“Royal Fever” and “The Giddy Commons”: Cary’s History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II and the Buckingham Phenomenon

Abstract

This chapter seeks to recover the political engagements implicit in Elizabeth Cary’s History of the Life, Reign, and Death of Edward II (written ca. 1626–1627; printed 1680). Cary’s History not only appropriates a genre of writing—Tacitean or political history, assumed to be a masculine preserve until much later—but it takes up a political fable, the story of King Edward II (1284–1327), that had already become deeply entangled with Jacobean and Caroline political controversy and that had obvious parallels with recent events in the public, political sphere.¹ The History’s engagement with contemporary current events has to do, of course, with the furor surrounding George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, whose career as court favorite to both James I and Charles I had made him the focal point of intense and sometimes violent political animosities by 1626. More precisely, Cary’s History explores what I am here calling the Buckingham phenomenon: the meaning of the duke’s career within the larger context of the controversy it occasioned. In response to the violent animosities and increasingly polarized political discourse of early Caroline England, Cary recasts the story of Edward II and his favorites in such a way as to anatomize the consequences of immoderate favoritism, showing how the intemperance of King Edward’s affections leads to a scenario in which only unbalanced and immoderate responses are possible.