Accounts of the reign of Charles I are all but unanimous that 1625 was a turning point. A major reason for the change, it is agreed, was the new court's commitment to ‘Arminianism’. That commitment has, indeed, been made to bear an increasing weight of interpretation by ‘revisionist’ historians. Stressing the relative weakness of early Stuart Parliaments, they have denied that they were set on an inevitable collision course with the monarchy, and have argued that Charles and Buckingham both did all that could have reasonably been expected in trying to work with them. The breakdown of 1629 was therefore not necessary but contingent: the result not of intractable differences of political ideology dividing the court, but of the strains of war on an antiquated political machine, together with the ‘rise of Arminianism’. Even those unconvinced by the revisionists’ arguments have not questioned the Arminian orientation of the court: they have tended, rather, to emphasize its political implications by claiming that the court clergy who were committed to it also encouraged the king in his inclinations to absolutism and in his hostility to Parliaments. The contribution of this chapter to that debate will be to re-examine the evidence for what most historians take for granted: that Charles I and his court were ideologically committed to ‘Arminianism’.

It was already evident that the new king inherited a deeply divided court, and that the tensions were political as well as religious. The alienation of Archbishop Abbot over the Spanish match went to the heart of that primate's conception of Protestant orthodoxy, but it also embraced constitutional issues.