ABSTRACT
An emerging trend in the scholarship considers how the eventual explosion of hostilities played out not just on the battlefields of England but also in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. It has often been useful to cast the English Civil War (1642-1651) as the last religious war and the first political revolution. Elsewhere, the kaleidoscope vision of the Civil War as a confluence of issues in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales is Trevor Royle's thesis (2004), which explains the Covenanters, the Bishops' War, Cromwell's campaigns in Ireland, and the Levellers and Diggers as manifestations of regional issues bundled into a great conflagration. Despite the many changes wrought by the Civil War, the unfinished political and religious settlement continued to play itself out in 1688. One of the greatest military challenges to Britain in the postwar period was its contentious relationship with both the sovereign Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as part of Great Britain.
