1 - Charles I and Public Opinion on the Eve of the English Civil War

Summary

In his biography of Archbishop Laud, penned in the 1650s, Peter Heylyn contrasted Queen Elizabeth's skilful deployment of royal ceremonial to make herself ‘popular’ with ‘her People’ - ‘never Majesty and Popularity were so matched together’, he observed - with James I's and Charles I's failings in this regard. The result was catastrophic: ‘first a neglect of their Persons … and afterwards a mislike of their Government’. Writing on the eve of the Restoration, the marquess of Newcastle agreed that ‘Sere-money doth Every thing’, and therefore advised the soon-to-be Charles II to imitate Queen Elizabeth and show himself ‘Gloryously, to [his] People’; he was adamant, however, that Charles should keep tight control over the press, since among the many errors of ‘these Laste two Raynes’ was allowing ‘Every man’ to become ‘a state man’ by their reading of domestic and foreign newsbooks. A quarter of a century later, licenser of the press and govern¬ment hack Roger L'Estrange concluded that Charles I's error had been not so much allowing the people to read the news as failing to do a good enough job in getting his own views across in the press. ‘The Government itself’, L'Estrange believed, ‘is Answerable in a High Measure for the Distempers of the Multitude’; ‘if the King's Friends would but take Half the Pains, to set them Right, that his Enemies do, to Mislead them, you would find … the Common People as well Dispos'd to Preserve the Government, as they are Otherwise, to Embroil it’.