In a culmination of a long period of challenges to royal prerogatives, Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army overthrew the royal government. His foot soldiers, if you will, included some of the most original, radical and exuberant political thinkers in Western history. For a brief moment the king was gone and radical leaders like John Lilburne and Gerrard Winstanley and their ideas held sway, although Cromwell and the gentry were shortly able to reassert control (before eventually losing power in the English reformation). Cromwell considered the radicals "a despicable and contemptible generation of men."

Hill's book tells the marvelously exciting stories of the Ranters and Seekers, Levellers and True Levellers (or Diggers), and the Quakers. Diggers, so called because they cultivated land they held in common in communes, were the most radical strain. They vied with the Levellers, who "merely" supported the universal right of every male head of household to vote for parliament. These events scared to death the usual powers-that-be. Thomas Hobbes' wrote the Leviathan in reaction against the chaos, as he saw it, of the English Civil War.

In summarizing the impact of the radicals' ideas, Hill quotes their enemy Clement Walker that they had "cast all the secrets and mysteries of government...before the vulgar (like pearls before swine)...[and] made the people thereby so curious and so arrogant that they will never find humility enough to submit to a civil rule."

Hill states, "For a short time, ordinary people were freer from the authority of church and social superiors than they had ever been before, or were for a long time to be again." Hill's excellent book tells the story of how such an event came to be and how the lords and gentry regained power and smashed the radicals.

A must read for anyone interested in the history of political ideas or English history. ( )

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The period during which the English Civil War was fought was important in the growth and development of Protestantism and was the birthing period for Quakerism.

from the Introduction: 'Popular revolt was for many centuries an essential feature of the English tradition, and the middle decades of the sevententh century saw the greatest upheaval that has yet occurred in Britain. ... the long-term consequences of the Revolution were all to the advantage of the gentry and merchants, not of the lower fifty per cent of the population ... This book deals with what from one point of view are subsidiary episodes and ideas in the English Revolution, the attempts of various groups of the common people to impose their own solutions to the problems of their time, in opposition to the wishes of their betters who had called them into political action.'
Hill recommends David Underdown's Pride's Purge, about which he writes, 'His is the view from the top, from Whitehall, mine the worm's eye view.'

This is a wonderful little history of the spread of radical ideas by pamphlet during the Cromwellian Commonwealth.