The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth Century English Millenarianism

Bernard Capp is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy, and this 1972 book remains the first and still the standard comprehensive scholarly study of the Fifth Monarchist movement, tracing its social composition, its political and religious program, and the two failed armed risings its most committed adherents mounted in 1657 and 1661. The book includes biographical appendices for nearly two hundred eighty identified Fifth Monarchists and a survey of every known Fifth Monarchist group, work that has not since been superseded by a later study of comparable scope. This record has not independently traced a documented history of scholarly rebuttal to Capp's specific findings; its account of the movement's chronology and its two risings is treated here as the field's standard reference. Use it for the documented history of the Fifth Monarchist movement and Thomas Venner's two attempts to bring its expectation about by force.