Volume 14, Number 8 · April 23, 1970
Revolution Then
By Lawrence Stone
The Court and the Country
by Perez Zagorin
Atheneum, 336 pp., $10.00
What happened in England in the middle of the seventeenth century? Was it a 'great rebellion' as Clarendon believed, the last and most violent of the many rebellions against particularly unprepossessing or unpopular kings that had been staged by dissident members of the landed classes century after century throughout the Middle Ages? Was it merely an internal war caused by a temporary political breakdown due to particular political circumstances? Was it the Puritan Revolution of S. R. Gardiner, to whom the driving force behind the whole episode was a conflict of religious institutions and ideologies? Was it the first great clash of liberty against royal tyranny, as seen by Macaulay, the first blow for the Enlightenment and Whiggery, a blow which put England on the slow road to parliamentary monarchy and civil liberties?
Review, 3031 words
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