Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England
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COURT PATRONAGE AND CORRUPTION IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND COURT PATRONAGE AND CORRUPTION IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND Linda Levy Peck London First published in 1990 by the Academic Division of Unwin Hyman Ltd. First published in paperback in 1993 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1990, 1993 Linda Levy Peck All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Peck, Linda Levy Court patronage and corruption in early Stuart England. 1. Great Britain. Government. Patronage. History I. Title 354.420009 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Peck, Linda Levy. Court patronage and corruption in early Stuart England/Linda Levy Peck. p. cm. Originally published: Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1603–1649. 2. Great Britain—Court and courtiers—History—17th century. 3. Patronage, Political—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Political corruption—Great Britain—History—17th century. 5. England— Social conditions—17th century. I. Title. DA390.P43 1993 306.2′094l′09032–dc20 92–46114 ISBN 0-203-16824-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-26340-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-09368-6 (Print Edition) To my mother Arlene Levy Stiomer Contents Preface xi Introduction The fountain of favor 1 1 The language of patronage: a discourse of connection 12 2 The structures of patronage and corruption: access and allocation 30 3 Court patronage networks 47 4 Court connections and county associations: the case of Buckinghamshire 75 5 Corruption and early modern administration: the case of the navy 106 6 Corruption and the economy 134 7 Corruption and political ideology 161 8 The language of corruption: a discourse of political conflict 185 Conclusion 208 Notes 222 Selected bibliography 289 Index 310 ix Preface The completion of a project, like the ending of the old year and the beginning of the new, is a moment for reflection. When it comes time to acknowledge one’s scholarly debts, how much one owes to others becomes apparent. This book would not have been possible without the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided fellowship support both to me and to the research libraries at which I worked, for which I am deeply grateful. I am grateful too to the British Academy and the American Council of Learned Societies for grants for this project. The Henry E.Huntington Library provided fellowship support to use its extensive manuscript collections for which I wish to express my great appreciation to Robert Middlekauff, Martin Ridge and Mary Robertson. A fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1988/9 enabled me to complete this book for which I wish to thank Werner Gundersheimer, Barbara Mowat and Lena Orlin. Purdue University generously allowed me to work at these research libraries and I am grateful to John Contreni, David Caputo and Varro Tyler for their support. I learned so much by participating in the Folger Center for the History of British Political Thought, from teaching a research seminar on early seventeenth century political thought and from organizing a conference on “The Mental World of the Jacobean Court.” I am deeply grateful to J.G.A. Pocock, Lois Schwoerer, Gordon Schochet and Lena Orlin for the opportunity to take part. If this book sounds as much like Politics, Language and Time as The Structure of Politics on the Eve of the Accession of George III, that may be the reason. Both the Huntington and the Folger provided good fellowship. I especially enjoyed the Folger fellowship class of 1988/9, A.R.Braunmuller, Gail Paster and Michael Neill, who will find traces of our conversations in these pages. I am very grateful to Barbara Donagan, Mark Edwards, Elizabeth Read Foster, Caroline Hibbard, Derek Hirst, Wilfred Prest and Barbara Taft for reading xi Preface the individual chapters and providing helpful comments. Deepak Lal kindly allowed me to try out some of my ideas on corruption and the economy before a World Bank audience. Very special thanks go to A.R.Braunmuller, Stanley Engerman and John Guy who read most or all of the complete manuscript and provided extensive comments. Most of ail I wish to thank John Morrill for his close and very helpful reading of the text. Even if we disagree on some of the answers I hope I have addressed his penetrating questions. As he celebrates his eightieth birthday, I wish to acknowledge a special debt to Jack Hexter for his continuing gift of inspiration. Finally to dear friends and family who must have wondered how I had wandered so deeply into the thickets of patronage and corruption, my thanks for their support and