First published in 1938. A study of the political doctrines and events which led to a hardening of lines between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. "From the March of 1604, when James I met his first Parliament to the assembly of the Long Parliament in November 1640, there was going on a conflict between irreconcilable views concerning the constitution of government in England. It was concerned with what had been and with what was and, necessarily, with what should be." By 1640 the question soon would be "how stable government could ever again be established . . . But the confusion, if it produced little else of value, produced a ferment of thought." And this ferment has had an incalculable effect on the centuries which have followed.

Among the many topics discussed, on the basis of firm knowledge and with reasonableness, are the King and the nature of his claim, the parliamentary opposition and its conceptions and the possibility of compromise, the approach to Toleration, Puritanism and the Laudian Church, and the final collapse of government.