A major perspective on Charles I's relationship with the English aristocracy in the lead up to the Civil War.

This is a major study of Charles I's relationship with the English aristocracy. Rejecting the traditional emphasis on the 'Crisis of the Aristocracy', Professor Richard Cust highlights instead the effectiveness of the King and the Earl of Arundel's policies to promote and strengthen the nobility. He reveals how the peers reasserted themselves as the natural leaders of the political nation during the Great Council of Peers in 1640 and the Long Parliament. He also demonstrates how Charles deliberately set out to cultivate his aristocracy as the main bulwark of royal authority, enabling him to go to war against the Scots in 1639 and then build the royalist party which provided the means to fight parliament in 1642. The analysis is framed throughout within a broader study of aristocratic honour and the efforts of the heralds to stabilise the social order.

A major new perspective on Charles I's relationship with the English aristocracy in the lead up to the Civil War.

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642 is the first study to focus on the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the travels and public profile of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king's progresses and Caroline progress entertainments than currently exists, this volumes throws fresh light on the question of Charles I's accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the political conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles's overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the history opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practiced by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king's accessibility further through case studies of Charles's three 'great' progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles's spectacular royal entry to the city on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his subjects or able to deploy the propaganda power of public display as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.

A major new perspective on Charles I's relationship with the English aristocracy in the lead up to the Civil War.

This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms - England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

The story of the reign of Charles I — told through the lives of his people. Prize-winning historian David Cressy mines the widest range of archival and printed sources, including ballads, sermons, speeches, letters, diaries, petitions, proclamations, and the proceedings of secular and ecclesiastical courts, to explore the aspirations and expectations not only of the king and his followers, but also the unruly energies of many of his subjects, showing how royal authority was constituted, in peace and in war — and how it began to fall apart. A blend of micro-historical analysis and constitutional theory, parish politics and ecclesiology, military, cultural, and social history, Charles I and the People of England is the first major attempt to connect the political, constitutional, and religious history of this crucial period in English history with the experience and aspirations of the rest of the population. From the king and his ministers to the everyday dealings and opinions of parishioners, petitioners, and taxpayers, David Cressy re-creates the broadest possible panorama of early Stuart England, as it slipped from complacency to revolution.