'An Engine Which the World Sees Nothing Of': Revealing Dissent Under Charles I's 'Personal Rule'

In 2000, Jonathan Scott characterized the years of Charles's personal rule by the term the 'peace of silence'. By this he meant that the seeming peace and quiescence of the 1630s was chiefly due to the silencing of dissent. For much of the twentieth century, this 'peace of silence' could be found reflected in the historiography of early Stuart England. Even when the personal rule received its first full-length study - Kevin Sharpe's 1992 The Personal Rule of Charles I - the story of dissent in the 1630s remained largely underexplored. In order to uncover the covert and diffused nature of dissident thought under Charles's personal rule, it is necessary for research to adopt a commensurately localized or decentred frame of reference.Work which has done this has often revealed previously obscured veins of dissent.A future direction for studies of dissident thought and action in the 1630s could lie in network analysis and, in particular, the examination of puritan networks of association.