observations on early stuart parliamentary history

Observations on Early Stuart Parliamentary HistoryCommons Debates 1628Volume I, Introduction and Reference Materials. Volume II, 17 March -19 April, 1628. Volume III, 21 April - 27 May, 1628 by Robert C. Johnson; Mary Frear Keeler;Maija Jansson Cole; William B. BidwellReview by: Stephen D. WhiteJournal of British Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1979), pp. 160-170Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175517 .

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REVIEW ARTICLE REVIEW ARTICLE REVIEW ARTICLE

Observations on Early Stuart Parliamentary History*

STEPHEN D. WHITE

Commons Debates 1628. Edited by Robert C. Johnson, Mary Frear Keeler, Maija Jansson Cole, and William B. Bidwell: The Yale Center for Parliamentary History. Volume I, Introduction and Reference Materials. Volume II, 17 March-19 April, 1628. Volume III, 21 April-27 May, 1628. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977).

Although political and constitutional history no longer occupies a dominant position in Tudor-Stuart studies, the past decade or so has seen the publication of important work on the history of

parliament between 1604 and 1629.1 Recent work on this old- fashioned subject, moreover, has given rise to a sharp controversy about the political attitudes and objectives of early Stuart M.P.s, about the relevance of parliamentary studies to attempts to ex-

plain the outbreak of the English Revolution, and about the ways in which historians have studied and ought to study the history of early seventeenth-century parliaments. This debate was in- itiated in 1965 by G. R. Elton in an article bearing the provocative title, "A High Road to Civil War?" In this study of the Apology of 1604, Elton vigorously attacked the view that early Stuart parliamentary conflicts clearly foreshadowed or inevitably led to the Revolution.2 And in a later essay, he charged that early Stuart historians had inaccurately portrayed parliament primarily as a forum for constitutional debate, underestimated the role of com-

promise in its proceedings, and slighted its work on more routine and less controversial matters.3 In reply to Elton's second article, J. H. Hexter maintained that M.P.s of the 1620s were often more

*The author wishes to thank Professor Theodore K. Rabb for commenting on a draft of this review article.

1. This literature is too extensive to be listed here. Much of it is referred to in the works cited below.

2. G. R. Elton, "A High Road to Civil War?" in Charles H. Carter (ed.), From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly (New York, 1965), pp. 325-44, esp. pp. 325-29.

3. G. R. Elton, "Studying the History of Parliament," British Studies Mon- itor (hereafter, B.S.M.), II (1971), 4-14.


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OBSERVATIONS ON EARLY STUART HISTORY OBSERVATIONS ON EARLY STUART HISTORY OBSERVATIONS ON EARLY STUART HISTORY

concerned about constitutional issues than other matters and that

increasingly frequent and embittered disputes over these issues made parliament less and less willing or able to transact the routine business that Elton had urged parliamentary historians to study.4 Hexter did not indicate precisely how the constitutional conflicts of the 1620s were related to the Revolution, but he insisted that historians who ignored them in order to focus on more mundane

parliamentary actions could "miss the point of most of what was

going on most of the time in the Parliaments of James I and Charles I."5

Like Hexter, both David S. Berkowitz and T. K. Rabb defended

parliamentary historians like Notestein against Elton's attacks.6 But Rabb also drew attention to what he considered a general weakness in most recent parliamentary historiography. He claimed that although its practitioners seemed to see a relationship between their own work and studies on the origins of the Revolution, their

narrowly political and constitutional outlook was such as to pre- vent them from establishing clear connections between parliament's revolutionary actions of the 1640s and the proceedings of Jacobean parliaments. If seventeenth-century historians were to succeed in "linking parliamentary history with the Civil War," he maintained, they would have to effect a synthesis of more recent social

interpretations of the Revolution and more traditional constitutional and political historiography.7

Whereas Rabb had intimated that significant connections could

probably be established between the proceedings of early Stuart

parliaments and the English Revolution, Conrad Russell later suggested that such links were at best tenuous and at worst non- existent, when he urged historians to abandon "the ingrained assumption . . . that Parliament, well before the Civil War, was

already set on a course which led to serious challenges to the Crown and ultimately to political supremacy."s In his efforts to undermine this assumption, Russell did not embark on the difficult task of showing that historians could fully explain the Revolution without discussing early Stuart parliamentary history. Instead, he

4. J. H. Hexter, "Parliament under the Lens," ibid., III (1972), 4-15. 5. Ibid., 12. For a response to Hexter's article, see G. R. Elton, "A Reply,"

ibid., III (1972), 16-22. 6. David S. Berkowitz, "Parliamentary History, American Style," American

Journal of Legal History, XVI (1972), 260-73; and Theodore K. Rabb, "Parliament and Society in Early Stuart England: The Legacy of Wallace Notestein," Ameri- can Historical Review, (hereafter, A.H.R.), LXXVII (1972), 705-14.

