Whatever may be true of earlier periods, Dr Ashley thinks that to write the history of England in the seventeenth century without politics is to empty out the baby with the bath water. The political and constitutional changes in this epoch were remarkable. Thus when the first Stuart, King James I, came to the throne in 1603, he exercised wide and undefined powers, including the right to suspend the law. But the seventeenth century saw the execution of one King and the banishment of another, while William III was King by election and not by heredity. When the last Stuart, Queen Anne, died in 1714 the powers of the Crown had been reduced by statute, the monarch had ceased to be his own first Minister, and the House of Commons had become pre-eminent in the State.

          In the author’s opinion the Interregnum in the middle of the century, far from being a backwater in our history, marked a turn in the river. With the rise of science, as practised by Newton and his friends in the Royal Society, the gradual acceptance of the idea of liberty of conscience first actively promoted by Oliver Cromwell, the invention of realist political theories by Hobbes and Harrington, and the spread of Puritan nonconformity, the whole field of thought and complexion of life was transformed. Dr Ashley discusses the movements not only in politics, but in the arts and in literature, and their foreshadowings of our world of today.