Conventional typologies of lordship and its relationship with royal power in the territories of the English crown emphasize the precocious distinctiveness of royal power as against noble lordship, with the latter consequentially bound by an essentially restrictive territorialized model. With the decline of pan-British activity after the difficult years of 1296 to 1333, the focus of most English historians of lordship is on a primarily English territorialized lordship that, because of a fragmentation of holdings, might be powerful but has never constituted an overwhelming nexus. Writing in the shadow of K. B. McFarlane,Footnote ¹ they have concentrated on processes of exclusion, definition, and stratification in the nobility in the late Middle Ages. The vista of English royal authority, formal and informal, is also constantly spread before us as a clearly distinctive alternative to noble lordship. Consequently, the emphasis has been on overlapping patterns of interest, the importance of noble patronage and household, and the significance of interactions with that ever-growing English royal authority.Footnote ² R. R. Davies, in his last, unfinished book on lords and lordship in the long fourteenth century, however, reminded us that lordship was potentially more complex and extensive than that. His prime points of reference were marcher lords: their lordship, and that of some in Ireland, “approximated (or could do so) more closely to royal lordship than we sometimes care to acknowledge.”Footnote ³ This article is intended to explore the continuum that Davies proposed. In place of the neat, clean hierarchy subordinated to a growing royal authority, the potential complexity of manifestations of sovereignty in these territories is considered. In particular, the use of royal titles by people other than the English king is assessed, as are associated ceremonial and issues such as forms of dating. Some practical manifestations of “sovereign” power in judicial and fiscal rights and relations between princes and in the capacity to exclude the intervention of others are also considered. In doing so, I am responding to prompts from the recent historiography of the jurisdictional complexity of England and other early modern states.Footnote ⁴ Borrowing a term applied elsewhere for political systems in which sovereignty is not held by one individual in absolute form but shared in a more diffuse manner,Footnote ⁵ I argue for the continuing reality of sub-kingship, whether with royal title or a lordly one associated with the most extensive powers, in the British Isles through the late medieval and early modern period.

The clearest evidence for such a sub-kingship is found in the case of the kingship, or lordship, of the Isle of Man, in material relevant to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That evidence illustrates the royal status and power of the island's lord in the eyes of audiences locally and further afield. About thirty-two miles long, and at its widest fourteen miles across, the island covers just over 220 square miles. It lies in the Irish Sea between Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England, where it is about thirty-five miles from the coast at St. Bees, in the historic county of Cumberland, about the same distance from the coast of Ulster near Downpatrick, less than fifty miles from the nearest point in Wales, the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Môn), and only sixteen miles from Burrow Head on the Machar Peninsula in southwest Scotland. The Isle of Man was Viking, then Scottish territory, and was the subject of English interest for some decades before it was taken by Edward III during the 1340s. Edward granted the island to William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury; in 1392–93, his son sold the island to William le Scrope, Earl of Wiltshire. The revolution of 1399 resulted in the island's being granted to the Earl of Northumberland, whose subsequent treason led to grants in 1405–6 to Sir John Stanley (d. 1414) the first of a succession of members of the Stanley family.Footnote ⁶

The ability of these rulers to appoint to the bishopric of Man was at several points clearly associated with sovereign rights. In 1399, Henry Percy received the island with all appurtenances, “simul cum Patronatu Episcopatus dictae Insulae de Man”; again in 1406, the same formula was used for Sir John Stanley.Footnote ⁷ The lord levied customs; he was also entitled to all “Choice Wine.” He received treasure trove, deodands, waifs and strays; the goods of excommunicates and of aliens who had died without swearing allegiance, and of strangers who were found guilty of manslaughter; and purveyance and preemption; he also had exclusive rights of hunting in forests and warrens. He issued ordinances in consultation with his council and the deemsters (judges) and keys (jurymen and lawgivers) in a manner that came to take the form of a legislative process in the sitting of Tynwald. He had a full range of courts, with a complete set of jurisdictions and sanctions, the Court of General Gaol Delivery being the superior court of criminal justice, and the Chancery Court the superior civil court, and he had powers to impose, mitigate, and pardon a death penalty. His admiralty is especially worthy of note, marked by the lord's rights to royal fish and to the profits of wreck. All were signs of royal power.Footnote ⁸

