Faction at the Early Stuart Court

In the third of our series of articles on faction, Kevin Sharpe shows how, in the early 17th century, the monopoly of patronage by a court favourite distorted the pattern of politics in council, court and parliament.

For all the administrative developments of the sixteenth century, the government of Stuart England was still the king's business. In a personal monarchy, the art of politics is the art of managing men. And in seventeenth century England, even more than in France and Spain, government depended upon co-operation. English monarchs had no agents of the central government in the locality, nor any standing army to enforce their will. Government rested upon a working relationship between the king and his ministers in Whitehall and the nobility and gentry who wielded influence in the counties. In securing co-operation, the crown could count upon a large measure of natural support: the experience of civil' war in the fifteenth century confirmed a belief that order depended upon strong monarchy; a sense of duty and obligation to the sovereign was strengthened by the association, after the Reformation, of the crown and church; propaganda from the pulpit and the press trumpeted the virtues and necessity of loyalty and obedience. But what converted loyalty and obedience into an identity of interest and a working partnership was patronage.

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