The proper title of the tract is The Propositions for your Majesty’s Service containing two parts: the one to secure your state and bridle the impertinency of Parliaments; the other to increase your Majesty’s revenue, much more than it is. Each part suggests policy alterations and offers advice on implementing the changes. Interspersed are occasional sinister platitudes, such as that “in Pollicye it is a great[er] Tye of the people by force and necessitye then meerely by love and affection”—a version of the Machiavellian trope that it was better to be feared than loved—or the warning that “the secret intent” of the Propositions must be “concealed from anie English at all eyther councellor of Estate or anie other.”Footnote ¹⁷

The second part of the Propositions aimed at creating new revenue streams or raising one-time sums. These were not all radical, and many had been seriously considered by the Privy Council during the past decades. Proposals to sell titles of honor, regulate lawyers’ fees, or impose taxes on meat, salt, wool, offices, and alehouses were familiar, if not well liked.Footnote ¹⁸ This familiarity must not be overemphasized, however, for the most characteristic rhetorical move of the second part was its constant attribution of these impositions to contemporary Continental princely regimes. The Propositions suggested the king must institute a gabella as in Tuscany, sell titles as in Spain, and regulate innkeepers as in Naples.

To ease the acceptance of these foreign practices, the Propositions marked a number of feudal revenues, such as wardship, for elimination. This exchange of old practices for new echoed several projects from the century’s first decade, particularly the failed “Great Contract” of 1610, by which the kingdom would have supplied a regular revenue to the crown in exchange for the elimination of certain traditional payments.Footnote ¹⁹ The Propositions extended this logic through its proposal to institute a decima, a yearly 10 percent property tax applied both to “monyed men in Townes, as Landed men in the Countryes.” The decima would alter crown finance so much that it “may serve in steede of Subsedyes Fyftenthes and such like, w[hi]ch in this Case is fitt to bee released … in Recompence of the said Decima w[hi]ch will yeeld yo[u]r ma[jes]tye more in Certaintye then they doe Casuallye, by Fyve hundred thousand pounds p[er] ann[u]m at the least.”Footnote ²⁰ Subsidies were the main form of taxation granted by parliament. Replacing them with a decima would eliminate parliament’s role in royal finance.

Nor was this the only challenge to parliament: bridling its misbehavior was the main objective of the first part of the Propositions. The solution was not to adjust parliament’s formal privileges. Instead, in its most radical and troubling analysis, the tract traced the cause of parliament’s troubles to the overly independent countryside and boroughs. The Propositions would choke this problem off at its source by bringing about “the peoples more subjeccon. And by their Subjeccon yo[u]r Parliament must bee Forced consequentlye to alter their style, and to bee conformable to yo[u]r will and pleasure.” To accomplish this, fortresses should be constructed in the chief towns and garrisoned by paid soldiers, preferably “Chosen of another nation” but at least “not to bee borne … w[i]thin Fortye or Fiftie myles” of their station. Second, highways would run only through fortified towns and surveillance would be established through constant guard. Finally, an oath would be required of every subject clarifying the monarch’s powers vis-à-vis parliament, affirming that the king of England is empowered to “eyther make lawes or reverse anie made … w[i]thout Further consent of a Parliament or neede to call them at all.” This, the Propositions insisted, was not intended “to put downe altogether Parliaments” but only “to abridge them,” as the tract explained, on the model of Louis XI of France.Footnote ²¹ In sum, in the world envisioned by the Propositions, the military occupation of England by foreign troops would enforce a regime of direct taxation and overawe the population, supporting the rule of a prince who made and reversed laws at will.

The Propositions derived from a proposal written in 1614 by the Catholic exile, pirate, and probably illegitimate son of the earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Dudley.Footnote ²² After losing his claim to a series of hereditary titles, Dudley had declared his Catholicism and moved to Florence, where his theories of naval engineering led to positions at the Medici court and an important role in the construction of fortifications at Livorno.Footnote ²³ During negotiations to find a match for Henry, King James’s eldest son, among the princes of Italy in the early 1610s, Dudley established contacts within Henry’s entourage and sent him a number of treatises on ship design, offering to make the prince “Master of the seas.”Footnote ²⁴ When Henry died unexpectedly in 1612, Dudley cast about for another patron.Footnote ²⁵ Hearing rumors of the failed 1614 Parliament, Dudley forwarded “a certeyne dessine of mine, w[hi]ch [if] followed in Englande by his Ma[jes]tie I knowe may make him secure against all these rubbs for his profit,” to the royal favorite, Robert Carr, earl of Somerset. The design, Dudley suggested, would validate King James’s status as an “absolute monarch,” keeping “the bridel in his owne hand” so “he may doe what him selfe thinketh fitt w[i]th ought Contradiction” or fear of being “vexed” by “Parlamente.”Footnote ²⁶ Somerset thanked Dudley for his suggestions, but Dudley had even worse luck with his second bid for patronage.Footnote ²⁷ The death of Sir Thomas Overbury under mysterious circumstances led to scandal, resulting in Somerset’s fall from favor and eventual conviction for Overbury’s murder.Footnote ²⁸ With Somerset’s fall vanished any hopes that had been pinned on the disgraced favorite, and Dudley’s project lay buried until the summer of 1629.Footnote ²⁹ When the Propositions emerged in July, all signs of Dudley’s authorship and the tract’s original context had been effaced. Whatever its origins, Charles and the Privy Council were surely correct to see the Propositions as referring, in an oblique way, to recent events.

Precisely how the council learned of the Propositions is unclear, but by 3 November 1629 it began a fevered investigation, often sitting till midnight and neglecting all other business.Footnote ³⁰ It appears they began by tracing the copies of the Propositions sold by commercial manuscript dealers back to a man named Robert Flood, who immediately implicated his employer, Sir Robert Cotton.Footnote ³¹ Cotton and the earl of Clare were soon arrested and their papers searched.Footnote ³² Within days the number of suspects grew to include the earls of Somerset and Bedford, the attorney Gilbert Barrell, and John Selden, already confined for his role in parliamentary protests the previous spring. Bishop Theophilus Field and Dr. Samuel Turner were questioned, while Oliver St. John of Lincoln’s Inn and Cotton’s librarian, Richard James, were detained.Footnote ³³ Rumors promised that the number of suspects would double.Footnote ³⁴

