ABSTRACT
The meaning of parliamentary elections in seventeenth-century England long seemed clear enough. The mid-twentieth-century master narrative of England's history was unapologetically progressive, a story of the conscious and socially responsive construction of restraints on the arbitrariness of monarchical power. Voting presumably originated as something akin to the shout of affirmation that greeted the elevated king at a coronation. Voting procedures were of course encountered at the hustings, too, as the Martyr King knew. The novel factor in the modernization that Kishlansky celebrates may then have been the advancing partisanship, but scarcely the voting. Guy Miege identification of opinion and voting seems emblematic of a gathering position that John Milton, that strenuous participatory republican, surely deplored. Voting in the modern Anglo-American lexicon comes with individualist associations that are hard to escape and that seem already to have formed in Miege's thinking.
