What holds these essays together is the rejection of the idea of ''the birth of the modern world''. England before the Civil War was not a country welcoming a brave new world but one clinging fearfully to an old one. Change, where it happened, was not the result of a deliberate striving for ''progress'', and the polity of pre-Civil War England was not on the point of collapse. Parliaments were not dominated by two ''sides'' in training for a Cup Final at Naseby, but were groups of people struggling with limited success to reach agreement.