The Pelican History of England #6: The Stuart Period (1603–1714)

Originally, The Pelican History of England covered the seventeenth century with 1952's England in the Seventeenth Century by Maurice Ashley. That would be the only volume in the series, however, to be totally replaced. While some went into many editions, and Roman Britain was even substantially revised by a different author, in 1978, Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon was published, and that was it for England in the Seventeenth Century. Why? I don't know. I own a 1990 printing of the 1985 second edition of Stuart England; perhaps the first edition explained this choice, but Kenyon's preface to the second mostly focuses on explaining the changes since the first. Maurice Ashley didn't die until 1994, so it wasn't that, say, he was unavailable to update the book or something.

Anyway, how's the actual book? I find it interesting how the writers of these books were obviously granted a lot of freedom in their approaches; Kenyon does something I don't remember seeing before, which is he doesn't just open by laying out a thesis about the period in question, but he actually takes differing theses about the period in question as his topic. Kenyon rejects the "teleological approach of the Whig–Liberal historians" (15) where "a form of government... proceeded, subject to various trifling adjustments, down to the present day, and which not only made the nation Free and Right but showed it to be Great and Right" (14). That is to say, a lot of previous historians viewed this period as the gradual but inevitable evolution to the current system of British government, where the monarch's power is subordinated to that of a permanent, elected Parliament: "We have been brainwashed into accepting the... theory of inevitable, almost effortless parliamentary advance" (44). But this evolution was by no means inevitable... but if you don't accept the claims of the Whig approach to history, what do you have left? "Instead of striding along a brightly illuminated high road, the historian now shuffles uneasily in a thick fog from one lamp-post to another, the lamp-posts wide apart and eccentrically sited, and frequently shifting their position" (15). How's that for a metaphor!?

The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England
by J. P. Kenyon

Second edition published: 1985
Originally published: 1978
Acquired: March 2025
Read: April 2025

The body of the book mostly focuses on the shifting status of the monarchy versus Parliament, which makes sense in a period that saw the temporary abolition of the monarchy, and another monarch run out of the country and replaced with someone else. The introduction does lay out some other issues, such as the fluctuating status of the gentry (25), and Kenyon mentions in his preface that the first edition did have a chapter on literature and art that he cut (9-10), but overall it's monarchs that he focuses on here. (I like what he says near the end of the introduction about James I and Charles I: "It is a truism that they did not understand the English; it is not always acknowledged that their subjects took some understanding" [56]). At first, this made me view the book as the kind of traditional history that previous writers in the Pelican History series largely eschewed. 

But when I got to the conclusion, I realized Kenyon wasn't going through kings (and queens) because he was interested in kings qua kings; I realized it was because he was specifically interested in the status of the monarchy versus that of Parliament, which he portrays as much more complicated than it was usually perceived as: "It is conventional to assume that 1649 and 1688, and even 1660, represent the triumph of parliamentary over monarchical institutions. With the benefit of hindsight this may seem obvious; it was not so at the time, and it is to be doubted if it ever was.... [W]eak and disorganized as the monarchy often was, Parliament was more so... (353). Kenyon ends up claiming that if power was vested anywhere, it was in neither monarchy nor democracy but aristocracy; the most stable institution of the era was the House of Lords: "What was founded in 1688... was not parliamentary monarchy but aristocratic monarchy" (355).

So, as a guide to how the monarchy and Parliament negotiated their shifting power, I found this a strong and clear volume of the series, one of my favorites... though like many of the later volumes in the series, it certainly benefits from having 350 pages to cover a single century, as opposed to three centuries or more. Parliament became increasingly bold in this era, for example asserting that Charles I needed "to give up all his powers of command, appointment and policy-making right across the board, even in the education, upbringing and marriage of his own children" (151)! Unfortunately, Kenyon argues, "few people outside his immediate family felt any emotional attachment to the person of the King, and without this he lacked the catalyst which might have transmuted a very strong and widespread support for the institution of monarchy into loyalty to the monarch himself" (154). Sure, people liked the idea of kings, but not this king, unfortunately for him. Similarly, Charles II could have concentrated power back in the monarchy, but Kenyon argues it was once again a problem of the monarch's personality: "in the first few vital years of the Restoration, Charles squandered all his chances. He was not a lazy man, but he lacked concentration, his interests were too diversified, and he did not apply himself to the business of governing" (211-12). If England had had monarchs with different personalities, the long-term victory of Parliament would have been by no means assured. Even so, when James II came to power in 1685, Kenyon claims that "the monarchy was at the very zenith of its power" (242-43), which historian overlook because of their "foreknowledge of the Revolution, only three years away" (242).

The negotiations over the Glorious Revolution are fascinating; basically Parliament wanted someone else to be king because of James II's Catholicism (among other issues) but also needed to thread a very narrow needle to make this happen. How can you ignore James II's son the Prince of Wales but claim that Mary ought to be the new queen regnant on basis of her being the child of James II? (275) Parliament ended up exerting a lot of authority over the monarch when it required monarchs to declare they weren't Catholic, and that they weren't allowed to marry Catholics either (277). Later this was extended to the monarch having to specifically be an Anglican (305). It used to be that monarchs established a government, but now there was "the concept of government existing independently of the King, who is just another official, though the most important one" (277). This all eventually resulted in some disputes: "Was [Queen] Anne's title purely hereditary, as the Tories insisted, or was it, as the Whigs argued, dependent on the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement?" (336) How much power did Parliament have over the monarch?

Kenyon is a lively and opinionated writer at times; I laughed at his description of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham: "Such men do not attract first-class historians" (84)! Quite a burn to whatever biographers had written about Buckingham before him! If the book has a flaw, it's that Cromwell, the Commonwealth, and the Interregnum feel kind of glossed over... but I suppose that makes sense; if Kenyon's interest is in the power of monarchy, then the actual Interregnum isn't really of interest to him, only how it began and how it ended.

In our current era in America, where the executive asserts continually expanded powers, it's fascinating and almost comforting to realize what an aberration that last couple centuries in America have been. For most of human history, rulers often did just summarily imprison or execute their opponents. Yes, it hasn't been that way for some time, but that's just a blip across the scale of most of history. Cold comfort, one supposes, but I will take what I can get.