SOMETHING VERY EXCITING is happening in the world of Civil War and Cromwellian studies. At long last the mid-seventeenth century is getting a measure of the public attention it deserves. Recently, readers have enjoyed Paul Lay’s Providence Lost (2020) and Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell (2021) while blockbuster novelists including Robert Harris and Philippa Gregory are moving into this fertile period.
Historians have long appreciated the unique fascination of this “Age of Conscience”, where centuries-old norms were overturned overnight, ordinary people were forced to make extraordinary choices each day, and the whole thing was captured by the first newspapers. However, the complicated Civil Wars of the 1640s, and the
