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for local control. The success of individuals established the roots of regional royalist armies in the north and west but the King’s own field army was slow to build in the Midland counties. It created a federation of regiments under particular commanders as much as an integrated army.47 A map of military outcomes – strongpoints and towns held, musters achieved, armies assembled – is probably not a map of enthusiastic royalism. For both sides mobilization through print, preaching and the use of local institutions as a platform for partisan politics had been crucial. There were more musters by the authority of the ordinance than the Commission of Array, and petitions in support of Parliament were offset more by petitions for accommodation than by positive support for the King against Parliament. There were plenty of signs of reluctance to go to war, but far fewer than many people thought Parliament should concede.48

Two military parties were forming but it is by no means clear that opinion at large was dividing neatly into two camps. There was no National Covenant, but instead a series of contentious slogans – the Prayer Book or Protestation – and attempts to read in natural and supernatural events signs of God’s purposes. Amidst all the shouting it is possible to discern the formulation of coherent, and radical, constitutional theories, but they were not always officially owned, and neither did they command universal assent. Neither was there an equivalent of the Covenanters” Tables: a revolutionary body responsible for the campaign. Instead there were contests for existing institutions of national or local government – Parliament, quarter sessions and assizes. There is very little evidence of pure neutralism, in the sense of a disengagement from the political issues, but there is plenty of evidence of hesitation in committing to one ‘side’ or to resolving the conflict by force. For individuals this posed crises of conscience, in choosing between propositions which had not previously been understood as alternatives, or using established arguments in ways that must have flirted with insincerity. The apparent need to secure political and religious ends had produced a constitutional crisis, and as that crisis played out largely consensual values were presented as alternatives. Potential conflicts in a common-sense system were being forced into the open: quite different meanings were applied to an apparently shared language of politics, with increasingly lethal consequences. But it was both common and understandable to try to contain these conflicts within existing languages of honour, loyalty and legality and so forth.

How people chose was a product of circumstance as well as conviction. Explanations for patterns in these choices vary according to who was making the choice, under what circumstances, and what the question was. Signing a Root and Branch petition in December 1641 might reveal a religious sensibility most likely to lead to an affinity with Parliament, but a lot could have changed by August 1642. It was certainly a different kind of choice from acquiescing in the use of a Grand Jury to support a partisan use of the militia, or to signing up for military service against the King’s army. Different kinds of choice were being made at different moments, and there was always an element of calculation about local conditions, too. It was also the case, of course, that there were more than two sides to the arguments, and many more than two possible positions. In other words, numerous choices confronted people without a clear sense of two sides. Choosing sides in such circumstances was painful and, probably, conditional.

The difficulty and complexity of these choices are made clear for almost any individual whose thoughts about the issues have come down to us. Sir Edmund Verney famously overcame his personal political preferences and joined the King’s army, admitting as much to Hyde: ‘My conscience is only concerned in honour and gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread and served him near thirty years, and