Revolutionising politics
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Revolutionising politics

Culture and conflict in England, 1620–60

Jason Peacey, Paul D. Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard, Scott Sowerby

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eBook - ePub

Revolutionising politics

Culture and conflict in England, 1620–60

Jason Peacey, Paul D. Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard, Scott Sowerby

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About This Book

In this fascinating collection, twelve colleagues of the late Mark Kishlansky come together to reconsider the meanings of England's mid-seventeenth-century revolution. Their chapters range widely: from shipboard to urban conflicts; from court sermons to local finances; from debates over hairstyles to debates over the meanings of regicide; from courtrooms to pamphlet wars; and from religious rights to human rights. Taken together, they indicate how we might improve our understanding of a turbulent epoch in political history by approaching it more modestly and quietly than historians of recent decades have often done. Revolutionising politics will appeal to professional historians and their students interested in the social, cultural, religious and legal history of seventeenth-century English politics. Specific chapters will interest scholars in book history, the cultural history of politics and the history of political, civil and human rights.

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Year
2021
ISBN
9781526148148

Part I

Conceiving politics

1

Honour and anger: shipboard politics in 1627

Eleanor Hubbard
A curious election took place on board the Hector on 8 May 1627. The powerful ship was ready to depart on a privateering voyage to the coast of Spain when its captain, Richard Harris, was unexpectedly recalled by the Duke of Buckingham. The Hector’s owner, the Earl of Warwick, scrambled to salvage the voyage and to reassure the mariners who had expected to sail with Harris. The day after the bad news had been announced, Warwick came on board with a distinguished gentleman, Sir Francis Stewart, and called up the whole company, offering the gentleman as their new captain, if they chose to accept him. Stewart himself made a ‘pleasinge’ speech ‘leaveing itt untto theire choice what to dooe’. His courtesy was well received. ‘The Companie of theire owne voluntarie love and disposition, imbraced Sir Francis Steaurtt And chose him to bee our Captaine.’1
The mariners unanimously ‘chose’ Stewart to be their captain, but what sort of a choice did they have? The event bears an intriguing resemblance to the uncontested early Stuart parliamentary elections studied by Mark Kishlansky, who argued that these were not elections at all in the modern sense, but selections in which local elites came together to select the gentlemen deserving of the honour; voters gave their deferential assent.2 Contests were rare and damaging because personal honour, not ideology, was at stake, and voters did not often choose between multiple options. Unity was the point. Kishlansky speculated that, for these non-voting voters, participation was valuable and meaningful because it allowed them to share in an honourable ceremony, not because they hoped to choose a particular candidate who espoused particular views.3 Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus, in which the failed election of the titular war hero leads to disaster, provided Kishlansky with an illustration of this perspective. Coriolanus is clearly honourable, but his scorn for the people leaves him unwilling to seek their approval, and the crafty tribunes seize on Coriolanus’s indifference to popular opinion and welfare to foment unrest. For Kishlansky, the politically minded tribunes are ‘out of step with the common notion that selection is a celebration of honor’, an assumption that is shared by both the bloodthirsty hero and the bulk of the citizenry. The citizens, Kishlansky emphasised, believe they have the right to assent to Coriolanus’ election, but not necessarily the right to deny their assent: ‘if he tells us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our noble acceptance of them’, one of them affirms (2.3.6–8).4 Stewart’s honour seems indeed to have played a central role in his selection as captain. He was a Member of Parliament, the second son of the Earl and Countess of Moray, a cousin of King James I and had exercised naval command. The sailors appear to have been flattered that this eminent person had asked for their support. Their own prestige was surely enhanced by participation in the process, and unity was indeed achieved – for a time.
For Kishlansky, the nature of these ‘selections’ demonstrated that, until a later period, social unity prevailed in early Stuart politics. Voters may have enjoyed participating, but their role was essentially a deferential one. Social unity proved elusive on the Hector, however. The sailors tendered their deference in the expectation that the captain would care about them and their interests, and when their hopes for reciprocity were dashed, they came to suspect that Stewart’s eminence had blinded him to the needs and grievances of his men. Indeed, they may have been right. A voyage narrative penned by the shipmaster indicates that Stewart interpreted his men’s expressions of grievances as personal slights and reacted with explosive anger. The sailors, in turn, were offended by Stewart’s disregard for them: despite their subordinate status they had honour of their own to defend. Two economies of honour thus came into conflict: one expandable and circulatory, in which deference and care were markers of reciprocal esteem, the other finite and zero-sum, in which the status of superiors was bolstered by the humiliation of their inferiors, whose interests did not really count. Stewart was perfectly conversant with the first, but shifted into the second as it became clear that the rewards of the voyage would be meagre. For the sailors, of course, the expandable, circulatory model was the only one that offered any satisfaction: when deference became self-abasement, they refused to play along and Stewart lost control of the ship. Taken as a whole, the troubled voyage shows how potent mixtures of material grievances and wounded honour could fuel fighting men’s incendiary challenges to authority.
