In time, Catholics, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Anglicans all came to live here in peace, and with the end of Cromwellian rule and the ascent of the later Stuart kings, sympathetic to Catholicism, the colony finally stabilized and flourished.

Second, and more importantly, when English Protestants tried to create a polity rooted in religion they wound up in sectarian strife and Cromwellian tyranny.

The Cromwellian reforms hold the seeds of a worldview that is familiarly modern: one in which there is no fundamental (in the sense of being institutionally recognized) difference between one part of the nation and another, or between February and October, but in which change is the constant condition of the present, and the past is a foreign country.