The Age of Impertinence

The logic of my focus on 17th century English politics won’t really be revealed until the blog shifts several gears through law, administration, and economy. Shamelessly I am sifting history for evidence to support a new theory of institution formation. The theory will remain secret. What you see here is the topsoil of organic material, and a trail of clues among the tea leaves. But there is another reason, which I think justifiably adds to my new found interest. I’ve discovered that at least two of my ancestral family relations played more than just walk-on parts in some of the premier 17th and 18th century institutional dramas. Today I will describe how one of those relatives, Oliver St John*, first cut his political teeth.

Oliver St John by Pieter Nason (National Portrait Gallery, London)

In late 1629 my relative Oliver St John was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was among a handful of noblemen, parliamentarians and lawyers accused of seditious libel, subversion of crown authority, and conspiracy to slander the king. One of his codefendants was John Selden, possibly England’s most able lawyer at the time, and a leading critic of Charles I’s attempts to maintain a pliant parliament and judiciary by arbitrary means. Selden was already in prison on charges relating to his participation in an attempt (both physical and polemical) to prevent the 1629 dissolution of parliament. These were momentous days as rumours spread of an imminent “alteration in government”. Charles might have been preparing to rule without parliament (in fact this is what happened during the next 11 years). At a critical juncture when England was at war and in the midst of economic crisis, nothing could be more unwelcome to the executive ruling group than public discussion about basic forms of government.

The prosecution in Star Chamber alleged that St John and his co-conspirators -- all of whom had a history of opposing the king by having resisted arbitrary taxation and the forced loan, or supporting the Petition of Right whose purpose was to clarify the limit of the king’s prerogative -- had written a tract which libelled the king. The case against them was eventually dropped. The case was weakened by the discovery that the tract in question had actually been written years earlier by an outlaw nobleman and expat adventurer, purportedly as serious advice to James I, but perhaps as a spoof or satire. 

The puzzling thing about the tract and the prosecution of St John and his group in the Star Chamber is that the document recommended unconstitutionally strengthening the king’s prerogative and limiting the role of parliament. What could these staunch defenders of parliament possibly gain by making this bad proposal available to a larger audience? The tract advised the king to take new “absolute” powers, impose martial law, post army garrisons around the country, unilaterally legislate without parliament, and create arbitrary taxes … in other words all the things that the king’s opponents most feared he might really do. 

The king’s advisers counselled that the anonymous tract was obviously a seditious libel intended to implant in people’s minds the idea that the king was seriously considering such actions. The king’s supporters were at this time desperate to avoid any suggestion they were contemplating “innovations” in government that would undermine the cherished ancient laws upon which parliament’s authority was founded. These years saw the birth of dangerously newsy libel that became an important expression of opposition and public opinion, often disguised as humorous irreverent songs or poems with ideological double meanings, which could be circulated in pamphlet form and were likely to be discussed by upper, middle, as well as lower members of society. 17th century libel was not unlike the contemporary blog which can spread news faster and (supposedly) with more subversive potential than corporate media and political estates. Ridicule, impoliteness, and lack of deference were core ingredients of the libel.**

From the perspective of this blog, an especially interesting aspect of my Oliver’s libellous tract was the title: ‘A proposition for his Majesty’s Service to Bridle the Impertinence of Parliaments’.  

T’was true! Parliament was outrageously impertinent in the 1620s! I am going to label England’s 17th century the ‘Age of Impertinence’ in contrast to a necessarily more polite 18th century enlightenment society with its oligarchs and bourgeoisie dignities and virtues. Every worthwhile modern political or artistic innovation began as sheer impertinence. By the standards of their times the builders of new institutions and new cultural movements have always been fundamentally disrespectful of the plain-as-a-pikestaff superiority of the established sociocultural and ideological orders. 17th century English impertinence was most visibly displayed in satires, libels, pamphlets, and … parliaments. 

There is a fair argument to be made that the parliamentary duo of John Eliot (sometime leader of the House of Commons) and Selden, the best known radicals among parliament’s rebels and reformers, were excessively impertinent. They went too far, too fast with their demands. Probably they placed Charles I in an impossible position when foreign war and domestic economic crisis made public order the paramount concern. Eliot’s and Selden’s intransigence was the major reason why parliament was not permitted to reconvene until 1640. There was a group of incremental reformers in parliament who with hindsight might be judged to have been the better tacticians. Notwithstanding, it remains obvious that institution builders of the 1620s (Petition of Right), 1640-50s (Civil War to Commonwealth), and 1680s (Bill of Rights) would have achieved nothing at all had they not been vehemently impertinent. Even William III, convinced that the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights 1688-89 did not threaten monarchial absolutism, spoke bitterly of parliament’s “mass of impertinences”.

My relative Oliver St John did well to begin his political career with that sticky predicament of the libellous tract which associated him with Eliot and Selden. The impertinences of these men, St John included, were to be seen above all in their commitment to legality and proper procedure within an evolving formal separation of powers, as against divine right and arbitrary absolutism. In the same month that St John and the group which circulated ‘A proposition for his Majesty’s Service to Bridle the Impertinence of Parliaments’ were charged, Selden and Eliot were indicted with like-minded group for serious impertinences stemming from parliament’s fight with the king over the authority of parliament. In the public mind, the two cases were one and the same, and academic historians have since viewed them jointly as principal illustrations of the political and legal climate of the 1620s, distinguished by deep conflict over the “character and principles” of English governance. 

St John would later win important concessions and victories for the parliamentary cause by mastering the art of patient or quiet compromise. Unlike Eliot he was not repeatedly imprisoned. Yet he was similarly a leader of long and stubborn fights for worthy procedural causes. The statesman and historian Lord Clarendon said “Mr St John never forgave the [royal] Court the first assault”, i.e. never forgave indictment by the Star Chamber and internment in the Tower for exercising rightful freedom of speech.

St John is said to have obtained the libellous tract in the library of Robert Cotton -- a parliamentarian with an important collection of legal and political manuscripts which were resource material for critics of arbitrary government -- and then to have circulated it to several wealthy and influential political opponents of the king. Both Eliot and Selden were friends of Cotton, and used his library to prepare speeches. Even when the true provenance of the tract had been discovered, Viscount Dorchester, who was Charles I’s Secretary of State, still declared its dissemination to be a conspiracy to cultivate a hatred of the king and government based on the falsehood of an "innovation" to control and curb parliament. The king had no intention, declared Dorchester, to “change the laws and customs of the kingdom”. In May 1630 the king ordered that those accused of circulating the seditious tract be released in celebration of the birth of his first heir. But the king was a conflicted man. He felt such loathing toward Eliot for his repeated impertinences, and for the troubles those impertinences had caused his government, that he let Eliot die in prison and insisted he be buried at the Tower of London rather than allow his family to remove the body. 

* I claim ancestral connection to Oliver St John’s grandfather.

Michael G. Heller ©2014