7. Ibid., 709; see also 710. 8. Conrad Russell, "Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604-1629,"

History, LXI (1976), 1-27 at 3.

















History, LXI (1976), 1-27 at 3.

















History, LXI (1976), 1-27 at 3.

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THE JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES THE JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES THE JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES

simply endeavored to attack what he characterized as "[t]he con- ventional belief that the Parliaments of the period 1604-1629 were a 'high road to Civil War'."9 In order to substantiate Elton's earlier claim that this patently muddled and ambiguous metaphor really misrepresented early Stuart parliamentary history, Russell first

argued that since parliament did not seek absolute sovereignty during the early seventeenth century and could not even effectively use its power to block legislation and withhold supply, it could not be cast in the role of "a potential challenger to the King for

supreme power.'"0 He then stated that only in 1610 and 1626 did major conflicts occur in parliament,"' that early Stuart M.P.s "were not divided from their friends among the Council by any issue of principle that turned them into an opposition,"'2 and that the Revolution could not therefore be treated as "the logical con- clusion" of parliament's proceedings between 1604 and 1629.13 While he conceded that most parliaments of this period were "not

very happy" ones, he attributed their generally somber mood

mainly to the political schizophrenia of parliamentary members who simultaneously represented "the centre in the localities and

. . the localities in the centre."14 To reinforce this contention and make his position more graphic, he suggested that the clash that took place in this period between "the country" and "the court" was actually waged not "between members of Parliament and the King" but "within members' own minds."'5

Recently, several other historians have supported Russell's and Elton's claim that the early Stuart House of Commons was not a center of "opposition" to the crown and that parliament's proceedings in this era did not inexorably lead to the Revolution. Paul Christianson and James E. Farnell maintained that at least until 1642, parliament was largely controlled by a few powerful members of the House of Lords;16 and Mark Kishlansky argued that prior to 1647, this same assembly generally functioned accord-

ing to the principles of a "consensual" political system that "left

9. Ibid., 3. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 9-11. 12. Ibid., 24; see also 18 and 20. 13. Ibid., 2. 14. Ibid., 26. The phrase "political schizophrenia" is my own and not Russell's. 15. Ibid., 27. 16. Paul Christianson, "The Peers, The People, and Parliamentary Manage-

ment in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament," Journal of Modern His- tory (hereafter, J.M.H.), XLIX (1977), 575-99, esp. 575-76; and James E. Farnell, "The Social and Intellectual Basis of London's Role in the English Civil Wars," ibid., 641-60, esp. 643-45.





















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little place for opposition" to the King.17 Even more recently, however, these revisionist views about early Stuart parliamentary history have been challenged by Derek Hirst and Hexter. Hirst claimed that Christianson and Farnell had exaggerated the parliamentary influence of peers and that Kishlansky had ignored "telling signs of the growth of [parliamentary] partisanship" between 1621 and 1642.18 In addition, although he praised these writers for re-

jecting "determinist" approaches to early Stuart history,19 he charged that they had presented an excessively static picture of early seven-

teenth-century politics and had ignored the fact that during this

period, parliamentary members were becoming increasingly re-

sponsive to political pressures emanating from "the world outside Westminster."20 In an even lengthier response to the revisionists, Hexter admitted that they had identified significant flaws in earlier work on the causes of the Revolution.21 But like Hirst, he sharply criticized their interpretation of early Stuart parliamentary history. After identifying and questioning some of the assumptions that lay behind their novel approaches to the study of parliament,22 Hexter

argued that significant parliamentary conflicts took place as early as 1604 and became progressively more intense between 1621 and 1629.23 He also insisted that early Stuart M.P.s frequently joined together to "oppose" royal acts and policies, to defend their own

privileges and to give formal parliamentary expression to their own distinctive constitutional creed.24 Moreover, after maintaining that these parliamentary opponents of the King and their revolu-

tionary successors were engaged in a struggle for political liberty and "the rule of law,"25 he claimed that their struggle could only

