Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public's 'Privado' (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

Henry Parker and the English civil war is the first full study in fifty years of the author of the most celebrated political tract of the early years of the English civil war, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. Professor Mendle situates each of Parker's significant tracts in its polemical, intellectual, and political context. He also views Parker's literary work in the light of his career as privado, or intimate adviser, to leading figures of the parliamentary leadership. Parker emerges as a fierce opponent of clerical pretension from any quarter, a strikingly brutal critic of the common law mind, and a leading proponent of parliament's most uncompromising position, a claim to a species of executive power so encompassing (and so like the claims of Charles I) that it can fitly be called parliamentary absolutism.

Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History

HENRY PARKER AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Series editors ANTHONY FLETCHER

Professor of Modern History, University of Durham JOHN GUY Professor of Modern History, University of St Andrews and JOHN MORRILL Reader in Early Modern History, University of Cambridge, and Fellow and Tutor of Selwyn College This is a series of monographs and studies covering many aspects of the history of the British Isles between the late fifteenth century and the early eighteenth century. It includes the work of established scholars and pioneering work by a new generation of scholars. It includes both reviews and revisions of major topics and books, which open up new historical terrain or which reveal startling new perspectives on familiar subjects. All the volumes set detailed research into our broader perspectives and the books are intended for the use of students as well as of their teachers. For a list of titles in the series, see end of book.

HENRY PARKER AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR The political thought of the public's "privado"

MICHAEL MENDLE University of Alabama

HI CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13,28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 1995 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1995 First paperback edition 2002 A catalogue recordfor this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Mendle, Michael, 1945Henry Parker and the English civil war: the political thought of the public's "privado" / Michael Mendle. p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in early modern British history). ISBN 0 521 48227 5 1. Great Britain - Politics and government - 1642-1649. 2. Parker, Henry, 1604-1652. 3. Political science - Great Britain - History - 17th century. 4. Great Britain. Parliament - History - 17th century. 5. Pamphlets - Authorship - History - 17th century. I. Title. II. Series. DA415.M46 1995 941.06'092-dc20 94-43021 CIP ISBN 0 52148227 5 hardback ISBN 0 521521319 paperback

For Chris, Nicky, and Jane Elizabeth

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments List of abbreviations 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

page xi xvi xviii

The public's privado The ship money case and The Case of Shipmony Religio laid Observations and the political theory of the emergency The Observator observed "Vaine Confidence in the Law": the Observator responds Diverse urgent emergent considerations Disputable and visible politics Conclusion: contrary points of war

1 32 51 70 90 111 137 160 180

Appendix: The writings of Henry Parker Index

191 197

IX

PREFACE

More than fifty years have passed since Wilbur Jordan yoked Henry Parker and Henry Robinson in Men of Substance.1 Since then Parker has not been the focus of a book, not even a large part of one. To be sure, Parker has not been forgotten. Margaret Judson continued her remarkable readings of Parker across six decades.21 have attempted some preliminary studies of my own.3 Recently Robert Zaller has added an overview.4 Many writers have looked at Parker's most famous tract, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses, and some have read more widely. Now there are signs of a renewal of serious interest. Parker figures significantly in John Sanderson's "But the People's Creatures," and Richard Tuck's Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 brings his great learning in continental ideas to bear on a central aspect of Parker's thought, the twinned notions of necessity and the public good.5 All things considered, however, the simultaneous neglect and interest is perplexing. By general concession, Parker was the most aggressive, thoughtful, and provocative parliamentarian writer in the early years of the Long Parliament and civil war era.6 While his later writings are less celebrated, they 1 2

3

4 5

6

W. K. Jordan, Men of Substance (Chicago, 1942). M. A. Judson, "Henry Parker and the Theory of Parliamentary Sovereignty," in Carl Frederick Wittke, ed., Essays in History and Political Theory in Honor of Charles Howard Mcllwain (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); idem, The Crisis of the Constitution (New Brunswick, 1949); idem, From Tradition to Political Reality: A Study of the Ideas Set Forth in Support of the Commonwealth Government in England, 1649-1653 (Hamden, Conn., 1980). Michael Mendle, "The Ship Money Case, The Case of Shiptnony, and the Development of Henry Parker's Parliamentary Absolutism," Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 513-36; idem, "Henry Parker: The Public's Privado," in Gordon Schochet, ed., Religion, Resistance, and Civil War, Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, vol. 3 (Washington, DC, 1990), pp. 151-77. Robert Zaller, "Henry Parker and the Regiment of True Government," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 135 (1991), pp. 255-85. John Sanderson, "But the People's Creatures": The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester, 1989); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572-1651 (Cambridge, 1993). For a long list — but never complete, for it keeps growing - of such appraisals, see my "Henry Parker," pp. 151-2.

xi

xii

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are hardly a secret. In a crowded scholarly world, where the great minds and happenings are studied continuously, the near-great repeatedly, and the rest more often and more intensely than anyone would have imagined when Professors Judson and Jordan first shared their Parkerian labors, one would have supposed that Parker would have generated at least a small cadre of publishing students. Yet this has not happened; apparently Parker has scared off nearly as many scholars as he has attracted. A very fine scholar of early modern political thought once told me- after I had begun this project- about the "curse of Parker." As these words are written, I am not yet its victim. But my own lively sense of the difficulties facing other students of Parker, actual and prospective, has shaped this volume. To an extent that I did not fully appreciate when I began the project, I have had to ask and answer the most elementary questions about Parker and his writings to make much sense of them; there were few helps along the way. Some questions were bibliographical. No two lists of Parker's writings are the same; I had to make my own decisions and, to an extent, devise reasonably consistent grounds to do so. In the chapter devoted to the controversy Observations generated, I needed to clear other bibliographical thickets just to make my way. Other questions were biographical and circumstantial. Along with the contexts provided by the wider world, Parker's own struggles shaped what he said and how he said it. He had to work for a living, and often was his master's voice; experience taught me always to ask, cut bono? But Parker also became adept at using others' pulpits to preach his own sermons. This was true of tracts he wrote on behalf of the Vintners, the Stationers, and the Merchant Adventurers - each of which bears upon Parker's political thought - as well as of tracts like A Discourse Concerning Puritans and Scotlands Holy War, which, though rich in Parker's own ideas, were not the freestanding meditations of a disengaged mind, but pieces written on behalf of narrow political interests. Other problems led from text to context, and from one text to another. For example, Parker wrote a tract called The Contra-Replicant. Who was the Replicant, and why did Parker see the need to answer him? Were Parker as studied as, say, James Harrington, not to mention Milton or Hobbes, answers would have been quickly available at the bottom of the page of a fine modern edition. My own search plunged me into a moment early in the war when it seemed that London was about to fall to a royalistfifthcolumn. That sort of outcome proved to be typical. Almost all of Parker's writings were reactive and controversial - most often he "observed" others' views in order to state his own, and seemed to be goaded to the inkhorn by something he had read. Routinely I needed to answer questions about the tracts to which Parker responded or about the immediate political situation as a precondition to other labors.

Preface

xiii

All this is to say that I hope the strength (and I fear to some readers the weakness) of this book will be its elementary character. Perhaps it will foster sustained interest in Parker, in part by clearing the reader's path of obstructions, and making the tracts more accessible. Perhaps also it will pull Parker out of the conceptual ruts in which some modern scholarship has left him. One wonders, for example, whether the modern scholarly stress upon Parker's notions of popular sovereignty and consent owes something to their being easier to understand than Parker's views on the logic of the royalist judges in the ship money case, although the latter may be quite as important as the former. With those concerns in mind, I have preferred to make the book more useful than clever. The design is essentially chronological, the better to develop short-run contexts and to see some longer-term transformations, and proceeds from tract to tract rather than from theme to theme. Although I have not tried to summarize each tract, the reader at least should be able to determine what it was about and - often very much the same thing - what provoked its appearance. Characteristically this task has depended on the establishment of polemical and political contexts. To return to an earlier example, the reader will at least know why it was The Contra-Replicant. He or she will also discover that the tract's secondary agenda was to reply to some of the critics of Observations, and as such was among the most impassioned and revealing of Parker's writings. Of course, thematic treatment is also valuable. I have chosen to arrive at it through a narrative and tract-centered route. Thefirstchapter, a contribution towards a biography, establishes something about Parker's circumstances and activities, raising themes pursued in the chapters beyond; the most important are Parker's role as counsellor or "privado" and his connections to the parliamentary and army leadership. This chapter also discusses a few writings, mostly minor, of greater biographical than conceptual significance, as well as one smuggled tract of the 1630s, Divine and Politike Observations, in which I detect Parker's hand. The chapters that follow are generally though not slavishly chronological. For example, I have grouped Parker's early religious and ecclesiastical tracts together and I wait until a chapter devoted primarily to the later 1640s to discuss two commercial tracts from the early 1640s. In the main, however, George Thomason's description of the organizing principle of his collection of pamphlets serves as my guide: "the Method . . . is Tyme."7 Readers more indifferent to circumstances and individual tracts will find occasional remarks and notes and the index helpful in linking or contrasting key themes beyond the capitular walls. In the concluding chapter, I consider some long-term dynamics of Parker's writings. Although it concludes my study, it is hardly the last word on its subject. 7

Cited in Lois Spencer, "The Professional and Literary Connexions of George Thomason," The Library, 5th series, 13 (1958), p. 114.

xiv

Preface

Nowhere am I more acutely aware of this study's provisionality than in the matter of the backgrounds and sources (in the conventional, cruder sense) of Parker's ideas. In a few instances, I have quoted or emphasized passages in the hope that another student will be able to peer beyond my own horizon, and show "where they came from." But my failure (and, I gather, others') may be the real curse of Parker, the more cruel because it runs exactly counter to early expectation. In the initial stages of research, some quick successes led me to expect that Parker's sources and inspirations would leap off the page, and that Parker would be exposed as a highly derivative, indeed a source-dependent writer. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, for example, relied surreptitiously upon Paolo Sarpi, and the still-unprinted eighth book of Hooker's Of the haws of Ecclesiastical Polity bore heavily, it had already been noted, upon Parker's The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment. Virgilio Malvezzi (and perhaps Machiavelli) provided a little more grounding for A Discourse Concerning Puritans.8 Buoyed by these initial findings, I confidently awaited others, only to be disappointed at the meager yield. Richard Tuck's suggestion that Parker's inspiration may have been Hugo Grotius proved hard either to develop or dismiss. Parker read De Jure Belli ac Pads attentively, but also quite critically. Continuing along a furrow earlier opened by Tuck, I discovered that Jus Populi, the tract most nearly in the grand manner of "high" political thought, used Bodin to attack Grotius and Grotius to tame Bodin. 9 Yet en bloc those results fell so well short of expectation that I was forced to revise my original view. While Parker's first tracts of the 1640s showed signs of a reading program, I could find little additional evidence of other silent partners. Perhaps the highly reactive, rather than constructive and initiatory, temper of Parker's intellect as well as the press of affairs kept Parker from his books - or, rather, led him away from some books and towards others. In 1643, writing on behalf of the Stationers, Parker disparaged the canaille of pamphlets that had overrun the press, but he was no less caught up in it as reader and author than the publishers who had abandoned grander and more ambitious projects in favor of the instant returns of ephemeral little tracts. 10 Increasingly, therefore, I was led to seek Parker's primary contexts in the flows and lurchings of political events and the pamphlet culture. Scarcely less importantly, I have tried to situate Parker within the broader linguisticconceptual matrices of his day and in a biographical-conceptual space 8

9

10

Chapter 3, pp. 53-4 and 63-4; Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (University, Alabama, 1985), pp. 132-3, 213-14 (n. 54^. See Chapter 6, pp. 131-2; Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 146-7, and idem, Philosophy and Government, pp.204, 231. See Chapter 7, p. 148.

Preface

xv

peculiar to him, the role of the public's "privado." For these labors I have felt appropriately rewarded. Nevertheless, I will wonder until shown by another student what very obvious (or it may be, very obscure) connections I have missed. The reader will discover that these researches into Parker, however basic, reveal a sophisticated and complex mind. Perhaps too much so: for many tastes and prejudices, Parker will seem contradictory and not always sympathetic. That may be another reason why Parker has received less attention than might have been expected. He was a parliamentarian and an absolutist, a spokesman for the self-proclaimed defenders of liberty and property and a brutally dismissive critic of the ancient constitution and the common law, a voice for popular sovereignty and a sneering contemner of the poor and unlettered. In religious and ecclesiological matters he combined or at least conjoined the most extreme sort of anti-Catholicism with equally virulent hostility to episcopacy and presbyterianism. While Parker ran with the Independents, he was a state supremacist pushing an updated and reworked version of the Henrician and Elizabethan supremacy. He never had a good word for indefeasible individual liberty and usually had a cynic's suspicion of the claims of "conscience"; one of the few complimentary things he had to say about Catholics was that he admired their ability to control the press and censor books. These contradictions and failures to conform to an unambiguously heroic model were not what I anticipated when I first became acquainted with Parker, the "man of substance." For a while they threw me off, as I resisted seeing the obvious in favor of the expected. Eventually these conundrums of ideological inconsistency came to intrigue me, and to challenge me to examine my own assumptions. I hope readers will be able to follow my lead to the second position.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first acknowledgment must be to my predecessors in Parker studies. Like many others, I marvel at Margaret Judson's incisiveness and good sense every time I re-encounter it. If scholarship were not in part a virtuoso activity (like playing the violin) that needs to be practiced in each generation simply to perpetuate the skill, there might be little reason to redo her work. On the face of it, Professor Jordan's work has not held up as well. Published in 1942, the dawn after the darkest hour, it tried to make Parker a good Whig or apologize for him when he was not. Perhaps war-time conditions also made it hard for Jordan to ensure that his text met the highest standards of scholarly accuracy and completeness. Inevitably, too, the post-war boom in seventeenth-century studies superannuated even the sounder parts. The obvious deficiencies of Men of Substance were one inducement to begin this study. Having completed it, however, I am left with more admiration for Jordan than when I began. More than once his light illumined my path when no other would. Having also stumbled where he stumbled I inevitably feel a bond of kinship with any survivor of the "curse of Parker." This project has benefited enormously from the support of other scholars. Across the years my greatest debt remains to John Pocock, whose encouragement at several stages was vital. Particularly, at his invitation I delivered a paper on Parker to William Lamont's seminar on mid-seventeenth-century British political thought, sponsored by the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought. In time that paper grew into this book. I also owe a great deal to the interest and prodding of John Morrill. Wearing his Historical Journal hat, he saw fit to publish a highly technical article I wrote on Parker's The Case of Shipmony; as an editor of the series of which this volume is a part, he encouraged me to submit the manuscript and generally performed the office of bonus pastor. On both accounts I am quite grateful. Some parts of this book draw upon studies I have published elsewhere. Biographical material in Chapter 1 first appeared in "Henry Parker: The xvi

Acknowledgments

xvii

Public's Privado," in Gordon Schochet, ed., Religion, Resistance, and Civil War, Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought, vol. 3 (Washington, DC, 1990), pp. 151-77. Parts of Chapter 2 first appeared in "The Ship Money Case, The Case of Shipmony, and the Development of Henry Parker's Parliamentary Absolutism," Historical Journal, 32 (1989), pp. 513-36. Some pages of Chapter 4 draw upon a propadeutic essay, "The Great Council of Parliament and the First Ordinances: The Constitutional Theory of the Civil War," Journal of British Studies, 31 (April 1992), pp. 133-62. For permission to use these studies I am grateful to the publishers. I also wish to thank the Research Grants Committee of the University of Alabama for support at an early, crucial phase of the project.

ABBREVIATIONS

BL Bodl. CJ CSPD CSPIreland LJ OED Private Journals I Private Journals II Private Journals III PRO SP ST STC

Works

British Library Bodleian Commons Journal Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland Lords Journal Oxford English Dictionary Willson H. Coates, Anne Steele Young, and Vernon F. Snow, eds., The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 3 January to 5 March 1642 (New Haven, 1982) Vernon F. Snow and Anne Steele Young, eds., The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 7 March to 1 June 1642 (New Haven, 1987) Vernon F. Snow and Anne Steele Young, eds., The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 2 June to 17 September 1642 (New Haven, 1992) Public Record Office State Papers Thomas Bayly Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809-26) A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title of Books . . . 1475-1640, 3 vols., 2nd edn., revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and completed by Katherine F. Pantzer (London, 1976-91) W. Speed Hill, gen. ed., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Cambridge, Mass., 1977- )

Note: references to tracts often include the British Library Thomason collection shelfmark or Wing or STC numbers within square brackets. xvin

Abbreviations

xix

Dates: while I have taken the year to begin on 1 January, George Thomason did not. To avoid misunderstanding, Thomason dates are double-dated between 1 January and Lady Day.

(«* I robe assumptions that had governed discourse in the case, and, more generally, the key constitutional questions of the later 1620s. The parliament men of 1640-1 thought they had made bold by shouting their disgust with the republican and necessitarian logics of ship money, whereas before they had muttered in their cups. Parker, by contrast, exploited the natural proclivities of these 54 55 56 57 58

D'Ewes Journal, ed. Notestein, pp.74 and n.9, 543. ST, III, cols. 1260, 1293, 1302, 1303. Mr. Edwards Hydes Speech at a Conference betweene Both Houses, on Tewsday the 6th of July, 1641 (London, 1641) [BL E. 198 (36)], p. 4. The Case of Shipmony, pp. 2 (cf. 3), 9. 59 The Case of Shipmony, p. 7. The Case of Shipmony, pp. 13-14.

44

Henry Parker and the English civil war

languages, turning them back on their promoters, like a longbowman counterattacking with the arrows unavoidably supplied by the enemy. One assumption Parker opened to scrutiny was that the king's resort to prerogative power or, alternatively, his justification for his action by the law of necessity was a consequence of his public role. Accordingly, the king's interest was the same as the commonwealth's. But Charles gained from ship money in a way his subjects did not, even if ship money was carefully segregated from other crown receipts. The problem with objection, however, was that any counter-assertion seemed to be worse. If the king was not the state, a more thorough reevaluation of the constitutional situation was called for than most men were prepared to allow. Still, it is suggestive of the potential of the situation that Jones only supported ship money "with this limitation and condition, that none of it comes to the king's purse." 60 Another unexamined proposition was that Hampden stood, nobly or misguidedly, for the subject's rights - subject's, not subjects'. Thus his challenge pitted the (largely passive) rights of the individual against the kingstate. Berkeley initially tried to dissolve the apparent tension between the "peculiar interest" of the subject and the general good, though later he gave up. 61 Croke held that the case concerned the king "in his prerogative and power royal" and the "subject, in his lands, goods, and liberty," a view different only in phrasing from that of Finch. 62 Of course, the juxtaposition of private and public prejudiced the outcome, and made Croke and Hutton seem to genuflect towards the general good while defending selfishness through technicalities and dodges. In examining these assumptions, Parker took a different and devious route. Resorting at times to the characteristic idiom, he too counterpoised the "Kings prerogative" and "the liberty of the subject." In choosing the latter, Parker might be mistaken for a liberal, a proponent of individual rights and the limitation of state power. But this was a matter of words, perhaps misused, not of sense. In the same passage, Parker glossed "the liberty of the subject" as "the peoples liberty."63 That slight shift from the single subject to the whole signaled a different approach to ship money and its constitutional import. The "peoples good and profit"64 crept from passive, individual rights to active, republican power: by the true fundamentall constitutions of England, the beame hangs even between the King and the Subject: the Kings power doth not tread under foot the peoples liberty, nor the peoples liberty the King [sic] power. All other Countries almost... differ ...: some, but very few, allow a greater sphaere of Soveraignty to their Princes; but for the 60 61 63

ST, III, col. 1191. Charles was careful to keep ship money out of the Exchequer. 62 ST, III, cols. 1090, 1102; cf. Trevor, 1127. ST, III, cols. 1217, 1225. 64 The Case of Shipmony, p. 4; cf. pp. 7, 8, 40, 41. The Case of Shipmony, p. 5.

The ship money case and The Case of Shipmony

45

most part now adaies the world is given to republists, or to conditionate and restrained forms of government.65 Prerogative existed "for the perfection, and good of the people." 66 The king's role was instrumental to the general good, but his welfare was not necessarily coextensive with it. The essential question about ship money was whether it did in reality enhance the general welfare; ship money provided opportunities for profit, and a king, Parker pointedly observed, was as greedy as the next man and no more inoculated against error. While kings required a "munitie" from prosecution, "the State" needed to protect itself, "whether evill proceed from the King mediately or immediately, out of malice, or ignorance." If anything, the odds were against royal innocence. A prince "not seduceable" was "a thing most rare." 67 The current line ("our best Kings") from Elizabeth to Charles had done "undue illegall things at some times" (later corrected in parliament), and the really difficult creatures, the "ill disposed Princes" (John, Henry III, Edward II, and Richard II) "made England miserable."68 As Parker separated king from people, he hardened the latter category, by heavy use of the "state" as a rough equivalent of "people" in contradistinction to "king." The royal prerogative was "(perhaps) profitable for the State," "the whole state" was to be preferred before "the King."69 It was indifferent to the "state" (as was noticed before) whether kings erred from malice or ignorance; Elizabeth's approach to the crisis of 1588 was good "for her and the State," in contrast to ship money, a "fraudulent practice contrived against the State," the same "state" that Parker glossed as "we." 70 Parker's most provocative use of "state" was in his argument that "where the whole state is grantee, that grant shall have the force of a Statute, because it is pro bono publico, and because the whole state is in value and dignity as much to be preferred before the King, as the King is before any private grantee."71 The immediate context was the interpretation of the scope of statutes; but any reader of Observations recognizes in it Parker's famous assertion that the king was singulis major, universis minor. The fusion of people and state allowed Parker to embrace with advantage the royalist judges' arguments from necessity and the common good. Opposition to ship money could assume an offensive posture. Hampden was now on the side of the public good, and Parker was able to brand the opponents of parliaments - by implication, the favorers of ship money - as private

65 67 69 71

The Case of Shipmony', The Case of Shipmony, The Case of Shipmony, The Case of Shipmony,

pp. 7 - 8 . pp. 22, 43, 70. pp. 11, 16. p. 26.

