Memories of the civil war, regicide and interregnum were malleable, fallible and pervasive in late seventeenth-century England. Here Andrew Marvell, in his debate with the Anglican clergyman and polemicist Samuel Parker, produced a version of the most powerful anti-dissenting case. His presentation was satirical, but it captured the essence of the argument: the civil war had been caused by fanatics, who were doctrinaire republicans, and whose actions inevitably led to regicide. Nonconformity was merely another name for this fanaticism, and, if not carefully controlled in the Restoration, it would send England spiralling back into armed conflict. As generalisations, each one of these statements was almost wholly wrong, but that hardly mattered. As beliefs they framed actions and helped to produce, and sustain, religious persecution. Their contestation is one of the underlying themes of this book. The fact that the mid-century was (and remains) a site of dispute points, however, to the fundamental importance of those years in shaping what followed.

The English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, whatever its causes, had profound religious consequences. It is now clear that there were strains of radical religious thought running under the surface of the pre-civil war religious landscape.