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BEYOND THE PALE: JOHN CUSACKE AND THE LANGUAGE OF ABSOLUTISM IN EARLY STUART BRITAIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1998

LINDA LEVY PECK
Affiliation:
George Washington University

Abstract

John Cusacke, an Irish gentleman who was educated on the continent and worked on the fringes of the court of wards, constructed a striking re-reading of kingship, law, colonial government, and parliament in a series of tracts written between 1615 and 1647. His writings provide insight both into seventeenth-century colonial theory and early Stuart political thought. Shaped in the cauldron of Irish land struggles and continental political thought, Cusacke rejected Old English constitutionalism, arguing instead that Ireland was a colonial dependency of England. Further, to gain royal favour for various projects, Cusacke recast contemporary conceptions of parliament and common law, rejecting the centrality of custom, insisting that the king was the law maker and vigorously attacking Sir Edward Coke. Cusacke's writings reached the libraries of James I and Charles I, and their officials Sir Robert Naunton, master of the court of wards, and attorney-general Sir Robert Bankes. Cusacke's tracts graphically demonstrate the existence of an absolutist political discourse in early Stuart Britain applied not to issues of theology or of international law but to domestic politics.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I have greatly benefited from presenting this essay to seminars at Johns Hopkins University, University of London, Cambridge University, and St Andrews University. I am grateful to Glenn Burgess, John Guy, John Morrill, Michael Perceval-Maxwell, Michael Questier, J. G. A. Pocock, Conrad Russell, Johann Sommerville, and Tim Wales for discussions of Cusacke's views.