The council quickly realized that the distribution of the Propositions centered on the Westminster home of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton.Footnote ³⁵ Cotton possessed a huge manuscript collection, including thousands of state papers of both antique and more recent origin, which he shared with his friends and acquaintances. Government documents were not Cotton’s only sensitive holdings. When Ben Jonson was examined in 1628 for having composed an epigram praising the duke of Buckingham’s assassin, Jonson pleaded that he had merely read the poem while at Cotton’s house for dinner.Footnote ³⁶ On this occasion, however, Cotton proved to be more than an avid collector; indeed, several copies of the Propositions were traced back directly to Cotton’s library or to Cotton himself. Moreover, this proliferation had proceeded not only through exchanges with friends, but also through the more unruly, and déclassé, world of the commercial manuscript trade. Cotton further aroused the investigators’ suspicion by his conduct: Cotton at first denied all knowledge of the Propositions, and he even offered to admit authorship of the tract if it were to be found in his study. This bold posturing was designed to signal confidence that it would not be found. Unfortunately for Cotton, the subsequent search revealed both a copy of the Propositions and Cotton’s half-finished answer or rebuttal. Cotton’s attempted deception, Lord Keeper Conventry observed, tended “to increase … S[i]r Rob[er]ts offence,” while Attorney General Heath considered Cotton “more deeplye ingaged in the Pacte, then all the rest.”Footnote ³⁷

How exactly Cotton became tangled up in the Propositions is unclear. Oliver St. John claimed that he had originally found the Propositions in Cotton’s library among a “bondell of papers” in a little-used upstairs room while innocently searching for a treatise on fen drainage in July.Footnote ³⁸ Both Cotton and James vehemently denied that Cotton was the source of the Propositions, which Cotton maintained he had obtained from Clare late in the summer. The real provenance of the Propositions, Cotton insinuated, lay elsewhere.Footnote ³⁹

Whatever the truth of the matter, the depth of Cotton’s involvement was inescapable. This can be inferred through comparing the defendants’ answers produced for the Star Chamber proceedings against them.Footnote ⁴⁰ While all the defendants were charged with having “divulged and disp[er]sed” copies, most insisted that the Propositions remained within closed circles.Footnote ⁴¹ Selden and Barrell confessed only to possessing a copy, and Bedford, Somerset, and Clare admitted to distributing the Propositions to one or two specific individuals.Footnote ⁴² Their answers described in detail the times, places, and circumstances under which the Propositions changed hands.

Unlike his codefendants, Cotton only denied distributing the Propositions with the purpose to raise rumors—not altogether. Instead, Cotton advanced the stronger claim that the “dispersinge … or the deliverie” of the Propositions was positively legal behavior that he could not be required to explain or defend.Footnote ⁴³ This was a tacit admission that Cotton had, in fact, distributed the Propositions more widely and matches the regime’s understanding: the new privy councillor Lord Wentworth noted that the charges were leveled “against S[i]r Robert Cotton most particulerly for makeing manie copies.”Footnote ⁴⁴ However, according to the testimony of his friends, Cotton was innocent. St. John, they averred, had discovered the Propositions in Cotton’s house, to be sure, but without his knowledge, and removed it without obtaining Cotton’s permission.Footnote ⁴⁵ Cotton gave the Propositions to Flood and told him to prepare a copy, but Flood decided to make additional copies for sale without Cotton’s knowledge or approval.Footnote ⁴⁶ Sir Simonds D’Ewes blamed the incident on Richard James.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to D’Ewes, James “lent out or let out Sir Robert Cotton’s most precious manuscripts for money, to any that would be his customers, which Sir Robert was wont to lend freely to his noble and loving friends; which I once made known to Sir Robert before the said James’s face.” D’Ewes imagined James had rented the Propositions to St. John. When the Propositions came back into Cotton’s hands, he “set a young fellow he then kept in the house to transcribe, which infallibly proves that Sir Robert knew not himself that the written tract itself had originally come out of his library. This untrusty young fellow imitating, it seems, the said James, took one copy secretly for himself … and out of his own transcript sold away several copies.” This young fellow was undoubtedly Flood, whom D’Ewes “heard it certainly affirmed … was [Cotton’s] bastard.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This picture of servants taking advantage of a renowned antiquarian is perfectly possible. Cotton was getting on in years, and there is something attractive about librarians and scribes creating and distributing a seditious libel on their own initiative. But these were almost certainly falsifications designed to shield Cotton from responsibility for one of the most serious charges: the deliberate delivery of copies not only to his friends but also into the milieu of commercial reproduction.Footnote ⁴⁹

From Cotton’s house the circulation of the Propositions proceeded simultaneously on multiple levels. One common mode of transmission was a kind of political sociability, much like what Harold Love terms “user publication.”Footnote ⁵⁰ People received copies of important manuscripts from their friends and clients in the capital and mentioned, displayed, and shared manuscripts of interest with colleagues and associates. For example, Bishop Field mentioned the Propositions to Clare before services in St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Clare did him one better, lending the bishop a copy of the tract he had recently obtained from Somerset. Somerset had himself borrowed the Propositions from Bedford, his neighbor in Chiswick.Footnote ⁵¹ Clare, Bedford, and Somerset were committed to close custody in the homes of privy councillors and clerics (Bedford, for example, was delivered to the custody of Sir Julius Caesar), while rumors suggested they would be joined by Viscount Saye; the earls of Lincoln, Essex, Warwick, and Hertford; the bishop of Lincoln; and the disfavored archbishop of Canterbury.Footnote ⁵²

Nor were peers and bishops the only ones reading the Propositions. John Selden received a copy while in prison for his part in the 1629 Parliament, while Gilbert Barrell, attorney for another imprisoned parliamentarian, borrowed a copy from a colleague. Indeed, attorneys at the Inns of Court shared the tract both with their patrons and with each other. Upon examination Bedford admitted that he had received his copy while in residence at Woburn Abbey from his attorney Oliver St. John. Barrell also implicated St. John, claiming that St. John had displayed the Propositions prominently enough in his Lincoln’s Inn chambers that visitors were apt to notice it. Upon examination, St. John roughly confirmed both stories.Footnote ⁵³

St. John’s display of the Propositions suggests that possession of political tracts could be fashionable. As Love argues, the circulation of manuscripts often served to “nourish a shared set of values and to enrich personal allegiances.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This process seems analogous to sharing a painting or book for those whose tastes ran in that direction.Footnote ⁵⁵ Showing off a manuscript of interest was a display of intimacy and could help form, reinforce, and mobilize social relations. Along the same lines, Sharpe notes that scribal communities who discussed “unorthodox and controversial literature … could not but be, in the broadest sense, political communities.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The political-interpretive community within which the Propositions circulated is particularly interesting. These were not random individuals but were all, or almost all, linked to the recent political disturbances.Footnote ⁵⁷ Clare’s son Denzil Holles had been imprisoned with Selden for his role in the 1629 tumult in parliament. Barrell was an attorney for Sir John Eliot, whom Charles saw as the ringleader of the lot. Bedford, St. John, and especially Cotton and James shared similar links. The figures implicated by rumor seemed “appropriate” precisely because they, too, were identifiable to contemporaries as participants in the recent stirs.Footnote ⁵⁸ Charles may not have been Nixonian, but this might easily pass for an enemies list.Footnote ⁵⁹

Yet not all distribution followed extant social patterns. As John Rawson observed, professional scribes and those that “deale in manuscripts” had a particular interest in papers concerning “matters of state.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These “manuscripts” were sold in bookshops and by scriveners and other writers. As Rawson and D’Ewes both recorded, the council discovered the Propositions after it had entered commercial circulation, when Flood had lent his copy to dealers or “sold away several copies” himself.

