In the mid seventeenth century English radicalism boiled over into revolution, the monarchy was abolished, and a republic founded. During the Civil War, culminating in the public execution of the king, major Tudor resistance writings were reprinted, and new writers resisted the republic as it began to resemble monarchy. Ousted royalists, now in opposition, took up resistance writing. And revenge plays again thrived.

When a 1638 court upheld the legality of the king's exaction of “ship money,” judges “affirming the absolute power of the monarch” (Hudson 209), the public uproar may have sparked the reissue in 1639 of Ponet's Short Treatise; as the Civil War began in 1642, it was reissued again. In 1643 Buchanan's Baptistes appeared in its first English translation as Tyrannical-Government Anatomized. Randall, noting the “no-holds-barred title,” remarks its fresh relevance: this “play about kingship, religion gone bad, and martyrdom for true religion” offered in John the Baptist a figure to inspire a “reformist spirit” (103). Provocatively, a Parliamentary committee made a presentation of it to King Charles (99).