What if the most important execution in human history was carried out by a man who, twenty years earlier, had been a failed farmer contemplating suicide in the English fenlands? What if the revolution that invented modern democracy began with a dispute over twenty shillings in ship money?
On January 30, 1649, an axe fell in London, and a groan rose from the crowd that would echo through every revolution that followed—from the Boston Tea Party to the storming of the Bastille, from the streets of Prague in 1989 to Tahrir Square in 2011.
We begin in the marshy fenlands of Cambridgeshire, where a young Oliver Cromwell walked among the reeds, tormented by the conviction that he was damned. He had failed at farming, failed at business, failed at everything the world measured success by. He had no way of knowing he was about to reshape the world.
This is the story of how a nobody became a general, how a general became a king-killer, and how a king-killer became a dictator who ruled three kingdoms while refusing to wear a crown. It is the story of the English Civil War—the conflict that asked questions so dangerous that two centuries would pass before they could be safely answered.
At Putney Church in 1647, common soldiers debated ideas that would have gotten them executed a generation earlier: that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he, that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed, that kings could be judged by the people they claimed to rule.
We follow Cromwell through the battlefields of Marston Moor and Naseby, through the brutal sieges of Drogheda and Wexford where he left a curse that still echoes in Irish memory, through the miracle at Dunbar where his trapped army destroyed twice its number. We watch him dissolve Parliament with the words that have rung through centuries: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go!"
And we witness the execution of Charles I—the first time in European history that a reigning monarch was tried by his own people and put to death by legal process. The king who had believed he answered only to God discovered that he answered to an axe.
The revolution failed completely. Cromwell died in 1658. His son lasted eight months. The monarchy was restored. Cromwell's corpse was exhumed and hanged. His head spent three centuries passing through curiosity collections before finally being buried in a secret grave.
And yet the revolution succeeded beyond its founders' wildest dreams. The ideas articulated at Putney crossed the Atlantic, informed the American founding, inspired the French Revolution, and became so fundamental to how we think about government that we can barely imagine alternatives.
A journey through the impossible revolution—the one that failed in every way that mattered and changed everything anyway.