ABSTRACT
Charles I and Oliver Cromwell lived in a time of revolution: Charles was its victim and Oliver its instrument. The dissolution of the monasteries, the closure of abbeys and the sale of chantries enabled King Henry VIII to confer financial advantages by selling most of them off to pay for foreign wars and so benefiting the landed gentry and rising middle classes, including lawyers and merchants. Some historians have insisted that the English revolution, as they call it, was part of a general crisis that afflicted the whole of Europe in the mid-seventeenth century. Men like Edward Hyde, John Culpeper, Viscount Falkland and George Digby, who were all to become Royalists in the civil war, were alike critical of the government’s recent actions, particularly its financial methods. But if one man can be picked out as the principal agent of a revolution against the Crown it was not John Pym but Alderman Isaac Penington.
