Abstract
Within the manuscript collection at the British Library in London is a curious document entitled “Notes concerning the minority of a king and the administration of government during a king’s minority.”1 The anonymous author, who probably composed this work early in the year 1751, consulted a significant body of primary and secondary sources to fashion a narrative that unmistakably identified the significance of minority reigns in English history. Indeed, the author duly recounted the major historical developments of England’s six minority reigns: the successive confirmations of Magna Carta by Henry III, the growth of councils and parliaments as consultative and administrative bodies under Richard II and Henry VI, the historical evolution of the office of Lord Protector of England, and the recognition of kingship as an abstract entity in political theory. This history of English royal minorities was compiled to serve an immediate political purpose. Frederick, Prince of Wales and heir apparent to the British throne, had recently died ( 31 March 1751), leaving his thirteen-year-old son, the future George III, as the elderly George II’s heir apparent. Quite suddenly, the dusty precedents of England’s medieval and early modern past became all too relevant to the possible contingency of a mid-eighteenth-century royal minority.2
Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.
… Ecclesiastes, 10:16
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
British Library (afterward BL) Add 36085 (“the “Hardwicke Papers” vol. 737).
See Derek Jarrett, “The Regency Crisis of 1765,” English Historical Review 85, no. 335 (April 1970): 282–315.
J. S. Roskell, “The Office and Dignity of Protector of England, with Special Reference to its Origins,” English Historical Review 68 (April 1953): 193–233.
The date of 1389 for the conclusion of Richard II’s minority signifies the king’s own determination that he had achieved his full majority.
See Charles Beem, The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Cited in S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 14.
For the classic study on the medieval theory of the “king’s two bodies,” see Ernst Kantorwicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). See also F. W. Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation,” in Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland (3 vols.), ed. H. A. L. Fisher, 3: iii, 245–49 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911).
BL 36085, n. 1. This manuscript notes how Edward III, king at age 14 in 1327, was recognized as an adult king, which the anonymous author identifies within the theory of the “king’s two bodies,” noting that “the king, as king, is always of full age, that his acts cannot be voided by his non-age.”
See Tomoo Ishida, The Royal Dynasties in Ancient Israel (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977), 40–52.
John Rogerson, Chronicles of the Old Testament Kings (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 80–85.
John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, pt. 1, books I and II, ed. Henry Bergen (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution, 1923), 249–52.
See Henry A. Myers, Medieval Kingship (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 15–35.
“William of Pagula, Mirror of Edward III,” Medieval Renaissance Texts and Studies, no. 225 (New York: University of New York, 2002), 64–140. For Wyclif, see Medieval Political Theory—A Reader: The Quest for a Body Politic, 1100–1400, ed. Cary J. Nederman and Kate Langon Farhan (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 221–29.
John Gower, The Works ofJohn Gower (3 vols.), ed. G. C. Macaulay, 3: 33–385 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901). For more recent textual analysis of Gower’s work, see Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), passim.
Thomas Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham 1376–1422, trans. David Preest (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2005), 242–45, 254–63, 300–311.
John Stow, The Chronicles of England, from Brute, unto this Present Year of Christ 1580 (London: Ralphe Newberie, 1580), 470.
See Martyn J. Whitlock, The Origins of England, 410–600 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 5, 113, and Barbara York, Kings and Kingdoms of Early Anglo-Saxon England (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 156–78.
Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law (Studies in Mediaeval History IV), trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), 12.
Frederick Pollard and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1878), 2:263.
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. D. H. Farmer (New York: Penguin, 1991), 187–92.
Frederic William Maitland, The Constitutional History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946), 59–60.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. and trans. Michael Swanton (New York: Routledge, 1998), 115.
Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 373–74.
Ann Williams, Kingship and Government in Pre-Conquest England, c. 500–1066 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 107.
William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, vol. 1, ed. and trans. R.A.B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 269.
Simon Keynes, “The Declining Reputation of King Aethelred the Unready,” in Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. David Hill, 27 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1978).
Maitland, Constitutional History, 59–60, 97–98.
Karl Leyser, “The Anglo-Norman Succession, 1120–1125,” in Anglo-Norman Studies xiii, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boy-dell Press, 1991), 13:225–41 and C. Warren Hollister, “The Anglo-Norman Succession Debate of 1126: Prelude to Stephen’s Anarchy,” Journal of Medieval History 1 (April 1975): 19–35.
Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 80–115.
John Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 65–111.
Cited in Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 7.
Roger of Wendover, The Flowers of History, trans. J. A. Giles (New York: AMS press, 1968), 68.
Sidney Painter, William Marshal (London: John Hopkins Press, 1933), 118–19. Also William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England. 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1873), 1:551.
Wendover, Flowers of History, 179–80; Matthew of Westminster, The Flowers of History, trans. C. P. Yonge (New York: MS Press, 1968), 95.
For a detailed explanation for the sources regarding John’s probable murder of Arthur, see F. M. Powicke, “King John and Arthur of Brittany,” English Historical Review 24, no. 96 (Oct. 1909): 659–74, and Dominica Legge, “William Marshal and Arthur of Brittany,” Bulletin of the Institute ofHistorical Research 55 (May 1982): 18–25.
Stubbs, Constitutional History, 1:535. Stubbs argued that Richard’s 1189 accession was also partly an elective process.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2008 Charles Beem
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Beem, C. (2008). Woe to Thee, O Land! The Introduction. In: Beem, C. (eds) The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616189_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616189_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37561-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-61618-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)