Early modern Britain
Adrian Johns
If in time, as in place, there were
degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of time would be
that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660
-- Thomas Hobbes
This course explores the history of Britain – and of England in particular – in a period of radical and lasting transformation. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, England, Scotland, and Ireland were separate kingdoms, relatively weak powers on the fringe of Europe. By the end of the seventeenth, they would have undergone at least one revolution (maybe two), and would be on the verge of creating a United Kingdom that would rise to a position of global dominance. Central elements of modernity – of capitalism, industry, and science – originated in this time and place too. But they emerged as part and parcel of a culture that also, and inseparably, embraced astrology, natural magic, providentialism, and millenarian prophecy. It was the age not only of Elizabeth I and Oliver Cromwell, but of Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Locke, Purcell, and Sir Christopher Wren. The course will try to describe and explain the extraordinary ferment of those times, focusing in particular on the seventeenth century, when the nation’s “troubles” came to a climax.
This tumultuous period has attracted historians ever since the seventeenth century itself. Indeed, the main line of descent of British historiography dates back to the history of the “great rebellion” written towards the end of the seventeenth century by the Earl of Clarendon. The historical literature on early modern Britain is consequently extremely rich, extensive, and sophisticated. As well as outlining major processes of the period itself, the course aims to introduce students to some of this literature.
Addressing a period that saw repeated political upheaval, including the execution of one king, the formation of a republic, and the expulsion of another, it is unsurprising that most historians who survey early modern Britain focus exclusively on politics. But to follow suit would be to neglect some equally momentous and fascinating questions – and perhaps to sell the political issues themselves short, too. For example, Sir Isaac Newton created what is often thought of as the foundational text of modern science, his Mathematical principles of natural philosophy, as he was about to confront the most notorious of King James II’s judges as MP for Cambridge; and after the revolution of 1688 he was responsible for hunting down currency counterfeiters in a bid to preserve the value of the nation’s coinage and defend its economy. The public sphere and civil society originated in the coffeehouses of Restoration London. The modern fiscal-military state dates, perhaps, from measures taken, and theories propounded, in the seventeenth century. And the novel – that distinctively commercial and empirical form of literature – originated in this time and place too. The political narrative itself is fascinating, and often gripping; but it is even more interesting to try to integrate the politics with these other cultural phenomena. We shall endeavor to do that in this course.
Appointments
My office is Social Sciences 505. My scheduled office hours are 10:00 to 12:00 on Fridays, but you are welcome to make an appointment for another time. My email is johns@uchicago.edu; my phone number is 702 2334.
Grading
Grading for this course is by a combination of class participation and written work.
30% Class participation. This includes attendance and contribution at the weekly meetings. You are expected to e-mail to me, by the end of the day before each class, a question or topic for discussion which has emerged from your reading. You should also expect to give at least one class presentation during the quarter. This year, when H1N1 is likely to be rife, it is especially important to skip class if you feel ill. You do not need special permission. (Early modern physicians had the right idea: when plague comes, get out of its way.)
70% Written work. This comes in the form of a term paper, the deadline for which is Monday, December 7. I will supply a range of options for topics. You may propose your own subject, but for your own benefit you should submit your proposed title and draft bibliography for approval before writing the essay.
All papers should be submitted electronically to me at johns@uchicago.edu. Please include a bibliography, and follow proper academic referencing norms. (I do not mind what particular set of conventions you use for references, as long as you are consistent.) Also, when submitting the essay please give the file a title that clearly includes your first and last names – e.g., johnsmithHIST49601.doc.
Extensions to the deadlines are at my discretion. In general, they are given readily for
unpredictable issues like illnesses or job interviews, but less readily for
foreseeable scheduling problems like sports events and deadlines in other
classes.
Readings
The literature on Tudor and Stuart Britain is dauntingly large, and much of it is of high quality. Indeed, one of the reasons to study this topic is to encounter a field that has such a rich historiographical tradition, extending back to the seventeenth century itself. These recommendations inevitably reflect my own tastes. If you walk down the relevant stacks in the Regenstein you will find a wealth of excellent material on every aspect of the subject.
For the later Tudors, the two books I rely on are S. Brigden’s New worlds, lost worlds: the rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603 (2000), and P. Williams’s The later Tudors: England 1547-1603 (Oxford, 1995).
