Lionel Cranfield stands out in a reign full of larger-than-life personalities. Menna Prestwich did much to spotlight his career while simultaneously pillorying most of his contemporaries, particularly James, Salisbury and Villiers. Our sense of the period has changed significantly since her study appeared in 1966, not least in the abandonment of Whig perspectives and hostile stereotypes. Alongside a more favourable historiography, we now seek to understand the dynamic interaction of political ideas and action. There is a great deal of Cranfield the sharp businessman and frustrated reformer in Prestwich's work. However, her Cranfield is as much a boorish bureaucrat as Conyers Read's dull, administrative, William Cecil. Describing Cranfield's association with the Mitre Club and his book purchases, Prestwich wrote that he ‘was not a politician … but a technocrat concerned to get the Crown back on an even financial keel’. Yet crown finance was an element in an ongoing discussion about kingship to which Cranfield contributed as more than just a ‘technocrat’. Cranfield identified himself as the king's governor, but one who acted quite explicitly for the best interests of the realm and invoked the public good in its own right. Cranfield thus initiated an uncompromising attack on the contingent politics of kingship by alter-rex and its impact on crown finance. However, this was only the continuation of Cranfield's long-term assault on the failures of fiscal policy, particularly projects, which began with his work with Northampton and Ellesmere, was pursued in the 1617–18 reform drive, and pushed home in the attack on Mandeville and projectors in the parliament of 1621.