Julia Merritt's monograph Westminster 1640–60 continues where her 2005 study The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court, and Community, 1525–1640 left off, covering the ‘Royal City’ in the period of Civil War and Republic, 1640–60. As with the previous volume, Westminster 1640–60 is largely narrative in style and takes a political culture approach to the history of Westminster. What is presented, therefore, is more along the lines of the newer approaches to parliamentary history pioneered by scholars such as Jason Peacey and Chris Kyle rather than the sociologically driven urban history of later twentieth-century scholarship, or more recent ‘history from below’ approaches to urban history. Historians looking for discussions of poor relief, social control or crime will largely be disappointed. Conversely, Merritt's study will be of immense interest to students of urban political culture, the functioning of parish and local government and the relationship between the state and (in this case, immediate) locality.

The outbreak of the Civil War, as older studies of the neighbouring City of London, such as those of Pearl or Lindley shows, was accompanied by riots and scuffles often countenanced by many within the ranks of the civic and parochial elite. Professor Merritt's opening chapter deals with similar themes in Westminster, showing the divisions within Westminster society relating to the outbreak of war. The analysis is competently handled and, if not always new in its material, sets the foundation for the political transactions of the locality for the rest of the work. More impressive is Merritt's handling of the various parliamentarian regimes’ attempts to project an aura of legitimacy in the former seat of kings. Merritt takes issue with those historians who see the parliamentarian regimes as failing to create a political symbolism of legitimacy comparable to the symbolic projection of authority of the previous royal regimes. Against such blanket negative assessments, Merritt's analysis of parliamentarian political ritual and theatre is convincing and balanced.

By the early seventeenth century, as Merritt has shown in her earlier book, Westminster had developed as the centre of gentry and aristocratic business, with the royal court and the legal district marking Westminster as the essential location for the provincial aristocracy and gentry to conduct their affairs. This in turn had fostered the rise of Westminster as the hub of fashionable society where elite men and women were to shop, see and be seen. As Merritt shows, the development of fashionable high society, from attending ‘the season’ to property development, often more commonly associated with Restoration culture, developed under the parliamentary and republican regimes of the 1640s and 1650s. Indeed, it was the necessity to protest or pay parliamentary sequestrations on family estates that acted as a new draw bringing country ladies to Westminster to enact business for their husbands in exile. Fashionable society in Westminster focused on the triangle of Hyde Park, the New Exchange and the Spring Garden, but co-existed alongside an increasingly militarized Westminster populated by soldiers and the paraphernalia of near-military rule such as forts, prisoner of war camps and firing squads. In describing these apparently incongruous worlds, Merritt deploys a careful analysis of the physicality of Westminster itself, showing how high society and the requirements of a bloated military could co-exist. This mutual co-existence, however, could be rapidly punctured when the various plots and other security threats that plagued the parliamentarian and republican regimes of the period manifested themselves in military crackdowns.

In a period characterized by what John Morrill has termed the ‘last of the wars of religion’, it is fitting that Professor Merritt's final chapter should focus on religion. Despite a few minor terminological infelicities (e.g. William Strong's gathered church at Westminster Abbey is described as ‘separatist’, a somewhat inappropriate term in the context of the 1650s, and the failed eleventh Presbyterian classis is described as a classis of the London provincial assembly rather than of the Province of London), Merritt's analysis is highly convincing. Her case-study of the conflict between the parishioners of St Martin in the Fields with its hard-line Presbyterian reformer Daniel Cawdrey is particularly enlightening. In her analysis, Merritt is careful not to conflate jurisdictional struggles between parishioners and the new religious order, with its designs on well-established parochial offices and power, with ‘Anglican’ resistance, although she recognizes that the two often shaded into each other. Against the struggle between the parishioners of St Martin in the Fields and the intemperate Cawdrey in the 1640s, Merritt paints an informative diptych analysing the more sensitive efforts of its 1650s minister, the equally Presbyterian Gabriel Sangar, to bring Reformed polity to the parish. In addition to case-studies of religion in Westminster's parishes, Merritt also covers the struggles of Quakers, Roman Catholics, independents and prayer book ‘Anglicans’, whose access to prayer book services in the relatively well-protected private houses of Westminster marked them out as the largest ‘sect’ in the town. In light of the widespread incidents of resistance to parliamentarian religion, Professor Merritt could have been tempted to follow the example of a previous generation of historians by analysing the religious scene in terms of ‘the failure of godly rule’. Thankfully, such an un-nuanced analysis is resisted. Instead, and in line with the recent work of Ann Hughes and Bernard Capp, Merritt focuses on the competition, conflicts and compromises that made up the diverse religious ‘marketplace’ of Westminster in the republican period.

In conclusion, Westminster 1640–60, whilst perhaps lacking in discussions of themes of interest to some social historians, makes up for this by providing a wealth of material that will be of great interest to students of urban political culture.