It is hard to overpraise this admirable – indeed one would have thought impossible – account of the history of England, Scotland and Ireland from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his son Charles II. The great masters of English 17th-century historiography, S. R. Gardiner and Sir Charles Firth, between them took nearly 30 volumes and even then did not quite make it to the finish. But this even-paced, readable, good-natured and wise volume not only tells the reader what happened and when but gives him a clear impression of the individual actors, large-minded and generous, without being blind to weakness, folly or vindictiveness and above all not fitting them into a preconceived explanation of the most dramatic and perhaps the most formative series of events in our political history.
Political? Yes, political. Because though the author is sensitive to and understanding of the religious principles and controversies of the period, though he mastered the staunchless flow of modern publications detailing the economic and social facts and tendencies that underlay this era of change and expansion, he is, by profession, a political historian.
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