This book is a revised and extended version of the six Trevelyan Lectures that Conrad Russell delivered at Cambridge University in the Lent Term of 1995. Between then and his death in October 2004, Russell developed the lectures into a much longer typescript that was approaching its final form when he died. Scholars of early seventeenth-century England owe Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush a great debt of gratitude for sensitively editing this manuscript and bringing it to publication. This new book ranks alongside Russell’s earlier works, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979) and The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), and together they offer a sustained and detailed account of early Stuart parliaments.