The politic history of early Stuart parliaments

This essay traces the development of a particular way of writing the history of parliament: the politic history. A creation of the late Renaissance, politic histories preferred to explain events neither through divine intervention, nor through imperceptible forces and contingency, but rather through human intentionality. Following classical and contemporary models such as Tacitus, Commynes and Guicciardini, English politic historians wove narratives of vice, secrecy and dissimulation. The essay explores how, in the early seventeenth century, historians appropriated the modes of politic composition and applied them to new institutional settings: university elections, church councils and especially parliaments. It concludes with an analysis of the most impressive politic history of the early Stuart parliament, Sir John Eliot’s Negotium posterorum. Composed during Eliot’s imprisonment after 1629, the Negotium posterorurm is clearly the first part of a formal, politic history of Charles I’s reign, heavily modelled on Tacitus and with parliament as its central stage. Eliot’s project suggests how politic narration could be applied to the recent past, helping to produce historicised accounts of the present.