Between the Short Parliament and the outbreak of the Civil War, a commitment to the rule of law and an absence of godly zeal continued to characterise those who became Constitutional Royalists. These attitudes informed both their attack on Charles I's recent policies and their subsequent opposition to the reforms sought by Pym's Junto. Certainly they all in varying degrees disliked Laudianism, and were thus able initially to co-operate with the likes of Pym in its destruction. But the reasons for their hostility towards Laud were quite different. Whereas Pym's perception of every issue was coloured by his religion, these figures were driven by a vision of the constitution and the common law which was applied to various policies and institutions, including the Church. They did not feel overriding religious imperatives and wished to make the Caroline Church acceptable not to God but to 'Jacobethan' values.

This in turn reveals the inseparability of their spiritual and secular beliefs. Conrad Russell has written that in seventeenth-century England 'it was as ludicrous to talk of separating Protestantism from politics as it would be now to talk of separating Socialism from politics'. In the case of the Constitutional Royalists this intertwining took the form of a defence both of the law and of the 'religion by law established'. The two attitudes reinforced each other: they were locked in a symbiotic relationship within which they were distinguishable but not separable. Together they came to form the bottom line of the Constitutional Royalist outlook, which was that the common law and God's law were compatible, and that loyalty to the monarch provided the best defence of both.