The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603–1714

355 Pages·1995·38.477 MB·English

by  Howard Nenner (auth.)

THE RIGHT TO BE KING
STUDIES IN MODERN HISTORY
General Editor: J. C. D. Clark. Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
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The Right to be King
The Succession to the Crown of England,
1603-1714
Howard Nenner
Professor of History
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts
© Howard Nenner 1995
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1995 978-0-333-57724-0
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
First published 1995 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-12954-6 ISBN 978-1-349-12952-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12952-2
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
04 03 02 01 00
For Jack Hexter
with affection and admiration
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xi
Appendix I: The Line of Succession from HenlY VII xii
Appendix II: The Line of Succession from James I xiii
Introduction: The Succession in History and Theory 1
1 The Late Elizabethan Succession Question 13
2 God's Providence and Man's Presumption 26
3 Kings by Law, Lineal Succession, and Undoubted Right 55
4 A Settlement with Something of Monarchy in It 72
5 The Need for a Certainty in the Succession 95
6 The Unsettling Prospect of an Elective Crown 120
7 The Survival of Hereditary Monarchy and the End of
Indefeasible Right 147
8 The Problem of Allegiance 184
9 A Rightful and Lawful King and Queen 219
Conclusion: The Persistence of Fiction 250
Notes 259
Bibliography 308
Index 335
vii
Preface and
Acknowl edgements
For the first time since the abdication crisis of 1936 the succession to the
throne has become a matter of national concern and public debate. Allow
ing for the likelihood that the monarchy will survive, some of the ques
tions being asked are whether the Prince of Wales is fit to be king; whether
at the death of Elizabeth II he ought to be bypassed in favour of his elder
son; and even whether it might be wiser to settle the succession in some
other line of the royal blood. Explicit in this debate is a fundamental
concern for the welfare of the nation. Equally important is the implicit
recognition that the birthright of the apparent heir has long been subor
dinate to the public good. Although what will happen to the succession is
politically unclear, what can happen is constitutionally certain: a sovereign
parliament may at any time choose to deprive the Prince of Wales of his
heritable expectation of the throne. That was made sure more than two
hundred years ago. Across the span of the long seventeenth century, from
the execution of Mary Stuart in 1587 to the death of Anne in 1714, the
indefeasible right of hereditary succession eventually gave way to the right
of parliament to settle the estate of the crown. How that came to pass, how
it came to be settled that the right of inheritance was a presumptive right
only and that the heir to the throne might be constitutionally disabled and
displaced, is the subject of this study.
Parts of the study have appeared previously. Excerpts from my exam
ination of the Exclusion Crisis treated in Chapters 5 and 6 have been taken
from a working paper in volume 4 of the Proceedings of the Folger Insti
tute Center for the History of British Political Thought, published as 'Ideas
of Monarchical Succession in the Debate on Exclusion', in Gordon J.
Schochet (ed.), Restoration, Ideology, and Revolution (Washington: The
Folger Shakespeare Library, 1990). Excerpts in Chapter 7 from 'Pretense
and Pragmatism: The Response to Uncertainty in the Succession Crisis of
1689,' in The Revolution of 1688-89: Changing Perspectives, edited by
Lois G. Schwoerer, © Cambridge University Press 1992, are reprinted
with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Other parts of Chapter
7 are derived from 'Sovereignty and the Succession in 1688-89' in The
World of William 11/ and Mary II, edited by Dale Hoak and Mordechai
Feingold, with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press
ix
x Preface and Acknowledgements
© 1995 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
I have had useful comments from the editors of each of these publications,
many of which have found their way into this book.
I am grateful to the staffs of the British Library, the Beinecke Library
at Yale, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, the three repositories at which
most of my research was done. I am also grateful to have had the financial
support that makes a lengthy research project of this sort possible. The
American Bar Foundation awarded me a fellowship in the early stages of
my work, while Smith College has been especially generous in its sabbati
cal policy and in providing periodic grants from its Committee on Aid to
Faculty Scholarship. My greatest debts, however, are personal, to those
colleagues and friends whose help I am pleased to acknowledge in this
small way. I am grateful for the scholarly advice of Jonathan Clark, Frank
Ellis, Richard Kay and Wallace MacCaffrey, for the organisational skill
and cool head of Catherine Lewis, and for the research assistance of my
students past, Polly Clark Michel; present, Ginger Ogilvie; and future,
Elizabeth Gendler.
My three most important acknowledgements are of contributions that
deserve to be in a separate class. Jack Hexter, to whom this book is
dedicated, excited my taste for English constitutional history almost forty
years ago and taught me the dangers of imparting too much certainty to
the intentions of political actors in the past. Tom Green, who comments
on everything that I write and publish, read my manuscript in its entirety
and demonstrated again the acuity of his judgement and a depth of friend
ship that I prize almost beyond measure. Lastly, my wife, Pamela White,
has been responsible for much more than the patience for which spouses
are routinely acknowledged and celebrated. It is no exaggeration to record
that her critical intelligence and editorial skills, evident throughout this
book, are unsurpassed - and that the gerunds that remain are mine alone.
As a further mark of my great good luck, England in the seventeenth
century turns out to be her spiritual home.
17 November 1994
Elizabeth I's Accession Day HOWARD NENNER
List of Abbreviations
AHR American Historical Review
BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
BL British Library
CJ Journals of the House of Commons
CSP Calendar of State Papers
DAL Debate at Large
EHR English Historical Review
HJ Historical Journal
HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly
HMCR Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission
U Journals of the House of Lords
P&P Past & Present
PH Cobbett, The Parliamentmy History of England
PRO Public Record Office
SR Statutes of the Realm
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
xi