SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER, LL.D. HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY AT KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON; CORRESPONDING THE ROYAL BOHEMIAN SOCIETY OF SCIENCES VOL. I. 1637-1640 LONDON LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1882 All rights reserved 5-11192.5. PREFACE ΤΟ VOLUMES I. AND II. In the two volumes which are now given to the public, and more especially in the second, I have reached a part of my work to which all that I have hitherto done has been leading up, and of which all that I can hope to accomplish in the future can be but the development. If I have judged rightly the first fourteen months of the Long Parliament, I am likely to judge rightly the future course of the parties which then came into collision. If I have erred seriously here, I am not likely to find anything worth saying hereafter. What the difficulties of the task have been can only be fully known to those who have attempted to face a similar problem. It is not merely that the subject-matter is one which, even at the present day, strangely evokes the divergent sympathies and passions of Englishmen, and that it has been already attempted by writers of no mean reputation, some of whom have succeeded in convincing their readers that there is nothing more to be said about the matter; but that even the richest materials fail Reclass, MVP 11-6-33 to yield all that the historian requires. Again and again, however, the frontier of knowledge may be advanced, the enquirer is confronted by darkness into which he cannot safely penetrate. Yet in spite of all risks I have ventured to tell again a familiar tale. It has not, I hope, been for nothing that many years ago, as a young and unknown writer, I deliberately refrained from selecting a subject more attractive in its own nature than the reign of James I. could possibly be. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that it was the duty of a serious inquirer to search into the original causes of great events rather than, for the sake of catching at an audience, to rush unprepared upon the great events themselves. My reward has been that, whether the present work is well or ill done, it is at all events far better done than it could have been if I had commenced with the tale of the Puritan Revolution itself. Whether that tale will ever be told in its completeness by me, neither I nor any one can tell. To me personally, as a descendant of Cromwell and Ireton, it would be a special satisfaction to call up them and their contemporaries before me, and to learn the true secret of their success and failure. To the historian no more interesting period can be found than one in which men of virtue and ability strove with one another in seeking the solution of the highest problems at a time when the old chain of precedent had been violently snapped, and when all things seemed possible to the active intelligence. Whatever the future may have in reserve, this present work has constantly reminded me by how |