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The royal Stuarts : a history of the family that shaped Britain
\"The Royal Stuarts ruled for over 300 years in Scotland and for a century as the Royal Family of Britain and Ireland. They were leading actors in the foremost political dramas of British history - the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Union of the Crowns, the English Civil War and the Restoration - and remain the most controversial and divisive of royal families. Drawing on the accounts of historians past and present, novels and plays, Allan Massie tells the family's full story, from the salt marshes of Brittany to the thrones of Scotland and England, and then eventual exile. A book which gets beyond the received generalisations, The Royal Stuarts takes us deep into the lives of figures like Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I and Bonnie Prince Charlie, uncovering a family of strong affections and fierce rivalries, the brave and capable, the weak and foolish.\"--Publisher's description.
Book
Disorienting fiction
This book gives an ambitious revisionist account of the nineteenth-century British novel and its role in the complex historical process that ultimately gave rise to modern anthropology's concept of culture and its accredited researcher, the Participant Observer. Buzard reads the great nineteenth-century novels of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and others as \"metropolitan autoethnographies\" that began to exercise and test the ethnographic imagination decades in advance of formal modern ethnography--and that did so while focusing on Western European rather than on distant Oriental subjects.
Disorienting Fictionshows how English Victorian novels appropriated and anglicized an autoethnographic mode of fiction developed early in the nineteenth century by the Irish authors of theNational Taleand, most influentially, by Walter Scott. Buzard demonstrates that whereas the fiction of these non-English British subjects devoted itself to describing and defending (but also inventing) the cultural autonomy of peripheral regions, the English novels that followed them worked to imagine limited and mappable versions of English or British culture in reaction against the potential evacuation of cultural distinctiveness threatened by Britain's own commercial and imperial expansion. These latter novels attempted to forestall the self-incurred liabilities of a nation whose unprecedented reach and power tempted it to universalize and export its own customs, to treat them as simply equivalent to a globally applicable civilization. For many Victorian novelists, a nation facing the prospect of being able to go and to exercise its influence just about anywhere in the world also faced the danger of turning itself into a cultural nowhere. The complex autoethnographic work of nineteenth-century British novels was thus a labor to disorient or de-globalize British national imaginings, and novelists mobilized and freighted with new significance some basic elements of prose narrative in their efforts to write British culture into being.
Sure to provoke debate, this book offers a commanding reassessment of a major moment in the history of British literature.
eBook
'What think you of this present state?': representations of Scotland and Anglo-Scottish union in Robert Greene's 'The Scottish History of James the Fourth' and John Ford's 'Perkin Warbeck.'
[...]wisdom eludes the Scottish king, who remains the 'foreign' embodiment of a 'slippery state', in a way which gives the lie to his father-in-law's paroxysms of familial amity. [...]at an early stage, the King of England hands down a thread of English monarchical political insight, which it is to become incumbent on his daughter to bring to Scotland. [...]Ford draws on a tradition in which 'the English had projected onto Scotland the intemperate characteristics associated with extremely northern complexions - slow wits, ferocity, and barbarism':50 Are all our braving enemies shrunk back, Hid in the fogs of their distempered climate, Not daring to behold our colours wave In spite of this infected air? (4.1.14) This is but a cold phlegmatic country, not stirring enough for men of spirit; give me the heart of England for my money. [...]Perkin Warbeck owes considerably more to Shakespeare than simply constituting a late homage to his history plays; Ford employs the same outward appearance of ideological conservatism whilst simultaneously exposing the cracks - in this case, the divisions and differences -within a united Great Britain and between conflicting monarchical ideals. Greene envisages a royal union with Scotland, whilst Ford considers the limitations of merely royal union in a Great Britain divided politically, militarily, religiously and culturally. [...]we can trace a gradual move from a perception of the potential benefits and necessary political weighting of a monarchical Great Britain (which, Greene's play suggests, must be largely Anglocentric and Europhobic) to dubiety in Ford's play about Great Britain's stability, and a recognition of the endurance and hierarchy of separate national identities within that union. 1 Steven G. Ellis and Christopher Maginn, The Making of the British Isles: The State of Britain and Ireland, 1450-1660 (Abingdon: Routledge 2013), p. 290.