loving kindness. I should like to express my great thanks to the librarians and staff of the manuscript room and the North Library of the British Library, the Public Record Office, the Bodleian Library, and Duke Humfrey’s Library, Oxford, the Cambridge University Library, the Library of Congress, the National Maritime Museum, the National Register of Archives. In particular I want to thank the Master and Fellows, Magdalene College, Cambridge for permission to use the Pepys manuscripts and Richard Luckett, the Pepys Librarian, and Mrs. A.Fitz-Simons and Mrs. E.M.Colemans who were so helpful to me while I worked there. I have used the resources of the Yale Parliamentary Diaries Center on many occasions for which I thank Maija Jansson and William Bidwell. I am grateful to Sir William Gordon Gumming for permission to cite family papers at the National Museum of Scotland. The Journal of British Studies has allowed me to draw upon my article “For a King not to be bountiful were a fault: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England,” vol. 25 (1986), pp. 31–61. Dr. Helen Braham, curator of the Rubens collection at the Courtauld Gallery, was kind enough to show me Rubens’ modello of Royal Bounty overcoming Avarice which serves as this volume’s cover. How can one adequately express one’s thanks? Seneca suggested that such debts cannot be repaid but they remain, living, in the memory of the recipient. I, of course, am responsible for the errors that inevitably linger in the book. West Lafayette, Indiana January 1990 xii COURT PATRONAGE AND CORRUPTION IN EARLY STUART ENGLAND Introduction The fountain of favor John Webster began his Jacobean tragedy The Dutchesse of Malfy with a striking image of good and bad government: …a Princes Court Is like a common Fountaine, whence should flowe Pure silver-droppes ingeneral. But if’t chance Some curs’d example poyson’t neere the head, “Death and diseases through the whole land spread. And what is’t makes this blessed government, But a most provident Councell, who dare freely Informe him, the corruption of the times? Though some o th’Court hold it presumption To instruct Princes what they ought to doe, It is a noble duety to informe them What they ought to fore-see…1 The magnificent fountains of Renaissance and seventeenth-century Europe symbolized the contemporary vision and rhetoric about royal patronage.2 The metaphor of the fountain was used repeatedly in the Elizabethan and early Stuart period to describe the monarchy, especially the king’s favor, to his subjects. Bountiful, free-flowing, continuous, the king granted favor to his subjects. Monarchy was a never-ending source of reward, the earthly embodiment of God, who was the original spring or wellhead, the fountain of life and justice. At the same time there was, in practice, a second aspect of a fountain: recirculation. On the one hand the fountain was continuous, visibly moving in one direction; on the other, it was based on the principle of the water returning to its source. When the king rewarded his subjects and servants, they returned loyalty and service in their turn to the king. 1 Court patronage Contemporaries invoked the same metaphor to describe political corruption. The pollution of fountains, the muddying of the streams of royal patronage, “signified the corruption of the times.” The minister John Stoughton preached: “The ancients were wont to place the Statues of their Kings by Fountaines, intimating they were the Fountaines of good or ill in the common-wealth, as indeed they are.”3 Corruption, identified by Webster in The Dutchesse of Malfy with corporeal images of death and disease, posed a significant and perennial threat to royal government and its support by both servants and people. This book analyzes the language, context, configuration and consequences of royal patronage and corruption in early Stuart England. It examines the changing characteristics of bounty, those “pure silver-droppes” of which Webster spoke, and the structure of patron-client relationships. It also looks at contemporary norms of bureaucratic behavior and the intermingling of public and private interest, market and government in the early seventeenth century. Was early Stuart government more corrupt or merely perceived to be more corrupt than its Tudor forbears? Was English government becoming unworkable or was it mismanaged by the early Stuarts? To answer such questions, this study not only considers the general problems of governance from 1550 to 1650 as early modern government expanded its scope without an adequate financial base, and the impact of economic distress and inflation from the 1590s on, but also places these questions in the larger context of the changing values and ideology of the Crown, its officeholders and the political elite.