Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Affection, Interest and Office in Early Modernity

  • Chapter
An Intellectual History of Political Corruption

Part of the book series: Political Corruption and Governance ((PCG))

  • 363 Accesses

Abstract

Conceptualising corruption as a process of degeneration enabled two broad forms of usage in Medieval and Early Modern discourse. First, corruption could be used to describe the process of moral or physical decay of animate beings, possibly even including the degeneration of the earth and the cosmos itself. Second, corruption might also be used to describe the terminus of this process of decay, the state of death or utter destruction to which the process of decay inevitably led. Complicating this categorisation was that both of these usages could also be applied in descriptions of the moral vitiation of a person or a whole community, and the political debility or decline of nations and empires.1 A further complication was that the moral and political connotations of degenerative corruption were often linked to widespread acts of public office corruption, that is, the abuse of public (secular or Church) offices. The apparently divergent understandings of degenerative and public office corruption were also connected by prevailing assumptions about the correspondences between the divine structure of the cosmos, the hierarchies of nature, the rightly ordered society and the well-proportioned body of a human being. As Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618) put it, ‘in the little frame of man’s body there is a representation of Universall, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts thereof’.2

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. Waquet, Corruption, pp. 88–9; Burke, ‘Tradition and Experience’, 138–41; D.C Allen (1938) ‘The Degeneration of Man and Renaissance Pessimism’, Studies in Philology 35 (2), 222.

    Google Scholar 

  2. W. Raleigh (1971) [1614] The History of the World, CA. Patrides (ed.) (London: Macmillan), Bk I, Ch. 2, § 5, p. 126. Also see T. Forde (1649) Lusus Portunae: The Play ofPortune: Continually Acted by the Severall Creatures on the Stage of the World (London: Printed for R.L.), pp. 20–1.

    Google Scholar 

  3. See, for example, G. Buchanan (2006) [1579] **A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots, M.S. Smith and R.A. Mason (trans., eds) (Edinburgh: Saltire Society), p. 50; Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, Bk I, Ch. XVI, pp. 37–41; Williamson, ‘Seventeenth-Century Melancholy’, 147.

    Google Scholar 

  4. G. Goodman (1616) The Tall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature, Proved by the Light of our Naturall Reason (London: Felix Kyngston); W. Poole (2010) ‘The Evolution of George Hakewill’s Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God, 1627–1637: Academic Contexts, and Some New Angles from Manuscripts’, Electronic British Library Journal, 7, 1–32. http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/pdl/ebljarticle72010.pdf, date accessed 27 August 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  5. J. Hurstfield (1967) ‘Political Corruption in Modern England: The Historian’s Problem’, History 52 (174), 26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. A. Fitzmaurice (2007) ‘American Corruption’ in J.F. McDiarmid (ed.) The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 222.

    Google Scholar 

  7. N. Mears (2005) Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 186–208.

    Google Scholar 

  8. J.H.M. Salmon (1980) ‘Cicero and Tacitus in Sixteenth-Century France’, The American Historical Review 85 (2), 320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. D. Womersley (1991) ‘Sir Henry Savile’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts’, The Review of English Studies XLII (167), 332, 322.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. R. Tuck (1993) Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 41;

    Book  Google Scholar 

  11. M. Peltonen (1995) Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 124–6.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  12. L. Levy Peck (1990) Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London: Routledge), pp. 161, 186, 203.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  13. R.G. Asch (1999) ‘Corruption and Punishment? The Rise and Fall of Matthäus Enzlin (1556–1613), Lawyer and Favourite’ in J.H. Elliott and L.W.B. Brockliss (eds) The World of the Favourite (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 104–5.

    Google Scholar 

  14. J.P. Sommerville (2007) ‘English and Roman Liberty in the Monarchical Republic of Early Stuart England’ in ZZ McDiarmid (ed.) The Monarchical Republic, pp. 207, 215.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Also, R. Cust (2007) ‘Reading for Magistracy: The Mental World of Sir John Newdigate’ in ZZ McDiarmid (ed.) The Monarchical Republic, p. 183;

    Google Scholar 

  16. and J.R McDiarmid (2007) ‘Common Consent, Latinitas, and the “Monarchical Republic” in Mid-Tudor Humanism’ in The Monarchical Republic, pp. 63–5.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Ibid., p. 63; A.O. Hirschman (1982) ‘Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?m’ Journal of Economic Literature 20 (4), 1464.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Such imagery was commonplace in diplomatic discourse reporting the tumults and debilities of foreign states. See, for example, ‘Davison to Walsingham, December 15, 1578’ and ‘Harborne to Walsingham, September 15, 1584’ in A.J. Butler (ed.) (1903) Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1578–1579 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office); and S.C. Lomas (ed.) (1916) Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, 1584–1585, pp. 343 and 66.