The main source for the voyage of the Hector is a carefully penned manuscript entitled Mightt and Woulde Nott, Or: The Observeation of the Right Honnourable the Earle of Warrwicke his Voadge Made uppon the Coaste of Portingale in the Yeire of Our Lorde God Anno Do: 1627, with the passadges which princyally happenede; And the proceedings thereof; But espetially of the rule and goverment in the Good Shipp called the Hector under the commaunde of Sir Fraunces Steaurde knight Captaine of the Saide Shippe. According to the belligerent capitals at the bottom of the page, the manuscript was ‘Writen By William Ball Marrinner Cleering Himselfe of an Aspertion Falclie Imputed Uppon Him On the Voadg’.5 Ball, the shipmaster of the Hector, appears to have been blamed by Stewart for the debacle, and wrote up a fifty-four folio account of the voyage to vindicate himself – apparently for publication, although it was not printed and ended up in the government’s hands instead.6
The narrative describes the voyage almost day by day, and appears to have been based on a shipboard journal, though it omits the navigational details that would be found in a ship’s log. Ball edited some things out of the original ship journal but put other things in, notably the scathing comments that appear throughout the narrative, which were written in a very simple code with numbers substituted for the most common letters, coyly marked with the marginal note ‘in Lattine’. There is no actual Latin in the text: Ball was literate, but not literary. He was a Londoner and had worked as a shipmaster, by his account, for nineteen years, having originally been apprenticed in 1597.7 He must have been successful in his profession to have been chosen master of the 400-ton Hector, and by 1629 he was a younger brother of the Trinity House of Deptford, the shipmasters’ guild.8 He had a good sense of what was due to him as master, and he did not take criticism lightly.
Much though he grew to dislike Stewart, Ball also disapproved of the more fractious members of the crew, as well as the captain who had preceded Stewart, many of the ship’s inferior officers, all gentlemen on board and indeed virtually everyone he mentioned in the narrative. He believed in good government, and as a man who for most of his career had been the commanding officer on board, had clear ideas about what it entailed. The two appendices included at the end of the narrative, written in the same hand, supplement Ball’s account. One of these is a copy of the grievances of the company of the Hector, which was apparently written during the voyage and presented to Sir Francis Stewart along with the signatures of ‘thirttye of the principall cheefe officers and mens hands’, and the other is a copy of the general orders for the voyage set out by the Earl of Warwick.9
The 400-ton Hector was the second-largest ship of the fleet in Warwick’s 1627 privateering expedition, the largest of the Earl’s four major privateering ventures in the war years of the 1620s. Warwick enjoyed an unusually expansive commission: while ordinary reprisal voyages carried letters of marque, he had obtained letters patent from the Crown that allowed him to attack and plunder enemies at sea, to keep prizes without having to make account for them, to administer martial law, and even to invade and capture Spanish territory – all independently of the Admiralty, much to the dismay of the Lord High Admiral, the Duke of Buckingham, who was leading the naval war effort.10 Hostile to Warwick and his venture, Buckingham recalled the original captain, Richard Harris, to royal service. Harris, a trusted commander, had overseen the Hector’s setting out and had hired the master.
In early May, then, when the fleet was about to leave Plymouth, Warwick came aboard with Sir Michael Geere, Sir Francis Stewart and other sea captains. He greeted the company, had his commission read aloud and announced that Harris would not accompany the fleet. According to Ball, the ship’s company was deeply dismayed both by the commission of martial law and by the loss of their captain, and ‘answered with a gennerall voice if Capt Harris went not on the voadge, there was but fewe, or none, desired likewise to goe annie ffarther’.11 They muttered amongst themselves that Warwick must have planned for Geere to command the Hector all along. If this was the case, however, the sour mood that greeted Warwick’s announcement must have convinced him that he would need to take different measures to restore morale, and he instead decided to offer them Stewart as an unquestioned gentleman and man of honour.12 The following day, Warwick returned, with Stewart and without Geere, and all the company was called up on deck. Warwick allegedly said:
I am as truelie sorrie and greived for Dicke Harris his goeinge a waie, as...

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