ABSTRACT
Most historians have in effect concerned themselves with the crisis of 1640, with the isolation of Charles I from the great majority of his people. The events of 1640-2 are treated as of secondary importance, the falling away of the faint-hearted as the crisis worked itself out. The royalists are portrayed, even by those without ideological axes to grind, as men lacking both vision and the stomach for a fight-men unable to overcome an inbred respect for authority and the hierarchy of values expressed in the Great Chain of Being.
