> I’m sufficiently sad to think that this sounds like fun, especially when you bear in mind that the good guys are pre-ordained to win.

good guys? Tell that to the Irish!

I’m not the plank – I promise – but I used to work with a bloke who was in the Sealed Knot. They apparently only recreate the battles that the Roundheads lost. They like the Royalists. The Civil War Recreation Society do the Roundhead victories. The two groups don’t like each other.

As far as I know, the whole situation’s like West Side Story but with more real ale and less attention to personal hygiene.

In war nobody is innocent, so if you can’t prevent it you won’t be able to claim you’re *good* even if you’re on the side of the winners.

Oliver Cromwell and Saddam Hussein, both brutal dictators at the head of one party theocracies.

One loses all credibility when one talks utter rubbish.

Saddam was a Baathist, not a theocrat, nor did he preside over a theocracy.

Your supreme ignorance renders the rest of your article irrelevant.

And the last thing the Cavaliers would have wished for would have been intervention from the American colonies; there was plenty as it was, all of it on the parliamentary side. People like Henry Vane, the governor of Massachusetts who came back to do the revolution…

(The original Sealed Knot was a post-1650 royalist conspiracy, so you can probably guess the intention here.)

Sorry, Dave, but your handle on 17th century history isn’t as good as it might be. The left of the day were the Levellers and Diggers – you might try googling “Putney debates” for a start – and Cromwell was their sworn foe: he thought that universal suffrage would lead to the destruction of property rights, so he probably wasn’t much of a political thinker, either.

The period saw not one but two military coups d’état (or three if you count William of Orange’s invasion in 1688, it’s hard to see what else it was) – a significant and underestimated disjuncture between British and American history.

Nor do I see why you are so starry-eyed about the sundry continental revolutions. Most were extremely short-lived and were succeeded by repressive régimes such as that of Napoleon III in France. The Russian case needs no comment, except perhaps to recall that the Bolsheviks had b*gger-all support outside of Moscow and St Petersburg, as the elections to the Constituent Assembly proved.

Arguably, the best place to be a member of the working class in the 19th century was Germany, and that was down to Bismarck’s “tory paternalism” and had nothing to do with revolutionary activities by students or anyone else.

What Mike said. The idea that the aristocrats, gentry and property owners that led the Parliament side were ‘the good guys’ is a bit befuddling. On a pure ‘most liberal’ analysis, the King was for freedom of conscience to a much greater degree than any on Dave’s chosen side.

And, y’know, shutting down all forms of popular entertainment and banning Christmas as unChristian aren’t the actions of any side I particularly like the sound of…

Yeah – that Russian revolution worked out really well, didn’t it?

There is one obvious reason why it’s so difficult to organise a revolution in England………
….. no one wants to fight in the pissing rain.

MattGB you are talking rubbish- actually its much more complicated than that. There were plenty of people who argued for extending toleration on the Parliamentarian side- Cromwell berated the Scots that they might think whether in the Bowels of Christ they might not be mistaken! In both the constitutions of the 1640s and 1650s- the 2nd Agreement of the People (which as Barbara Taft shows came from the Army) and the Instrument of Government (which Cromwell brought in) there was a commitment to toleration to anyone who was Protestant and accepted the state. That was far more liberty of conscience than Charles I was promising (he wanted an erastian Anglican Church in which the person of the King was united with the person of Christ in the church). You get real radicals on the Parliamentary side- like William Walwyn- arguing for complete toleration.

Radicalism on the Parliamentary side is far far too big and foreign a subject to deal with right now- but it did exist and though it isnt’ what we would think of today as radical (the Diggers fled the town and went to set up a commune in Surrey to prepare for the coming of Christ) it did have elements which we might recognise and admire.

Actually Steve, I’m not talking rubbish, although TBH I may have been conflating my monarchs, I know that JamesII was very very pro tolerance and freedom of conscience and got them mixed up. But, y’know, what’s a bit of hyperbole?

Compared to an inability to spell the name of the person you’re responding to online anyway…

Mat, you’re right, it was James II. And of course it was a cynical ploy to try to build support for Catholic toleration. James II is a somewhat tragic figure who seems to have had a nervous breakdown in 1688 (well, throwing the Great Seal into the Thames in the belief that it would make the country ungovernable is magical thinkng even by contemporary standards – you can’t imagine Louis XIV of France or William of Orange doing it).