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Although the Thirty Years War was ostensibly fought over religion, dig a little and you'll find "the great game" of the princes. The Holy Roman Empire was, as was said, neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. By the 16th Century Germany was divided among many principalities and was a power vacuum. The War, after the initial conflicts, had mainly to do with who would dominate this vacuum, the leading contenders being Austria, France and Sweden.

As usual, the heaviest price was paid by the German peasantry, who suffered terribly after decades of brutal war.

The English Puritans in my view were reformers, opposed to a corrupt aristocracy. Had the English Civil War happened a century later, England might have been the first representative democracy, and not the U.S. But, Cromwell proved no Adams or Jefferson.

I think if you dig a little deeper in the English Civil War, as usual there was a lot going on under the surface.

On the one hand you had the genuine religious reformers who thought "high time Oliver came to purge the land!" as Kipling memorably put it in "A Doctor of Medicine". And on the other, corrupt aristocrats in Charles I's court -- although Charles himself (though in some ways a pretentious prig) was almost incredibly moral and went to his death in a heroic manner that did him great credit.

But the overwhelming majority of the folks involved in the conflict were deep in the dispute between the Crown and Parliament over who was going to exercise the temporal power and collect the cash . . . once again as usual, it's "follow the money".

Thankfully, Richard was not the man his father was, or things might have gotten far, far worse. Of course, Charles II for all his considerable political acumen was a bad bargain for the reformers as far as his personal immorality and corruption were concerned.

The image that sticks with me is "pretty witty Nell" Gwyn leaning out of her carriage to address the London mob, "Peace, good people! 'Tis the Protestant whore!"