For the period 1603-60, the definitive chronicle is still S.R. Gardiner’s History of England (becoming the History of the great civil war and then the History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate as appropriate), in many volumes, published initially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gardiner was rather a marginal figure in the historical profession, and some of his interpretations have not lasted. But the narrative he presents is exhaustive – he rarely misses a significant detail – and the accounts of military events in the civil war are especially valuable. One reason for that is that Gardiner took the trouble to walk over virtually every battlefield, at a time when modern development had not yet altered them beyond recognition. Modern historians still find his work the ultimate reference point. Among the many modern histories of these decades, I like Austin Woolrych’s Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660 (2004) – a judicious if sometimes slightly crusty interpretation. It is apparently out of print now, even though it is not very old. Trying to identify the “causes” of the civil war/civil wars/rebellion/revolution (all these terms carry their own baggage) used to be an industry in its own right; of its many products I like best Ann Hughes’ Causes of the English Civil War (2nd ed., 1998). If forced to choose from the many books on the civil wars themselves, I would go for Michael Braddick, God’s fury, England’s fire: a new history of the English civil wars (2009). And finally, if you get really satiated on this topic, you may find Blair Worden’s The English Civil Wars 1640-1660 (2009) sympathetic: it ends up arguing that the whole thing was pointless.
For the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, I would opt for Tim Harris’s two volumes, Restoration (2005) and Revolution (2006), which combine to offer a good, sensible account.
Among works raising broader questions or dealing with more social or cultural themes – works, that is, which historians not particularly devoted to early modern Britain should find lastingly valuable – I particularly recommend these: E. Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England 1400-1580 (1992); Adam Fox, Oral and literate culture in England, 1500-1700 (2000); D. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, rhetoric, and politics, 1627-1660 (1999); C. Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self (2002); S. Shapin, A social history of truth: civility and science in seventeenth-century England (1995); D.R. Como, Blown by the spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (2004); and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (orig. 1972; many later impressions). Jonathan Scott’s England’s troubles: seventeenth-century English political instability in European context (Cambridge, 2000) offers a fresh perspective written with real vim. Selections from many of these are cited as appropriate below. Occasionally, as with Como’s book, they are not included in weekly readings because the text is really too integrated to yield readily excisable chunks.
Mid-seventeenth century England offers an unusually rich trove of primary sources too, thanks partly to the efforts of a London bookseller named George Thomason. Thomason decided to collect every circulated tract he could find during the years of the civil war and interregnum (some of them in manuscript), and he preserved the resulting collection, hoping to sell it to the state. As a result, an extraordinarily detailed mass of texts has descended to us, under the collective name of the Thomason Tracts. Now housed in the British Library, they have been integrated into the enormous endeavor to film and now digitize all early modern printed works produced in England or English. This is accessible on the Net as Early English Books Online (EEBO), alongside an even larger project to digitize eighteenth-century works (Eighteenth-century Collections Online, or ECCO). Both EEBO and ECCO can be reached in the database section of the UC Library online catalogue. Where possible, I have included digital versions of primary readings in the course Chalk site, downloaded from EEBO. For a flavor of the culture of the period, you cannot do better than to venture into the pamphlets of any year from 1640 on and simply “follow your nose.”
This is not even to mention the extraordinary literary and artistic achievements produced in this time and place. It would theoretically have been possible for a citizen born in Elizabeth’s reign to cross paths with Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare, Jonson, Bacon, Milton, Hobbes, Harrington, Marvell, Dryden, Locke, Newton, and Defoe, all in one (longish) lifetime. A few of these authors’ works are sampled in the readings suggested below; you will doubtless have encountered many more elsewhere. And in fact a comparison of, say, the Faerie Queene with Defoe’s novels might well tell you as much about what really changed in this era as a narrative of social or political events. “Great books” as they are, these works were as much products of their time as any pamphlet or newsletter, and they should be read alongside “small books.” An important part of the historian’s task is to understand how to do that.
Bottom line: students are advised to obtain the following:
M. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Penguin, 2009)
T. Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his kingdoms, 1660-1685 (Penguin, 2006)
T. Harris, Revolution: the great crisis of the British monarchy 1685-1720 (Penguin, 2008).
All are in paperback and should be affordable. Copies have been ordered at the Seminary Co-op.
Other readings are listed below. Those with a double-asterisk (**) are
especially recommended.
Sessions
The class meets on
Thursdays from noon to 2:50pm, in Social Sciences 401. Attendance at all sessions is required: this
is especially important as the calendar this year gives us one fewer session
than usual
1. October
1, 2009 Introductory
session
No reading for this session.
