Few periods in English history deserve the label “discordant” more than the seventeenth century. The Civil War and Glorious Revolution, the sectarian strife that pitted Protestant against Catholic, Anglican against Puritan, the national antipathies dividing England, Ireland and Scotland – all of these conferred on the age of the Stuarts a singular lack of harmony. But for the Victorians, it was discordant in another sense as well. The controversies of the seventeenth century had left deep divisions in English society which were still being felt long afterward. Victorian Whigs, Tories and radicals were as divided on the past as they were on contemporary politics. Dissenters sought inspiration in an earlier Puritanism, while some Anglicans looked longingly to the Stuart Church. The Cromwellian settlement still poisoned relations between Protestant England and Catholic Ireland. Indeed, no other period of the past intruded on the Victorian present so discordantly as the seventeenth century.

The purpose of this book is to explore how a number of Victorian historians approached the Stuart past, and to propose a thesis. The debate over the seventeenth century, I will argue, generated a body of politically engaged literature because it touched on one of the most controversial issues of the day – namely, the conflict between Church and Dissent, and to a lesser extent, between Protestantism and Catholicism. To be sure, the Victorian historiography of the Stuarts spoke to other matters as well, and I have no intention of reducing such rich material to a single theme.