Abstract
the Great Rebellion of 1641 has cast its shadow back into the reign of Elizabeth I, so that some historians have seen the collapse of the monarchy as already determined when James I rode south into his Promised Land. However high his hopes, James’s real legacy was a Crown weakened by inflation and by the costs of war with Spain, a Government undermined by faction and an administration polluted by corruption. Clientage wove bonds of association between nobles, ministers and civil servants who competed for the rewards of the Crown and the profits of office. Parliament, largely composed of the prosperous and educated gentry for whom court and county connections played the part that politics does in our modern society, had acquired strength and prestige. Puritan groups had taught sophisticated opposition tactics in Elizabeth’s Parliaments, while James was to encounter formidable and learned antagonists in the common lawyers. Sir John Neale considered that towards the end of the sixteenth century ‘the Tudor constitution was by now standing on uncertain foundations: on little more than the masterful nature and unique personality of an ageing Queen.’ Professor Notestein tolled his passing bell when, emphasising the role of the common lawyers, he wrote that the reign of James I ‘gave us in politics a new kind of Commons that was by and by to make inevitable a new constitution’.1
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Bibliography, and Guides to Further Reading
S. R. Gardiner, History of England 1603–42, vols I–IV (London 1883), gives the magisterial political account of the reign. D. H. Willson, James VI and I (London 1956) is a lively biography of a king whose financial irresponsibility and political ineptitude have been generally conceded. The controversy over the role of the gentry and of the position of the nobility is best summarised by J. H. Hexter,’ storm over the Gentry’, with a full bibliography, in his Reappraisals in History (Evanston 1961). W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finances of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies, 3 vols (Cambridge 1912) suggests by its title a limited subject, but gives the most succinct, penetrating and authoritative analysis of Elizabethan and Jacobean finance and aspects of the economy, especially in the first volume. F. C. Dietz, English Public Finance 1558–1641 (New York and London 1932) combines liveliness with massive detail, drawn largely from manuscript sources, on every aspect of the administration.
Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury, awaits his biographer. Professor Hurst-field dealt with Cecil’s work in the Wards in his concluding chapters of The Queen’s Wards (London 1958), and Professor Stone has investigated his profits as a minister in ‘The Fruits of Office: The Case of Robert Cecil, First Earl of Salisbury’, in Essays In The Economic And Social History Of Tudor And Stuart England, ed. F. J. Fisher (Cambridge 1961). Menna Prestwich in Cranfield: Politics and Profits under the Early Stuarts (Oxford 1966) gives a critical account of Salisbury’s administration. The best biography of Bacon is that by E. A. Abbott, Francis Bacon (London 1885), which covers both his political career and also his writings. Cranfield, who left a mass of papers dealing with his private affairs and public career, has had two books, separate and independent studies, devoted to him, neither of which is strictly a biography. Professor Tawney in his Business And Politics Under James I: Lionel Cranfield As Merchant And Minister (London 1958) presented a triptych of Cranfield as a merchant, as an administrator and as a minister. The first panel, occupying nearly half the book, painted Cranfield in his role as merchant and speculator. M. Prestwich, op. cit., put more emphasis on administration, politics and the gains of office. The details in chapter 8 here have been drawn from this.
E. A. Abbott, Bacon and Essex (London 1877) gave a penetrating analysis of feuds and declining morality at the court; but Sir John Neale’s studies of Elizabethan Parliaments and his lecture ‘The Elizabethan Political Scene’ PBA (1948), reprinted in his Essays In Elizabethan History (London 1958) have stimulated recent work on clientage, faction and corruption. It will be apparent that the present chapter owes much to the work of these two scholars. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. M. McClure (Philadelphia 1939), extremely entertaining and largely accurate, best gives the flavour of the period from the point of view of London and the Court. Geoffrey Goodman, The Court of King James The First, ed. J. S. Brewer (London 1839) is another lively source, especially illuminating both because of Bishop Goodman’s friendship with Cranfield and also for the appendix of letters in vol II.
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© 1973 Alan G. R. Smith, Jennifer M. Brown, Gordon Donaldson, S. G. E. Lythe, Christina Larner, John Bossy, Brian Dietz, Louis B. Wright, Menna Prestwich, W. J. Jones, G. C. F. Forster
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Prestwich, M. (1973). English Politics and Administration 1603–1625. In: Smith, A.G.R. (eds) The Reign of James VI and I. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15500-2_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15500-2_9
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