Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625-1642, by Richard Cust

Abstract

This excellent, challenging study by Richard Cust divides into two sections. The first analyses the policies of Charles in the 1630s that were designed to reaffirm the principles of social hierarchy and to strengthen the aristocracy (chs. 1–3). The second part (chs. 4–5) provides a narrative of the role of the nobility in the political crises that confronted Charles from the mobilisation of troops for the first Bishops’ War (January 1639) to the plunge into Civil War in England in the summer of 1642. The work is a rich repository of challenging ideas based on an enviable command of the sources and a mastery of such technical questions as the use of proxies in the House of Lords. But the bifurcated structure of the work creates problems of overall integration of the argument that Professor Cust does not handle entirely successfully. The second section of the work owes (and acknowledges) much to the studies by John Adamson and Conrad Russell. But while these scholars concentrated on the development of an aristocratic opposition to Charles (an opposition ultimately prepared to lead, at least initially, the Parliament’s mobilisation of forces against the king), Professor Cust examines the other side of the coin—the emergence of a potent group of ‘loyalist peers’. Two-thirds of those peers who declared their sympathies in the summer of 1642 declared for the King. These chapters provide a detailed and telling account of developments at York and Westminster, although this reviewer would stress that many peers ultimately joined the King because they were repelled by the growing radicalism exhibited by Pym and the majority in the Commons rather than the ‘sense of obligation and allegiance’ on which the author dwells. At only one point does Cust’s sure command of the central issues appear to desert him. Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, dominates the initial section of the book, as Charles’s inspiration and coadjutor in the affirmation of traditional social values. He was appointed to command the first campaign against the Scots. He then disappears from the account, apart from a few cameo roles. Cust remarks this ‘political eclipse’ only in a lengthy footnote (p. 244, n. 3), but one might consider that the issue deserves more discussion than this afterthought.