66

The Case of Shipmony, p. 7, also see pp. 13-14. 68 The Case of Shipmony, pp. 21, 25. 70 The Case of Shipmony, pp. 22, 27, 40, 41.

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Henry Parker and the English civil war

interests, the "three noted factions" of papists, prelates, and "Court Parasites" or "Projectors."72 Parker was also able to clothe himself in a favorite royalist raiment, reason of state. Littleton and some judges had taken this low road, with the relish of men impatient with excessive scrupulosity. Littleton sneered at those who demanded a declaration of war as a precondition of ship money, since "in this latter age" wars "begin by the sword, not by the trumpet or herald." Crawley thought that "no well-advised man will think it fit" to call a parliament in a real emergency; " 'Quando Hannibal ad portas,' for the senators then to sit down in their robes is rather a charge to the commonwealth, then aught else." Berkeley called parliamentary assent to emergency taxation "fancied policy" and "a kind of judaizing opinion." 73 This sort of ridicule misconstrued the sophisticated logic of a St. John, but it did not entirely miss in its caricature of the "common law mind," at its worst a one-issue mentality.74 Given the dominant English sensibility that the king conducted his affairs both regaliter and politice, many men - the judges amongst them - were prepared to concede that the common law either did not apply to every transaction of state or, in a gentler formulation, that the common law wisely left a territory, often denominated as policy or government, out of its direct purview. Parker did not disagree. His scepticism about the self-evidence of the law was the starting point of The Case of Shipmony; it matched his predilection for rhetoric and argument drawing far more from statecraft than from jurisprudence. Ignoring legal terms, Parker sprinkled The Case of Shipmony with the exotic argot of another prudence ("intradoes" and "avisoes" and "privadoes")75 and provocatively discussed England's constitutional arrangements, not always to England's obvious advantage, in comparative terms.76 Parker also employed "state" and its derivatives to associate himself with the language of realpolitik, just as had many of the royalist judges. It was his turn to ridicule. Thus the dominion of the seas (which was a secondary theme in the trial), in its ceremonial aspects, was "a glory fitter for women and children to wonder at, then for Statesmen to contend about." 77 Manner bespoke matter. "Matters of state" - which Holborne had eschewed in his argument in 1637 — were as much a public concern as "matters 72 73 74 75 76

77

The Case of Shipmony, pp. 32, 39; cf. p. 34, where the third group is defined as "Court dependants, and projectors." ST, III, cols. 959, 1082, 1097, 1098. The term, of course, was developed by Professor Pocock in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The Case of Shipmony, pp. 16, 29, 35, 46. A traditional element is that England always wins the comparison with France. Otherwise the comparisons suggest that the English might learn from their neighbors: The Case of Shipmony, pp. 6-8, 2 2 - 3 , 3 7 - 8 , 4 4 - 5 . Selden's Mare Clausum was cited by Littleton, Davenport, Finch, and Bramston; ST, III, cols. 928, 1210, 1226, 1247. The Case of Shipmony, p. 19.

The ship money case and The Case of Shipmony

47

of Law, or points of Theology."78 The public business was precisely the business of parliament, which was to assume the role hitherto identified in the logic of the trial as the king's alone, the maintenance of the general welfare through the exercise of political prudence. "Parliament" thus became the bridge between the vague, jusnaturalist "people" and the institutional, sometimes nasty "state." Using a slightly alien sense of the word Parker spoke of the "States in Parliament"; in a more native vein he described parliament as the "States best physick, nay almost its naturall necessary food." Equally, parliament was vox populi, and a king "which is potent in Parliament... is as it were inskonsed in the hearts of his subjects."79 Parker used these cliches to make a radical point - that parliament was better able to do the public business than were the self-serving counsellors of the king: but this was to say that policy belonged to the dominium politicum, and, what was more, parliament possessed the power presumed in the arguments from necessity and the general welfare. That was what the royalist judges denied and what Hutton alone very tentatively suggested: "I do not say that parliaments is the government [in the technical sense], but kings have governed by them ... I do not prescribe power to the parliament to govern the realm, but the public have been governed by parliament."80 The predominant sentiment at the trial was that parliament, venerable as court and legislature, was unfit for government and policy. "Many times things are impossible, and inconvenient to be done by parliament," said Littleton, noting that parliaments were often too slow. Berkeley concurred, adding that parliament men could have "sinister ends." In a passage that greatly irritated Parker, Crawley found parliaments slow and too public for a king prudently to reveal secrets. A parliament man might be only "a friend, in shew" or an undiscovered "neuter."81 The charges of slowness ("so most of the Judges alledge") and perversity ("so Crawly boldly suggests") gave Parker motive and occasion to argue parliament's superiority as a policy-making council because of its public character. Once again eliding from the trite to the extraordinary, Parker noticed "three things wherein parliaments excell all other Counsells." Parliaments were wiser: that "an inconsiderable number of Privadoes should see or know more then whole Kingdomes, is incredible." Their advice was more trustworthy: "private men may thrive by alterations: and common calamities, but the common body can affect nothing but the common good, because 78 79 80

81

The Case of Shipmony, pp. 2 0 - 1 ; ST, III, col. 969. The Case of Shipmony, pp. 21, 3 4 - 5 , 38. STy III, col. 1196. Holborne spoke with exceptional opacity about a potentially sensitive time, the minority of Richard II (994); Croke asserted that parliaments were "most fit to consult de arduis regni" (1135, cf. 1154) but limited his discussion of this consultation to the giving of money. ST, III, cols.960, 1083, 1096, 1101. The Case of Shipmony, p p . 3 1 , 32.

48

Henry Parker and the English civil war

nothing else can be commodious for them." Finally, parliamentary advice was more "effectuall for the publicke welfare" than other counsel, including that of "Cabinet Counsellors."82 The moral was that Charles ought "to adhere to Parliaments, and to abhorre the gross delusive suggestions of such as disparage that kinde of Councell." Parliaments would not deny aid when "publicke danger is truly imminent" and the charge "fairely exacted"; "no Nation can unnaturally seek its own ruine." Nothing remained but for Parker to claim the benefit from the arguments from necessity and the public welfare that he carefully refused to trample. Necessity is "ill-pretended, when the meer doing of the thing is as dangerous as that for which it is done." "For the good of the Kingdome there is more necessity that Ship-money be damned than maintained." It was for the king's good as well. Flatterers talked up "this shadow of immoderate power ... to poison the phantasies of weake humours, undiscerning rash Princes," but "if Kings did rightly understand their owne good, none would more shunne uncontrollable absoluteness then themselves."83 The general welfare, state necessity, and the parliamentary way in matters of policy as well as law were inseparable: such was the message of The Case of Shipmony.

IV

The Case of Shipmony was a tour de force. Training the arguments from necessity and the common good back upon their royalist promoters, Parker damned the royalists for the sins they had charged to Hampden's side, anti-social individualism and naivete. Yet The Case of Shipmony was more than a tactical triumph. The determinative features of Parker's mature political thought were present, in a sort of genetic code. They would lead to the full-blown bicameral parliamentary absolutism of 1642 and 1643. In The Case of Shipmony^ they generated an implicit and unexplored notion of parliamentary sovereignty. Even this requires qualification. Parker saw the parliament as superior to the king alone, but the king was considered to be a part of the parliament. Without apparent strain Parker upheld monarchy as part of Lord Say's vision of a balanced constitution of three "estates" of king, Lords, Commons.84 Because the parliamentary way was cast in terms of power-sharing and because power itself was regarded as inherently dangerous, Parker could make it appear that parliamentary sovereignty was the solution to the absolutism problem, rather than (as it became) the appropriate form of absolute power. Similarly, Parker avoided the hard cases that a 82 84

83 The Case of Shipmony, pp. 35-6, 38. The Case of Shipmony, pp. 27-8, 39, 44, 46. Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 128, 130; The Case of Shipmony, p. 38.

The ship money case and The Case of Shipmony

49

theory of sovereignty is designed to handle; The Case of Shipmony was a persuasive to unity, not a justification of conflict or an analysis of the constitutional causes of civil collapse.85 Policy suggestions at the end of The Case of Shipmony best show Parker's sense of parliamentary sovereignty. Parliament should reverse the judgment in the ship money case, reward the good judges, and punish the bad. It should declare "the meaning of our Lawes & Charters" and clarify the issues raised in the case about necessity and prerogative power. Those who in future should "attempt to lay the like taxes" should be punished as "Felons, Traytors, or forcible Intruders" while provision should be made "against a military kinde of government." Finally, parliament should "settle" the way of providing for war and the king's true needs.86 Little room was left by this for an independent dominium regale. In particular, parliament was to exercise control over the executive, largely by threatening retribution upon judges and officeholders for deviating from parliament's sense of the laws and of the relation of law to policy. This was the technique by which Pym, Say, Essex, and their allies cowed the Caroline government into partial submission in 1641. When raised to a point of principle in the Nineteen Propositions, this demand joined the militia ordinance in leaving Charles no alternatives other than capitulation or civil war. However, Parker pulled up well short of bicameral parliamentary absolutism. He did not examine closely the relation of parliamentary power to law. Parker did remark that the "Medes and Persians had a law, that no Law once past, should ever be repealed; but doubtlesse this Law being repealedfirst,all 85

Conflict was not absent, though it was couched in historical comparisons and references. Parker attacked the bad kings of English history and defended their opponents, "our ancestors," w h o "purchased their charters of freedome with so great an expence of bloud" {The Case of Shipmony, p. 2 4 ; cf. p. 41). The most extended treatment was of Henry III, which Parker came to as a digression upon his point that parliamentary advice was more faithful than private advice. This was provoked by Sir Robert Cotton's A Short View of the Long Life and Raigne of Henry the Third, a staunchly royalist and aulic piece that attacked Henry's opponents, and argued, as Parker had it, "according to the Court Doctrine at this present," that in parliament "Princes are ever lesse then they should be, subjects more." See The Case of Shipmony, pp. 3 6 - 7 ; [Sir Robert Cotton], A Short View of the Long Life and Raigne of Henry the Third, King of England Presented to James (n. p., 1627) [STC 5 8 6 4 ] , p. 2 8 . Parker rejected an attempt at the trial to disallow Magna Carta on the grounds that it was extorted by force {The Case of Shipmony, p. 14, cf. pp. 2 4 - 5 ) ; for this issue in the trial, see ST, III, cols. 1 0 5 1 - 2 (Bankes), 1 1 0 6 (Berkeley, that Magna Carta is only a statute in the form in which it was confirmed), and 9 8 2 - 4 (Holborne's defense of Magna Carta). Also revealing is a treatment of Anglo-Scottish affairs in light of the unwillingness of the Roman plebs to follow Coriolanus into battle against their Latin neighbors, the Volscians; The Case of Shipmony, p. 2 8 . The same story, presumably from Plutarch or one of its adaptations, may be responsible for Parker's comparison of the "Kings power" to "the digestive faculty in nature," which distributes to the other members of the body nourishment in return for the heat they contribute to it {The Case of Shipmony, p. 20). This is, of course, Menenius' fable of the belly.

86

The Case of Shipmony,

pp. 46—9.

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Henry Parker and the English civil war

others might suffer the same alteration."87 Yet it is some distance from this comment to a fully developed idea of parliamentary absolutism, and no reason to suppose it should have been otherwise. No circumstance was present to test if Parker would invoke necessity to justify his own side's deviations from legality; the other side had broken the law, and Parker was not about to let them forget it. They, not he, had been seduced by power; they, not he, had been able to use public power to serve their private ends. The critical period for further development was from mid-1642 to early 1643, when a dramatically changed situation - the assumption of government by the two houses of parliament on the grounds of an emergency - led Parker to draw out the implications of his own position. However, in 1641 two kinds of discourse might have led Parker to explore matters he had evaded in The Case of Shipmony. One was occasioned by the execution of Strafford, the one great illegality (to some minds) that the parliament had allowed themselves in the first months of the Long Parliament. The other was a consequence of Parker's approach to church-state relations. Here Parker faced another challenge to conventional ways of thinking, similar in scope and shape to the problem addressed in The Case of Shipmony. In both cases Parker needed to devise a way to accept the royalist arguments without accepting the royalist conclusions. Thus Parker's tracts on religion and the church, full of interest in themselves, are also foundations of his parliamentary absolutism. 87

The Case of Shipmony, p. 15.

Religio laid

A bibliographer could be forgiven for concluding that in 1640-2, some of his most active years, Henry Parker was primarily a religious pamphleteer. According to the standard reckoning, Parker took leave of "pure" politics after the The Case of Shipmony (which appeared in late 1640 or early 1641), not returning to the subject until mid-1642, in Some Few Observations and Observations. In the same interval, Parker wrote A Discourse Concerning Puritans (which appeared about the time of The Case of Shipmony), The Altar Dispute, The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, and The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment. While the received view probably understates Parker's involvement in "political" pamphlets,1 by any calculation Parker devoted well over half his literary activity in 1640-1 to religious and ecclesiological questions. Nor did he neglect these topics later; they engaged him at intervals throughout his literary career. But the bare bibliography is misleading. Theological disputation was not Parker's metier, and he knew it. By Parker's own reckoning, he wrote The Altar Dispute only by ignoring the "dissuasions" of his "owne particular professions, interest, and want of learning."2 Parker approached his religious pamphlets gamely, and his quick but steady scholarship and his cleverness served him well. Yet Parker was not prepared to do battle with his intellectual equals in the ecclesiastical structure on their own ground - no more than the churchmen were suited to combat with Parker when armed with the weapon of his choice, the political analysis of clerical pretension. In early 1641, Parker's religious and political pamphlets occupied different locales in the tableau of public affairs. While The Case of Shipmony was a lonely effort in pure political argument, from the beginning of the Long Parliament era Parker's religious writings jostled for space in the throng. Hosts of clerics-English and Scottish, conformist and puritan, episcopal and root-and-branch - rushed to press, some to shore up existing positions, others to use the prestige of publication in the scramble for place and power 1 2

See pp. 72-4, 82-3 for my ascription of other writings to Parker in these years. The Altar Dispute, sig. A 2 verso.

51

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Henry Parker and the English civil war

launched by the summoning of the Long Parliament and the attendant collapse of the Laudian church and the old Star Chamber-based licensing structure. A number of talented and well-placed laymen took advantage of the new freedom, or sought, as did Sir Thomas Aston, to condemn it and to staunch the flow of anti-episcopal ink. The output of the alehouse crew and the printed petitions from the localities often dwelt on religious and ecclesiological matters. If it is a pardonable exaggeration to say that Parker reinvented the political pamphlet in the England of the Long Parliament, with respect to his religious pamphlets, Parker's was a voice amidst the clamor. From the beginning, however, Parker's voice could be heard. At the time, there was nothing quite like it in the religious press, though that would change. The uniqueness is the more surprising in that Parker fused his position out of several strands of argument, none of which was unusual and some even passe amongst critics of the Laudian order. What immediately caught the eye in Parker's religious writings was their highly political sensibility. That is not to say they were "secular." God suffuses Parker's world, and Parker was not ashamed of a robust, practical spirituality. But as Parker's characteristic concerns and modes of argument in his political pamphlets had little to do with theology and heavily prescriptive uses of Scripture (the intellectual provinces of the clergy), his religious pamphlets had much — for critics too much — to do with politics. Parker's perspective was always the layman's, his spiritual sensibility ever yoked to a political agenda. Within this sub-genre Parker excelled. Amongst well-known contemporaries only Harrington, Hobbes, and Selden (in some of his moods) matched Parker in exuberant, visceral, and unrelenting suspicion of the clergy; and in the main, with respect to priority of publication of the theme, they followed him.3 Parker's ideological examination of religious viewpoints as the expression of clerical self-interest is sparkling, his brutal cynicism on this score markedly at odds with his remarkable though doubtless cultivated naivete about the benevolence of the parliament. 3

Harrington: James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington, edited with an introduction by J. G. A. Pocock (London, 1977), pp. 77-99; Mark Goldie, "The Civil Religion of James Harrington," in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 197-222. Hobbes: J. G. A. Pocock, "Time, History and Eschatology in the Thought of Thomas Hobbes," Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1973), pp. 148-201. Selden: John Selden, Table Talk, ed. Sir Frederick Pollack (London, 1927); Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 149-55, 159. Selden in the early 1640s was a defender of the bishops, though on political grounds; his religious and ecclesiastical views at this time merit the sort of careful study that his political and constitutional writings are now receiving. For this see Richard Tuck, '"The Ancient Law of Freedom': John Selden and the Civil War," in John Morrill, ed., Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649 (London, 1982), pp. 137-62; Paul Christianson, "Young John Selden and the Ancient Constitution, ca. 1610-18," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 128 (1984), pp.271—315; J. P. Sommerville, "John Selden, the Law of Nature, and the Origins of Government," Historical Journal, 27 (1984), pp.444—5.

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For all his sharpness, though, Parker's doctrinal orthodoxy and conventional piety were above suspicion.4 This was a rare mixture and consequently a valuable one. No one knew quite where Selden stood (it did not help that he shifted), and Hobbes' despiritualized religiosity or his atheism (it does not much matter which is the case) damned his anti-clericalism. By contrast, the little Parker had to say about doctrinal and liturgical matters reveals a fairly conventional Protestant, if anything a little too comfortable with mid-Anglican practice for many puritan tastes. Parker's melding of advanced anticlericalism and the manner of the "downe-right Protestant" was probably sincere.5 Conveniently, it was also a surpassing tactic in the war of words.

Parker's first religious pamphlet of the Long Parliament era, A Discourse Concerning Puritans, delivered what its title proclaimed and more. The discourse divided the puritan flock into four varieties - the ecclesiastical puritan (the original kind, who "did not like a pompous or ceremonious kinde of discipline in the Church" and whose opposition elided naturally from ceremonies to "church policie"), the religious (or dogmatic) puritan, the puritan "in State" or "political Puritan," and the ethical puritan or puritan "in morality."6 Along with a parallel if shorter typology of "Antipuritans," the anatomy of puritanism was put to prescriptive use, for, as the title page had it, A Discourse Concerning Puritans was a "vindication" of those who suffer by the "mistake, abuse, and misapplication of that Name." Less predictably, given the title and initial thrust of the work, Parker used a book of the Servite priest and Venetian polemicist, Paolo Sarpi, to launch into a fierce tirade against clerical pretensions from any corner.7 In the normal flow of thought, the use of a Catholic to damn Laudians as well as Catholics was appropriate to a vindication of the puritans. Extraordinarily, though, 4

5 6

7

Parker's liturgical stance is mainstream reformist throughout, though not without a strong streak of acceptance of traditional worship forms. A later pamphlet, Jus Regum, pp. 12, 15, does hint at a theological stance far more comfortable with free will and works than most Protestants would accept. But whether this should be read back into the 1640-2 context is doubtful, as is how much stress should be laid upon these words as a considered statement of soteriological doctrine, as opposed to remarks designed to minimize the minister's and maximize the individual's role in religious life. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 58: "if thou art a downe-right Protestant, and no more, I am the same, and no more." A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 10; see also pp.11, 41, 49-50. This scheme was not original to Parker. Professor William Hunt read a paper presenting some of his research on this subject at the December 1985 meeting of the American Historical Association. For the Arminian inclusion of Calvinist doctrine as a mark of puritanism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 140-1, 156, 167, 186. On Parker's use of Paolo Sarpi, History of the Inquisition, trans. Robert Gentilis (London, 1639), see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, p. 132 n.54.

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Henry Parker and the English civil war

Parker subjected the presbyterians to the same scourge: the vindication turned into an attack. What was lacking in coherence and symmetry was compensated by boldness and vision. In a few pages Parker put himself beyond several levels of debate as they were being worked out in 1641 and 1642, and would be again in 1643-5, in the controversies first amongst episcopal and anti-episcopal partisans and later amongst religious or ecclesiastical Independents and presbyterians. The defense of puritans from calumny began with an extensive borrowing from Virgilio Malvezzi on the theme (also prominent in Machiavelli) of the perniciousness of calumnies to a state.8 Parker had several objects in mind. Probably Lord Say, who is mentioned by name on three occasions, was in a special sense to be defended.9 Parker's high indignation was also goaded by a printed visitation sermon of Henry Leslie, the Scottish-born bishop of Down and Connor.10 Parker often wrote when he judged an artifact of the press particularly dangerous; most likely Leslie's syllabus of puritan errors and misbehavior served that role in prompting A Discourse Concerning Puritans. And again, as he would later, Parker had also his own agenda, the examination of the hidden motives of the calumniators, a task that elided into the startlingly generic attack upon the clergy. In this attempt to enlist gentry anti-clericalism in the real if limited defense of puritans, manner was essential to matter. A mistake in tone could lose all. Despite its anonymity, A Discourse Concerning Puritans advertised its social milieu, Parker's easy first-person urbanity establishing a cultural distance from the tedium of academic ecclesiological polemic as well as the hysteria of the persecuted and fanatic. Since gentlemen rarely described themselves as puritans (even in the face of the consensus of contemporary opponents and modern scholars), the mood required a genial denial that the author himself was a puritan. "Some Antipuritans are so termed because they are no Puritans, but such I dislike not, for I my selfe am neither the one nor other." And again: "I am not scrupulous or precise, in my life I am not strict, or austere." Non-puritans, therefore, were put at their ease. Parker further refrained from attacking those anti-puritans who held "Puritans in very many things erroneous" but did so without hatred to their persons: "from these men I am but little removed." Of course, generosity had its purpose - to isolate the "Antipuritan of the worst sort," who hated the persons as well as the opinions of puritans and condemned "the good things in those which are 8 9 10

For the borrowing from Malvezzi, seech. 1 n.52. Cf. Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. l,chs. 7,8. Parker made a reference to Machiavelli on p. 36: cf. Machiavelli, Discourses, bk. 3, ch. 1. See above, p.xiv n. 8. Leslie, A Speech, Delivered at the Visitation of Downe and Conner. The address was published by George Thomason and his partner, Octavian Pulleyn. Parker notes the speech specifically in A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp.5, 39, 40, 42, 5 0 - 1 , 57.

