Ian Atherton. Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, 1st Viscount Scudamore, 1620-4. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. 300 pp. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-5091-6.

Reviewed by Caroline Hibbard (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Published on H-Albion (May, 2001)

Ian Atherton. Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, 1st Viscount Scudamore, 1620-4. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. 300 pp. Index. $79.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7190-5091-X.

Biographies have not been a format much used of late for organizing scholarly exchange; and Scudamore, an ambassador but not otherwise a courtier, is scarcely a household word even among early Stuart historians. So it is a little surprising, but gratifying, to report that this book is quite successful in casting light on important interpretive issues. Scudamore was a royalist and a Laudian, but also essentially a country gentleman. Atherton is correct that this "type" has been depicted as rare and, thus, not much studied. A good deal more attention has gone to the activist godly types, such as Sir Robert Harley in Scudamore's own county of Hereford. Although it is organized in a roughly chronological fashion, treating successive stages of Scudamore's life and the issues associated with them, the book is not a straightforward biography. The departure from a chronological scheme leads to some confusion over the later stages of Scudamore's life, key elements of which have to be retrieved from preceding chapters.

Atherton identifies his central aims as threefold: to provide "a case study of how an ambitious gentleman sought to forge a political career on a variety of levels"; to look at religion, divisions at court, and foreign policy in the 1620s and 1630s, and to contribute to ongoing debates in those areas; and to seek to explain a zealous supporter of royal policy and government, a lay Laudian, and a supporter of the Duke of Buckingham (p. 18). Atherton himself is clearly on the other side of the political fence from Scudamore, a point that emerges almost off-handedly at an early stage where he refers to "the clear immoderation and unconstitutionality of both King Charles and Archbishop Laud" (p. 19). One must all the more admire the massive and meticulous research in both central and local sources that the author has devoted to his subject, and the care with which he attempts to explain his character and views.

Atherton takes as a sort of unifying theme the idea that there were "varieties of honour" and corresponding varieties of self-fashioning. Although the opening chapter on the "rhetorics of honour and advancement" is a wonderfully nuanced examination of 17th century ideas about honour and ambition, I am not sure that the idea of multiple self-fashionings does much to advance our understanding of Scudamore's character or career. I am much more persuaded by his discussion of how self-assertiveness and even aggression were intrinsic to the aristocratic honour code--something he might have more firmly connected with his discussion of ambassadorial behavior in a later chapter. The gentry code of service to crown and commonwealth is a theme that is often and rightly invoked.

The second chapter describes the descent of the Scudamores of Holme Lacy, and the regional context of the Welsh marches, where in the 16th century the Scudamores profited from court office and monastic spoils to build estates and local power in Herefordshire and neighboring counties. The Scudamores emerged by the 1620s as the richest family in a county with no resident peers, who were powerful at court though no longer resident there after the accession of James I. When the future viscount's father died in 1619, a few years after his own marriage to a marcher heiress, his grandfather set about to establish him in the local offices due to the family--captain of the county horse, JP, custos rotulorum, deputy lieutenant, MP for the county--an inheritance the viscount would prove unable to pass on to his heir in the Restoration. The viscount's martial activities, or "military self-image"--a theme of this chapter--were mainly in the lieutenancy, unlike his two younger brothers who were career soldiers. The single speech to the Herefordshire gentry at musters might seem a slender basis on which to build a putative world-view for Scudamore, but Atherton skillfully deploys it to reveal his subject's very rigid and hierarchical social vision.

The family seat at Holme Lacy was host to learned and well-travelled visitors, and the chapter on the viscount's intellectual and religious world helps recover a relatively neglected section of the intellectual/political/religious world of the 1630s. Aristocratic figures of this period who were genuinely learned no longer look like anomalies to us, in large part because of Linda Peck's study of Northampton and work on other noblemen. An avid reader of divinity, Scudamore was also "on the borders" (p. 52) of several scientific and philosophical circles: those of Mersenne, Hartlib and Grotius. He was an early and highly successful agricultural innovator, developing a strong cider that became both a luxury item and a "large-scale enterprise" (p. 55), and working to advance other fruit and berry production in Herefordshire. Atherton suggests that there was a spiritual side to this practical husbandry, "God and Christ the gardeners" (p. 57) serving as exemplars for Christians on earth. Moreover, Scudamore shared with George Herbert and Henry Vaughan a sense of the physical world (and the English landscape in particular) as manifestations of God. Atherton further connects this, persuasively to my mind, with the sacramental character of Scudamore's piety.

