Revolutionary England is a perennially vibrant field of study. The roll-call of events, crises, and changes that electrified mid-seventeenth-century England certainly retains an impressive cumulative force. The descent into civil war, killing of a king, creation of a republic, fits of military government, written constitutions, dominance of Oliver Cromwell, abolition of a state church, eruption into major European conflicts, conquest of Scotland and Ireland, and efflorescence of powerfully articulated political thinking dazzled, bewildered, or appalled contemporaries.