On 1 December the IHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar will be hosting an online seminar via Zoom with Dr Kathryn Marshalek. Kathryn will be presenting her paper ‘Anti-Catholic Penal Statutes and the Royal Prerogative in the English Parliaments of the 1620s‘. There will be a question and answer session following the presentation. The seminar will take place online via Zoom. Please contact seminar@histparl.ac.uk for Zoom details.
Abstract
This paper will reexamine the relationship between religious grievances and constitutional conflict in the English parliaments of the 1620s. Looking at episodes in the parliaments of 1621, 1624, and 1625, this paper argues that the prerogative power of mercy, exercised to protect Catholics from the full weight of parliamentary statutes governing religious conformity, emerged as a key point of constitutional tension between the Crown and the Commons. By the close of the 1625 session, the Commons attempted to leverage supply not only against a formal petition for religious redress, but against a request that Charles I not exercise this ancient and largely uncontested prerogative. By situating these parliamentary conflicts within the context of early Stuart foreign and dynastic politics, this reframing accordingly locates the origins of the decade’s constitutional crisis in the Commons’ defence of a law-based, penalty-based system of enforcing conformity upon a religious minority.
Kathryn Marshalek is a historian of early modern England and an Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the destabilizing political force of persistent religious pluralism both within and between states in Europe after the legal and doctrinal Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century. Her work has appeared in English Historical Review, Journal of British Studies, Historical Research, and Renaissance Quarterly.
