ABSTRACT
The early years of Charles’s personal rule were ones of economic depression. The opening years of the King’s personal rule were therefore marked by a number of orders sent from the central government to the justices of the peace throughout the kingdom, instructing them how to cope with scarcity of food, the spread of infection owing to plague and the threats to the maintenance of public order from desperate men out of work. Later in the spring of 1641 Oliver was still acting as adviser to, and spokesman for, displaced commoners who lived near his home in Ely. In general it has been argued that ‘a new kind of public service was coming into existence in republican England’. Cromwellian officials were no longer drawn from an upper or ruling class but from what has been called a middling class of county and parochial gentry. Charles I had nothing equivalent to a Civil List.