    Google Scholar 

  19. D.G. Hale (1971) The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague/Paris: Mouton), pp. 53–5.

    Google Scholar 

  20. T. Starkey (1973) [1540] Exhortation to Unitie and Obedience (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press), p. 14.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Guicciardini also spoke of the ‘city’ as a ‘body composed of many limbs’ (F. Guicciardini (1994) [1521–4] Dialogue on the Government of Florence, A. Brown (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 115).

    Google Scholar 

  22. See A. Cowan (2009) ‘Cities, Towns, and New Forms of Culture’

    Google Scholar 

  23. and K. Gouwens (2009) ‘Human Exceptionalism’ both in J.J. Martin (ed.) The Renaissance World (New York: Routledge).

    Google Scholar 

  24. C. Fasolt (2009) ‘Religious Authority and Ecclesiastical Governance’ in ZZ Martin (ed.) The Renaissance World, pp. 370–5.

    Google Scholar 

  25. According to Haigh, the ‘anti-clerical’ indictments of a Catholic clergy sunk in iniquitous corruption were certainly exaggerated (C. Haigh (1983) ‘Anticlericalism and the English Reformation’, History 68 (224), 392),

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. while Frans van Liere contends that the Medieval Roman Catholic Church generally maintained higher standards of financial probity than most secular courts (F. van Liere (2008) ‘Was the Medieval Church Corrupt?’ in S.J. Harris and B.L. Grigsby (eds) Misconceptions About the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge) pp. 31–4).

    Google Scholar 

  27. In the 1559 ‘Instructions for the Council of Trent’ that aimed to reform Catholic practice and doctrine from within, it was asserted that the ‘principal troubles in religion have arisen from the abuses which have crept into the Church by the corruption of discipline and manners…’ (J. Stephenson (ed.) (1866) Calendar of State Papers, Foreign, 1561–1562 (London: Longmans) p. 626).

    Google Scholar 

  28. M. Luther (1963) ‘Disputation for the Exposition of the Power of Indulgences, Published on 31 October 1517 at Wittenberg’ in Luther’s and Zwingli’s Propositions for Debate: The Ninety-Five Theses of October 1517 and the Sixty-Seven Articles of 19 January 1523, C.S. Meyer (trans.) (Leiden: Brill), Number 25.2 [27], p. 7.

    Google Scholar 

  29. J. Calvin (1960) [1536/1559] Institutes of the Christian Religion, J.T. McNeill (ed.), EL. Battles (trans.) (Louisville: The Westminster Press), Bk IV, Ch. 5, §18–19, pp. 1100–1.

    Google Scholar 

  30. See also J. Calvin (1954) [1543] ‘The Necessity of Reforming the Church. A Humble Exhortation to the Most Invincible Emperor Charles V’ in Calvin: Theological Treatises, J.K.S. Reid (trans.) (London: SCM Press), pp. 185–91.

    Google Scholar 

  31. On English Protestant reformist rhetoric on the corruptions of the Catholic church, see A. MacColl (2004) ‘The Construction of England as a Protestant “British” Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies 18 (4), 596–8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Groebner, Liquid Assets, p. 153; also G.W. Bernard (1998) ‘Vitality and Vulnerability in the Late Medieval Church: Pilgrimage on the Eve of the Break with Rome’ in J.L. Watts (ed.) The End of the Middle Ages? England in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (New York: Sutton Publishing), p. 223.

    Google Scholar 

  33. H. Zwingli (1963) ‘The Sixty-seven Articles of 19 January 1523’ in Luther’s and Zwingli’s Propositions for Debate, number 56, p. 49. By referring to ‘Simon’, Zwingli meant Simon Magus, who, in Acts 8: 9–24, was said to offer money to ‘receive the Holy Spirit’ and from whom the term ‘simony’ was derived. ‘Bileam’ or ‘Balaam’ was a false Hebrew prophet who corrupted the Israelites with unclean gifts.

