Connecting centre and locality

Political communication in early modern England

Chris R. Kyle, Jason Peacey

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526147141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This collection explores the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century Britain, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, politics in the localities and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The goal is to create a dialogue between two prominent strands in recent historiography and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period. Chapters by leading historians of Stuart England examine how the state worked to communicate with its people and how local communities, often far from the metropole, opened their own lines of communication with the centre.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chris R. Kyle and Jason Peacey

In 1986, Kevin Sharpe noted that ‘communication to the king and from the king was the binding thread of government’.¹ It was an important corrective for historians focused solely on the machinations of Westminster politics or the daily operation of village communities. For Sharpe the early Stuart period saw a fragmenting of the lines of political communication between centre and locality as the monarch, aristocracy and Privy Council became increasingly isolated from the politics of the ‘periphery’ and a steadily building distrust of central government. In this move, Sharpe highlighted questions about the relationship between political and social history, and the possibility that this kind of communication ought to be central to debates about the political dynamic of the early Stuart period.² If this was conceived as a call to arms then few were willing to take up the cudgels. Given that the dust has settled on the debate over revisionism, now is the time to revisit the value of communication as a means of addressing fragmentation within the discipline and the political tensions of the age. What is required is recovering these lines of communication and interrogating how they operated, not least with a view to tracing change and continuity over an extended period beyond the 1620s and 1630s. It might also require investigating a variety of forms and methods beyond that of just court and Council. Thus, this collection of chapters is set up to explore the dynamics of local/national political culture in seventeenth-century England, with particular reference to political communication. It examines the degree to which connections were forged between politics in London, Whitehall and Westminster, and politics in the localities, and the patterns and processes that can be recovered. The fundamental goal is to foster a dialogue between two prominent strands within recent historiography, and between the work of social and political historians of the early modern period.

The primary focus of this volume is the long seventeenth century, which reflects in part the areas where work is being done on political communication and matters addressing the relationship between centre and locality. But also it is in this period that the social, political, economic and religious dynamics foregrounded these issues in unprecedented ways for contemporaries. We need to be alive to the fact that England confronted profound changes in all aspects of life, from confessionalisation to Europe’s religious wars, economic transformation, an agrarian revolution and a communications revolution marked by the rise of the newspaper and professional newsletter writers, the development of the newsbook and the creation of a partisan print culture, to name but a few of the most important developments. All of these revolutions have an impact on centre/locality relations, and yet all too often the dots have not been connected. As such, one of the aims of this volume is to start the process of thinking about how various early modern revolutions were connected and to suggest that political communication provides a useful way of achieving this. One volume cannot hope to address adequately all these seemingly disparate revolutions and fundamental changes in society. However, its long seventeenth-century focus also reflects the opportunities to build upon some of the most exciting work being done in this field. In future, research undertaken by Tudor scholars may well alter this meta-narrative and analysis, and perhaps even shift the focus to an earlier period and emphasise different aspects of communication, but with some notable exceptions this research has not yet begun in earnest.³

In recent decades social historians have gone a long way towards revolutionising our understanding of the politics of local communities, whether in terms of parish life, industrial communities or civic corporations. This has been particularly apparent, for example, in the work of Andy Wood, Phil Withington and Keith Wrightson, and in research into the local dynamics of state formation and office-holding, and into what has been dubbed the ‘unacknowledged republic’.⁴ Likewise, our understanding of the potential for political engagement outside the capital has also been transformed by the work of scholars such as Tessa Watt, Adam Fox and Alastair Bellany, who have done so much to shed light on the textual and material culture of public life, and on the ways in which both printed and scribal texts impinged upon the consciousness of even the most humble individuals.⁵ It is clear, in other words, not just that there was a vibrant politics within specific localities but also that this was predicated in no small part on the fact that people lived in a literate environment, even if they were illiterate themselves.

At the same time, of course, equally important strides have been made towards rethinking the nature of political life at a national level, not least on the part of those who might be described as ‘post-revisionists’. Central to this strand within recent historiography have been attempts to emphasise how far our appreciation of conflict and consensus can be enhanced by focusing on print culture, the news revolution and communicative practices. This has involved everything from analysis of cheap print (and indeed the popular stage) to the development of newsbooks and the contemporary preoccupation with ‘popularity’, and indeed with the possibility of detecting a ‘post-reformation’ or indeed Habermasian ‘public sphere’. This is evident, therefore, in the work of Tom Cogswell, Richard Cust, Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, as well as that of Tim Harris and Mark Knights, and considerable attention has been paid to the relationship between elite and popular politics, and to the ways in which politicians of various hues became increasingly conscious of the need to consider ‘public opinion’.⁶ This could involve either propaganda or censorship, or indeed attempts to protect the arcana imperii, to clampdown on ‘lavish and licentious discourse’, and to punish seditious speech.

The problem, however, is that these two hugely fruitful strands within the historiography of early modern Britain have not yet been connected as successfully as they might have been, and that they have not often been brought into dialogue with one another. The perils of such fragmentation of scholarship are that local communities can seem disconnected from national politics, while, on the other hand, historians of central government are in danger of imposing a top-down model of political communication, and one which leaves little room for considering the agency and authority of specific localities, or indeed their impact on the wider political landscape. The risk is that historians fail to question persistent assumptions and ideas about the pervasiveness of localism and fail to consider the degree to which the early modern period witnessed the emergence of something much closer to a shared political landscape. This is not to say that such issues have not been addressed. From debates about the ‘county community’ and ‘state formation’ to work on ‘negotiating power’ and ‘mobilisation’, it has become clear that historians are beginning to think about ways of recovering the communicative links between the centre and the localities. Nevertheless, the issue can scarcely be said to have achieved the degree of prominence that it deserves.

