David Cressy's new book, Charles I and the People of England, offers something of a “prequel” to his earlier England on Edge (2005), which tackled the “revolution before the Revolution” (426)—the years immediately preceding the outbreak of civil war. Here Cressy's focus is on the popular reaction to Charles I's rule in the years before the summoning of the Long Parliament. It also shares much with Cressy's recent Dangerous Talk (2010) in its attentiveness to the voices of plebeian dissent captured in seditious words cases.

In contrast to Dangerous Talk, however, Cressy here is interested in listening to the voices not only of those who wished to insult or scold Charles I but also of those who wished to offer him counsel. Lucy Martin was one of these “importunate petitioners” (chapter 6) who delivered her message to the king by wrapping it around a stone and throwing it towards Charles as he listened to the Lenten sermons at court in April 1626. Her story, which opens the book and is referred to repeatedly through the text, effectively captures many of the themes and arguments of Cressy's work. Martin's intervention breached contemporary gender norms, as well as court etiquette, but her message, a confused mixture of the personal, political, and providential, was intended for the king's benefit, that he might avert the terrible divine judgement that Martin saw looming over both monarch and nation. Martin was interrogated by the privy council, demonstrating that popular interventions were not simply ignored by Charles I's regime, but their response was to send her to Bridewell to be whipped for her “scandalous” (5) message.

Cressy elaborates on the relationship between Charles I and his people in nine thematic chapters. The first offers a wonderfully rich and yet concise overview of English society in the early seventeenth century. The remaining eight tackle various flashpoints during Charles's reign, from the controversy over his coronation oath and its obligations, to the popular response to his religious policies and the crown's drives to reform popular culture through the reissued Book of Sports in 1633. All of these subjects will be familiar to historians of the period but, rendered from the perspective of the 98 percent of the population who were not part of the social or political elite, are given fresh life in this book. Cressy's eye for vivid detail, evident in his earlier works, also remains undimmed: from the cleric with a side line in magical dentistry to the crown's right to purchase bears at discount and Grace Cary's bloody premonition of the regicide a full decade before the axe fell on Charles I's neck.

Successfully targeting a general as well as academic audience, Cressy manages the difficult task of delivering a readable and highly engaging text without relying on the narrative form. However, while the book is aimed at nonspecialists, it makes some important interventions in recent historiographical debates. Chapter 5 in particular, “An Accessible Monarch?,” takes issue with the major bone of contention in recent analyses of Charles I's kingship: was he an isolated and aloof aesthete, deaf to the concerns of his people, or, in fact, an able and energetic monarch whose troubles were not (or at least not all) of his own making? In this chapter, Cressy takes issue with the late Mark Kishlansky's argument that Charles I's extensive travels during his reign demonstrated he was an accessible monarch. Cressy argues convincingly that totting up the miles traveled is not enough: where and for how long the king went on his progresses must also be ascertained. This is an important point and Cressy provides plenty of detail both concerning the king's itineraries through his reign and of public reactions to his peregrinations. Cressy demonstrates that Charles spent only a small proportion of the year traveling and that on these progresses rarely ventured further north than the Midlands. When Charles did have to visit Scotland for his coronation in 1633, Cressy notes, the return trip from the Scottish borders to London was completed in only four days, hardly indicating a desire to linger in his northern kingdom. This, as Cressy puts it, was “drive-by kingship” (168): leisurely meanderings that might put the king in contact with the people of the provinces were avoided. Equally, in chapter 6, on popular petitioning, as Cressy notes, addresses a subject that has largely only been tackled for the period after 1640. In this section, therefore, Cressy gives testimony to lively petitionary culture in England before the summoning of the Long Parliament.

The one major shortcoming of the book is that for all Cressy's rich insights and lucid prose, his argument remains somewhat impressionistic and the evidence to support it largely anecdotal. We do not, for example, learn whether indictments for seditious words increased during Charles I's personal rule or, similarly, whether the pace of petitioning activity quickened during these years. Nonetheless, a strong picture does develop of Charles I's kingship as revealed through his relationship with his people. It is a vision of the king that also complements important recent work by Tim Harris on Charles I and his engagement with public opinion (“Charles I and Public Opinion on the Eve of the English Civil War,” in The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited, ed. Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell [2013], 1–26). Harris argues that the king made surprisingly sophisticated attempts to win over the public. The problem, as Harris sees it, was that this early modern public relations was in the service of royal policies that were fundamentally unpopular and on which Charles was unwilling to compromise until it was too late. Similarly, Cressy's Charles I's is a king almost too ready to intervene, and yet whose public interventions reveal a deep disdain for the popular voice and an ingrained hostility to listening to what it had to say. The tragedy of Charles I, as Cressy shows us, is that while some of his subjects denounced him as a purblind fool there remained many others, like Lucy Martin, who sought an audience to save not only the kingdom but also the king.