Hampton Court Palace
A scholarly project is never finished, even when the student has received the approval of the examining committee and several copies of the work itself have been beautifully bound and sit on a shelf. In 2006 my doctoral dissertation, The King's Own Conference: A Reassessment of Hampton Court 1604, was approved and bound. It is the fruit of several years of research into King James I's first year as Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even then, I saw avenues of further study stretching into the future: chief among them was the so-called Second Hampton Court Conference of 1606, an event which is usually treated as part of a larger story but would be well-served by a narrative history. I have also seen more clearly since then that some parts of the dissertation can be reworked both to be of interest in themselves and to fit more clearly into the main argument.
The first chapter of the thesis has been reworked and published in the March 2008 issue of the journal Anglican and Episcopal History, under the title "Hampton Court Again: the Millenary Petition and the Calling of the Conference." It was very important that that particular piece of the argument appear having been refereed and editied professionally. It calls into question the accepted historiography of the conference, the belief that James I promised to hold a conference as a response to a particular petition. This, I hold, reopens the question of why James called the conference, and whether he meant it to be a debate between two sides.
In the posts on this blog I intend to make available parts of my thesis that might be of general interest, and to do so in a form that is more accessible (by which I mean interesting) than is usual in a dissertation. I begin, however, with the Abstract.
2 comments:
What a helpful and important insight! So the government wasn't just trying to contain criticism; it was actually trying to strengthen the Church. That really does begin to change our view of early Stuart Anglicanism.
Thanks, Alan. I don't think there can be any doubt that the king wanted to strengthen the church - or that he was sure he was the one responsible for doing it. Containing criticism was probably, in his view, part of that strengthening.
A new quetion just came to mind. Is the fact that James did not give the puritans much at the conference proof that he wasn't listening, or didn't want to listen to them? To pose a somewhat flippant comparison, when someone (often a teenager) angrily says, "You're not listening!" or "You don't understand!" they may well have been heard and understood, but not convincing.
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