The English courts could not touch the island, and this applied even to those which expressed the power of the crown to respond to the petition of the subject, in spite of jurisdictional boundaries, initially King's Bench, later the medieval Chancery, and even, ultimately, Parliament in its function as a high court. The English crown's response to petitioners might have been influential in shaping the development of some jurisdictions elsewhere, but the Isle of Man was not one of them.Footnote ⁹

A distinctive position in foreign relations on the part of the lord was recognized by the English crown. Sometime in the period 1389–1393, provision for redress in relation to truces with France, Scotland, and elsewhere acknowledged the responsibility of the Earl of Salisbury for the lordship of Man.Footnote ¹⁰ The lordship was treated distinctly in orders for proclamation of a truce in 1414 and 1416, and in the truce of Tours (1444) and its successors under Henry VI, Thomas Stanley as lord of Man was relatively unusual, with only the royal dukes of York and Norfolk, in being consistently identified as confederate of the king of England.Footnote ¹¹

It was not just the powers of the lord that mattered, however: it was how he or she was described and his or her title. Late medieval English chroniclers record the use of the royal title and associated paraphernalia in connection with the Isle of Man. The usually reliable Geoffrey le Baker records that William de Montacute, First Earl of Salisbury, was crowned king of Man in the early 1340s.Footnote ¹² Then, half a century later and prompted by recent and contemporary transactions in relation to the kingship, as it was sold by the second William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, to William le Scrope, and then passed through the hands of the Percies before being granted to the Stanley family, Thomas of Walsingham gave some prominence to the Manx kingship and to Man as a kingdom. Walsingham was one of the St. Albans chroniclers who made that tradition the nearest thing to an official historiography that England possessed, stating the case clearly: “rex uocatur, cui eciam fas est corona aurea coronari.”Footnote ¹³ His successors such as John Capgrave continued this tradition.Footnote ¹⁴ Other informed English observers also relied on the concept of kingship: William Worcester in the late fifteenth century stated that the castle of “Fotrey” (meaning Fouldry Castle on Piel Island) belonged to the king of Man: pertinent Regi de Man.Footnote ¹⁵ It was even possible for the English king's representatives to refer directly to a king of Man, as at the Council of Constance when they were cataloguing the kings who were subject to the English king.Footnote ¹⁶

On the island itself, the late medieval administration of its rulers used the language of kingship freely. On Sir John Stanley's first visit to the island as its ruler, he was described as being in “Royal array, as a King ought to do by the Prerogatives and Royalties of the Land of Man.” He sat on Tynwald Hill on a chair covered with red “Royall Cloath and Cushions,” with a sword borne upright before him.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1422, the court of Sir John Stanley (d. 1437) saw a proclamation of his title: “by the Grace of God, King of Mann and Th'isles”; later in the decade, action was taken against a “Traytor to the King of Mann by the Laws of Mann.”Footnote ¹⁸

The title of king was commonly used by his officers in the more routine business of the island's courts. The earliest surviving extensive records open with a description of the officers present in court on 28 November 1496, which describes deemster John More as justice domini Regis. At the end of the sequence of courts begun on 8 May 1497, in the Gaol Delivery held at Castle Rushen on 22 May, an even more explicit formula appears: justices domini Regis Mannie.Footnote ¹⁹

Even when the title used for the island's ruler is lord, there are often signs that this is a royal lordship. Papal letters of 1392 for William le Scrope regarding the building of a castle on Patricksholm (Peel), and for alms for the cathedral of the diocese, describe him as lord, but also as lord of the kingdom of Man and the Isles.Footnote ²⁰ Methods of dating, placing ourselves in time, are also potent signs of royal power, and the 1417–18 court in the island was dated by anno Domini and “Regalitat’ Dni Mann quarto.”Footnote ²¹ Even if the regnal year of the king of Man was not used, the Stanley lords might pointedly omit the regnal year of the English king and use anno Domini alone instead, as was still the practice early in the sixteenth century and even in documents issued in England. This was tantamount, in any case, to asserting that they had royal authority under God in the island.Footnote ²² The Stanleys referred to the people of Man as their subjects.Footnote ²³

Manx language sources are few and far between, limiting our ability to assess whether monoglot Manx speakers saw their rulers as kings. The “Traditionary Ballad,” however, probably written between 1485 and the death of the First Earl of Derby in 1504, implies that the title Ree was then the accustomed manner of address to the lord. This clearly meant “king” in as full a form as the title of the monarch of England, for whom the word was also used. Orry (meaning Godred Crovan, d. 1095) was the “first . . . to be king in the iland” (“Ree er yn Ellan”)—a passage suggesting a very self-conscious awareness of the difference the title made to the standing of the island's ruler. The ballad emphasizes the legitimacy of the transition from the Viking dynasties to the lordship of William de Montacute: William himself, the ballad affirms, “was king of Man.” The Stanleys’ arrival is greeted by the loyalist sentiment “one king after another preserving us from danger.”Footnote ²⁴ Whether in England or in Man itself, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the idea of a king of Man, or at the least a lord associated with kingly powers, was widespread and widely accepted.

