Hello everyone and welcome back to the history of England, episode 431 B. A world turned upside down?

This week feels like an historic moment. It is my last publishing forer into the first phase of the English Revolution, 1640 to 1689.

That's just a plot spoiler to point out there'll be more trouble coming along. This time it will be glorious. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more. Say no more.

Anywho, I have two jobs. One is to park company with some of the folks at whose side we were

standing when the restoration

balloon went up, finish off their stories a bit, wave to them from the key as they sail out

into the seas of historical oblivion with a hanky and a tear. You'll find that in the afterlife's

episode. The other is to ask, did it achieve anything? Did it change anything?

Now, I figured some of you might not be interested in one or the other of those two topics,

so instead of one big episode, I have spread this into two shorter ones,

and also should issue a warning that these don't take us chronologically forward one iota in our story of England,

so you can just skip one or both of them and you won't miss out.

Odd, possibly, but that's the way I've done it.

So, this episode is about that question, was it all for naught?

Blair Warden is one of those historians

whose quite extraordinary intelligence and insight

just hits you in the face.

And his conclusions have been in the back of my head

throughout the whole of this, the last couple of years or so.

He's the one who quotes Dryden.

And Dryden had walked with Cromwell's funeral cortege,

but later years had turned him into a Tory and a Jacobite,

...