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I’ve not posted for a while, not because I’ve fled the 17^th century or surrendered my obsession with Cromwell and his Puritan warriors to the quotidian demands of work (ten hours/day in the bond market, not counting commute time); the far more important role of husband/soon-to-be-dad (our first due July 14; Oliver’s my first name-choice for a boy); music, a side-endeavor that’s somewhat mentally easier than writing (my doom-thrash band, The Django Horror – I play all instruments and record/mix in the study – hopes to release its first disc, “Hordes of Mongrel Cultists,” later this year.)

No, none of that; time’s always available to the properly motivated/incentivized. My writing time’s been spent reworking what began here into more of a “proper” novel, one that I expect/hope will be published later this year or early next on pulped dead trees and sold via Amazon or better booksellers. Less letters, more narrative, more conversations, less post-facto or pre-facto descriptions. What’s here is a first draft of my English Civil War; what’s next is the second/third draft, which can’t but benefit from the distance/reflection attendant to stepping back with a deep breath.

The book starts earlier, in mid-July, with Cromwell at a separatist conventicle in my fictional village of Holyfen, between St Ives and Ely in East Anglia. Kilmister is the elected minister, and an interpreter of Revelations; among other things, he entrusts to Cromwell his “prophecies” which are being serialized in Anglia Rediviva, Sydney’s newsbook. Right now I’m working on a scene showing Edmund’s first meeting in London with his mother and Sydney (a scene that didn’t happen in the first draft; where Syd and Edmund, who’ve communicated mutual dislike via letters, meet the, meet the day after Edgehill). It takes place on a green in a London suburb, where a radical Puritan preacher – part of the Antinomian underground so brilliantly described in Mr Como in “Blown by the Spirit” – leads Syd’s household in their devotions. Mom is taken aback by the utter dearth of even the most basic sacramentalism/liturgical elements, including the standard Separatist refusal to utter the Lord’s Prayer. Edmund, who I think will have had some contact with the Antimonians in America that grew up around Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, won’t be surprised, but he has other things on his mind.

So yes: lot more about the Puritans: what they thought, how they thought, and how Cromwell was essentially not a Machiavellian political schemer, or a proto-dictator, or a Romantic hero, but a Puritan who read his Bible through the lens of English tradition and common law. We fight for the liberty of the Gospel and the law of the land, he’s reported to have said when raising the first troop of Ironsides among the freeholders of East Anglia.

“What’s this book about?” someone once asked me. “Err, the English Civil War,” I said. “Told in real time. Imagine if the Puritans had blogs.”

Well, no, not exactly. That confuses form and content. The book’s about the Puritans, rather, the Independent Puritans who cohered around Cromwell and achieved the greatest discovery of the modern era – and, I’d argue, next to the Jewish discovery of monotheism, the greatest intellectual and moral achievement in the history of human civilization, the idea of Liberty.

Liberty, to arm themselves, to defend the liberty of the Gospel and the law of the land against the schemes and the terror of Antichrist.

More on Antichrist soon. It’s time to return to the separatist conventicle in the London ‘burbs.