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By Root 1214 0

in the localities. Charles won his legal battles but there is little doubt that in some minds the imaginative use of the prerogative to raise money, associated as it was with a reluctance to call parliaments, represented a shift in the balance of the constitution. There is also little doubt that this question of legality hampered administration either because of principled objection or because it offered plausible cover for tight-fistedness. It was probably both, but in either case legal debate gave public airing to constitutional questions, and these were of relevance to lives of the middling sort, and open to discussion at relatively humble levels of English society.

Opposition to Laudianism made a connection between religious and civil liberties – it was partly driven by a fear of clerical authority. The Reformation in England rested on statute and threats to it arising from episcopal authority were easily connected in the minds of the godly with the threats posed by an extensive view of the royal prerogative. It was as much clerical ambition as popery that made Laudianism seem threatening, or at least the religious ‘innovation’ was identified by opponents with an expanding royal prerogative.115

It was not only Puritans who were anxious about Laudianism, therefore. Central aspects of Calvinism in England appealed beyond the ranks of those known as Puritans and it is not possible to draw a distinction between hotter Protestants and others simply on the grounds of their attitude towards Calvinism: the doctrine of predestination had held together people who were divided on questions of ceremony and church government. By the same token, it was not only Puritans who might sympathize with the plight of the Covenanters – Calvinists who were similarly offended by Laudian policy – and such sympathy as there was did not necessarily depend on an admiration of Scottish practice either. Most English people would probably not have willingly signed up to join the church of Alexander Henderson, but many of them might see in that church a potential ally against Laudianism.

For men schooled in English history and Renaissance values, as local magistrates were, there were abstract principles at stake here. Classical values of republican virtue, manifest in active citizenship, were widely known among the English gentry; so too was a deep attachment to the ‘ancient constitution’, unique liberties which formed the inheritance of Englishmen, and which they owed a profound duty to protect. Of course, their opposition might arise from narrow local interest or even self-interest and personal ambition, but the ethos and practice of Stuart government dignified their opinions as crucial to the health of government. Renaissance republicans were not necessarily more altruistic than twenty-first-century democrats, but the principles they asserted still mattered to the conduct of government. Informed local officeholders, when making judgements about particular policies, were equipped with the knowledge and understanding to arrive at an independent view about the direction of religious and political affairs. Their education might tell them that this independent view, their ‘discretion’, was a personal virtue essential to their public role.

English government depended on active involvement, sometimes informed explicitly by classical histories, which prompted action for the public good, but which might be critical of the crown. Felton had demonstrated the existence of these ideals of active Christian citizenship, capable of opposing the King’s favourite and military commander in the interests of the commonwealth. His actions also demonstrated the tensions caused by Caroline policies in the fraught conditions of Reformation Europe. These elements of Caroline political culture, and Caroline politics, were exaggerated by the personalities – Felton’s own, the melancholy loner, and Buckingham’s – and by war, financial problems and meetings of fractious parliaments. The 1630s were calmer – with no Buckingham, parliaments or war and a lower intensity of public