An examination of the reputation of the principal Roundheads (Cromwell, Ludlow, Hampden and others) and how over the past 350 years each generation has projected its own concerns on the most traumatic event in English history. Worden discusses several works including Ludlow's "Memoirs", (the account of the Revolution which was only exposed as a forgery 300 years after its publication) and Thomas Carlyle's "Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell", showing how the fighting has intellectually never really stopped.