Official history has not been generous to the republicans who in the middle years of the seventeenth century defeated the king in a civil war and tried to construct a democracy without a hereditary upper chamber or a monarchy. Their legislation, which has been deleted from the statute book, reveals a series of endeavours to reform the law in ways which it has taken most of the intervening centuries to retrace. It included, in the Instrument of Government 1653, Britain's first and only written constitution, on which the framers of the Bill of Rights twenty-five years later perceptibly drew.

In 1642, an army of republicans with cropped heads and round helmets, led by Oliver Cromwell, started a civil war which ended in 1649 with the defeat of the Cavaliers and the execution of King Charles I. The country was taken over by psalm-singing Puritans in tall hats and black cloaks, who closed the theatres, abolished Christmas and made everyone's life a misery until Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. Not long afterwards, in 1689, the Glorious Revolution gave us a constitutional monarchy.

Charles I was a Cavalier King and therefore had a small pointed beard, long flowing curls, a large, flat, flowing hat and gay attire. The Roundheads, on the other hand, were clean-shaven and wore tall, conical hats, white ties and sombre garments. Under these circumstances a Civil War was inevitable.