King Charles i was a difficult man to know. Divided by rank even from his closest associates, Charles's personality was also less distinctive than, say, his father's, whose preoccupations and salty language generated endless contemporary anecdotes. Nevertheless, speculation on ‘the man’ Charles Stuart – what sort of man and king he was – has become a cottage industry among historians trying to measure his share of blame for the collapse of his kingdoms into civil war.

David Cressy presents his spirited and exhaustively-researched new book as a contribution to this debate. In fact, Charles I and the people of England has very little to say about Charles i as a person; this is one of the book's primary virtues, as the sources for Charles's personal conduct are polemical and difficult to use. Cressy's intervention is more historiographical, and goes like this: some scholars have tried to defend Charles i by arguing that he was not as aloof, unpopular, inaccessible and unreasonable as is often assumed. A few – or at least the late Kevin Sharpe – sometimes suggested that negative impressions of Charles were anachronistic errors, constructed after the collapse of his reign by his parliamentarian enemies or their sympathisers in the historical profession. Cressy, however, convincingly shows that negative impressions of Charles i were generated throughout his reign. In other words, not only later propagandists, but also some of Charles i's own subjects, said that he was a rotten king.

Cressy makes this point through what we might call argument by successive quotation, and it is in these extended recitations of evidence that Cressy really finds his voice. Charles I and the people of England features a number of passages that only an encyclopaedist like Cressy could write: one eight-page section narrates, in chronological order, weather conditions for every season of every year, complete with illustrative quotations, for the first fourteen years of the king's reign (pp. 56–63). The book jacket blurb, by Tim Harris, describes Cressy's book as ‘evocative’, which means that Cressy uses primary sources to make things concrete and particular: by enumerating the food available at accession-day festivities in Cambridge (p. 85), or by describing Charles i's royal progresses as the vast logistical enterprises that they must have been, reciting the number of carts requisitioned by the Ordnance Office, the number of wheelwrights needed to maintain the carts, and so on (pp. 162–3). An especially good chapter on petitioning catalogues the immense variety of petitions that Charles received (from palace staff for unpaid wages, from suppliers for unpaid bills, from convicts for pardons, from debtors for protections) and recounts the charming history of the mathematical projector Richard Delamain (pp. 186–90).

Cressy particularly delights in telling a certain kind of story. He is interested in ordinary people, in giving ‘commoners of all sorts their voice’ (p. 8); but he is most interested in them when they are being obnoxious to authority figures. Cressy's heroes are the unruly, those who refused to do as they were told, the sort of village lad who would tell his clergyman that the sermon wasn't worth a fart. ‘Instead of remaining silent and subordinate’, Cressy concludes one representative anecdote, ‘Elizabeth Stevens spoke her mind and stood up for her family’ (p. 245). For Cressy, these anecdotes represent what he sometimes calls ‘vernacular opinion’, a sort of vibrant, egalitarian folk culture that was ‘more radical and more visceral than the politer formulations of the elite’ (p. 288). Cressy's recitation of his evidence is, as always, impressive, though afficionados might find it familiar: one randomly chosen page recites the views of the Kentish sawyer Matthew Haman, the London gunsmith Thomas Aldberry, John Basset of Stepney, Alice Jackson of Holborne, Rachel Mercy of Fakenham, the knacker Miles Cushion of Fincham, Joan Sherrard of St Dunstan in the West, and the Yorkshire artisan Thomas Beevers (p. 300). All appeared in Cressy's 2010 Dangerous talk (pp. 154, 192–3, 196).

Cressy's commitment to a particular vision of ‘vernacular opinion’ sometimes gets him into trouble. For example, to make village rebels seem particularly rebellious, Cressy overstresses the settled, complacent character of elite politics and ‘dominant opinion’, whereas the deep division of the elite political establishment arguably helped to authorise the microrebellions that Cressy describes. Further, for Cressy, village rebels were only properly rebellious when they were criticising the king. But what happens when King Charles and ‘vernacular opinion’ found themselves on the same side of a contested issue? One way to understand the controversy over the ‘Book of Sports’, for example, is to recognise multiple authorities in parish life: landlords, ministers, bishops, the middling sort, JPs, and so on. The Book of Sports, which listed lawful recreations that could be used on Sunday afternoons, restricted how far godly ministers could tyrannise over their flocks. By reissuing it, the king was (among other things) protecting some subjects from the self-aggrandisement of others. This sort of activity was a major aspect of royal legitimacy, as John Walter has continually stressed. But from Cressy's perspective the episode looks like just another example of overreaching royal interference.

What does all this mean for how we think about early Stuart England? Those interested in topics that Cressy touches again, like the Book of Sports or the beauty of holiness, will find his discussions instructive. The overall effect is somewhat muted, for Cressy is ultimately more interested in evidence than in the interpretive framework that he erects around it. Interpretive remarks occasionally float to the surface, only to disappear under the tide of evidence. A chapter on Charles's accessibility promises to steer ‘between traditional and revisionist positions' (p. 153) by focusing on how well Charles ‘coped with his people's expectations’ (p. 161), but never reconstructs those expectations or measures how well Charles met them. And when Cressy concludes that Charles ‘was the author of his own troubles’ (p. 312), I was uncertain just how this assessment was reached given how little space was devoted to Charles's performance of kingship. The book, in short, conclusively shuts the door on a pernicious error but never substantiates its final judgment.