Skip to content

This is part one of a major five part article  on what was actually the English bourgeois revolution. We shall run it over the next two weeks on this website

None comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him. Richard Rumbold, Leveller.

Politicians, mainstream historians, constitutional lawyers and the like would have us believe that there is something uniquely decent about the way in which the British conduct their affairs of state. These are marked out, so they say, by tolerance, hatred of violence, a sense of justice and fairness, willingness to compromise and by gradual, evolutionary change. Not for us, they continue, warming to their theme, are the extremism, the violence and the awful revolutionary upheavals witnessed in France, Russia or elsewhere.