2. October
8, 2009 Forms, degrees, and
practices of reformation
This session should provide an initial portrait of conditions in the sixteenth century. One dominant issue throughout the early modern period was “reformation” – its nature, history, providential role, and appropriate degree of “heat.” A good way to begin, therefore, is by looking at how what began as dynastic politics developed into a defining schism, yielding major cultural rifts for the rest of the period over such things as dress, conduct, and “popery.” Repeatedly, these were the terms in which disagreements would be couched and conflicts fomented.
Primary sources:
G. Elton (ed.), The Tudor Constitution (1982), 348-50, 364-7, 377-8.
** “The epistle” (“Oh Read over Dr. John Bridges”), from The Martin Marprelate Tracts: a modernized and annotated edition (ed. J.L. Black) (2008), 3-48 (notes on pp.211-35).
Secondary sources:
Introductory:
** K. Thomas, Religion and the decline of magic (1971), 3-24, 301-32.
** S. Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (2000), 140-78.
P. Williams, The later Tudors (1995), 1-30.
K. Wrightson, English Society (1988), 199-220.
More specific:
** E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), 524-64.
** E.H. Shagan, Popular
politics and the English Reformation (2003), 270-304.
E. Cameron, The European Reformation (1991), 79-93, 111-35.
D. MacCulloch, “Henry VIII and the Reform of the Church,” in MacCulloch (ed.), The Reign of Henry VIII (1995), 159-80.
S. Doran, Elizabeth I and Religion 1558-1603 (1994), 14-44.
L. Manley, Literature and culture in early modern London (1995), 63-122.
3. October
15, 2009 England, the three
kingdoms, and Europe
When James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I on the death of Elizabeth, he confronted (and to an extent personified) a peculiar problem: he had to reign over three different kingdoms — England, Scotland, and Ireland — each with its own mutually-contradictory demands. To tackle this problem, he applied a pronounced view on the status of the monarchy and the dangers of opposition. James articulated a learned version of royal “absolutism,” and his Lord Chancellor, Francis Bacon, tried to put this into practice. Here we examine the difficulties faced by a king ambitious of building a harmonious political nation out of three diverse realms, while confronted by puritan opposition at home and aggressively militant Catholicism abroad. The so-called “three kingdoms” problem would continue to dog Britain’s rulers for the rest of the century.
Primary sources:
The Political Works of James I (ed. C. McIlwain, 1918), 269-80, 287-9, 307-11.
Secondary sources:
** C. Russell, “The British problem and the English Civil War,” History 72 (1987), 395-415.
**M. Braddick, God’s fury, England’s fire, chs. 1-2.
** J. Wormald, “The Creation of Britain: Multiple Kingdoms or Core and Colonies?” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2 (1992), 175-94.
J. Wormald, “James VI and I: Two Kings or One?” History 68 (1983), 187-209
J.P. Sommerville, “James I and the Divine Right of Kings,” in L.L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (1991), 55-70.
L.L. Peck, “Introduction,” in Peck, Mental World of the Jacobean Court, 1-17 (read only 1-12).
J. Scott, “England’s Troubles 1603-1702,” in R.M. Smuts (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (1996), 20-38.
4. October
22, 2009. From personal rule to
civil war
From the end of the 1630s, Charles I attempted to reign over his kingdoms without summoning the supply-granting body called “parliament.” This period of “personal rule” has been subject to radically opposed interpretations by historians, because of what followed it. Towards the end of the decade, Charles and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, tried to unify religious practices in Scotland under English norms. Their efforts led to disaster. The Scots rebelled and inflicted humiliating defeat on the English army that Charles sent to quash them. Forced to call a parliament at long last, Charles found himself facing a long list of grievances that the MPs wanted redressed before they would fund his military campaign. As he negotiated and plotted to avoid relinquishing what he saw as important points of principle, the king only succeeded in strengthening parliamentary determination to stand firm. His leading minister, the Earl of Strafford, was brought to the block, Laud himself was interned in the Tower of London, and riots demanded the abolition of the bishops. In 1642, after an abortive attempt to arrest the leading parliamentarians, the king finally withdrew from London, hoping to unite his few supporters into an army. This process – the outbreak of a civil war that would lead to the king’s trial and execution, the abolition of monarchy and the peerage, and the proclamation of a republic – is perhaps the most contested in Britain’s history. Was war on the cards during the personal rule? What were the sides contending for? Did the conflict have deeper social causes? And what role did the populace play? The readings here give a taste of controversies that continue to rage to this day.
