This Handbook brings together leading historians of the events surrounding the English revolution, exploring how the events of the revolution grew out of, and resonated, in the politics and interactions of the each of the Three Kingdoms--England, Scotland, and Ireland. It captures a shared British and Irish history, comparing the significance of events and outcomes across the Three Kingdoms. In doing so, the Handbook offers a broader context for the history of the Scottish Covenanters, the Irish Rising of 1641, and the government of Confederate Ireland, as well as the British and Irish perspective on the English civil wars, the English revolution, the Regicide, and Cromwellian period. The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution explores the significance of these events on a much broader front than conventional studies. The events are approached not simply as political, economic, and social crises, but as challenges to the predominant forms of religious and political thought, social relations, and standard forms of cultural expression. The contributors provide up-to-date analysis of the political happenings, considering the structures of social and political life that shaped and were re-shaped by the crisis. The Handbook goes on to explore the long-term legacies of the crisis in the Three Kingdoms and their impact in a wider European context.

In Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution, Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille explores Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, which, although composed between 1664 and 1667, were first published in 1806. The Memoirs were a best-seller in the nineteenth century, but largely fell into oblivion in the twentieth century. They were rediscovered in the late 1980s by historians and literary scholars interested in women's writing, the emerging culture of republicanism, and dissent. By approaching the Memoirs through the prism of history and form, this book challenges the widely-held assumption that early modern women did not - and could not - write the history of wars, a field that was supposedly gendered as masculine. On the contrary, Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson, a reader of ancient history and an outstanding Latinist, was a historian of the English Revolution, to be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.

Ian Gentles provides a riveting, in-depth analysis of the battles and sieges, as well as the political and religious struggles that underpinned them. Based on extensive archival and secondary research he undertakes the first sustained attempt to arrive at global estimates of the human and economic cost of the wars. The many actors in the drama are appraised with subtlety. Charles I, while partly the author of his own misfortune, is shown to have been at moments an inspirational leader. The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms is a sophisticated, comprehensive, exciting account of the sixteen years that were the hinge of British and Irish history. It encompasses politics and war, personalities and ideas, embedding them all in a coherent and absorbing narrative.

In Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill takes up themes that have emerged from a lifetime's investigation into the causes of the English Revolution. However, Hill does more than analyze the origins of the Revolution. He examines the ways the seeds of change sown during the revolution, grew into transformative politics in the period following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Hill argues that the intellectual heritage of the English Revolution was mixed. While he acknowledges its achievements, he also depicts some of its failings. Consequently, he challenges the view that radical notions faded with the Restoration, suggesting instead, that they continued in pervasive and subtle ways throughout the course of English and American history. The apparent similarity between the England of 1640 and that of 1660 is shown to be illusory. Each period's institutions survived but the social context had changed. In this way, Hill demonstrates how intellectual consequences cannot be separated from the social and economic factors of the nation that produced them. He concludes that historians should turn their attention to the "unofficial" radical heritage that is less easy to comprehend, though no less important. This is a highly readable and provocative account by one of the world's foremost historians.

Original and thought-provoking, this collection sheds new light on an important yet understudied feature of seventeenth-century England's political and cultural landscape: exile. It considers exile both as physical displacement from England-to France, Germany, the Low Countries and America-and as inner, mental withdrawal. The essays assembled here demonstrate, among other things, both the shared and highly individual experiences in exile of figures conspicuously diverse in political and religious allegiance.

This study brings a new perspective to a pivotal debate: the causes of the English Revolution. It pinpoints the economic motives behind the opposition to the crown, and shows their connection to the changing mind-set and political transitions of the time. Distinctively, it identifies the radicalism of the mercantile sphere, and the developing claim of "freedom of trade," the basis on which parliament challenged the king’s fiscal prerogative. Freedom of trade was associated with rights of consent, which were asserted as a guarantee of economic interests, and as a political principle. This informed the constitutional changes pushed through by parliament early in 1641, establishing freedom of trade by parliamentary control of the customs, and giving the assembly an automatic place at the center of affairs, the first requirement of representative government. Crucially, it was not the crown but parliament that appropriated the state interest, through an independent definition of national priorities. As England coalesced into a political and commercial unit, the open and communal patterns of medieval times were overlaid. The land itself came to be perceived and used in a different way. Freedom of trade had an agrarian aspect. An extended class of gentry and yeomanry occupied consolidated farms, displacing the smallholders from the common lands. With intensified marketing, the old moral restraints on trade and property died away. A more exploitative ethic undermined the balance of relationship with the land. The book makes an original connection between the English Revolution and the processes of environmental change.