Puritanism and Revolution by Christopher Hill

Author:Christopher Hill [Hill, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Religion, England, Great Britain, Europe, Christianity, Civilization, 17th Century, Revolutionary, Puritans, Great Britain - History - Puritan Revolution; 1642-1660, Puritans - England - History - 17th century, Great Britain - Social Conditions - 17th Century
ISBN: 9780140552027
Google: pccdkP75yj0C
Amazon: 0140552022
Publisher: Viking Pr
Published: 1968-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

speculating in debentures. Moreover, when lands were transferred they either remained in the hands of purchasers anxious to recoup themselves, or after improvement at their hands were resold at a higher price to others, or returned to delinquents whose own impoverishment made it necessary for them to turn improving landlords. The moral of the Duchess of Newcastle's The Tale of a Traveller is that constant vigilance is needed if a landlord is to thrive. 1 The restored bishops had a concerted rent policy, which included the conversion of leases for lives into leases for years, and whose object was the extraction of the maximum rent and fines from their estates. 2 So even where Royalists recovered their lands in or before 1660, they had to get on or get out. There was much mortgaging and reselling in the period from 1660 to 1688. The Duchess of Newcastle claimed that after his return her husband had to sell lands to the value of £56,000 in order to pay debts: after that he had to turn improving landlord. 3 After 1660, indeed, it became a social duty to get rich. The Duke of Albemarle, his physician tells us, realized that "if the Wealth of the Nation came to centre most among the lower and trading Part of the People, at one Time or other it will certainly be in their Power, and probably in their Desires, to invade the Government". This was the more likely if the nobility made themselves "contemptible and weak, by the Number and Weight of their Debts, and the continual Decay of their Estates". So the self-made Duke resolved "to become as great an Example to the Nobility of honourable good Husbandry, as he had been before of Loyalty and Allegiance". 4 In this new commercial world the

____________________ 1 D. Grant, Margaret the First, p. 231.

2 Ed. J. C. Hodgson, Northumbrian Documents of the 17th and 18th centuries ( Surtees Society, 1918), pp. 213-15, 226, 234-8; Clarendon, Life ( 1759), II, pp. 184-6.

3 Ed. Firth, Life of the Duke of Newcastle, pp. 78-9; Grant, op.cit., pp. 199, 229-33; cf. Henry Oxinden of Barham ( Oxinden and Peyton Letters, pp. xvii, xxxviii). Further research is required into this point before we can be quite sure of the full significance of Mrs. Thirsk's researches, as indeed she herself recognizes. Roger Coke suggested that the effort to recover his lands in the sixteen-fifties often left a Royalist's family in financial difficulties after the Restoration. Many may have been forced to sell their estates again before the end of the century ( R. Coke, A Detection of the Court and State of England, 1694, II, pp. 101, 105, 375-6).

4 T. Skinner, Life of Monck ( 1724), p. 384.

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