Previous studies on the Civil War in Lancashire have tended to concentrate on social and economic issues with emphasis on the gentry. No attempt has been made to examine the war in the county in a wider context. Here the integration of political, socio-economic, administrative, and military elements, that is war effort, is analysed over the period 1642-1651. Unusually the thesis treats the war effort of both sides, thereby aiming to illuminate the reasons for the conflict's eventual outcome. A wide range of sources is utilised with an emphasis on the extensive collection SP 28 in the Public Record Office and a database of over 770 Civil War officers. Recent scholarship-has suggested that the cohesive nature of Parliament's approach to the war left it well placed to employ local resources as part of a wider war effort. In contrast, it has been thought that the weight Royalists placed on personal service due to Charles I denuded the localities of resources and fatally undermined their capability to make a meaningful, sustained contribution to the king's cause. Lancashire's experience endorses the general thrust of these arguments, yet modification is needed. Parliament's policy of encouraging co-operation between centre and county was only occasionally apparent, largely during times of extreme danger. At other periods the attempts to introduce administrative and financial innovation and maximise the county's involvement were delayed by popular intransigence, the moderate county committee's reluctance to endanger county security and Royalist resistance. After Parliament's initial triumph in 1646 popular resistance grew over the continuance of war-inspired financial impositions and the depredations of unpaid soldiery. The war of 1648 represented a temporary hiatus in the process by which the ruling traditional elite, largely identified with Presbyterianism, was eradicated by centralisation and the rise of local radicals. For the Lancashire Royalists the loss in October 1642 of some 1,100 men to the main army was a handicap. Just as serious was incompetent leadership, the failure to establish meaningful association, and financial weakness. The scale and significance of further departures, mainly of Roman Catholics, has been largely ignored. The early collapse of independent Lancashire Royalism was crucial in that subsequent military activity was pursued by a few irreconcilables and hard-nosed professional soldiers, insensitive to local Royalists. The Lancashire Royalists made a great contribution to the national war effort but the consequence was the woeful feebleness of Royalism in the county itself. Parliament's victory in Lancashire was based upon support from the centre, superior manpower and logistics, substantial sequestration receipts administered by a mix of army officers and plebian officials and a measure of organisational modernisation. The patent weakness of the Lancashire Royalists, for whom the support of Roman Catholics was a mixed blessing, enabled Parliament, despite a multiplicity of problems, to emerge victorious.

Economic historians conventionally date the origins of the English fiscal state to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. By European standards this was a belated innovation; the Spanish, Dutch and French had developed effective methods of debt service around a century earlier, based upon high tax revenues and borrowing. This study will explore the reasons why the English lagged behind their rivals in developing a fiscal state. England was not a poor country, and the reasons for its low tax base and poor creditworthiness were largely political. However, political historians, accustomed to analysing texts, rarely appreciate the significance of figures. This study will use financial data to contextualise debates about Crown finances, showing that a significant proportion of the political nation was dissatisfied with important areas of domestic and foreign policy. However, a political culture which sought to establish a consensus encouraged them to subvert, rather than confront the regime; keeping the Crown underfunded was an effective way of achieving this goal. The 'power of the purse' is usually interpreted as Parliament's propensity to vote inadequate sums of direct taxation; but it included the ability to block attempts at financial reform, often portrayed as arbitrary government. When King Charles implemented significant reforms despite widespread criticism, he raised sufficient revenue to govern without recourse to Parliament. However, this undermined the consensus on which his regime relied, and became a key factor in its abrupt collapse in 1640.

This thesis addresses the archaeology of destruction and the challenges and opportunities it presents to archaeologists. It primarily focuses on the recording, analysis, and interpretation of destroyed buildings, and how the overall life cycle of these buildings affects our understanding of the destruction evidence. At its core are two fundamental arguments. The first is that the deliberate destruction of a society's material culture is a complex social phenomenon with a variety of causes and effects, all of which deserve to be examined closely by the archaeological community. The second is that the methodological challenges posed are so complex that they require a multidisciplinary approach utilising a range of subjects including-but not limited to-history, structural and explosives engineering, building construction, and conservation. These themes are explored by looking at one particularly misunderstood type of destruction: the slighting of castles in the English Civil War, specifically between 1642 and 1660. While the word 'slighting' is generally used as a synonym for destruction, its application to castles has been problematic as interpretations of what this means vary widely. In the absence of a universally recognised definition, this thesis has provided one: the non-siege, intentional damage during times of war of high status buildings, their surrounding landscape or works, and/or their contents and features. In the course of expanding the definition of slighting, several common assumptions regarding the motivation for slighting are challenged. The most prevalent is that slighting was simply a fiscal and military policy by Parliament to save money and 'deny use to the enemy'. Instead, other social, religious, and political factors are shown to be equally if not more significant causes for destruction, including local rivalries, social climbing, gender tensions, property speculating, and religious turmoil. The conclusion is that communities both benefited and suffered from slighting, and played active roles in instigating, stopping, and interacting with the destruction in their midst.

