In the course of his challenging reassessment of the parliamentary politics of the early seventeenth century, Conrad Russell has suggested that modern students of the period have approached the subject with deep-seated preconceptions about the existence of fundamental conflicts between the crown and the house of commons. As a result, the willingness of the lower house to take up issues of parliamentary privilege has probably been over-rated. The explanation for this long-standing misapprehension lies in the fact that the views of those M.P.s who wished to pursue such issues have found their way into the record far more often than the silences of their colleagues who did not want to take them up.