Thanks to the work of legions of scholars, the millenarian expectations
within large segments of the population in Cromwellian England have been
carefully examined. The widespread belief that England, with its
messianic leader 1 Cromwell, heralded the millennium is well known. Less
well examined, perhaps, has been the cultural conceptions of the role of
millenarian and messianic ideas in the "long" eighteenth century.
Especially during the stable Hanoverian era - until the American and
French Revolutions - the common- place millennial expectations of the
English Civil War appeared to recede. By the end of the eighteenth
century, with the Napoleonic wars, millenarian views and interpretations
underwent a minor renaissance but with nothing like the fervor, it is
commonly thought, of the Puritan era when so many believed that the end
was near. By the end of the eighteenth century, so the "official" story
goes, the religious sceptics and deists of Enlightened England such as
David Hume had done too well their work of tarring such religious
radicalism with the brush of "enthusiasm. " Happily, this "official"
interpretation of the events of the early modern period - in which
scholars have too often taken their cue from writers such as Hume and
simply ignored millenarian contexts and expectations in the Age of
Reason - has undergone a marked shift in the past twenty years.