Charles I and the People of England. David Cressy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. ix + 448 pp. $49.95.

Abstract

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