On the Short Parliament of 1640
I have been contemplating writing an essay on the Short Parliament of 1640 for a considerable period of time. My interest was first aroused when Esther Cope was kind enough to show me the draft copy of the edition of the sources she later edited for the Camden Society, sources which have been amplimented by the later work of Judith Maltby on the Aston Diary. In the process, I have read the analyses of John Adamson, Mark Kishlansky, Kevin Sharpe and Conrad Russell, the last three of whom have passed away. John Adamson's piece in his book, The Noble Revolt, seems the most lucid of these while I was surprised to note that Kishlanky's defence of King Charles I's handling of the Parliament failed to mention his contemporaneous negotiations with the Spanish Habsburgs: contemporaries would, I suspect, not have regarded these overtures as contingency-planning but as duplicitous. The one I had real trouble with was that by Conrad Russell, much of which was a precis of the surviving...
