Prolonged involvement with Parliament has in the end convinced me that the customary concentration on it as the centre of public affairs, however tra… - Geoffrey Elton

One of the chief tests of the quality of historical work lies in its readability. History, even serious history, is interesting, and the historian who makes it dull deserves the pillory.

If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays on the causes of the civil war, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown, but it will be less well tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real.

The political institutions of England were peculiar. In a manner quite unknown elsewhere, its monarchy combined high prerogative claims and exceptionally effective government with the absence of coercive power and an instinctive regard for the supremacy of the law. Its Parliament uniquely combined co-operation in government with the satisfaction of the subject's needs: no other representative institution in Europe was so firmly integrated into the monarchical system of government, so thoroughly organised for routine business, so flexibly able to accommodate all interests. In England taxes fell most heavily on the wealthier part of the nation, an oddity which provides perhaps the most striking contrast of all to European custom – which in this respect was to grant exemption to the powerful. English law, notoriously, was very different indeed... And these, and other, distinctions appear not only to the eye of the historian; they were very visible also to observers of the day. By the side of the often bemused and rarely commendatory reports of visitors from abroad there grew among Englishmen a strident selfconsciousness of separateness, from Richard Morison's "English hands and English hearts" peculiarly able to win against all odds, through John Aylmer's God who is English, to John Foxe's elect nation.