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From Cavalier to Roundhead Tyranny, 1642–9

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Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649

Part of the book series: Problems in Focus Series ((PFS))

Abstract

THESE sentiments in an address by Charles I to the inhabitants of Nottinghamshire at Newark in July 1642, on the eve of the Civil War, were both to become a recurrent and increasingly prominent feature of Royalist propaganda over the next few years and to evoke an increasingly sympathetic response in the minds of many of those who had sided with the Parliament against the King in 1642. To his dying day Charles continued to assert that his royal rights and the liberties of his subjects were inextricably bound together. The Parliament which had withheld from him his property at Hull assuredly would not hesitate to commit similar outrages on the property of his subjects. One of Clarendon’s most telling criticisms of the constitutional usurpations of the King’s opponents derived much of its force from this frank admission of the ways in which the Crown itself had gone too far during the eleven years of personal government in the 1630s. What was now happening, he averred, was that the same principles … should be used to the wresting all sovereign power from the Crown, which the Crown had a little before made use of for the extending its authority and power beyond its bounds, to the prejudice of the just rights of the subject. A supposed necessity was then thought ground enough to create a power, and a bare averment of that necessity to beget a practice, to impose what tax they thought convenient upon the subject by writs of ship-money never before known; and a supposed necessity now, and a bare averment of that necessity, is as confidently and more fatally concluded a good ground to exclude the Crown from the use of any power by an ordinance never before heard of; and the same maxim of Salus populi suprema lex, which had been used to the infringing the liberties of the one, made use of for the destroying the rights of the other .…2

… And assure yourselves, when Laws shall be altered by any other Authority than that by which they were made, your Foundations are destroyed. And though it seems at first but to take away my Power, it will quickly swallow all your Interest.1

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Notes and References

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  1. Robert Ashton
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John Morrill

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© 1982 Robert Ashton, Anthony Fletcher, Roger Howell, Ronald Hutton, Mark Kishlansky, John Morrill, Donald Pennington, Richard Tuck

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Ashton, R. (1982). From Cavalier to Roundhead Tyranny, 1642–9. In: Morrill, J. (eds) Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16911-5_9

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