    Google Scholar 

  34. A.B. Zlatar (2011) Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 158;

    Book  Google Scholar 

  35. B.S. Gregory (2009) ‘Christian Reform and its Discontents’ in ZZ Martin (ed.) The Renaissance World, pp. 598–600.

    Google Scholar 

  36. A. Fix (1987) ‘Radical Reformation and Second Reformation in Holland: The Intellectual Consequences of the Sixteenth-Century Religious Upheaval and the Coming of the Rational World View’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1), 71–3.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. P. Harrison (2002) ‘Original Sin and the Problem of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2), 243.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. T. More (1927) [1529] The Dialogue Concerning Tyndale by Sir Thomas More, facsimile from the collected edition (1557), W.E. Campbell (ed.) (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode), pp. 134–5.

    Google Scholar 

  39. Also, Hale, The Body Politic, p. 51. William Tyndale (c. 1492–1536) responded by rejecting More’s corporeal metaphors as just another of the ‘sotle allegories & fasifienge[s]’ perpetrated by Catholics to obscure the Gospels (W. Tyndale (2000) [1531] An Answer unto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, A.M. O’Donnell and J. Wicks (eds) (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press), pp. 77, 113, 164).

    Google Scholar 

  40. Ibid., Bk II, Ch. 1, §5–6, p. 248. See, for example, D. Van Drunen (2004) ‘The Context of Natural Law: Jean Calvin’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms’, Journal of Church and State 46, 513.

    Google Scholar 

  41. J. Knox (1878) [1558] **The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, E. Arber (ed.) (London: Southgate), p. 32.

    Google Scholar 

  42. A.N. McLaren (1996) ‘Delineating the Elizabethan Body Politic: Knox, Aylmer and the Définition of Counsel 1558–88’, History of Political Thought 17 (2), 248–52;

    Google Scholar 

  43. P. Hicks (2005) ‘The Roman Matron in Britain: Female Political Influence and the Republican Response, ca. 1750–1800’, The Journal of Modern History 77 (1), 35–69.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  44. G. Buchanan (1958) The Tyrannous Reign of Mary Stewart, W.A. Gatherer (ed., trans.) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 62–3.

    Google Scholar 

  45. See, for example, R. Morison (1972) [1539] An Exhortation, facsimile reprint (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum; New York: Da Capo Press), pp. 3–5, 16–17; and Sir J. Cheke (1569) [1549] The Hurt of Sedition, How Grievous it is to a Commonwealth (London: Willyam Seres), 62. On the metaphor of ‘disease’,

    Google Scholar 

  46. see D. Erasmus (1997) [1516] The Education of a Christian Prince, L. Jardine (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 2, 39; also J. Ponet (1556) A Short Treatise of Politik Power (British Library W462573), Ch. VI.

    Google Scholar 

  47. E. Dudley (1948) [1509] The Tree of Commonwealth, D.M. Brodie (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 25, 28, 77, 94, 79. All the following information in this paragraph is taken from these pages.

    Google Scholar 

  48. R Bacon (1998) [1622] The History of the Reign of King Henry VII, B. Vickers (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 175.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  49. A. Cromartie (2006) The Constitutionalist Revolution. An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 87. This same aspiration was voiced with remarkable clarity in diplomatic correspondence from France, in July 1578, where an anonymous author declared ‘that there is no foundation on which commonwealths may be more firmly established, even as on a rock, than religion…. This holds together as a great edifice the body of the commonwealth, so that if this be corrupted the commonwealth must fall’. (‘Representation sent by a Gentleman of France to the Estates General and Particular Towns and communities of the Low Countries in the obedience of the Catholic King’ in Butler (ed.) Calendar of State Papers, Toreign, 1578–1579, p. 109).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  50. T. Starkey (1989) [1529–32] A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, T.F. Mayer (ed.) (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society), p. 31. Similar, though less laboured, imagery was invoked by Thomas Elyot (1834) [1531] in his Boke Named the Governour (London: John Hernaman), Bk III, p. 257.

