ABSTRACT
Generations of students have learned that the foundations of modern England were laid in the century between the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s and the Civil War of the 1640s. During that century, England underwent the religious revolution that made it a protestant nation-divided within itself between puritans and conformists, but much more clearly divided from Rome, the presumed seat of Antichrist. And during that century of demographic growth and inflation, England’s ‘political nation’ — the men who by right of birth or wealth participated in the political process and the administration of the realm-expanded dramatically and became self-conscious and active defenders of what they construed as constitutional liberty. Marxist historians have traced these changes to socio-economic factors-the decline of feudalism and the emergence of a new mercantile capitalist class.1
