Tudor and Stuart History - Joint Session

For the Queen and for himself“. Authority, participation and policing in Elizabethan and Jacobean England 
This paper seeks to examine the legal practice of common informing in terms of its political implications for the rule of Elizabeth I and James VI and I. Common informing allowed individuals who were not themselves affected by an offence to sue in the name of the Crown and on their own behalf, thereby claiming part of the forfeiture. Despite the risks of abuse and contemporary criticism, informing remained a means of law enforcement as well as of creating and upholding the Crown’s authority during the 16th and early 17th century. Research on political participation has often marginalised or omitted informers as they were not officeholders. I would like to argue, however, that informers were an integral part of rulership. My research thus aims to re-examine the relationship between authority and participation and to contribute to a deeper understanding of late Tudor/early Stuart politics. 


Negotiating loyalty in Revolutionary England, 1649-1660
The execution of Charles I and the establishment of the Republic in 1649 reconfigured the parameters of loyalty and throughout the 1650s it continued to be contested, negotiated and redefined. Accordingly, this paper scrutinises how people collaborated and demonstrated loyalty to the state through popular political processes. By conceiving of loyalty as a two-way process of negotiation between the state and its citizens, rather than something which is enforced on an unwilling populace, there is scope to reassess our understanding of how individuals sought to engage with the state, and to interrogate how this was also utilised by the Republics to broaden their support. 


Christine Gerwin is a PhD student at the Technical University Dresden, Germany and Waseem Ahmed is a PhD student at University College, London