17. Mark Kishlansky, "The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament," ibid., 617-40. Kishlansky conceded that beginning in 1626, "parliament could not always act according to the ideals of consensus politics," and that it engaged in sometimes divisive debates on topics like the Petition of Right (623-24). Nevertheless, he insisted that "the opposition which appeared in Charles's Parliaments . . . was neither the precursor nor the equivalent of the Parliamentarian Cause," and that in the later 1620s, "neither parliamentary pro- cedure nor political practice was adopted to reflect a new relationship between king and parliament." He also claimed that the Petition of Right was generally acceptable even to "the staunchest defenders of the king's prerogatives." Ibid., 623-24.

18. Derek Hirst, "Unanimity in the Commons, Aristocratic Intrigues, and the Origins of the English Civil War," J.M.H., L (1978), 51-71, esp. 52-56.

19. Ibid., 51. 20. Ibid., 53, 56, 59-60, 70. 21. J. H. Hexter, "Power Struggle, Parliament and Liberty in Early Stuart

England," J.M.H., L (1978), 1-50; see esp. 12-15. 22. Ibid., 15-30. 23. Ibid., 25-30, 32-46. 24. Ibid., 27, 38-39. 25. Ibid., 47.

























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be ignored, dismissed, or trivialized by historians who were oblivi- ous to the political problems of the modern, as well as the early modern, world.2

Although this ongoing controversy has raised important questions about the history of parliamentary politics and even about the politics of parliamentary history, it has not been leading to- wards Rabb's proposed synthesis of parliamentary studies, social

history, and analyses of the causes of the Revolution. Thus far, the participants in this debate have discussed parliamentary his-

tory almost exclusively in political terms; and most of them have

explicitly used their work on parliament to attack the view that the Revolution had deep-seated social causes. Meanwhile, social historians continue to ignore parliamentary history, perhaps because they regard it as an out-moded form of histoire evenemen- tielle and perhaps because they no longer believe that their work can or should help to explain political behavior on a national level.27

The publication of the first three volumes of Commons De- bates 162828 may not interest the proponents of an histoire totale that often excludes both political and constitutional history.29 Nor will these texts conclusively tell us how, or whether, to link early Stuart parliamentary history with the Revolution. But the appear- ance of these splendidly edited sources, which will soon be available in complete form, will do more than facilitate the recon- struction of parliament's proceedings in 1628 and the study of the Petition of Right; it will also provide us with a clearer, if neces-

sarily partial, perspective on early Stuart parliamentary history and historiography. A reading of these sources suggests three

provisional conclusions about the current controversy about early seventeenth-century parliaments; and the last of these conclusions

points toward one of the ways in which parliamentary studies and social history can be fruitfully combined.

In the first place, these sources show, in an indirect way, that Elton, Russell, and Kishlansky have provided useful correctives to

26. Ibid., 47-50. 27. On the tendency of social historians to ignore early Stuart parliamentary

history, see Rabb, "Parliament and Society," A.H.R., LXXVII (1972), 709-10. 28. Robert C. Johnson et al (eds.), Commons Debates 1628, 3 vols. (New

Haven and London, 1977). 29. For some interesting comments on the tendency of some recent historians

to "bypass" political history, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Geno- vese, "The Political Crisis of Social History: A Marxian Perspective," Journal of Social History, X (1976), 206-20, esp. 215-19. For another lament, in a different key, on the decline of political history, see G. R. Elton, Political History, Princi- ples and Practice (New York, 1971), esp. pp. 57-72.





























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more traditional views of at least certain early Stuart parliaments. A comparison of the Commons' debates of 1628 with those of 1621 and 1624 suggests that earlier writers were wrong to portray the

period from 1604 to 1629 as one of almost unrelieved parliamentary conflict. When seen from the vantage-point of 1628, M.P.s of the early 1620s appear to have been primarily concerned with

promoting rather traditional remedies for heterogeneous grievances, many of which had been the subject of parliamentary com-

plaint for at least a generation. Moreover, even if one allows for the fact that disputes over free speech ultimately led to the dis- solution of the Parliament of 1621, the constitutional controversies of the early 1620s seem relatively mild and unembittered when

compared with those of 1628. Furthermore, in 1621 and 1624, parliamentary members seem to have been considerably more willing than their Caroline counterparts to avoid constitutional conflicts, to strive for consensus on at least certain issues, and to work for

compromises that would facilitate effective parliamentary action.

