1. This label was not used by S. R. Gardiner. In fact, Gardiner wrote that Charles ‘had no wish to erect a despotism, to do injustice, or to heap up wealth at the expense of his subjects’. Elsewhere he wrote: ‘His was a government not of fierce tyranny, but of petty annoyance.’ History of England from the Accession of fames I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642 (10 vols, London, 1883–4, 1894–6), VIII, 299, 222–3.
2. Compare H. Kearney, The Eleven Years’ Tyranny of Charles I (London, 1962).
3. Morrill wrote that there is a ‘formidable prima facie case of legal tyranny’ against Charles for what he did in the period 1626–9 and ‘very palpable’ evidence for the period 1639–42. ‘Charles I, Tyranny and the English Civil War’, in The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (London, 1993), pp. 291–2.
4. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray (Oxford, 1888), I, 28.
5. James F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. II, Royal Proclamations of King Charles 11625–1646 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 226–8.