Introduction

Abstract

It is always dangerous to compartmentalise history into distinct periods and to elevate a particular period into one of special significance. The process of change is both more gradual and more subtle than such tendencies would allow. Yet the seventeenth century does have some claim both to distinctness and significance in ways which make it of particular interest and value for study by our own age. No historian today could claim that politics suddenly altered course in 1603, or that sixteenth-century harmony abruptly changed into seventeenth-century discord. Yet contemporaries did contrast the apparent failings of Stuart government with the presumed glories of the Elizabethan age: for much of the century and beyond, Elizabeth’s accession day (17 November) was celebrated as a national festival. Few doubted that the problems of contemporary government were far more serious and immediate than those faced by their forefathers. There was much to support this view. The nation experienced civil war, eleven years of confused and often frightening republican government, a dramatic if bloodless revolution in 1688, and above all the unique trial and execution of a reigning sovereign in 1649. The sixteenth century had nothing to match this in terms of dramatic turmoil, despite the importance of the events of the 1530s.