Royal Panic Attack

• King James VI and I and His English Parliaments by Conrad Russell, edited by Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush
  Oxford, 195 pp, £55.00, February 2011, ISBN 978 0 19 820506 7

Since the 1960s, social historians have made enormous efforts to expand the range of history beyond the familiar cast of monarchs, courtiers and parliamentarians to recover the lives of the lower orders. ‘History from below’ has complicated and enriched the national story: witches and wet nurses, Ranters and Muggletonians, autodidacts, knitters and servants have all emerged from the shadows of neglect and condescension. In the midst of this historical revolution the career of the parliamentary historian Conrad Russell, whose first book was published in 1971 and who died in 2004, seemed like a fantastical conceit on the unfashionable notion of ‘history from above’.