Primary:
J. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution (1966), 14-16, 109-17, 171-5, 222-3, 228-40, 244-7.
Charles I, Answer to the XIX Propositions (1642).
Secondary:
** M. Braddick, God’s fury, England’s fire: a new history of the English civil wars (London: Penguin, 2008), Chs. 3-4.
** P. Lake, “The Laudian Style,” in K. Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (1993), 161-86.
** A. Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (2nd ed. 1998), 114-48.
C. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (1983), 19-37.
H. Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (1989), 40-119.
N. Tyacke, “Puritanism, Arminianism, and Counter-Revolution,” in C. Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (1973), 119-43.
P. Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in R. Cust and A. Hughes (ed.), Conflict in Early Stuart England (1989), 72-106.
A. Woolrych, Britain in revolution, 1625-1660 (2004), 155-233.
J. Adamson, The noble revolt: the overthrow of Charles I (London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), 501-19.
D.R. Como, “Predestination and political conflict in Laud’s London,” Historical Journal 46 (2003), 263-94.
5. October
29, 2009. The world turned upside
down: making a republic
When the royal forces had been defeated, many in the victorious New Model Army interpreted their triumph as providential: it had been ordained by God to free Britons from tyranny. But to what end? As it seemed that traditional authority might be overthrown, so a dizzying array of groups produced new ideologies and faiths to fill the vacuum. Promulgated by London’s printers, they contended to replace the old regime in church and state. The most important of these groups were the Levellers. Arising in London, they made common cause with soldiers in the New Model, hoping to impose a settlement that would drastically alter the old “Norman” constitution. At Putney, they and their soldier allies confronted their generals, Cromwell and Ireton, in a series of debates over their Agreement of the people. These debates were recorded in detail; they provide an extraordinarily vivid image of seventeenth-century people struggling to forge a new political order.
The Leveller program was defeated, but the problem of settlement remained. With Charles I tried and executed, and the bishops and lords abolished along with the monarchy, the remnants of the Long Parliament and their military supporters struggled to create a republic that would last, with precious little sign that they enjoyed popular support. Throughout the 1650s repeated efforts were made to solve this problem. The two most lastingly influential contributions would be Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana, but these were just two among a panoply of pamphlets, tracts, and libels from authors at all levels of society. Here we will sample a range of contributions to this ferment, including the model constitution invented by the “true Leveller” Gerrard Winstanley, the visionary “Ranter” Abiezer Coppe’s extraordinary Fiery Flying Roll, and the radical anti-Cromwellian tract Killing no murder.
Primary:
** The agreement of the people (1647).
** J. Milton, Areopagitica (1644).
** J. Harrington, “A system of politics,” in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), Harrington: The commonwealth of Oceana and A system of politics (1992), 267-93.
G. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform: reprinted in C. Hill (ed.), Winstanley: ‘The law of freedom’ and other writings (1973/2006), 273-389.
“The Putney Debates,” in A. Woodhouse (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty (1986), 1-124.
A. Coppe, “A Fiery flying roll” (1650) in N. Smith (ed.), A collection of Ranter writings from the seventeenth century (1983), 80-116.
Sir Henry Vane, A healing question (1656).
[J. Streater], Government described (1659).
[S. Titus], Killing no murder (1657/1659).
Secondary:
** Braddick, God’s fury, England’s fire, 507-28.
** C. Hill, The world turned upside down: radical ideas during the English revolution (1972), 107-50.
** J. Scott, England’s troubles (2000), 247-89.
Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 366-401.
A. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647-1648 (1987), 214-48.
D. Norbrook, Writing the English republic: poetry, rhetoric, and politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge, 1999), 192-242.
J. Scott, Commonwealth principles: republican writing of the English revolution (Cambridge, 2004), 252-93.
6. November
5, 2009. The world turned rightside up: the Restoration and its crisis
In the end, with efforts to build a republic exhausted, the son of Charles I was invited back unconditionally to restore the monarchy as Charles II. But while the Restoration could undo many of the legal and religious changes wrought in the previous two decades, some problems remained harder to solve. The issue of the three kingdoms was one: Charles and his brother and successor, the Catholic James, still had to juggle the interests of Scotland and Ireland alongside those of England itself. Another was the development of urban, popular politics, fueled by the development of printed pamphlets and newspapers – and now by the rapidly multiplying coffeehouses, in which printed news could be read and debated. By the 1670s the Restored regime was well on its way to a crisis of its own, which inherited concerns and memories from the 1640s but gave them new meanings. In the so-called “exclusion crisis,” an absolute monarchy at first confronted, and then exploited, this new culture of politics. Here we shall ask how contemporaries came to terms with this novel experience.
