The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the Personal Rule of Charles I
The assembly of the Long Parliament in November 1640 witnessed an outburst of passionate hostility toward recent royal policies in church and state. “The Common-wealth hath bin miserably torne and macerated,” declared Harbottle Grimston, “and all the proprieties and liberties shaken: the Church distracted, the Gospell and Professors of it persecuted, and the whole Kingdome over-run with multitudes and swarmes of projecting cater-wormes and caterpillars, the worst of all the Aegyptian plagues.” Yet, as Kevin Sharpe has recently reminded us, “to those on the road during the 1630s, the journey seemed far from a headlong rush towards conflict.” Sir Henry Wotton could write in 1633 that “we know not what a Rebel is; what a Plotter against the Common-weal: nor what that is, which Grammarian[s] call Treason: the names themselves are antiquated with the things.” To resolve this flat contradiction requires much further research into the politics and government of Charles I's Personal Rule. In particular, a clear picture of the political behavior, relationships, and attitudes of many public figures is still lacking. This article therefore presents a case study of one prominent individual: Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, privy councillor and lord chamberlain to Henrietta Maria. These offices gave Dorset an exceptional opportunity during the 1630s to “see more clearly into [the king's] intents and actions.” Moreover, both official sources and personal correspondence should reveal his activities during the Personal Rule and his attitudes toward it. What follows will examine in turn Dorset's duties as the queen's lord chamberlain, the political influence that this office conferred, his work as a privy councillor, his relations with various factions, and his private opinions of the regime and of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.
The Baronial Context of the English Civil War
WHEN rebellion broke out in England in 1642, the political nation had been, for over a decade, obsessed with medieval precedent and its gothic past. Practices and institutions which had seemed defunct revived, during the 1630s, into new and sometimes controversial life. Trial by combat was reintroduced in appeal of treason in 1631, and confirmed by the judges in 1637 as a legitimate legal procedure even in disputes of property; in 1636 a bishop was appointed to the Lord Treasurership for the first time since the reign of Edward IV; in 1639 England went to war without the summons of a Parliament for the first time since 1323; and the following year the Great Council of Peers met, for the first time since the reign of Henry VIII, to deal with a revolt of the Scottish nobility. At Court, the king was encouraging a gentleman of his Privy Chamber, Sir Francis Biondi, in his labours on a massive survey of the baronial struggles in England from Richard II to Henry VII—a work which, when it appeared in 1641 as The Civill Warres of England, was shortly to be endowed with a profoundly ironic topicality.
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.