It is not surprising that the Propositions circulated through both “user” and commercial networks simultaneously.Footnote ⁶¹ Circulation practices were mutually interdependent because people had different kinds of relationships. A man might purchase a manuscript from a dealer, being a party to commercial circulation; he might then show it to a colleague at Lincoln’s Inn; finally, he might send it to his patron somewhere in Bedfordshire. But, unusually, this case allows us to see how user publication could transition into commercial publication and thus reach a potentially wider audience. The order is more commonly imagined in reverse, as commercially produced material passed along to the purchaser’s friends through user publication. In this case, however, the Propositions had already circulated through user publication and was only then brought to commercial dealers. Commercial publication required a much lower degree of social familiarity between the provider and the purchaser than user publication. The council discovered the Propositions precisely because the tract had made the transition to a less personal and therefore potentially wider audience.

Two explanations are possible. First, perhaps Cotton’s servants discovered the Propositions in Cotton’s library, found that they “touched matters of State,” and decided they were worth wider, commercial circulation.Footnote ⁶² This represents a possibility endemic to the world of user publication. While scholars have regarded manuscript circulation as restricted to a relatively closed coterie, in practice, networks were enormously leaky.Footnote ⁶³ Most gentlemen did not do the scut work of copying themselves, instead assigning the task to a servant. While Flood was found bringing the Propositions to market, any of the other servants who handled the Propositions could have done the same. Somerset, for example, did not himself write out a copy for Clare but instead “Caused a Coppie to bee made,” presumably by one of his servants.Footnote ⁶⁴ For his part, “becaws Summersets coppy was written in so small a hand, as he could not reade it,” Clare ordered his servant “Marriott to write a coppy.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Other investigations of manuscript circulation found similar “leakage.” For example, the 1634 investigation of Lord Balmerino found that Balmerino’s servant, Robert Dalgleish, had made a personal copy of his master’s “Petition” and shown it to at least one other person.Footnote ⁶⁶ The practice of having servants copy written tracts both exposed those servants to the tracts themselves and created the possibility that additional copies would be created and shared.

The second, and much more likely, possibility is that the move from user to entrepreneurial publication was directed by Cotton himself. For Cotton, who had spent his life preparing memoranda for the highest of the Privy Council, a turn toward publicity would represent a serious shift. Changing audience changes meaning: a memorandum handed discreetly to the king or his councillors becomes something else entirely when published to a wider public.Footnote ⁶⁷ But by 1629 Cotton and his circle had some experience with introducing political documents to impersonal audiences through handwriting. Sharpe notices a complementary shift in the tone of Cotton’s writing, asserting that by the 1620s Cotton had “abandoned the plain style of the antiquarian discourse for the racy polemic of the pamphlet.”Footnote ⁶⁸ But even when it came to “pamphlets,” handwriting was Cotton’s preferred medium. More than a dozen tracts composed by Cotton were copied by hand and sold commercially, making Cotton one of the most widely distributed manuscript authors in England. Even the few of his works that were printed covertly, such as his 1628 Danger Wherein the Kingdom Now Standeth, were often transmitted in handwriting.Footnote ⁶⁹ Cotton’s links to commercial scribal networks was not incidental. Cotton cultivated powerful links with professional scribes, who were employed to copy items in his collection. Cotton’s close associate, the scribe Ralph Starkey, was a pioneer in commercial scribal publication and sold handwritten copies of politically sensitive texts until his death in 1628.Footnote ⁷⁰ Cotton and his allies, particularly Sir John Eliot, spent years exploiting these resources to make political interventions, circulating speeches, petitions, and other tracts.Footnote ⁷¹ Beyond his deep familiarity with the techniques of commercial manuscript publicity, Cotton’s skittish behavior and half-confessions all argue that his circulation of the Propositions was a deliberate political act. Mobilizing this conjunction of politics and commerce constituted an attempt to widen the circulation of the Propositions beyond what was available through personal networks alone. Using a servant to execute this plan was also standard: only eighteen months earlier, the earl of Lincoln’s servants had been accused of distributing a handwritten tract against the 1626 “forced” loan, clearly at Lincoln’s direction.Footnote ⁷²

Cotton deliberately attempted to circulate the Propositions but not because he approved of them. Indeed, it is clear from the trial materials that Cotton had been composing a rebuttal to the tract’s suggestsions. The Propositions required a rebuttal, Sir Henry Bouchier explained to Archbishop James Ussher, because it tended “to the oppression of the Common-wealth.”Footnote ⁷³ The Propositions represented not a positive program but instead a damning critique of the Caroline regime’s tendency toward Continental government.

The political analysis advanced in the Propositions has been marginal to most scholarship on early Stuart political thought. Its nearly total rejection of parliament and limited monarchy ran counter to the ideal “constitutional consensus” shared both by leading parliamentarians of the later 1620s and by many supporters of the Caroline regime. It also lacked any obvious connection to the patriarchal style of absolute kingship championed by Sir Robert Filmer, Dr. Robert Sibthorpe, and Roger Mainwaring or any mention of church government or even religion itself.Footnote ⁷⁴ These, combined with an evident disdain for moderation and preference for what the Florentine writer Francesco Guicciardini called “extraordinary and violent remedies,” suggests that the Propositions owed a considerable intellectual and stylistic debt to Niccolò Machiavelli.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Machiavelli invoked here, however, was not the classical republican familiar from the work of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock but instead the conniving, lion-and-the-fox Machiavael, more familiar to the early modern English thanks to his presence in late Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.Footnote ⁷⁶ Charging hated royal advisors with atheistic Machiavellianism was a common tactic of Elizabethan political polemic and was used in both the 1584 Catholic pamphlet commonly known as Leicester’s Commonwealth and in the Puritan John Stubbes’s 1579 Discoverie of a gaping gulfe.Footnote ⁷⁷ In contemporary usage, the language of the Machiavael was almost exclusively negative, used to indicate villainous intent.