Journal Article
James II and David Nairne: The Exiled King and his First Biographer
During the last years of his life in exile, King James II became increasingly dependent on, and even friendly with, one of his servants at Saint-Germain-en-Laye named David Nairne. Yet none of the many biographies of the king shows any awareness of this. In fact there is no mention of Nairne in any of the books devoted to the life of the king. The present article therefore has a double purpose. The first is to draw attention to an interesting master–servant relationship which has been overlooked for too long. The second is to use that relationship to shed new light on the final years of the king. One reason why those years have posed such a problem for his biographers is that almost all of the king’s papers were destroyed during the French Revolution. By studying the close relationship between James II and David Nairne, we are able to demonstrate that Nairne was both the king’s archivist and his first biographer. James II entrusted his papers to Nairne and asked him to use them to write his Life. Immediately after the king’s death, Nairne continued to assemble and arrange all of these papers, and it is his detailed diary entries which enable us to have a good general idea as to what was lost when they were destroyed. It is to a great extent the involvement of James II with Nairne, who was Scottish, which has misled so many people into wrongly identifying the Stuart court at Saint-Germain with Scotland.
Journal Article
Puritans and the 'Monarchical Republic': Conformity and Conflict in the Elizabethan Church
The origin and influence of republican ideas in Elizabethan England are examined. It is believed that the use of 'resistance' texts that justified rebellion and regicide led to the most virulent expressions of republican thought. An analysis of Puritan ecclesiology is also presented.
Journal Article
About the Political Dimensions of the Formation of the King James Bible
Michael G. Rather Jr., examines in his article \"About the Political Dimensions of the Formation of the King James Bible\" the politics surrounding the formation of one of the most influential text in culture and politics in England and later in English-speaking countries. The translators and King exhibited a duality of beliefs emblematic of Jacobean society. These dualities of hierarchy and commonness, ceremony and purity, clarity and majesty were instituted in England followed by the Australian, US-American, and Canadian cultures. A better understanding of the people who were a part of this translation and the King who commissioned the translation will help literary historians better understand the text's enduring popularity. The King James Bible was designed to bring conformity and to support the hierarchical structures within the English monarchy and Anglican Church. Rather's analysis of the political perspectives and personalities involved in the formation of the King James Bible illuminates how a text designed to support institutions of the state came to be influential text stretching to contemporary times in English-speaking countries.
Journal Article
Satire and Sycophancy: Richard Corbett and Early Stuart Royalism
This article examines the poetry and cultural context of Richard Corbett, one of the most influential poets in manuscript circulation during the first half of the seventeenth century. Corbett's work, almost all of which might be categorized as panegyric or satire, is unashamedly controversial. Most notably, he stigmatizes Puritans as enemies of the state, and identifies himself with the interests of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, consistently confronting the plethora of anonymous libels that attacked the notorious royal favourite. Consequently, he not only claims a status as spokesman for the Crown and court, but also emerges as a figure rival poets might attack, in the process refining their own nascent poetics of opposition. The article examines poems by and about Corbett, in an effort to delineate the literary structures of cultural and political division. It also compares his work to that of his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson and Thomas Carew, and argues that it typifies fundamental contemporary shifts in approaches to the poetry of praise and blame. Indeed, it might be argued that Corbett helped to define a literature of early Stuart royalism.
Journal Article
Yelverton, Buckingham, and the Story of Edward II in the 1620s
In 1621, in testimony before the House of Lords, Sir Henry Yelverton compared George Villiers, marquis of Buckingham, to Hugh Spencer, one of the notoriously corrupting favourites of King Edward II. This parallel was widely reported, and contributed to the popularity of the Edward II story as a vehicle for discussing Buckingham's controversial career throughout the 1620s. The present article examines the reverberations of Yelverton's parallel, and argues on the basis of them that the popularity of the Edward II story had to do with its reversibility. Contemporaries applied the story to the political turmoil of the 1620s in conflicting ways: some used the parallel to point towards the corrupting influence of favourites and to criticize Buckingham; others drew parallels between the verbal intemperance of Yelverton and his ilk and the unruliness of Edward's opponents. After Yelverton's parallel, the story offered a rich template for topical application as it could be read as either a warning against favouritism or a warning about the regicidal potential of those who opposed the favourite. The article concludes with a transcription of a manuscript account of Yelverton's outburst.
Journal Article
\Geography is Twinned with Divinity\: the Laudian Geography of Peter Heylyn
This critical history of geography looks to the political concepts that historical actors held and analyzes the incorporation of these concepts into geography. Peter Heylyn, who politicized his geographical books Microcosmus (1621) and, still more, Cosmographie (1657), followed William Laud's characteristic brand of High Church Anglicanism, avowedly hostile both to Roman Catholicism and to Calvinist forms of Protestantism, while upholding an ideal of the Church of England as both independent and apostolic. Further, Laudians were stalwart defendants of monarchy as a divine institution. This Laudian vision of church and state informed Heylyn's geographical works, which goes against a received wisdom that they are divorced from his polemical historical, political, and theological tracts. We thus recover the politics of early modern geography as contemporaries might have understood them.
Journal Article