Treason and the State

This study traces the transition of treason from a personal crime against the monarch to a modern crime against the impersonal state. It consists of four highly detailed case studies of major state treason trials in England beginning with that of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, in the spring of 1641 and ending with that of Charles Stuart, King of England, in January 1649. The book examines how these trials constituted practical contexts in which ideas of statehood and public authority legitimated courses of political action that might ordinarily be considered unlawful - or at least not within the compass of the foundational statute of Edward III. The ensuing narrative reveals how the events of the 1640s in England challenged existing conceptions of treason as a personal crime against the king, his family and his servants, and pushed the ascendant parliamentarian faction towards embracing an impersonal conception of the state that perceived public authority as completely independent of any individual or group.

• Effectively brings together political, intellectual and legal history in relation to one of the great turning points in British history • An important contribution to the debate about the evolution of the notion of the ‘state’ in early modern political thought • An important contribution to the developing exploration of the relationship between British and Irish history in the early modern period

Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. Concepts: 1. The statutory basis of English treason law; 2. Sovereignty and state; Part II. Practice: 3. Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford; 4. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury; 5. Connor Lord Maguire, Second Baron of Enniskillen; 6. Charles Stuart, King of England; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

\'… readable and engaging … Treason and the State is a worthy addition to the \'Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History\' series. It opens up significant questions about the nature of the revolution against Charles I and reveals how the revolutionaries struggled to free themselves from precedent and to the re-fashion their conceptions of treason and state.\' Alan MacDonald, University of Dundee, Journal of Continuity and Change