A cavalier attitude to monarchy

Historians have long been more interested in the Roundheads than in the Cavaliers. It was the parliamentarians who achieved England’s revolution, or the nearest thing the country has come to one. It was they who overthrew the monarchy, the House of Lords and the bishops, they whose insistence on parliamentary rights, and whose attainment of a measure of religious toleration under Cromwell, apparently pointed ahead to modern values.

Now the balance is changing. Historians have become less ardent for progress. Under their increasingly sceptical gaze the gap between parliamentarian thinking and the outlook of its later congratulators seems ever wider. Besides, over-population has driven students of the parliamentarian cause into neighbouring pastures.

The trouble is that the royalists prove harder to study. They either wrote fewer documents or, fearing prosecution, destroyed records in defeat. The parliamentarians, having driven the king from London, expanded the bureaucracy of Whitehall and voluminously registered its measures.