ABSTRACT
Charles I ability to motivate his supporters, while invariably assisted by the public-relations skills of his closest advisers, were considerable. Charles’s conduct of the Civil War highlighted many of his positiveas well as negative attributes as king. When Prince Rupert, the King’s nephew, arrived at Nottingham, he ‘found there a very thin and small army and the Foot very meanly armed’. The parliamentarian forces were also larger in number and more quickly in the field to advance against the king, leaving Charles’s own position extremely vulnerable and compelling him to move to Shrewsbury in an effort to raise troops from Wales and the north-west. Charles himself, particularly given the favourable course of his war effort so far, was in no mood to surrender on one of his red lines, the government of the Church by bishops, nor indeed on the giving-up of his supporters to parliamentarian retribution.
