The Discourse of Legitimacy in Early Modern England

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

Civil discourse · Discourse analysis · Legitimacy · Linguistics · Media studies · Monarchy · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Realm · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Subject (documents · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Scottish History and National Identity