How isolated an example is that of the Isle of Man? There were in practice many parallels elsewhere in the North Atlantic archipelago that represented a form of sovereignty under the overall control of the English crown, in which extensive powers of lordship were associated with use of the title of lord that had more than the usual resonance to it—or even a title of king. The most extreme example, but one that should be taken a little more seriously in light of the Manx evidence, lies in the Isle of Wight. It may originally have been home to an Anglo-Saxon royal dynasty, but there is nothing clearly royal about the title to the island in the years immediately after the Norman Conquest. On the other hand, the title of lord was associated with Wight before it was appropriated by Edward I, notably by its last and most powerful de Revières lord, Isabella de Fortibus, through to the 1290s, and there was a growing tradition that the island was held as freely as the king held England.Footnote ²⁵ In 1382 William de Montacute, Second Earl of Salisbury and Lord of Man, was made keeper of the island for a year, extended in 1385 to a grant of the lordship and keeping for life, with unusually extensive rights.Footnote ²⁶ By February 1382/3, he was using the title “Seignior de Man & de l'Isle de Wight,”Footnote ²⁷ a juxtaposition implying some equivalence. By the 1440s, further steps toward formal sub-kingship may have been taken: the Tewkesbury chronicle, the Clare/Despenser family annals, describe that Henry Beauchamp was crowned king of the Isle of Wight by Henry VI in 1444: “coronatus est in Regem de Wyth Manu Regia.” A little later, the death of Henry is recorded: “obiit autem dominus Henricus . . . Rex de insulis le wythe.”Footnote ²⁸ In this light, it is perhaps understandable that Richard, Duke of York, felt so sharply the loss of the island, to which his aunt Philippa, widow of Edward of Langley, Duke of York, had on her death in 1431 still proudly laid claim as “dame de l'ysle de Wyght,” when it was resumed and given to Edmund, Duke of Somerset, in 1452, confirmed to his widow, Eleanor, in 1456, and granted to the new duke, Henry, in 1457.Footnote ²⁹

Henry Beauchamp takes us to another possible instance of fifteenth-century sub-kingship, in the Channel Islands. The Tewkesbury Chronicle, in marking his death, refers to him as king of Wight, as shown above, but goes further, describing him as “rex de insulis le wythe et Gardsay, et Jardsey.”Footnote ³⁰ For Jersey and Guernsey, this is an admittedly isolated instance, but the bailiwicks do show the continuing potential for the power of lordship, in a context in which judicial and other administration became almost entirely autonomous after the mid-fourteenth century.Footnote ³¹ After the grant of the lordship of the isles to the Duke of Bedford in 1415, there is, for example, in 1417 a contrat issued in Jersey describing Thomas Daniel as bailiff under the “tresnoble & puissant prince monss’ le duc de Bedefford Comite de Rychemund & de Kendall Conetable dengleterre & ss'r des yslles.” A similar formula was used for Bedford's successor in the lordship, his brother Gloucester, after his grant in 1437.Footnote ³² The sense of the independence of the lordship is accentuated by the manner in which, during times of uncertainty in the mid- to late 1450s, reference to all external authority was dropped, with the Jersey bailiff John Poingdestre referred to simply as “ballif en lisle de gersei.”Footnote ³³

Another parallel, in the Irish Sea, was provided by Lundy—and again a connection through the Montacutes appears. William acquired Lundy in 1332, just a year before Man.Footnote ³⁴ Here the title that the island carried at that time is not clear, although it already had significantly extensive rights and a distinctive position associated with it, for example, permitting its separate treatment in the Anglo-Scottish treaties of 1464, 1484, 1488, 1491, 1492, 1493, and 1497.Footnote ³⁵ A century later, the pirate Thomas Salkeld chose in 1610 to call himself king of Lundy, and as late as the English Civil War, a royalist captain writing to Lord Saye and Sele described him as “petty Prince” of the “preety Island.”Footnote ³⁶ These instances point to the significance of islands, however small, in being able to sustain royal titles. English political culture and the political culture of the islands themselves recognized a completeness to the political community of an island.

