© Oxford University Press 2009, all rights reserved.
The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England
University of Wisconsin, Madison
The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England, by Robert Zaller (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2007; pp. 820. $65).
Whatever its title may suggest, this book is about political and religious thought between the Henrician Reformation and the meeting of the Long Parliament. It is concerned with the ways in which people legitimated claims to power in church and state. More strictly, its subject is the ‘political languages’ (p. 2) employed by English people. The various languages in question, Professor Zaller contends, singly ‘and collectively ... constitute a discourse’ and he regards the ‘discourse of legitimacy’ ‘as the sum total of articulated statements from, to, or about power and its instruments’ (p. 2).
The book devotes a chapter each to ‘The Discourse of Monarchy’, ‘Sacred Discourse’, ‘The Discourse of the Realm’, ‘The Discourse of the Law’, ‘The Discourse of the Stage’, and ‘The Discourse of Parliament’. A final chapter concerns ‘Stuart Parliaments and the Crisis of Legitimacy’. Zaller asserts that on the eve of the Civil War there occurred ‘a migration of legitimacy’ from crown to parliament (p. 5). Since many people sided with parliament in the war, this seems plausible, though perhaps only partially so—for many others became royalists. The book is a fine, scholarly, and wide-ranging discussion of religion, thought and politics between the Reformation and the Civil War. Based on primary sources, but especially on an impressive range of secondary works, it contains a great deal that students of the period (and of English thought more generally) will find insightful and stimulating. At more than seven hundred pages of text, plus ninety of notes, this is a large work, and the reader may sometimes have difficulty in seeing the wood for the trees. One theme that does recur frequently is that marked differences of ideas—or, at least, of language—existed from an early date, and that they fuelled political discord. These claims are aimed especially at the revisionist thinking of the late Conrad Russell and others, who contended that the English Civil War had few long-term origins, and that in early Stuart times sweet consensus reigned on matters of political and constitutional principle. Particularly in his final two chapters—which are about parliament—Zaller convincingly undermines the revisionist case, demonstrating that conflict on questions of principle ran right through the history of the early Stuart period, and back well into the Tudor age. These two chapters together provide a self-contained narrative history of parliaments in the century before 1640. They are the strongest part of the work.
Zaller tells us that the book is about languages or discourse, but in fact it devotes remarkably little space to describing the linguistic peculiarities of early modern writers. Indeed, proponents of the discourse of monarchy (for example) seem to have adopted very much the same vocabulary and turns of phrase as those who subscribed to the very different discourses of, say, the Realm or the Law. Commonly, Zaller in fact talks about concepts or ideas rather than languages, and sometimes he makes the distinction between the two explicit, despite the use of ‘Discourse’ in chapter and section headings. He tells us, for example, that the Elizabethan William Harrison implied that England had ‘had, time out of mind, a fundamental law, although Harrison does not employ the term or even the concept as such’ (p. 240). So there is a world of concepts beyond discourse, and a world of implied concepts beyond that.
Given the centrality of monarchy to the early modern English state, Zaller spends surprisingly little space (less than fifty pages) on its discourse, and omits consideration of a number of its most able defenders, including Filmer and Hobbes. The chapter on ‘Sacred Discourse’ is more than three times longer than that on monarchy. A good deal of it is taken up with sections on Familists, Separatists, and other fringe groups, whose importance is not demonstrated. The discussion of Richard Hooker, the best-known defender of the established Elizabethan church, is distinctly odd. Zaller declares that Hooker eliminated ‘any practical distinction between false professors and the godly’ since he argued that ‘any group or individual claiming warrant for practices or beliefs apart from those sanctioned by the visible church and its princely governor on behalf of the invisible church of Christ was deluded and schismatic’ (p. 99). Hooker made no such claim. To have done so would have implied that the Marian martyrs, and all Protestants in Catholic countries, were schismatics. He argued that a visible church was one that endorsed some of the central doctrines of Christianity, but might be in error on other key points; there was nothing deluded about rejecting error. What the Puritans objected to in the English church, however, were not errors, but indifferent ceremonies. It was Hobbes and not Hooker who turned martyrs into schismatics.
Zaller's chapter on ‘The Discourse of the Realm’ is largely about Sir Thomas Smith's De Republica Anglorum and three other works. According to Zaller, ‘The discourse of the realm designates speech neither originating with nor directly reflecting the state and its organs’, and its concerns included ‘establishing perspective on the proper relations between state and commonwealth’ (p. 223). But the terms ‘state’ and ‘commonwealth’ were often used interchangeably: Smith worked for the state as ambassador to France and as Secretary, and his book was largely concerned with state institutions like parliament and the courts. Moreover, it is difficult to see why only the four works are analysed in this chapter, and so many similar writings are omitted. Nor is it easy to grasp why the book as a whole considers only a few ‘discourses’ and omits, say, the ‘discourse of natural law’, or those of poetry, civic humanism, or neo-Roman thinking.
The chapter on the law pays particular attention to Selden, St German, and Coke. Selden is portrayed as a consistent advocate of mixed and limited monarchy, but no convincing argument is mounted to explain why, if that is so, Hobbes favourably cited him in Leviathan, though Hobbes was a deadly enemy to mixed monarchy, nor why Laud befriended him in the 1630s. The book is generally clearly written in straightforward English, but on occasion the reader will encounter the modern discourse of literary criticism. Discussing the ‘discourse of the stage’, Zaller contends that ‘what was new in the Caroline period was the aestheticization of power as such in the courtly ritual of the masque’ and underlines the problems that the Crown encountered as a result of the ‘practical detachment of the King from his subjects, and thus from the semiotic exchange on which legitimation was based’ (p. 472). The chapters on parliament make many interesting and compelling points about matters ranging from the Act of Proclamations of 1539 to the holding down of the Speaker in his chair in 1629.
There is no bibliography, and the use of ‘op. cit.’ in the notes sometimes makes it hard to track down bibliographical details. There are many small errors. Elizabeth did not promise that she would make no windows into men's souls, though Bacon claimed that was her basic attitude. Melville was not James VI's mentor. The work that gained Selden an international reputation was De Dis Syris, not Titles of Honor. Bishops Kitchin and Stanley did not take the oath of supremacy. Gondomar was not the first Spanish envoy to England for decades. The idea that there is a link between one's actions as a subject and one's prospects in the afterlife was not especially Arminian, but was voiced by many Calvinists, and by Hobbes. Nevertheless, this book contains much fine material especially in its discussion of parliamentary history.
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