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Puritans" along with the bad. To the anti-puritan extremist, Parker said "hate me as a professed Puritan."11 Leslie's sermon took the long view of puritanism, and not unnaturally Parker did the like. The word, Parker said, "sprang up almost with the Reformation." But while Leslie sought to link the Elizabethan puritans and those of his own time in a rising tide of indiscipline, and to find the wolf of sedition masquerading as a lamb of tender conscience, Parker found current puritans a beaten, harmless crew. The old puritans were "more fiery than now"; modern puritanism was but "the breathlesse carkas" of the Elizabethan movement. For "want of Sectaries living in these days," the antipuritans paraded the tired trio of Elizabethan bogey men, the mentally unbalanced Hacket and Coppingef and the separatist Robert Brown.12 Deploying the same debunking strategy* Parker tried to cut the chain of mistaken inference that turned Lords Say and Brooke into puritans for their "scrupulous opinions," turned puritanism into mutiny and mutiny into a blanket condemnation of the puritans' every thought and deed. By means of this "confused imposture" the bishops were able to "inferre" the "seditious" out of the "scrupulous" puritan.13 Parker argued that the objection to puritans reduced itself to three heads: "fury, faction, and hypocrisie." The puritans' defense lay partly in direct refutation; but employing a favorite strategy, Parker also set out to tar the anti-puritans with their own brush. Fury, it has been seen, Parker conceded for puritans of earlier days, but not for the modest, mainstream Protestants (as Parker saw modern puritans) of his own time. And "in truth, the World has not any thing more furious then such as most pretend against" puritans. Hypocrisy, charged against the ethical puritan whose "severe life" set him off from "the common vanities of the time," was also dismissed: "our Saviour himselfe will hardly escape this description." In Christ's time, the accusation came from the "the High Priests and Pharisees," whose "owne fayned sanctity" made them "more apt to suspect the same in others." 14 The charge of "faction" drew Parker into his first Long Parliament-era denunciation of the clergy. "Faction" was far more serious business than the 11 12

13 14

A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp.2, 57. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp.5, 37-8. Similarly, Parker argued that anti-puritans made much of King James' hostility to puritans in Basilikon Doron but ignored the late king's "second thoughts" distinguishing seditious and scrupulous puritans in the English edition; A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 13-15. In this, Parker was either a little disingenuous or misinformed. The revised treatment of the English edition was a political response to English conditions. See the account in Basilikon Doron, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols., Scottish Text Society Publications no. 16, 18 (Edinburgh, 1944, 1950), and Jenny Wormald, "James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 36-54. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 10, 15; cf. p. 52. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp.7, 38, 51; cf. p.53.

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petty politics of the palace backstairs of some current historiography. While some modern usage makes "faction" the lowest level in a rising hierarchy of activity-faction, opposition, rebellion-Parker's "faction" was factio, a term not far away from seditio.15 Thus the defense from the charge of faction was necessarily a defense from the charges of sedition and mutiny, from "setting the World on fire."16 In addition, faction was private interest pursued at the expense of the public, pars in opposition to universis. To counter the charge, Parker identified the puritan with the centrist figure of the "downe-right" Protestant, the "civill honest Protestant which is hearty and true to his Religion."17 The category of "political" puritan was similarly exploited to move puritans to the middle and their opponents to the fringe. Parker did not immediately own the term; his convention required that the "Puritan in State" be a "new enlargement of the name," the illegitimacy of which was evidence of the breadth of the "devils net." Still, the expansion of meaning amounted to an admission that parliament was puritan, in the debased sense; and the "blame of a parliament, is the blame of a whole kingdome."18 Conversely, Parker set out to show that the anti-puritans were themselves guilty of faction in both of its aspects - that they constituted a private interest group conspiratorially at odds with king and kingdom. Here Parker made a crucial elision. Anti-puritans of the worst sort were "the greatest of the Clergie,"19 a phrasing that linked anti-puritanism to the ladder of preferment and, hence, episcopacy. But from this notion Parker slid to a more general set of accusations against "clergymen" and "churchmen," even unto John Calvin.20 By these steps the problem became generic, or at least quasi-generic, for Parker introduced an important distinction between theory and practice. No less than the Catholics, Protestants "attribute[d] too much" to priests, and so were quite as apt to suffer from clerical tyranny. But in the doing Protestants 15

16 17 18 19 20

Cf. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarchy in Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann Sommerville (Cambridge, 1990), p. 27: all democracies "secretly crept in by the back door of sedition and faction." The usage received comment from Algernon Sidney: Filmer "has recourse to the ugly terms of a 'back-door sedition' and 'faction'," Discourses Concerning Government (1698), in David Wootton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy (New York, 1986), p. 428. For another example from Parker, Jus Regum, p. 24. Some recent scholarship has sought to reintroduce an ideological or principled dimension to high factional politics: e.g., David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London, 1985), and Neil Cuddy, "The Conflicting Loyalties of a 'vulger counselor': The Third Earl of Southampton, 1597-1624," in John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf, eds., Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), pp. 121-50. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 52. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 9, 58. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 9, 10. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 2. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 12, 16, 22-3, 28, 31.

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violated their nature. In principle "Protestants ... have no other ayme but to diminish ecclesiasticall authority," in contrast to the "court of Rome which hath no other ayme, but to increase it, and to make the Temporall her servant."21 Protestantism, accordingly, was laymen's religion. By implication, opposition to clericalism in itself was a species of piety. It was, however, a specially focused piety. Following an already worn path that he would retrace at intervals throughout the 1640s, Parker cast the layman's case as the king's. He chose to work under the broad canopy of the Tudor royal supremacy, a tradition that had itself exploited imperialist and Marsilian idioms of earlier centuries. In later pamphlets in 1641, Parker relied heavily upon Richard Hooker and Thomas Bilson, whose works gave entree to the English imperialist tradition, and it is not unlikely that Parker drew loosely upon them here.22 However, in A Discourse Concerning Puritans Parker provided no precise intellectual itinerary. Sarpi was useful in castigating Rome, but ultimately Parker had to break with the "learned Papist" over the role of the clergy.23 "Our reverend" Launcelot Andrewes provided a text, and perhaps more, but Parker shared neither his cast of mind nor his doctrine.24 Whatever the source, if determinate source there need be, the message was unmistakable. "My beliefe is, that the Prince is the Head, the Fountaine, the Soule of all power whatsoever, Spirituall, or Temporall." 25 To a degree this was simply the language of sovereignty, hostile to independent loci of power of any sort: "there can be but one Head which ought to have command." 26 Without a single head of state and church, "humane nature must needs be destitute of those remedies which are necessary for its conservation, since power cannot be divided."27 But such magniloquence on behalf of kingship carried obvious danger when brought outside the church-state arena. So did high-flying remarks about the "spiritual unction" of princes that brought them "divine graces" higher than "the sense of Laick or Secular will beare."28 How Parker managed the political exposure that this sort of language entailed is a matter to be examined shortly; at present, it suffices to see that 21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28

A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p p . 2 1 , 2 8 . This is taken almost verbatim from Sarpi, History of the Inquisition, trans. Gentilis, p. 67. See pp. 64-6. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 2 0 , 2 6 . A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 3 1 ; cf. The Works of Launcelot Andrewes, Sometime Bishop of Winchester, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1 8 4 1 - 7 2 ; reprinted N e w York, 1967), V, p. 150: Moses, as chief magistrate, "was made custos utriusque tabulae-, so he is made custos utriusque tubae." A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 3 5 . A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 2 9 . A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 17. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 1 7 - 1 8 .

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sovereignty and spiritual unction were yokemates in service to a passion that would take nearly any risk in pursuit of its goal. That objective was the discrediting of the organized clergy as an interest group whose very being posed a threat to the whole community, and whose unfettered workings spelt disaster. This, for Parker, was the lesson of medieval history, taught to the "Emperour of Germany" as also to "England, and some other Potentates sometimes."29 But the roots of the problem lay in an even remoter past, in mistakes and defects incident to the establishment of Christianity in the Roman empire by Constantine and Theodosius: the "gowned Empire" had been abusing its power "ever since Constantine almost." Constantine, as Parker said of princes in general, had been "hoodwinkt." The "pious Emperor" heaped wealth upon the church "as if some other Ruler more sacred and competent then himselfe were necessary." But the gifts proved to be "poyson ... not balme," and led to wars, schism, and a millennium of spiritual decline.30 Parker understood that action had an indirect and symbolic component as well as a direct effect, and so, for example, the use of altars and submissive postures of worship had not only directly to do with styles of reverence but had also indirectly provided "a further reach ... of benefit to the clergy." In the reign of Theodosius, the clergy had used such tactics as part of their "mysticall way of deceiving."31 They hounded the emperor himself out of the chancel, "to let him understand that none but men in holy Orders might presume to set their feet on sacred ground." 32 Even worse, however, was St. Ambrose's censure and excommunication of Theodosius (in 390, for the emperor's responsibility for a massacre in Thessalonica), "so confidently cited alwayes" by episcopal and presbyterian partisans alike.33 Remarkably,

29 30

31 32 33

A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 25. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 16, 22, 24; cf. p. 25. By identifying "Churchmen" and the Pharisees (p. 16), Parker implied an even more remote ancestry of ecclesiastical corruption. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 22. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 12. The Ambrose—Theodosius confrontation provided what has been called a "litmus test'* for Elizabethan values: Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), p. 224. As Lake notes, Patrick Collinson has called attention repeatedly to the theme. See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 24-7, 29-34; idem, Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583 (Berkeley, 1979), pp. 242-6; idem, "If Constantine, then also Theodosius: St Ambrose and the Integrity of the Elizabethan Ecclesia Anglicana,iy in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 109133. Parker underestimated the extent to which Elizabethan churchmen were discomfited by the dual implications of the Ambrose-Theodosius confrontation; Ambrose's actions could neither be embraced without qualification nor utterly disavowed.

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Parker here uncovered a Thucydidean mode, replying to Ambrose in the voice of "pious penitent" Theodosius himself. Parker's Theodosius, unlike the actual emperor, visibly resented the punishments of the archbishop of Milan.34 The language of sovereignty provided a general, political rationale for the emperor's position. The image of the holy commonwealth, Israel, conjoined the sacred to the temporal. Allowing for the sake of argument the full guilty responsibility that he otherwise denied, Parker's Theodosius wondered why he ought "to suffer more than" Saul, David, Solomon, and Manasseh, whose crimes were no less serious than those charged to the Roman, and why he and not they should be subjected to a "new coercive, vindicative [sic: vindictive?]" power of excommunication not in use before Christ. "We read of none such" independent spiritual power in those days, temporal power having "of its owne nature a competent force and habitude to restraine all things repugnant to publike quietnesse, and honesty." "We cannot imagine that Christ came to take away any of this authority from Magistrates."35 The establishment of Christianity had been, therefore, a decidedly mixed blessing. Parker never suggested that it should be undone- he never adopted a separatist position - and indeed by his own principles he could not. The language of sovereignty insisted that power has its locus. If power did not lie in the hands of the prince—state—people, then, dangerously, it resided elsewhere. Scriptural history contained a similar burden. Under the old covenant Israel did not know the sort of ecclesiological problems that plagued God's people after their establishment under the new covenant; this Parker took as proof that there was nothing inherently illegitimate about the supremacy of public authority over the clergy. Moreover, Parker believed that in principle, the establishment, which Parker associated as much with Constantine as with

34

35

See A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 35, where Parker acknowledges the fact of Theodosius' submission to Ambrose, but has Theodosius argue that his action is not a "president for the time to come" and worry prophetically that his submission would "likely" lead to "perpetuall conflicts and contestations betweene Princes and Prelates." The existence of this admittedly contrived speech, and others like it, has some methodological significance for the study of seventeenth-century political ideas. Formulations redolent of games and strategy are now common in the analysis of political thought; the existence of these speeches suggests that seventeenth-century participants saw their activities in a cognate way. Parker resorted to a Thucydidean speech in Jus Populi, p. 65 (mispaginated, for sig. 14 recto) and a string of them in Scotlands Holy War, p p . 3 7 - 4 3 . John Lilburne used one in Legall Fundatnentall Liberties (London, 1649), pp. 29-30, and again at his 1649 trial: Theodorus Varax [Clement Walker,] The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne (London, [1649]), p. 4. For the language of games in the study of political thought, J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), p. 5. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp.32, 34—5.

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Theodosius, translated into Constantine's hands the dignity and such meager power as bishops wielded in the days of persecution.36 The flawed establishment, however, had been costly. Constantine's pious folly had led to endless subsequent broils of church and state and to a decline in clerical spirituality. The "wooden Chalices" and "golden Priests" of the heroic age were replaced by "wooden Priests" and "golden Chalices." The clergy grew "more glorious, but lesse gracious." 37 Before the "installment of Christian Princes" bishops were more "Arbitrators" than "Judges" and did not "intrench ... upon the Lay power" in matters of pecuniary and corporal punishment. Yet those bishops did not err in their spiritual judgments "whilst God did inspire (according to his promise) a miraculous power of binding and loosing infallibly."38 Establishment, therefore, inaugurated 900 years of decline in the church as in the state, a process only reversed by the resistance of temporal powers after 1200 and by the Reformation. Restoration of temporal authority had proceeded unevenly. Some Catholic states had done in practice as much as many Protestants.39 While by its nature Protestantism sought to diminish ecclesiastical authority, it had not been altogether successful in combating the resistance of the clergy, whose intrenched interest overrode the suasions of their own confession and of secular policy. On the critical issue of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and, more narrowly, the power of the keys, Protestants - "not only the Episcopall, but the Presbyteriall side also" - continued to "attribute too much" to "Priests." If Protestants still upheld priests (note the Catholic term), "Divines" (note the Protestant term) of all persuasions "have trumped the World" about "the true bounds and limits of Ecclesiasticall Jurisdiction." 40 Within the Protestant camp, degrees and times of transgression

36

37 38

39

40

A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 24. Parker distinguished between the sacred "dignity" of the bishops in the church'sfirst300 years and the equally sacred "honour, and power" of Constantine. But this distinction, though important, is relative rather than absolute, for Parker also recognized that the "poore persecuted Bishops" of the pre-establishment period did "feebly" exercise some "authority" and provided some "protection," both of which "devolve[d]" into Constantine's hands. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p . 23. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 23; cf. p. 20 on the "temporary" and "miraculous" nature of the power of binding and loosing in the Petrine commission. Parker associates, but does not absolutely assert, a causal link between spiritual decline and establishment. Parker's views of the power of the keys imply an aboriginal but latterly forfeited or lost clerical right of excommunication; this is to be contrasted with the wholesale rejection of excommunication in Jus Regunt; see below, p. 139. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 25. Parker saw the propensity to revolt from Rome in terms of geographical distance. Nearer states like Venice, France, and Spain gave "in words" what they denied in practice. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 28.

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varied. "Presbytery has indeed heretofore passed her bounds, yet not of late," while episcopacy claimed an independent divine right from Constantine's time "till this instant." 41 Such was the setting for Calvin's drubbing in this self-professed vindication of puritans. Parker prepared the way by noting jocoseriously that while it was said that Calvin in Geneva "wanted Nothing but Name of Bishop" the bishops of the pre-Constantinian church "wanted all but the Name."42 There was nothing playful about Parker's main treatment of "that great Archprelate" Calvin. Like any other churchman, Calvin argued "according to the Popish ground" that temporal jurisdiction was "assistant" to the spiritual, and that both had their "several" ends and means.43 These assumptions ran counter to the royal supremacy, and Parker rejected them outright. If the prince's aim, "true Religion," was the same as "prelate's," then his "Power" was as "sacred to effect these ends" as the churchman's - that is, the prince had a divine right in religious matters at least equal to the clergy's. In fact, a prince's right was necessarily greater than that of his "surrogates." 44 Calvin's notion of two separate jurisdictions, thus, was "a way to erect regnum in regno." In the church universal priests and kings were equally the sons of Christ, but in the "Nationall, Locall Church" the clergy were "part" of the prince's "charge, and under his protection." The relation of king to clergy was no different than that of king and his other clerisy: "the Priest... may learn a limitation from the Lawyer." For although both sorts of men could serve as judges and decide cases against the king, where the king was a party, they were not permitted to "harm the royal dignity of his calling" or to call the king himself to punishment.45 II

Parker's remaining pamphlets on church affairs were mainly in the anticlerical mode that had very nearly swallowed the defense of puritans in A Discourse Concerning Puritans.46 First to appear was the brief effort at self-interpretation, The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated. As Parker explained it, James Ussher, the archbishop of 41

42 44 46

A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 43. It is hard to follow Parker here about Protestant episcopacy: the more recent development in the episcopal camp was the notion of a jus divinum for episcopacy (parallel to the presbyterian claim). This supplanted earlier jure humano justifications of episcopacy. Parker may have taken a longer perspective, viewing the jure humano argument associated with the Elizabethan establishment as a discontinuity with the longue duree of Catholic episcopacy. 43 A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p. 23. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp. 28-9. 45 A Discourse Concerning Puritans, p.30. A Discourse Concerning Puritans, pp.31—2. The Altar Dispute has a different thrust, but its decisive (because distinctive) contribution is to anti-clericalism.

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Armagh, had found the arguments against jure divino episcopacy in A Discourse Concerning Puritans "weak." The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, dedicated to Ussher, was Parker's response. The cultivated gentility of A Discourse Concerning Puritans now was handsomely repaid. Parker's claim to a dispassionate, disinterested approach to the problem had not been belied by a false step in A Discourse Concerning Puritans. His hostility to presbyterian clericalism proved equally handy; for were he wrong, Parker could not be accused of "private interests" but only of simple "error." 47 In this modest tract Parker insisted upon, rather than argued for, a royal, lay, and political supremacy over the church. Ussher's reservations were hardly to be stilled by Parker's rather relaxed approach. Greater interest attaches to a series of throw-away asides, in which Parker formulated a more concrete statement of the relation of king, parliament, and clergy than was to be found in A Discourse Concerning Puritans. Parker claimed to be willing to abide by the "precept" of Scripture or by "any Canon extending to all places and times" in matters of church government. However, "Divines were [n]ever yet agreed upon any such," and thus - the coyness is notable - "it seems" that "under the King, that Junto of Divines, Statesmen, and Lawyers in Parliament, which hath a Legislative power over the State, hath the same over the Church."48 In the same sidling manner, Parker thought "no man" would deny that the "fittest policie" for the king's government of the church was "the same pattern by which he governeth the State."49 Attempting an end run around the power of bishops in matters of doctrine, Parker blithely tossed out (with another "it seemes") a new mechanism to promote doctrinal conformity: "our two famous Vniversities" should be consulted, and in case of their disagreement "a Junto" of divines from London, "our third Oracle," should "arbitrate." 50 In his conclusion, Parker expected that discussion of the issues would lead to a resolution of the ecclesiological question, and the 47

48

49

50

The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, sig. A 2 recto; the presbyterians (and Calvin in particular) are yoked with papists elsewhere (p. 3, cf. p. 9) and their scheme (p. 20) is dismissed as "not so adequate and conformable to Monarchy." The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, pp. 2 - 3 . Parker was a little disingenuous; by this time he clearly could not have favored the presence of the bishops in the House of Lords, yet their presence in the parliamentary roster gave weight to the claim of ecclesiastical legislative power. In The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, Parker does not directly address this question, but see p p . 5 , 8, and, especially, 10 ("the solemn use of Synods, Counsels, and Parliaments does not at all depend upon episcopacy"). The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, p. 3. This was a Marsilian proposition (pp. 3—4): "it is the same body of men now, of which both State and Church are compacted, and so it was not in the Apostles times; and the same body hath the same head now, as it had not in the beginning." The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, p. 10; the point is remade on p. 1 1 .

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"new module of government which so many have so variously phansied" would "open it self, and offer it self to us of its own accord."51 Parker did not doubt the result. The "pattern of the State would be sufficient to present to us afit8c harmonious pattern for the Church."52 This was, of course, an aggressively laic credo. Parker did not directly say so - he did not have to - but his view of the original-copy relation ran directly counter to a famous high puritan slogan. For the Elizabethan archpresbyter Thomas Cartwright as for the New England divines Thomas Hooker and John Cotton (who shared this view in a letter to Parker's friend and patron Lord Say), the state should follow the church, even as the "hangings" should be cut according to the "house." In rejecting this outlook, Parker again combated episcopacy with a weapon equally lethal to the clerical puritans. 53

in

The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment probably appeared in November 1641. A different half-title ("The Divine Right of Episcopacie Refuted") suggests kinship with The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated. Apparently True Grounds was the full-dress reply that Ussher did not really receive in The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated.54 In this respect True Grounds did its work thoroughly, Parker drew heavily upon Bilson and Hooker, and showed considerable acquaintance with Laudian and Catholic polemic and with proof-texts of the patristic literature. The eighth book of Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, not yet in print but circulating in manuscript, was particularly influential: its strongly Marsilian thrust was useful to Parker not only for its content but for the implied imprimatur it lent to Parker's own opinions.55 In most respects, though, True Grounds added some needed ballast, but little more, to Parker's position as it had been developed in A Discourse Concerning Puritans. 51 52 53 54

55

For these forms, see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 1 4 0 - 7 and refs. there cited. Ussher himself had a share in such schemes. The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, p. 11. Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 67,128. Parker mentions Cartwright in The Altar Dispute, p. 13. The physical form is slightly irregular. Though a major pamphlet of ninety-nine pages, expensive of the time and resources of author and publisher, True Grounds appeared without dedication or preface, and the first page after the title bore the signature B[l verso], suggestive perhaps of some late changes. The use of Hooker was noted by Donald Lawless, "Book VIII of Hooker's 'Ecclesiastical Polity'," Notes and Queries, n.s. 3 , no. 5 (May 1956), pp. 2 2 4 - 5 ; see also n . 6 1 below. The many references to Bilson {The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 13,16-18,21,

31, 32, 35, 48, 59, 63, 96) seem to relate to Thomas Bilson, The True Difference (London, 1586); the extensive passage quoted by Parker on pp. 17-18 corresponds to The True Difference, pp. 67-8.

