First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The years since 1981 have been one of the three of four lowest points in the relationship between the Universities and the State in 800 years of English history. Conrad Russell looks at the dispute which has implications for academic freedom.

What holds these essays together is the rejection of the idea of 'the birth of the modern world'. England before the Civil War was not a country welcoming a brave new world but one clinging fearfully to an old one. Change, where it happened, was not the result of a deliberate striving for 'progress', and the polity of pre-Civil War England was not on the point of collapse. Parliaments were not dominated by two 'sides' in training for a Cup Final at Naseby, but were groups of people struggling with limited success to reach agreement.

King James VI and I and his English Parliaments is a posthumously published work by Conrad Russell, the foremost historian of his generation working on early Stuart parliaments, and is based on the Trevelyan lectures which he delivered at the University of Cambridge. It provides a chronological narrative of the early English Parliaments of James VI and I, covering in detail the four sessions of the 1604-1610 Parliament and the Addled Parliament of 1614, with a final chapter looking towards the parliaments of the 1620s. The narrative demonstrates that two problems in particular dominated these sessions: the financial problems of the Crown, and the pursuit of a formal Union between England and Scotland. These were a continuous source of division and disagreement, and neither was satisfactorily resolved. It also highlights important subsidiary issues, notably the clashes between James and his judges over the status of the Common Law and the relatively muted tensions over religion. Detailed consideration is given throughout to the character and style of James' kingship. This book can be read alongside the same author's Parliaments and English Politics, 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979) and The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-1642 (Oxford, 1992) to provide the first continuous narrative of parliamentary proceedings from the accession of James to the outbreak of Civil War since the massive work of S. R Gardiner. Drawing on the much wider range of sources available to modern historians, in particular the full range of parliamentary diaries, it offers the most up-to-date analysis we have of conflict between Crown and Parliament during a turbulent phase of British History.

This is a history of the dramatic events which led to the collapse of Charles I's authority in England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1640s. Conrad Russell links incidents in the King's three domains to construct a narrative account which makes sense of British history, as well as of the national story of each country. Offering a new interpretation of events, this study traces the important role of the Scots in dividing the English, and examines the Irish rebellion in its contemporary context. Above all, Professor Russell uncovers the role played by the King himself, and argues that Charles Stuart was not the passive figure portrayed by so many historians, but an active protagonist in the political events which were eventually to lose him not only one crown, but three.