Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution.

Glenn Burgess. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ix + 229 pp. $ 30. ISBN: 0-3000-6532-9.

Towards the end of this book, the author notes that it has been devoted to an essentially "negative task," but hopes that "more than purely negative results have been achieved." In fact, both the negative and the positive ambitions of the study are fully realized. Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution is a careful, subtle, and scrupulous investigation into the tropes of early Stuart political thought, an extended exercise in the historiographical definition of terms. Burgess works with precision to reconstruct those terms in their original complexity, and thus removes from them many years of accreted simplification. His negative project, he says, is to "underrain[el the absolutist-constitutionalist dichotomy" (209) that has so often dominated historians' treatment of conflicts within the political nation of the time.

Roughly, James I and his adherents are said to have propounded doctrines which located "absolute" authority in the crown; this set them over against those who upheld the ancient English "constitution" as a check on royal prerogative. But, as Burgess shows, neither of these terms was likely to be used in the early seventeenth century in the senses that are attributed to them now. Some Continental theory that tended towards "absolutism" was available to English political thinkers, that of Jean Bodin, for example. There were even some proponents of"absolutism" to be heard on the English scene, such as Alberico Gentill and Roger Manwaring. But as Burgess shows, almost no English writer was committed to "[g]enuine absolutism," which "existed, at best, only on the very margins of English political thought." Almost no one, that is, was willing to assert that the king had the "authority to make law, to break law (or, at any rate, to be free of it), or to tax (i.e., to dispossess), without consent" (90).

Mainstream political thinkers - and this stream was very broad - saw no contradiction in upholding both a divine right of kings, limited only by the mandates of heaven, and legal limits on monarchy, which forestalled such abuses. Kings might be impervious to earthly resistance, but they were nonetheless bound to govern, for the most part, in accordance with the common law of England. And Burgess is especially acute in demonstrating that it was this law and this law only that restricted prerogative. The "constitution" that has often been opposed to "absolutism" was not in this period regarded as a fixed body of principles distinct from the law itself; it simply was that law as applied and elaborated, "a loose bundle of customary or conventional practices that defined kingship," and "a complex mass of particulars" (135). On the binding authority of this "law," all parties, even James I, were in agreement. Instead of ideological struggle in the Stuart period, Burgess sees a "'constitutionalist' consensus" (210) that was both more internally diverse and yet more consistent than the long standing dichotomy would imply. Debate was possible, but was rarely over political principle. "Absolutist" claims could be made, but were not allowed to influence political practice.

The strengths of this book, then, lie first in its insistence that disputation among Englishmen in this time be understood in terms that are specific to this time, and then in its nuanced sense of those terms. Burgess covers a wide spectrum of English political thought, allowing for disagreement without resorting to Whiggish polarizing; he is lucid and convincing throughout. Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution is a highly valuable contribution to the study of the insular "mind" of the early modern English political class.

DAVID J. BAKER University of Hawaii