    Google Scholar 

  51. Starkey, An Exhortation, p. 5. In a letter to Lord Lisle, then Governor of Calais, Thomas Cromwell urged him to preserve unity amongst his council by suppressing ‘diversity of opinion’ in matters of religion, ensuring thereby that ‘perfect truth’ is ‘divided from men’s corrupt affections of lavour, malice or displeasure’. (T. Cromwell (1981) [1539] ‘Cromwell to Lord Lisle, 6 May 1539’ in M.S. Byrne (ed.) The Lisle Letters (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 453).

    Google Scholar 

  52. Starkey, Dialogue, pp. 10–1. Here, Starkey employs another organic metaphor, that of the garden or ‘gud culture’ needed to stop the ‘wedys’ from ‘over grow[ing] the gud corne’. See also Â. Bergvall (1993–4) ‘Reason in English Renaissance Humanism: Starkey, More and Ascham’, Connotations 3 (3), 220–1.

    Google Scholar 

  53. Ibid., pp. 121–2. Starkey earlier denounced those advisors to princes who ‘procure theyr owne’ advantage by offering false advice and ‘corrupt’ the commonwealth with ‘lyke opynyon’ and ‘lyke affecte’ (p. 16). On Starkey’s political proposals, see T.R Mayer (1985) ‘Faction and Ideology: Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue’, The Historical Journal 28 (1), 9.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  54. Mayer contends that Starkey was inspired by ‘the constitutional traditions of the late middle ages’, while Hadfield argues that Starkey took inspiration from the Venetian government (T.F. Mayer (1989) Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 156);

    Book  Google Scholar 

  55. A. Hadfield (1998) Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

    Google Scholar 

  56. S. Kettering (1988) ‘Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France’, Trench History 2 (2), 132–3;

    Google Scholar 

  57. M. Jansson (2005) ‘Measured Reciprocity: English Ambassadorial Gift Exchange in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Journal of Early Modern History 9 (3–4), 348–70.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  58. R. Harding (1981) ‘Corruption and the Moral Boundaries of Patronage in the Renaissance’ in G.F. Lytle and S. Orgel (eds) Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press), p. 63.

    Google Scholar 

  59. See also A. Maczak (1991) ‘Aristocratic Household to Princely Court’ in R.G. Asch and A.M. Birke (eds) Princes, Patronage, and Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c. 1450–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 316–17.

    Google Scholar 

  60. N.Z. Davis (2000) The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 15, 15–22.

    Google Scholar 

  61. Also, I.K. Ben-Amos (2000) ‘Gifts and Favors: Informal Support in Early Modern England’, The Journal of Modern History 72 (2), 314–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  62. Davis, The Gift, pp. 26–8; F. Heal (2008) ‘Food Gilts, the Household and the Politics of Exchange in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 199, 53–4.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  63. G. Elton (1993) ‘How Corrupt was Thomas Cromwell?’ The Historical Journal 36 (4), 907; Kettering, ‘Gift-Giving’, 142.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  64. L.K. Regan (2005) ‘Ariosto’s Threshold Patron: Isabella d’Esté in the Orlando Furioso’, MLN 120 (1), 62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  65. E.H. Shagan (2007) ‘The Two Republics: Conflicting Views of Participatory Local Government in Early Tudor England’ in ZZ McDiarmid (ed.) The Monarchical Republic, pp. 20–2;

    Google Scholar 

  66. M. Goldie (2001) ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Olficeholding in Early Modern England’ in T. Harris (ed.) The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 153–94.

    Google Scholar 

  67. A.G.R. Smith (1977) Servant of the Cecils: The Life ofSir Michael Hickes, 1543–1612 (London: Jonathan Cape), pp. 70–2.

    Google Scholar 

  68. Gratuities might be offered as a way of bolstering the suit of particularly able and qualified candidates, indicating that office could not always be won by bribes alone. Swart concluded that in some cases, corruption served to advance those not of noble birth who possessed genuine talents and abilities (K.W. Swart (1949) Sale of Offices in the Seventeenth Century (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), pp. 112–27).

    Book  Google Scholar 

  69. B. Barnes (1975) [1606] Four Bookes of Offices (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum). Barnes’ four books correspond to four virtues: temperance in governing the Prince’s treasure, prudence in ruling moderately, justice in governing wisely and fortitude in enduring the perils of war.

