Order out of chaos

What got into them? For two decades in the middle of the 17th century, English- men transformed their world, overthrowing and eventually executing their king, abolishing bishops and the House of Lords, and incidentally slaughtering each other — and from time to time their Scottish and Irish neighbours — on a scale that approached the carnage of the first world war.

Explaining these ‘English civil wars’ — the term Blair Worden gives to the sequence of conflicts that afflicted the country between 1640 and the Restoration in 1660 — has always been tricky. How does one make sense of the multifarious possible causes, or the bewildering, Russian-novel-like profusion of characters; or do justice to the conflict’s great moments of drama (the show trials in Westminster Hall, the battlefield confrontations, the public execution of King Charles I, the offer of the crown to Oliver Cromwell)? How, too, to account for the civil wars’ anticlimactic end: after all the blood and idealism spent in the quest to create a godly ‘New Jerusalem’ in England, the return of the Stuart monarchy and the libidinous and cynical Charles II?

Not surprisingly, professional historians have been only partially successful in explaining all this to themselves; still less effective in explaining it to the general public.