Abstract
Revolutions are messy affairs for those involved. Contemporaries who lived through the revolution that followed the English Civil Wars found it hard to make sense of what they had experienced. Modern historians have found it impossible even to agree on a label: it has been described as a Puritan Revolution, Great Rebellion, the last of Europe’s wars of religion, or the first modern revolution. Lawrence Stone, following the seventeenth-century political philosopher James Harrington, traced the origins of civil war to the massive shift in economic power that followed Henry VIII’s seizure of monastic lands and their subsequent sale, along with most crown lands. In 1640, many saw the Scottish crisis as a golden opportunity for a radical change of direction. Most contemporaries thought the war would be over within a few weeks or months, the same mistake made by later generations on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
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