Finally, although these members usually offered legal justifications for the parliamentary actions that they favored, they were clearly less interested than many M.P.s of 1628 in developing constitutional positions that were consistent and coherent.30

At the same time, however, the Commons Debates 1628 seem to bear out Hexter's twin contentions that early Stuart M.P.s sometimes attached a much higher priority to debating divisive constitutional issues than to transacting more routine parliamentary business and that historians cannot justifiably ignore or minimize the role of constitutional conflict in early Stuart parliaments. These texts suggest, first, that in 1628 leading members of the Commons were divided from the Court's principal spokesmen and from most members of the Lords by at least one "issue of principle," which concerned the King's power to imprison his subjects, and, second, that their concern about this issue led them to abandon almost all work on more routine business and to turn parliament into a forum for constitutional debate and for attacks on the Court's recent policies.31 These sources also indicate that in an effort to gain parliamentary support for their own views on im-

30. I have tried to substantiate these points in "Sir Edward Coke in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624: Parliament, the Law, and the Economy" (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1972) and in Sir Edward Coke and "The Grievances of the Commonwealth," 1621-1628 (Chapel Hill, 1979). For other views on changes in parliament's proceedings between 1621 and 1629, see Hexter, "Power Struggle," J.M.H., L, 45; Hirst, "Unanimity in the Commons," ibid., 56; Kishlan- sky, "The Emergence of Adversary Politics," ibid., XLIX, 623-24.

31. See Hexter, "Parliament Under the Lens," B.S.M., III.





















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prisonment, opponents of the royalist position manipulated established parliamentary procedures and repeatedly refused to accept compromises that would have led only to a pseudo-consensus.32 Finally, these texts and other sources show that the King and his most active supporters never accepted the principles ex- pressed in the Petition of Right and made numerous attempts to modify this document or to nullify its legal force.33 From a reading of these debates, one cannot, of course, conclude that England was in a state of revolution in 1628, that any such conflict was, strictly speaking, "inevitable" as of that date, or that an embryonic revolutionary party had come into existence. Nevertheless, these texts suggest that one can deny that a significant parliamentary "conflict" occurred in 1628 only if one insists on using this term in a curiously restricted sense. They also lead one to suspect that unless one equates a desire to explain historical events with a commitment to some vulgar form of determinism, one should not rule out the possibility that parliament's proceedings in 1628 had something to do with the outbreak of the Revolution.

A comparison of most modern treatments of the Parliament of 1628 with the first-hand accounts now available in the Commons Debates 1628 leads to a third, somewhat surprising observation about early Stuart parliamentary historiography. It suggests that even those writers who treat constitutional conflict as a major theme of parliament's proceedings in 1628 have, in fact, said relatively little about much if not most of "what was going on most of the time" in this particular parliament. These sources show that the Commons' debates were often taken up with fearsomely technical arguments about the legal issues raised in the Petition of Right. But if we turn to modern discussions of this Parliament or the Petition, we will find that these legal arguments are rarely discussed in detail.34 Moreover, if we then compare primary and

32. On the refusal of the Commons to compromise with the Lords about the substance of the Petition, see David S. Berkowitz, "Reason of State in England and the Petition of Right," in Roman Schnur (ed.), Staatsriison: Studien zur Geschichte eines politischen Begriffs (Berlin, 1975), 165-212.

33. See Berkowitz, ibid., and Elizabeth Read Foster, "Printing the Petition of Right," Huntingdon Library Quarterly (hereinafter, H.L.Q.), XXVIII (1974), 81-84.

34. For recent discussions of the Petition, see J. N. Ball, "The Petition of Right in the English Parliament of 1628," in Album E. Lousse (Louvain, 1964), IV, 43-64; Berkowitz, "Reason of State," in Staatsrison; J. S. Flemion, "The Struggle for the Petition of Right in the House of Lords: The Study of an Oppo- sition Victory," J.M.H., XLV (1973), 193-210; Elizabeth Read Foster, "Peti- tions and the Petition of Right," Journal of British Studies, XIV (1974), 21-45; Foster, "Printing the Petition of Right," H.L.Q., XXVIII; and Christopher Thompson, "The Origins of the Parliamentary Middle Group, 1626-1629," Trans- actions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XXII (1972), 71-86.