Also significant is the continuing existence of the title of the Lordship of the Isles—the Hebridean portion of the old Kingdom of Man and Isles. It was this title the Macdonalds continued to bear until 1493, when they were dispossessed by James IV.Footnote ³⁷ It is, however, striking that the Stanleys frequently referred to themselves not simply as king or indeed lord of Man but as king or lord of Man and the Isles: they did so in the documentation of legal proceedings of 1422, for example. On 27 May 1574, the royal license for Henry, Earl of Derby, to enter his lands referred to Edward, his deceased father, as Lord of Man and the Isles.Footnote ³⁸ As Alexander Grant has noted of the Scottish lordship of the isles, dominus is a “notoriously difficult word to translate.” He points out that before 1476 it was uniformly used as a translation for the Gaelic Rí, which can mean king. As seen above, the Manx equivalent Ree seems to have stood for king in the context of late fifteenth-century Man.

There were also the marcher lordships, as Rees Davies pointed out—William de Montacute had obtained Denbigh in 1331, just a couple of years before the grant of the Isle of Man, and so some of the possible parallels must have seemed obvious to him.Footnote ³⁹ These marcher lords possessed regalities by right of conquest from the native Welsh princes, not grant from the crown. The parallel, particularly with Man before 1399, was very strong. Of course, the Welsh marcher lordships were abolished under Henry VIII, but not until 1536, and even then they retained some quasi-royal rights, including that of taxation.Footnote ⁴⁰ While the status of other extremely powerful lordships differed, having been granted by the English crown and to a greater or lesser extent shaped in their creation by it (rather than conquered by the lords themselves, as in the case of the Welsh lordships), they should nonetheless be taken into account in this survey, as they provide other points along the spectrum of lordship alluded to by Davies. The bishop of Durham possessed very extensive rights over his palatinate, with a mint operating from the twelfth century and justices of assize and of the peace appointed under his own seal, as well as his own sheriff, coroners, and other officers, for example; the palatine county of Lancaster was created for Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster, in 1351, with a nearly equivalent set of rights and privileges that made the duke's position “entirely exceptional” and with “as much resemblance to the contemporary French seigneurie as to any other English lordship.”Footnote ⁴¹

Paradoxically, there are also the examples of allegations of ambition for kingship, or of potential royal generosity, that did not in practice bear fruit. These instances should be read in the light of the evidence already offered and treated as potentially more serious than has often been the case. But in themselves they also added to the climate in which the use of royal titles was more widespread than has been accepted. The most prominent examples are those relating to Ireland. Under Richard II, the king's creation of Robert de Vere as Duke of Ireland in October 1386, enhancing his former palatine powers as marquess to a position where Richard retained only liege homage for the lordship, encouraged some to think that de Vere would be made king there. Later in the reign, it was believed a similar grant of kingship in Ireland was intended for the Duke of Surrey.Footnote ⁴² Then, under Henry VIII, there was the possibility that his illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, might be made king of Ireland, where he was for a time lord lieutenant.Footnote ⁴³ On a similar theme, some of the concern about Piers Gaveston under Edward II arose from the belief that the king intended to make him a “princely” grant of the royal earldom of Cornwall.Footnote ⁴⁴

The position of heirs to the English throne provides a final context. One element of its importance here lies in the way their lordship drew on an element of the sovereignty of the English crown that was unavoidably present in their persons as heirs. This aspect of sovereignty was acknowledged more explicitly in some cases than in others, usually because of circumstances of dynastic insecurity, as when Henry IV had the position of his eldest son recognized in Parliament at his accession.Footnote ⁴⁵ The wider significance of these princes lies in part in the fact that, in their territorial associations with Wales, Cheshire, and Cornwall, they could draw on the power of the western parts of Britain; that power, in their hands, was significant, partly because of the very difference that was enshrined through the special position of the prince. The resources represented by the princes’ association with the western parts of Britain could be material—with an extensive and geographically focused set of fiscal, legal, and other rightsFootnote ⁴⁶—and through the link to the “British history,” they also came in the form of a powerful stock of traditions and ideas about the past.Footnote ⁴⁷