Aristocratic women were integral to Jacobean court life and actively involved in royal service, in the ceremonial of court and state, in the pursuit of financial benefit, in marriage strategies and court family networks, and in court, foreign and religious politics and patronage. The time scale of the thesis encompasses James VI's reign as James I of England, 1603-1625, as court life for aristocratic women did not end with the death of his queen consort, Anne of Denmark. As ladies-in-waiting and/or the kin or clients of powerful men at court, aristocratic (and other elite women) could exercise a degree of power, authority and influence and participate both formally (through their Privy Chamber posts) and informally in the life and functions of the Jacobean court. This study moves beyond, reappraises, and revises recent published work on the Jacobean court by literary scholars, which focuses on the court masque, literary pursuits and cultural patronage of a small number of aristocratic court women, and extends recent published work by historians who have included women in their studies of the Jacobean court. Together with the insights gained through extensive new archival research, this study provides a broader and deeper understanding than hitherto available, of the significant roles these women could play at court and the place of the court in their lives. Moreover, this view of the Jacobean court from a female perspective reveals much about that institution, about the nature of politics and patronage beneath the level of high politics and the careers of great ministers and royal favourites, and about early seventeenth century British aristocratic society and its relationship with the monarchy.

This PhD dissertation is a biographical study of the life and political career of the second earl of Salisbury (1591-1668). It examines his early life and the preparation for the aristocratic role he would be expected to play. It looks at the early influences he experienced in his highly politicised home and also from Pembroke, Raleigh, Harrington, Buckingham, as well as in the courts of King James and Prince Henry. The second and third chapters discuss how he dealt with the deaths of his father and Prince Henry, which came at a crucial point in his life. He had to finish the first earl's building programme and settle the debts that had been incurred by him. These chapters also look at the care he gave his family and staff; the rationalisation of his inheritance; and his success in passing on a large patrimony to his family. The final four chapters deal with his long political career. They look at the difficulties he faced to get a Court appointment, the problems he experienced with Buckingham and the troubles he met later with King Charles's personal rule and his anti-Calvinist policies. He was a loyal courtier, who also served as a competent Lord Lieutenant for thirty years and a Privy Counsellor for fifteen. Despite this he displayed an independent streak and was prepared to stand his ground when the occasion demanded, although he was cautious enough to be pragmatic where his sovereign was involved and did not risk political suicide. He could not be counted as a front rank political leader, but he was able, because he did not allow himself to be identified with any faction, to influence those lords who occupied the middle ground. In the fraught years of 1641-2 he tried to bring the king and Parliament together, even risking his inheritance by going to York contrary to a Lords' order. When civil war broke out he continued to work to bring the two sides together, whilst maintaining his loyalty to Parliament. After Charles's execution he served Parliament in the Commons and also in Cromwell's Council of State. The thesis brings out Salisbury's devotion to Calvinism and the part this played in his actions. It also deals with the stain that his reputation has suffered from historians who have neglected him and accepted unthinkingly the royalist Clarendon's judgement. Whilst researching this thesis the rapid introduction of digitisation has seen an increase in the material available to the student at home. This has increased the hours available for study and decreased travelling costs. I have found this beneficial but can see that younger students would not enjoy the increased isolation.

This thesis is about how and why Restoration-period political culture changed in England in the run up to the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681. It argues that it was the tension between Charles II’s desire and attempts to rule personally and his opponents’ desire and attempts to prevent him from doing so, which drove politics and change during the 1670s. It suggests that while people in the Restoration period were concerned with developing, representing and debating issues, ideas and identities, that intellectual process was only one part of political culture. The other was a much broader practical concern with how those ideas could be turned into reality through policymaking and practice. This thesis aims to explore these more practical concerns and to show that it was the contest for the power to turn ideas into policy and then to turn that policy into practice which proved decisive in the gradual breakdown of relations between the king and his opponents throughout the 1670s and in the final dissolution of parliament in 1681. In order to explore this other practical side of political culture, which has not yet received a great deal of scholarly attention, the thesis will draw upon methods and source material outside of those traditionally used by political historians and in doing so will try to make a meaningful contribution to an emerging historiographical trend, perhaps best described as the ‘process turn’.

