ABSTRACT
Charles seemed optimistic as he spent the winter at Oxford preparing for the 1645 campaign. Charles’s confidence explains why he treated the parliamentary emissaries, who arrived in Oxford on 27 November 1644, with marked frigidity. Parliament refused to accept the validity of the patents of nobility that Charles had granted several of his commissioners on the grounds that they had been issued after Lord Keeper Littleton’s defection from London with the Great Seal. The preparations that most concerned the king involved the creation in March 1645 of a separate command in the west under the titular charge of the Prince of Wales. The execution of Charles’s old friend and counsellor, Archbishop Laud, on 10 January, did not appear to have much effect on the king. Henrietta Maria was in Paris trying to persuade the French, Dutch, Irish, Danes, Scots, Swedes, and the pope – in fact anyone who would listen – to try and help her husband.