The picture of Scudamore as a practicing Laudian is pursued convincingly and at length, in a chapter that is worth careful attention. Scudamore's piety was "built around two main pillars: the special or sacred nature of the church and all things dedicated to it, including the clergy; and the importance of the sacraments, especially the eucharist, in his devotions" (p. 59). Reparation of churches such as Abbey Dore was the reparation of sacrilege, and the church he rebuilt there was altar-centered, carefully graduated, with a series of hallowed spaces, and the clergy separated from the laity. Concern that it was sacrilege to hold former monastic lands was not unique to Scudamore. Yet at considerable cost to himself he made elaborate amends through the restoration of tithes to clergy and churches. He believed in "hallowed times" such as Lent, and from the 1620s through the 1650s he supported numerous local clergy and those sequestered by the parliamentary or Interregnum regimes. He "shared none of the puritan concern for a preaching ministry" (p. 69) and supported pluralist, non-resident ministers. He aimed at monthly communion, made elaborate preparations for it, and practiced auricular confession; he performed acts of charity in connection with the Eucharist, made frequent gifts of altar plate and eucharistic implements. All these features of his piety were on display in his ambassadorial chapel in Paris in the 1630s, which scandalized both visiting English Protestants and French Huguenots.

Although rhetorically moderate, he was not a waverer towards Rome; rather he was a "prayerbook" member of the Church of England. In addition to the influence of Laud, Atherton traces that of Lancelot Andrewes, adding to the voices of Peter Lake, Peter McCullough and Anthony Milton in placing a renewed emphasis on Andrewes's influence in the early 17th century period. Scudamore's "religious self-presentation" underlay Charles I's good opinion of him and this would help bring him preferment despite his dubious successes as a local governor; in Hereford his religious style was comfortably supported by the conservative environment which his puritan neighbor Sir Robert Harley so often lamented.

The chapter on Scudamore as a local governor seemed less successful to me, in part because it uneasily yokes the 1620s and the 1660s, in part because his role here is reactive rather than creative, and in part because the picture drawn is of a local magnate whose promises to the crown turn out to be largely unfulfilled. As Atherton concludes, if Scudamore was successful in his local governor role, it was because he was able to mediate between local parties, and also able to moderate (if not frustrate) the demands of the crown on the locality. The account tends to dissolve into a discussion of country government which is necessarily incomplete (quarter session and assize records for the 1620s and 1630s have been lost), but in the context somewhat digressive. As JP and custos rotulorum for Herefordshire from 1622 to 1628, as subsidy commissioner in the mid-1620s, as a forced loan commissioner in 1626-27, and as the major figure in county government up to 1642, Scudamore is seen alternately trying to browbeat and inspire the county gentry to respond to the government's demands and initiatives. The long account of the collection for rebuilding St. Paul's is probably the best we have for any county, but it reveals that Scudamore, who might have been expected to wax eloquent on this particular subject given his enthusiasm for restoring churches, was relatively mute. Local suspicions of crown intentions, cited by Atherton (and many historians) as an important drag on this as well as other local collections, indicate a mistrust of the king not shared by Scudamore. Subsequent chapters reinforce an impression of naivete, not to say even stupidity, on Scudamore's part.

In his chapter on "the search for preferment" Atherton does an excellent job of showing how Scudamore (and local politicians like him) cultivated patrons at court so as to protect their county position. In the process, he explains Scudamore's "virtually insatiable appetite for news in the 1620s and 1630s" (p. 153), which bequeathed such a treasure trove of newsletters to later historians. It is not clear when or why Scudamore decided that he should aim at more than a county role--a misguided decision as it turned out, although Atherton treats it as almost inevitable. Buckingham's intervention in Hereford county politics, upsetting the Scudamore family's traditional position in favor of the Pye and Harley families, was probably crucial. When Scudamore failed to be returned as Knight of the Shire in 1625 and again in 1626, he sought Buckingham's patronage and in the 1628 parliament he was "a vigorous but ineffectual supporter of Charles and Buckingham" (p. 145).

The reward for his parliamentary support of Buckingham came with an Irish peerage in July 1628, although this was a dubious honor that gave him no influence in Ireland and, at the same time, some diminution of role in England. Preferment outside the county still escaped him. As a "politician" (p. 155 for Atherton's use of the term) aiming for higher office, he seems ill qualified and singularly inept. After returning from France in 1639 he would change his ways and became a London resident, but by then he had thoroughly demonstrated his incapacity for court life and gained the distinction of being one of very few returned ambassadors who never received further promotion. At the Restoration he tried to play the role for his son James that his grandfather had performed for him in the 1620s, settling him in the line of county governors that his family status merited; but the young man was a dissipated bankrupt whose death in 1668 probably saved the family from further disgrace and total political eclipse.

