Volume 51, Number 9 · May 27, 2004
When the Lid Came off England
By Keith Thomas
Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660
by Austin Woolrych
Oxford University Press, 814 pp., $35.00
'If in time, as in place, there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of time would be that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660.' With these words the philosopher Thomas Hobbes opened his dialogue Behemoth (1679), which surveyed the tumultuous happenings of mid-seventeenth-century Eng- land, when there was 'a circular motion of the sovereign power,' as 'it moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the Rump; from the Rump to Oli- ver Cromwell; and then back again from Richard Cromwell to the Rump; thence to the Long Parliament; and thence to King Charles II.'
Review, 4214 words
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