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.
England on Edge traces the collapse of the government of Charles I, the disintegration of the established church, and the accompanying cultural panic that led to civil war. Focused on the years 1640 to 1642, it examines social and religious turmoil 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.
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.
Catholics and Treason takes the narratives generated by the contemporary law of treason as it applied to Roman Catholics, during and after the Reformation of the Church in the sixteenth century, and uses them to explore the Catholic community's writing of its own history. Prosecutions of Catholics under the existing law and via new legislation produced a great deal of documentation which tells us much about contemporary politics that we could not garner from any other source. The intention here is to locate the narratives of persecution inside the context of the 'mainstream' history of the period from which, for the most part, they have been routinely excluded but out of which they partly emerged. In that respect, this is the history of the post-Reformation Church and State with the politics (of violence) put back. This volume takes as its starting point the magnum opus of Bishop Richard Challoner, his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, and it works backwards from that book into the period that Challoner describes. Historian Michael Questier seeks to reassemble as far as possible the historical jigsaw puzzle on which Challoner laboured but which he could not complete, thinking about the implications for our view of the post-Reformation and of the way in which Challoner and others described the Catholic experience of in/tolerance.
