Nicholas Sharp

In this brief presentation, I try to summarize and explain the work I have been doing on the political language of the early Jacobean regime. I focus especially on writings by the three most wealthy, influential, and powerful people in early Jacobean England, Lord Treasurer Salisbury (Robert Cecil), Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Thomas Egerton), and the King himself. My idea is that in the texts produced by these three men -- all closely bound by mutual interests, common goals, and similar values -- we yet see profoundly conflicting ideas of governance which belie any monolithic interpretations of "the Court" as a unified political force. To the contrary, I believe that when we examine texts produced specifically by and for the three dominant voices of the early Jacobean political elite, we see that "the court" was locked into a system of self-defeating discourse which continually increased the political instabilities it was hoping to settle.

My primary focus is on the "Treatise to His Majesty" which Lord Treasurer Salisbury wrote for the King in 1608. Intended to be read only by the king and selected privy councilors (such as Sir Julius Caesar, Salisbury's chief assistant at the treasury, and Lord Ellesmere), the treatise remained in manuscript until 1987 when Pauline Croft edited it for the Camden Miscellany. My interpretation of this lengthy document, a sort of "white paper" sketching out the king's political and financial problems and recommending administrative and political actions to get control, stresses Salisbury's deeply Elizabethan assumptions about politics, especially his sense that the king can govern only through and with parliament, (especially the house of commons), partially because of law and custom but more largely because of practical and pragmatic issues of national will. In contrast, Chancellor Ellesmere's writings from the same period (documents which also stayed out of print and enjoyed strictly limited circulation until Knaffla's edition in 1977) recommend a strict legalism, emphasizing the almost scriptural sanctity of royal prerogative and the heretical nature of political deals that would proscribe the king's constitutional responsibility to rule by his own conscience. At the same time, the King's statements, especially his speeches in Parliamentary sessions of 1607 and 1610, reveal a political philosophy framed in European, especially French, absolutist terminology derived from Bodin, stressing the primacy of an unlimited sovereignty centered in the king as the only hope for maintaining a unified state within a nation otherwise ripped apart by ignorant and selfish factions.

Though often perceived as a unified force bent on the exercise of absolutist power, in other words, the leadership of the Jacobean court was far from unified in either its program or even its terminology for ruling.