The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens

The Proclamations of the Tudor Queens
Author: Frederic A. Youngs
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1976-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521210447

This study investigates the independent prerogative which Mary I and Elizabeth I exercised through royal proclamations. These public documents were announced throughout England, informing men and arguing the Queen's positions, commanding local officials to perform specific actions, and on occasion creating new but temporary law that was designed to meet crisis situation when no delay could be tolerated. The theoretical relationship between this prerogative power and the existing statutory law has been the subject of much debate. This study adds an element previously neglected, the investigation of the Queens' actual use of the proclamations, showing that they did innovate with vigour and legislate in them, but only to supplement and not supplant the law, and within the limits slowly being formulated in the sixteenth century. Professor Youngs demonstrates how the proclamations affected domestic security and foreign affairs, social and economic matters, and religion.

A History of English Assizes 1558-1714

A History of English Assizes 1558-1714
Author: J. S. Cockburn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 1972-09-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521084499

Historical background and the operations of the court.

Rethinking the Scottish Revolution

Rethinking the Scottish Revolution
Author: Laura A. M. Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 697
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0192563785

The English revolution is one of the most intensely-debated events in history; parallel events in Scotland have never attracted the same degree of interest. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution argues for a new interpretation of the seventeenth-century Scottish revolution that goes beyond questions about its radicalism, and reconsiders its place within an overarching 'British' narrative. In this volume, Laura Stewart analyses how interactions between print and manuscript polemic, crowds, and political performances enabled protestors against a Prayer Book to destroy Charles I's Scottish government. Particular attention is given to the way in which debate in Scotland was affected by the emergence of London as a major publishing centre. The subscription of the 1638 National Covenant occurred within this context and further politicized subordinate social groups that included women. Unlike in England, however, public debate was contained. A remodelled constitution revivified the institutions of civil and ecclesiastical governance, enabling Covenanted Scotland to pursue interventionist policies in Ireland and England - albeit at terrible cost to the Scottish people. War transformed the nature of state power in Scotland, but this achievement was contentious and fragile. A key weakness lay in the separation of ecclesiastical and civil authority, which justified for some a strictly conditional understanding of obedience to temporal authority. Rethinking the Scottish Revolution explores challenges to legitimacy of the Covenanted constitution, but qualifies the idea that Scotland was set on a course to destruction as a result. Covenanted government was overthrown by the new model army in 1651, but its ideals persisted. In Scotland as well as England, the language of liberty, true religion, and the public interest had justified resistance to Charles I. The Scottish revolution embedded a distinctive and durable political culture that ultimately proved resistant to assimilation into the nascent British state.