To Assist In Understanding
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle

Christopher Hill's seminal essay "The English Revolution 1640," recasting Cromwell's rebellion as class warfare, is available online.

The orthodox attitude to the seventeenth-century revolution is misleading because it does not try to penetrate below the surface, because it takes the actors in the revolution at their face value, and assumes that the best way to find out what people were fighting about is to consider what the leaders said they were fighting about. We all know that during the seventeenth century England underwent a profound political revolution. Everyone has heard of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads, King Charles and his Cavaliers, and we all know that a King of England had his head cut off. But why did this happen? What was it all about? Has it any significance for us at the present day?

Hill (1912-2003) thought the answer to that last question was yes, and he managed to convince a generation of British historians of it, even those who disagreed vehemently with his answers to the first two. We can safely say that Neal Stephenson thinks so, too, based on the evidence of Quicksilver, and the immediacy of the connections he makes has made me itchy for The Confusion, the trilogy's second volume.