(Minor Field) British History, 1603-1642

RATIONALE Constructing a field on "British history, 1603-1642" is admittedly ambitious. This period—from when James assumed the English crown (and thereby created a composite British monarchy) to when the English Civil War (the last of the wars of three kingdoms) began—has been one of the most written about and most hotly debated periods in English historiography; therefore any coverage I give it will necessarily be limited and cannot represent the full range of scholarly opinions on early seventeenth-century Britain. Despite these limitations, though, I have put together this field because I feel that an understanding the politics and political culture of the period is a prerequisite for historicist criticism. There are certainly other areas I could have included in this field-such as social history, studies of the early Stuart courts, the relationship between British and European politics-but I have chosen to focus primarily, though not exclusively, on national politics in the following overlapping areas: 1) English political theory (including theories of the ancient constitution and common law); 2) governance and parliamentary politics (especially in the union debates, the 1620s, and the early 1640s); 3) religion and religious debate; 4) "the British problem" (how England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, in the words of J.G.A. Pocock, "interacted so as to modify the conditions of one another's existence"); and 5) the causes of the Scottish Revolution, Irish Rebellion, and English Civil War (admittedly controversial and somewhat loaded terms for these wars). These categories obviously are interconnected and thus are hardly autonomous (can we speak of "the British problem" without considering the role of religion?), and this interconnectedness should, in fact, demand our attention. For example, how do theories of the ancient constitution and the common law influence how we think of the parliamentary opposition Charles faced in the 1640s? As Conrad Russell and others have begun to show, how should we conceptualize the "English Civil War" within a British context, taking into account of the Scottish Revolution and Irish Rebellion that preceded it? What role did religion play in the cultural divisions that marked England during the early seventeenth century? And while my focus is mainly on national politics, the studies on my list show how often national political concerns were not just the preserve of a political elite, but filtered down to the more humble and common members of society. Further, the changes in English, Scottish, and Irish religious institutions and culture would have been experienced by almost all of their respective populations, a fact of signal importance when it comes to interpreting the period's political history. So while this field cannot realistically do justice to the breadth of historical research on the period, I think it does provide a solid foundation for beginning to think about the politics in and of "Britain" in the early seventeenth century.

PRIMARY READINGS Bradshaw, Brendan, and John Morrill, eds. — The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996. Brown, Keith M. — Kingdom or Province?: Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603-1715. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Burgess, Glenn. — Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. — The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Cogswell, Thomas. — The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621-1624. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Collinson, Patrick. — The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625. The Ford Lectures 1979. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Cust, Richard. — The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626-1628. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes, eds. — Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642. London: Longman, 1989. Durston, Christopher, and Jacqueline Eales, eds. — The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996. Fincham, Kenneth, ed. — The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1993. Fitzpatrick, Brendan. — Seventeenth-Century Ireland: The War of Religions. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1988. Fletcher, Anthony. — The Outbreak of the English Civil War. London: Arnold, 1981. — Reform in the Provinces: The Government of Stuart England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Ford, Alan. — The Protestant Reformation in Ireland, 1590-1641. 2nd ed. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997. Galloway, Bruce. — The Union of England and Scotland, 1603-1608. Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986. Hughes, Ann. — The Causes of the English Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1991. Mason, Roger A. — Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Milton, Anthony. — Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Morrill, John. — The Nature of the English Revolution. London and New York: Longman, 1993. Morrill, John, ed. — The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Perceval-Maxwell, M. — The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994. Pocock, J. G. A. — The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Though in the Seventeenth Century. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Russell, Conrad. — The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. — The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-1642. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. — Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Sharpe, Kevin, and Peter Lake, eds. — Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Sommerville, J. P. — Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640. London and New York: Longman, 1986. Stevenson, David. — Revolution and Counter-revolution in Scotland, 1644-1651. London: Royal Historical Society, 1977. — The Scottish Revolution 1637-1644: The Triumph of the Covenanters. Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973. Tuck, Richard. — Philosophy and Government, 1572-1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Tyacke, Nicholas. — Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Underdown, David. — A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. — Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.