Henry Parker and the English Civil War
The Political Thought of the Public's 'Privado'

Professor Mendle situates each of Parker's significant tracts in its polemical, intellectual, and political context.

Michael Mendle (Author)

9780521521314, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 November 2003

228 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

"...the book is to be commended as an indispensible guide to the life and thought of the first great apologist for the doctrine of parliamentary absolutism." The American Journal of Legal History

This is the first full study in fifty years of the author of the most celebrated political tract of the early years of the English Civil War, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. Professor Mendle situates each of Parker's significant tracts in its polemical, intellectual, and political context. He also views Parker's literary work in the light of his career as privado, or intimate adviser, to leading figures of the parliamentary leadership. Parker emerges as a fierce opponent of clerical prevention from any quarter, a strikingly brutal critic of the common law mind, and a leading proponent of parliament's most uncompromising position, a claim to a species of executive power so encompassing (and so like the claims of Charles I) that it can fitly be called parliamentary absolutism.

Preface
1. The public's privado
2. The ship money case and The Case of Shipmony
3. Religio laici
4. Observations and the political theory of the emergency
5. The Observator observed
6. 'Vaine Confidence in the Law': the Observator responds
7. Diverse urgent emergent considerations
8. Disputable and visible politics
Conclusion: contrary points of war
Appendix: the writings of Henry Parker.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]