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There was, however, a significant exception. Parker took what appears to be a highly unusual approach in True Grounds toward the common clerical argument - as presbyterian as it was Catholic - that spiritual matters ranked above secular ones. Commonly secularists resisted it by adding the sacred to the temporal, hedging kingship with divinity. Parker certainly did this. But Parker also argued that the secular powers were more sacred than the "spiritual" authorities precisely because kings possessed power. It was not what kings shared with the clergy but what the clergy lacked that gave kings their higher spirituality. On this point Parker saw his own approach as distinctive, even to the point of breaking with the Tudor royal supremacists. With considerable perceptiveness Parker espied the residual, reflexive clericalism of staunch Anglican (and clerical) "defenders of [royal] supremacy." Bilson and even Hooker (who otherwise wrote so "judiciously" and "profoundly") placed the "Crosier ... in Honour, and Sanctitie, before the Scepter."56 Like the Constantinian foundation discussed in A Discourse Concerning Puritans, the ballyhooed Elizabethan establishment had its inner, clericalist flaws. Parker, whose rejection of the Catholics and presbyterians seemingly made him not unlike an Anglican faute de mieux, now distanced himself even from the most satisfactory clerical polemicists. To "detect the errour of Divines" about the spiritual superiority Parker first attacked the conventional assumptions linking patristic clericalists like Ambrose and Athanasius, the sixth-century patriarch of Constantinople Gregorius Nazianzus, and Erastian Anglicans like Bilson. Then he launched his own counter-thesis: princes were holier than priests, precisely because of their worldliest attribute. Correlating the three attributes of power, wisdom, and goodness with the three Persons of the Trinity, Parker found that "Power and Dominion of it selfe is divine," and, indeed, the more divine as the power is more absolute. The quest for power was "the first and greatest sin of men and Angels" alike, but was almost excusable in its inevitability: "Nothing is more desirable to man, or more adequate to the aymes of intelligent creatures then power." Heaven itself was "differenced by Power." It was "hard to say" that angels and saints differed much in wisdom or goodness, but that "they differ in power and glory we all know," a fact witnessed by the power-based vocabulary (e.g., the "Thrones, and Principalities") of Neoplatonic angelology.57 "Absolute power," the Father, gave being to absolute wisdom, the Son, and they in turn gave being to absolute goodness. The heavenly subordination was reflected in earthly arrangements. Wisdom and goodness were "blessed graces" and a clergy, Parker barely conceded, might have a greater share of them than a prince. But "in regard of 56 57

The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 12-13, 43. Peter Lake stresses the renascence of conformist clericalism in Anglicans and Puritans?, pp. 114-19, 213-25. The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 18, 35—6.

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that civill sanctitie which is visible to mans eye, Caesar is to be worshipped more then Peter." Power "is an excellence more perfect, and publike and visible."58 Power, that "Glorious, Divine thing," had wrought the Reformation; power made the "Proclamations of Princes ... more efficacious Sermons" than the pulpit variety.59 Accordingly, "Power in the State," like the sacred ark of the Hebrews, is "priviledged from common sight, and touch" and ought to be "united in some one person only" and so "lineally intayled" that the power can never die or cease or "suffer any violent motion, or alteration." Power, Parker put it apothegmatically, "is as the soule of Policy."60 High-flown praise of the prince was part of the English imperialist tradition, and it might be argued that Parker had not done much more than grab the best of its wind with his sails. But there was an obvious risk to the author of The Case of Shipmony and the future author of Observations. Would not the glorification of princes, even unto idolatry, vis-a-vis the clergy have unfortunate consequences with respect to the laity and to parliament? Parker's response was to enunciate with exceptional clarity the counterposing doctrine — that human power was founded in consent. Richard Hooker, whose ineradicable residual clericalism had shown to Parker the limitations of men of that coat, had resoundingly discussed consent, the basis of power in the public good, and the happiness of a legal rather than arbitrary monarchy in the eighth book of Ecclesiastical Polity. While Hooker allowed that not all civil power was founded in consent, he urged that it certainly could be, and in the best of worlds, ought to be. Deploying the Marsilian logic that the state and church were different expressions of the same community61 and the propositions that the laity were coactors in church legislation and governance and that a church was a non-compulsive community based on faith, Hooker squeezed together the role of consent in church and in the state in a vise of tightening implication. Parliament was a court "not so meerly temporall" that "it might meddle with nothing but only leather and wooll." Equally, "for the devising of lawes in the Church it is the generall consent of all that giveth 58

59 60 61

The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 36; cf. p. 4 0 , on the limitations of clerical excellence and p. 8 5 , for a restatement that it is "absurd" to make power servile to wisdom. The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 6 0 - 1 . The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 8 5 . The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 4 3 . This was the passage Parker found particularly valuable. Parker quoted and paraphrased a substantial excerpt (pp. 4 2 - 3 ) , ending the passage, "Thus farre Hooker, most judiciously and profoundly." Cf. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Books VI, VII, VIII, ed. Peter Stanwood (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 8 1 ) , vol. Ill of Works, pp. 3 1 9 - 2 2 . Other instances, not otherwise mentioned here, of direct quotation or substantial paraphrase: The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 3 1 , and Works, III, pp. 3 1 6 - 1 7 ; The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 5 7 - 8 , and Works, III, pp. 429—30; The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 87, 8 9 - 9 0 , and Works, III, p p . 4 0 2 , 403^4; The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 9 1 , and Works, III, p. 4 0 1 .

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them the forme and vigor of lawes."62 Thus Hooker had no trouble urging with respect to Christian kings a proposition that Parker would insist upon as fundamental in his political writings: that the king was "major singulis universis minor."63 Parker followed, invoking general consent to cage the high claims for kings he had otherwise advanced. The "supreame civill Magistrate has this power [of command and of "forcing obedience"] grounded upon the common consent of Mankinde, and is as strong as is the politicall consent of humane nature in its supream Law of publike conservation."64 The supreme magistrate's power was not the result of some remote and irreversible act of consent, a statement of principle without practical application. Princes in parliament had greater majesty than princes alone, common consent "having not derived all power into the King" but "reserved much thereof till a full union be in Parliament."65 Apart from the presence (or absence) of divines, parliaments were more fit than either princes alone or clerical synods in matters spiritual, and as competent to treat of doctrine and discipline as (in an echo of Hooker) leather and wool.66 Indeed by implication parliament was the true Constantine. For admitting the Roman maxim that whatever pleased the prince had the force of law but also that "Princes had this power by common consent" and, further, that this same common consent in latter ages when "policy" became "perfect" had restrained princes through sovereign laws, the power that in earlier ages had been vested in princes and synodal councils was now vested in princes and "the highest of all Counsells, viz. Parliaments."67 IV

Parker had sensed in The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment as he had earlier in A Discourse Concerning Puritans the symbolic and evocative power of words in themselves - simply to use certain words was to make an argument, to persuade. It was in The Altar Dispute that Parker most tellingly explored this theme, providing his most direct and cutting analysis of clerical language as promoter of clerical interest, and, incidentally, laying a claim as a Long Parliament-era originator of the "ideological" analysis of clerical pretensions that would be followed by a diversely radical group including the Leveller and freethinker William Walwyn, the absolutist Thomas Hobbes, 62 63 64 65 66 67

Works, III, pp. 4 0 1 - 2 . Works, III, p. 337. Parker used this notion in a different context in The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment; see p. 64. The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 24-5. The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 91. The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, pp. 88,91-2. Hooker is used in both passages; cf. Hooker, Works, III, p p . 4 0 1 - 3 . The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, p. 94.

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the anti-clerical republican James Harrington, and the Digger leader Gerard Winstanley. The Altar Dispute was Parker's somewhat tardy contribution to a large if waning debate on the propriety of the Laudian innovations in the eucharistic service. In calling for several reversions to earlier forms, Laud and his followers had rejected advanced reformed practice. The table was to be called an altar; it could be made of stone; its placement in the church was changed to reflect its prominence; the rite itself was allowed to be a sacrifice. From the onset, the altar dispute, as Parker aptly dubbed the whole controversy, was a combat over symbols, verbal and non-verbal. Both sides, unlike the Elizabethan adiaphorists, thought that names could hurt as much as sticks and stones. The title of John Williams' anti-Laudian tract identified the kernel of contention: The Holy Table, Name and Thing.68 Parker entered the fray at several levels, but the most significant was his carefully modulated analysis of the politics of the vocabulary and postures of worship — the ideological bearing of symbolic action. Whereas a rejection of the word or name might be taken to imply an automatic rejection of the thing for which it stood, Parker insisted that this was not his position. He could accept the thing; what he would not abide was the secondary level of implication - the "subtext" - of the name: "if we did reject the Priest utterly as lesse proper then Minister ... yet we reject not the thing with the name." 69 Even "altars" themselves, the most provocative of the Laudian symbolic innovations, were not "necessary causes" but only "possible occasions of superstition"; the Fathers used the words "Altar, Sacrifice, Sec. harmlessly to themselves."70 This was, of course, a tacit acceptance, though by no means an endorsement, of common Anglican practice insofar as it could be shorn of ideological trappings. However, terms were seldom innocent. There were grounds of "policie" as well as "conscience" to shun "words in themselves offencelesse, where better choyce may be had, and where great abuse has beene offered."71 While patristic usage had been innocuous, others purposefully misconstrued it; and on Parker's reading, heathenism as much as popery lurked even where there was "no sinne in the bare words." The "very word Altar foments superstition."72 Without any great precision, yet unmistakably withal, Parker linked the Ambrose—Theodosius confrontation with the use of altars: both 68

69 71 72

John Williams, The Holy Table, Name and Thing ("Printed for the Diocese of Lincoln," 1637). See the treatment in Tyacke, Anti-Calvinism, pp. 2 0 0 - 1 6 , 2 2 1 (on the identification of the altar's space as a specifically sacerdotal space). 70 The Altar Dispute, p. 14. The Altar Dispute, pp. 26-7. The Altar Dispute, pp. 32-3. The Altar Dispute, pp. 27, 32, 40 (viz, sig. F8 verso). The last point Parker claimed to have learned from Bilson.

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were the first stages of "Antichrists entrance." As the one showed how "the Hierarchy" was "advanced" even "in good times," so the other brought "factious" terms into play even before the height of their abuse in the form of a stone altar and "an immolating Priest."73 The early English reformers could not abolish these uses in a stroke. They were, after all, the "common" terms and first-generation Protestants "were necessitated to use these words conversing with Papists at that time when no other words were current." In the prayer book issued in the first year of Edward VPs reign, the old words were used, for "neither was the tide of language yet turned, nor the reformation in any degree perfected." The second Edwardian prayer book, however, removed the words sacrifice and altar, reflecting "the better judgement, and more setled practise of the State." And so, by difficult stages, the English reformers began the hard job of "extirpating] a sensuall Religion of great antiquity."74 But the process was not yet complete. In Edward's day it had been resisted even "by the holiest of Prelates," whose residual clericalism caused them to oppose the anti-ceremonialism of Miles Hooper: ceremonies were "the darling of Episcopacie" and their preservation was of high "concernment to Hierarchy."75 "Altar-worship," as Parker called it, had become inseparable from priest-worship. In antiquity the formula was "Presbyterii &c aris advolvi." By means of that fateful linkage "not onely excessive honours, but also all the revenues and treasure of Churchmen were first raised and advanced ... It is not to be wondred therefore, if ambitious and covetous Prelates did so much magnifie, and extoll that, which did so much magnifie and extoll them."76 Despite the Laudians' "pretenses of zeale and devotion ... to royalty," altar-worship led to "conclusions that are very dangerous, and prejudiciall to Princes." Parker pointed to Ambrose's exclusion of Theodosius from the chancel. If altars possessed sanctity, the priesthood gained from the proximity. If the sacrament were a sacrifice, priests were the sacrificers: but "how many Kings ha's this doctrine dethroned?"77 Theodosius, like Constantine before him, had been undone by his own misdirected piety. He swallowed one of Rome's "most powerfull intoxications," the very argument that did and "will still convince, and confound, and degrade all Christian Princes whatsoever."78 73 74 75

76 77 78

The Altar Dispute, p. 19. The Altar Dispute, p. 20. The Altar Dispute, p. 23. Parker asserts this link in refutation of Peter Heylyn's claim that the reformers only accepted the abolition of the terms altar and sacrifice out of a misguided and un-English desire to humor John Calvin. The Altar Dispute, p. 59. The Altar Dispute, pp. 60-1, 62; cf. p. 54. The Altar Dispute, p. 63.

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The juxtaposition of The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment and The Altar Dispute shows the crux of Parker's political-religious thought as it emerged in 1641-2. On the one hand, Parker evidently perceived by the time of The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment that the fulsome praise of princes in the ecclesiological context brought an unwelcome entail to the civil. But, equally, Parker scarcely knew how to combat clerical pretensions without recourse to the idiom. Even in The Altar Dispute (which appeared shortly before Parker enunciated the full form of his political doctrine of parliamentary absolutism), Parker responded to the Anglican pride in the unbroken continuity of episcopal ordination across the Reformation divide by calling it the accidental and unnecessary result of the fact that some of the "Romish clergy"-Parker named Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Hooper-had gone over to Protestantism. Had they not cooperated, ordination might well have come from "the sacred hands" of Edward VI.79 The tension between the political vision of parliamentary supremacy and the ecclesiological vision of the royal supremacy did not disappear. As late as 1645, Parker argued against the clergy by arguing for the king, as the title Jus Regum suggests. In spring 1642, however, the urgent need was to address the other side of the great conundrum. It is not surprising that shortly after the publication of The Altar Dispute Parker turned to a similar debunking, demythologizing examination of the idiom surrounding civil kingship. There was another continuity. As in the religious and ecclesiological writings, Parker's emergent political vision took it for granted that Constantine was a dupe. 79

The Altar Dispute, p. 65. It would be interesting to know if any other writer ever referred to such stalwarts and martyrs (as they were conventionally held to be) of reform as erstwhile "Romish clergy."

Observations and the political theory of the emergency

To this point, we have seen Parker twice entering the nurseries of royalist thought. Both times he stepped gingerly, lest he crush the flowers as he trampled the weeds. In The Case of Shipmony, Parker deployed the royalist judges' own logic to damn the promoters of ship money, and to proffer the parliament as the repository of conciliar wisdom as well as the common good, against the individual interest of evil counsellors. In his religious pamphlets Parker used the Tudor royal supremacy to disarm the clerics' formidable arsenal, advancing the king's cause as the layman's. Parker's use of imperialist political idolatry drove him to clarify parliament's role with respect to the king. Yet it is surprising to see the extent to which Parker committed himself to such a dangerously double-edged weapon as Tudor imperialism. Had Parker gone no further with these royalist idioms, he might be seen as a mainstream thinker, clever in his use of traditional and, at least by some reckonings, conservative arguments to make damning but ideologically modest points against the seeming proprietors of those arguments. This evaluation corresponds to Parker's ostentatious parade of his gentility (even when it was that oxymoron, anonymous gentility), which served to reinforce the appearance of moderation. Of course, this was a pose - not a falsehood but a staged representation, psychologically as well as rhetorically useful. Parker did develop his ideas further - it was this that made him famous as the Observator - so it remains to follow along his path. In the standard reckoning, which is not wrong, this path is denominated "parliamentary sovereignty." It is in several ways more revealing, however, to call Parker's position (and the position of the houses of parliament in whose interest Parker wrote) "parliamentary absolutism." The locus classicus of the emergence of parliamentary absolutism was the political crisis associated with the militia in the spring and summer of 1642, when the two houses found reason to break with the letter of the law and the traditional constitution in order to preserve themselves, in accord (so they claimed) with a law that was at once higher and less knowable. Like the 70

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royalist absolutism upon which it drew, parliamentary absolutism was a theory predicated upon the existence of emergencies, which were the necessary, validating preconditions of the exercise of absolute power. The emergency thus was in a curious position of being both the essence of the matter and a most misleading feature. There had to be an emergency, understood and, better, felt as such. Equally, though, parliamentary absolutism (again like its royal progenitor) was a doctrine about latent or sleeping power; and while the requisite emergency appeared as a spontaneous and contingent complex of events, many of the thoughts and actions had already been scripted by a theory as much in need of an emergency to activate it as the emergency was in need of a theory of action to deal with it. Before turning to Observations, therefore, the elements of the political theory of the emergency need some treatment.

The constitutional and legal breach over the militia was the greatest crisis of the Long Parliament before the civil war. But it was not thefirstsuch moment. To some observers at the time (and doubtless to more in retrospect), there had been an earlier occasion when law had been pitted against an emergency and self-preservation, and when parliament had chosen the illegal course. This was in the attainder of the earl of Strafford in the spring of 1641, which followed hard upon the failed impeachment trial against him. While Strafford's stunning defense in the House of Lords had overcome the accusations of his enemies, it did not suffice to save him. Justifiably more fearful of the man than ever, the parliamentary leadership adopted the bullying tactic of attainder. By a retrospective statute Strafford was declared guilty of the treasons the managers of the impeachment could not prove at law. If the argument itself was barren, the emotional manipulation and physical intimidation at the time and in the next weeks were rank: appeals to fear and the conveniently discovered army plot, threats to the bishops, and an unholy coordination of parliamentary maneuvering and the behavior of the London crowd. The tactic worked. The Commons accepted the leadership's ploy with only fifty-nine dissentient voices (their deviance was duly recorded by their enemies). With jostling crowds outside Westminster, the Lords caved in, and Charles, heeding Strafford's and the crowd's warnings that the minister had to be sacrificed to save the king, reneged on his earlier undertakings to Strafford and signed the attainder. In the attendant near-hysteria, Pym got his bill to prevent the present parliament from being dissolved without its own consent, virtually a perpetual parliament act. He and his friends also got the Protestation, a loyalty oath that was so platitudinously vague as to be equally (if but potentially) dangerous to those who subscribed as to those who

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did not. The introduction in late May of the root-and-branch bill and Pym's Ten Propositions in June 1641 rode the same political snowball, though events would show that the ball had reached the bottom of the slope. It is testimony both to the leadership's residual political strength and Charles' continuing political debility that the leadership's aggression was not more widely condemned at the time. But the period from late April into June 1641 was a hinge period, and though the hinge was sticky, the shifting energies eventually forced the door to move. Amongst the earliest to push was George Digby, the son of the earl of Bristol. Like his father, Digby had been notable as an opponent of personal rule-perhaps the more so as afigurewell on the flanks of the reformist common front. It did not take long before Digby began to shake free. When the clamor for religious reform was all but universally voiced, Digby was amongst thefirstto become unnerved publicly about the banausic element amongst the root-and-branchers. Political disaffection took a little longer to jell; for the moment Digby continued to cooperate in the impeachment case against Strafford. But quitting his erstwhile colleagues on 21 April 1641, Digby declared Strafford's provable misdeeds did not deserve a sentence of death, that the parliament was proceeding illegally in condemning him for acts not defined as crimes at the time of their commission, and that the most serious charge against the earl hung upon untrustworthy evidence. Digby's speech, surreptitiously printed and publicly condemned, amounted to a manifesto for a nascent constitutional royalism, in which Charles' errors were not defended, but his opponents' were judged worse.1 In July, partly to protect him from the mounting wrath of the parliamentary leadership, partly to strengthen an anti-opposition group in the Lords, Charles elevated Digby to the peerage. Now that Digby was safely beyond the Commons' reach, the speech was reprinted. The message may have been more menacing the second time around, for the political re-evaluation it had called for was too great to have been made in a day or week, though for some nervous onlookers it had to be made, and the reprinting created the occasion. The reprinted speech appeared at an uncomfortable time for the parliamentary leadership. Pym and his friends faced mounting difficulties over church policy, residual shock over the seeming alliance with the London mob in pushing the attainder through the House of Lords, and with a growing sentiment that while Charles had purged his government of its corruptions, the reformers themselves might need a similar cathartic. Inside the Commons, the republication of Digby's defection speech caused considerable commotion.2 The opposition cause needed a literary counterploy, which was exactly the mission of An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech in the House of Commons, a polished and well-mannered 1 2

The Lord Digby His Last Speech against the Earle of Strafford ([London,] 1641). C/, II, pp. 207, 208-9; BL Harl. 479, fol. 57 a and b.