    Google Scholar 

  70. J. Hurstfield (1973) Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London: Jonathan Cape), pp. 187–8.

    Google Scholar 

  71. J. Cole (2007) ‘Cultural Clientelism and Brokerage Networks in Early Modern Florence and Rome: New Correspondence between the Barberini and Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger’, Renaissance Quarterly 60 (3), 740–1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  72. On patronage as liberality, see G. Kipling (1981) ‘Henry VII and the Origins of Tudor Patronage’ in ZZ Lytle and ZZ Orgel (eds) Patronage in the Renaissance, pp. 118–9. See also Robert Johnson’s Essais (1601) in which he criticises patrons who reward ‘lavorites’ only with ‘kind gestures’ without ‘ministering to their wantes’. However, he also maintains that it would be wise for patrons ‘to bee reserved in giving to those’ who ‘winde themselves into favour, by working a more worthier [client] into disgrace’ serving their own ‘avarice’ and ‘selfseeking contempt of others’. Invoking Cicero, he opined that sell-seeking adventurers ‘seeme allected to none but to Praetors’ and thus become the willing accomplices of tyrants (Johnson, Essais, pp. 54–6).

    Google Scholar 

  73. C. Condren (2009) ‘Public, Private and the Idea of the “Public Sphere” in Early-Modern England’, Intellectual History Review 19 (1), 21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  74. Ibid., 22, 26. See lor example, Richard Brathwaite’s argument that the ‘vocation’ of men was both ‘publicke, when imployed in allairs of state’ and ‘private, when in domesticke business’ they concern themselves with ‘ordering’ the ‘household’. ‘As every man’s house is his Castle’, he continued, ‘so is his family a private Common-wealth, wherein il due government be not observed, nothing but contusion is to be expected’. This task called for the application of the same virtues of temperance, obedience and service that were required in the discharge of public office (R. Brathwaite (1975) [1630] The English Gentleman, lacsimile reprint (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum), pp. 136, 155–6).

    Google Scholar 

  75. C. Perry (2010) ‘Court and Coterie Culture’ in M. Hattaway (ed.) A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), p. 304.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  76. Smith, Servant of the Cecils, pp. 56–69. Smith contends that some of these payments, especially those lor appointment to local offices, were ‘perfectly proper’ and legally defensible, and that as a consequence ‘it would be quite wrong to brand him [Hickes] as “corrupt” simply lor accepting’ them (p. 80). The receipt of suits and the constant press of suitors were routine hazards of office (P.M. Handover (1959) The Second Cecil: The Rise to Power 1563–1604 of Sir Robert Cecil later Pirst Earl of Salisbury (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode), p. 128).

    Google Scholar 

  77. See, for example, N. Constantinidou (2010) ‘On Patronage, fama and Court: Early Modern Political Culture’ in Renaissance Studies 24 (4), 607–9;

    Google Scholar 

  78. M. Feingold (1987) ‘Philanthropy, Pomp and Patronage: Historical Reflections upon the Endowment of Culture’, Daedalus 116 (1), 155–78.

    Google Scholar 

  79. J.S. Block (1998) ‘Political Corruption in Henrician England’ in C. Carlton, R.L. Woods, M.L. Robertson and J.S. Block (eds) State, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A.J. Slavin (New York: St Martin’s Press), p. 48.

    Google Scholar 

  80. Davis, The Gift, pp. 73–4; Ben-Amos, ‘Gilts and Favors’, pp. 332–3; also F Heal (1996) ‘Reciprocity and Exchange in the Late Medieval Household’ in B.A. Hanawalt and D. Wallace (eds) Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Tifteenth Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 190–1.

    Google Scholar 

  81. W. Roper (1962/1990) [1555] The Life of Sir Thomas More in R.S Sylvester and D.P Harding (eds) Two Early Tudor Lives: The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey and The Life of Sir Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 219. Roper’s hagiography presents More as having performed his duties assiduously, ‘from all corruption of wrong-doing or bribes-taking kept himself so clear that no man was able therewith once to blemish him’ (p. 231).

    Google Scholar 

  82. See also S. Brigden (2000) New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603 (London: Penguin), p. 166;

    Google Scholar 

  83. also J.K. Sawyer (1988) ‘Judicial Corruption and Legal Reform in Early Seventeenth-Century France’, Law and History Review 6 (1), 96–7.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  84. T.E. Hartley (ed.) (1981) Proceedings of the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, Vol. 1: 1558–1581 (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier), pp. 251–3; ‘First Case of Bribery, 1571’ in J.R. Tanner (1951) Tudor Constitutional Documents A.D. 1485–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 526–7.