It can therefore be argued that in the late Middle Ages these islands were home to a group of lords whose powers and standing took them to the level where they warranted the title of lord with many resonances of sovereignty, and sometimes even that of king, reflecting many of the powers of royalty. It must be acknowledged that such an account stands in the face of the historiography of the past two centuries, and especially of a historiography describing the final death of sub-kingship in the territories of the English crown. That historiography has tended to focus on the Isle of Man and events in 1504. Virtually all historians of the island have been convinced of the surrender of the royal title in that year. R. H. Kinvig described the surrender of the title in 1504, on the death of the First Earl of Derby and the accession of the Second Earl, following A. W. Moore in his major history published in 1900. Most recently, Roger Dickinson pushed the date of the end of the Manx kingship even earlier, stating that Sir William Montacute dropped the title when he took control of the island in the 1330s.Footnote ⁴⁸

A belief in the final demise of sub-kingship around this time is also true of the wider historiography of England and the British Isles in general. Sir Geoffrey Elton provides an eminent and stark example of belief in the inevitability of centralization and the imposition of uniform royal sovereignty. While Elton generally accepted that Henry VII's main challenge was to provide strong leadership, not to reshape social alliances, he believed that there was “only one problem [that] could not be solved by mere restoration or revival, and that was the problem of franchises and feudal courts”: he writes of how popular support enabled “Tudor kings to ride roughshod over the petty kingdoms.” It was the achievement of the Tudors, and, for Elton, a major element of Thomas Cromwell's “revolution in government,” that they took a country that, though centralized, suffered from the limited disunity which did exist, and completed its unification.Footnote ⁴⁹ Elton's approach to this subject has been challenged, but others adopting different perspectives on centralization in the whole of the British Isles still often draw on the Manx example. Ralph Griffiths, for instance, relies specifically on the fact that Henry VII made the Earl of Derby surrender his title of king of Man in 1504 as a sign of tightening royal control in the non-English territories of the crown.Footnote ⁵⁰

The problem with all these statements about the Isle of Man is that they rely on a claim that James, Seventh Earl of Derby, made about his ancestors in his history of Man written during the civil war: since the reign of Henry VII (and the death of Thomas Stanley, first earl of Derby) “of modesty or policy—I know not well which,—they have called themselves only Lords of Man.” Clear enough: yet the account contains many inaccuracies, notably the statement that Thomas Stanley was created earl by Edward IV, and James, about to suffer martyrdom for the cause of monarchy, was unlikely to say anything that derogated from its authority.Footnote ⁵¹ Some of the other pieces of evidence most frequently cited for the end of the title are also distinctly problematic. It has become usual to claim that a report of May 1551 suggests the Earl of Derby had been asked to surrender his title of “lord of Man,” for example. This report is a letter from Rome recounting what sources in the Low Countries were indicating about the state of English politics. What it specifically says is that the Earl of Derby had been asked to renounce his title to the Isle of Man to the king, which is not a challenge to the distinction of king or lord per se but rather to his ownership of the island.Footnote ⁵²

These are dubious foundations for allegedly sudden change, but there is continuing evidence for kingship and lordship in the Isle of Man into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The survival of the administrative and judicial records of the island in the early sixteenth century is patchy; but although after a break in the records John More and John McCristen appear as justices domini ibidem in October 1505, in the next sequence of surviving records, in April 1506, there is another description of justices domini Regis. As late as October 1538, the deemsters are described as justices domini Regis. From 1543, however, it does appear consistently that the officers are referred to in relation to a lord, not a king.Footnote ⁵³ There is a similar sense of a possible transition about this time in John Leland's Laboriouse Journey and Serche, a gift to Henry VIII on New Year's Day of 1546, which described Man as one of a group of “somtime kingedomes.”Footnote ⁵⁴

We should also recognize that the English king's Chancery had for centuries been unwilling to ascribe the title of king to the ruler of Man. Michael Bennett has identified one example of its use of rex, for Sir William Scrope during the reign of Richard II, but otherwise, lord is consistently used. For example, when Luce Macquyn petitioned for a grant of alms in the island in December 1403, he indicated that they were customarily payable by the lords or kings of the island, but the grant that followed stated baldly that the alms were founded by the kings of England; it made no reference to the lords of the island.Footnote ⁵⁵

Still, a statement of customary law in 1577 referred to the king of the island.Footnote ⁵⁶ And lordship, if that is what it was, retained the most kingly associations. As late as 1691, the Tynwald ceremony saw the lord appearing on Tynwald Hill seated on a “chaire of state,” the governor on his right, the bishop on his left, and with “the sword of state holden before his Lordship with the point upward.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Manuscript copies of the statutes of Man—a key document for those involved in the administration of the island—are usually prefaced by the supposed true chronicle of Man— essentially a list of kings. Learning the law, or simply looking up a reference, therefore meant leafing through a listing of kings: monarchy literally provided the framework for the increasingly important recording of the law.Footnote ⁵⁸ I have already noted above the significance of the references to Manx kings as Ree in the “Traditionary Ballad” at the time of its composition before 1504. The long survival of the ballad in the oral tradition implies no fear, at the very least, among the Manx of associating the lordship with the royal title, whether in relation to Orry or to the more recent Stanleys, in the centuries after 1504.

