Stubbe had been committed to the new republic proclaimed in 1649 from at least 1651, when he was charged with bringing the Engagement to the University of Oxford. The patronage which he enjoyed from Owen and Vane, both staunch commonwealthmen, sealed his political loyalty. What his precise political views were before 1659, however, is not known. That year he took up his pen on behalf of ‘the good old cause.’ The evidence does not tell us who sponsored him in that enterprise, although his ideas reflect the views of Vane and anti-Harringtonian Army radicals before and after the dissolution of the Rump in October. The fact that Stubbe's republican tracts were published in late 1659 indicates that he wrote in the cause, if not the pay, of the Vanians.

The central question Stubbe confronted in these papers was how to stop the drift towards the restoration of monarchy and put the republic upon a solid foundation, and his chief adversary, curiously enough, was a fellow republican, James Harrington, who produced the most sophisticated republican theory to come out of the mid-century revolution. Only the context can explain their disagreement. Stubbe was an admirer of Harrington's theory but argued that it could not be trusted without serious modifications to solve the crisis of 1659. It is these modifications that Stubbe set forth in his work.