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By Root 1253 0

that if… [the royalists] did attempt any thing there, or read their Commission… they would beat them all down and kill them, aye, if they were all hanged for it; and thereupon betook themselves to arms, both men, women, and children’.60 The earl was more interested in his position in London than in the county, and that may have affected his local influence when he succeeded to the lieutenancy, but this was, nonetheless, a powerful demonstration of popular agency. When the gentry of North Devon came out in support of the Commission of Array it was observed that ‘those men will never get renown and credit again of their Country’.61 Cheshire royalists were clear that they did not enjoy unanimous popular support and when William Davenport asked his tenants for support in the King’s service they wrote that although they would not ‘harbour a disloyal thought’ against the King, ‘yet we dare not lift up our hands against that honourable assembly of parliament, whom we are confidently assured do labour both for the happiness of his Majesty and all the kingdom’. Davenport noted in his diary that the next day, a sabbath no less, ‘not staying or belike caring much for me or my answer’, they had enlisted for parliamentary service.62 In Warwickshire, the godly activist Lord Brooke appealed below the ranks of the gentry, who were disproportionately royalist. In alliance with the middling sort, some of whom can be positively shown to have been ideologically motivated, he took military control in a county where the gentry were twice as likely to be royalist as parliamentarian. In Gloucester, too, activists below the level of the gentry took the initiative as their social superiors hesitated.63

Where relatively free political choices were being made, as in the Stour Valley, they reflected local politics, local histories of economic and social change, and of religious affiliation. Putting together all the evidence for Devon, for example, creates a complex picture but one in which those below the gentry frequently had an important voice. This seems also to have been true elsewhere in the country: contemporary perceptions that particular areas were more prone to support one side or another can be mapped against their religious complexion and that, in turn, seems to have owed something to social structure and patterns of economic activity.64 To put it the other way, though, military command did not depend on ideological unanimity,65 and one universal finding of studies of allegiance is the existence of division in every locality that has been studied.66

Local political ecologies clearly did not make choices inevitable, therefore, although they did create conditions that might make them, on the whole, tend in one direction rather than another. It might be better to think in terms of the responses to particular mobilizations rather than a fixed allegiance to one of two sides. Looking back across the two years of campaigns – the elections, petitioning, promotion of the Protestation, implementation of the Militia Ordinance or the Commissions of Array, and then the raising of money and men for the field armies – it is clear that different questions were being posed at different times. At particular moments MPs, printers, local officeholders and ministers sought to galvanize support for a specific project or policy. They were presented as parts of larger visions, but it was quite possible these various projects might meet different responses in the same places, or for apparently rival mobilizations to succeed in the same localities. There were patterns in the way these things were mobilized – in the networks which promoted them and the ideological temper of the locality in question – but they also have a history, an element of contingency, calculation and mutability. For example, when the King crossed the Pennines seeking support in the summer of 1642, some Derbyshire miners signed up in return for remission of the tithe of tin. Many models of popular allegiance would suggest that these miners should be parliamentarian. They worked as independent