Eyewitness accounts of the trial and execution of Charles I portray a revolutionary moment in English history

The first newspaper arrived in England in 1620 and sparked a huge demand for up-to-the minute reports on domestic and world events. Men and women in Renaissance England were addicted to news, whether from the battlefields of Europe, or the scandal-filled salons of its courtiers. Newspapers commented on politics, crime, omens, bad weather, natural disasters, and strange apparitions. Breaking News traces the development of the newspaper in England, from its origins in manuscript letters and imported corantos in ShakespeareÕs England, to the introduction of daily newspapers, regional journals, and specialist magazines around 1700, as well as the first stirrings of American journalism. The examples of early journalism illustrated here reveal the indelible mark the early English newspaper has left on modern news culture. Chris R. Kyle is associate professor of history at Syracuse University. Jason Peacey is lecturer in history at University College London.

The first study to deal exclusively with the cult ofKing Charles the Martyr - Charles I as suffering, innocent king, walking in the footsteps of his Saviour to his own Calvary at Whitehall - and the political theology underpinning it, taking the story up to 1859.

This study traces the transition of treason from a personal crime against the monarch to a modern crime against the impersonal state. It consists of four highly detailed case studies of major state treason trials in England beginning with that of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford, in the spring of 1641 and ending with that of Charles Stuart, King of England, in January 1649. The book examines how these trials constituted practical contexts in which ideas of statehood and public authority legitimated courses of political action that might ordinarily be considered unlawful - or at least not within the compass of the foundational statute of Edward III. The ensuing narrative reveals how the events of the 1640s in England challenged existing conceptions of treason as a personal crime against the king, his family and his servants, and pushed the ascendant parliamentarian faction towards embracing an impersonal conception of the state that perceived public authority as completely independent of any individual or group.