Alastair Blair Worden, FBA (born 12 January 1945), usually cited as Blair Worden, [1] is a historian, among the leading authorities on the period of the English Civil War and on relations between literature and history more generally in the early modern period.
He matriculated as an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1963. After spending a year as a visiting student at Harvard he began graduate research at Oxford in 1967. [2] After a period as a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, teaching History, he took up a position as a Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London. [3] In 1997 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, [4] and in 1999 he delivered the British Academy's Raleigh Lecture on History. [5] As of 2011 he is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall. [6] He is well known for his revolutionary article "Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan", which changed established historical perceptions about what exactly caused Oliver Cromwell to reject the offer of the Crown.[ citation needed ]
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, and civil servant. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including twelve books, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost elevated Milton's reputation as one of history's greatest poets. He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell.
Oliver Cromwell was an English statesman, politician, and soldier, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in British history. He came to prominence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, initially as a senior commander in the Parliamentarian army and latterly as a politician. A leading advocate of the execution of Charles I in January 1649, which led to the establishment of Commonwealth of England, he ruled as Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death in September 1658.
Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the love-song "To His Coy Mistress", to evocations of an aristocratic country house and garden in "Upon Appleton House" and "The Garden", the political address "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland", and the later personal and political satires "Flecknoe" and "The Character of Holland".
Sir Charles Harding Firth was a British historian. He was one of the founders of the Historical Association in 1906. Esmond de Beer wrote that Firth "knew the men and women of the seventeenth century much as a man knows his friends and acquaintances, not only as characters but also in the whole moral and intellectual world in which they lived."
Pride's Purge is the name commonly given to an event that took place on 6 December 1648, when soldiers prevented members of Parliament considered hostile to the New Model Army from entering the House of Commons of England.
John Robert Lewendon Maddicott, is an English historian who has published works on the political and social history of England in the 13th and 14th centuries, and has also written a number of leading articles on the Anglo-Saxon economy, his second area of interest.
The Wars of the Three Kingdoms, sometimes known as the British Civil Wars, were a series of intertwined conflicts fought between 1639 and 1653 in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, then separate entities united in a personal union under Charles I. They include the 1639 to 1640 Bishops' Wars, the First and Second English Civil Wars, the Irish Confederate Wars, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and the Anglo-Scottish War of 1650–1652. They resulted in victory for the Parliamentarian army, the execution of Charles I, the abolition of monarchy, and founding of the Commonwealth of England, later The Protectorate, a unitary state which controlled the British Isles until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.
The resettlement of the Jews in England was an informal arrangement during the Commonwealth of England in the mid-1650s, which allowed Jews to practice their faith openly. It forms a prominent part of the history of the Jews in England. It happened directly after two events. Firstly a prominent rabbi Menasseh ben Israel came to the country from the Netherlands to make the case for Jewish resettlement, and secondly a Spanish New Christian merchant Antonio Robles requested that he be classified as a Jew rather than Spaniard during the war between England and Spain.
The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–1653) was the re-conquest of Ireland by the Commonwealth of England, led by Oliver Cromwell. It forms part of the 1641 to 1652 Irish Confederate Wars, and wider 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Modern estimates suggest that during this period, Ireland experienced a demographic loss totalling around 15 to 20% of the pre-1641 population, due to fighting, famine and bubonic plague.
The Good Old Cause was the name given, retrospectively, by the soldiers of the New Model Army, to the complex of reasons that motivated their fight on behalf of the Parliament of England.
John Stephen Morrill is a British historian and academic who specialises in the political, religious, social, and cultural history of early-modern Britain from 1500 to 1750, especially the English Civil War. He is best known for his scholarship on early modern politics and his unique county studies approach which he developed at Cambridge. Morrill was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and became a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, in 1975.
"Upon Appleton House" is a poem written by Andrew Marvell for Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron. It was written in 1651, when Marvell was working as a tutor for Fairfax's daughter, Mary. An example of a country house poem, "Upon Appleton House" describes Fairfax's Nunappleton estate while also reflecting upon the political and religious concerns of the time.
Peter Mandler is a British historian and academic specialising in 19th and 20th century British history, particularly cultural history and the history of the social sciences. He is Professor in Modern Cultural History at the University of Cambridge and Bailey fellow in History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Politics were an important part of John Milton's life. Milton enjoyed little wide-scale early success, either in prose or poetry, until the production of his later, controversial political works starting with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes.
John Streater was an English soldier, political writer and printer. An opponent of Oliver Cromwell, Streater was a "key republican critic of the regime" He was a leading example of the "commonwealthmen", one division among the English republicans of the period, along with James Harrington, Edmund Ludlow, and Henry Nevile.
Nathaniel Ingelo was an English clergyman, writer and musician, best known for the allegorical romance Bentivolio and Urania.
Colonel Nathaniel Rich was a member of the landed gentry from Essex, who sided with Parliament during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. He has been described as "an example of those pious Puritan gentlemen who were inspired by the ideals of the English Revolution".
John Hall (1627–1656), also known as John Hall of Durham, was an English poet, essayist and pamphleteer of the Commonwealth period. After a short period of adulation at university, he became a writer in the Parliamentary cause and Hartlib Circle member.
Toby Christopher Barnard, is emeritus fellow in history at Hertford College, University of Oxford.
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: with Elucidations is a book by the Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle. It "remains one of the most important works of British history published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."