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‘We have a good king and our imaginations ought to be good to him’: Divided Loyalties Forced on East Midlands Sheriffs, 1580–1640

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Loyalty to the Monarchy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400-1688

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Abstract

The office of sheriff in English counties predated the Norman Conquest but by the late fifteenth century had become tainted and weakened. There has been some dispute or differences among historians of the Tudor period on the exact nature and extent of the weaknesses of the office and the contemporary perception of its place at the interface between central and local government and governance. When the first two Stuart kings of England sought alternative sources of revenue to parliamentary subsidies, and their legal advisers developed the enhanced use of prerogative rights, the enforcement of those rights and the collection of the revenue fell on the annually appointed sheriffs in each county. This chapter will explore the impact such reliance on prerogative rights had under both James VI and Charles I on the loyalty given to the monarchy generally, and those monarchs in particular, by the royally appointed sheriffs in the East Midlands, facing clear and obvious conflicts of loyalty between their local and national interests, and on the interpretation by judges of the concept of observance of the rule of law, where it may conflict with their perceived or anticipated loyalty to the crown.

Quotation from ‘The Judgment of Sir William Jones in The King v John Hampden, 1637/38’, in A Complete Collection of State-Trials, and Proceedings For High-Treason, And Other Crimes And Misdemeanours; From the Reign of King Richard II to the Reign of King George II, 6 vols. (London, 1730), i, pp. 501–719 (afterwards Hampden’s Case), quotation at pp. 664–6.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    G. R. Elton, England under the Tudors (London, 1991), p. 59.

  2. 2.

    T. G. Barnes, Somerset 1625–1640: A County’s Government during the ‘Personal Rule’ (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961).

  3. 3.

    J. Morrill, County Communities and the Problem of Allegiances in the Civil War (London, 1993), p. 186.

  4. 4.

    Arguments and judgements in Bates’ Case are found in, G. W. Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents 1558–1625 (Oxford 1913) (afterwards ‘Prothero’), pp. 340–53.

  5. 5.

    Henry IV, Cap. 5; 9 Edward II, Stat. 2; 2 Edward III, Cap. 4; 5 Edward III, Cap. 4; Richard II, Cap. 11; 23 Henry VI, Cap 7.

  6. 6.

    Richard Bullock, ‘Sheriffs’ Changing Roles in the East Midlands, 1580–1640’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 2018).

  7. 7.

    CPR, 1596–97, p. 72, item 382.

  8. 8.

    Prothero, p. 174.

  9. 9.

    Elton, England under the Tudors, pp. 394–5.

  10. 10.

    Acts of the Privy Council (afterwards APC), 1600–1, p. 148 (Letter 8 February 1601 [P]rivy [C]ouncil to sheriff of Nottinghamshire).

  11. 11.

    APC, 1600–1, p. 150 (Letters 13 February 1601 to various lords including Huntingdon and Shrewsbury).

  12. 12.

    CSPD, 1595–97, p. 153 (cclv, item 59).

  13. 13.

    APC, 1587–88, p. 98 (Letter 29 May 1587, PC to sheriff and justices of Nottinghamshire); APC, 1592–93, p. 77 (Letter 21 February 1593, PC to sheriff and justices of Nottinghamshire).

  14. 14.

    CSPD, 1581–90, pp. 195–6 (clxxii, items 70 and 74).

  15. 15.

    Ibid., p. 281 (clxxxiii, item 62).

  16. 16.

    Ibid., p. 307 (clxxxvi, items 81 and 82).

  17. 17.

    Ibid., p. 275 (clxxxiii, item 29).

  18. 18.

    APC, 1592–93, p. 267 (Letter 25 May 1593, Council to John Bassett and justices of Nottinghamshire).

  19. 19.

    J. Neale, The Elizabethan House of Commons (London, 1976).

  20. 20.

    ‘Letter Chamberlain to Carleton, 28 June 1599’, in The Chamberlain Letters, ed. E. McClure (London 1966) p. 27.

  21. 21.

    P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I’, in Elizabethan Essays, ed. P. Collinson (London, 1994), pp. 36, 43.

  22. 22.

    P. Collinson, ‘De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back’, in Elizabethan Essays, ed. Collinson, pp. 14, 16.

  23. 23.

    James I, The True Law of Free Monarchies (London, 1598), p. 202; Prothero, p. 400.