The statements recorded during the regime’s investigation of the Propositions provide more precise clues to tract’s reception. Of course, the defendants’ answers are not infallible guides to the discussions provoked by the Propositions; views that confirmed the prosecutions’ suspicions would probably have been omitted. Nevertheless, the defendants recounted several conversations in which each “delivered his opinion” of the manuscript’s text. Clare, for example, declared to Somerset that he thought the Propositions was “a Fantasticke projecte of some braine sicke Travellor, whoe had made Colleccons out of the gover[n]m[en]t of some Princes in Italie and other forraigne States, noe waie suetable to the gover[n]m[en]t of this Kingdome.” When St. John sent a copy of the Propositions to Bedford, he identified the tract as “plotts Commonwealth, or Sr Thomas Moores Utopia,” by which St. John explained that he meant “a speculative or contemplative projecte never like to bee putt in execucon.” Later, at Bedford’s home, St. John “asked his lo[rdshi]pp whether hee had received, Sr Thomas Moores Utopia w[hi]ch this defendant had sent him, w[hi]ch his lo[rdshi]pp answered … that i[t] was an Utopia indeed.”Footnote ⁷⁸

“Utopia” is a peculiar appellation for a writing so rooted in the particular political geography of European states, but the timeless and placeless aspects of the Utopia should not be exaggerated. While More’s Utopia described an ideal commonwealth, like the speculative republic of Plato’s Laws or the scientific paradise of Bacon’s New Atlantis, an important contemporary discourse identified the ideal commonwealth with England’s constitution or, to use contemporary terminology, its “frame.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Though rarely could two people agree on the precise terms of the frame, appealing to England’s moderate arrangements was an extremely common mode of legitimation.Footnote ⁸⁰ Traditional practices were seen as a main source of English strength by privy councillors and regime critics alike. In its structure, this analysis derived from the fifteenth-century writings of Sir John Fortescue: the liberties of English subjects, particularly freedom from military occupation and from most impositions, enabled them to grow rich, happy, and well fed. As Fortescue noted, the English “eat every kind of flesh and fish in abundance.”Footnote ⁸¹ When summoned by their loving monarch, these subjects offer a free gift of high value that could be collected without cost. This system, which Fortescue called dominium politicum et regale, produced a feedback loop of plenty.

For Fortescue, the key point of contrast was French government, being merely dominium regale and having exactly opposite consequences. In a chapter of his De laudibus legum Angliae, titled “The evil things that come from only royal government in the kingdom of France,” Fortescue explained that through depredations of the French king’s soldiers and his many impositions, “the people live in no little misery. They drink water daily, tasting no other drink except at solemn feasts. They wear frocks or tabards of canvas like sackcloth … the men and women eat no flesh, except bacon lard … and if anyone grows in wealth at any time … he is at once assessed for the king’s subsidy more than his neighbours, so that he is soon levelled to their poverty.”Footnote ⁸² While Alan Cromartie dismisses Fortescue’s observations briefly as mere “patriotic feeling,” the deleterious effects of foreign governing practices remained an important touchstone for English political analysis throughout the early Stuart period.Footnote ⁸³ Accounts of the political life of other polities, notably France, Spain, and Italy, were used to represent the reverse of an analysis that celebrated English distinctiveness.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, when Englishmen wanted to talk about tyranny, they often described the political systems of other countries. Sir George Carew’s 1609 survey of France highlighted the role of governing practices that kept the French under “an oppressing servitude rather after the manner of the petty pilling Tyrants of Italy then according to the greatnes and magnanimitie of theire anncient Princes who governed theire Subiects in a mixed temp[er]ature.” The effect of these “imoderat exactions” was “a chaine of disorders consisting of many Lincks,” particularly “a great weaknes in matters of Force to resist invasions and to represse rebellions.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Robert Dallington devoted much of his 1605 Survey of the State of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany to the misery wrought on the Tuscan population by garrisons and heavy taxation of the country by the Medici grand dukes. The rule of the grand dukes “(to speake in one word, and not to use a harder terme) is meerely Despoticall.” The effects of this government were equally straightforward, as Dallington noted that “this People lives much discontented, as appeareth by their daily and great, (but Private) complainings: having fresh in their mindes their former libertie, and heavie on their backes their present yoake.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Sir Walter Raleigh’s extremely influential Dialogue between a Councilor of State and Justice of the Peace, printed in 1628 as the Prerogative of Parliaments but circulated widely in manuscript since 1615, featured a passage that mirrored the Propositions exactly—perhaps because they both emerged from the same context, the failure of the 1614 parliament. Debating the merits of parliamentary government, the councillor asked, “why should not our king raise money as ye kings of france do by their letters and edicts onely: for,” continued the councillor, “since ye time of Lewis ye eleventh, of whome it is said yt he freed ye French kings of their wardships, the french kings have seldome assembled ye states for anie contribution.” The justice, in turn, explained that “except England were as Naples is, and kept by a garrison of another nation, it is impossible for a king of England to greaten and enrich himselfe by anie way so assuredlie, as by ye love of his people.” But this combination of garrisons and taxation without parliament would debilitate “ye strength of England,” which rested on the shoulders of “ye people and yeomanrie.” By contrast, thanks to the fortified countryside, “the peasauntes of france have no courage nor armes.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Extralegal rule that departed from traditional English practices to cleave to foreign ones would produce generations of people who were weak and poor. This result would harm both king and people. Therefore, the contents of the Propositions’ proposals, combined with its tendency to attribute them to Continental princely regimes, would have made the Propositions odious to an English audience.

Recent scholarship has struggled to classify this style of discourse. Its proponents were not republicans in any ordinary sense; they drew on medieval and contemporary works as much as the classical tradition; and they did not usually insist that the prince was subordinate to the law. This has led some scholars, such as Alan Cromartie and J. P. Sommerville, to misclassify its texts and authors as “absolutists.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Many, such as Raleigh and Cotton, took pains to acknowledge that, at least formally, the king possessed an expansive power. Kings were not necessarily required to rule in a moderate manner; but a wise and prudent prince would do so, and a deviation from these moderate courses signaled something very wrong in the body politic.Footnote ⁸⁹