THE DEBATE OVER THE COUNTY COMMUNITY

The issue of how best to understand the relationship between ‘centre and locality’ has been a live one for generations, although in certain ways it has been – and perhaps continues to be – dominated by the reverberations caused by the work of scholars like Alan Everitt, not least his account of The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion.⁷ Grounded as it was in the possibilities offered by the opening up of gentry family archives and the development of a network of county record offices in the 1950s and 1960s, Everitt’s book offered a provocative interpretation of the relationship between centre and locality, which conjured the notion that local communities were insular, self-contained and uninterested in political affairs beyond their boundaries, especially those at court and Parliament. This idea about the prevalence and importance of the ‘county community’ – and of national politics as involving something like a ‘confederation of county commonwealths’ – may well have provided a necessary corrective to an old-fashioned political history which focused solely on the goings-on in Westminster and Whitehall, and yet the idea of the county community was a controversial one, not least because it became central to the ‘revisionist’ assault on the idea of there being a high road to civil war, involving profound and pervasive ideological division. In no small part, therefore, revisionism was grounded in the work of historians who were indebted to Everitt, not least Anthony Fletcher (on Sussex), and perhaps also David Underdown (on Somerset). Fletcher certainly insisted on the ‘inherent tension’ between centre and locality, and on ingrained localism in the face of the ‘growing pretensions of the state’.⁸ More particularly, such ideas were evident in the work of John Morrill, in terms both of his monograph on Cheshire and of his subsequent account of the ‘revolt of the provinces’, in which he detected evidence about a reaction against the intrusion of political discord into the otherwise consensual world of a provincial ‘silent majority’ from outside, manifested most obviously in terms of neutralism and later of hostility towards the parliamentarian state, and the disruption that this brought to traditional forms of local government.⁹

Obviously, the idea of a county community was subjected to powerful critiques from a number of directions almost immediately, not least in terms of other studies of particular counties, which raised a series of methodological and evidential issues, and which argued that more needed to be done to do justice to both local affairs and national politics, and indeed to the connections between them. In part, of course, the challenge came from scholars who defended older ideas, rooted in the work of historians like Christopher Hill, not least in terms of William Hunt’s The Puritan Moment.¹⁰ It was also possible to argue that a focus on localism ran the risk of underplaying the impact of government attempts to enforce national policies.¹¹ Hassell Smith, of course, insisted on the need to recognise a complex relationship between local and national politics, partly in relation to financial exactions, partly in relation to local factionalism and partly in relation to the ways in which institutions like Parliament were regarded as useful means of solving local problems.¹² Most obviously, perhaps, the response came from those whose work became central to the so-called ‘post-revisionist’ turn, and studies of Warwickshire (Ann Hughes), East Anglia (Clive Holmes) and Herefordshire (Jackie Eales) made it clear that English counties were not all insular and not all the same.¹³ They did not all have natural boundaries or dominant urban centres, and they were only more or less economically and socially self-contained, and evidence was found to suggest that familiarity with the outside world – through education, domestic service and military experience, as well as through time spent in London – acted as a powerful solvent of localist customs, traditions and mentalities.

It was demonstrated convincingly that the picture of political life within individual counties could look very different depending upon who was made the focus of attention. Within Cheshire, therefore, Sir Richard Grosvenor did not look like William Davenport, and elsewhere the picture of local politics looked rather different when attention was turned to the aristocracy, whose members very often had strong ties to Whitehall and Westminster, not to mention through the lens of post-reformation Catholics.¹⁴ It certainly looked different through the lens of parochial elites and the ‘middling sort’, a point which began to emerge with Underdown’s study of Somerset, and which certainly came through in Peter Clark’s account of English Provincial Society.¹⁵ What emerged from a range of studies, indeed, was the need to recognise the significance of religion and ideology, not least in terms of the strength of godly communities, and it became clear that the divisions that would lie at the heart of the civil war could and did emerge from within counties.

More importantly, perhaps, it was argued that politics within local communities was rarely distinct from national politics, and that the categories of ‘local’ and ‘national’ were not mutually exclusive, much less ‘distinct and usually antagonist spheres’. This made it possible to move beyond ideas about national politics intruding into local affairs and enforcing its policies, and about an ‘extractive and coercive centre’, and to develop instead an ‘integrationist’ approach which recognised that local and national politics overlapped, intersected and interacted in interesting ways. This involved arguing that local politics could be seen as reflecting, expressing and res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘A dog, a butcher, and a puritan’: the politics of Lent in early modern England
• 3 The Lord Admiral, the Parliament-men and the narrow seas, 1625–27
• 4 Space, place and Laudianism in early Stuart Ipswich
• 5 ‘Written according to my usual way’: political communication and the rise of the agent in seventeenth-century England
• 6 Diligent enquiries and perfect accounts: central initiatives and local agency in the English civil war
• 7 Provincial ‘Levellers’ and the coming of the regicide in the south-west
• 8 Sovereignty by the book: English corporations, Atlantic plantations and literate order, 1557–1650
• 9 Local expertise in hostile territory: state building in Cromwellian Ireland
• 10 News and the personal letter, or the news education of Theophilus Hastings, 7th Earl of Huntingdon, 1660–71
• 11 The news out of Newgate after the 1715 Jacobite rebellion
• INDEX