This thesis examines the ways that English royalists negotiated the challenges of defeat in the Interregnum. It explores how royalists living in England accommodated to the demands imposed by successive Interregnum governments, how far and in what ways they were able to maintain their loyalty to the Stuarts, and how they responded to the practicalities of living with a proscribed political identity. It reassesses existing views of defeated royalists and their experiences during this time, and offers significant evidence to prove that many of these long-established understandings have been based on preconceived notions about forms of royalist behaviour which are the product of misleading bifurcations in the ways royalism has been traditionally defined. Using both traditional historical sources as well as literary materials, this thesis reveals that much can be gained from comparing the different ways that royalists represented themselves both privately and publically, and to different audiences. It offers essential re-examinations of a series of prominent royalist experiences that have either received limited study or distorted analysis, including oath-taking in defeat, the process of compounding for sequestered estates, the interpretation of royalist 'retirement', and the ways that royalists fostered politicised connections using correspondence and the assistance of intermediaries. In all, it documents a series of hitherto unrecognised strategies that English royalists employed to accept degrees of partial reintegration with Interregnum governance, which simultaneously protected their royalist identity and reputation. By revealing the ways that royalists achieved this, both in the approaches they took, and the level of success that they found, this thesis adds significantly to current understandings of Interregnum royalism and the contours of post-Civil War reintegration.

This dissertation explores how England's overseas companies between 1601 and 1698 through the use of religious governance regulated the behaviour of their personnel and peoples and developing three models to do so, pastoral, theocratic and ecumenical. It asks three central questions. First, how did corporate flexibility facilitate the establishment of overseas companies as distinguishable bodies that operated as extensions of English government abroad? Second, how did companies develop distinct ways of controlling the religious behaviour of the English settlers and the peoples who came under their jurisdiction, including Native Americans, Muslims, Hindus, Catholics, Armenians and Jews. Third, in what way did the models of governance interact, and how did they influence debate in England? Chapter one examines the traces the foundational and influential use of religious governance in England's early attempts to colonise Ireland and Virginia between 1606 and 1624. Chapter two examines the development of corporate religious governance in the Atlantic following the VC, focusing on the Massachusetts Bay Company's (MBC) member's denominational allegiance in influencing the development of the theocratic model of governance that the company would adopt. Chapter three moves away from an analysis of communities assessing the role of individual agents, in particular chaplains in the East India Company (EIC) and Levant Company (LC) from 1601 to 1660, and how the two companies developed a form of pastoral governance to establish control of their corporate personnel in the religiously diverse environments. Chapter four returns to the MBC focuses on the role of the individual in transporting theocratic governance across the Atlantic alongside communal responsibility in decline of the MBC's theocratic governance between 1639 and 1684. Chapter five continues to build upon the differences in global corporate governance highlighting how the development of ecumenical governance in the EIC in the post-braganza era (1661-1698) and how through a policy of moderate religious inclusion can highlight how these models could ensure corporate success, rather than failure. This dissertation provides a new way of understanding government formation and corporate identity in the early modern era, and how religious governance shaped the behaviour of English expansion in the seventeenth century.

This thesis examines the ways in which mo~ t~<fi~~es ~~~ archaeology. together with expertise from disciplines such as ballistics. can be integrated with the methods of military history to advance the understanding of historic battles. Warfare in seventeenth-century England provides the chronological and spatial scope of the study. First the history of past investigation of battlefields is reviewed. In the light of this assessment a new overarching methodology for the investigation of historic battlefields is defined. Techniques of reconstructing the historic terrain are described. ' . together with the ways in which the evidence from the primary sources for the battles can be used to place the military events more accurately within its contemporary landscape. The hypotheses develop,ed by such work are 'then the subject of validation and enhancement through analysis of the 'physical evidence left by the battles themselves. The methods of surveying and analysing the battle archaeology are defined. with particular attention being given to the lead bullet. which is the' primary component of the archaeology of seventeenth-eentury battles. Met.ho~s of analysis are desCl'!bed and a classification of bUII~t attributes is presented. supported by the results of new experimental weapon firing. The whole t~partite methodology is then tested through a major new field investigation and documentary stUdy of the' terrain. battle archaeology and military hist~fY of the 1642 battle of E~gehill. a major action of the English Civil War. This allows the effectiveness of the methodology in tackling the problems posed by a major battle to be assessed. Finally there is a consideration of the wider potentials of the methodology for the study of battles and other fields of conflict in' earlier and later centuries in England and more generally in Europe.

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