Faction at the Early Stuart Court

For all the administrative developments of the sixteenth century, the government of Stuart England was still the king's business. In a personal monarchy, the art of politics is the art of managing men. And in seventeenth century England, even more than in France and Spain, government depended upon co-operation. English monarchs had no agents of the central government in the locality, nor any standing army to enforce their will. Government rested upon a working relationship between the king and his ministers in Whitehall and the nobility and gentry who wielded influence in the counties. In securing co-operation, the crown could count upon a large measure of natural support: the experience of civil' war in the fifteenth century confirmed a belief that order depended upon strong monarchy; a sense of duty and obligation to the sovereign was strengthened by the association, after the Reformation, of the crown and church; propaganda from the pulpit and the press trumpeted the virtues and necessity of loyalty and obedience. But what converted loyalty and obedience into an identity of interest and a working partnership was patronage.