Reformation of the Constitution Law, Culture and Conflict in Jacobean England
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Biographical note
Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, UK.The work is immensely readable. The focus on one event, using it as a lens for wider analysis, is effective, and Ward’s regular attempts to tie the events of 1616 into modern events – references to Brexit, Partygate and the travails of the 2019 to 2024 Conservative government abound – work well.
The Law Society Gazette
This book revisits one of the defining judicial engagements in English legal history.
It provides a fresh account of the years 1606 to 1616 which witnessed a series of increasingly volatile confrontations between, on the one side, King James I and his Attorney-General, Sir Francis Bacon, and on the other, Sir Edward Coke, successively Chief Justice of Common Pleas and Lord Chief Justice.
At the heart of the dispute were differing opinions regarding the nature of kingship and the reach of prerogative in reformation England. Appreciating the longer context, in the summer of 1616 King James appealed for a reformation of law and constitution to complement the reformation of his Church.
Later historians would discern in these debates the seeding of a century of revolution, followed by another four centuries of reform. This book ventures the further thought that the arguments which echoed around Westminster Hall in the first years of the seventeenth century have lost little of their resonance half a millennium on. Breaks with Rome are little easier to ‘get done’, the margins of executive governance little easier to draw.
Introduction: Irony and Rhyme
1. Reformation
2. The Aspirations of James Stuart
3. The Casebook of Sir Edward Coke
4. The Lives of Francis Bacon
5. Apotheoses
Epilogue