On November 9, 1605, the warden and fellows of All Souls College wrote to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, in some distress, and, as they thought, on a matter of considerable importance. Then, as now, they elected fellows at the beginning of November. On this occasion, they believed it essential to explain that they had turned down a nominee of Salisbury and the king; the man had failed to turn up for examination, and the college nervously pointed out that it did have its academic standards. But it could assure Salisbury that another candidate of the king's was safely in. This letter is the first of many ironies of the Gunpowder Plot. It was not unusual for colleges to worry about the pressure applied by the crown and its leading ministers to their selection procedures. That this anxiety should have preoccupied this institution at this particular time is nevertheless a delightful example of the differing priorities of philosophers and kings.

For the letter was written four days after men had learned the stupendous news that the king, the queen, at least one of their children, the lords temporal and spiritual, the judges, the leading members of the House of Commons, any foreign ambassadors present, and no doubt many others as well—King James put the figure at thirty thousand—were to be blown up by the Catholics.

In a sermon preached at Hampton Court on September 30, 1606, John King proclaimed that “our Solomon or Pacificus liveth.” James I had “turned swords into sithes and spears into mattocks, and set peace within the borders of his own kingdoms and of nations about us.” His care for the “Church and maintenance to it” was celebrated. All that remained was for his subjects to lay aside contentious matters and join “with his religious majesty in propagation of the gospel and faith of Christ.” The sermon was the last in a series of four preached—and later printed—at the king's behest before an unwilling audience of Scottish Presbyterians. The quartet outlined James's standing as a ruler by divine right and laid down the conceptual foundations of the Jacobean church. A godly prince, exercising his divinely ordained powers as head of church and state, advised by godly bishops, themselves occupying offices of apostolic origin and purity, would preside over a new golden age of Christian peace and unity. A genuinely catholic Christian doctrine would be promulgated and maintained; peace and order would prevail. James I was rex pacificus, a new Constantine, a truly godly prince. As he himself observed in 1609, “my care for the Lord's spiritual kingdom is so well known, both at home and abroad, as well as by my daily actions as by my printed books.”

The Forced Loan of 1626–27 has traditionally been regarded as one of the milestones of early seventeenth-century politics. The great nineteenth-century Whig historian S. R. Gardiner saw it as the product of “new counsels” by which Charles I came increasingly to rely on the royal prerogative, and he depicted the opposition to this as a principled defense of Englishmen's liberties. Others writing in the same tradition have generally echoed these views. Thus the loan has been presented as the climax to a first stage of struggle between “Court” and “Country” or as a staging post on the “high road to Civil War.” Latterly, however, this verdict has come into question.

With the work of “localist” and “revisionist” historians we have come to appreciate more clearly the extent of attachment to the local community and the continual striving toward consensus in relations between king and subject. This has led to a general revaluation of what have traditionally been regarded as clashes of principle. Local historians have stressed that opposition to taxes generally owed far more to backsliding and provincial inertia than to any concern for constitutional propriety. And a greater understanding of the problems of administration—particularly in wartime—has led to a recognition that government decision making was often a reflex action, prompted by the immediate need to make ends meet. These insights have been incorporated into the work of Conrad Russell, who has provided the most recent assessment of the loan.

Debate over the nature of central-local relationships has played an important part in recent discussion of the origins and course of the English Civil War. It is an oversimplification, but not a caricature, to say that two distinct sets of views are current. The first, and in many ways the most consistent and coherent, arguments are those found in the work of the local historians who have developed the idea of the county community as the most important focus for the activities of the provincial gentry and, in more general form, in Morrill's The Revolt of the Provinces and Hutton's The Royalist War Effort. In this work a clear separation is seen between local and national issues or preoccupations. The majority of the county gentry, and still more the ranks below them, were ill informed about national developments and concerned with the activities of central government mainly as they affected the stability of their local communities. Only a small minority of activists were genuinely committed to the Royalist or the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War; the most characteristic provincial response to the divisions of 1642 was reluctance to become involved, as shown both in widespread neutralism among individuals and in collective attempts at local pacification. Gradually the whole of England was drawn, willy-nilly, into the war, but allegiance was determined largely by contingent military factors: the proximity of London or of the king's army or the relative effectiveness of the small numbers of local partisans.