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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (Paperback)
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Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (Paperback)
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In this ambitious reinterpretation of the early Stuart period in
England, Glenn Burgess contends that the common understanding of
seventeenth-century English politics is oversimplified and
inaccurate. The long-accepted standard view holds that gradual
polarization between the Court and Parliament during the reigns of
James I and Charles I reflected the split between absolutists--who
upheld the divine right of monarchy to rule--and
constitutionalists--who resisted tyranny by insisting the monarch
was subject to law--and resulted inevitably in civil war. Yet,
Burgess argues, the very terms that have been used to understand
the period are misleading: there were almost no genuine absolutist
thinkers in England before the Civil War, and the
"constitutionalism" of common lawyers and parliamentarians was a
very different notion from current understandings of that term.
Burgess turns to the great body of common law that enshrined many
of England's liberties and institutions. Examining the political
opinions of such key figures as Sir Edward Coke and Sir Francis
Bacon, he concludes that the laws of the land represented a
civilization no monarchist would have attacked. Further, absolutism
was a rare creed at the time and, while it was accepted that the
king was next to God in authority, this detracted nothing from the
insistence that he rule under the law. Rather than a polarization
of ideas fueling political division, says Burgess, it was Charles
I's inappropriate exploitation of agreed prerogatives that exposed
tensions, forged divisions, and ruptured the "pacified politics" of
which the early modern English were so proud. Burgess's new
perspective sets the political thought of Hobbes, Locke, and others
into contemporary context, revises the distorted view of pre-civil
war England, and refocuses discussion on the real conflicts and
human complexities of the period.
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