One of the most exciting historiographical developments in early Stuart studies over the last couple of decades has been the rise of the ‘New British History’. In order to understand the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, it has been shown, we must recognize that James I and Charles I ruled over a multiple-kingdom inheritance that was inherently unstable, that the policies they pursued in any one kingdom inevitably had reverberations in the other two (making it extremely difficult to rule all three kingdoms at once in a harmonious way), and that Charles I's inability to manage his problematic multiple-kingdom inheritance effectively played a large part in his downfall. We have also been reminded that Scotland and Ireland revolted against Charles I before England did, and thus that the causes of the English Civil War need to be sought, at least in part, in external and contingent factors, rather than solely within England. As Conrad Russell argued: ‘the Civil War is not an enclosed English subject. It cannot be understood in any purely English context’; ‘the problem of multiple kingdoms had a major influence on the daily developments of the crisis which led to the English Civil War’. The New British History has proved controversial: Scottish and Irish historians have criticized the anglocentric bias that seemed inherent in Russell's approach, whilst many English historians would question whether England should be de-centred so much in accounts seeking to explain the origins of the English Civil War.