This study has not been an attempt at comprehensively retelling the story of the English law of treason during the Civil War. Rather, it has endeavored to show how on four important occasions of state political ideas were deployed for the purpose of redescribing and legitimating particular courses of political action. In this way imperfectly shared political ideas and vocabularies came to play a concrete role in the shaping of political life. Without needlessly resurrecting Whig narratives of the rise of absolutism versus the triumph of parliamentary liberty, it is still credible to characterize the English Civil War as a struggle for sovereignty. It was a struggle for the control and ultimately the very definition of the positive powers of the state – powers with which Charles I was no longer trusted after a decade of personal rule that had seen ship money, a disastrous Scottish war, a complete cessation of parliaments, and, most disturbingly, “Popish innovations” in the Church of England.

These positive powers were, generally speaking, law-giving (whether judicial or legislative), war and peace, coinage, taxation, the appointment of ministers and magistrates, and, especially, power to determine the doctrine and discipline of the established church. Legal-constitutional and religious perceptions of misgovernment in the first two years of the Long Parliament were closely intertwined. The religious and the legal-constitutional were hardly, as John Morrill has suggested, “quite separable and distinct perceptions of misgovernment” for William Prynne, Oliver St. John, Samuel Browne, John Hampden, or the subsequent royalist, Edward Bagshawe.