    Google Scholar 

  85. Edward VI (1966) [1551] Discourse on Reform of Abuses in Church and State in W.K. Jordan (ed.) The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (London: George Allen and Unwin), p. 164. The metaphor is elaborated on pages 160–1.

    Google Scholar 

  86. T. Smith (1970) [1583] De Republica Anglorum (Menston: The Scholar Press), p. 47. Significantly, when Smith defines the ‘common wealth’, he does so not by employing the language of a body politic, but by emphasising that it is based on the actions of ‘a multitiude of tree men collected together and united by common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves’ (p. 10). Older notions of the organic unity of the ‘body politic’ still made sense in terms of the legal doctrine of the ‘body politic’ defined by Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case in 1608, by which the monarch’s private (mortal) person was separated from the public (immortal) person of the state. As the preamble to the ‘Lay Subsidy Act’ of 1601 shows, the organic unity of the English ‘body politic’ retained strong rhetorical appeal.

    Google Scholar 

  87. Here, Parliament referred to itsell as her majesty’s Taithfiil and obedient subjects’, constituting ‘one Body Politic’ in which ‘your Highness is the head and we the members’ (J.H. Thomas (1986) [1836] Lord Coke’s Pirst Institute of the Laws of England, Vol. I (Buffalo, NY: William S. Hein), p. 59; ‘Lay Subsidy Act of 1601’ in Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents, p. 612).

    Google Scholar 

  88. Davis, The Gift, p. 51. See also C. Condren (2001) ‘The Problem of Audience, Office and the Language of Political Action in Lawson’s Politica and Hobbes’s Leviathan’, Zeitschrift für Historische Porschung 26, 301.

    Google Scholar 

  89. A.J. Slavin (1966) Politics and Profit: A Study of Sir Ralph Sadler 1507–1547 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 177–8. In Robert Greene’s many satires on petty thelt and rampant fraud, England was pictured as a commonwealth of ‘conny catchers’ perpetually deceiving and defrauding honest and gullible citizens. Interestingly, his satires tended not to include corrupt public officials in the legion of ‘conny catchers’. In the work of his later plagiarist, Anthony Nixon, petty ‘conny catching’ was replaced by a concern for the ‘knavish’ corruption of lawyers, the wealthy and by the emulators of ‘fashion’; see R. Greene (1592) The Third andLastpart ofConny-Catching. With the new Devised Knavish art of Foole-Taking (London: Printed for T. Scarlet); R. Greene (1592) The Defence of Conny-Catching (London: Printed by A.I.); A. Nixon (1615) The Scourge of Corruption. Or A Crafty Knave Needs no Broker (London: Henry Gosson and William Holmes). This shift of emphasis was recognised by Miller, but he did not place special emphasis on the place of corruption (E.H. Miller (1954) ‘Another Source for Anthony Nixon’s “The Scourge of Corruption (1615)” ‘, Huntington Library Quarterly 17 (2), 173–6). The satirical image of a commonwealth of corruption (Parnassus) was also employed by Boccalini in 1612; see The Works of the Celebrated Trajano Boccalini; Consisting of Panegyricks, Satyrs, and Criticisms, in Advertisements from Parnassus, Vol. 1 (London: R. Smith, 1714).

    Google Scholar 

  90. G. Cavendish (1962/1990) [1558] The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey in R.S. Sylvester and D.P. Harding (eds) Two Early Tudor Lives, p. 13.

    Google Scholar 

  91. S. Adams (1995) ‘The Patronage of the Crown in Elizabethan Politics: the 1590s in Perspective’, in J. Guy (ed.) The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 25.

    Google Scholar 

  92. R.H. Britnell (1998) ‘The English Economy and the Government, 1450–1550’ in J.L. Watts (ed.) The End of the Middle Ages? pp. 96–7, 104–7; Brigden, New Worlds, pp. 183–4.

    Google Scholar 

  93. M.J. Braddick (2000) State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 48–50;

    Book  Google Scholar 

  94. D. Loades (2002) The Chronicles of the Tudor Queens (Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing), pp. 136–7.