Perceiving deviance was the key insight: for despite the obvious benefits of English dominium politicum et regale over Continental dominium regale, it was widely suspected that evil men labored to persuade the king that he could increase his honor and authority if he abandoned England’s moderate frame.Footnote ⁹⁰ In an influential exposition of this point, Raleigh’s justice of peace (JP) warned that moves toward arbitrary government had been encouraged only by “men of y[our] L[ordshi]ps ranke to assist the[i]r owne passions … covering their private hatred w[i]th the colour of the king’s service.” The problem was not the constitutional balance of law and prerogative, as the JP continued, but rather the councillors themselves. “When the sub[jec]t hath need of the kings prerogative,” the JP explained, the councillors instead “use the strength of the Law: & when they require the Law yu afflict ym w[i]th the prerogative & tread the great Ch[art]re under y[ou]r feet, as a torn parchment or waste paper.”Footnote ⁹¹ In Raleighan analysis, these councillors were “evil counselors” who wanted to expand forms of prerogative taxation, since the profits of fee farming and commissions accrued to their own pockets, while it was in the councillor’s interest, not the king’s, to imprison his enemies without showing cause. In order to secure these benefits, the councillors persuaded the king of the backward notion that parliamentary rule diminishes his power and unparliamentary rule increases it. In this tradition, far from being an obvious pretext for criticizing the king, “evil counselors” represented a persistent and endemic threat to parliamentary government. Their aim was to replace traditional English rule with arbitrary government for their own purposes. Raleigh’s Dialogue is an account of limited monarchy under siege and the scenario of military despotism that awaits in case of failure.

Fears of Privy Council–driven political innovation warned that distinctive English practices were fading, that England would soon be like other polities, and that the English parliament would follow other parliaments into oblivion.Footnote ⁹² Even defenders of the regime could appropriate this theme. Urging the House of Commons to repent of its pursuit of Buckingham in 1626, Sir Dudley Carleton warned that the Commons’ proceedings might provoke Charles to abandon parliament entirely: “This kind of parliament has been formerly in most kingdoms, but in most monarchy is changed by new counsels, for when they changed their parliamentary liberties into tumultuary endeavors, it was changed by the sovereign to another form of government. We are the happiest of nations. In this kingdom I see men look like men; they have flesh on their backs and clothes to cover that flesh. In other places the men look like ghosts, their bodies clothed with canvas suits and wooden shoes.”Footnote ⁹³ Carleton’s speech echoed Fortescue, Carew, and Raleigh. The notion that foreign practices were despotic and tended toward ruin was a standard trope and was used to delegitimize proposed policies. Contrariwise, the Propositions’ embrace of foreign practices inverted the genre conventions of early Stuart political analysis. With its Machiavellian rhetoric, foreign exempla, and list of tyrannical practices, the Propositions eschewed early Stuart political language to embrace the grammar of tyranny.

If the Propositions was so despicable, why circulate it? The regime, at least, concluded Cotton had been pursuing a political strategy, divulging the “damnable projecte” as “a meanes to draw upon his Ma[jes]ty the hatred of his Subjects whoe might imagine, though unjustly, that his Ma[jes]ty intended to put the same in execucon.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This was the charge outlined in the indictment, or “bill of information,” prepared by Attorney General Heath. Heath’s bill praised Charles for having “p[re]served and mainteyned the Auntient and Fundamentall Lawes of this kingdome w[i]thout any Innovacon.” Nevertheless, “some malitious persons” who were “evill affected to yo[u]r Ma[jes]tye, And to your happie governem[en]t; and intending to rayse f[a]lse scandalous and seditious Rumors against yo[u]r ma[jes]tye and yo[u]r gratious governem[en]t; have of late wickedlye and seditiouslye Framed contrived and written, [a] False seditious and pestilent Project.” Heath’s bill then reproduced the full text of the Propositions, which, it explained, had been intended to be “divulged and disp[er]sed as if the same had beene enterteyned by yo[u]r Ma[jes]tye wth purpose to bee put in execucon therebye to rayse Feares and jealousies in the mynds of yo[u]r good Subjects.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Heath argued that the circulation of the Propositions could easily mislead readers into accepting the tract as a genuine memorandum reflecting the king’s and council’s intentions to alter the frame of government. As Sir Nathaniel Brent put it, the Propositions could “breed an opinion … that our gracious soveraigne hath these dangerous plots in his head.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Readers attached to England’s present frame would thereby become suspicious of regime activities and look with displeasure on the king.

Insiders could tell that the Propositions did not reflect regime thinking at all. As Secretary Dorchester noted, “being in ye place of trust and securetie that I am … I may say w[i]th a goode conscience that I have seene nothing in his Ma[jes]ties courses or commandements w[hi]ch may in any way offend a Just mind.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Given the certain knowledge that the regime was innocent, the Propositions acquired an exactly opposite character. It was evidence of a plot, surely, but not a regime plot. Instead, the Propositions must have been wickedly contrived by outside parties in order to induce the false belief in readers that such proposals were under consideration, all to discredit the regime and to raise “infinite discontentment and jealousies.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus, the Propositions confirmed the existence of a “popular plot” against the crown that, as Richard Cust has shown, haunted the nightmares of the Caroline regime.Footnote ⁹⁹ Charles advanced the same interpretation in his Declaration Showing the cause of the late Dissolution, which blamed the tumultuous end of the 1629 parliament session on a few “turbulent and ill-affected spirits” who sought to “sow and disperse their jealousies.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This perception of a “popular plot” was not confined to rhetoric. Heath’s investigation of the parliamentary agitation in March 1629 focused on whether Eliot and his allies had planned their actions in advance and particularly on whether Eliot’s resolutions had been “soe made & contrived purposely, that it might be published before the parliament should be dissolved.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the council’s view, the characteristic tactics of the popular plot were conspiracy, publicity, and misleading the multitude.

But outside the circles of the council, a radically different interpretation was current. Rumor, the Venetian agent Soranzo reported, placed the Propositions “among the papers of the Duke of Buckingham,” who had been assassinated the previous year.Footnote ¹⁰² The Suffolk pastor John Rous recorded, identically, that the “booke” containing “projects to get money without a parliament” had been “found in the duke’s study.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This narrative was heavily promoted by Cotton himself, who told Samuel Turner and probably anyone who would listen that the Propositions had been found in “the Duke of Buckingham’s pockquett.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

