If we wish to improve our understanding of the English revolution, one of the topics we shall need to reconsider is the debate between Crown and Parliament over the issue of political liberty. Admittedly this may appear a woefully hackneyed claim to make. Surely the traditional whig interpretation always took the Crown's attacks on the freedom of subjects to be among the leading causes of the civil war? And surely it was one of the main aspirations of what Alan Cromartie has described as the hyper-whig interpretation popularised by Conrad Russell and his disciples to cast doubt on precisely that article of faith? Has not the theme of liberty already been done to death?

My answer is that I am interested in a view of liberty different from the one examined by the whig historians and their hyper-whig adversaries. These schools of thought were alike concerned with whether or not there was an assault on freedom in the sense of an increased campaign of interference with the legal rights and liberties of subjects in the decades before 1642. According to the whigs, the Crown was engaged on just such a campaign of lawless oppression, which in turn explains why the presentation of the Petition of Right in 1628 was always treated as a pivotal moment in the whig grand narrative. The Petition specifically charges that, although the people of England possess ‘divers Rights and Liberties’ under the law, they are being prevented from exercising them, subjected to vexatious compulsion and otherwise ‘molested and disquieted’ in a manner ‘wholly and directly contrary’ to the customs and statutes of the realm. Further objections about Crown interference were raised as soon as Parliament reconvened in 1640. This was the moment when Henry Parker emerged as the most resourceful protagonist of the parliamentarian cause. Parker's Case of Shipmony, first published in November 1640, begins by complaining in the same vein that the use of the royal prerogative to impose levies and forced loans ‘is incompatible with popular liberty.’ The tract ends by expressing the fear that England may soon be reduced to the level of France, where the king's absolute powers have oppressed the people and ruined the state.