Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution

The standard view is that James VI & I and Charles I believed in their divine right to rule, the constitutionalists thought kings should obey laws, and that the irreconcilable differences led inevitable to the Civil War. Burgess (history, U. of Hull, England) presents contemporary common law and legal thought to argue that almost no one was a pure absolutist or constitutionalist and that the conflict was generated much more by personalities and particular events than by philosophical positions. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

In this ambitious reinterpretation of the early Stuart period in England, Glenn Burgess contends that the common understanding of seventeenth-century English politics is oversimplified and inaccurate. The long-accepted standard view is that the gradual polarization of Court and Parliament during the reigns of James I and Charles I reflected the split between absolutists (who upheld the divine right of the monarchy to rule) and constitutionalists (who resisted tyranny by insisting the monarch was subject to law) and resulted inevitably in civil war. Yet, Burgess argues, the very terms that have been used to understand the period are misleading: there were almost no genuine absolutist thinkers in England before the Civil War, and the 'constitutionalism' of common lawyers and parliamentarians was a very different notion from current understanding of that term.