The Practice of Politics: The English Civil War and the ‘Resolution’ of Henrietta Maria and Charles I

Bulman attempts to prove that it is possible to locate and describe historically specific styles of political decision-making. It does so by recovering a historically specific style of decision-making that Henrietta Maria and Charles I employed to confront the outbreak of the English Civil War. He also also examines the letters that Henrietta Maria wrote to Charles I between Feb 25, 1642 (when she arrived in The Hague to raise money for her husband) and Jul 13, 1643 (when she finally rejoined Charles in England at Edge Hill). During this period, the queen was working hard at a distance to advise and assist her husband in his efforts to invent and raise a royalist party. She often felt compelled to explain and justify her methods and concerns in these letters because she feared that Charles was abandoning the couple's preferred style of decision-making for a competing ones which she dubbed the politics of "base souls"