Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State

A study of the the royal pardon in Tudor England.

K. J. Kesselring (Author)

9780521037556, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 July 2007

256 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.4 cm, 0.394 kg

'… this is an important and well-crafted study, written in a lively style, which repays careful reading. It offers many new insights and its findings also have significant implications for the wider discussion concerning crime and public order in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England.' Sehepunkte

Using a wide range of legal, administrative and literary sources, this study explores the role of the royal pardon in the exercise and experience of authority in Tudor England. It examines such abstract intangibles as power, legitimacy, and the state by looking at concrete life-and-death decisions of the Tudor monarchs. Drawing upon the historiographies of law and society, political culture and state formation, mercy is used as a lens through which to examine the nature and limits of participation in the early modern polity. Contemporaries deemed mercy as both a prerogative and duty of the ruler. Public expectations of mercy imposed restraints on the sovereign's exercise of power. Yet the discretionary uses of punishment and mercy worked in tandem to mediate social relations of power in ways that most often favoured the growth of the state.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and conventions
1. Introduction: mercy and the state
2. Changing approaches to punishment and mitigation
3. Changing approaches to the pardon
4. Patronage, petitions and the motives for mercy
5. Public performances of pardon
6. Protest and pardons
7. Conclusion
Appendix I: sources
Appendix II: benefit of the belly
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC], Politics & government [JP], History of religion [HRAX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]