Since this book was written in 1972 a huge amount of new research and interpretation has been published on the subject. Two options were therefore open when preparing a second edition. The first was to rewrite the book to incorporate such of the new material as seemed convincing; the second was to write a postscript, surveying and evaluating the new material and pointing out where the 1972 edition now needs modification. This second option has been chosen, since it turned out that much of the new work either supported, or at least did not directly contradict, what had been said originally, and that the areas in need of serious modification were relatively small. The reader is therefore invited to start with the book as it was written in 1972, and then move on to ‘Second thoughts in 1985’, which describe and evaluate a vigorous, ongoing debate and its historiography concerning the causes of the English Revolution.