Proceedings In The Opening Session Of The Long Parliament House Of Commons 21 December 1640 20 March 1641

Presents the records of proceedings in the House of Commons (5 volumes) and the House of Lords (3 volumes) beginning in November 1640. This volume contains the debates that lead to the beginning of the impeachment trial of the Earl of Strafford for High Treason.

The volumes of Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament present the records of proceedings in the House of Commons [5 volumes] and the House of Lords [3 volumes] beginning in November 1640. Volume 1 of theproceedings in the House of Commons is the first of two volumes leading up to the beginning of the impeachment trial of the Earl of Strafford for High Treason. For those interested in the causes of the breakdown that led to civil war and revolution in mid-seventeenth-century England, the volumes of Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament are a good place to begin. The debates in this session focus on the accumulated problems -- political, social, economic, and religious -- that were the legacy of Charles I's years of personal rule. During the almost seven months between the dissolution of the Short Parliament in April 1640 and the first session of what came to be called the Long Parliament in November 1640, the King, his advisors, and army commanders were absorbed with the financial and military problems of the Scottisharmy camped in the north of England. In the Irish parliament in Dublin, reaction against the King's close friend the Earl of Strafford, the Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland, was beginning to crystalize. Throughout the kingdom, religious unrest continued. All of these elements came to play in the Long Parliament. Volume 1 of the House of Commons debate covers the opening session from 3 November through 19 December 1640. This volume plus Volume 2 [December 21,1640 through March 20, 1641] provide the debates leading up to the beginning of the impeachment trial of the Earl of Strafford for High Treason.

England on Edge deals with the collapse of the government of Charles I, the disintegration of the Church of England, and the accompanying cultural panic that led to civil war. Focused on the years 1640 to 1642, it examines stresses and fractures in social, political, and religious culture, and the emergence of an unrestrained popular press. Hundreds of people not normally seen in historical surveys make appearances here, in a drama much larger than the struggle of king and parliament. Historians commonly assert that royalists and parliamentarians parted company over issues of principle, constitutional scruples, and religious belief, but a more complex picture emerges from the environment of anxiety, mistrust, and fear. Rather than seeing England's revolutionary transformation as a product of the civil war, as has been common among historians, David Cressy finds the world turned upside down in the two years preceding the outbreak of hostilities. The humbling of Charles I, the erosion of the royal prerogative, and the rise of an executive parliament were central features of the revolutionary drama of 1640-1642. The collapse of the Laudian ascendancy, the splintering of the established church, the rise of radical sectarianism, and the emergence of an Anglican resistance all took place in these two years before the beginnings of bloodshed. The world of public discourse became rapidly energized and expanded, in counterpoint with an exuberantly unfettered press and a deeply traumatized state. These linked processes, and the disruptive contradictions within them, made this a time of shaking and of prayer. England's elite encountered multiple transgressions, some more imagined than real, involving lay encroachments on the domain of the clergy, lowly intrusions into matters of state, the city clashing with the court, the street with institutions of government, and women undermining the territories of men. The simultaneity, concatenation, and cumulative, compounding effect of these disturbances added to their ferocious intensity, and helped to bring down England's ancien regime. This was the revolution before the Revolution, the revolution that led to civil war.