ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that the early years of Charles I’s ‘personal rule’ were, in outward appearance at least, calmer and more stable than those which had immediately preceded them. By the end of 1630 England was once more at peace, and for much of the ensuing decade there were few overt signs of domestic conflict or crisis. Contemporary commentators were particularly struck by the apparent harmony within the country, a situation which was in marked contrast to the turmoil the Thirty Years’ War had brought to many of the states of continental Europe. One claimed that the peace and prosperity of England was the envy ‘of all other parts of Christendom’, while another noted that throughout the country ‘the people, both rich and poor, did look cheerful’. On the other hand, the central issues which had generated the conflicts of the late 1620s had not gone away; the role of any future parliament remained extremely uncertain, a range of non-parliamentary taxation continued to be collected by the government, and the Laudian takeover of the English church proceeded apace. The return of political stability during the early part of the personal rule can therefore only be explained in one of two ways: either the English political nation had by now become reconciled to a number of policies against which its representatives at Westminster had fought so vigorously just a few years earlier; or conversely it remained fundamentally opposed to them but, in the absence of parliaments, could find no obvious medium to express its continuing dissatisfaction.
