The Privy Council and Problems of Enforcement in the 1620s

Abstract

It has become the fashion amongst historians seeking to explain the collapse of early Stuart rule to ignore the center and to consider instead the alienation of the local communities and their leaders, on whose co-operation the execution of the crown's policy depended. G. E. Aylmer has become something of a lone voice in the respect that he accords to central government, and even he deliberately and cautiously refrained from commenting in his magisterial work on the efficiency and impact of the Caroline government. Scholars attempting to analyze the crown's problems in 1640 are increasingly turning to the concept of local inertia. Conrad Russell stresses declining collaboration between the crown and the parliamentary gentry in his discussion of the fate of parliamentary supply. Others in local studies have castigated the local magistrates for their destructive fiscal role, for lightening their own burdens, and looking on complacently when their neighbors and inferiors did the same. The gentry failed to give enough in parliament, and then ensured that the sums were even smaller when collected. Anthony Fletcher's verdict on the selfishness of the Sussex gentry is even more resounding than Russell's on the obtuseness of the parliamentary gentry: “The magnate gentry must bear full responsibility for the collapse of the subsidy as an effective fiscal instrument … as the King's servants in the county [they] acquiesced when the community at large followed their example and put the protection of their own pockets before the financial needs of the central government.”