Conclusion

Abstract

‘Let [the king] come in, and call a parliament of the greatest cavaliers in England, so they be men of estates, and let them sit but 7 years, and they will all turn Commonwealth’s men’, prophesied James Harrington in early 1660.¹ Within seven years, indeed, the Restoration government was in an acute political crisis; after three decades of political conflict it succumbed, almost without a fight, to Prince William and his Dutch troops. Had the attempt to reconstruct the pre-Civil War polity been (as both Harrington and Hobbes, for different reasons, would have thought) fundamentally misconceived? Historians in the past have believed so: the Civil War both demonstrated the inadequacy of England’s antique system of government, and pushed it further into obsolescence; no longer could it accommodate the aspirations of a politically mature people, and no longer could it deliver the stability they craved.