Even when the Stanleys were in England, they might use the fullest form of their lordly title, as when in 1532 Edward Stanley, in a commission issued from his manor of Colham in Middlesex on 26 June, referred to himself as “Soveraigne and liege Lord of the same Isle.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The poetry of the northwest of England also tells a different story. In the poem “Flodden Feilde” in the Percy folio manuscript, the title of king is still used. In debate over the performance of northwestern forces at the battle, Henry VIII calls for Thomas Stanley: “[W]ho will fetch me the king of Man, / the Honnorable Thomas Erle of Darbye?”Footnote ⁶⁰ Writing at some time from 1515 to about 1528 in the northwest,Footnote ⁶¹ the poet was confident that his audience would accept the idea of Henry VIII's referring to Stanley as king. And references to courtiers such as Sir William Compton suggest the poet had an acquaintance with the early Henrician court or even that he was recording an eyewitness account; so the poem may just record the use by Henry of the title king when addressing Thomas Stanley.Footnote ⁶² The ballad “The Winning of the Isle of Man, by the Noble Earl of Salisbury,” current in the seventeenth century, included an explicit reference to the creation of a kingship there for Montacute.Footnote ⁶³ As late as 1637, in the poetry of Robert Codrington, Countess Alice, who had been the wife of Earl Ferdinando, was referred to as queen: “Countesse Dowager of Derby and Queene in the Isle of Man.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Others in England around the court believed there was a king in Man. In 1533, the Venetian ambassador explained to his government that there “the Earl of Derby is King, but dependent on [sottoposto a] his Majesty” Henry VIII.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, the perception abroad continued to be of a royal status—as when an Armada pilot in 1597 described the coasts of the British Isles, including Man, where Derby “is called king [Rey].”Footnote ⁶⁶

The scholars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—antiquarian and legal—helped to reinforce awareness of the existence of the Manx kingship and its deep historical roots. Camden in 1586 provided an edition of the “Chronicle of the Kings of Man” as part of his work Britannia and indicated that the crown had passed to Scrope in the fourteenth century, citing Walsingham. Most significantly, he categorically stated that Sir John Stanley received the island and that he and his successors, now earls of Derby, Manniæ reguli appellantur. Camden's informant, John Meyrick, bishop of Man between 1576 and 1599, had expressed the opinion to him in 1577 that the island's distinctive language, law, and currency were indicators peculiaris dominii—of a distinctive type of lordship.Footnote ⁶⁷

Sir Edward Coke, in his 1608 commentary on Calvin's case, referred to the “little, but yet ancient & absolute kingdom of the Isle of Manne.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Michael Drayton, in the twenty-seventh song of his poetic work Poly-Olbion, described the island, mentioning “her right successive Kings.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Even John Selden, in some ways the originator par excellence of the idea of English exceptionalism and centralization, played a role in perpetuating the idea of Manx kingship. His view of English distinctiveness did color his account of the Manx kingship in Titles of Honor, published in 1614. Selden was keen to emphasize its limitations, even that sub-kingly titles might have been used in error at times, so eager was he to preserve the idea of English difference from a continental Europe that had seen the seizure by dukes and counts, originally merely office-holders, of near sovereign regional powers, until strong monarchs seized them back in the late Middle Ages. For Selden, the lords of Man were “litle otherwise Kings, then Dukes or Earles are.” In spite of this, his account preserved the idea of a kingship in Man, even if it was one he thought had been misunderstood.Footnote ⁷⁰

Still, Coke and Camden in particular became near canonical in their status as legal, antiquarian, and social authorities—and therefore carried the idea of the Manx kingship into the eighteenth century. Then, antiquarians like William Cowper, who had spent time in the island in 1729, could assert confidently that the lord of Man “may not only use the Stile, and title of King, but cause himself to be crown'd such.”Footnote ⁷¹