It's always refreshing to find a biographer prepared bluntly to announce that his subject was "not up to the task" (p. 171), and Scudamore's career as ambassador to France, beginning in January 1635, amply bears out that verdict. He apparently owed the position to Laud, but found the uncourtierlike prelate could offer him little useful guidance in a position for which he was so ill-suited. He was a pawn in Charles's double-edged foreign policy, meant to stall France during serious negotiations with Spain. When in April 1636 the king decided to pursue a French alliance in earnest, he sent as extraordinary ambassador to France the Earl of Leicester, an adept ambassador who could and would speak French. Thus began an unhappy three-year standoff between the two rivals, much to Scudamore's disadvantage. Woven into this sorry tale, however, are very interesting discussions by Atherton about the sizeable literature on the role of ambassadors that was produced in the early 17th century, and about the way in which diplomacy was both intensely personal and yet obsessed with procedure.

Weaker aspects of the argument are his insistence that all Scudamore's actions and problems with the French were based on his instructions. Charles may not have been willing publicly to "fynd falt" with his ambassador over his calculated snubs to the French Huguenots; but this is not, pace Atherton, an "unequivocal" endorsement (p. 180). And the author doesn't take into account the inevitable ambiguities of a "pro-French" position after 1630, when half the French royal family was at odds with the other half; Henrietta Maria's position cannot be understood outside that context, and France cannot necessarily be equated with Richelieu. Finally, Laud was in no sense "Hispanophile" (p. 209), except as that word was used to denote those who vehemently opposed calling a Parliament. The picture we get of Scudamore as ambassador (although the author tries to soften it), is one of an inflexible, unworldly country bumpkin; unaware of the most important court quarrels in London that affected whom he could or should trust; and unwilling to cultivate either the French court or England's natural allies among the Huguenots. Scudamore was someone who had, as Atherton admits, "built his house on sand" (p. 199).

The years after Scudamore's return to England saw the outbreak of the civil war in which the viscount played a very ambiguous role as a royalist leader. His personal papers for 1639-43 were lost in a parliamentary raid, so much has to be inferred from his actions and subsequent explanations. Atherton does not comment on his absence from the Short or the Long Parliaments. Scudamore first publicly appears in the politics of this period as a promoter of the pro-episcopacy petition in his county in January 1642; but he then disappears as the royalist party emerges in Herefordshire, not being one of the "nine worthies" who printed declarations against the parliament in the months before the outbreak of war, nor active in the commission of array. But he successfully promoted his son James into the vacated seat for Hereford city in July, albeit at the expense of one of the "worthy" candidates. This prefigured divisions among the county royalists which severely damaged the king's cause. Atherton argues that Scudamore's delay in moving to the fore was not due to "moderation," as others have suggested; and he suggests (although he does not quite say) that it was due to his rivalry with the other county royalists. From December 1642 when the royalists retook Hereford until April 1643 when Waller briefly retook it, there was "a bitter and ultimately crippling struggle between Fitzwilliam Coningsby and Viscount Scudamore for leadership in Hereford" (p. 234). These quarrels, in which Scudamore seemed to have used his contacts at the court in Oxford with some success, contributed to royalist losses in the southern marches of Wales; he himself surrendered to Waller and was sent to London where he remained in house arrest until 1647. It had been a brief inglorious career as a royalist.

The viscount himself suffered heavy losses in the 1640s, but he was able to donate alms to distressed divines in the 1650s (and 1660s) which contributed to an image of probity and loyalty. At the death of his wastrel son James in 1668 the grandson "Jack" became the heir, but his power and position as second viscount were to be considerably less than those that the first viscount had inherited in the 1620s. Scudamore died in London in 1671; during his lifetime and subsequently his reputation was nurtured by clergymen, who remembered with gratitude his munificence to the church. The author's concluding remarks about the importance of local clergy, "the most prolific of publishers" (p. 264), in fashioning lasting images of 17th century figures, are among the many insights born of deep immersion in the county scene which fill this excellent study.

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Citation: Caroline Hibbard. Review of Atherton, Ian, Ambition and Failure in Stuart England: The Career of John, 1st Viscount Scudamore, 1620-4. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. May, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5132

Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.