People and Parliament: Representative Rights and the English Revolution [Hardcover]

This book offers a fresh and rounded perspective on the English Revolution of the 1640s. It uses detailed evidence to show how the economic requirement for parliament's services underpinned a demand for political change. It suggests that this took shape through a working 'discourse' of ideas about the status of representative forms.Introduction: Pasts and Presents Legislative Beginnings: 1603-1610 The Constitutional Dimension The Foreign Policy Dimension Legislative Ambitions Frustrated The Vacuum Filled: the Triennial Act of 1641 Politics and Religion: the Balance of Motivation Statute Law and Civil War: 'a right that induced men to fight' The Sovereignty of Parliament Epilogue: 'a Parliamentary Man' Appendix I: Thomas Hobbes and the idea of the representative Appendix II: Dartmouth's parliamentary diary

'This re-interpretation of the Triennial Act of 1641 is important. It dispels some persistently repeated misunderstandings, and should lead to a reassessment of the initial aims of the Long Parliament' - Norah Carlin, author of The Causes of the English Civil War