England Under the Stuarts

G.M. Trevelyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136477010
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An undisputed classic, England Under the Stuarts is an account of England in the years between 1603 and 1714, charting England's progress from a 'great nation' to a 'great empire'.

G. M. Trevelyan's masterful narrative explores the major events of this period, which witnessed the upheavals of Civil War, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. While never neglecting to examine the conditions of English life, this celebrated historian highlights the liberty and toleration that emerged during these years.

Almost a century after its first publication, and now with a new introduction by John Morrill, Trevelyan's thorough survey of the Stuart age remains certain to inform and delight anybody with an interest in this period of English history.

CHAPTER 1

England, 1603–40 – The Upper Class; Its Life, Culture, and Social Functions – Law, Police, and Humanitarianism

England, bound in with the triumphant sea. – Richard II

The English gentry

THE division in English society most nearly corresponding to that chasm which on the continent divided the nobles from the remainder of mankind, was not nobleman and commoner, but gentle and simple. For the English Lords were little more than a section of the gentry enjoying certain political privileges; they were, for all purposes of life and intercourse, still part of the larger society which they claimed to lead.¹ The laws of duel, and the other obligations of noblesse, belonged in England to all families of landowners who could show their coat-of-arms. Thus the class who wore swords and had the right to demand satisfaction of an Earl, included persons who differed from each other greatly in income and in manner of life. There exist today several widely different popular conceptions of the English country gentleman in the Stuart epoch, whether it be a vision of the high-souled and cultivated Puritan squire of the type of Hampden and Hutchinson, or of his brother the Cavalier, or Macaulay’s portrait of the bucolic Tory squire of the period after the Restoration, growling over his ale at the foreign proclivities of James II or William III, in the broadest accent of the countryside. The truth is that throughout the whole Stuart epoch essential differences of wealth and manners divided the gentry into not a few distinctive kinds.²

In respect of religion and politics there was indeed a greater variety among the landowners under James and Charles I than was to be found after 1660. It was only the events of the Great Rebellion that created a standard type of squirearchical opinion. The country gentleman, if he did not belong to the strong minority of Catholic squires, adhered to no separate party in Church or State; the Englishman was not yet a creature of politics and denominations. The leaders and representatives of the landed class, and therefore presumably a large section of that class itself, were more concerned to resist the encroachments of the Crown than to support its sovereignty, which had not then been called in question; and the Puritan temper, which inspired many of their own number, alarmed and disgusted them less than the novelties which Laud was introducing into their Church.

County society was not a close caste. A poor gentleman was sometimes glad to save his estate by marrying his sons to the dowries which a wealthy yeoman could provide for his daughters.¹ The descendants of clothiers, who purchased old lands with new money, or of the richer yeomen who ‘gentleized’ their sons, were sooner or later accepted into the circle of families, many of whom had risen in the same way after the Black Death or the fall of the monasteries. But the period of social probation was irritating to such aspirants while it lasted, and is said to have been a frequent cause of Roundhead proclivities in the Great War.²

Residence in the Country

The Court was a strictly limited circle, and beyond the precincts of the Court there was, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, no such thing as a ‘London season’. In the reign of Charles 1 an attempt was made on the part of some ladies, who were tired of the country, to take up their residence in the capital and parade in fine dresses in Hyde Park, while their husbands disported themselves at the playhouses across the river; but a royal proclamation from the most paternal of governments, enforced by some shrewd fines in the Star Chamber, soon drove back these pioneers of fashion to their rural duties. In times of ‘scarcity and want’ James I had sent back even his courtiers to their places in the countryside. The Bourbons encouraged the French noble to leave his rural home and assert his place in society by living at Paris or Versailles; but the Stuarts, like all their English subjects, regarded the status of country gentleman as a profession in itself. The Privy Council looked to every squire to keep open house, relieve want, give employment, and so aid the working of the Poor Law, whose administration was in the hands of justices selected from the same useful class.¹

Under the first two Stuarts the provincial capitals were social centres frequently visited by the richer gentry of the neighbourhood, according to a custom dating from time immemorial. But it was chiefly in the country house life, in the round of visits paid in the family coach or pillioned behind their brothers through the muddy lanes, that young ladies became acquainted with the bridegrooms selected by their parents. The small choice within a thirty-mile radius was no doubt unfortunate, but there were corresponding advantages in this confinement to rural society: for there both the ladies and the gentlemen found the duties and realities of life thick around them, in daily contact with other classes. As yet they had not been attracted to an isolated life of fashion in London, and the country house was still the scene, not merely of relaxation, but of business. On the other hand, military barbarism in castle and moat-house was already a thing of the past, and the Renaissance civilization introduced at the Elizabethan Court had penetrated to the seats of the better sort of gentry.

