Lawyers, Gunpowder, and Money: Lawfare in the Stuart Kingdom

A paper I am presenting at the Ohio Valley History Conference

I am presenting this paper at the Ohio Valley History Conference on 5 October. It will unlock for free subscribers the day before.

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ABSTRACT: The East India Company’s 1630 lawsuit against military entrepreneur John Fowke is contextualized as lawfare, broadly defined as the manipulation or exploitation of legal systems to achieve political and/or military objectives, such as damaging or delegitimizing opponents.

John Fowke became a political threat to Charles Stuart at the beginning of his reign by leading the agitation over tonnage and poundage rates.[1] Fowke’s Atlantic mercantile activities likewise threatened the royal gunpowder and saltpeter monopolies. Fowke had only just finished paying his way out of the first trouble when a royal ally of the court serving as Company counsel attacked Fowke’s illicit trade in gunpowder.

The Honorable Company sued John Fowke in Chancery Court, which had evolved out of the royal scriptorum.^[2] Religious courts were hostile to medieval merchants squabbling over the interest rates in their contracts, spurring the rise of secular courts in Europe as venues for men of high finance to sue one another, and the Chancery was one of these.^[3] Royal chancellors held the privy power over royal charters and commissions, so by Fowke’s era the merchants of London used the Chancery Court as their arena for business disputes.^[4] Sir Edward Coke, one of the most formative English legal minds of the age, set the course of English law towards a separation of powers in 1608 when he denied King James I “authority to participate in the judicial decisions of his own courts.”^[5] Businessmen wanted a judge who was free of royal interference, too.

Sir William Acton attended the case as Company counsel.^[6] Previously, as a sheriff of London, Acton had refused to recognize a parliamentary order to release Fowke and his fellow agitators from the Fleet.[7] Charles I rewarded Acton for this intransigence with a baronetcy, an unprecedented reward for a Londoner who had not served as an alderman yet.[8] Acton complained about the “impertinent discourse of Mr. Fowkes” during the case.^[9] In 1640, Acton became the first political victim of John Fowke’s political machine.[10] Fowke resumed his quarrel with the Company in the House of Lords as the siege of Oxford began in 1646.[11] The dispute was not resolved until 1657, when Action was still serving as Company counsel.[12]