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exercise in damage control. Its anonymous author, though a "private man," had an "interest" in "the King and State" and so sought to relieve Digby of the burden of his new-found scruples.3 Digby had objected fiercely to the retrospective nature of the attainder. Most interestingly, An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech did not try to make a legal case for it. Rather, An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech employed idioms seen in The Case of Shipmony and Parker's religious pamphlets to deny the need to find a legal justification for killing a political opponent. The "safety of the people is the supreme Law." To change their government "without their consents" was "the highest Treason [that] can be committed against a State." This was the present case, which, as in writings in the established Parker canon, juxtaposed private and public interests. "Wicked Iudges and Counsellors" could transform a "a free mighty Monarchy" into a "slavish, and impotent tyrannie," and "bee Instruments of overthrowing the Common-wealth," because they believed they had more to gain "in their private fortunes" than they had to lose "in their parts of the publike." 4 In this emergency, parliament was the public's protector: "the representative Body, the High Court of the Kingdome" had "a liberty to doe any thing not unjust in it selfe (though not as yet legally declared to bee just) for the preservation of the greater body it represents." In such a situation, if "Prudence, and Policy" found the "Lawes already made" inadequate, the parliament was not bound by the laws of nature, the land, or of God to adhere to existing laws in a case "where the safety of the whole commeth into question." Scripture permitted ex post facto definitions of crime; and what God did, so could "the Assembly of Gods on Earth."5 The trappings of the imperial, sacral kingship devolved to the parliament, quite as one would expect from the efforts at clarification in Parker's religious tracts. In arguing that parliament had a latitude in dispensing with "punctilios of Lawes" that Parker never allowed the king alone, An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech fell but a little short in expressing the full contempt for the common law mind that was a hall-mark of the mature Parker.6 But was Parker the author? If so, then this was a tract that Thomason failed to attribute to his friend. The similarities, while more than suggestive, are not conclusive. There is one further bit of evidence, an episode later in Parker's career that may reflect upon this tract. An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech dwelt much on a matter raised by Digby, the critical role played by a written 3

4 5 6

An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech in the House of Commons . . . Now Printed in Regard of the Reprinting of that Speech ([London,] 1641), pp.3, 26. Thomason acquired another reply, slighter and less distinguished: An Aproved Answer to the Partiall and Vnlikt of Lord Digbies Speech ([London], 1641). An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech, pp. 12-13, 15. An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech, pp. 17, 21, 24. An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech, p. 21.

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note and testimony by the secretary of state, the elder Sir Henry Vane. These were thought to prove that at a meeting of the council Strafford had advocated the invasion of England by Irish troops. If the remarks were accurately reported, Stafford's treason was clear. However, Vane's puzzling recovery of memory after twice having confessed to having no recollection of the remarks at all, as well as suspicious shufflings of the key document by the younger Vane and by John Pym, left matters open to doubt. An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech rousingly defended the elder Vane, whose credibility had been shaken severely.7 While this was inevitable, given Digby's attack, and of no help in attribution, the tract's defense of Vane may impinge upon an otherwise murky episode in 1644. Upon completion of his service as secretary to the Committee of Safety, Parker sought the newly vacant post of registrar of the prerogative office. In June 1644 the MP Michael Oldisworth nearly wrested the office away from Parker, but was prevented - according to Parker's later account - only by a timely intervention by old Sir Henry Vane, who otherwise is not known to havefiguredin Parker's life.8 If An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech was in fact the work of Henry Parker, it would establish a way station between the position of The Case of Shipmony and the later fully developed hostility to legal scruples seen in Parker's tracts of 1642 and 1643. If not, then An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech becomes part of the "context." But without Parker, in July 1641, that part of the contextual terrain is almost unrelievedly barren. In the next year the situation changed dramatically.

II

It is one thing to violate the structure of law protecting the subject, another to lay claim to power historically and legally understood to be the king's. Well before the militia ordinance and the crisis it provoked, the houses of parliament without arousing any commotion at all had laid the claims that would later bring England to an impasse and, ultimately, war. Characteristically an emergency lay at the center of things, providing occasion, rationale, and cloak for a species of emergency action that soon enough would become the object of intense scrutiny: the parliamentary ordinance.9 The requisite precondition was the king's departure into Scot7 8 9

An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech, pp. 4-10. Henry Parker, Memorial! {n.p.,n.d.) [BL 669 f. 11 (101)]; this is the second memorial. See p. 24 and n. 104. This section and the next draw from my treatment of the same matters in "The Great Council of Parliament and the First Ordinances: The Constitutional Theory of the Civil War," Journal of British Studies, 31 (April 1992), pp. 133-62, to which the reader is referred for more extensive treatment and more detailed documentation.

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land in August 1641. The prospect was fraught with real-enough peril. No one was quite certain what a settlement with the Scots might amount to, and to get to Edinburgh the king had to pass by temptation twice, as he made his way through both the English and the Scottish lines in the north. The news was contradictory but unreassuring. The earl of Holland, the English commander, sent a series of ominous, even frantic messages to his fellow peers about a sudden reversal of Covenanter allegiance; Holland himself was the target of other rumors, as was nearly anyone with command of or access to arms. Even after Charles made his way to Edinburgh, and the Scots left England, both without incident, fears were recycled as Charles and the Scottish parliament began negotiations in earnest.10 In this climate, with the king out of the country and the privy council a shadow of its former self, the two houses transacted some of their business in the form of five "ordinances." The first established a protocol for "committees" to attend upon the king in Edinburgh (and less officially to keep an eye out for danger coming from the parliament in Scotland). Others established a day of thanksgiving for the peace between the kingdoms, made administrative adjustments to payment procedures for poll money, attempted to disarm recusants and their families, and stopped the departure of troops into foreign service.11 There was real doubt about what the houses had done. Precedent provided little help, and recent parliamentary usage, almost none. But although there was some heated (and revealing) debate about the ordinance disarming recusants, in no sense were these ordinances a matter of contention between the king and his friends, and the parliamentary leadership. Charles himself, when informed simultaneously about an ordinance and the poaching of royal deer, reserved all his indignation for the latter; Hyde and Falkland, who would be amongst thefiercestcritics of the militia ordinance, did their share to promote the ordinance to prevent soldiers from entering foreign service.12 However ravenous the parliamentary wolf and his ordinances were to become in the not-so-distant future, the August-September ordinances found their sheep's clothing in a melange of received ideas. Of these most important was the seeming platitude that parliament was the "great council" of the king and kingdom. This, it will be remembered, was Parker's insistent theme in The Case of Shipmony, a leitmotif through his other known works, and, in the early years of Parker's pamphleteering before thefigurebecame a public commonplace, a possible indication of Parker's authorship of unattributed tracts. Even in 1640 and early 1641 Parker could not have been unaware of its latent implications. But for many of Parker's readers, the claim that 10 11 12

"The Great Council of Parliaments and the First Ordinances," pp. 140-3. L7,IV, pp.372, 375, 383, 385,394. Mendle, "The Great Council of Parliaments and the First Ordinances," pp. 149-50.

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parliament was the great council probably meant little or nothing; it was a visible emblem of a hidden agenda. The great council figure had a history. Modern scholarship and seventeenth-century opinion concur that there is a family resemblance between medieval parliaments and great councils, although scholars now and then do not agree on the precise lines of affinity. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the great council identification had become, at the least, a marker for the claims advanced in the Commons to have a free advisory interest in any of the kingdom's affairs, particularly those having to do with the king's government and prerogative authority. The parliament-asgreat-council formula pointed to a realm of competence distinct from parliament's legislative and taxing role, for which the slogan was often "the representative body of the kingdom," and its judicial activity (the "high court of parliament"). Thus from Wentworth's case in 1576 to James Vs wrangle with the parliament of 1621, the great council theme had been yoked to the claim of liberty of speech in parliament, the right to discuss affairs belonging, so it was usually held, to the king's executive competence within the dominium regale. Before 1640, there is little indication that anyone in parliamentary circles, with the exception of James Whitelocke, thought systematically in terms of anything other than proffering advice in executive matters, or, at most, holding executive matters hostage to parliament's other, undoubted functions. Direct "determination," as opposed to non-compulsory advice, lay with the king alone, a phrasing that usually meant the king with the advice of his own council. This does not mean that those fearful of an unchained dominium regale had no language to state their concerns. When opponents of early Stuart absolutism made their case, usually they did so in terms of the law. The law, they argued, made no exception for one obnoxious manifestation or another of the dominium regale; the prerogative and the king's discretionary power worked within the law (by which purists meant the common law), not beyond it. The king could do no wrong, so wrongful acts undertaken in the name of the king's government needed a bridle of legal restraint. Of course, no one admitted to wanting the reins in his own hands. 13 The summoning of the Long Parliament saw new developments. Charles' dominium regale was in disarray. Much of its personnel was incarcerated, in exile, under investigation or the threat of it, or desperately seeking new parliamentary masters. The privy council itself functioned after a fashion, but the much-heralded bridge appointments and a new political climate limited its effectiveness. Unsurprisingly, and without theory or coordination, the two houses stepped into the conciliar breach, not only advising, but also in many instances determining; for example, both the Commons and the Lords simply took over censorship functions earlier accorded to the Star Chamber. The 13

Mendle, "The Great Council of Parliaments and the First Ordinances," pp. 134-9.

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constitutional significance of these actions was generally not raised, and their propriety not questioned. Especially after the royal assent to the non-dissolution act, the two houses became the great council in a way that had not been true before. According to prevailing theory, royal councils supplied remedies for the inevitable "defects" of the person (or natural body) of the king.14 Ordinarily in political matters they supplied advice which a sage king followed or, upon the most excellent and rare reasons, rejected, presumably in favor of another counsel (as in the royal formula of denial of a public bill, le roy s'avisera, the king will take advice). In legal matters, the advice of the king's judges was virtually binding upon him. There were also special cases when the defects incident to a situation required a council to do more than advise. The defects of royal minority or physical or mental incapacity created one peril, the absence of the king from the realm another. Charles' departure to Edinburgh thus created a constitutional opening as well as a danger. One approach to this situation was the request for the appointment of a custos regni during the king's absence. The custos' military responsibilities were not an issue of contention; the proposal foundered upon the custos' authority to give the royal assent to legislation. The Lords were suspicious of a blanket commission, fearing that this would shift the whole constitutional burden on to their house. Equally, though, some members of the lower house saw the need of the moment in non-legislative, executive terms: they called for a provision adequate to "emergent Occasions for the Safety of the Kingdom."15 Falkland noted specifically the need to cover "occasions of passing proclamations," 16 which were, of course, issued by the king and his privy council, and might conceivably be issued by that council alone upon a suitable emergency created by the absence or other defect of the king. And that leads precisely to the nature of thefirstparliamentary ordinances - the parliamentary analogues of proclamations and other actions of the privy council, many of which (including proclamations) were technically still known as ordinances. Thus while Sir Simonds D'Ewes went looking for a specifically parliamentary precedent for the summer 1641 ordinances (probably chasing a will-o-the-wisp of Sir Edward Coke), what was predominantly at work was a kind of analogical thinking and, with it, a transfer of power. The great council would act as a more assured privy council would in a similar situation. Thefirstordinance establishing the committees to attend the king in Edinburgh did nothing so remarkable as to require the special term; but earlier, franker versions had referred to the "committees" as "commission14 15 16

For the theory of defects, see Sir Matthew Hale, Sir Matthew Wale's Prerogatives of the King, ed. D. E. C. Yale (London, 1976), pp.93, 106-32. BL Harl. 479, fols. 140b, 141a (9 August); ZJ, IV, p. 356 (10 August). BL Harl. 5047, fol. 55a.

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ers" and had addressed openly the need to conduct a direct diplomacy with the Scots - and that was certainly matter for an ordinance. The printed version of the ordinance declaring a day of thanksgiving (a traditional matter for proclamation) was in fact closely modeled on a royal proclamation, and was distributed through the same channels.17 The other ordinances followed paths pursued earlier by proclamations, not statutes. Indeed, the one nearexception proves the rule. D'Ewes and John Selden, both careful legal thinkers, objected to the ordinance disarming recusants because they believed it went beyond the enforcement of old law into the making of new law in matters of life and property - thus straying into what had long been regarded as illegitimate activity for a proclamation.18 Neither they nor anyone else on record objected to the propriety of bicameral ordinances as such. The issue was simply whether the ordinance (an executive action, whether undertaken by king and council or, exceptionally but appropriately, the great council alone) had moved into the terrain of life and property- matters of legislation, taxation, and jurisprudence. The process by which this had occurred was unexceptionable, although matters had drifted far from the freedom of speech of Elizabeth and James I: "instructions" sent to the committees in Edinburgh justified the ordinance prohibiting foreign military service in terms of the "Duties" of "Counsellors to His Majesty's Great Council of Parliament," which had led them to consider matters involved in "the making or strengthening of Alliances Abroad" and "Reason of State."19 ill

If all this was the embryo of constitutional revolution, no one in the autumn of 1641 noticed the conception. The next time around, however, matters would dispose themselves quite differently. Another emergency, another absence (of sorts) of the king, another ordinance of the great council - but this time the king objected vigorously, and his growing party grafted newfound constitutional and legal scruples to their now already well-rooted fears of a puritan takeover of the church. This time, too, the full weight of assumption bore upon what the houses did, and why they and their opponents said they did it: what emerged was bicameral parliamentary absolutism. If there had been an inkling of this before, it had been in the interstices of Parker's Case of Shipmony, and, so it has been suggested, in the remarkable reply to Digby's speech on Strafford's attainder. When the houses needed further support for their position, they would find it Parker's Observations. 17 18 19

BL 669 f. 3 (12); Mendle, "The Great Council of Parliaments and the First Ordinances," pp. 145, 148. BL Harl. 164, fols. 70a, 78b-79a. L/, IV, p. 394. The instructions stated that the king had earlier given the houses the power of consent in the matter of the Spanish troops.

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The new emergency was not an event, but rather an increasingly desperate public mood following a good many frights. The Irish rebellion, the "Incident" in Scotland, and the parliamentary leadership's aggressive maneuvering after the September recess led to marked heightening of fears and tensions in November 1641. For both royalists and their opponents, security concerns became all but obsessive. The need for a "posture of defense" (a cry that was bound inextricably with questions of command and control) joined the other elements of an already ugly and rapidly deteriorating political environment. The Grand Remonstrance and the petitioning and crowd campaigns accompanying it; mounting intimidation, some of it physical, upon bishops and (so they were dubbed by the faithful) "bad lords"; and street scuffles between parliamentarian supporters and young royalists were succeeded by the overthrow of the effectively royalist government of the city, by Charles' attempt to arrest the Five Members, and by the removal of the Commons from Westminster into the bowels of puritan-controlled London. This led to Charles' own departure from London on 11 January, a removal that became part of the logic of the militia ordinance. As early as 18 January, there was talk of executing the much-desired posture of defense by means of a militia "ordinance." On 25 January the Commons presented a petition to the king to this general effect, stating that since the upper house had as yet refused to join with the Commons in a petition to the king to put the Tower and armed forces under the control of personnel approved by parliament, the Commons would appeal to the king directly.20 Charles easily parried the demand, waiting for a more regular course; the Lords were then subjected to extreme pressure, even unto talk of their abolition as a distinct chamber. Voting Charles' earlier maneuver a denial, on 31 January the Commons drafted the first version of the militia ordinance, and awaited the acquiescence of the now-diminished upper house.21 This came in stages, although the outcome was not in doubt by the first days of February. On 16 February the Lords agreed to a revised militia ordinance, amended at their insistence to make the enforcement procedure somewhat less arbitrary, a matter that had long bedeviled royal proclamations and had been a barely subcutaneous concern with the August and September ordinances. Like the Commons' petition to the king of 25 January, the militia ordinance that emerged from these debates envisioned action by the king as well as the houses of parliament. The exclusion of the king, though contemplated in some quarters, was not part of the ordinance's wording or in any sense its essence. The ordinance differed from an act not in respect of the number of constituent parts assenting to it, but in the kind of action it contemplated: an 20 21

Private Journals /, p. 105; C/, II, p. 395. C/, II, p. 406; Private Journals /, pp. 551-2.

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emergency response to a situation (it was argued) so desperate that the normal legal courses simply could not be followed. Interestingly, on the same day that the Lords accepted this tripartite version of the militia ordinance, both houses without the king tended to naval procurement; the Lords called it an "order," the Commons an "ordinance," while the king took no notice of it all, presumably because this emergency funding measure crossed no Rubicon.22 The militia ordinance was different. Charles refused to do what was asked, give "the Royal Assent," and insisted that only an "Act of Parliament" could do something so fundamental as change the law - yet another indication that an ordinance was distinguished from an act of parliament by its matter and function, not the number of parties assenting to it. 23 This rejection provoked the bicameral version of the ordinance. To the houses, the king's denial proved that the king was the pawn of the "evil counsellors" whose enmity to "the State" threatened its very existence. The king's going into "any remote Parts from his Parliament" exacerbated the emergency, and created a kind of absence. The bicameral ordinance was the appropriate "speedy Remedy."24 Debate showed that the great council had understood itself to have moved from "advice" to determination, even to taking a self-menacing weapon out of the king's hands or taking his hands off the helm of the ship of state.25 Even before the bicameral ordinance was adopted on 5 March, the king's position had been defined, as the so-called constitutional royalists writing for the king saw the houses' actions as exercises of "arbitrary Power" in defiance of the traditional constitution and the rule of law.26 The elaborations and amplifications of the war of words never muted the original theme. Bicameral ordinances destroyed both the subject's "title to Magna Charta"27 as well as the ancient constitution that had encased certain of the king's rights within the dominium regale. Parliament may have been the great council, but that did not divest the king of his right to hear their advice and not act upon it. 28 The Answer to the XIX Propositions, whatever else it may have been, was a lecture on the independent right of a king and on the limits of the power of both houses in matters of "government." 22 23 24 25

26

27 28

C/, II, pp. 434-5; LJ, IV, pp. 609-10; Private Journals /, p. 397. C/, II, pp. 4 5 9 - 6 0 . C/, II, p. 460. The Lords accepted these resolutions in the afternoon; L/, IV, p. 620. Private journals /, p. 482. Sir Ralph Verney, Verney Papers. Notes of Proceedings in the Long Parliament temp. Charles /, ed. John Bruce, Camden Society Publication no. 31 (1st series) (London, 1845), p. 184; this entry is in cipher. For the key, see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, p. 224 n. 24. C/, II, p. 476; Edward Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection (London, 1642[/3]), p. 91. This point closely mimicked debates within the house and probably reflected Hyde's judgment of the most effective form of resistance. Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, pp.250-1; see also pp.285, 287. Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, p. 146.

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Parker wrote in support of the houses' responses to the king's spokesmen. It is sometimes thought that all the quires of parliamentary verbiage in the public exchanges provided no very coherent response to the king's charges. This is not so. Notwithstanding the boilerplate expressions of gratitude and duty to the king, the houses did not shrink from the most forthright statements of their own position. Perhaps for those expecting or hoping for some other case than the houses offered, the declarations are mystifying. There is precious little to smack of resistance theory and monarchomach notions; and tight little nods to the commonplaces about the common good do not lead to deep obeisance to democratic or populist ideals. Even suitably aristocratic notions such as Tacitean republicanism or classical mixed government are at most mists in the air. And for those who following Bodin's lead make legislative action the principal manifestation of sovereignty, the houses' continuing insistence that the militia ordinance was not a change of the law nor an attempt to legislate without the king seems an evasive denial of responsibility. There is an element of truth to this last point, at least insofar as it reflects some royalists' fears and some parliamentary supporters' hopes. However, it quite misses what the houses actually claimed, which is probably what a good many leaders in thought and action actually intended. And it also does not account for what the houses' royalist opponents charged them with - seizure of executive authority, and its use in a manner reminiscent of what opponents of the early Stuarts had always considered absolutism. Parliament's own declarations, far from rejecting the language and style of Stuart absolutism, appropriated them; it will be remembered that Parker's The Case of Shipmony had adopted a surprisingly accommodating posture towards the absolutism of the ship money judges. Thus the king's charges of arbitrary government were denied halfheartedly and justified with full vigor. When the king condemned the bipartite version of the ordinance, the houses replied that the bipartite version had become even more necessary as a result of the king's earlier denial of assent to the tripartite version, and that the ordinance was justified "by the fundamentall Laws of the Kingdome," a phrasing that to those who urged it meant the laws of God, nature, and necessity.29 When the king replied in a vein similar to worried legal conservatives in both houses, that England's laws were not so lightly known or established, the houses produced the claim that they alone constituted the supreme judicature, thus becoming judges of the legality of their own bicameral actions.30 In the declaration or remonstrance of 19 May 29 30

C/, II, p. 479. Private Journals II, pp. 41-4. See also ZJ, IV, p. 646.

Some members tried fruitlessly to include the king by speaking of "parliament" rather than the two houses; CJ, II, pp. 481, 486-7; LJ, IV, p. 650; Private Journals U, pp. 48, 55-6, 60; Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, p. 114.

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1642, the houses provided the fullest synthesis of their position to date. Constituting "the supream court and highest Councell," the houses undertook the self-preserving action required by the king's "dangerous absenting" himself from the great council. This was not a law, but an ordinance, a way "more speedy, more easily alterable,... more proper and more applicable to the present occasion, then a Bill." While the power to save the kingdom was "by the Constitution of this Kingdome, ... in his Majestie, and in his Parliament together," the "Wisdome of this State" gave "the Houses of Parliament ... a power to supply what shall be wanting on the part of the* Prince." And the king's absence and his unwillingness to do what was "necessary" were sufficient evidences of his failure to follow the "advice and direction" of the great council.31 The defense of this position from royal attack was the raison d'etre of Observations and its immediate predecessor, Some Few Observations. IV

Certainly once, perhaps twice, before Observations, Parker wrote on behalf of parliament in the war of words. Some Few Observations, attributed by Thomason to Parker, was a tune-up for the major tract to follow. A Question Answered: How Laws Are to Be Understood, and Obedience Yielded? is very possibly by Parker, an anonymous broadside that preceded Observations by almost three months but which shared nearly identical phrasing with it. 32 Whoever was its author - and Parker must remain at the top of the list - this slight single sheet attracted a great deal of attention. In a furious message to the Lords of 22 April 1641, the king singled it out to the House of Lords as rank "Sedition" worthy of "exemplary Justice."33 Conversely, A Question Answered became almost a proof-text to the Levellers, an antidote to Romans

31 32

33

Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, pp. 205-8. [Henry Parker?], A Question Answered: How Laws Are to Be Understood, and Obedience Yielded? [London, 1642] [BL 669. f. 6 (7)]. For the attribution, see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 179, 187-8, 224 nn. 29, 30. Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, pp. 150-1; PRO SP16/490/12,16/490/12.1; BL 669 f. 5 (6). For Parker's avowal of the doctrine in other places, see Observations, pp.4 and 44, and Scotlands Holy War, p. 25. A trio of crises c. 11—15 April may have precipitated A Question Answered: the earls of Essex and Holland were faced with contradictory orders of attendance from the king and the Lords, the situation at Hull had suddenly worsened, and (most seriously) the houses had directly countermanded the king's efforts to raise troops for Ireland, raising precisely the issue of A Question Answered; See CJ, II: pp. 529-32 (13,14 April 1642); Private Journals II, pp. 163-5, 169-70, 177; LJ, IV, pp. 710, 712, 720; V, pp. 3, 4.