166 166 166




secondary accounts of other early Stuart parliaments, we are again likely to note a similar disparity between the interests of many parliamentary historians, who rarely analyze legal arguments very closely, and the concerns of contemporary diarists, who often re- corded these arguments very fully.;35 The tendency of parliamentary historians to give little attention to parliamentary legal discourse is perhaps justifiable, if we can assume that participants in

parliament's legal debates were either royalists or anti-royalists whose constitutional views were so obviously right or wrong as to

require little or no explication or analysis. Such relative neglect of parliamentary legal arguments may also be proper, if we can assume that such arguments could always be produced when needed and that they served merely to justify and mask the crude

pursuit of short-term political advantage and/or the crass promo- tion of clear-cut class interests. If, however, we are not prepared to accept such Whig or reductionist assumptions about legal argu- ment and law, we may be able to see how parliamentary action was often shaped and sometimes limited by the need that members generally felt to legitimate the proceedings that they favored and by their own necessarily limited notions of what parliament could or should do. In the same way, we may also be able to ac-

quire a clearer understanding of the complex process by which members sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed in their con- scious or unconscious efforts both to portray their own limited

objectives as the objective needs of the commonwealth and to

identify the privileges and powers that they wished to enjoy with the rights and liberties of all English subjects. If pursued in these ways, the analysis of parliament's legal debates will not only illuminate the internal history of this body, it may also contribute to our understanding of pre-revolutionary political ideology and create one of several possible links between early Stuart parliamentary studies and the social history of early modern England.

The editors of the Commons Debates 1628 quite properly avoid

taking any explicit stands on broader questions about how we should look at early Stuart parliamentary history. But their pains- taking editorial labors still seem to reflect a firm and justifiable conviction that parliament's debates on the Petition of Right and related matters are worth studying closely. At the same time, however, since this edition also throws light on parliament's more

35. Even the Commons' debates on parliamentary judicature, for example, have not been meticulously analyzed. See Stephen D. White, review of Colin G. C. Tite, Impeachment and Parliamentary Judicature in Early Stuart England (London, 1974), in Harvard Law Review, LXXXIX (1976), 1934-45.





















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routine business in 1628, it will enable historians to test the hy- potheses of Elton, Hexter, Russell, and Kishlansky about the concerns, priorities, and anxieties of early Stuart M.P.s. Moreover, as

J. G. A. Pocock has recently pointed out, these parliamentary debates also contain important information about English political ideas in this period.36

The Commons Debates 1628 is largely made up of edited, annotated texts of two types of sources: "[p]rivate diaries, either full or fragmentary," which "consist of or are based on notes kept by individual members of the Commons while they were actually sitting in the House";37 and materials, here called "narratives," which were compiled soon after a parliamentary session for the purpose of presenting "an ordered narrative" of the Commons'

proceedings.38 These volumes, therefore, resemble previous editions of early Stuart parliamentary sources, such as the Commons Debates 1621,9 but the present editors have made several notable

improvements in both content and format on older publications of this sort. First, unlike the Commons Debates 1621, their volumes include a newly edited and annotated version of the Journal of the House of Commons for their parliament, since the printed edition of this text is slightly inaccurate, not adequately glossed, and somewhat inaccessible to some readers.4? Second, the editors' an-

alysis of the parliamentary "narratives" is far clearer than earlier treatments of this type of text; and it makes an important sub- stantive contribution to early Stuart historiography by proving that some members of this parliament were intent on composing and

disseminating full reports of the Commons' proceedings in 1628.41 Third, in printing only a composite text of the important "narra-

36. See J. G. A. Pocock, "The Commons Debates of 1628," Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXIX (1978), 329-34.

37. Commons Debates 1628, I, 23. 38. Ibid., 4. 39. Wallace Notestein et al (eds.), Commons Debates 1621, 7 vols. (New

Haven, 1935). For references to other printed editions of early Stuart parliamentary sources, see Robert C. Johnson, "Parliamentary Diaries of the Early Stuart Period," Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, IV (1971), 293- 300.