The manor house

These mansions were of every variety of size and style; there were modest halls and manors, such as now serve as farmhouses or even as barns; and lofty rural palaces of red brick and carved stone, decorating wooded parks and retired valleys. The increased profits from land newly enclosed went chiefly to the pocket of the landlord; and at this period he was more ready to employ money in raising a great Jacobean mansion than in further improving his estate. In these halcyon days of pride in new prosperity, when the final success of the Tudor rule seemed to have secured the island from all chance of again becoming the scene of military operations, houses were built for peace that were yet to taste of war; mullions and gables rose from which the sentinel would soon look forth; garden walks were laid out across which the iron shot would tear; and carved oak adorned the staircase, on whose broad landings the pikes of the last defenders would go down before the roar and the tramp of the rush that ends the day.

Its pictures

The high vaulted dining-halls were hung with tapestry, armour, weapons, and relics of the chase; the long, well-lighted galleries, which were then built for resort and conversation, were decorated with the family portraits – dismal lines of black-painted boards from which angular maidens and blanched youths looked down out of their ruffs, relieved here and there by some great ancestor standing as Holbein saw him, or by the heir in the style of Vandyke. The only pictures in these English homes were the portraits. In the great days of Dutch art our writers found fault with Holland, because there ‘every man’s house is full of pictures, a vanity that draweth on a charge’. Diaries and guide-books of travel in Italy, written by scholars and men of cultivation, describe the treasures of palaces and churches, and above all the monuments of antiquity; but scarcely a word is wasted on the pictures, even in detailed accounts of Florence or the Campo Santo of Pisa. At Rome, Raphael passes as unnoticed as his predecessors, though in the Sistine a passing word may be spared to ‘that excellent artificial painter called Michael Angelo Buonaretto’. But in spite of the fortunate demand for family portraits which was filling the mansions in every part of England with masterpieces of the Dutch and Flemish schools, and in spite of the influence of King Charles, who was a true connoisseur, and of the Earl of Arundel, called ‘the father of vertu in England’, it cannot be maintained that painting was intelligently appreciated even by the upper class. On the other hand, good taste in architecture, gardening, carving in wood, engraving in metal and other arts that minister to the uses of life, was then natural and widely spread.¹

Hunting

After the mansion itself, the chief object of pride was the park, where the deer were shut in by high palings, cut from the old oaks of the glades in which they browsed. Sometimes they were hunted slowly round the inside of this enclosure; the ladies and their cavaliers caught glimpses of the sport from some point of vantage, and listened critically to the cry of the hounds, whose notes of different pitch were meant to harmonize like a peal of bells.¹ But a nobler form of the chase was to hunt ‘at force’ over the whole countryside. Although deer-hunting and deer-poaching were at this time the ambition of all English sportsmen, some of the smaller gentry had to be content with forms of the chase more within their means. The otter was speared, the badger trapped, the hare coursed, and the fox hunted by squires who each led out his own little pack, and confined the chase within the borders of his own estate and to the company of his own family and guests. County hunts and long runs were unusual.² Some landowners recognized no other function in life save the daily hunt, followed by the nightly carouse at the ale-house whither they repaired after dinner with the ladies of the family; a scheme varied by little else than the statutory church service on Sunday. The round of earthy amusements and besotted pleasures wasted the lives and fortunes of many gentlemen not really above the common people in their habits, who if they had but been classed as yeomen would have worked hard upon their estates.³

Fowling

Fowling stood in the same position of honourable rivalry to hunting that it holds today. But fowling was then conducted, not with gun, but with hawk or net. The art of netting and luring birds by innumerable devices was then much practised by gentlemen; but the ride along the brook or across the meadows, watching the professional movements of the hawk overhead, was at once the most fashionable and popular mode of taking fowl. The use of the shot-gun, which was destined to displace all other methods of fowling, was still forbidden by an old law, of which the penalties were sometimes exacted under King James. The two birds principally mentioned in the game laws are partridge and pheasant, then about equally wild. For the pheasant was not in those days cross-bred and reared by the keeper; its remote ancestor, the eastern bird of plumage, introduced by the Romans to adorn their villas, had taken refuge during the lawless centuries that followed the departure of the legions, in the depth of the medieval forest. When Elizabeth died, game was so plentiful in the wastes and woods of England that no great jealousy was felt of the sporting instincts of ‘mean tenants and freeholders’, so that foreigners noted with surprise that ‘peasants’ were ‘permitted to hunt’ with big dogs. But the game laws of James’s Parliaments began that series of squirearchical enactments, which before the century ended had in effect taken from the small yeoman the right of sporting over his own land, and had made the taking of game a privilege of the larger landowners.¹