For those looking to locate the source of this evil counsel somewhere within the regime, Buckingham was the perfect suspect. George Villiers, the last favorite of James I, had made a clean transition to a new reign with his power not only intact but increased.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ A respectable political analysis, advanced between 1626 and 1628, identified the duke as the primum mobile of the kingdom’s ills. “He is,” Sir Edward Coke asserted, “the grievance of grievances.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Cotton himself had been a sharp critic of the duke, circulating an anti-Buckingham speech in 1625, embarrassing the duke at a Council debate in 1627, and sharing anti-Buckingham poetry with visitors to his house in 1628.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In songs, verse, and libels, Buckingham was held responsible for a web of disasters, including the murder of the previous king.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Many of these complaints depicted Buckingham as a traitor who plotted to sell the kingdom to its enemies, and part of Buckingham’s supposed plan to weaken England was to overturn English liberties. As Edward Kirton warned in 1628, Buckingham “endeavours to make us slaves; he connives at our enemies; and in my conscience has some dangerous plot upon us.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even Archbishop Abbot concluded “that the Duke had a purpose to turn upside down the Laws, and the whole Fundamental Courses, and Liberties of the Subject; and to leave us not under the Statutes and Customs which our Progenitors enjoyed, but to the pleasure of Princes.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The duke’s supposed plot was not simply general evil but instead a specifically imagined scheme to overthrow the particular order of the kingdom. Unfortunately for his enemies, Buckingham’s murder did not produce the expected revolution in government, and many of those on the outside remained on the outside. Critics continued to pin the kingdom’s ills on the duke’s former associates. In March 1629 Sir John Eliot identified Lord Treasurer Richard Weston as “the great enemy of the Commonwealth” and found him “acting and building on those grounds laid by his Master, the late Duke of Buckingham.”Footnote ¹¹¹ It seemed that Buckingham’s influence and counsel had survived his murder.Footnote ¹¹²

Like the popular conspiracy investigated by the council, the Buckingham attribution buttressed an existing framework. The Propositions seemed to prove that the duke really did have evil long-term plans for the kingdom. This evidence was all the more pressing because the tract did more than outline a dystopian vision of England whose liberties had been replaced with the “tirannies of the pettie states of Italie, the Turke and the French k[ing].”Footnote ¹¹³ The Propositions was also a guide to practical despotism, offering advice on how to make the courses more palatable, how to divide subjects and set them against one another, and how to move quickly to prevent anyone from having time to organize a “Combynacon or opposicon” against the policies.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This was the real danger: not the proposals themselves, which could be written off as the work of some “brain sicke travellor,” but the instructions for implementation.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In this, the Propositions differed from a bad precedent or exceptional measure (like a benevolence or loan) that, while technically illegal, was mainly dangerous if the exception became the norm. The tract’s proposals were much more insidious, representing a secret plot against English liberties that would be carefully concealed from the subjects. The circulation of the Propositions was therefore not part of a debate about the true nature of royal authority, law, and liberty. Instead, the Propositions essentially accused the regime of concealing its true intentions under the color of argument. Claims about “necessity” were not necessarily wrong or inappropriate; they were pretexts.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Policies such as billeting soldiers might be legitimated through reference to necessity while secretly intended for another use.

Therefore, the Propositions invited readers both to worry that the king and his advisors were entertaining its proposals and to scrutinize the regime’s recent actions for evidence of conformity with them.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Stated justifications for a policy were irrelevant, since the efficacy of the program required secrecy. Thus, we can rephrase the question of how the Propositions were understood by asking to what extent contemporaries were able to identify the regime’s recent behavior with the tract’s proposals.

There were three central aspects of the Propositions that had specific contemporary resonance. The first was a major search for new revenue streams. The decreasing yields of parliamentary grants combined with the staggering costs of war had sent everyone searching precedent books for alternative ways of raising revenue.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Many proposals were drawn up for reordering fees, and many included proposals for taxes that also appeared in the Propositions.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, though an excise raised hackles in June 1628, the measures eventually used (a benevolence, ship money, and the “forced” loan) could not be found in the Propositions.Footnote ¹²⁰

Second, and more disturbing, was a building military presence in England. Troops pressed for service abroad were stationed in English towns during the late 1620s. While scholars have noted the corrosive political effects of these soldiers, their focus on the immediate costs of billeting and the prospect of unruly behavior has obscured the fear that the soldiers would be used as an instrument of arbitrary government.Footnote ¹²¹ In fact, the council had contemplated using the troops to enforce their edicts on the earl of Dorset’s proposal, though ultimately few councillors had the stomach for it. This did not stop Carleton from threatening north Oxfordshire loan refusers with “Berkshire soldiers” who “will be well content to be removed to eate Banburie cakes.”Footnote ¹²²

Berkshire soldiers were hardly the most foreign available. Many were Irish, and rumors told of a troop of German cavalry imported from the continent as a more reliable tool for use against Englishmen (recall the Propositions’ suggestion to employ soldiers “of another nation”).Footnote ¹²³ The council’s protests that the soldiers would soon be disbanded met suspicion and disbelief.Footnote ¹²⁴ In parliament, Sir John Strangeways asked a reasonable question: if the German cavalry were intended “for any foreign service why come they hither?” Eliot’s warning about “praetorian bands” and Sir Francis Stuart’s caution against a “perpetuus dictator” both invoked the prospect of troops used to secure direct political authority.Footnote ¹²⁵

Third, and most important, many had begun to fear that the king’s advisors were leading him away from parliamentary courses and toward arbitrary government. Perhaps the king was considering rule without parliament: in 1626 the French bishop of Mende told the Venetian ambassador that Charles had “spoken to him of the means used by the kings of France to rid themselves of parliament.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The king of France particularly intended here was Louis XI, mentioned in the Propositions and widely regarded as the ruler who took the French monarchy hors de page.Footnote ¹²⁷ An incendiary forgery called a Letter from a Jesuit to the Father Rector at Brussels, which circulated in manuscript during 1628, fed these fears by outlining a secret plot “to destroye the Parliament and introduce a new species or forme of Goverment.” The “Jesuit” plan was to persuade the king “by p[ro]bable argum[en]ts” to “free himselfe of his wardshipp as Lewes the xith did” through introducing a set of impositions backed by “a mercenary armie of 2000 horse and 20000: foote.” The objective of the supposed “Jesuit” was to use these innovations to destroy the strength and independency of the Commons, making them “resemble the abject pezant in Fraunce, who are little better then slaves,” and leaving them ripe for conquest.Footnote ¹²⁸ Much parliamentary activity during the 1628 session, particularly the first Commons’ Remonstrance of 17 June, was moved as a way to address these fears.Footnote ¹²⁹ In language similar to the Letter from a Jesuit, the Remonstrance warned that “the strange and dangerous purpose of bringeing in Germane horse and Riders … gave us just cause to suspect that” sinister figures, “under some colourable pr[e]tence might secretly by this as by other waies Contrive to Change the frame of both religion and governm[en]t.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Matters only deteriorated from there. In August, Buckingham was killed by John Felton, who took as his warrant a written copy of the Commons’ Remonstrance he had borrowed from a Holborn scribe.Footnote ¹³¹ The resummons of the parliament was delayed until February. After further frustrations in the Commons, Sir John Eliot and his allies, including John Selden and Denzil Holles, staged a dramatic scene, holding the speaker in his chair by force and locking the doors of the chamber.Footnote ¹³² Inside, Eliot and the others spoke against alteration in government and religion. After the Commons voted to adjourn itself, Eliot, Holles, Selden, and a number of others were arrested and arraigned.Footnote ¹³³ Handwritten copies of Eliot’s protestation, which labeled counselors that advised the king to levy unparliamentary taxes as traitors, spread abroad rapidly.Footnote ¹³⁴

