"The history of England between 1603 and 1640 is not the history of a growing disease in the body politic, but of conflict – some of it healthy, some morbid – within a setting of agreed essentials: or rather it was this until the impatient attempt at a drastic solution on the king's behalf persuaded his opponents that the essentials were no longer agreed. Thus the prehistory of the civil war should certainly be read as the breakdown of a system of government. But it did not break down because it had been unworkable from the first... It broke down because the early Stuart governments could not manage or persuade, because they were incompetent, sometimes corrupt, and frequently just ignorant of what was going on or needed doing."
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Civil wars involving the states and peoples of EuropeMilitary history of EnglandPolitics of the United Kingdom17th-century military history
Original Language: English
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Sources
Geoffrey Elton, 'The Stuart Century', Annali della Fondazione italiana per la storia amministrativa, 2 (1965), quoted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–1972, Volume Two: Parliament/Political Thought (1974), p. 161
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/English_Civil_War
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