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List of contents
- Preface
- 1: The Elizabethan Settlement, the Issue of the Royal Succession, and the Emergence of Religious Dissent, c. 1558-1571
- 2: Puritans, Catholics, and Dynastic Crises, 1571-1582
- 3: Protestant Foreign Policy and the Coming of War, 1582-1593
- 4: European Politics and the Stuart Succession in England, 1593-1603
- 5: The Accession of James Stuart and the Kingdom of Great Britain, 1603-1610
- 6: The Jacobean Polity and the Failure of Via Media Politics, 1611-1620
- 7: Dynastic Marriage Diplomacy, Parliamentary Conflict, Peace and War, 1621-1629
- Conclusion: Into the Personal Rule of Charles I
About the author
Michael Questier recently left East London to take up a senior research fellowship in the department of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He also holds an honorary chair in the Centre for Catholic Studies at the University of Durham.
Summary
Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558-1630 revisits what used to be regarded as an entirely 'mainstream' topic in the historiography of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - namely, the link between royal dynastic politics and the outcome of the process usually referred to as 'the Reformation'. As everyone knows, the principal mode of transacting so much of what constituted public political activity in the early modern period, and especially of securing something like political obedience if not exactly stability, was through the often distinctly un-modern management of the crown's dynastic rights, via the line of royal succession and in particular through matching into other royal and princely families. Dynastically, the states of Europe resembled a vast sexual chess board on which the trick was to preserve, advance, and then match (to advantage) one's own most powerful pieces. This process and practice were, obviously, not unique to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the changes in religion generated by the discontents of western Christendom in the Reformation period made dynastic politics ideologically fraught in a way which had not been the case previously, in that certain modes of religious thought were now taken to reflect on, critique, and hinder this mode of exercising monarchical authority, sometimes even to the extent of defining who had the right to be king or queen.
Additional text
Questier emphasizes that this is not counter-factual history, but alternative histories can be felt hovering in the background. What if Elizabeth I had been deposed and replaced by Mary Queen of Scots? What if the Armada or the Gunpowder Plot had succeeded? Questier delineates a world in which those things remained possibilities. ... by "incorporating the ideological fissures and fractures", Michael Questier has supplied us with a valuable sense of how contested, divisive and rebarbative the early modern political process remained.
