Liberty against the Law

Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies

Christopher Hill

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781788736800
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788736817
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In this, the last book published during his lifetime, renowned historian of the English Revolution Christopher Hill uses the literary culture of the seventeenth century to explore the immense social changes of the period as well as the expressions of liberty, the law and the hero-worship of the outlaw defiance. As well as chapters on gypsies and vagabonds, Hill analyzes class, religion and the shift away from the importance of the church after the Reformation. Liberty against the Law is a late classic of Hill's work and essential reading for anyone interested in the history and politics of the seventeenth-century.

Notes

1. Unlearning Imperialism

1.Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge U.P., 1984), p. 275.

2.Act II, scene i. As Morse observes, ‘Scot-free’ was provocative in 1640, when Charles was being held to ransom by an invading Scottish army which had been welcomed by the opposition in Parliament (D. Morse, England’s Time of Crisis: From Shakespeare to Milton, 1989, p. 117).

3.Nancy K. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge U.P., 1992), p. 95.

4.Pepys, Diary, 25 July, 26 August and 1 November 1661; 11 January 1669.

5.W. H. Irving, John Gay: Favourite of the Wits (Duke U.P., 1940), p. 203.

6.See pp. 15–18 below.

7.Butler, op. cit., pp. 135–6, 220–33. For the Court of Wards, see pp. 41, 278, 335 below.

8.Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (Oxford U.P., 1962).

9.Butler, op. cit., pp. 263–5.

10.Ibid., pp. 39–40.

11.Richard Brome, Five New Playes (1653), Epistle by Alexander Brome, ‘On the Comedies of … Richard Brome’.

12.Brome, The Antipodes (ed. A. Haaken, 1967), pp. 33, 38.

13.Ibid., pp. 6–7, 64–5, 73, 86–7.

14.Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book V, Canto II, stanza xxviii.

15.Op. cit., quoted by Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642, p. 263.

16.‘The Notorious Robbers Lamentation, or Whitings Sorrowful Ditty’, in Bagford Ballads (ed. J. W. Ebsworth), II, 1878, pp. 556–9. Whiting was hanged in 1695.

17.Ed. A. L. Young, Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (Northern Illinois U.P., 1993), p. 31.

18.B. Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford U.P., 1994), p. 95

19.See epigraph — beggars proclaim their freedom.

20.Herbert, Works (ed. R. A. Willmott, n.d.), pp. 94–5; Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson (World’s Classics), pp. 305, 277. First published 1670.

21.Herbert, op. cit., pp. 94–5, 136, 139, 209. For Herbert’s opposition to enclosure and his love for good old customs, see Sidney Gottlieb’s insightful The Social and Political Backgrounds of George Herbert’s Poetry’, in ‘The Muses Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century (ed. C. J. Summers and T.-L. Pebworth, Missouri U.P., 1988), pp. 112–14.

22.D. Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge U.P., 1975), pp. 132, 141–53, 161–80.

23.Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago U.P., 1978), pp. 193–4. See Chapter 7 below.

24.‘A Songe’, in The Phanseys of William Cavendish, Marquis of Newcastle (ed. D. Grant, 1956), pp. 75–6; A. Harbage, Cavalier Drama (1926), p. 117.

25.In Character Writings of the Seventeenth Century (ed. H. Morley, 1891), pp. 320–22; Butler, Poetical Works (ed. G. Gilfillan, Edinburgh, 1854), II, p. 246.

26.Love in a Wood; or St. James’s Park, in Plays (ed. W. C. Ward, Mermaid Series), p. 24.

27.See Chapter 9 below.

28.J. L. Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1892), I, pp. 481–90.

29.Butler, Theatre and Crisis, p. 235.

30.When in 1711 the authorities broke up a pope-burning procession on Queen Elizabeth’s Day, bag-pipers in the demonstration were playing ‘Lillibulero’ (D. Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England, 1989), p. 188.

31.Adina Forsgren, John Gay: Poet of ‘a lower order’ (Stockholm, 1964), pp. 82, 119, 166, 168, 190.

32.W. H. Irving, John Gay: Favourite of the Wits (Duke U.P., 1940), pp. 14, 24–9, 107, 119, 125, 211, 217. Gay, Poetical Works (ed. G. C. Faber, Oxford U.P., 1926), pp. 116, 37–8, 75.

33.Ibid., pp. 85, 124, 127, 162, 186–8, 237–8, 258–61, 279–84, 286–91, 293–6.

34.Ibid., pp. 161, 187, 277, 291–3, 296–8. For lawyers, cf. The Beggar’s Opera, Act I, scene ix, Act II, scene v, Act III, scene xiii; see Chapter 22 below.

35.Ibid., pp. 146, 169, 245–6, 301. Cf. Ducat in Polly, ‘Why, I married her in a reasonable way, only for her money’ (Poetical Works, p. 542). David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford U.P., 1995), p. 28.

36.Gay, Poetical Works, p. 208.

37.Ibid., pp. 378–9, 468–9, 478, 495–8, 523.

38.To a Lady on her Passion for Old China’, in Gay, Poetical Works, p. 180.

39.Irving, op. cit., pp. 67, 107, 209, 211, 216,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I. Introduction
• II. Lawlessness
• III. Imperial Problems
• IV. Christian Liberty
• V. Society, Law and Liberty
• VI. Aftermath
• Notes
• Index