Reading History: The Interregnum, 1649-1660

Not so long ago it could be said with some truth that the Interregnum, 1649 to 1660, or roughly the 1650s, was a neglected decade. Specialists of the early Stuarts, peddling notions that the period saw the Great Rebellion, the Puritan Revolution, the English Revolution or whatever, tended to lose interest in the late 1640s with the ending of the Civil Wars, the petering out of the revolution – if indeed there was a revolution – and the apparent dissipation of the heady atmosphere of the years between the assembly of the Long Parliament and the execution of Charles I. Those devoted to the later Stuart era, fixing their eyes on that other revolution, the sensible or Glorious one of 1688-9, generally took as their starting point the Restoration of 1660 with Charles II safely and surely back on the throne.