ABSTRACT
This epilogue presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. Recent work on the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions has emphasized how comprehensively the new orders that emerged from these upheavals betrayed the peasants and workers who had helped bring them into being. So expensive did it prove that in the end the regime was bankrupted. We know from Simeon Ashe and other observers that many were impatient for battle on the march to Edgehill, at First Newbury and at Marston Moor, for example. Supporters of the king too could burst into tears of exaltation, as at Selby when he addressed them on the eve of the Second Bishops' War. During the English revolution it usually had to do with religion or personal attachments. Little over a decade later the English people, supported by their counterparts in Scotland and Ireland, emerged from their 18-year republican experiment as if from a bad dream.
