Treason, Allegiance and Sovereignty in England, 1608–88

Abstract

Political and social upheavals astonished and perplexed the English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish from 1603 when the Tudor royal scepter passed to a Scottish Stuart, through to 1689 when a Protestant Dutch prince claimed victory over the departed papist James II. During this time subjects contested sovereign authority in the black print of the press and in the red blood of the battlefield. Perhaps the most dramatic assertion of sovereignty displayed itself in the trials for treason. When James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland in 1603, both he and the Westminster parliament accepted 25 Edw. III, Stat. 5, c. 2 as the law of treason. According to this 1352 statute, subjects committed treasonable acts against the king – not the Crown, not the commonweal, not the government, not an abstract state, but the person of the king. As such, the medieval treason law confirmed James’s understanding of sovereignty in England in 1603.