Introduction

There is hardly any more agreement among present-day historians about the consequences of the English Revolution than there is about its causes. The main difference amongst historians has been whether the English Revolution was a major turning point in the history of Britain. Such historians also believed that 1660 marked an equally decisive turning point in the role of religion in the political and social life of England. In the last decades of the twentieth century this turning-point view was challenged by revisionist historians. Revisionist historians also showed that after the Restoration religion, far from losing its importance, remained a powerful political and social force. Currently, this continuity view still has much support amongst historians, who recognise that the monarchy, though strengthened by a conservative backlash in its favour in the early 1660s, faced the same problems it had faced before 1660: the triple problems of finance, ruling multiple kingdoms and religious divisions.