New Science, Old Order: the gardens of the Great Rebellion
The trial of King Charles I for a constitutional crime, essentially a crime of ideas, and his subsequent public execution in the heart of his capital left England in an intellectual ferment. In the political uncertainty of the next four years social, economic and religious opinions of the most extreme description flourished. This was the actively "revolutionary" period of the Great Rebellion, the time between 1649 and 1652 when sects like the Quakers, Levellers and Fifth Monarchy Men expressed theories that might have seemed bizarre even in the France of 1789-92.