This is a study of the histories of the English Civil War or some aspects of it written in England or by Englishmen and Englishwomen or publish ed in England up to 1702, the year of the publication of the first volume of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. By the terms of this definition, Clarendon is himself, of course, one of the historians studied. Clarendon's History is so formidable an achievement that all historians writing about the war before its publication have an air of prematureness. Nevertheless, as I hope the following pages will show, they produced a body of writing which may still be read with interest and profit and which anticipated many of the ideas and attitudes of Clarendon's History. I will even go so far as to say that many readers who have only a limited interest or no in terest in the Civil War are likely to find many of these historians interest ing, should their works come to their attention, for their treatment of the problems of man in society, for their psychological acuteness, and for their style. But while I intend to show their merits, my main concern will be to show how the Civil War appeared to historians, including Clarendon, who wrote within one or two generations after it, that is to say, at a time when it remained part of the experience of people still alive. A word is necessary on terminology.

In early 1618, Anne Cecil (nee Lake), Lady Roos, accused Frances Cecil, countess of Exeter, of having committed adultery and incest with her husband, the countess's step grandson, William Cecil, Lord Roos. The countess had attempted to poison her twice, first with a poisoned enema, and later with a poisoned syrup of roses. With the help of the countess, Lord Roos secretively fled England for Catholic Italy, leaving his wife and family behind. Now, the murderous countess was again planning to poison Lady Roos, and perhaps also her father, Sir Thomas Lake, the king's Secretary of State. The countess vehemently denied these sensational charges, fell on her knees before the king, and asked for justice and restoration of her damaged honour. The accusations and the countess's defence quickly became a public scandal. The king and council investigated and ordered the matter be solved in the Court of Star Chamber. The Lake and Cecil families promptly sued and counter-sued each other for slander. The trials attracted much attention, not least because Lake's position as Secretary hung in the balance, and because King James decided to emulate the Biblical King Solomon and sit as a judge himself. While the feud and entangled scandals make for sensational reading, they also offer unexplored windows into the culture, society, and politics of Jacobean England. These were events with resounding reverberations and profound impacts on the Jacobean court, involving both its domestic and foreign spheres. Here Johanna Luthman scrutinises the scandals in detail for the first time. Employing a diverse range of methodologies and critical lenses, including those from the history of medicine and gender, and an analysis of several court cases that have not yet been studied, Luthman demonstrates the importance of incorporating the history of these scandals into an understanding of complex and fraught world of the court of King James VI. In so doing, the book offers new perspectives from which to understand the period, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in Jacobean history, as well as the history of gender, family, medicine, and scandal more generally.