The four peers who acted as the King's pallbearers, together with Dorset and Seymour, remained a close-knit political grouping throughout the 1640s. But that decade saw a gradual disintegration of the broad Constitutional Royalist front which had existed in the summer of 1642. From 1645–6 onwards, Hyde was exiled and isolated; Culpepper remained influential but henceforth in association with Jermyn and Ashburnham; and Strangways was in prison. The Constitutional Royalists increasingly formed discrete clusters of individuals, small political constellations which had similar values, but scarcely collaborated with each other. They were ideologically aligned, but not politically co-ordinated.

This brings us to the question of how far there was a coherent theory of Constitutional Royalism during these years. This chapter will suggest that a number of writers advanced ideas very similar to those of the King's moderate advisers. Eight authors stand out as the leading exponents of Constitutional Royalist theory: John Bramhall, Sir Charles Dallison, Dudley Digges the younger, Henry Feme, James Howell, David Jenkins, Jasper Mayne and Sir John Spelman. None of these was a member of the Long Parliament, nor were they ever involved in peace negotiations. The majority of them had works published at Oxford during the first Civil War. These were nearly all produced by the printer to Oxford University, Leonard Lichfield, who also printed the King's declarations and proclamations during these years. It would be unwise to attribute much significance to this beyond the fact that Lichfield clearly did not print things which the Court found objectionable: writers at Oxford would naturally have used Lichfield and this fact does not in itself reveal much about their attitudes or connections.