When Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament, following the Civil War, England was a republic but by no stretch of the imagination a democracy.

In a Free Republc: Life in Cromwell's England (Sutton, £20), by Oxfordshire author Alison Plowden, describes what it was like to live in this period, when dozens of different groups sprang up to fill the vacuum left by the royal family.

They included the Levellers, whose ideas of democracy and freedom went further than Cromwell and his generals wanted. The protesters were accused of being in favour of sectarian violence and their demand for 'one man one vote' (women did not get a look-in) was labelled a call for anarchy.

Cromwell clamped down on the rebels, and when one unfortunate, 23-year-old trooper Roger Lockyer, was executed in London, it was said that he had more mourners than the late King Charles.

After riots in Banbury and Northampton, the famous Burford mutiny took place, when soldiers refused to serve in Cromwell's Irish invasion, and instead headed north from their camp at Salisbury. They were cornered at the Crown Inn by Cromwell's troops, who imprisoned 340 men in Burford Church, while another 560 mutineers escaped. Three 'ringleaders' were shot in the churchyard.

Having rejected universal suffrage, Cromwell was in a quandary about how to replace the Rump Parliament, since he was unlikely to win an election in which the only voters were landed gentry. He eventually declared himself Lord Protector.