Primary:
** J. Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681).
Sir Roger L’Estrange, The growth of knavery and popery (1678).
E. Settle, The character of a Popish successour (1681).
Secondary:
** T. Harris, Restoration: Charles II and his kingdoms (London, 2005), 85-135.
** M. Knights, Representation and misrepresentation in later Stuart Britain: partisanship and political culture (Oxford, 2005), 272-334.
J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 1991), 3-49.
T. Harris, London crowds in the reign of Charles II: propaganda and politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge, 1987), 62-95.
S. Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 67 (1995), 807-34.
R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary politics and Locke’s ‘Two treatises of government’ (1986), 181-227.
7. November
12, 2009 Nature and knowledge
Nature was at the heart of the seventeenth century upheavals in more than one sense. New approaches to natural knowledge implied that not just academic philosophers and physicians, but the unlicensed laity, might arrive at truths hitherto unsuspected, and that those truths might lead to power. Explorations and discoveries revealed new worlds, from which empires might be made, but which at the same time challenged traditional understandings of Creation. The telescope and microscope suggested new and unsettling views of the place of humanity in the natural order. In the civil war and interregnum, broad attempts had been made under the leadership of an émigré Pole, Samuel Hartlib, to reform agriculture, the economy, and society on the basis of a state-sponsored effort in natural philosophy. After the Restoration Hartlib’s efforts were abandoned, but instead a group of gentlemen formed the Royal Society for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, at which a new, experimental approach would be pursued at regular weekly meetings. The idea was partly to provide a peaceful way of tackling questions about the natural world, which would no longer fuel civil conflicts. From this approach would develop the experimental science that has been so central to modernity.
Primary:
R. Hooke, Micrographia (1665), preface, 1-4.
** T. Sprat, The history of the Royal Society (1667), 1-124.
Secondary:
** S. Schaffer, “Godly Men and Mechanical Philosophers: Souls and Spirits in Restoration Natural Philosophy,” Science in Context 1 (1987), 53-85.
** S. Shapin,
“The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England.” Isis 79 (1988): 373–404.
C. Webster, The Great Instauration (1975), 32-99.
J.E. McGuire and P. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan’,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society 21 (1966), 108-26.
8. November
19, 2009 The
first modern revolution?
In 1688, James II, the Catholic son of Charles I who had come to the throne after his brother Charles II died in 1685, was driven from power. An invading army from the Netherlands landed in the West Country, and James’s apparently formidable military dissolved in the face of the threat. Once again revolution was at hand. William of Orange found himself the rather reluctant occupier of an empty throne. It has been claimed that this transition – the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in fact constituted the real revolution of the seventeenth century, and, moreover, that it was the world’s first distinctively modern revolution. Central to that claim is an argument that the change of regimes in 1688 resulted in a transformation in political economy. “Political economy” was itself a new discipline in this period, and James had adopted one form of it in a bid to produce a military empire. William and Mary adopted a very different form, based on manufacturing and the arguments about property developed by John Locke, which became the basis of Britain’s industrial growth in the new century. Here we will look at the nature and implications of the revolution in 1688, and in particular ask whether modern political economy did originate then.
Primary:
J. Locke, Two treatises of Government (many editions), Second treatise. [NB: This was originally written during the Restoration crisis, but not published until after 1688].
D. Defoe, An essay on projects (1697), Introduction [and sample the rest].
Secondary:
** S. Pincus, 1688: the first modern revolution (2009), 11-45, 143-78, 366-99.
** T. Harris, Revolution: the great crisis of the British monarchy, 1685-1720 (London, 2006), 477-517.
J. Brewer, The sinews of power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (1990), 64-85, 114-34.
J. Hoppit, A land of liberty? England 1689-1727 (Oxford, 2002), 13-50.
T. Claydon, William III and the godly revolution (Cambridge, 1996), 122-47, 227-37.
No meeting November 26, 2009 - Thanksgiving