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13:1 cited in tract after Leveller tract simply by its place (p. 150) in Edward Husbands' An Exact Collection.34 The eponymous question was whether a subject could disobey the king's command to disregard the militia ordinance. As the question was phrased, the case addressed the dilemma of individual obedience more than the collective right of the people, but Parker (to accept his authorship) elided from one position to another. The constitutional right of the king was blandly conceded: "His Majesty (let it be granted) is intrusted by Law with the Militia" But this trust contained the implicit condition that it be used for the good of the kingdom; if that understanding were violated, the letter of the law turned against its spirit and equity. If a general pointed his artillery at his own troops "it did ipso facto estate the army, in a right of disobedience." Parker moved from individual disobedience to active collective assumption of power in Some Few Observations, a reply to the king's answer to the declaration of both houses of 19 May 1642. A polemical rebuttal of the king's hard-hitting answer was undoubtedly useful, but for the houses to have responded on that level would have appeared both scholastic and undignified. That circumstance joins with another in the genesis of Some Few Observations. Much as A Discourse Concerning Puritans shows signs of being written in the interest of Lord Say (specifically to defend him from the accusation of being an incendiary), Some Few Observations took special care to defend John Pym, particularly (as Parker scornfully put it) from the accusation that Pym was a political enchanter or "nigromancer." 35 The royal answer to parliament's 19 May declaration targeted the factual assumptions of parliament's case: the militia ordinance was undertaken to prevent a plot by the kingdom's enemies - but there was no plot; the king's absence was generated by the tumults - not the evil counsel of malignants. 36 The houses' insistence that they were supreme court and great council gave them what amounted to a dispensing and suspending power; by the same logic as the houses employed in the militia ordinance, they might declare that the younger brother inherited. The houses were headed to "the exercise of such an Arbitrary power as before they complained of." None of this could be cloaked by calling parliament the great council, for the rules had not yet changed: parliament's "advice" would always be welcomed, but "determi34

35

36

Amongst the many citations, one stands out because it explicitly connected A Question Answered and Observations: John Lilburne, Innocency and Truth justified (London, 1645 [1646]), p. 57. Lilburne says the position of A Question Answered is "notably discussed by the Author of the printed observations upon some of his Majesties late answers and expresses (who is commonly reputed to be one in a speciall manner to be imployed by the Parliament).*' For more on the Leveller appreciation of Parker, see below, p. 153. Some Few Observations, p. 4, cf. p. 6. In a matter of weeks, Parker would become, in effect, Pym's employee as secretary to the Committee of Safety, in which Pym played his usual leading role. Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, pp. 240-2.

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nation" belonged to the king.37 This applied to all matters of state, those addressed by ordinance as much as by bill.38 Parker's task in Some Few Observations was to refute the king's rejoinder. Readers of Observations have no trouble rinding in Some Few Observations clear antecedents of the more famous tract's doctrines. When pushed by the king's charges to face up to the nature of parliament's actions, Parker claimed for the two houses of parliament what the earlier royalists had claimed for the king alone. As the ship money judges had earlier accepted that in ordinary times the king had to go through parliament for taxes, Parker did not deny the king's right "to order the Militia in times of no extraordinary danger." But in extraordinary danger parliament (or the two houses or "whatsoever name is due") can do what "the Kingdome thinkes most safe."39 In so doing, parliament, acting on grounds of "extraordinary necessity of State," functioned as a council rather than a court or a legislature. It was supreme: the "judgement of the major part in Parliament, is the sence of the whole Parliament; and ... the whole Kingdome; and ... is more vigorous, and sacred, and unquestionable, and further beyond all appeal, then that which is the judgement of the King alone... or... with any other inferiour Clandestine Councell."40 To the objection that the usurpation of the king's rights was the epicenter of a wider attack upon individual rights, Parker replied that the king's "interest in the Militia" was "not privileged more then a subiect['s], for the States proprietie cannot be excluded out of eyther." No individual rights were "pure and unconditionall." All were subject to "common right." 41 For all the bravado, Parker had little to say about the relation of the great council to the law and about the similarities of his position, and the parliament's, to the absolutism of the 1630s. Much could be inferred, as the king's writers had done with parliament's own declarations, but little was stated. Whether the silence owed more to indifference than to a more politic sort of reticence is unclear, but it was precisely in its forthrightness in this matter that Observations differed from Some Few Observations, Otherwise, the two tracts were scarcely distinguishable in point of doctrine. Observations, 37 38

39 40 41

Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, pp. 250-4. Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, p. 250. In a brief but important remark, the king declared his view of the constitutional status of the ordinance: "We never said, There was no such thing as an Ordinance (though Wee know that they have been long dis-used) but there was never any Ordinance, or can be without the Kings consent." This encapsulated both the previous and future sense of an ordinance. The king's remarks conceded the central point of the great council-executive action identification, while insisting that no action of the monarchy proceeded apart from the king. No royalist declaration ever dealt with the AugustSeptember 1641 ordinances. Some Few Observations, pp. 2-3, 5. Some Few Observations, p. 9; for the counciliar aspect, see also p. 4. Some Few Observations, p. 8.

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however, could not afford to have ducked the question. The king's answer to the houses' remonstrance of 26 May (which appeared too late for Some Few Observations to address) made discretion impossible. In a brutal exegesis of the parliamentary position, an extraordinary conclusion moved beyond ironic charges of absolutism to a simple reduction of the parliamentary case to its absolutist essence. Four of seven propositions made the point piecemeal: (1) the houses had "an absolute power of declaring the Law," (2) the houses were bound by "no Presidents" and "may doe what they please," (3) the houses without the king could "dispose of any thing" for the sake of "the publike good," of which they alone were supreme judge, (4) the houses alone were to judge of the treason of their members. The fifth drew the theoretical conclusion: "the Sovereigne Power resides in both Houses of Parliament, and that we have no negative voice ... We Our Self must be subject to their Commands."42

As the king's answer to the houses' remonstrance of 26 May ended with these startling reductions, Parker ended Observations with their defense. To be sure, Parker denied some matters (notably, that the houses desired a power to depose the king). In the main, though, Parker used Observations to provide the underpinning for the triumphant acceptance of the very worst accusations the king's spokesmen could make against the houses, and for a comparison of them with a similar list that Parker compiled from the king's arguments. The rest of the tract was to sustain these conclusions, which were not a contrived exit, but the raison d'etre of the entire exercise. As its title indicates, the bulk of Observations was in the fashion of Some Few Observations and, indeed, most of Parker's oeuvre: a point-by-point rebuttal of opponents' arguments. Nevertheless, Parker had greater ambitions, and began his tract with some general considerations "for methods sake." The "contestation" of "Regall" and "Parliamentary" power could be understood through an examination of each power's efficient and final causes. The king's power, like all power, came from God, but this proved nothing. Nor did the king's parallel claim that his power came from the law, because law was "nothing else but the Pactions and agreements of such and such politique corporations," confirmed by God. Grounded, then, neither in direct divine grant nor a preexistent law, "power," regal or otherwise, "is originally inherent in the people, and is nothing else but that might and vigour 42

Husbands, ed., An Exact Collection, pp.297—8. The sixth conclusion attacked the parliamentary claim that it was not levying war against the king (with respect to Hull) but upholding his authority; the seventh unfairly accused the houses of claiming a right of deposition.

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which such or such a societie of men containes in it selfe."43 The people might make a law placing that power into "such and such hands." This granted, Parker derived the two subordinate maxims from this argument about the source of monarchical power. This first is that though the king "be singulis Major, yet he is universis minor" This commonplace of later medieval and early modern political thought was referred to a much less common maxim: "if the people be the true efficient cause of power, it is a rule in nature quicquid efficit tale, est magis tale [the cause of something is the greater thing]."44 The "same people" that was the efficient cause was also the final, cause of "Regall Authortitie," and salus populi was thus the "Paramount Law" of "all Politiques." The people were the efficient cause of parliaments as well as of kings. The relationship was even tighter, because parliaments were not, as were kings, mere agents or ministers of the people, but rather the same thing in a different mode. Cause and effect were the same.45 Similarly, although monarchs and parliaments also shared the same final cause, "publike safety and liberty," parliaments were more closely bound with the public good, which had not been "so effectually-provided by Monarchs till Parliaments were constituted, for the supplying of all defects in that Government."46 In short, as Parker had it later in the tract, parliament was "the whole kingdome it selfe" and "the State it self."47 Modern scholars have often settled upon these contributions to the flow of England's public discourse, marking them out as the central matter of Observations, and of Parker's place in civil war political thought. There is, perhaps, a less-than-optimal reason for the attention: these essays in natural law theorizing, occurring at the beginning of the tract, are rather more accessible than the constitutional, historical, and political back-and-forth that comprises the bulk of Observations-, particularly to American scholars, who are 43 44

45

46

Observations, p. 1. Observations, p. 2. On singulis major, universis minor, Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, II: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), pp.41, 45, 1 1 7 - 1 8 , 1 2 0 , 1 3 3 , 1 8 1 - 2 , 3 3 3 ^ , 3 4 2 , 3 4 7 . Quicquid efficit tale, est magis tale (also phrased as quod efficit tale est magis tale) is more mysterious, and attracted a good deal of contemporary notice. One critic thought Parker derived it from Suarez. I have found some close but verbally inexact parallels: Francisco Suarez, Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suarez, S. ]., 2 vols., trans. Gladys L. Williams, Ammi Brown, and John Waldron, intro. by James Brown Scott (Oxford, 1944), pp.39-40, II, pp.93 {=l:De Legibus, pp.39-40), 386 (=l:Defensio Fidei Catholicae, pp.207-8), 855 {=l:De Triplici Virtute, p. 821). Another parallel is to Althusius, The Politics of Johannes Althusius, trans, with intro. by Frederick S. Carney (Boston, 1964), pp.68, 117. See also below, pp.24-5. The passage is less than transparent. Observations, p. 5: "the whole Kingdome is not so much the Author as the essence it selfe of Parliaments, and by the former rule tis magis tale, because we see ipsum quid quod efficit tale." 47 Observations, p. 5. Observations, pp. 28, 34.

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attuned by their own seminal (and eighteenth-century) texts to expect grand thoughts and sentiments to accompany grand events, Parker's remarks seem to cut to the core. Even allowing for such bias, Parker's introduction remains significant. In the first place, by bringing such theorizing to bear on the constitutional debate, Parker did much to open the discourse to a far wider range of notions than the original participants (viz, "king" and "parliament") deployed. In the debates following Observations, several participants found this aspect of the emergent controversy congenial, and Parker himself attempted a general theory of politics in Jus Populi. Unquestionably, Parker's maxims joined his absolutism as foci of the grand debate. In the second place, Parker's invocation of the people as the source of all power amounted to an adequate, if brief, grounding for a theory of popular sovereignty; the identity of parliament and people made Parker's popular sovereignty also a doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Finally, the reduction of human law to "pactions" of particular corporations brutally demystified the relation of law to king and polity. Parker was now fully prepared, as with The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment he had not been, to "dispell umbrages" - to confront and dismiss the theology of kingship. Hierarchical analogies and arguments from descending theories of royal power, though "most pleasant," were false. Kings were not fathers, except to their own children. The patriarchal tie did not apply to the bond of "man and man... for civill ends." Nor were kings heads; the metaphor of the body politic was equally unhelpful. In the natural body, head and members lived and died together; in the body politic, the head needed the members, but the body could survive the "dissolution" of the head.48 Nevertheless, these opening passages and a few other remarks in a similar vein amount to only a small fraction of Observations. The sting of the king's bill of indictment may have sharpened Parker's tongue (and, some might argue, have led Parker to resort to the extreme remedy of natural law). But once Parker identified parliament and people, he felt free to return to the specifics of his case and the king's, and to return to political and constitutional controversies as they were commonly understood. Observations thus rehearsed familiar ground. It did so with a new-found anger, restating positions stated or implied in the parliamentary declarations and Some Few Observations in the most aggressive manner possible - viz, by owning the label and language of the royalist criticism. Thus the names of "arbitrary" and "absolute" power were no longer to be shunned: it was "necessary" for "every State somewhere" to have arbitrary power, just as each man

48

Observations, pp. 18—19. Cf. the remark, p. 41, about the "imaginary grandour" promoted by misguided monarchists.

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appropriately "has an absolute power over himself." Neither man nor state could hate itself, so this power held no danger - and, predictably, Parker added here that parliament was the state. 49 The selfsame "Arbitrary supremacy of Parliaments" applied also to the declaring of the law. 50 The finale followed seamlessly. The king charged the houses with assuming "an absolute indisputable power of declaring Law." Parker said the power must reside somewhere. The king charged the houses with abandoning the binding force of precedent; Parker concurred. Royalists had damned the houses for judging of "publike necessity without the King" and for claiming the right to "dispose of anything." Parker thought the role fit "by the vertue of representation, as the whole body of the State." When the king charged that the houses claimed "Soveraign power," even in the face of the king's "negative voyce," Parker replied in the idiom of executive supremacy: "This power is not claimed as ordinary; nor to any purpose, But to save the Kingdom from ruine." If these claims seemed terrible, Parker suggested, their opposites were worse. Parker finished by a list of counterpropositions, "drawn from the king's papers." The subject had a choice. Parker had made his. VI

Not quite yet had Parker finished his observing. Twice in July, under two different and misleading titles, Parker issued what purported to be a petition to the king from the inhabitants of London. Both titles, in various ways, revealed that the petition format was a cover. The first ignored the London connection; the second edition further lowered the veil of pretense from the title, which was now (in short form) The Danger to England Observed.51 Parker's imaginary petitioners responded to the king's recent "severall messages and commands" for "concurrence" with his plan "to invade his Great Councell." Following the now established Parkerian line, the petitioners declined, since parliament was a "sacred Court" and the kingdom's "representative, elected, intrusted Councell," superior to all "private" councils whatsoever.52 Conjoined with what were now cliches of parliamentarian

49 51

52

50 Observations, p. 34. Observations, p. 36. The first edition [BL E. 107(29)], dated by Thomason 17 July 1642 and attributed by him to Parker, is A Petition or Declaration, Humbly Desired to Be Presented to the View of His Most Excellent Majestie; by All His Majesties Most Loyall and Dutifull Subjects (London, 1642). The Danger to England Observed, Upon Deserting the High Court of Parliament. Humbly Desired by all Loyall and Dutifull Subjects to Bee Presented to His Most Excellent Majestie (London, 1642); the tract is self-dated 28 July 1642, and bears the BL shelfmark, E. 108 (17). Except for changes made to the title pages and the headline and block initial on p. 1, the editions used the same undistributed type. The Danger to England Observed, p. 1.

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discourse were some of the sharper insights that Parker had more recently been making. The King's "manifestoes," he said, were admirable enough in "generall Expressions" but belied by the particulars, the "strange persecution of a Parliament." "Professions" of "law, right, and limited power" could not obliterate the absolutist positions "intermingled" with them. While Parker derided the king's brutal exposure of the convolutions of parliamentary claims as "meere merriment," his pseudo-petitioners begged that the king concede "the Parliaments arbitrary power in declaring Laws, Sec." outside "any ground of charge."53 In 1642 there could be no more extraordinary demand. 53

The Danger to England Observed, pp. 4, 6.

rospect of a wholesome order of purer days - of 1640-2, when people and •arliament were in harmony; of the time before the Norman Conquest; of the ime before kings. "Providence hath given us our own choice; If we take it we are made; if not, the old judgement of God lies on us for our stupidity, and blindness." Power now ought to go the "just heirs," a parliament founded upon "the first principle for the liberty of the people" and clothed with the people's "Authority." Of course, there was a catch. It was now a parliament "backt with the power of a faythfull Army."19 In the crudest of revenges, the Fortescuean division of power had reasserted itself, precisely when it had been formally abolished. England had become a dominium politicum et militare. The hardest part to swallow remained the mysterious, mischievous 16 17 18

19

Jus Populi, p. 6; see also p. 13. Severall Poysonous and Sedicious Papers, p. 3. True Portraiture, p. 38: Charles' absolutist designs would have succeeded "if Divine Providence had not miraculously prevented." Scotlands Holy War, p. 24. Cf. Professor Zaller's discomfort ("Henry Parker and the Regiment of True Government," p. 281) at Parker's providentialism. I concur that Parker was not a millennarian; I disagree that Parker was "particularly anxious ... to avoid the imputation that the torch of grace passed from Parliament to the army." That, it seems to me, is inescapably what Parker thought had occurred. True Portraiture, pp. 39, 41, 42.

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Fortescuean "et." In what sense, indeed, had the army "back*" parliament? Who had "backt" whom? In his providential optimism, Parker overlooked the problem. At times he sounds like the Henry Parker of the early 1640s, the indignant political younger son brimming with confidence about the triumph of the "greater, and better party, that stands for the Majestie of Parliaments." Levellers and royalists had tried but failed to separate the people from parliament; even London was coming around.20 Alas, Parker could not quite believe himself; the public's privado remained, as a privado must ever be, cynical. He pricked his own bubble of hope, all but simultaneously fretting about the selfsame people's capacity to be fooled - by the divine right of kings, by the crowdpleasing antics of Lilburne, by the pseudo-scruples of the presbyterians. So Parker hedged his bet, advising the commonwealth's old and new enemies to submit to the higher powers, to the "last appeal" of the "decision of the Sword." Parker was not permitted to learn that the game was not yet over- or perhaps he was spared that sorrow. But the irony that his cause was undone not by the sword but by the contrary trumpets of the never-ending war of words would not have been lost upon the public's privado. Ill

As befits a privado, Parker remains elusive at the end of this study. One wonders where he would have pitched his tent in the treacherous, shifting terrain of the 1650s. Parker had already allowed the holy sword to compromise his parliamentary conscience; almost certainly he would not have been a die-hard Rumper. Probably, though, he would have found some relief, even solace, in the Protectorate; its seeming stability and practicality would have appealed to him. Equally, the Protectorate's blithe disregard for history and ancient constitutional form, which made it ridiculous to those conservative spirits to whom it was supposed to appeal, would have commended it all the more to Parker. The one indubitable point is that the Parker of 1642—4 and 1649—51 could not have accepted the Restoration, any more than the Restoration had room for Henry Parker: Parker's notions and writings figured prominently in Roger L'Estrange's catalogue of "Books, Libels, and Positions, which are to be supprest" in his Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press.21 Of course, some of the fog about the man might burn off under the sun of newly discovered evidence: a portrait (most unlikely, given Parker's rank) or 20 21

A Letter of Due Censure and Redargution, p. 29. Roger L'Estrange, Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (London, 1663), objected by title to Parker's True Portraiture, Observations, and Jus Populi, and devoted a section to the maxim Parker popularized, singulis major, universis minor, pp. 13, 18, 19—20; the words quoted above are from the running head on pp.8—9.

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(rather likely) letters and further tell-tales of Parker's hand in England's public and private archives. But perhaps not. It may be that we know as much or as little as ever we will about the ultimate irreconcilability of the roles assumed by the public's privado, a tension that a better-placed man of an earlier generation described as the predicament of a "vulger counselor." 22 Parker - the servant of Say, Essex, Pym, Cromwell, and Ireton - must have gained their trust in all the usual ways: by doing their bidding well and discreetly, by not betraying resentment through shirking the menial chores (in Parker's case of an amanuensis), by keeping eyes and ears open and lips sealed, and, no less importantly, by putting his masters at their social ease. Parker could not have served so many had he not served them well. Yet why did he serve so many? Essex, of course, died while Parker was in his service, and perhaps the best testimonial to Parker's work at the Committee of Safety died with Pym. But Parker's off-and-on tie to Lord Say and his falling fortunes in the middle and later 1640s - the failure to gain the prerogative office and the virtual exile to Hamburg- hint at incompatibilities intimated elsewhere. Had Henry, the child of a leading Sussex family, burned family bridges in becoming a metropolitanfigure?What experiences impelled the barrister of Lincoln's Inn to abandon and then contemn the common law? To ask such questions is to confess the hopelessness of answering them. But it is suggestive that the younger son who was forced to live by his wits ridiculed the foppish "young gallants" of his own social milieu, lectured Sir Ralph Verney on the imperative of making political choices by the lights of nature and reason, and could not accept that he was not by "philosophy" the equal of his elder brother.23 These views connect, one suspects, with perhaps the most revealing of Parker's autobiographical comments: that he passed by opportunities to enrich himself while at the Committee of Safety.24 The point, of course, is that nearly everyone else about him managed to serve himself as much as or more than the public. For men of the sort whom Parker served, religion was non-negotiable; the rest, however, had its price. Politically, they were willing to compromise - Verney in seeking some sort of composition, Essex in seeking peace, Pym in seeking to hold together his coalition, and Say, Cromwell, and Ireton in trying to stave off the social consequences of the equality of consciences in which they believed. And they let their private interests temper their public values, finding ways to feather their own nests as they feathered others'. If this was wrong by one logic, it was right by another: what else was a leader or a father supposed to do on behalf 22

23

See Neil Cuddy, "The Conflicting Loyalties of a 'vulger counselor': The Third Earl of Southampton, 1 5 9 7 - 1 6 2 4 , " n. 15. See above, p p . 4 , 2 3 , 128—9, 1 5 1 . Also see Parker's poem to Massinger, quoted above p . 6

n.21. 24

See above, p. 2 0 .

