In Franz Kafka's The Trial, a horrifying fable of human alienation from human institutions, there is a central encounter between Kafka's persona K. and the painter Titorelli, whose task is to reproduce endlessly the icons of the judicial system—arbitrary, logically absurd, yet cruel and inescapable—of which K. has become the latest victim. Approaching a painting in progress, K. recognized its subject as a judge, but could not identify a large figure rising in the middle of the picture from the high back of the judicial seat:

In the militia ordinance of March 5, 1642, the houses of Parliament declared an emergency and “ordained” a solution. The emergency was the “imminent Danger” posed to king, Parliament, and kingdom by the “Rebellion and Insurrections” of “Papists, and other ill-affected Persons.” The solution was the selection of suitable county lieutenants, who were authorized to appoint deputies and officers and otherwise perform their duties.

Charles rejected the ordinance, ensuring a double confrontation: an arms race and the public exchanges known as the “war of words.” The Civil War—the predictable outcome of the rattling of words and swords—was bound intimately to the defense or attack of the three propositions stated or implied by the militia ordinance: that there was an emergency, that to address it the two houses required control of the militia, and that an “ordinance” was the appropriate constitutional strategy for the occasion.

The third matter is the focus of this study. But the genius of the militia ordinance and, more generally, the central constitutional assertion of the two houses on the eve of civil war was that the emergency, the mobilization of force, and the ordinance were intertwined beyond untangling. It was not merely that the militia ordinance was a response to an emergency situation beyond the reach of exact precedent. It was equally true that the constitutional thinking of parliamentary leaders, developed well before the militia ordinance and the train of events to which it specifically refers (the Irish rebellion of October 1641 and the attempt upon the five members of January 1642), more or less obliged them to produce an emergency as the grounds for the type of action they took.

The twentieth century has not been kind to the “Whig interpretation of history” with its emphasis on the inexorable triumph of reason and progress. Mortally wounded on the battlefields of Flanders, the liberal certainties that underpinned it were finally laid to rest in the shadow of the Holocaust. With the Whig interpretation died the tradition of seeing nineteenth-century politics in terms of the gradual, but uninterrupted, evolution of democratic principles and institutions. In its place emerged a new orthodoxy that stressed the discontinuities of popular politics during the nineteenth century and argued for three distinct phases of political development. The first, a phase of militant, semirevolutionary politics, coincided with the “industrial revolution” and led up to the defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s. This, it was argued, was followed by a period of stabilization during the mid-Victorian decades characterized by relative prosperity and political docility among the working classes. The final phase began with the economic downturn of the late 1870s and was said to have witnessed the reemergence of working-class militancy and socialist politics and to have culminated in the formation of the class-based Labour party.

This three-phase model emerged in embryonic form between the wars in the agitprop histories of Marxist writers such as Theodore Rothstein and T. A. Jackson and in the more influential works of G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. At the same time, many of the reductionist assumptions that underpinned it were simultaneously finding favor within Britain's emergent school of economic historians.