Radicals like the Levellers a revolution in political theory and set the agenda of political debate from then on but in practice they were roundly defeated, as Cromwell turned against the radical alliance which had brought him to power while frightening away the bulk of the parliamentary classes. With that betrayal, the Commonwealth lost the wider social base that might have sustained the republican revolution but the irony is that even this was not enough to reassure more conservative and nervous parliamentarians. The experience of civil war, with the revolutionary forces it had unleashed, ended by reuniting the propertied class, not behind the parliamentary project that had driven them to conflict with the king in the first place but, on the contrary, behind the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Anything, even a renewal of the absolutist threat, was evidently better than a 'World turned upside down'.