Of all the centuries of English history, the seventeenth probably seems the most crucial to most students. It is generally regarded as the period when state and society were shaken apart and put together again, a revolutionary era with powerful consequences for the future, the foundation of modern England. Not only did it witness – or so we are told – the end of the medieval constitution, the establishment of parliamentary monarchy, and the acceptance of a secular state harbouring any number of Churches and denominations; it was also the time when England's imperial expansion began, when capitalist organization took its modern form, and when developments in science and philosophy replaced a whole inherited body of thought about the world by one that may fairly be called modern. Many would regard it as the formative century in the experience of England: an age of fascinating and fruitful turmoil.

One would therefore naturally expect to find an abundance of good books on this century; good minds and able writers must surely be falling over each other in their zeal to make the age their own. Now it is quite true that many of the ablest English historians have in fact been so attracted, but it is surprisingly difficult to find a good, up-to-date, single account of the whole period. Maurice Ashley's contribution to the Penguin History of England (1952) is the weakest volume in that series.