  24. 24.

    G. Burgess, ‘The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered’, EHR 107 (1992), p. 841.

  25. 25.

    Burgess, ‘Divine Right of Kings’, p. 848.

  26. 26.

    P. Croft, ‘Review of The Struggle for Succession in late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representation, ed. J-C. Mayer’, EHR 121 (2006), p. 217.

  27. 27.

    J. Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History 68 (1983), 187–209.

  28. 28.

    T. Millington, The True Narration of the Entertainment of His Majesty (London, 1603), reprinted in Stuart Tracts, 1603–1693, ed. C. H. Firth (Westminster, 1903), pp. 11, 35.

  29. 29.

    J. Wormald, ‘James VI and I’, in ODNB, available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14592.

  30. 30.

    Exodus 20:12 (KJV).

  31. 31.

    P. Collinson The Birth Pangs of Protestant England: Cultural Changes in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’ (New York, 1988), p. 59.

  32. 32.

    APC, 1613–14, p. 491 (Letter 4 July 1614, PC to sheriffs, JPs and mayors).

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    APC, 1621–23, p. 176 (Letter 31 May 1622, PC to sheriffs, mayors, bailiffs etc.).

  35. 35.

    P. Slack, ‘Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631’, TRHS, 5th series, 30 (1980), 1–22.

  36. 36.

    APC, 1630–31, p. 111 (Letter 12 Nov 1630, PC to bishop of London, sheriffs, JPs and lord mayor).

  37. 37.

    See L. Perille, ‘Harnessing Conscience for the King. Charles I: The Forced Loan Sermons, and the Matters of Conscience’, Exemplaria 24 (2012), 161–77.

  38. 38.

    CSPD, 1625–26, p. 353 (15 June 1626, Draft Proclamation).

  39. 39.

    For a fuller background, see R. Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626–1628 (Oxford 1987), p. 49.

  40. 40.

    Perille, ‘Harnessing Conscience’, p. 164.

  41. 41.

    Prothero, pp. 400–1.

  42. 42.

    Prothero, p. 399.

  43. 43.

    Hampden’s Case.

  44. 44.

    ‘Letter Chamberlain to Carleton, 28 October 1620’, in The Chamberlain Letters, ed. McClure, p. 248.

  45. 45.

    John 20:17 (KJV).

  46. 46.

    The episode is dealt with in detail in T. Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642 (Oxford 2014), pp. 131–4.

  47. 47.

    CSPD, 1625–26, pp. 434 (xxxvi, item 34), 399 (xxxiii, item 59), 407 (xxxiv, item 4), 427 (xxxv, item 90).

  48. 48.

    K. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992), p. 629 quoting J. Dias, ‘Politics and Administration in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, 1590–1640’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1973), p. 355.

  49. 49.

    CSPD, 1637–38, p. 443 (cccxc, item 116).

  50. 50.

    Ibid., p. 462 (cccxci, item 39).

  51. 51.

    ‘Lord Keeper Coventry speech to Assize Judges, 14 February 1636’, in Hampden’s Case, p. 510.

  52. 52.

    Hampden’s Case, pp. 664–6.

  53. 53.

    Hampden’s Case, pp. 664–6.

  54. 54.

    Hampden’s Case, p. 686.

  55. 55.

    CSPD, 1635, p. 216 (cccxiii, item 50).

  56. 56.

    CSPD, 1636–37, p. 543 (cccli, item 91).

  57. 57.

    A fuller exposition is at W. J. Jones, Politics and the Bench: The Judges and the Origin of the Civil War (London 1971), p. 126.

  58. 58.

    See particularly, Sir George Vernon, Hampden’s Case, p. 637, and Sir John Denham, p. 672.

  59. 59.

    See particularly, Sir George Crooke, Hampden’s Case, p. 646, and Sir Richard Hutton, p. 670.

  60. 60.

    In the judgement given in Hampden’s Case, p. 615.

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  1. Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

    Richard Bullock

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  1. Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Matthew Ward

  2. Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

    Matthew Hefferan

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Bullock, R. (2020). ‘We have a good king and our imaginations ought to be good to him’: Divided Loyalties Forced on East Midlands Sheriffs, 1580–1640. In: Ward, M., Hefferan, M. (eds) Loyalty to the Monarchy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain, c.1400-1688. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37767-0_10

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