Extract

Ruth E. Mayers' book is a vindication of the restored Commonwealth regime that ruled the British Isles between May and October 1659. Hitherto this has been seen as an unpopular and insecure government, brought back to power by a revolutionary army that had ejected it six years before and doomed to exist for only a few months before it fell out with the soldiers all over again and was thrust out a second time. This second expulsion precipitated the rapid sequence of events that culminated, after seven more months, in the fall of Britain's only republic to date and the restoration of the English monarchy and the House of Lords. Power in this short-lived regime was vested in the remnant of the House of Commons created by the purge carried out by the army in 1648, and the low respect of historians for it has been signaled by the tendency of many until recently to adopt for it the insulting term coined by its contemporary enemies: “the Rump.”

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