One of the chief tests of the quality of historical work lies in its readability. History, even serious history, is interesting, and the historian wh… - Geoffrey Elton

English government has a special claim to be studied. It developed in comparative freedom from outside interference, producing a curious blend of decentralized and popular freedom with strong, efficient, and centralized administration.

I think now that in England under the Tudors (1955), attempting to restore him [Thomas Cromwell] to view and show him in a truer light, I made some rather extravagant claims for him, though I stand by the essence of my opinions there. I still think that Cromwell was the most remarkable English statesman of the sixteenth century and one of the most remarkable in the country's history. I still think that he instigated and in part accomplished a major and enduring transformation in virtually every aspect of the nation's public life. And I still think that he was largely responsible for the fact that the medieval heritage of common law and representative institutions remained at the heart of England's modern government, until very recent times.

[O]nce...the early seventeenth century is treated as a sequence of events rather than the working out of a destiny – the parliamentary history of 1603–28 ceases to be the record of the "inevitable" accentuation of inherent strain and becomes comprehensible as a series of political crises, complicated by personality, in which the outcome may be identified but cannot be presumed from the start. In the context it is worth notice that James I's last Parliament was the only one in which Crown and Commons worked in a measure of harmony, and that even in 1628 the opposition leadership carefully avoided any proposals which could be read as an invasion of prerogative rights. The ineffectiveness of the Petition of Right, as futile a document as even constitutional struggles have ever thrown up, neatly demonstrates the absence of revolutionary strains in the difficulties encountered up to that point. Before Charles I's experiment in the 1630s, war was not so much inevitable as totally improbable; and the failure of Charles's government was not rendered "inevitable" by deep divisions in society or inherited stresses in the constitution, but was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system.