ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the period that began with renewed war in England and Wales and concluded with the culmination of wars of conquest which saw Ireland and Scotland subsumed into a Republic of the British Isles. It is the period in which the monarchy was slued off in the wake of a revolution that in itself grew from the anger generated by the second Civil War and the king’s failure to conclude a peace. In perhaps the most thoughtful and thought-provoking book on this revolution, Brian Manning has looked at the way that it affected the various social groups and classes as well as different generations and genders.1 In that work will be found discussions of the activists who comprised the various stages and elements of the revolution. This chapter by contrast contains the experiences of many who were observers or participants at the fringes of the English Revolution, such as John Clopton and Walter Powell who kept diaries of the period which avoided direct references to their ‘interesting times’, or poets in Wales who celebrated the times but bemoaned Wales’ distance from the heart of the revolution. There are Scotsmen, once the centre of religious and political affairs, who became aware that they were being sidelined and losing control of what was once their cause. The revolution forced introspection on many people; for the most part this forced a concentration on their own affairs at the expense of their involvement in the massive changes wrought around them: what John Morrill recently called the victims but not the heroes of the ‘English Civil Wars’.2 The major or most dramatic actors of these years often appear then, not centre stage as we are used to seeing them, but as characters who are sometimes off the set like Shakespeare’s characters from Hamlet, in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
