“These are days of shaking,” declared an English preacher in 1643, “and this shaking is universal.” The English cut the head off the king, Charles I, abolished the House of Lords and disestablished the court, establishing a Puritan Republic under Oliver Cromwell.

The comparison of the present with the spate of civil wars in the mid-17th century is strikingly accurate. The mighty Spanish Empire was convulsed by regional disturbances. The largest state in Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, temporarily disappeared.

While the political world was convulsed, the world was seized by an overwhelming sense of doom — the Antichrist was surely on the march again! — and weird sects such as the British Diggers demanded that society should be turned upside down.

Court and country

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