    Google Scholar 

  95. Adams, ‘The Patronage of the Crown’, pp. 31–40. Adams speculates that the rise of monopolies, ironically, favoured a decline in venality and the consolidation of an ethos of ‘public service’ (p. 42) in England, in contrast to France. See also L. Levy Peck (1981) ‘Court Patronage and Government Policy: the Jacobean Dilemma’ in ZZ Lytle and ZZ Orgel (eds) Patronage in the Renaissance, pp. 28–42.

    Google Scholar 

  96. This is covered in more detail in Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption, pp. 136–43, 185–6. On the role of favourites, see L. Levy Peck (1999) ‘Monopolizing Favour: Structures of Power in the Early Seventeenth-Century English Court’ in ZZ Elliott and ZZ Brockliss (eds) The World of the Favourite, pp. 56–8.

    Google Scholar 

  97. ZZ Anon. (1948) [1584] ‘Copie of a Letter Wryten by a Master of Arte of Cambridge, commonly known as Leycesters Common-wealth’ in G. Orwell and R. Reynolds (eds) British Pamphleteers, Vol. 1: From the Sixteenth Century to the French Revolution (London: Allan Wingate), pp. 37–8. This tract was squarely aimed at Elizabeth I’s noted favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

    Google Scholar 

  98. W. Harrison (1968) [1587] **The Description of England, G. Edelen (ed) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 257.

    Google Scholar 

  99. T. Smith (1954) [1581] **A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, E. Lamond (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 32–6.

    Google Scholar 

  100. N. Wood (1997) ‘Avarice and Civil Unity: The Contribution of Sir Thomas Smith’, History of Political Thought XVIII (1), pp. 35–6.

    Google Scholar 

  101. W. Prest (1991) ‘Judicial Corruption in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 133, 74–6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  102. J. Bodin (1955) [1576] Six Books of the Commonwealth, M.J. Tooley (trans.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 164–5.

    Google Scholar 

  103. Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption, p. 9; J.G. Harris (1998) Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 61.

    Google Scholar 

  104. W. Prest (1995) ‘William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Polities’, Journal of British Studies 34 (4), 465, 468–9. It was Elizabeth I who apparently described him as ‘good and honest Lambarde’.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  105. Scot did not restrict himself to expatiating on the danger of allowing friendship to sway judgement, but also ‘unbridled affections’, commenting to his judicial listeners that ‘when ye robe your bodies, ye should also apparrell your mindes with calmed affections’. (Scot, God and King, p. 17). William Ames also based on Biblical passages his admonitions against judges receiving ‘bribes’ because it ‘bendeth the inclination of the [judge’s] mind’ by which ‘judgement is either corrupted… [or] sold’ (W. Ames (1975) [1639] Conscience With the Power and Cases Thereof, facsimile reprint, (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum), p. 284).

    Google Scholar 

  106. Peck, ‘Monopolizing Favour’, pp. 65–6; also R.G. Asch (1991) ‘The Revival of Monopolies: Court and Patronage during the Personal Rule of Charles I, 1629–1640’ in ZZ Asch and ZZ Burke (eds) Princes, Patronage, pp. 358–9, 374–6. For claims and counter claims of ‘corruption’ and bribery, see ‘Sir Robert Bannister to…’, J. Bruce (ed.) (1868) Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I, 1637 (London: Longmans), p. 334; Petition of Endymion Porter and Sir John Millisent, February 1633’, in J. Bruce (ed.) (1862) Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1631–1633, p. 552; ‘An Ordinance for the better raysing and levying of Marinors, Saylors, and others…, 3 February 1642/3’, in C.H Firth and R.S. Rait (eds) (1911) Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum 1642–1660, Volume 1, 1642–1649, (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office), p. 73.

    Google Scholar 

  107. Anon. (1953) Mercurius Alethes: or, An Humble Petition of the Corrupt Party, Dissolved at Westminster, April 20. 1653. (London), p. 8. For the implications of the King’s execution and the Rump parliament for the discourse of the body politic, see M.S.R. Jenner (2002) ‘The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’, Past and Present 177, 96–102

    Article  Google Scholar 

  108. T.P Anderson (2006) Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 171–89.

    Google Scholar 

  109. M. Braddick (2009) God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Penguin), pp. 577–80.

    Google Scholar 

  110. Hale, Body Politic, pp. 77–9; also P. Burke (1998) ‘The Demise of Royal Mythologies’ in A. Ellenius (ed.) Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation (Oxford: Clarendon Press), pp. 245, 247. Harris contends that the major intellectual cause of the decline of the metaphor was the decline of ‘humoral’ theories of disease (Harris, Foreign Bodies, p. 142). Nonetheless, the metaphor retained something of its traditional prestige, if only as a commonplace.

