![]() ![]() ![]() The author is particularly insightful on the advancement of this “middling sort.” As challenges to the monarchy mounted, Parliament began to gain real power and became “the institutional voice of the new political classes.” Healey ably chronicles the suspenseful buildup to the shocking regicide of 1649 via two primary threads: republicanism, tinged with fervid anti-Catholicism and royal absolutism. With the explosion of the press and proliferation of free schools came “the rise of the literate middling sort”-i.e., those below the gentry class-who grew more politically active and opinionated and who were directly involved in challenging the authoritarian strictures of James I and his son, Charles I. Healey, a professor of social history at Oxford, offers an ambitious narrative stuffed with engaging detail about the social and political developments that led to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, restoration, and shift to a constitutional monarchy following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. ![]() A wide-ranging study of the social and political makeup of 17th-century Britain. ![]()
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