Why was there a civil war in seventeenth-century England? The question continues to exercise historians, especially as the coherent explanations of S. R. Gardiner, echoing in reality only the partisan account of the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, no longer command easy acceptance. Of late, discussion has mostly concentrated on social analysis, on the supposition that the division which became manifest in 1642 reflected definite and ascertainable groupings within the nation. This paper is not going to treat once more of the much battered problem of the gentry; that controversy has found enough summaries, of varying degrees of sympathy, to deserve the decent rest and respect accorded to old age (if not old hat). Those who took part in the war believed themselves to be defending opposing views on Church and state; they thought– or often said– that religious and political convictions divided them from one another. This interpretation has taken some bad knocks from historians investigating what was actually said and done in the years before 1640. Even the existence of a distinguishably Puritan point of view in the Church of England has been called in doubt, though it should be said that such arguments lead more properly to the conclusion that within the Church there existed both high and low streams of opinion, and that at least before the age of Laud these did not represent a conflict between Anglican and Puritan so much as a struggle for ascendancy between two sections of the English Church.