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of those particularly dependent upon him? Whatever the reasons, Parker could not go along. He had greater faith in his patrons and the parliament (and later, the army) than they merited, more even than they thought they merited. What did Essex really think of Parker's promotion of him as dictator? How many members of parliament were as convinced as Parker of their rectitude, or willing as he to free themselves from the bonds of law? Whatever orders the contrary trumpets blared in his head, they never distracted Parker from putting the publicfirst;that was the point of his elegy on Essex. The public's privado took his cause and his job seriously. And maybe we glimpse Parker's problem with those who knew him best: he cared too much.

Appendix: the writings of Henry Parker

The most important lists of Parker's writings are in the index to G.K. Fortescue, ed., Catalogue of the Pamphlets ... Collected by George Thomason, 1640-1661, 2 vols. (London, 1908), and in Donald M. Wing, ed., Short-Title Catalogue ... 1641-1700, 2nd edn., revised and edited by John J. Morrison, et al. (New York, 1988). The Thomason tracts include a number of Parker manuscripts (which fall outside the compass of Wing); Thomason's title page attributions, though not infallible, vastly enlarge the Parkerian corpus. The second edition of Wing significantly emends the list in the first edition, and (apart from the manuscripts) is now the best available enumeration, as far as it goes. 1 Neither list is entirely satisfactory. Both include a number of tracts that I do not believe Parker wrote, or are at best doubtfully ascribed to Parker; Wing omits post-1640 tracts Parker certainly did write, and Fortescue does not keep up with variant titles. In the following, I have used the Thomason collection as a basis. That is because all of Parker's authentic printed writings from 1640 to Parker's death are to be found in one form or another in the collection. I have included the Thomason shelfmark and the Wing or STC number for each item for which it is available. Further comments (e.g., about multiple editions, reissues under different titles, and modern republication) are made as is appropriate. Where I have indicated that Thomason attributed a tract to Parker, I refer to Thomason's manuscript note on the tract, and not necessarily to Fortescue's catalogue. Where the author's name or part of his name is not in brackets, it is found on the title page or elsewhere in the tract (I have silently expanded the form "Hen." to Henry). Within categories, items are listed in chronological order. With Thomason items, I follow the Thomason dates or place-order in the Thomason collection. I also include a list of three anonymous and otherwise unattributed tracts that I have tentatively ascribed to Parker, and a list of manuscript writings of direct significance for Parker's political outlook. PRINTED WRITINGS IN THE T H O M A S O N COLLECTION [Parker, Henry.] The Case of Shipmony. [London,] 1640. BL E. 204 (4); Pollard and Redgrave STC 19215, 19216, 19216.5. Thomason ascribed this to Parker. [Parker, Henry.] A Discourse Concerning Puritans. [London,] 1641. BL E. 204 (3); Wing L1875; 2nd edn. L1876. Thomason ascribed this to Parker, the first Parker 1

Other lists of primary research value include the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books (valuable for its extensive cross-references), the Parker entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and (for clearing of some misattributions) Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, III, pp. 451-2. 191

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tract in his collection. Wing still ascribes it to John Ley. Parker acknowledged it as his own (see p. 18). P[arker,] H[enry.] The Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated. London, 1641. BL E. 162 (4); Wing P418. Preface signed by "H.P." Thomason notes Henry Parker. [Parker, Henry.] The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment. London, 1641. BL E. 176 (18); Wing P428. Thomason attributed this to Parker. [Parker, Henry.] The Vintners Answer to Some Scandalous Phamphlets. London, 1642. BL E. 140 (1); Wing P431. Thomason ascribed this to Parker. P[arker,] H[enry.] The Altar Dispute. London, 1641[/2]. BL E. 140 (19); Wing P393. Thomason expanded the title page initials; on sig. A2 verso "H.P." describes himself as Lord Say's "Allies-Man." [Parker, Henry.] Some Few Observations upon His Majesties Late Answer to the Declaration, or Remonstrance of the Lords and Commons of the 19. of May, 1642. [London, 1642.] BL E. 151 (23); Wing P424; another edn.: Wing P423. Thomason ascribed this to Parker. [Parker, Henry.] Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. [London, 1642.] BLE. 153 (26); Wing P412. Thomason attributed the tract to Parker. Wing lists another edition, P412A and a second corrected edition, P413. P413 was reprinted in photographic facsimile in Haller, ed., Tracts on Liberty, II, pp. 167-213. A modernized, abridged, and annotated text was published in Howard Erskine-Hall and Graham Storey, eds., Revolutionary Prose of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1983), pp.35-63. [Parker, Henry.] A Petition or Declaration, Humbly Desired to Be Presented to the View of His Most Excellent Majestie; by All His Majesties Most Loyall and Dutifull Subjects. London, 1642. BL E. 107(29); Wing P415. Dated by Thomason 17 July 1642 and attributed by him to Parker. With changes only to the title page and p.l, the same undistributed type was used in The Danger to England Observed, Upon Deserting the High Court of Parliament. Humbly Desired by all Loyall and Dutifull Subjects to Bee Presented to His Most Excellent Majestie (London, 1642); the tract is self-dated 28 July 1642, and bears the BL shelfmark E. 108 (17); Wing P401. P[arker,] H[enry.] The General Junto, or the Councell of Union. [London,] 1642. BL 669 f. 18 (1); Wing 402. Thomason wrote a tipped-in note of attribution at the beginning of the volume in which the tract appears; he also expanded the initials of the epistle dedicatory. [Parker, Henry.] The Contra-Replicant. [London, 1642/3.] BL E. 87 (5); Wing P400. Thomason attributed The Contra-Replicant to Parker. Tract was reissued in 1642[/3] [Wing P392A] and 1643 [P392B; BL E. 101 (23)], without a Thomason attribution under the title Accomodation Cordially Desired, and Really Intended. [Parker, Henry.] To the High Court of Parliament: The Humble Remonstrance of the Company of Stationers. London, 1643. BL E. 247 (23); Wing P425. Thomason supplied only a month date (April 1643) and an attribution. Reprinted, inaccurately, in Edward Arber, ed., Transcripts of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640, 5 vols. (London, 1875-84), I, pp. 584-8. [Parker, Henry.] The Oath of Pacification. London, 1643. BL E. 70 (27); Wing P410. Though ascribed to Parker in the printed index, not attributed to Parker by Thomason. [Parker, Henry.] Jus Populi. London, 1644. BL E. 12 (25); Wing P403. Though ascribed to Parker in the printed index, not attributed to Parker by Thomason. [Parker, Henry.] Mr. William Wheelers Case from his Own Relation. [London, 1644/5.] BL E. 25 (8); Wing P408. Thomason dated his copy 18 January 1644/5, attributing it to Parker.

Appendix: the writings of Henry Parker

193

[Parker, Henry,] The Speech of Their Excellencies the Lords Ambassadors Extraordinary ... Together with a Moderate Answer by a Private Gentleman. London, 1645.

BL E. 278 (9); Wing S4867. Thomason credited Parker with the "Moderate Answer." The single-sheet versions of the ambassadors' speech [BL 669 f. 10 (28); Wing S4866 and Wing S4867A] do not contain Parker's response. [Parker, Henry.] Jus Regum. London, 1645. BL E. 284(24); Wing P404. Thomason made a title page attribution. [Parker, Henry, and Thomas May and John Sadler, eds.] The Kings Cabinet Opened. London, 1645. BL E. 292 (27); Wing C2358. Underneath the title page's line "Together, with some Annotations thereupon" Thomason indicated Parker's authorship. [Parker, Henry.] The Irish Massacre. [London, 1646.] BL E. 353 (15); under the title, Wing cross-references The Irish Massacre to Parker, in which place there is no entry. Thomason acquired this incomplete tract sometime in September 1646. His note reads, "by Hen. Parker Esq begun before he made over to Hamb[urg] but not finished." The tract breaks abruptly on p. 24, after concluding only one of five observations announced and begun on p. 20. Parker, Henry. Memoriall, 4 May 1647. BL 669 f. 11 (8). Not listed in Wing. Thomson notes the memorial was "presented" 4 May. Not signed by Parker but self-evidently his. P[arker,] H[enry,] "Barrester of Lincolnes Inn." An Answer to the Poysonous Seditious Paper of Mr. David Jenkins. London, 1647. BL E. 386 (14); Wing P395. Thomason expanded the title page initial "P" to Parker. P[arker,] H[enry.] "Barrester of Lincolnes Inn." Severall Poysonous and Seditious Papers of Mr. David Jenkins Answered. London, 1647. BL E. 393 (8); Wing P422. Thomason expanded the title page initial "P" to Parker. Parker, Henry. Memoriall [the second memorial]. [London, 1648?.] BL 669 f. 11 (110); Wing P407. Signed by Parker. Thomason's own date for this piece, in error, is "January 1646" (viz, 1647). However, the second memorial carries events beyond June 1647 (see thirteen lines from bottom) and the place-order of the second Memoriall amongst the folios gives a date between 21 December 1647 and early January 1648.2 Parker, Henry. Of a Free Trade. London, 1648. BL E. 425 (18); Wing P414. Sig. A2 verso: Parker signed the epistle dedicatory from Hamburg, 30 December 1647. P[arker,] Hfenry.] A Letter of Due Censure and Redargution to Lieut. Coll: John

Lilburne. London, 1650. BL E. 603 (14); Wing P405. Thomason supplied Parker's name to the title page, and (p. 41) expanded the initials at the end of the tract (which is, as the title indicates, in the form of a letter) from H. P. to "H.Parker. Crom: Servant."

[Parker, Henry.] The True Portraiture of the Kings of England. London, 1650. BL E.

609 (2); Wing P429. Thomason's copy carries no other attribution. In the preface, signed "Henry Parker," Parker disavowed writing the balance of the tract; my reasons for assigning the whole to Parker are given on pp. 166-8 above. The tract was republished in 1688 [Wing P430], in a text that also included the Political Catechism sometimes erroneously ascribed to Parker; a few internal changes (e.g., pp. 28, 39) and a new ending (pp. 40-8) accommodated the Restoration and late Revolution. True Portraiture was included in the Somers tracts (1809). A Short

2

Priority of publication of this item and the next cannot be determined.

194

Appendix: the writings of Henry Parker

History of the Kings of England (London, 1692) is a reissue, though without Parker's signed preface or other identification to Parker, of the 1688 edition (including the Political Catechism) with a new title page; it has two Wing numbers, P422A and S3601. The still unsold sheets of the 1688 edition were reissued with a variant of the 1692 title page in Dublin in 1715. For this and Jonathan Swift's marginalia upon a copy of the 1715 edition, see Michael Treadwell, "Swift and A Short History of the Kings of England," in John Irwin Fischer, Hermann J. Real, and James Woolley, eds., Swift and his Contexts (New York, 1989), pp. 176-89. [Parker, Henry.] Reformation in Courts in Cases Testamentary [London, 1650.] BL E. 616 (5); Wing P419. Thomason dated the first page 14 November, and on p. 11 added a note attributing the tract to Parker, dated 15 November. Parker, H[enry]. Scotlands Holy War. London, 1651. BL E. 621 (16); Wing P420. [Parker, Henry.] The Cheif Affairs of Ireland Truly Communicated. London, 1651. BL E. 652 (14); Wing P398. Thomason's copy has the usual attribution, and is dated 2 February 1651/2.

TRACTS PERHAPS BY PARKER Divine and Politike Observations. [Amsterdam,] 1638. Pollard and Redgrave STC 15309. See pp. 6-10 above. An Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech in the House of Commons ... Now Printed in Regard of the Reprinting of that Speech. [London,] 1641. BL E. 198 (3); Wing A3420. See pp. 72-4 above. A Question Answered: How Laws Are to Be Understood, and Obedience Yielded?. [London, 1642.] BL 669 f. 6 (7); Wing Q179. For the attribution, see Mendle, Dangerous Positions, pp. 179, 187-8, 224 nn. 29, 30.

MISATTRIBUTIONS AND DOUBTFUL WORKS Animadversions Animadverted Or The Observator Defended. London, 1642. BL E. 114 (19); Wing P394. Doubtful. Although listed in the Thomason index under Parker, Thomason himself was silent, providing only the date, 26 August 1642. This reply to the early 3.nti-Observations tract Animadversions upon Those Notes could be by Parker, but is more likely the work of another hand. An Appendix to the Late Answer. [Oxford?,] 1642. Not in Thomason; Wing P397. This royalist compilation reprints William Ball's A Caveat for Subjects, Moderating the Observator (pp. 1-12) and the early a.nti-Observations tract Animadversions upon Those Notes (pp. 13-22), supposedly by way of an appendix to Digges' An Answer to a Printed Book. There is no reason to include An Appendix to the Late Answer in any list of Parker's works. See Madan, Oxford Books, II, p. 181 (item 1081). H. P. The Manifold Miseries of Civill Warre and Discord in a Kingdome. London, 1642. BL E. 153 (3); Wing P406. Misattributed. Although listed in the Thomason index under Henry Parker (and followed by Wing [P406]), Thomason himself did not so attribute this tract. It is unlike all that Parker is known to have written in manner and treatment, and does not correspond to Parker's political mood at the time of its publication, 2 July 1642. The title is somewhat misleading: the tract

Appendix: the writings of Henry Parker

195

recounts in some detail Catholic atrocities - in Germany in the Thirty Years War, in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in Paris, and in Ireland. Though Parker's anti-Catholic animus was palpable, this sort of human-interest approach was foreign to him. Manifold Miseries could be the work of Henry Peachum. The tract was printed "for G. Lindsey," who collaborated with John Gyles in the publication of another work of Peachum's, Square-caps turned into Round-heads. The attribution to Parker seems first to have been made by Bliss, Anthony a Wood's editor. Maximes Unfolded. [London, 1642/3.] BL E. 94 (3); Wing M1375. Seemingly attributed to Parker, probably by virtue of a typographical error, in the British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books (180:648). Though not recognized in Wing or the Thomason catalogue, Maximes Unfolded was accepted as Parker's by Robert Zaller, "Henry Parker and the Regiment of True Government." But the item as it appears in the catalogue, although set flush left with the principal Parker entries, is prefaced by the cross-reference indicator "See" and is also out of proper alphabetical order for the main entries. Maximes Unfolded is a complicated puritan political miscellany, perhaps of multiple authorship; it includes a defense of Observations (which is why it was cross-referenced to Parker), but is certainly not Parker's work. A Political Catechism. London, 1643. Two editions in Thomason: BL E. 104 (7*), Wing P416; BL E. 104 (8), Wing P416A. Misattributed. Sometimes ascribed to Parker on the authority of Anthony a Wood, but clearly at odds with Parker's sense of parliamentary absolutism. The tract is discussed by C. C. Weston, English Constitutional Theory and the House of Lords 1556-1832 (London, 1965), pp. 37-41; see especially p. 40 n.54 on attribution. The Trojan Horse of the Presbyteriall Government Unbowelled [London,] 1646. BL E. 353 (1); Wing P426. Doubtful. Thomason's weak attribution (see p. 140 above) reflects doubt about Parker's authorship, which I share. WRITINGS NOT PRINTED DURING PARKER'S LIFE AND LETTERS SIGNIFICANT TO PARKER'S POLITICAL THOUGHT 3 Folger Shakespeare Library MS. X d.245 (b). An epistolary poem by "Henerie" Parker to Philip Massinger. Printed in G. Thorn-Drury, ed., A Little Ark Containing Sundry Pieces of Seventeenth-Century Verse (London, 1921), pp. 2-3. Verney Papers, Claydon House [Yale Center for Parliamentary History microfilm copy, reel 6]. Letter of Parker to Sir Ralph Verney, 21 November 1644. Thomason collection, BL E. 286 (16). "Points of Consideration" (manuscript in seven unnumbered pages on Dutch affairs, reproducing printed material touching upon negotiations between the States-General and Charles I, and introducing a reply, in the form of a response by the houses of parliament). On the last page, Thomason noted Parker's authorship of the parliamentary reply. A Dutch version of the exchange between the ambassadors and Charles is in the Thomason collection, BL E. 281 (2). Thomason collection, BL E. 358 (1). Elegy upon the earl of Essex (manuscript). Thomason collection, BL E. 408 (6). "Henry Parkers Answer to the Retreate of the Armie. September 24 1647," a letter to George Thomason (manuscript copy in four unnumbered pages). 3

I do not include here the records of the Committee of Safety, or the Parker holographs in the House of Lords Records Office and the Public Records Office discussed in Chapter 1.

196

Appendix: the writings of Henry Parker

Henry Parker to William Lenthall, February 1649. Printed in The Gentleman's Magazine, 25 (March 1765), p. 109.

INDEX

Appeale to the World in these Times of Extreame Danger, An, 92 Aristotle, 124, 129, 130, 131 n.95 Arnisaeus, 132 Ascham, Anthony, 165 Aston, Sir Thomas, 52 Athanasius, St., 64 Augustus, 130

Bibles, Dutch-printed, 146 Bilson, Thomas, 57, 63-4 Bishops' Wars, 172 Bland, Peter, Resolved upon the Question, 94-5 Bliss, Philip, 104 Bodin, Jean, xiv, 81, 130, 131-2 Bostock, Robert, 26, 126, 140, 155 Boswell, Sir William, 16 Bracton, Henry, 98 Bramhall, John, 127 Serpent Salve, The, 127 Bramston, Sir John, 35, 37, 39, 40 Brenner, Robert, 149 Bristol, first earl of, see Digby, John, first earl of Bristol Bristol, second earl of, see Digby, George, second earl of Bristol Broade, Henry, 21, 22 Broade, "Mrs," 22 n.97 Brooke, Lord, see Greville, Robert, second Baron Brooke Brown, Robert, 55 Browne, Samuel, 24 Buckingham, duke of, see Villiers, George, first duke of Buckingham Burton, Henry, 7, 10, 137, 145 Butler, James, twelfth earl, marquis, and first duke of Ormonde, 123

Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans, 12 Ball, William, 194 A Caveat for Subjects, Moderating the Observator, 100 Bankes, Sir John, 35, 38, 40 Barclay, William, 132 Barlow, Thomas, 105, 107 Bastwick, John, 7, 10, 137, 145 Bedford, earl of, see Russell, William, fifth earl and first duke of Bedford Berkeley, Sir Robert, 36, 39-41, 44, 46, 47

Cade, Jack, 3 Caesar, Julius, 130, 151 Calvin, Jean, 56, 61, 62 n.47, 68 n.75 Campion, Grace, 4 n. 11, 24 Campion, Sir William, 4 n. 11, 24 Canne, John, 7 Cartwright, Thomas, 63 Cary, Lucius, second Viscount Falkland, 15, 43, 75, 77, 102 Certain Material Considerations, 108 Chambers, Richard, 22

Abbott, John, 24 • Abel, William, 11, 15, 141-4, 180 Abraham, 133 absolutism parliamentary, 81, 82, 85, 88, 98, 115 royal, 33, 40, 76, 81, 84, 108, 185 see also Parker, Henry, views, absolutism, parliamentary Act in Restraint of Appeals, 171 agitators, 157 Alexander the Great, 130, 151 Alfred, king of England, 105 Ambrose, St., 58, 64, 67-8 Andrewes, Launcelot, 57 Animadversions upon Those Notes, 19 n.79,

91-2, 194

Answer or Necessary Animadversions, upon Some Late Impostumate Observations, An, 100 Answer to the XIX Propositions, 80, 97, 99,

114, 117, 152, 168

197

198

Henry Parker and the English civil war

Charles I, king of England, 3-4, 36, 45, 7 1 - 2 , 1 0 3 , 112, 155, 171, 175, 178, 185 and ordinances, 75-77, 79-80 attacked or discussed by Parker, 116, 119, 120-1, 122, 133, 136, 162 Charles II, king of England, 162, 171, 173, 176, 178 Charta de Foresta, 119 Cheynell, Francis, 102 Chidley, Katherine, circle of, 5 Chillingworth, William, 92, 102, 111, 114 Christus Dei, 108-9 Clarendon, earl of, see Hyde, Edward, first earl of Clarendon Coke, Sir Edward, 42, 77, 94 Committee for the Advance of Money, 28, 112 Committee for Both Kingdoms, 23, 134 Committee of Safety, 19-22, 23, 24, 30, 74, 8 3 n . 3 5 , 134, 189 warrants of, 19—21 conciliarists, 124 Considerations for the Commons in this Age of Distractions, 92 Constantine, 8, 9, 58-60, 64, 66, 69 Coopers* Company, 141 Coppe, Abiezer, 30 Coppinger, William, 55 Cotton, John, 63 Council of State, 28 Covenanters, 18, 75, 173 see also Solemn League and Covenant Cranmer, Thomas, 69 Crawley, Sir Edward, 35, 38, 39-40, 36, 47 Croke, Sir George, 35, 39, 43, 44 Cromwell, Oliver, 28-9, 159, 162, 171, 173, 189 custos regni, 77 Cyprian, St., 137 Danegeld, 36 Daniel, Samuel, 167-8, 169 Danvers, Sir John, 17, 134, 180 Davenport, Sir Humphrey, 37, 39 David, 22, 59, 120-1, 162 Denham, Sir John, 38 Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex, 120 Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex, 19, 22-3, 24, 31, 49, 82 n.33, 120, 121, 189-90, 195 D'Ewes, Sir Simonds, 19, 22, 77, 78 Digby, George, second earl of Bristol, 25, 72 Digby, John, first earl of Bristol, 72 Digges, Dudley, 110, 132

