The Once and Future Cromwell.(Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity)(Poem)

Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity, by Blair Worden; Penguin, 2002, $49.95.

NEVER HAS parliament sunk so low." This British lament appears at first blush to be an eloquent cri de coeur emanating from a Blairite political landscape flattened by modish spin doctors. But in fact it was voiced way back in 1900. It appeared in National Review, a then proud journal devoted to the cult of efficient and rational decision-making. Parliament, where cosy deals alternate with mucous point-scoring, was seen as "unhealthy" when judged against this benchmark. It still is.

The National Review's all-too-understandable denunciation of politicians in the name of a greater good had, as is always the case, a sinister down side. For good measure it wanted MPs to be "bundled out of their seats by the strong hand of Cromwell". The barely articulate Puritan who disbanded the House of Commons in 1653 was a model dictator.

The National Review adhered to a burgeoning cult of Cromwell in which scorn for politicians as a species was a key ingredient. The plucking of Cromwell out of infamy is a fascinating cultural phenomenon that forms the centrepoint of Blair Worden's Roundhead Reputations.

Worden charts posterity's changing perception of some lesser seventeenth-century lights (notably the Puritan exile Edmund Ludlow and the republican martyr Algernon Sidney) as well as the strange history of the Lord Protector's fan club. His is a valuable exercise, for historical memory is a rich resource. The impoverishment of contemporary civic culture can in part be traced back to a situation in which, as Worden states, public life has never been "less historically conscious or informed".

Roundhead Reputations presents a sweeping but credible version of events and ideas. The English-speaking world's embrace of constitutional government, along with party politics, its later much hated offspring, is from this broad perspective quite a recent development. Political licence, as Worden has stated elsewhere, has predominated "only since the late seventeenth century". Before then compulsion held sway.

Purity and innocence, underpinned by an enforced uniformity of opinion, were seen as essential to ensuring the nation's security in Stuart England. God and the sword were unholy companions as militancy and militarism stalked the land. Armed Puritan zealots publicly executed King Charles I before seeking to impose fundamentalist rule on the earthy populace of England. These folks were not squeamish in imposing theological and political correctness.