This was the proper context of the Propostions’ circulation. Even as a speculative commonwealth it served to stoke the fears enunciated in parliamentary speeches and disseminated in handwritten copies throughout the kingdom. As a warning of the direction of “new counsels,” the Propositions was less a text than a commentary, a key for decoding the supposedly real intentions behind regime actions.Footnote ¹³⁵ As Lord Keeper Coventry observed, the main danger of the Propositions lay in the fact that it was “left to the free Interpretacon of all that shall receyve it.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Readers could interpret the tract as a genuine piece of secret counsel, possibly found in “the Duke of Buckingham’s pockquett,” associated with the king’s advisors. From the regime’s perspective, the same fractious spirits who had made a political issue out of the loan, and a fiasco out of the 1628–29 parliament—a faction that had come to include the earls of Clare, Bedford, Lincoln, Warwick and Essex, Sir Robert Cotton, Sir John Eliot, John Selden, Denzil Holles, Gilbert Barrell, and many other leading subjects—were attempting to undermine the regime through the popular strategy of misleading the multitude. As Heath charged, “The Faulte bee Aggrevated, From the worthienesse of their persons, height of witt, and Judgm[en]te Because the multitude is easelye ledd by the opinyon of those of whome they have a good opinyon, Next From the unseasonablenes of the tyme, whose Iche desires often to bee scratcht. And hee did Appeale to all their L[ordsh]ipps whether or noe they did not then commonlye heare a Runninge noyse of Rumors: The unquyett daughters of discontent.”Footnote ¹³⁷

In late November, the prosecution received a blow when Sir David Foulis clarified the provenance of the Propositions and identified it with the project supplied by Sir Robert Dudley in 1614. Foulis had been Prince Henry’s cofferer and served as Dudley’s contact in the Jacobean court. After Foulis’s revelations, the defendants tried to excuse themselves by citing the Propositions’ relative antiquity. Even the text itself, they argued, including a proposal to raise money through the Prince of Wales’s marriage when Charles as yet had no heir, suggested a date of composition “in the tyme of some of his ma[jes]ty[’s] progenitors.”Footnote ¹³⁸ As the earl of Bedford’s attorney argued, had this “designe in writing … that cast ill odours uppon the stat” been circulated in the time of King James, it would have been illegal to circulate it later; but since it “wase made then” and only “published in k[ing] charls tiem,” it was “generally not punishabell.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The antiquity of the Propositions was the heart of their defense. “Wherefore,” asked Somerset, was it necessary to “conseale a proposition made in former tymes?”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ According to this reasoning, something composed at an earlier political moment could not possibly be understood to apply to the present, and no one handling the Propositions was guilty of anything but a little antiquarian curiosity.

However, in the early Stuart era, “antiquarian” had not yet acquired its secondary meaning of “trivial.” The entire premise of antiquarian work was applying the past to the present. Antiquarians collected precedents and schemes from past reigns to help solve contemporary problems.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Several of the suspects were distinguished for their work in this field. John Selden had been commissioned by the House of Lords to collect precedents for the privileges of the English nobility and in 1628 had searched the Tower of London for records regarding the liberty of the subject’s person and goods.Footnote ¹⁴² Based on his research, Sir Robert Cotton had composed more than a dozen briefs, on topics ranging from the relative precedence of England over Spain to proceedings against foreign ambassadors who had miscarried themselves to the ways in which the kings of England had supported and repaired their estates.Footnote ¹⁴³ Each had been inspired by pressing contemporary concerns. Saying the Propositions had been composed in earlier times was not at all equivalent to saying it was not under consideration in later times. Robert Dixon, for example, knew that the Propositions had been presented “to King James” in the mid-1610s but still believed it had since made its way into the duke’s hands.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As Heath remarked, even though “the deffen[dan]ts, excused it, For an ould project, not begott, noe nor borne in theis tymes. … But when the ould one Relyves and Raysed From the sylent grave, growes Freshe by propagacon, is not this dangerous, maye not this ould one begett newe Consequences of perill?”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Heath was exactly right. What was important and meaningful about the Propositions was never simply the identity and intentions of the original author but rather how it would be read. It would make little difference if the Propositions had been written by Sir Robert Dudley or by aliens from outer space—the tract’s meaning was conferred by the way its readers understood it and how they chose to use it.

Therefore, Foulis’s testimony embarrassed and frustrated the prosecution but did not end it, and Heath continued to press his charge.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ As late as April 1630, Heath was considering revising his bill to reflect Foulis’s revelations.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Though less serious than composing scandalous material, circulating it was still a crime. In 1627, when Thomas Perkins was censured by the Star Chamber for circulating an antiloan tract, bishops Laud and Neile had called his offense treasonous.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The other judges disagreed but still sentenced the poor servant to an unpayable fine of £500. And in 1634, Lord Balmerino received a death sentence for circulating a petition written by another man, though the sentence was not executed.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Nevertheless, sometime in May 1630 the council decided to suspend prosecution.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The case’s final hearing took place on a day of housecleaning for the Caroline regime; that very morning, the Star Chamber sentenced Alexander Leighton to perpetual imprisonment for writing an attack on episcopal government.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The afternoon session did not begin auspiciously for the defendants. Both Heath and Coventry reiterated the dangers posed by the defendants and refuted, point by point, the defenses they offered.Footnote ¹⁵² Finally, Coventry announced a stop to the proceedings. The queen had given birth to a son at the end of May, and Charles had supposedly been inspired “to exempte the Nobillitye, and gentrye, fullye From the Censure of the Table.” Coventry “could not but prognosticate a happye succedinge Raigne of this younge prince, when but newlye come out of his Mothers wombe, hee becomes soe prittye a Mediator betweene his Father, and the peeres.”Footnote ¹⁵³

Why did Charles really release the men from further prosecution? Not everyone who was arrested during the tumults of 1629 was freed. Selden would continue in confinement until 1631, while Eliot, who refused to apologize, would die in the Tower. Probably the higher-ranking men were simply too powerful to charge with sedition without direct evidence of a conspiracy against the crown. Bedford was an important lord lieutenant, an essential part of Caroline royal administration, while Clare’s son-in-law Thomas Wentworth was a rising star on the council, and his influence undoubtedly would have helped. The earl of Arundel, also increasingly influential after Buckingham’s death, intervened on behalf of Cotton. Arguably, the Caroline regime decided to conciliate some of the 1629 troublemakers and punish the rest.

