For attempting a reassessment of the Cavalier (or Long) Parliament, Annabel Patterson is to be congratulated. As she points out in her opening section, it is some years since this parliament has been studied closely, and those that have published on the subject have tended to avoid consideration of the whole institution. Paul Seaward, in The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667 (Cambridge, 1988), ended his survey with the fall of Clarendon, while Andrew Swatland's The House of Lords in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1996) was concerned wholly with the upper chamber. In attempting to plug the gaps left by these and a number of other earlier publications, this volume represents, however, a missed opportunity. Patterson concentrates her resources on the Commons alone, making the most of her undoubted specialist knowledge of Andrew Marvell but avoiding reexamination of the upper chamber, except on one or two stray occasions when it suits her to accord the Lords some attention. She is otherwise content to refer the reader uncritically to Swatland. Were this all, the book would be simply disappointing (given that the title suggests a study of parliament and not just of one house), but there are numerous other failings of style, scope, and precision that contribute to making this a profoundly frustrating study. Patterson opens with an assault on the shortcomings (as she sees them) of “proper historians” (7). Indeed, throughout the book she adopts a curiously belligerent, sardonic tone, which is grating rather than enthusing. “Proper historians,” she asserts, tend to crowd their texts with a bewildering array of sources and footnotes justifying their conclusions, which has the effect, she suggests, “of a large cocktail party” (8); they are driven by “the search for fact as distinguishable from opinion” (37). Her answer to this is to examine a few texts in detail and to concentrate on the “voices” of the people concerned, reveling in the disparities of the sources she uses and making much of what she terms the “scofflaw” pamphlets of the times. All this may be well and good in theory, but the result is a book that is hard to trust. While Patterson may find lengthy sets of footnotes tedious, her failure to cite fully, her oddly uncritical attitude to a number of the sources she employs, and a general lack of precision leaves her open to a variety of criticisms, some of which need pointing out in detail.

A reader coming to this subject afresh might be forgiven for not realizing that this was not the first “parliament” of Charles II's reign, since no noticeable mention is made of the Convention that called the king back and that he sat for the remainder of his first year on the throne. The book is weighted very heavily in favor of the mid-1670s, very little time being given over to the first decade at all. Patterson's chronological survey in part 3 accords just eighteen pages to the period 1661–74; it treats the single session of 1675 in the following fifteen pages and the period 1677–78 in a further thirty pages (145–208). Patterson refers to Charles II and James II as the last of the Stuart monarchs (4), conveniently overlooking the last two Stuart queens, Mary II and Anne. She implies that, at the outset of the Cavalier Parliament, the lords were rejoined by the bishops (40), though they were not readmitted to their places until November 1661. She makes much of the Earl of Shaftesbury's questioning of the Duke of York's right to sit in the Prince of Wales's place in the House of Lords as “a shocking glimpse of early exclusionist feeling” (22). Apparently she is unaware of the myriad instances of peers, always protective of their privileges, insisting on their proper places in the chamber. A detailed exposition of the king's speeches during the Parliament is abandoned after the examination of a few examples with the pronouncement that it would be “tedious to pursue this pattern” (78). Another of her forays into the world of the House of Lords, over the incarceration of four peers for questioning the legality of the Parliament, finds her asserting that the source she is using is the “only” record we have of the proceedings at the time (133); this is something that is palpably false. She destroys her own argument two pages later by employing a further source for the same event, and she is clearly unaware of a number of other reports of the affair. Imprecision is evident elsewhere in the volume. Patterson miscounts the number of peers registering their protest against the passage of the disbanding bill (eliding Lords Grey and Clare into one; 222), provides confusing descriptions of the number of sessions (44, 124, 126), and misdates the opening of the Oxford Parliament to 21 March 1680 rather than 1681 (90). Also inaccurate is her statement that Sir Joseph Williamson's career ended with his incarceration in the Tower of London (204); this ignores his later long service as a diplomat under William III.

The one saving grace of this flawed study is the final chapter, which reads differently from the remainder of the book. It is both more credible and more engaging, and Patterson's identification of James Ralph as the editor of Grey's Debates is persuasive. There are still limitations. Patterson might have extended her survey of “how we got parliamentary history” to consider the manner in which the Lords’ records were reproduced by Ebenezer Timberland or to examine the continuing fascination of the later Stuarts on politicians such as Charles James Fox at the close of the eighteenth century. This, however, may be to quibble unfairly.

In general, though, this feels like a rushed volume, further evidence of which is its lamentable index and lack of bibliography. Citations within the text are occasionally vague or misleading. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is referred to throughout either as the New Dictionary or simply as the Dictionary, and Patterson mistakenly credits Oxford with the publication of The Entring Book of Roger Morrice (Boydell, 2007). It is undoubtedly high time that the Cavalier Parliament was subjected to fresh scrutiny. Sadly, this is not the book to do it.