In the age of Elizabeth there were mutterings of discontent; in the reign of her successor, James I, the House of Commons, speaking for the smaller landed gentry and the merchants, set forth the rights of its constituents in language which even a Stuart could understand; Charles I, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, tried a decade of personal government which ended in civil war and his death upon the scaffold in 1649. Then followed experiments in democracy two hundred years ahead of the times, which merely culminated in the Cromwellian dictatorship and, after the death of the stern Oliver, in the restoration of the monarchy. Reaction came as night succeeds the day, but the swelling currents of English commerce steadily recruited the ranks of the middle classes. Accordingly, when James II tried to turn back the tide in 1688, he was overthrown and the supremacy of Parliament was fixed for all time—a House of Lords crowded with newcomers and a House of Commons, both dominated in colonial and foreign affairs by mercantile considerations.
History has attached to this revolution the title "Puritan" as if it were essentially religious in character, but the title is primarily due to the "intellectual climate" of the age. The thought of the times was still deeply tinged with theology and the defense mechanism of men who were engaged in resisting taxes and other exactions was naturally drawn from the literature with which they were most familiar—the Old and the New Testament. "When the monarchy was to be subverted," wrote a shrewd observer of the age, "we knew what was necessary to justify the fact." All that was reasonable enough but the historian need not tarry long with the logical devices of men in action.
In reality, the English Revolution of the seventeenth century was a social transformation almost identical in its essentials with the French Revolution of the next century: a civilian laity emancipated itself from the mastery of Crown, aristocracy, and clergy. The process was long and painful and during its course many preferred the uncertain-
