Ship money during the personal rule of Charles I : politics, ideology and the law 1634-1640.

This thesis focuses on ship money as a key to examining politics,
ideology and the law during the Personal Rule of Charles I. The work
is divided into five chapters, with an Introduction and a Conclusion.
The first chapter traces the origins of ship money, places it in the
context of the government's foreign arid domestic concerns, and
analyses the first writ of 1634. The second chapter examines the
development of national ship money from the Privy Council's
perspective of "new counsels", as the great experiment In prerogative
taxation and as a key to the relationship between central and local
governors. This is followed by discussion of the impact of ship
money, emphasising the wide variety of response it evoked and the ways
In which this response changed, placing this in turn against a
background of debate about the nature of authority In the state. The
contemporary accounts for ship money are used as the statistical
base to illustrate changing response to the service arid the political
implications of this. The fourth chapter is concerned with opposition
to ship money, which was shaped by the continued absence of a
parliament during the Personal Rule. All of the different forms this
opposition took, varying from the court to parish level served to
strengthen the importance of law and tradition in English society. It
is argued that the experience of ship money substantiated fears that
there was a conspiracy to subvert the fundamental laws and religion
of England, and contributed significantly to a growth in -political
consciousness across the country and down the social scale. The fifth
chapter covers the period from the summer of 1639 until the
abolition of ship money by the Long Parliament, when politics without
parliament collapsed in spite of the efforts of the government to
unite the country against the Scots.