Over the past two decades, there has been a quiet revolution going on in historians’ understanding of how England’s ‘Great Civil War’ came about. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, a broad consensus had prevailed that the collapse of Charles I’s government was a consequence of the rising social and economic power of the gentry. That power found political expression in the House of Commons. When the going got rough in the early 1640s, it was the leaders of the Commons who championed the true (that is, godly Protestant) religion and the liberties of the people, and guided the nation to take up arms in their defence.

Over recent years, however, much of this version of events has been fundamentally recast. The realisation that this conflict, like most premodern ‘revolutions’, began as a revolt within the noble-dominated political elite – at court as well as outside it – has thrown into prominence figures who had hitherto barely been mentioned in historical narratives. Men like the earls of Essex, Warwick and Northumberland have been belatedly recognised as being among the big beasts of Westminster, a club mono­polised until recent years by members of the House of Commons.

Jonathan Healey is the first author of a mass-market book to draw on this transformative new research, and he does so with panache. The chronological focus is tight: the book covers the period from the spring of 1641 to the early summer of 1642. If that seems narrow, it is