Charles I's Lord Treasurer: Sir Richard Weston, Earl of Portland, 1577-1635

Chapel Hill, NC, U.S.A: The University of North Carolina Press. Very Good/Very Good. 1975. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 080781248X Dust jacket complete. Green cloth boards, gilt titling to spine. No ownership marks. Frontis plate. xvii, 261 pages clean and tight. This is the first biography of Sir Richard Weston, Earl of Portland, Charles I's able Lord Treasurer between 1628 and 1635, when he was the equivalent of a modern-day Prime Minister. Based on extensive research among manuscripts and other documents in the British Museum and Public Record Office, this study details the contributions to English financial and foreign policy of an official wrongly dismissed by most historians as a political mediocrity. Although this biography's main focus is on Weston himself, it also unravels the tangled history of the five parliaments of the 1620s, when the tensions that would ultimately lead to civil war were developing, and of the government's financial problems during that critical period. As Chancellor of the Exchequer during the early 1620s, Weston maintained a moderate profile in the House of Commons, which was rapidly becoming polarized between radical parliamentarians and strict royalists. Yet in 1626 he rose to defend the Duke of Buckingham against the mounting clamour for his impeachment. Although critical of the duke's policies, Weston insisted on the king's absolute right to control the composition of the ministry. After Buckingham's assassination in 1628, Weston became Charles I's chief minister and persuaded his master to rule without parliament until its members' tempers had cooled. During his term as the king's principal adviser, Weston was chiefly concerned to repair the financial and political damage that had resulted from England's involvement in the Thirty Years War. To this end he made strenuous attempts to negotiate peace treaties with France and Spain and to balance Charles I's budget by reducing his expenditures and developing new sources of revenue. Weston also sought to reconcile opponents of his master's policies to the government and arranged for several of them, including Sir Thomas Wentworth, to enter the ministry. Had his moderate and conciliatory approach been continued by his successors, the civil conflicts of the 1640s might have been avoided. Michael Van Cleave Alexander is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg. .