I need not complain of the times; every traveler tells them; they are as clear to see as an Angel in the sun. (Henry Osborne, October 1642)In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn valley, northwest of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, became the site of a grisly spectacle. Richard Dowdeswell, a steward of the property, described the scene in a letter to Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, the absentee owner resident in Great St. Bartholomew in London. Dowdeswell delivered terrifying news of how “a rising of neighbors about Corse Lawn” destroyed more than 600 of Middlesex's deer in a “rebellious, riotous, devilish way,” a hideous consequence of what Dowdeswell termed “this time of liberty.” Dowdeswell rode to the scene from his estate at Pull Court, a few miles from the chase, and “appeased the multitude, yet some scattering companies gave out in alehouses that they would not only destroy the remainder of deer but rifle your Lordship's house at Forthampton and pull it down to the ground and not let a tree or bush stand in all the chase.” The deer massacre became an assault on the chase, the forest, and the manor house of Forthampton, an estate close to the chase but not included in the meets and bounds of the forest. Middlesex's tenant at Forthampton Court, his brother-in-law Henry Osborne, prudently moved his household to Gloucester until Dowdeswell acquired a formal statement of protection from the earl of Essex to defend the forest, the deer left in the chase, and the house in Forthampton.
Just before his execution in 1649, Charles I addressed a crowd of his subjects on the "liberty and freedom" of "the people" of England, defining these as the "having" of laws rather than the making of them, and enshrining in English popular royalism a notion of "the people" as recipients rather than agents of government. In a sense, the subject of Charles I and the People of Englandthe myriad relations of king and people in early Stuart Englandreads the history backwards, from Charles's speech on the scaffold to his accession in the very different political environment of 1625. David Cressy frames the study as "a social history of early Stuart kingship, a political history of popular culture, and a cultural history of English politics in the second quarter of the seventeenth century" (7). One of the book's important descriptive arguments concerns the sheer complexity of interaction between the Crown and its more than four million subjects, presented in chapters on ceremonies, including the 1626 coronation; on petitions and court cases; on religious proclamations and performances; and on royal progresses, all in recognition of the extent to which most early modern English encounters with royal authority were encounters with the Crown, not with the royal person. Subject and sovereign may have been "clean different things," as Charles said on the scaffold, but in this sense they had come into increasingly regular contact during the early seventeenth century. In general, Cressy supports the view that this growing familiarity with royal authority and symbols in their institutional settings did not produce a stable relationship between Charles and his subjects, tending to generate more opposition and even resistanceespecially on
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