Alongside the title, many of the lord's remarkable powers continued unabated. There may have been signs in the appointment by Henry VIII of Henry Man as bishop in 1545 that the English king's authority was to become predominant in that aspect of the government of the island, but under the papacy in Mary's reign, Thomas Stanley's appointment bears all the marks of traditional lordship, and on his death Thomas Salisbury found his place in a process that recognized the role of Elizabeth as supreme governor but retained both the form and the reality of the patronage in the hands of the Earl of Derby.Footnote ⁷² Coke was therefore able to refer to the power of patronage as a “visible mark of a kingdome.”Footnote ⁷³ The lord's highly distinctive admiralty powers also continued; in 1624 the English council's regard for these powers was so great that it was willing to accept delay in negotiations with the French out of respect for them.Footnote ⁷⁴ And there was also a continuation of the island's position in foreign relations noted earlier: as late as 1546, in negotiations leading to the Treaty of Utrecht, Henry VIII was eager to ensure the specific treatment of Man, along with Berwick, Guernsey, and Jersey.Footnote ⁷⁵

There were clearly some limits to these powers. For example, in theory, the English Parliament had the power to bind Man and the Manx by statutes that specifically referred to the island. This was a potentially very significant limitation, were it not for the fact that the English Parliament did not in practice pass such an act. Before 1765, the only acts directly relating to the Isle of Man were those allocating the diocese to Canterbury jurisdiction in 1542 and confirming the title to Earl William and Countess Elizabeth in 1610.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although the Manx are referred to in some sixteenth-century acts, such as ones restricting trade and shipping, these are pieces of permissive legislation. As such, they effectively highlight the difference of the Manx position: they permitted the Manx privileges as an alien and therefore potentially otherwise disadvantaged group.Footnote ⁷⁷

In a similar way, after the early sixteenth century and for the next two centuries, qualifications to the previous absolute barriers to the involvement of English courts exist but are extremely limited. Even those courts that were otherwise most able to penetrate jurisdictional boundaries, like Star Chamber and Requests, did not see Manx business. The exception is significant: once the English king established an interest in Manx ex-monastic property, Augmentations did, very briefly, deal with Manx business, before that property was definitively alienated—but that is all.Footnote ⁷⁸

There is, then, a sense that the lord's sovereignty and majesty were beginning to be a little more restricted during the sixteenth century, but there is no sign of a sudden end to sub-kingship in Man, and it is hard to argue that the English crown became suddenly fundamentally hostile to its expression. If there was a tightening of the approach in some more official media, one trigger for a change in the use of language may have been the Act for the Ratification of the King's Majesty's Stile, passed in the Parliament of 1543–44. For the first time, it was laid down in the vernacular what precise words were to be used to describe the king, laws protected with the penalties of high treason.Footnote ⁷⁹ This coincides more or less with the adoption of conventional naming formulas for the sovereign authority in some local administrative and legal documentation in, for example, the Isle of Man, and in the Channel Islands. This was the more specific manifestation, in the control of nomenclature of lordship, of that focusing and projection of English royal sovereignty over subordinate jurisdictions that had earlier been expressed most notably in the acts for jurisdiction in liberties (27 Henry VIII, c. 24), and so-called Acts of Union for Wales (27 Henry VIII, c. 26; 34 & 35 Henry VIII, c. 26), which had the effect, among other things, of ensuring that in the areas affected, no one but the king could pardon for treason and felony or make justices of the peace, and it was only in his name that judicial writs and indictments would run.Footnote ⁸⁰

And yet, as demonstrated, that process could run alongside a continuation of aspects of more extensive lordship in some territories under the control of the English crown, and alongside a continuing use of titles that reflected that lordship. Recent scholarship has suggested continuing strength in traditional franchises, and even innovation, in the extensive and powerful lordships discussed above, such as in the palatinates of Chester and Durham and in elements of the principality of Wales and the duchy of Cornwall.Footnote ⁸¹ The regal title and its associated rights and paraphernalia survived for several reasons in Man and elsewhere. Man was at a key strategic point between England, Scotland, and Ireland; something more was operating than inertia affecting a backwater that might easily be ignored.

It should first be admitted that sarcasm might be the tone in which a Stanley was referred to as king of Man. Especially during the English Civil War and James Stanley's resistance to Parliament, his opponents used the title as much as anything to emphasize his isolation and weakness, and his absurdity. At one point late in the earl's resistance to Parliament, in 1650, Mercurius Politicus referred to him as king, mentioning that “they say hee hath a Leaden Crown”—which, it alleged, he intended to melt down for bullets to “shoot down that great enemy of Princes, called The Liberty of the people.”Footnote ⁸² But for this use to be possible, the idea of king had to be already present in the minds of those who slightingly used it and those who heard or read it.