Nevertheless, even after they were excused, the trial had consequences for the defendants. Somerset and Clare were pushed even farther away from the court, while the attitudes of Bedford, St. John, and James were probably hardened. The worst affected was Cotton. Even the most benevolent construction of events showed that his library contained dangerous material that he could not control.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Chief Justice Richardson suggested destroying the library, but Arundel proposed a commission to investigate the library’s contents.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Cotton’s collection of manuscripts, his life’s work, were sealed and inventoried, and his access was restricted. In August 1630, a gang of Westminster thugs tried to extort £200 from Cotton, reasoning that Cotton would pay to suppress allegations of sexual impropriety because Cotton “had great Enimyes” and “was in troble Alredy for his study.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Disfavor had a draining effect on him, and in 1631 he died, it is said, of a broken heart.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The council ordered all copies of the Propositions destroyed.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ This proved to be an entirely ineffective way to suppress the tract, for the text of the Propositions was embedded in Heath’s bill of information, numerous copies of which were made for the trial. These circulated almost immediately: the Gloucestershire minister Sebastian Benefield copied an abstract of the Propositions drawn from Heath’s bill into his notebook shortly before his death in August 1630.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Further copies of Heath’s bill (with the Propositions inside) proliferated throughout the 1630s. It is difficult to make inferences about the number of copies circulating in the early seventeenth century based on surviving numbers. Nevertheless, I have examined forty copies that seem to date from the 1630s, suggesting quite a large reach. At least sixteen contemporary copies of the Propositions, almost all embedded in copies of Heath’s bill of information, survive in the British Library alone.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Many others also exist in archives across the United Kingdom and the United States.Footnote ¹⁶¹ None is derived from the butchered version printed in 1642 as A Machavillian Plot, which omitted the names of the defendants, but several are obviously commercial products: BL Hargrave MS 489 contains two copies of Heath’s bill in the same elaborate scribal hand.Footnote ¹⁶² Justinian Isham annotated his copy, paying special attention to the sections on military occupation.Footnote ¹⁶³ The Buckinghamshire gentleman William Drake found reading the Propositions helpful to “enlarge understanding” and to “quicken invention.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ For Drake, it was a work that was good to think with.

Heath’s bill framed and legitimated possession of the Propositions. Even in 1629 there may have been an attempt to find a framing device: Cotton had planned a rebuttal, perhaps conceived as a way to circulate the tract without danger. Heath’s bill ironically proved to be the perfect solution, denouncing the Propositions as a seditious slander even as four-fifths of the bill was dedicated to reproducing the entire text. Further, since Heath’s bill had been composed in mid-November, before the council learned of the Dudley authorship, nothing in the bill indicated the tract’s true provenance, and nothing beyond Heath’s bald assertion contradicted reading the Propositions as a secret, embarrassing piece of counsel that had got about.

The symmetrical conspiracies described above shaped perceptions during the following decade of Charles’s personal rule. Charles’s suspicion of popular spirits made him wary of a parliament, even as his evident reluctance to recall it and his expansion of unparliamentary taxation led others to find the Propositions’ warnings frighteningly prescient.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The continued circulation of manuscript materials kept both sets of terms readily available. On the one hand, when ship money was levied in 1636 and 1637, Sir Roger Twysden decided that “if the tax were adjudged legal” it would make “the King more absolute than either France or the Great Duke of Tuscany,” a direct echo of the Propositions. After the imposition was upheld, Twysden ceased to “expect a parliament but on some necessity not now imaginable.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ On the other hand, framed by Heath’s bill the Propositions could be read not as an indictment of the regime but of those who questioned the regime’s intentions and sought to “rayse Feares and jealousies” against a king committed to law and tradition.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Thus, the bill of information and the Propositions also found their places in the document collections of Sir Marmaduke Rawdon, who supported the personal rule throughout the 1630s.Footnote ¹⁶⁸

The Propositions is an instructive case study in publicity and the contest over meaning in early Stuart politics. The varied interpretations that contemporaries applied to the Propositions demonstrate that the attribution of authorship, the form of a piece, and even beliefs about its intended audience could entirely alter how contemporaries understood a work. Political texts must be read not only in relation to other texts, but also with an eye toward form, expectation, and engagement with contemporary events and fears. This means that our ignorance about manuscript practices complicates our attempts to locate meaning in handwritten tracts. A robust approach is particularly important because works like the Propositions addressed politics much more explicitly and forcefully than most contemporary printed works. Scholars have spent countless hours working out the political allusions in plays, conduct manuals, and almanacs but have neglected a trove of explicitly political literature.

Further, many scholars have significantly underestimated the reach and power of the critique of Caroline governance worked out in the later 1620s.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The notion that the Caroline regime secretly aspired to impose absolutist tyranny was the leading criticism advanced by “ill-affected” circles in the later 1620s. These critics also developed sophisticated publicity techniques to encourage their views among wider audiences, particularly through commercial scribal publication. Beyond the Propositions, the Cotton-Eliot circle produced an entire corpus of manuscript pamphlets, and the “moderate” monarchism they articulated must not be dismissed as an unsophisticated precursor of republicanism or as an embryonic constitutional royalism. Other texts produced by this circle put problems of dissimulation and power at the heart of political analysis. In short, moderate monarchism had its dark side, heavily influenced by the literature of prudence and raison d’état. The problems addressed in these tracts, including evil counselors, the deleterious effects of arbitrary government, and the precarious position of moderate monarchies have been, at best, marginal to most scholarly treatments of early Stuart political thought. Further, handwritten tracts continued to be an essential tool for this circle into the 1630s: William Drake’s list of “Men fit to borow of Ma[nu]scripts” is headed by Oliver St. John, Gilbert Barrell, and Robert Cotton’s son Thomas.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Tracts with their roots in the 1610s and 1620s continued to circulate through the 1630s, and the semiparanoid reading of politics they encouraged was immensely important in the development of antiepiscopal and anticonciliar analysis in the later 1630s. Recovering manuscript tracts will restore an essential dimension of this group’s activities, linking their maneuvers with the growing literature on public politics and allowing them back into the narrative.Footnote ¹⁷¹

Finally, the affair of the “Devil’s Project” can be understood as part of the emergence of a public “political awareness.”Footnote ¹⁷² But the models that have explained the emergence of this “political awareness” have been too simple, viewing publicity as straightforward transmission of information, rumors, and ideas. On the contrary, as this episode suggests, publicity was complex, and worked by asserting that things were not what they seemed. For a populace steeped in suspicion and alive to the possibility of treachery and deceit, the Propositions served a hermeneutic function by providing a key by which readers could decode events.