It is a truism that we can only fully understand the events which gripped England during the 1640s by first understanding the nature of English politics and government in the opening decades of the seventeenth century. But an investigation of Constitutional Royalism underlines this rather obvious point with unusual force. For it represented – in both theory and practice – a very specific response to a particular set of political circumstances. It could only have emerged within those circumstances; and it cannot be explained in isolation from them. The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the broad outline of those circumstances, and thus explore the problem which Constitutional Royalism attempted to resolve. We will look in turn at the nature of the English constitution in the early seventeenth century; at the contrasting ways in which the first two Stuarts managed that constitution; and at the political and religious tensions which had emerged by the later 1630s.

The English monarchy as it had evolved by 1603 was in many ways unusual by European standards. A combination of relatively confined geographical frontiers and the ambition of successive medieval monarchs had enabled the institutions of government and the law to achieve an exceptional degree of centralisation by the end of the Middle Ages. The existence (from the twelfth century) of a law that was genuinely 'common' to almost all of England, and (from the thirteenth) of a Parliament which plausibly claimed to be 'the body of the whole realm' gave England a head start in the process of national consolidation which characterised early modern Europe.