ABSTRACT
A proper history of local Royalist administration will never be written, because the documents upon which to base it have not survived. In contrast with the hundreds of leaves of Parliamentarian committee papers preserved in the Public Record Office and elsewhere I can discover only three items to illustrate the machinery by which the Royalist war effort was carried on. One is the Docquet Book of the Clerks Of The Chancery,1 * containing a list of the various kinds of committee set up and the dates of their creation, although not the names of all their members. The second consists of a series of minutes kept of meetings of the Worcestershire Committee ‘for the guarding the county’ in March and April 1643,2 containing the names of those present, the business discussed and the decisionmade. The last is the Order Book of the Glamorganshire Committee ‘for the guarding the county’ ,3 comprising the instructions issued by that body between July 1643 and November 1644. It is proposed here to combine these sources with all the incidental evidence in other Royalist documents to produce at least a summary of the existing knowledge upon the subject, a skeletal portrait which may be revised if further evidence materialises or that surviving is better interpreted.
