The History is a political history of the seventeenth century. The first and second volumes cover the years 1603–1641; volumes three and four cover 1642–1647; volume five covers 1648–1660; volumes six and seven cover 1660–1683 and the last volume spans 1683–1689. Macaulay chose this period because, as she wrote in the first volume, she wanted "to do justice...to the memory of our illustrious ancestors". She lamented that her contemporaries had forgotten that the privileges they enjoyed had been fought for by "men that, with the hazard and even the loss of their lives, attacked the formidable pretensions of the Stewart family, and set up the banners of liberty against a tyranny which had been established for a series of more than one hundred and fifty years". She believed that the Anglo-Saxons had possessed freedom and equality with representative institutions but that these were lost at the Norman Conquest. The history of England, in Macaulay's view, was the story of the struggle of the English to win back their rights that were crushed by the "Norman yoke". She viewed the Commonwealth of England as "the brightest age that ever adorned the page of history...Never did the annals of Humanity furnish the example of a government, so newly established, so formidable to foreign states as was at this period of the English Commonwealth". The Long Parliament was "the most patriotic government that ever blessed the hopes and military exertions of a brave people". The Parliamentarian army's fighting "was not a trade of blood, but an exertion of principle, and obedience to the call of conscience, and their conduct was not only void of insolence but benevolent and humane". Macaulay justified the execution of King Charles I by claiming that "Kings, the servants of the State, when they degenerated into tyrants, forfeited their right to government". Following the argument of John Milton's Defence of the People of England, she argued that "the oaths of allegiance were to be understood as conditionally binding, according to the observance of the oaths kings made to their people. And neither the laws of God nor nature were against the peoples laying aside Kings and Kingly government, and the adopting more convenient forms". She was heavily critical of Oliver Cromwell, who she denounced as "the vain-glorious usurper" and as an "individual, no ways exalted above his brethren in any of those private endowments which constitute the true greatness