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SIR JOHN ELIOT'S THE MONARCHIE OF MAN AND EARLY STUART POLITICAL THOUGHT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2018

WILLIAM WHITE Open the ORCID record for WILLIAM WHITE [Opens in a new window]
WILLIAM WHITE*
Affiliation:
St Anne's College, Oxford
*
St Anne's College, 56 Woodstock Road, Oxford, ox2 6hs[email protected]
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Abstract

This article seeks to revise existing interpretations of the political writings composed by the early Stuart MP, Sir John Eliot (1592–1632), while imprisoned in the Tower of London between 1629 and 1632. In particular, it challenges the common understanding of Eliot as an absolutist writer. This characterization is shown to be based on a misreading of his principal treatise, The monarchie of man, and the problematic assumption that De jure – a translation he undertook of the continental absolutist, Arnisaeus – should be taken to epitomize Eliot's own views. The article also refutes the notion that The monarchie of man is an uncontroversial text that ignores contemporary political context. It is argued that the treatise can, in fact, only be read in relation to the constitutional crisis of the late 1620s: Eliot's work is presented as a subversive attack on Charles I's tyrannical pretensions, which supplies a remedy in the form of a Ciceronian insistence on active virtue. These findings in turn have implications for how we understand the political thought and culture of early Stuart England more generally.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 639 - 662
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Richard Serjeantson, who supervised the M.Phil. on which this article is based, for his guidance and support. I am also very grateful to Grant Tapsell and the anonymous referees of this journal for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

References

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3 See, for example, Conrad Russell, ‘Eliot, Sir John (1592–1632)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (ODNB), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8630. For the revisionist interpretation of the early Stuart period more generally, see Russell, Conrad, Parliaments and English politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharpe, Kevin; The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT, 1992)Google Scholar; Burgess, Glenn, The politics of the ancient constitution (Basingstoke, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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28 Ibid., fo. 9r.

29 Ibid., fo. 16v.

30 Ibid., fos. 16v–17r.

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35 Quoted in Salmon, French religious wars, p. 62.

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52 Ibid., fos. 27v–28r.

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63 Ibid., fo. 94r.

64 Ibid., fo. 10v.

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66 Russell, ‘Eliot, Sir John’.

67 Hulme, Life, pp. 354–8.

68 A copy of De jure made some time in the eighteenth century can be found in CRO, EL/729. Although the identity of the transcriber and the precise date are unclear, the round hand suggests a date closer to 1750 than 1700.

69 Grosart, De jure, i, p. xiv.

70 CRO, EL/655/5. See, for example, the facsimile reproduced in the front matter of De jure, i, by Grosart. He notes that the facsimile ‘will give the Reader some idea of the difficulty and toil in making our transcript for the press; and perhaps excuse any inadvertent misreadings’, p. 1n.

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107 BL, Harley MS 2228, fo. 33r.

108 Ibid., fo. 19r.

109 Ball, ‘Sir John Eliot’, p. 174. This view is echoed by others. Hulme finds it curious that, ‘without a break of any kind Sir John Eliot turns from politics to ethics, the second part of Monarchy of man’; Life, p. 370. Paul Hunneyball describes the work as ‘an ethical study’: ‘Eliot, John’, p. 199.

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123 See, for example, Burgess, Absolute monarchy, pp. 1–2, 47–8.

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