Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- 2 Taking contemporary belief seriously
- 3 The unreformed polity
- 4 Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
- 5 Counter-reformation England
- 6 Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
- 7 Restoration memory
- 8 Restoration crisis 1678–83
- 9 Invasion 1688–9
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
6 - Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- 2 Taking contemporary belief seriously
- 3 The unreformed polity
- 4 Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
- 5 Counter-reformation England
- 6 Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
- 7 Restoration memory
- 8 Restoration crisis 1678–83
- 9 Invasion 1688–9
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
Summary
I shall desire with Castruccio to be buried my face downwards, not to see or comply in the grave with the universal disorder.
Sir Thomas Roe, 20 June 1644God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, ev'n to the reforming of Reformation itself.
John MiltonINTRODUCTION
Between 1638 and 1651 there occurred the military culmination of the first phase of the troubles. In England this became a ‘Warre for Defence’ both of ‘Religion’ and of ‘Parliament’. We will not here be discussing its remarkable product: the English revolution. Our interest is in that destructive process, with both military and ideological dimensions, which forms its essential context. The troubles were an attempt to defend traditional institutions – monarchy, parliament and church – against ideological forces by which they were held to be imperilled. How, by 1649 in England, had they resulted in the destruction of those very institutions? The answer is that the resulting reformation process, once unleashed, could not be contained. At every stage its progress was military. When the successful defence of the reformation, in Scotland, gave way to further reformation and then radical reformation, England moved from rebellion through civil war to revolution.
DEFENCE OF THE REFORMATION (THE SCOTS REBELLION)
Armed defence of reformation in Britain began in Scotland. It is essential revisionist doctrine that Scots resistance to Caroline religious innovation was as sudden in 1637 as it was unexpected. Thereafter, only when a series of blunders by the king brought the Scots into English politics did they provide the mechanism for the destabilisation of that arena as well.
- Type
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- Information
- England's TroublesSeventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, pp. 135 - 160Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000