ABSTRACT
Financial and military necessities caused the crown to wield its emergency 'prerogative' powers on a scale and with an intensity unparalleled since the last years of the Elizabethan war against Spain. The 'inflation of honours', too, was felt to be undermining the prestige of the landed elite and this may have contributed to the new, more critical, role of the House of Lords in the constitutional conflicts of the 1620s. For many years the unpopularity of First Charles and the crown by 1640 were seen as the result of long-term developments. While there have been many differing historical interpretations of Charles First's government in the 1630s, in essence there are some main interpretations of the Personal Rule. Soaring corn prices and unemployment in the cloth-manufacturing areas, exacerbated by the politically motivated refusal of merchants to export cloth in 1629 and by outbreaks of plague, threatened law and order.
