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This book aims to revisit the county study as a way into understanding the dynamics of the English civil war during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a ‘county community’. It investigates the responses of the county’s governing elite and puritan religious establishment to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I’s Personal Rule. The second half of the book provides a rich and detailed analysis of the petitioning movements and side-taking in Cheshire during 1641-42. This important contribution to understanding the local origins and outbreak of civil war in England will be of interest to all students and scholars studying the English Revolution.
This chapter explores the role of dynastic priorities in shaping the gentry’s ambitions and striving for reputation in local society. It looks at the ways in which this shaped their social horizons and sense of kinship, as well as their competition for status.
This chapter explores the sense of identity associated with a sense of belonging to the ‘imagined community’ of Cheshire. It also investigates what it meant to be a country gentleman in this period, how encounters with London and the world of higher education shaped attitudes, and the various meanings of ‘Cheshireness’.
The introduction explores the historiography of the county study. It traces the flowering of the genre in the 1970s and 1980s and describes the new approaches since then that justify revisiting this approach to understanding the English civil war. It then explains the approaches adopted in this book.
This chapter explores the growing partisanship in Cheshire politics from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in October 1641 to the king’s visit to Chester that forced many to choose sides in September 1642. It highlights the roles of anti-popery and anti-puritanism, the emergence of an aggressive group of royalists led by Earl Rivers and Sir Thomas Aston and the unavailing efforts of the middle group to keep the peace and promote accommodation.
This chapter explores the emergence of the middle group in Cheshire politics in the spring and summer of 1641, opposed to Sir Thomas Aston’s pro-episcopacy petition, but then prepared to work with him on a petition in defence of the Book of Common Prayer in December 1641. Over this period those engaged in Cheshire politics sought to present themselves as non-partisan defenders of the county’s interests. But, as a study of Aston’s Remonstrance against presbytery demonstrates, this was a particularly hollow claim in his case.
This chapter explores the petitioning campaign in defence of bishops of January–February 1641 launched by Sir Thomas Aston. It investigates the ways in which this helped to stymie the hopes for a national settlement around the establishment of modified episcopacy that John Ley, in conjunction with allies at Westminster and in the shire, was promoting in the late winter and early spring of 1641.
This chapter explores the system of collusive management established by Bishop Bridgeman and local puritans led by John Ley. It investigates the challenges to this that arose during the 1630s as the Laudian authorities exerted pressure on Bridgeman to enforce anti-puritan measures and as a consequence of the fallout from William Prynne’s visit to Chester in 1637.