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Ruth E. Mayers. 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2004. xii + 306 pp. + 1 illus. $75.00.
Despite perpetual scholarly interest in the English civil wars and interregnum, historians are still able to find periods and episodes where conventional wisdom requires thorough revision, not least because of the prevalence of easy assumptions and lazy statements. Like scholars who have challenged the inevitability of the regicide and of the downfall of Richard Cromwell, Ruth Mayers questions common perceptions regarding England's republican government during the second half of 1659, although in doing so her account bears more than a passing resemblance to revisionist histories of the drift towards civil war in 1642, both for good and bad.
Mayers is undoubtedly right to stress the importance of reconsidering the revived Rump Parliament, which met from May-October 1659, following the collapse of the protectorate. This period is often treated as little more than a Canute-like attempt to stem the inevitable tide of resurgent monarchism, which led to the Restoration of the Stuart dynasty in the spring of 1660. She is unquestionably right to argue that, for this period more than others, there is a danger of accepting the version of events pedalled by the "victors"-the royalists-and in seeking to re-examine the "crisis of the commonwealth" she is more than happy to challenge the work of scholars as eminent as Austin Woolrych, Ronald Hutton, and Steve Pincus.
Mayers' central contention is that, rather than being doomed to failure, not least by irreconcilable tensions among the commonwealthsmen, the regime actually demonstrated its ability to overcome the difficulties that it faced, and she stresses contemporary evidence of republican strength as a counterweight to claims made by contemporary opponents. Aware that all...