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As Foucault argues, the imposition of punishment is not necessarily to reduce crime but to construct the individual subject. Law is not punitive and repressive; it can be positive and constructive, a productive mechanism of power. 9 Royalist versions of the law were punitive, but they depended ultimately on this complex interaction of subject and state. 10 The legal construction of ‘Royalism’ depends on a series of productions and configurations, and it is these concepts that will be explored in the remainder of this chapter, which concentrates upon the role of the law in the mediation and formation of identity.

27 A later declaration forbidding those with the King’s Evil to approach the court until Michaelmas was posted ‘on the Court gates, and all the ports and passages into the Citie’, physically protecting the King and his entourage (Mercurius Aulicus, 25 March 1643). A copy of a proclamation regarding the regulation of the army began ‘Theis our Comaunds Wee require forthwth to be published at the head of every Regimt. 30 They mediated the physical space of towns and cities, and constructed the space of the subject.

Therefore, an analysis of the relationship between the law, the lawgiver and the subject constructed textually and bodily by this law allows us an insight into the circulation of various discourses of power during the civil war. Discourses of legality are important in allowing for categorization and inscription of the subject. 3 A consideration of Royalist lawmaking allows us to understand how an identity of obedience and loyalism was inscribed upon the subject, who was to be constructed through a variety of powerful discourses that sought to configure the political technology of the body.