In his book Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, published in 1989, L. J. Reeve wrote:
Introduction
The reign of Charles I saw the complete breakdown of political consensus in his three kingdoms, the reluctant resort to armed conflict and the most extensive bloodshed. While historians, it would seem, are as far as ever from agreement about the reasons for these events, the period shows no sign of losing its ability to fascinate historian and reader alike. On one level the intrinsic interest of the Caroline regime derives from the fact of its collapse. To seek to understand the causes of the civil wars is natural enough. Yet this book, while it may shed some light on those later events, is not aimed directly at explaining the history of the 1640s. It focuses, rather, on those years during the late 1620s and early 1630s when Charles's rule was becoming established and its distinct character emerged. The intention is to achieve some understanding of the nature of that regime by investigating the problem of how it came into being. Beyond this, the course and collapse of Charles's rule were largely the products of its initial creation. …
This study is built around the intersection of two basic themes: the interaction of political and ideological developments and the two-way relationship between English and international affairs. The evidence has encouraged me to view the problems of the period in these terms. The book extends roughly from early 1628 to the latter part of 1632, that is from the height of the crisis of the Buckingham era to the time when Charles's withdrawal from the Thirty Years War was completed.
This space of almost five years saw a marked transformation of English politics — from government in conjunction with Parliament to government without reference to Parliament; from the administration of a royal favourite to that of the king and his circle; from government dependent upon parliamentary subsidies and rising debt to government based upon non-parliamentary taxation, customs revenues and war trade; from intervention in continental affairs to isolation; and from war to peace. The point of Charles's withdrawal from the European war is a conclusive as well as a convenient terminus ad quern: the king's decision in favour of non-parliamentary rule implied the necessity of peace abroad, and the progressive ending of a commitment to the war allowed the rejection of parliamentary means and the continuation of religious change at home.
Conrad Russell's detailed study of the parliaments of the 1620s, published in 1979, drew a sharp contrast between the political atmosphere of the Jacobean era and that which prevailed during the early years of Charles's reign. According to Russell the Caroline period was a new age, intensely ideological and politically 'a much less safe world'. While recent work has pointed to the way in which overt religious consensus was being eroded in England during the last years of James's life, there can be no doubt that this conclusion of Russell's is essentially true.
As religious and political divisions appeared in English politics during the late 1620s they came to affect significantly the framework in which those politics were pursued. This study, as part of its account of the emergence of Charles's regime, traces the development of certain changes evident at the end of the 1620s as the king came progressively to reject parliamentary ways. I have interpreted these changes as the advent of (for want of a better term) a 'new politics'.
These new politics were an uncharacteristic and in many ways an unwanted (even an unconscious) development. They were the politics of a non-parliamentary England, politics which came about with the breakdown of the traditional political and constitutional process.
Such a notion immediately begs the obvious question of what, in fact, the old politics were. It is not my purpose to paint a full-length portrait of pre- Caroline, let alone early Stuart, political society. There exists a number of very illuminating studies which already serve this need. It is possible, however, to point to certain features which made English political society workable under James I, notably confidence in the monarch as the head of the social and religious order, a degree of understanding between the ruling elements within the court and the wider political leadership of the nation, a broad ideological context for constitutional and religious life which, if sometimes unstable, was not undermined by government and often allowed official agreement rather than conflict, and the innate capacity for the conduct of an effective foreign policy based upon an official commitment to the life of the Protestant world and upon the economical and constructive application of limited resources in time of war. …
How can the new politics be characterized? Briefly, they involved an increasing resort to exclusive government, conspiracy and dissent at home, certain changes in political thinking (the most important of which was the undermining of the constitutional fiction that the king could — or should — do no wrong), and the eventual breakdown of the critical relationship between the administration of domestic affairs and foreign policy. In effect these developments constituted an internal assault on the customary framework of English politics and inherently weakened Charles's rule.
In seeking to describe these changes I do not wish to suggest any rigid structural definitions. The idea of an emerging new politics is simply a flexible shorthand for the various changes (combined with elements of continuity) which can be detected within the period and which can, at the most basic level, be seen as a pattern of change, a pattern which should be illuminating.
What caused these changes to emerge? In many ways they are inseparable from the specific policies which Charles adopted; essentially they were produced by the combination of his personality and beliefs (the effects of which were compounded by a grossly mismanaged war) with wider international influences. Somewhere within this book I suspect there lurks the deduction that if Charles had not succeeded to the English throne, had not been predeceased by his brother or had been assassinated like Henry IV of France (thus allowing Elizabeth of Bohemia and her children to enter the line of succession) the troubles of his reign would have been avoided. While this seems a likely proposition, the imagined alternatives or 'ifs' of history, occasionally helpful, are not in the end a useful object of study.
In terms of real events it is difficult to disagree with the conclusion reached by Clarendon in his history and by Pym in the Grand Remonstrance that Charles's accession led to increasingly serious trouble. The king's character and attitudes form one of the salient themes of this book. The portrait of Charles which emerges here is in many ways unflattering. Charles was an excellent connoisseur of the visual arts, but as a reigning monarch he was woefully inadequate. A major task of this book must be to explore the nature of that inadequacy: at very bottom he was an unsuccessful king because he was a weak man. But this study also contends that he was not in any sense a political man, something which his accidental involvement in public events has tended to obscure. …
… Any scholar who ventures into the pre-civil war era must acknowledge two historiographical debts. One is to Samuel Rawson Gardiner, whose masterly narrative remains the authoritative account of the events. While Gardiner's judgement upon individual episodes was often sound, his central constitutional theme remains implausibly simple and governed by an explicitly teleological approach. But so assiduous was Gardiner's research and so wide his technical skill that to discover him to have been in error or to have been ignorant of certain evidence brings an almost perverse satisfaction. …
… The other debt is to Conrad Russell, whose work on early Stuart parliamentary history has opened up whole new avenues of historical understanding. While Russell has aroused controversy and a number of scholars have striven to qualify his conclusions, the illuminating insights he has provided mean that students of the period will always benefit from his scholarship and be obliged to grapple with his views. …
… It may be helpful, therefore, to give an indication of my own view of the Russellian or revisionist interpretation besides what appears in the following pages. That interpretation has both a negative and a positive character. It denies the validity of Gardiner's view of a high road to constitutional conflict, civil war and parliamentary power during the early Stuart period and rejects the hindsight which facilitated this reading of the era. Speaking positively, Russell argues that Parliament existed within the wider context of early modern English society and political culture and must be understood in these (its own) terms. That culture, he maintains, was founded on assumptions of order, unity and consensus but was plagued by problems of localism, war, financial inadequacy and religious disunity. My belief is that any polarization of the debate triggered by these views is unhelpful — not because disputes are unseemly (on the contrary: they show that the field of study is alive) but because it is in the nature of the early Stuart period that it is not conducive to simple, extreme or all-embracing explanations.
The Caroline period is particularly complex in this respect, a growing jungle, formed by the intertwining of the politics of power and of deeply held belief within a European context. It is also my belief that the revisionist interpretation is weakened by its attempt to describe a structure or system of politics at a time when that system was undergoing significant change, being placed under pressure and being altered in subtle ways by national and international influences. Hence this study could be read as something of an alternative interpretation on a modest scale, or in another sense as an episodic sequel to the history of the 1620s, a decade of essentially parliamentary politics which led to the establishment of a non-parliamentary regime. …
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
The Source has been:
L. J. Reeve, Charles I and the Road to Personal Rule, Cambridge University Press 1989
Social Science Files collects and displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
‘The Heller Files’, quality tools for Social Science.