40. See Commons Debates 1628, I, 2-4. 41. See ibid., 4-23. For discussions of early Stuart parliamentary "narra-

tives" that bear at least some resemblance to the "narratives" for 1628, see Com- mons Debates 1621, I, 5-16; and Wallace Notestein and Frances Helen Relf (eds.), Commons Debates for 1629 (Minneapolis, 1921), pp. xv-xix. Although the present editors note the similarities between the so-called "Proceedings and Debates" for 1628 and the so-called "True Relation" for 1629 (see Commons Debates 1628, I, 9-10), they insist that the former "narrative" differs signifi- cantly from the latter and provides a much more reliable picture of parliament's proceedings (ibid., esp. 10).

























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tive," which they call "Proceedings and Debates," the editors follow the same general procedures that were used to compile the "True Relation" for the Parliament of 1629 and the so-called "X" journal for the Parliament of 1621; but they have described with unusual clarity the principles by which they constructed their "synthetic" text from 13 different manuscripts42 and have supple- mented this text with some lengthy variants.43 Fourth, instead of following the model of the Commons Debates 1621 and printing a succession of individual diaries or "narratives," the editors first

present a table of manuscripts which specifies the days covered in each parliamentary source and then group together all versions of each individual day's proceedings. In this way, they have en- couraged their readers both to examine all extant versions of any given debate and to read through each individual source without interruption. Fifth, the editors have also facilitated the task of

studying this parliament by constructing clear, cross-indexed outlines of the Commons' proceedings for each day of this session. With the aid of these outlines, a reader can easily learn what was done in the House on any particular day, find all extant versions of a particular speech or debate, follow the House's proceedings throughout the entire session on a particular subject or bill, reconstruct the precise procedural context in which a particular speech was delivered, or pursue similar technical interests.44 Sixth, in addition to providing volumes 2 and 3 with provisional indexes of such matters as bills, committees, and members' speeches and printing lists of M.P.s and important officials in volume 1, the editors have provided their readers with a convenient glossary of Latin and Law French terms; and while this glossary contains some unfortunate errors, it will still aid many readers and en- courage them to make sense of the Commons' more obscure debates.45

Seventh, the editors also print in volume 1 a list of legal citations, along with abstracts or translated excerpts from many of the more important materials that were cited in this parliament.46

42. See ibid., 39-40. 43. See, for example, ibid., II, 2-8, 12-24, 58-60, and III, 572-80. 44. For the table of manuscripts, see ibid., I, 49-51, and for a discussion of

the outlines of daily business, see ibid., 44-46. The editors have also eased the task of studying this parliament's proceedings by providing their edition with date tabs.

45. For the glossary, see ibid., I, 89-105. For some critical comments on it, see G. R. Elton's review of these volumes in Times Literary Supplement (June 24, 1977), 763-64 at 764.

46. See Commons Debates 1628, I, 104-36.

















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This section is slightly defective, since it fails to include texts of the writs that were frequently discussed in this parliament and does not clearly indicate that members who cited reported cases

may have been referring not to the printed versions that the editors cite and sometimes excerpt, but to manuscript reports of cases. In addition, this same section of legal citations includes notes on Year Book cases which are sometimes so brief as to provide readers with little enlightenment about the significance of the particular citation in question.47 Nevertheless, this section is still exceed-

ingly useful, and, like other features of this edition, it serves as a reminder that parliamentary legal discourse requires - and de- serves - close study.

While the editors have thus provided their readers with many different aids to the study of the Parliament of 1628, they have also done them a service by clearly indicating that their volumes, when complete, will constitute "not a definitive treatise on, but a convenient edition of the records of proceedings in Commons in 1628."48 Historians who use this extraordinarily convenient edition should therefore have no illusions about how much work they will have to do themselves in order to reconstruct and analyze the

history of this parliament and to use this new knowledge to help resolve current controversies about early Stuart parliamentary his-

tory. Nevertheless, if scholars successfully accomplish these tasks, they will owe a very great debt to those past and present workers at the Yale Center for Parliamentary History who have produced these magnificent volumes.

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY

47. See ibid., 116-19. 48. Ibid., 37 (editors' italics).







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observations on early stuart parliamentary history

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