The power of Manx lordship itself helped support the idea of a royal title. Someone with the power to tax and legislate, with admiralty jurisdiction and so on, was clearly a king. The Isle of Man's distance and difference from the core of the English state—in a time of relatively poor communication and restricted cross-cultural interaction—meant in very practical terms that jurisdiction should be local and largely autonomous.

There was a premium on the Manx kingship in English political culture because of the need for the dramatization of difference. Sometimes this served to increase a sense of challenge to norms—Christopher Marlowe's Edward II of 1593 creates Piers Gavaston king and lord of Man.Footnote ⁸³ Michael Drayton's Peirs Gaueston (1594) emphasizes the extreme and unusual generosity of Edward through reference to the island:

Yet Marlowe's and Drayton's source, in Holinshed's Chronicles, only describes Gavaston's creation as lord, not king.Footnote ⁸⁵ The arbitrary nature of Edward's action is pointed up by the writers’ deliberate mention of the kingship of Man. For many centuries the royal title in Man fulfilled a need for ways to express what the English are, in opposition to something they are not.

Finally, and probably most importantly, the political culture of the English at the center supported the idea of a Manx kingship, as it did other examples of local difference and particular power, as English political culture was founded on a respect for property and tradition. The mental world of the late Middle Ages and early modern period possessed many models for strong subordinate authority. Such models might be found in imperial systems, whether classical or medieval. People in the sixteenth century were increasingly aware of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy and of Anglo-Saxon relations with other kings, especially through stories like that of Edgar, rowed by the kings of Alba, Strathclyde, Mann, and North Wales on the Dee at Chester in 973.Footnote ⁸⁶ Cheshire antiquaries could describe “The Kinges of Mertia Pallatines of Chester” in direct succession with the earls of Chester after the Conquest.Footnote ⁸⁷ There was also an understanding of Celtic kingship (even if in Ireland its forms often concealed a move to realities closer to landlordship), something with which the Stanleys themselves had regular and continuing connections, from their service under de Vere in the 1380s, even through low points of English activity such as the middle of the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁸ At the Council of Constance, 1414–1418, it was a foundation of English claims to status that their king ruled over eight kingdoms (some with their own lesser kings), a claim countered by the French mainly on the degree of consent entailed.Footnote ⁸⁹ And English kingship itself was not vested exclusively in the body of the king but expressed also through queens, princes, and more distant members of the royal kin. This concept was most apparent in the ways in which the king's own children, especially his eldest son, might take on princely roles. The Prince of Wales was created with a rod of gold, a coronet (per circulum), and a ring, as well as a kiss and letters of creation.Footnote ⁹⁰ There had been a wider implication to this dynastic perspective in Edward III's use of his kin as princely lieutenants across his “empire.”Footnote ⁹¹ The Stanleys could associate themselves with the wider royal kin after the marriage of Thomas (d. 1504) and Margaret Beaufort in 1472 and even more after that of Henry (d. 1593) and Margaret Clifford in 1555. Margaret Clifford's mother, Eleanor, could be described straightforwardly and regally as “daughter and one of the heires to Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk & of Marye the frenche Queene wydowe to king Lewis daughter to kinge Henrye the viith and sister to kinge Henrye the eighthe.”Footnote ⁹²

The use of a royal title in relation to the Isle of Man was therefore a phenomenon that was longer-lasting and wider-ranging in its implications for the power of the island's rulers than has previously been recognized. Nor was it as isolated a phenomenon as the historiography might suggest, since other lords boasted titles indicative of extensive and concentrated lordship of the type to which Rees Davies alerted us. These were men with fiscal, judicial, and other rights that were such as to support more intense relationships with those in the areas they ruled, and it is therefore not surprising that a powerful vocabulary of “lordship” and even “kingship” might be used in addressing and describing them, with associated rites, ceremonial, and traditions. The traditional contrast often struck between lordship in the territories of the French and English crowns may not, therefore, be as stark as has been thought. The growth of the power of fifteenth-century French princes who ruled “by the grace of god,” wore crowns and regal robes, and choreographed their own coronation services has long been widely acknowledged.Footnote ⁹³ The potential for lordly title and its wider implications in the territories of the English crown should not be dismissed as easily as it often has been.