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Office under Queen Elizabeth: the Case of Lord Hunsdon and the Lord Chamberlainship in 1585

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2010

Lawrence Stone
Lawrence Stone
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the role played by the Court and government office in the social and political evolution of Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Professor Trevor-Roper has treated office under the Crown as a smooth highroad to economic advancement, one of the principal causes of such rise of the gentry as may have occurred. According to this view, the political antecedents of the English Civil War are best interpreted in terms of the polarities of Court and Country: it was reaction against an overgrown and corruptly lucrative Court that inspired the opposition in 1640; it was desire to dismantle the whole centralizing apparatus which inspired the policy of the Independents in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Others, including Professor Aylmer and myself, have subjected officialdom to detailed inspection and have concluded that its rewards were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth and Charles I, its personnel was restricted in numbers, and its more spectacular beneficiaries were a very small minority. The recently published letter of Sir Edward Stanhope to Thomas Viscount Wentworth, advising him to refuse the Deputyship of Ireland in 1631, has cast a flood of light on contemporary attitudes towards the acceptance of at least one high office. Forty-six years before, when Henry Carey, 1st Earl of Hunsdon, was offered the Lord Chamberlainship of the Royal Household, he received a similar letter of warning from a close follower.

Type
Communication
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , 1967 , pp. 279 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1967

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References

page 279 note 1 Trevor-Roper, H. R., The Gentry, 1520-1620 (Economic History Review, Supplement I), 1953.Google ScholarTrevor-Roper, H. R., ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, XVI (1959), 31–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarAylmer, G. E., The King's Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625-42 (1961).Google ScholarAylmer, G. E., ‘Office-holding as a factor in English History, 1625-42’, History, XLIV (1959), 228–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarStone, L., The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar.

page 279 note 2 Published by Professor , Zagorin in Historical Journal, VII (1964), 298–320Google Scholar.

page 279 note 3 Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1558-60, p. 115.

page 280 note 4 Naunton, F., Fragmenta Regalia, 1641,Google Scholarsub ‘Hunsdon’. The land grant in Cornwall was sold by his heir for £6,500 in 1606 (Close Rolls, 4 Jas. I, pt. 28). Goodman, G., The Court of King James I, p. 178Google Scholar.

page 280 note 5 Memoirs of Sir Robert Carey, Earl of Monmouth, ed. Powell, G. H. (1905), pp. 99–103Google Scholar (the original letter is in B.M. Harl. MSS. 6993/36).

page 280 note 6 Grazebrook, G. and Reynolds, G. P., Visitation of Salop, 1623, II,Google Scholar Harleian Soc, XXIX (1889), 473-4. T. F. Dukes, Antiquities of Shropshire (Shrewsbury, 1884), p. 135. That he was in the supply services at Chester is suggested by the fact that his sureties for the Berwick job were Cheshire gentry, rather than men from his native Shropshire. C.S.P.D. Add., 1566-79, pp. 489-90.

page 280 note 7 Cal. Border Papers, 1, 6, 9, 11; II, 8. H.M.C. Salisbury MSS., 11, 107. Berkeley Castle MSS., Letters, n, fo. 74.

page 281 note 8 See Appendix.

page 281 note 9 H.M.C. Salisbury MSS., xv, 343.

page 281 note 10 C.S.P. Dom. Add., 1580-1625, p. 250; 1603-10, p. 32. For the duties of the Clerks Controllers and the Cofferer, see Woodworth, A., Purveyance for the Royal Household in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Philadelphia, 1945), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

page 281 note 11 C.S.P.D., 1603-10, p. 600. McClure, N. E., Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), 1, 585.Google ScholarC.S.P.D., 1623-5, P. 24.

page 281 note 12 Berkeley Castle MSS., Roll 78. It is an indication of Burghley's easy tolerance of financial delinquency among high-born friends that on his death in 1596 it was discovered that Hunsdon had not paid Parliamentarytaxes since 1563, the fee-farm rent on Hunsdon manor since it was granted in 1559, or the purchase price of wardships going back to 1584.

page 282 note 13 , McClure, op.cit. p. 585.Google Scholar

page 282 note 1 This reproduction is by kind permission of the Trustees of the Will of the Right Hon. Randal Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Berkeley, deceased.