Duelling

The duel was then beginning to come into prominence with all its well-known modern characteristics. Offensive as it has now become to common-sense, it was then a step in the direction of humanity and law, for it took the place of the ‘killing affray’. In the fifteenth century, that golden age of bravoes, feuds begun in the law-court or the dining-hall were brought to an issue outside by open and murderous assaults. The hand of royal justice, becoming somewhat heavier under the Tudors, suppressed much of this private war and ‘bridled such stout noblemen or gentlemen’. But the work was still incomplete, and the law alone would have been unable to suppress these butcheries, so long as they were still condoned by public opinion. It was the new code of honour, which insisted that man should stand up alone against man, with equal weapons, that was now superseding that odious power of the grandee to set upon a poor neighbour with a host of bullies and retainers. But many characteristic stories of both town and country in the reign of James 1, show how long the old ideas lingered. A fencing-master in London accidentally put out an eye of one of his patrons, the Scottish Lord Sanquhar; after brooding over it for seven years, his lordship thought it essential to his dignity to hire assassins, who wiped out the score in the blood of the man who had maimed him, while he himself tried to conceal his share in the deed.¹ The memoirs of the reign are rife with stories of assassination as a point of honour. One of the most remarkable is recorded in the autobiography of the philosopher, Lord Herbert of Cherbury. One day, as he was riding through Scotland Yard behind the King’s own residence of Whitehall, the safest place one would think in the island, a gentleman, suffering from Othello’s complaint, rushed out at the head of four retainers from behind a corner, and let drive at his adversary. Lord Herbert, though worsted for a moment by the sudden and cowardly assault, continued to defend himself against his five assailants, before the eyes of a score of hostile spectators who had come to see the husband take his revenge. The four retainers, who were probably afraid of being hung for murder, pressed the attack so feebly that their master was finally dragged away in pitiable plight from under the knees of the redoubtable sage. Such at least is the account, perhaps too favourable to himself, which he gives of the matter. Public opinion at Court, which had progressed since the days of York and Lancaster, condemned the assault as murderous and dishonourable; but the attitude of the spectators who had come to see Lord Herbert stabbed, shows that the ‘killing affray’ was not yet held in universal abhorrence; so the stricter customs of the duel were likely to do more good than harm.¹ Systematized duelling never reached the excess of popularity which it enjoyed in France, where ladies so encouraged it as the proper vocation of nobility, that there was ‘scarce any man thought worth looking at that had not killed some other man in a duel’. If it was never so in England, the secret of the difference lay in this; the only business of the French noblesse under the Bourbons was soldiering; but as the English gentry pursued peaceable callings, their social ideas were eminently civilian. In contrast to the ‘swordsmen’ who swaggered about London streets, quarrelled on the ‘second cause’ of a point of honour, and ran each other through the body by the rules of Italian fence, there were many country squires who could give and take the lie direct in broad upland dialect, without feeling bound in courtesy to kill one another.²

Ladies and their occupations

As there was more than one type of English gentleman, so there were many types of lady, ranging from the heroines of allegories and sonnets, from Mrs Hutchinson, whose learning, taste, and intellect would have met the marital requirements of John Milton himself, down to the housewife who dozed with the squire over his ale, or the titled wanton and murderess who dominated over the factions at Court. The ladies of that day were forced to give a large part of their lives to household duties, and had less to spare for society and culture. In the absence of country doctors, it was the women of the house who practised the quaint lore of the art of healing – in part medicine, in part charms and white magic. Almost all the food, drink, and delicacies of the landlord’s family came off the estate, and in small manors the brewing of the beer, the salting of the Martinmas beef, and the daily cooking were the province of the wife and daughters: even in fine houses it was their business to preserve the garden fruit, and to sew for household use or ornament during long hours that would now either be devoted to more intellectual or more athletic pursuits, or else dissipated in conventionalities and distractions.¹

While the daughters of the well-to-do classes were not yet divorced from the active business of life, nor relegated to the drawing-rooms to which Miss Austen’s heroines were confined, on the other hand no professions or trades higher than manual were open to women, and scarcely any education was provided for them save that which each home could give. A very few clever women ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Principal Abbreviations Used in Footnotes
• Introduction by John Morrill
• Preface to the Revised Edition of 1925
• Preface to the Pelican Edition
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 England, 1603–40 – the Upper Class: its Life, Culture, and Social Functions – Law, Police, and Humanitarianism
• CHAPTER 2 England, 1603–40 – the Middle and Lower Classes in Country and Town – Industry and Commerce – the Conditions Favourable to Poetry and to Religion
• CHAPTER 3 James I – Puritans and Catholics
• CHAPTER 4 James I – Parliaments and Courtiers
• CHAPTER 5 The Rule of Buckingham – Wars and Parliaments, 1624–8
• CHAPTER 6 The Personal Government of Charles I, 1629–40
• CHAPTER 7 The Formation of Parties, November 1640-August 1642
• CHAPTER 8 The Civil War, 1642–6
• CHAPTER 9 Parliament, Army, and King, 1646–9
• CHAPTER 10 The Revolutionary Governments, 1649–60
• CHAPTER 11 The Restoration Epoch, 1660–78
• CHAPTER 12 The Reigns of Terror, 1678–85
• CHAPTER 13 James II, 1685–8
• CHAPTER 14 William and Mary
• CHAPTER 15 The Reign of Anne, 1702–14
• Genealogy of the House of Stuart
• List of Parliaments, 1603–1715
• Appendix A: How America was Peopled by the English
• Appendix B: The Poor Law after the Restoration
• Appendix C: Who Killed Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey?
• Appendix D: Commercial and Colonial Policy of the Restoration Era
• Appendix E: Finance under the Restoration and Revolution Settlements
• Bibliography
• Index