Having painted a broad-brush view of the early Stuart political and religious landscape, it is now time to add a series of cameos portraying individual reactions to it. This chapter will examine the early careers of those who later emerged as prominent Constitutional Royalists during the 1640s. It will analyse how these people perceived the developments described in chapter 2 and how they responded to them. What, if anything, did they have in common during the 1620s and 1630s? Did their backgrounds, beliefs or careers display shared characteristics which enable us to forecast their convergence on the eve of the Civil War? Can we establish any predictors of Constitutional Royalist attitudes, or was this a purely ad hoc political coalition? We will look at each of our ten leading Constitutional Royalists in turn, and analyse their political and religious attitudes, their public careers, their family backgrounds, their social and economic circumstances and their personalities. No infallible predetermining factors can be identified; but some intriguing patterns do emerge none the less.

Let us follow seventeenth-century precedence, and take the nobility first. James Stuart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, was born on 6 April 1612, a cousin of James I and Charles I. He had a claim to the Scottish but not the English throne, and from the start his royal blood was a crucial influence on his career. James I was sponsor at his christening, and later became his legal tutor and guardian.