.2 An Anglophile and distinguished figure in northern European intellectual life, as well as a leading servant to successive Princes of Orange, Huygens was a crucial mediator in relationships between British royalist exiles and political and cultural circles in the Netherlands. Huygens had visited England as a young diplomat in the 1620s and he remembered the friendships made then throughout his life.

To the Council of State

Access to justice – Two small businesses, located 3 and 5 kilometres away from a planned large scale shopping center, were granted standing in the Council of State to challenge the environmental permit for the establishment that had been issued by the Minister of the environment of the Flemish region. As to the substance of the case, the Council of State suspended of the permit, as the principle of care had been violated in the decision making and the negative impacts of the establishment would be impossible to rectify at a later stage. Environmental Permit – Large scale commercial complex – EIS – Insufficient measures to avoid important traffic problems – Access to Justice – Legal standing – Sufficient interest – Injunctive Relief – Effective Remedy 8. Case summary On administrative appeal, the Minister for the Environment of the Flemish Region granted an environmental permit for the operation of a large scale shopping complex (Uplace) near Brussels Airport. The area was covered by a brownfield agreement between the developer, the Flemish Government, the municipality and the Flemish Waste Management Agency. The Minister for Land Use Planning of the Flemish Region had previously approved a land use plan for the area and granted a building permit. The environmental permit, however, had been denied by the provincial government, due to concerns about traffic congestion. According to the SEA/EIA, the complex would generate almost 50 % increase in traffic on already saturated motorways. The permit applicant argued that because of the expected increase in traffic congestion, people would be more likely to utilize public transportation. Public transportation did not currently exist in the area but was planned for in the brownfield agreement. On appeal, the Minister for the Environment of the Flemish Region found that if all the transportation-related measures described in the brownfield agreement were taken, the traffic situation would be acceptable. Two small businesses subsequently filed a demand for annulment and for suspension of the environmental permit. The Council of State found that the first two requesting parties, located 3 and 5 kilometers away from the planned complex, had a sufficient interest in the case, and therefore standing, because they were likely to be faced with significant changes in traffic density in their vicinities, according to the SEA/EIA-report. The fact that they had not challenged the land use plan or the economic permit did not impact their interest in the case.

A European Crisis? Functional Breakdown and Multiple Kingdoms

The English, and those Americans who regard themselves as the heirs to the traditions of seventeenth-century England, have often been inordinately proud of ‘their’ civil war: By common consent the rebellion against Charles I belongs to the handful of the ‘great revolutions’ of Europe and the West, cataclysms which appear to mark the turning of times and to signify some fundamental change in the condition of humanity.1 This ‘common consent’ has disappeared. A major trend of ‘revisionist’ scholarship has been to cut the English civil war down to size; to see it as a much more commonplace struggle than the term ‘great revolution’ suggests. Conrad Russell, in particular, has stressed that it was the Scots who first offered an effective challenge to Charles I and, furthermore, that the king’s problems have much in common with those faced by continental rulers. His approach exposes the fact that, within much of the British education system, courses described as ‘British history’ are really English history, considered in isolation from developments in continental Europe and in ignorance of events in Scotland and Ireland. Yet the ‘English civil war’ was only one of many struggles between European rulers and their peoples in the mid-seventeenth century: the French monarchy collapsed in the late 1640s, faced with resistance from many sections of the population in the complex risings known as the Frondes; within the Spanish monarchy there were revolts in Catalonia, Portugal, Naples and Sicily; there were severe, if less dramatic, tensions between rulers and ruled in Sweden, the United Provinces, and several German states. Like the king of Spain, Charles I of England ruled over multiple kingdoms and he faced revolt in all of them: England indeed was the last to rebel. It has thus been argued that there could have been no English civil war without the risings in Scotland in 1638 and in Ireland in 1641; the troubles of the 1640s are better understood as the ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’. The English civil war should be regarded as part of a ‘British problem’ which in turn was a manifestation of a ‘General European Crisis’; with this approach, many revisionists challenge the Whig or Marxist stress on the particularly advanced nature of the English. This chapter examines both the insights to be gained through interpreting the English civil war in these wider contexts, and some of the problems thereby encountered.