"A Warts-and-All Picture of a Man with the Weaknesses of Any Other"

"And, as would be seen within 30 years of the Stuarts returning to the throne, they were just in- capable of behaving themselves. Perhaps the finest legacy of the regicides and the Protectorate was that the Glorious Revolution proceeded without a King being decapitated (even though James II and VII probably asked for it far more than his errant father had), and—the minor irritations of 1715 and 1745 notwithstanding—at last settled the question of the English Reformation that had started in 1534."

Simon Heffer at The Critic reviews Paul Lay's Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell's Protectorate.