1649 - REXIT :-) Charles I. Stuart, King of England, sentenced to Death by Decapitation

As is generally known, the Puritan Revolution in England failed to create a durable republican commonwealth: The hostilities between Parliament and King had been ignited by the latter`s attempt at browbeating the assembly into compliance with the help of the Earl of Strafford`s soldiery – if anything ran counter to the English nation`s profoundest instincts, it was „governance by the sword“. In 1641, Strafford paid with his life for the King`s attempt at establishing military rule; eight years later, Charles himself followed suit. As for his opponents, the genuine roundheads dug their own grave when they allowed Cromwell to create a professional army on their behalf – an army that, by its very design, was incapable of conforming to the restricted role the leaders of the Parliamentarian Party – urban intellectuals and „fat cat“ London merchants – had assigned to it: the role of a means to an end. The King was still very much alive when the English revolution split into two factions: the metropolitan bourgeois-parliamentarian faction in which the intra-Anglican opposition to episcopal church government and ceremonialism found its political embodiment. Theologically, this faction represented the Presbyterian mainline of Puritanism. On the other side of the divide was what could be termed the „military wing“ of the English Revolution which was rife with religious as well as social radicalism. Against the backdrop of the baroque landscape of the 17th century, the „New Model Army“ appears like an erratic block. The creation of the „New Model Army“ was one of Oliver Cromwell`s strokes of genius insofar as the Puritan mentality - proto-individualistic in its Augustinian belief in Divine election – is profoundly inimical to the requirements of military discipline. Being an early precursor of the bourgeois individual, the typical Puritan was neither a squire nor a menial servant, but one penny-pinching philistine of a metropolitan shopkeeper – in one word: he was Post-heroic.