the tracts in The Struggle for Sovereignty are anonymous. Where the authorship of a tract is in doubt, I have followed the attribution of the Wing Short Title Catalogue.
The contemporary market for tracts was so brisk that many essays went into several editions. Where this is the case I have preferred the first edition when it was available. Subsequent editions often contain responses to critics of the first edition. They are, therefore, longer—a disadvantage from my point of view. For the same reason the arguments in later editions tend to be more dilute with new passages inserted into the original text. Political tracts appeared in a variety of formats. I have included a mix of the most popular styles of the genre—formal dialogues, sermons, published speeches, familiar letters.
It has been a great luxury to be able to publish two volumes. Even so, after severely winnowing the hundreds of tracts I read to a manageable number, my initial selection would have created two books, each of which was fully double the present length. In short, the choice has not been an easy one. I am acutely mindful of the many excellent works that could not be included. Nevertheless, I hope the reader will find that closer acquaintance with the thought and wit of these particular authors will be time well spent and will find their tracts to be of interest, insight, and value. For myself, I have found them often brilliant, invariably thought-provoking, sometimes exasperating, always fresh, and frequently delightful.
EDITORIAL APPROACH
Fashions in editorial approach, as in all else, change. Earlier in this century editors thought nothing of silently altering early works, changing even the language itself. The trend is now moving in the direction of producing something very close to a facsimile of an original text. I have taken a middle road. Because the goal is to make these works accessible, even to those unfamiliar with seventeenth-century English literature, some sensitive modernizing has been done. Occurrences of blackletter type have not been reproduced and spellings that might confuse have been changed (a decision I am confident the writers of the seventeenth century would approve). In addition, the spelling of proper names within individual tracts has been made consistent, unusual punctuation has been brought up-to-date, and with a few exceptions, contractions not now in use have been spelled out. Because tracts often were published in haste, they frequently contained misprints. Such typographical mistakes have been corrected. Seventeenth-century printers capitalized some words in titles because the words began a new line or for other reasons of design. The titles of the tracts contained in these volumes retain their original spellings and punctuation; except on the title pages, capitalization in the tract titles follows modern convention.
In several instances, the Greek script was illegible in the original. I have indicated the missing text in those cases with three ellipsis points enclosed by brackets. A few tracts contained prefaces that, for reasons of space, I have not reprinted, although I have noted in the relevant headnotes any dedications these included. Marginalia have also been omitted. Marginal notes usually were confined to the notation of references, and these tend to be listed in barely legible, severely abbreviated, form. The practice of using marginalia was especially common and the list of references especially lengthy in published sermons. I hope these omissions will not detract from readers’ appreciation of the text, and I urge those readers with particular interest in the prefaces or the marginalia to consult the original pamphlets.
Apart from these exceptions, the text has been painstakingly reproduced. The language has been faithfully preserved, as have the capitalization and italics of the originals. All departures from twentieth-century norms stand as a continual reminder that one is dealing with another era.
The introductions and editorial footnotes are designed to aid readers unfamiliar with the political thought of seventeenth-century England. A grasp of the historical and philosophical background, in all its bewildering complexity, with all its contradictions, subtleties, and shifts, is critical to a sensible reading of these works. True, the conceptions with which the authors wrestled are profound, the political dilemmas eternal, but they were men of their century facing urgent contemporary problems. To miss that is to mistake their meaning.
I should like to thank all those who have generously assisted in and encouraged this ambitious undertaking. The Huntington Library awarded me a Fletcher Jones Foundation fellowship, which permitted the use of their splendid collection of seventeenth-century pamphlets, and the Earhart Foundation followed with a generous fellowship research grant. Bentley College awarded me a Bentley Institute Fellowship, which provided both funds and time to carry out the work.
Many scholars and friends read and commented on the selection of tracts and the introductory essays. In particular I would like to thank Quentin Skinner for his continuing encouragement throughout this project; John Morrill, David Wootton, and Donald Lutz for reviewing the lists of tracts and making valuable comments on the introductions; and Mark Goldie for his thoughts on the Restoration tracts. Many thanks as well to Derek Hirst for recommending Goodwin’s “Right and Might Well Mett”; to Tim Harris for drawing my attention to “Captain Thorogood His Opinion of the Point of Succession”; to John Morrill for urging the inclusion of Algernon Sidney’s splendid scaffold speech; and to Quentin Skinner for recommending the work of William Sherlock. I should also like to express my gratitude to Sir Geoffrey Elton and John Kenyon, good friends who are sorely missed, and to whom this collection is dedicated.
A special acknowledgment must go to Kim Cretors who valiantly undertook the formidable challenge of deciphering all these idiosyncratic texts and putting them on computer. My research assistants were a splendid help. I should like especially to thank Jeff Strong and Jacqueline Allard for their ingenuity in tracking down elusive references.
My family, as always, has been patient beyond belief or fairness. Living with a historian is never easy, especially a talkative one preoccupied with constitutional issues. The flaws that remain in the work, and I fear they are many, are my own.
Whose rights are to predominate in the State, the rights of the ruler or those of the people, the rights of the governed or those of government? It is this vexed question which produces tension in the structure of constitutional monarchy—a tension which may only make itself felt on exceptional occasions, but then shakes the whole edifice to the point of collapse.
—Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages
Seventeenth-century Englishmen were thoroughly confused about sovereignty, knew they were, but found the ambiguity tolerable. “To demand which estate may challenge this power of final determination of fundamental controversies arising betwixt them,” Philip Hunton wrote in 1643, “is to demand which of them shall be absolute … if the nondecision be tolerable, it must remain undecided.”1 Unfortunately in 1643 war between the king and Parliament had made nondecision increasingly impracticable. In that case Hunton advised “every person … [to] … aid that part which in his best reason and judgement stands for the publike good.” It was not a choice anyone had wished to make. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Englishmen prided themselves on their government’s nice balance between liberty and authority. It was this balance they hoped they had restored as the century closed. But in the years between, the scales tipped one way and then another as dissension, civil war, revolution, restoration, dissension, and revolution followed one another in giddy and unprecedented procession goaded by, and in turn setting in motion, probing of virtually every aspect of the relationship between the individual and the state.2 Central to these events and this relationship were rival claims for sovereignty. Claims were advanced for the sovereignty of nearly every component of English government—for the sovereignty of the king alone, for the king in Parliament, for the two houses of Parliament and the House of Commons alone, for the sovereignty of the law and that of the people.
If the scope of the controversy was unprecedented, so was the opportunity for debate. For the first time in their history Englishmen had the opportunity for political argument on a grand scale, and for the first time they were in a position to choose between political visions. Happily the shifting,