This book examines the background to the English military intervention
in the Thirty Years War. Blending accounts of diplomacy and factional
in-fighting at Court with parliamentary and popular politics, it aims to
illuminate the 'revolution' of 1624 when the Palatine crisis forced
James I to abandon his long-held dream of an Anglo-Spanish dynastic
alliance in favour of a more aggressive policy against the Habsburgs. In
studying the English polity in a period of crisis, Professor Cogswell
challenges many of the revisionist assumptions about early
seventeenth-century England and highlights the dangers in confusing the
history of Court faction with the broader political history of the
period. In particular, the author stresses the vital importance of
Parliament, an institution which in 1624 had no trouble delaying the
passage of the subsidy bill until the government redressed a long list
of grievances. Indeed, the 'blessed revolution' celebrated the evolution
of Parliament into what many contemporaries regarded as its proper role
in the state as much as it did the collapse of the longstanding
Anglo-Spanish entente.