Answer to a Printed Book, An, 101-4,

111,185,194

Unlawfulnesse of Subjects Taking up Arms Against Their Soveraigne, The, 103 n. 5, 104 see also Spelman, Sir John Digges, Sir Dudley, 102 dominium politicum et regale, 38, 41, 46, 47, 49, 76, 80, 149 n.51, 184, 187 see also Fortescue, Sir John Domitian, 136 Downing, Calybute, 14, 32 Dunbar, battle of, 171-2, 177 Eastland Company, 150 Edward II, king of England, 45 Edward VI, king of England, 68 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 45, 78, 109, 119 emergency, see necessity and Parker, Henry, views, necessity Engagement, 164-5, 171, 173, 177-9, 189 equity, 38-9, 95, 96 Essex, second earl of, see Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex Essex, third earl of, see Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex Examination of the Observations, An, 109 Falkland, Viscount, see Cary, Lucius, second Viscount Falkland Feme, Henry, 102, 110, 126, 130, 185 Resolving of Conscience, The, 97-9, 100-1 Fiennes, Nathaniel, 19, 21 Fiennes, William, first Viscount Say and Seale, 21, 22, 24, 63 Parker writes on behalf of, 5, 18-19, 41, 48, 54-5, 83, 97, 189, 192 and Malvezzi and Whitaker, 12, 13, 15, 146 Filmer, Sir Robert, 30, 90, 132, 165 Finch, Sir John, Baron Finch of Fordwich, 37, 39, 41, 44 Five Knights' Case, 41 Five Members, 79 Fortescue, G. K., 191 Fortescue, Sir John, 38, 94, 98, 187-8 see also dominium politicum et regale free trade, 148-53 "frivolous" petition, 112-14, 116 Frost, Walter, 14 Glanville, Sir John, 42 Goodwin, John, Anti-Cavalierisme, 110 grand council, 105-6, 107

Index see also privy council Grand Remonstrance, 79 Green, Giles, 143-4 Greville, Robert, second Baron Brooke, 35 Grotius, Hugo, xiv, 131-2

Johnson, Thomas, 150-1 Jones, John, 108 n.74 Jones, Sir William, 35, 39-41 Jordan, Wilbur, xi-xii, 30, 183 Judson, Margaret, xi-xii

Hacket, John, 55 Hall, Joseph, 18 Hampden, John, 18 see also ship money Hannibal, 40, 46 Harrington, James, xii, 52, 67, 119, 183 Harrison, Thomas, 35 Heath, Sir Robert, 162 Henderson, Alexander, 175 Henrietta Maria, queen of England, 121-2, 171 Henry III, king of England, 45, 49 n. 85, 167-8 Henry IV, king of England, 119-20 Henry V, king of England, 9 Henry VIII, king of England, 171 n.51 Herbert, Philip, earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke, 24, 27 Herle, Charles, Fuller Answer to a Treatise Written by Doctor Feme, A, 97-9, 110 Heylyn, Peter, Rebells Catechism, The, 110 High Commission, 154 Hinde, John, 137 Hobbes, Thomas, xii, 52-3, 66, 165, 167, 183 Holborne, Sir Robert, 36, 37, 39, 42, 46-7 Holland, earl of, see Rich, Henry, first earl of Holland Holies, Denzil, Baron Holies of Ifield, 157 Hooker, Richard, xiv, 131 Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, xiv, 57, 63-6 Hooker, Thomas, 63 Hooper, Miles, 68, 69 Hotham, Sir John, 93-^ Hunscott, Joseph, 22, 146 n.43 Hunton, Philip, 186 Treatise of Monarchic, A, 98-100 Hutton, Sir Richard, 35, 39, 43, 44, 47 Hyde, Edward, first earl of Clarendon, 14, 19,43,75,107,111,115-16

Kilvert, Richard, 15, 27, 141-4, 180

Ireton, Henry, 28, 152, 160, 189 James I, king of England, 55 n. 12, 76, 78, 120, 122 Jenkins, David, 27, 154-6, 183, 186, 187 John the Baptist, 137 John, king of England, 45 John of Paris, 124

199

Lamont, William, 139 Latimer, Hugh, 69 Laud, William, 7-9, 67, 137-9 law, "known," 81, 112-15, 117, 138 n.8 see also Parker, Henry, views, law Lennox, duke of, see Stewart, James, fourth duke of Lennox Lenthall, William, 28, 29, 196 Leslie, Henry, 18 n.75, 54-5, 123 L'Estrange, Roger, 188 Levellers, 17, 29, 82-3, 150, 153-4, 186 see also Parker, Henry, views, Levellers Lewes, Sussex, 168 Lewis of Bavaria, 124 Ley, John, 18n.77, 192 Lilburne, John, 5, 150, 154, 60-5, 182, 188 see also Parker, Henry, writings, A Letter of Due Redargution and Censure Lincoln's Inn, 4, 10, 155-6 Littleton, Sir Edward, Baron Littleton, 35, 46,47 Locke, John, 1, 132 Lot, 133 Machiavelli, Niccolo, xiv, 54 Madan, Falconer, 105, 107 Magna Carta, 49 n. 85, 80, 103, 114-15, 119, 135, 153, 163, 168 n. 30 Malvezzi, Virgilio, xiv, 12-13, 18, 54 Manasseh, 59,122 Marsh, John, 110 Argument or Debate in Law, An, 95 Marsilianism, 57, 62 n.49, 63, 65 Marsilius of Padua, 124 Marten, Henry, 143 Marvell, Andrew, 2 Massinger, Philip, 5-6, 14, 195 Maxwell, James, 185 Sacro-Sancta Regum Majestas 123—6, 127, 130-1, 132 May, Thomas, 25-6, 193 Merchant Adventurers, xii, 16-17, 148-51, 153, 157 Mildmay, Sir Henry, 28 militia ordinance and controversy, 49, 70-1, 79-80, 82-3, 84, 93-5, 103, 107,144, 181, 184 Milton, John, xii, 2, 14

200

Henry Parker and the English civil war

mixed government, 81, 98, 99, 168-9 see also Parker, Henry, views, mixed government monopoly, 141-2, 145-6, 148, 149-51, 181 Montfort, Simon de, 167—8 Naseby, battle of, 25 Nazianzus, Gregorius, 64 necessity, 95, 168 attacked, 108, 115 in ordinances, 71, 77, 78, 80 in parliamentary declarations, 93 in ship money case, 37—41, 42, 84 see also Parker, Henry, views, necessity New Model Army, 156-8, 171,174-5, 186, 197-8 see also Parker, Henry, views, New Model Army Nicholas, Sir Edward, 24 Nicholl, Anthony, 25 Nimrod, 129 Nineteen Propositions, 49, 102 Oldisworth, Michael, 24, 27-8, 30, 74 Ormonde, marquis of, see Butler, James, twelfth earl, marquis, and first duke of Ormonde Overton, Richard, 150 Parker, Henry Anglo-Dutch affairs, involvement in, 16, 22, 25, 95 amanuensis, 14, 22, 189 birth, 3 Church of England, communion in, 4—5 education, 4 gentility and "good manners,*' 7-8, 53, 62,70 abandoned, 119 health problems, 29 letters to Lenthall, 28, 196 to Thomason, 158-9, 186, 195 to Verney, 23, 189, 195 Observator (or Observer), 1, 2, 90, 100-1, 104, 105, 109, 123-6, 131, 153,185 parliamentary orders and letters, draftsman of, 22 prerogative office, suit for, 11, 17, 22, 24, 27, 29, 74, 153, 184 privado, xiii, xv, 3, 11, 13, 19, 24, 30-1, 107, 188, 189 see also privado relation to Lord Say, 5 see also Fiennes, William, first viscount Say and Seale

secretary to Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg, 16,26,27, 189 secretary to Committee of Safety, 19-22, 24, 31, 74, 111, 189 {see also Pym, John, relations with Parker) paymaster to spies, 21 refused to enrich himself, 20, 27, 30, 189 {see also Parker, Henry, views, private/public) secretary to earl of Essex, 19, 22 Star Chamber, recommended (?) to deputy clerkship of, 6 Thucydidean speeches, use of, 59, 136, 175 views absolutism, parliamentary, xv, 34, 48, 50, 70, 71, 82, 85, 87-8, 89,118-19, 133, 148, 181, 1 8 3 ^ ; attacked, 91, 103, 109,185 anti-clericalism, xv, 9, 51, 53—61, 64-6, 69, 138-9, 140-1 {see also Parker, Henry, views, episcopacy and presbyterianism) contradictions of, xv, 180-3, 190 Charles I, see Charles I, king of England, and Parker, Henry, views, monarchy, abolition of emergency, see Parker, Henry, views, necessity episcopacy, xv, 59-61, 62-3, 64, 68-9, 139, 150-1, 174,182 excommunication, 139 higher powers, obedience to (Rom. 13:1), 82-3, 126, 130, 1 6 3 ^ , 176, 178, 180, 182 law, xv, 11, 73, 93, 116-17, 135, 155-6, 163, 182-^, 189; civil law, 17 Levellers, 17, 82-3, 148, 152-3, 154, 162-4, 181, 188 liberty, xv, 44-5, 132-3, 152, 163-4, 169, 178 mixed government, 18, 44-5, 48, 97, 117,130-1,136 monarchy, abolition of, 28, 166, 171, 175-6, 178,187 necessity, 42, 48, 73, 82-4, 88, 93, 95, 118-19, 120-1,122,147,156, 176, 178; attacked, 101, 103, 107, 108, 109 New Model Army, 158-9, 174-6, 186, 187-8 parliament: centrality of, 133, 156—7, 180-6, 187-8; council/great council of, 9, 47-8, 84, 88, 118, 122 {see also parliament); judicial role, 88, 89,

Index 117-18, 121 {see also parliament); sovereignty of, 34, 48-50, 62-3, 69, 70, 73, 118-19, 138 {see also Parker, Henry, views, absolutism, parliamentary and sovereignty, popular) patriarchalism, 127, 132, 170, 178-9 {see also patriarchalism) people's stupidity, 169—70 popery, 57, 67, 138-40, 177 {see also Parker, Henry, views, anti-clericalism) power, 64-5, 85-6 prerogative, 35-6, 39 n.30, 44-5, 122, 126, 129-30, 136 presbyterianism, xv, 60-1, 139-41, 154, 157-9, 172,177,181,182, 186, 188 {see also Parker, Henry, views, anticlericalism); 'political,' 158-9 primogeniture, 4, 128-9, 189 private/public, 12, 16, 23, 31, 43-6, 48, 50, 56-7, 73, 118, 163, 164-5, 178, 190 providence, divine, 120, 122—3, 165, 171, 175-6, 187 puritans, 8, 53—5, 61 quicquid (or quod) efficit tale est magis tale, 86, 90, 127, 184-5; attacked, 90, 91, 99, 100, 102-3, 108,109, 124-5 reason of state, 100, 118-19, 156, 182 {see also Parker, Henry, views, necessity) religion: orthodoxy of, 4-5, 53, 67; political outlook on, 52, 57, 62—3, 64-5, 140 {see also Parker, Henry, views, anti-clericalism and royal supremacy) resistance, 101, 120-1, 132 royal supremacy, xv, 57, 59, 61, 62, 64-6, 69, 70, 139-40, 183 salus populi, 35, 43, 45, 73, 87, 122, 127, 155-6, 179, 181; attacked, 100, 101,102, 125 singulis major, universis minor, 43, 86, 87, 90, 185; attacked, 91, 97, 99-100, 101, 102-3, 106, 108, 109, 125, 127; defended, 97 slavery, 129, 132 sovereignty, popular, xiii, 65—6, 85—7, 90, 106, 126, 129-30,132, 167, 169-70, 181, 184,187 {see also Parker, Henry, views, singulis major, universis minor); attacked, 108 toleration, 174-5, 181 writings generally recognized and published in lifetime

201 Altar Dispute, The, 18, 51, 66-9, 192 Answer to the Poysonous Sedicious Paper of Mr. David Jenkins, The, 155,193 Case of Shipmony, The, 6, 8, 18, 32-7, 41, 43-50, 51, 65, 70, 73, 75, 78, 81, 97, 116, 119, 180, 183,191 Cheif Affairs of Ireland, The, 160 n. 1, 194 Contra-Replicant, The, xii, xiii, 22, 100, 110, 111-12, 114-21, 122, 123, 126, 133, 135, 174, 186, 187, 192 Danger to England Observed, The, see A Petition, or Declaration Discourse Concerning Puritans, A, xii, xiv, 8,11, 12, 18, 32, 51, 53-61, 62, 64, 66, 83, 131,137, 159,191-2 General Junto, or the Councell of Union, The, 17, 134-5, 180,192 Humble Remonstrance of the Company of Stationers, The, 15, 141,144, 146-8, 180, 192 Irish Massacre, The, 139-40, 193 Jus Populi, xix, 4, 87, 100, 111, 125-36, 152, 169, 179, 182,183, 185, 186,187, 192 Jus Regum, 9, 137-9,193 (with Thomas May and John Sadler,) Kings Cabinet Opened, The, 25-6, 193 Letter of Due Censure and Redargution, A, 159, 160-5, 166, 176,182, 193 Memoriall (first), 26, 27,193 Memoriall (second), 26, 27,193 Mr. William Wheelers Case from his Own Relation, 16, 141, 180, 192 Oath of Pacification, The, 111, 121-3, 135-6, 187, 192 Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses, xi, xiii, 1, 9, 34, 35, 45, 51, 65, 78, 82, 84-9, 90-110 passim, 111, 119, 123, 126, 127, 152, 169, 183-5, 192, 195; plagiarized by or borrowed from, 92; replies to, 90109 Of a Free Trade, 16-17,141,148, 151-3,166, 180, 181, 186,193 Petition, or Declaration, A, 88-9,192 Question Concerning the Divine Right of Episcopacie Truly Stated, The, 18, 51, 61-3, 192 Reformation in Courts in Cases Testamentary, 17, 29, 194 Scotlands Holy War, xii, 123, 141, 164,

202

Henry Parker and the English civil war

171, 173-7, 180,181, 182, 187, 194; tract on Engagement, 177-9 Severall Poysonous and Seditious Papers, 155-6, 187, 193 Some Few Observations, 9, 51, 82-5, 192 Speech of Their Excellencies the Lords Ambassadors Extraordinary ... Together with a Moderate Answer by a Private Gentleman, The, 25 n.105, 192-3 To the High Court of Parliament, see Humble Remonstrance of the Company of Stationers, The True Grounds of Ecclesiasticall Regiment, The, xiv, 51, 63-6, 69, 87, 119, 126, 131, 139, 183, 192 True Portraiture of the Kings of England, The, 166-71, 176, 182, 187, 193; Parker's authorship of whole, 166-7 Vintners Answers to Some Scandalous Phamphlets, The, 33, 141-4, 180, 192 writings, possible Answer to the Lord Digbies Speech in the House of Commons, An, 72—4, 78, 194 Divine and Politike Observations, xiii, 7-10, 137, 194 Question Answered: How Laws are to Be Understood, and Obedience Yielded?, A, 82-3, 93, 153, 194 writings, unprinted in Parker's lifetime elegy upon Essex, 23, 195 poem to Massinger, 5, 195 'Points of Consideration,' 25 n. 105, 195 see also Parker, Henry, letters writings dubiously attributed to Animadversions Animadverted Or the Observator Defended, 92 n.7, 194 Trojan Horse of Presbyteriall Government Unbowelled, The, 26 n . I l l , 140-1, 195 writings wrongly attributed to Appendix to the Late Answer, An, 194 Manifold Miseries of a Civill Warre and Discord in a Kingdome, The, 194—5; see Peachum, Henry Maximes Unfolded, 195 Political Catechism, A, 166 n.30, 193-4, 195 Parker, Jane, 5 n. 14, 23 n. 101, 30 Parker, Sir Nicholas, 3, 4 Parker, Sir Thomas, 3-4, 24

parliament council, great council, 70, 75-8, 82, 83, 108; determination vs. advice, 76, 80, 83-4, 107, 122 judicial role, 9, 76, 81-2, 83, 117, 121 ordinances of, 75, 77-8, 98, 115 remonstrance of 19 May 1642, 81-4 remonstrance of 29 May 1642, 85, 91 supplies defects of king, 77, 86, 98 sovereignty of, rejected by Hutton, 99 patriarchalism, 101, 106, 125 see also Parker, Henry, views, patriarchalism Paul, St., 130, 137 "peace campaign" of 1642-3, 111-15, 116, 174 Peachum, Henry, 195 Pembroke, earl of, see Herbert, Philip, earl of Montgomery and fourth earl of Pembroke Penington, Sir Isaac, alderman, 143 Petition of Right, 36, 41, 42, 93, 114, 115, 119,153 Philip II, king of England, king of Spain, 119,120, 135 Philip IV, king of Spain, 12 Philipps, Fabian, 30 Pierrepont, William, 43 Plato, 152 Pocock, J. G. A., 99, 120 n.38 Potter, Christopher, 102 Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 11, 22, 24 see also Parker, Henry, prerogative office, suit for Prideaux, Edmund, 24 printing ordinance, 144, 146-8 privado, xiii, xv, 3, 11-13, 46-7, 144 see also Parker, Henry, privado privy council, 75-7, 105-6, 108 n.73 proclamations, 77, 115 see also parliament, ordinances of Protestation, 71, 174 Prynne, William, 7, 10, 93-1, 137, 145 Sad and Serious Politicall Considerations, 172-3, 175 Soveraign Antidote, 93 Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes, 94, 98, 104-5, 110 Pym, John, 42, 49, 71-2, 74, 94, 142-3 relations with Parker, 19, 21, 25, 83, 189 Ratton, Sussex, 3, 168 reason of state, 38, 41, 46, 48, 78, 100, 115, 121 see also Parker, Henry, views, reason of state

Index Rehoboam, 120, 122 resistance theory, 81, 97 n.29, 101-2, 185 Review of the Observations, A, see Spelman, Sir John Rich, Henry, first earl of Holland, 75, 82n.33 Richard II, king of England, 45, 119-20 Richt Right press, 7 Ridley, Nicholas, 69 Robinson, Henry, xi Rossaeus, 124 Rous, Francis, 19 n.79, 25, 92 royalism, constitutional, 72, 80, 93, 98, 101, 106, 115, 118, 121, 133, 166, 183, 185 Rupert, Prince, 112 Rushworth, John, 14 Russell, William, fifth earl and first duke of Bedford, 21 Rutherford, Samuel, 123, 124 n.57, 130 Sadler, John, 25-6, 193 St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, 122, 195 St. Germain, Christopher, 39 St. John, Oliver, 10, 24, 37-9, 42-3, 46 salus populi, 3 9 ^ 2 , 95, 96, 102, 108-9, 168 see also Parker Henry, views, salus populi Sanderson, John, xi Sarpi, Paolo, xiv, 53, 57, 131 Saul, 22, 59, 120, 162 Say and Seale, Viscount, see Fiennes, William, first Viscount Say and Seale Selden, John, 24, 52-3, 78, 183 Semiramis, 107 Shakespeare, William, 120 Sheldon, Gilbert, 102 Shimei, 162 ship money, 18, 32-50 passim, 84, 100, 103, 115, 144, 154 Sidney, Algernon, 132 Simon of Sudbury, 137—8 singulus major, universis minor, 60, 96—7 see also Parker, Henry, views, singulus major, universis minor Skinner, Quentin, 124 Solemn League and Covenant, 173—5, 178 Some Considerations in Relation to the Act of 2 January, 1649, 177-8, 189 Some More New Observations, 92 Speed, John, 167-8 Spelman, Sir Henry, 104 Spelman, Sir John, 110, 132, 185 Case of Our Affaires, The, 104, 106 Review of the Observations, A, probable author of, 105, 106, 107 View of a Printed Book, A, not author of, 107

203

Star Chamber, 52, 76, 115, 137, 145 Stationers' Company, xii, xiv, 13, 15-16, 22, 144-8, 180 Stephen, St., 137 Stewart, James, fourth duke of Lennox, 13 Strafford, earl of, see Wentworth, Sir Thomas, first earl of Strafford Suarez, Francisco, 86 n.44, 91 Swift, Jonathan, 194 Temple, Sir John, 5 n. 15 Ten Propositions, 72 Theodosius, 8, 58-60, 67-8 Thirty Years War, 195 Thomason, George, xiii, xix, 1-2, 11, 13, 17, 23, 26 n. 110, 54 n. 10, 107, 157-8, 159 attributions and dates, 32, 73, 88-108 passim, 112 n. 3, 115 n. 16, 123, 126, 134 n. 106, 137 n. 2, 138 n. 5, 140, 143, 148, 151 n.65, 154 nn.74, 76, 155 n.78, 160 nn. 1,2, 177 n. 81, 190-5 Thorpe, Francis, 167-70 Touching the Fundamentall Laws, 96-7 treason, 94 Trent, Council of, 91 Trevor, Sir Thomas, 39 Tuck, Richard, xi, xiv, 38 Tyler, Wat, 163 Tyrrell, James, 132 Ussher, James, 61-2, 109, 123, 126 ,130 Uvedale, Sir William, 6 Uxbridge, Treaty of, 25 Vane, Sir Henry (the elder), 24, 42, 74 Vane, Sir Henry (the younger), 74 Verney, Sir Ralph, 23, 189, 195 Vernon, Sir George, 39, 41 Vespasian, 130, 136 View of a Printed Book, A, see Spelman, Sir John Villiers, George, first duke of Buckingham, 11,12 Vindication of the Parliament, The, 93 Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 124 Vintners' Company, xii, 11, 15, 16, 141-4, 180 Walker, Clement, 28, 160 Waller, Edmund, 43 Walwyn, William, 66 Warbeck, Perkin, 163 warrants, see Committee of Safety Wentworth, Peter (Wentworth's Case), 76, 109

204

Henry Parker and the English civil war

Wentworth, Sir Thomas, first earl of Strafford, 50, 71-2, 74,133 Weston, Sir Richard, 38, 40 Wheeler, William, 16 Whitaker, Richard, 12-13, 15,126, 146 White, John, 24 Whitelock, James, 76 Wildman, John, 28 William I, king of England, 171, 176 William of Ockham, 124

William of Orange, 22 Williams, Griffith, 123 Williams, John, 10, 67 Windebank, Francis, 10 wine patent, 1 4 1 ^ Winstanley, Gerard, 67 Wood, Anthony a, 2, 30, 195 Zaller, Robert, xi, 183, 195

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