Book Reviews : The King's Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625-1642. By G. E. AYL- MER. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Pp. xii, 487. $8.75.)

• Date: 01 December 1961
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400412
• Published date: 01 December 1961
• Author: Colin Rhys Lovell
• Subject Matter: Articles

964
showing the electoral districts and the relative strength of the key parties in the
January 2, 1956, and November 23, 1958, elections, are appended to this most
informative and interesting study.
HEINZ R. HINK
Arizona State University
The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625-1642. By G. E. AYL-
MER. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Pp. xii, 487. $8.75.)
This volume may not equal the towering monument of Tout’s studies on
medieval administration, but it is still a very sizable plinth. Ignoring the Bucking-
hams, Lauds, and Straffords, and most of all the Charleses, Professor Aylmer
looks closely at the last days of Tudor administrative practice before the deluge
of the Civil War. Using both descriptive and tabular techniques, he combines
institutional and personal attributes of the system to show an intensely personal,
almost &dquo;cozy&dquo; administration. Men entered it usually from the ranks of the gen-
try not only from the profit motive, but more importantly, to acquire further
social status. Technically all the king’s personal servants, most of them actually
felt that their loyalty lay to the man who had got them the job, often their im-
mediate administrative superior, who, for his part, felt free to hire whom and as
he would. Understandably, such a system produced the attitude that &dquo;office&dquo; was
in the same property class as &dquo;freehold,&dquo; which a man owned. Purchase and
sale were equally proper for either, even as Sir Francis Bacon pointed out. It is
fascinating to read of the quite legal creation of reversionary rights to the profits
of an office, or their standing as legally valid security for private mortgages.
From the modern view the weakness of the system was its insistence that
offices carry low salaries for their holders, who should actually be paid in fees by
people using their services. However, for men who were just dimly and grudg-
ingly seeing the outlines of the modern state, this view was...