Contributes to a better understanding not only of ecclesiastical power and politics but of life in an élite household in seventeenth-century Britain The Lambeth and Croydon Palace accounts for William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, represent the only extant record of the archiepiscopal household during his tenure in office. Spanning the period from December 1635 to January 1642, they offer a unique prism through which to view the highs and the lows of Laud's controversial career. They provide a wealth of new insights into his formal role, his private life and his personal habits, while at the same time casting new light on his associations with men and women from across the social hierarchy, including courtiers, privy councillors, merchants, MPs and, of course, the king. Yet the document itself, lost between 1642 and 1912 andnow housed in the National Archives, Kew, has almost entirely escaped the attention of modern scholars. This important manuscript is edited and analysed here in full for the first time. A lengthy introduction provides an overview of the ways in which the document brings to life both the household and its head, demonstrating how the household responded to its immediate social environment and the wider political context; interrogating the gifts and their givers to identify networks of people in social, political and religious terms; and, more generally, teasing out the relationship between material objects and political power. This is followed by a complete text of the manuscript, with contextual footnotes. Thus, the volume contributes to a deeper understanding not only of ecclesiastical power and politics, but of life in an élite household in seventeenth-century Britain. LEONIE JAMESis Lecturer in History at the University of Kent, Canterbury and author of 'This Great Firebrand': William Laud and Scotland, 1617-1645 (Boydell Press, 2017).

The correspondence of William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 to 1645, provides revealing insights into his mind, methods and activities, especially in the 1630s, as he sought to remodel the church and the clerical estatein the three kingdoms.

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1633-45), remains one of the most controversial figures in British ecclesiastical and political history. His rise to prominence under Charles I, his contribution to the framing and implementation of highly contentious religious policies, and his subsequent and catastrophic downfall remain central to our understanding of the coming of civil war. This book presents Scotland as a case study for a fresh interpretation of Laud, his career and his working partnership with Charles I. This approach throws much needed light on the depth of Laud's engagement in kirk affairs and reveals the real reasons for his ostensible abandonment by the king in 1641, enabling a better understanding of Anglo-Scottish politics in the early Long Parliament as well as developments connected to religion and the 'British Problem'. Importantly, the book demonstrates that Laud's involvement in Scotland was broadly consistent with, although differing in detail from, his approach in England and Ireland. It represents a major contribution to key debates on the nature of religion and politics in the 1630s and early 1640s and to current thinking on the role of Charles I and William Laud in the formulation of ecclesiastical policy, the 'British problem', and the causes of the British Civil Wars.

Edition of a wealthy merchant's accounts sheds fascinating insights into life at the time.

Censorship profoundly affected early modern writing. Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed picture of early modern censorship and investigates the pressures that censorship exerted on seventeenth-century authors, printers, and publishers. In the 1600s, Britain witnessed a civil war, the judicial execution of a king, the restoration of his son, and an unremitting struggle among crown, parliament, and people for sovereignty and the right to define “liberty and property.” This battle, sometimes subtle, sometimes bloody, entailed a struggle for the control of language and representation. Robertson offers a richly detailed study of this “censorship contest” and of the craft that writers employed to outflank the licensers. He argues that for most parties, victory, not diplomacy or consensus, was the ultimate goal. This book differs from most recent works in analyzing both the mechanics of early modern censorship and the poetics that the licensing system produced—the forms and pressures of self-censorship. Among the issues that Robertson addresses in this book are the workings of the licensing machinery, the designs of art and obliquity under a regime of censorship, and the involutions of authorship attendant on anonymity.