Introduction: themes, debates, sources

Abstract

'Constitutional Royalism' is one of the most familiar yet least often examined of all the political labels found in the historiography and literary criticism of the English Revolution. The term is most commonly used to describe a group of moderate Royalists who became prominent among Charles Fs advisers in 1641–2. The leading exponents are usually identified as Edward Hyde, Viscount Falkland and Sir John Culpepper; and their ideas are thought to revolve around a concept of limited monarchy which ruled under the law, and a wish to preserve the existing structures of the Church of England. These were the people who guided Charles I's more conciliatory actions in 1641–2, and whose political attitudes found their classic expression in the King's Answer to the XIX Propositions . Neither historical nor literary scholars appear to doubt the existence of Constitutional Royalism as a phenomenon during the twelve months before the outbreak of the English Civil War. But all this in turn prompts two further questions. First, how numerous and how co-ordinated were the Constitutional Royalists in 1641–2? We as yet know very little about whether there were other figures of similar outlook beyond the three leading characters, or about the extent to which they operated as a coherent political grouping. We immediately face a serious problem of taxonomy. How do we decide who should be classified as a Constitutional Royalist? The obvious danger is that of deciding in advance who should be in our sample, analysing their beliefs, and then using the results to define Constitutional Royalism. Such an argument would be tautological.