Using a wide range of legal, administrative and literary sources, this study explores the role of the royal pardon in the exercise and experience of authority in Tudor England. It examines such abstract intangibles as power, legitimacy, and the state by looking at concrete life-and-death decisions of the Tudor monarchs. Drawing upon the historiographies of law and society, political culture, and state formation, mercy is used as a lens through which to examine the nature and limits of participation in the early modern polity.

The last years of Henry VIII's life, 1539-47, have conventionally been seen as a time when the king persecuted Protestants. This book argues that Henry's policies were much more ambiguous; that he continued to give support to Protestantism and that many accordingly also remained loyal to him. It also examines why the Protestants eventually adopted a more radical, oppositional stance, and argues that English Protestantism's eventual identity was determined during these years.

Examining aspects of law, history, art, drama and literature, this study represents an original interpretation of a hidden culture: the arcane world of the early modern legal community, and its attempts to restrict governmental power during the period 1558 to 1660. Based at the Inns of Court in London, the legal profession regulated every aspect of its members' lives--dress, consumption, education, worship, entertainment, and even their dwellings--to represent the order of an ideal commonwealth, which it offered as a model for the government of the English State.

This volume provides a detailed book-length study of the period of the Protectorate Parliaments from September 1654 to April 1659. The study is very broad in its scope, covering topics as diverse as the British and Irish dimensions of the Protectorate Parliaments, the political and social nature of factions, problems of management, the legal and judicial aspects of Parliament's functions, foreign policy and the nature of the parliamentary franchise and elections in this period. In its wide-ranging analysis of Parliaments and politics throughout the Protectorate the book also examines both...

This comprehensive study of political and religious conflicts examines the challenge to Restoration institutions by Protestant dissent in the London of Charles II's reign. It presents liberty of conscience as the greatest political issue of the Restoration and explains how the contest between dissenters and Anglicans contributed to the development of parties in 1679-83 that unsettled the nation.

Proposing a new model for understanding religious debates in the churches of England and Scotland between 1603 and 1625, Charles Prior sets aside 'narrow' analyses of conflict over predestination, This book's theme is ecclesiology--the nature of the church, its rites and governance, and its relationship to the early Stuart political world. Drawing on a substantial number of polemical works, from sermons to books of several hundred pages, it argues that rival interpretations of scripture, pagan and civil history and the sources central to the Christian historical tradition lay at the heart of...

This is a study of the political, religious, social and mental worlds of the Catholic aristocracy from 1550 to 1640. Michael Questier examines the familial and patronage networks of the English Catholic community and their relationship to the later Tudors and Stuarts. He shows how the local history of the Reformation can be used to rewrite mainstream accounts of national politics and religious conflict in this period. The book takes in the various crises of mid- and late Elizabeth politics, the accession of James VI, the Gunpowder Plot, religious toleration and the start of the Thirty Years...

This book is a study of centre-local interaction, based upon the experience of the people of an English county, during a very turbulent period in their history. The work revolves around: the relationship between centre and locality, and the partisan use of local institutions and sentiment for 'national' ends. Dr Coleby combines administrative and political history, and establishes with unusual rigour and clarity the nature of the late-seventeenth-century English polity. Whilst there have been many county studies of the early Stuart and Civil War periods, few accounts hitherto have looked at...

Traditionally historians have argued that the court of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) was factional, divided among competing subjects who were manipulated by their Queen. This book provides a different account: of councilors who were united by two connected dangers, namely Catholic opposition to Protestant England and Elizabeth's refusal to marry or to settle England's succession. Working from the papers of the Queen's secretary, William Cecil, the author has set this crisis in the context of events in Scotland, Ireland and mainland Europe, and has explored fully the long-term political impact of...

This book is the first modern intellectual biography of the Scottish theologian and political theorist Samuel Rutherford (c. 1600-1661). Its main purpose is to provide a thorough discussion of Rutherford's religious and political ideas, and their role in the ideology of the Scottish Covenanters whose rebellion against Charles I marked the beginning of the British troubles in the mid-seventeenth century. The book also constitutes an important multidisciplinary case study in the Calvinist and Puritan traditions.