Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War

D. Alan Orr

jun 2002 · Cambridge University Press

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This study traces the transition of treason from a personal crime against the monarch to a modern crime against the impersonal state. It consists of four highly detailed case studies of major state treason trials in England beginning with that of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, in the spring of 1641 and ending with that of Charles Stuart, King of England, in January 1649. The book examines how these trials constituted practical contexts in which ideas of statehood and public authority legitimated courses of political action that might ordinarily be considered unlawful - or at least not within the compass of the foundational statute of Edward III. The ensuing narrative reveals how the events of the 1640s in England challenged existing conceptions of treason as a personal crime against the king, his family and his servants, and pushed the ascendant parliamentarian faction towards embracing an impersonal conception of the state that perceived public authority as completely independent of any individual or group.

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D. Alan Orr was educated at Queen's University at Kingston, the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge where he received his PhD in 1997. He has subsequently taught at Carleton University in Ottawa and Queen's University at Kingston. His work has appeared in The Journal of British Studies and he is a contributor to the New Dictionary of National Biography. His current research interests lie in the area of Anglo-Irish relations in the first half of the seventeenth century and the problems associated with the extension and enforcement of English legal customs over the whole of Ireland.