The Central-Municipal Political Relationship In Stuart England, 1603-1688

During the period from Henrician Reformation in the 1530s up to the late Elizabethan reign of 1580s, for the purpose of solidifying governance and order in urban communities, Tudor monarchs adopted a policy of decentralization by widely incorporating towns and boroughs in the provinces. From the 1590s onwards, however, out of the desire for enforcing control over municipal corporations, Elizabethan central government began to adjust its governing policy from decentralization to centralization, which made the conflicting aspect of central-municipal relationship increasingly stand out under the Stuarts in the seventeenth century. From the perspective of central government, the Stuart central-municipal relationship could be addressed in both structural and nonstructural or personal angles. Whereas the structural relationship revolved around incorporation charters, the personal relationship was concentrated upon the choices of allegiance and loyalty on the part of municipal officials.From the point of view of provincial cities, towns and boroughs, local factors had their own particular and direct bearing on central-municipal relationship, which is explained selectively in this thesis in terms of urban localism and local initiative. This process of investigation is devoted to indicating that the evolution of the Stuart central-municipal relationship resulted from the reciprocity of both central and municipal factors.Notwithstanding the fact that an embittered central-municipal relationship under the Stuarts was becoming relatively extrusive arising from the tightening of central control over municipal corporations, yet this didn't amount to a fundamentally antithetical relationship between the two. There still existed another positive fact that was political negotiation and interdependence between central government and municipal corporations, on which this thesis enlarges in three selective aspects, i.e. the practical need in common of guarding against popular politics, the national consciousness of the local elites and their resultant identification with central government, and finally the political negotiation by local aristocrats between the municipal corporations and the central government.Based upon the above discussions, it is ultimately held that, so far as the seventeenth-century English central government was concerned, the key to a stable and effective local governance consisted not so much in the absolute control over municipal corporations, as in the maintaining of a moderately balanced power relationship with the municipal corporations and an effective combination of both the central and local factors, which, on account of the limitedness of central governing resources in Stuart England, predicates an active political participation of central-municipal relationship on the part of local urban elites. This is also the right key point of the increasing integration of central and local governments in the developing nation-state of early modern England.