...he will not lead any man farther back in this journey, for the discovery of the entrance into these dark ways, than the beginning of this King's reign....that it brake out. Neither do I look so far back as believing the design to be so long since formed; (they who have observed the several accidents, not...

...contemporaries. In the preface to his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wan in England, Clarendon writes, "I am not so sharp-sighted as those who have discerned...Princes and great ministers of state in Christendom." Like the youthful Dryden harping on "the Nations sin," Clarendon assigns the final cause of the Rebellion...