‘This Proud Unthankefull City’: A Cavalier View of London in the Civil War

Abstract

Relations between the king and his capital before the Civil War had never been easy. The great city had grown in importance with the permanent residence there of the kings of England; London housed the centre of government, the law courts and the Inns of Court, and the great town houses of those nobles, leading politicians, office-holders and courtiers, who needed to be close to the sovereign. The presence of the king’s palace at Whitehall, close to such a centre of population — the London metropolitan area contained at least a third of a million inhabitants on the eve of the Civil War — presented peculiar problems, of which the king and his entourage were acutely aware.