    Google Scholar 

  111. See, for example, the preface to C.G. Cock (1656) England’s Compleat Law-fudge, and Lawyer (London: Printed for Edmund Paxton); and ‘Lover of the Laws’ (1659) A Vindication of the Laws of England as They Are Now Established (London: Printed for John Starkey), pp. 1–2.

    Google Scholar 

  112. J. Seiden (1892) Table-Talk, S.H. Reynolds (ed., intro., notes) (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 89.

    Google Scholar 

  113. J. Milton (1847) [1641] Reformation in England, and the Causes That Hitherto Have Hindered It in The Prose Works of John Milton (Philadelphia: John W. Moore), pp. 5–6, 19.

    Google Scholar 

  114. T. Hobbes (1994) [1640] The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, Human Nature, De Corpore Politico, J.C.A. Gaskin (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Part I, XIX, p. 107.

    Google Scholar 

  115. T. Hobbes (1996) [1651] Leviathan, R. Tuck (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Part I, XVI, 111–14

    Google Scholar 

  116. L. Foisneau (2007) ‘Omnipotence, Necessity and Sovereignty: Hobbes and the Absolute and Ordinary Powers of God and King’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’ Leviathan, P. Springborg (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 282.

    Google Scholar 

  117. A. Blau (2009) ‘Hobbes on Corruption’, History of Political Thought 30 (4), 601. Blau argues that Hobbes was concerned primarily with corrupt mental states (612).

    Google Scholar 

  118. Authorship of the Horae is disputed. We follow the consensus among Hobbes scholars in attributing them to his pupil, Cavendish. See N. Malcolm (2007) Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years War; an Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 7.

    Google Scholar 

  119. T. Hobbes [attrib.] (1995) [1620] ‘A Discourse of Rome’ in N.B. Reynolds and A.W. Saxonhouse (eds) Three Discourses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 81.

    Google Scholar 

  120. T. Hobbes (1998) [1641] On the Citizen, R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), Ch. 13, § 17, p. 152.

    Google Scholar 

  121. J. Harrington (1977) [1656] The Commonwealth of Oceana in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.) The Political Works of fames Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 161–70, 269–70, 299, 303, 312.

    Google Scholar 

  122. J. Barnouw (1986) ‘American Independence: Revolution of the Republican Ideal; A Response to Pocock’s Construction of “The Atlantic Republican Tradition”’ in P.J. Korshin (ed.) The American Revolution and Eighteenth-Century Culture (New York: AMS Press), p. 63.

    Google Scholar 

  123. A. Sidney (1996) [1664–5] Court Maxims, H.W. Blom, E.H. Mulier and R. Janse (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 131–3. The following quotation comes from these pages.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  124. A. Sidney (1990) [1681–2] Discourses Concerning Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics), pp. 51, 135, 184–5, 229, 252.

    Google Scholar 

  125. Sidney, Discourses, pp. 141–2, 185. Onnekink argues that from the 1660s, even the institution of the royal favourite, so often associated with the corruption of royal patronage, was more or less obsolete (D. Onnekink(2006) ‘“Mynheer Benting now rules over us”: The 1st Earl of Portland and the Re-emergence of the English Favourite, 1689–99’, English Historical Review CXXI (492), 693–713.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  126. W. Temple (1932) [1673] Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 66.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith University, Australia

    Bruce Buchan (Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2010–2014)

  2. School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia

    Bruce Buchan (Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2010–2014)

  3. University of Adelaide, Australia

    Lisa Hill (Professor of Politics)

Authors
  1. Bruce Buchan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Lisa Hill
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2014 Bruce Buchan and Lisa Hill

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Buchan, B., Hill, L. (2014). Affection, Interest and Office in Early Modernity. In: An Intellectual History of Political Corruption. Political Corruption and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316615_5

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation