Contemporary Historian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Church History ◽  
British History ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Civil War Era

Fuller’s Church-History reflects his own experiences of revolution. Its last part is one of the earliest accounts of the Civil War era, antedating accounts by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes. He begins with divisions in the English Church during Queen Elizabeth’s reign and proceeds with events in his own lifetime, especially in the reign of Charles I. He sees the Caroline political and ecclesiastical regime, especially the role of Archbishop Laud, as having alienated many nonconformists, as well as provoking the Scots to attack. The trial and execution of King Charles following the defeat of the royalist cause is somber. The Church-History cites reasons for the regime’s failure that have often been overlooked. Responses to the work by Peter Heylyn were followed by Fuller’s detailed, anguished, and determined reply. Fuller’s contemporary analysis of one the great upheavals in British history is a striking account of what happened and why.

Viewing the Scaffold from Istanbul: The Bendysh-Hyde Affair, 1647–1651

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 421-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Charles Fissel ◽  
Daniel Goffman
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Commercial Activity ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Company Directors ◽  
Council Of State

Slightly more than two years after the decapitation of Charles I, the Commonwealth of England inflicted the same punishment on the same block against his follower, Sir Henry Hyde. The failure to reach a settlement in the aftermath of the British civil war led to the king's beheading. Explaining Hyde's execution, however, requires a geographically broader context, for Sir Henry undertook his treasonable activities against the overseas interests of the English Commonwealth and Sir Thomas Bendysh, who had served as English ambassador in Istanbul since 1647, when he assumed the role of protector of English merchants. Although Bendysh later quarreled with his charges, the unexpected appearance of Henry Hyde in Istanbul in 1650 rallied the merchants behind him, for Hyde represented to them a return to the recent past, with its governmental interference and royal regulation of commercial activity. His presence also forced merchants to choose sides, thereby transposing upon Levantine commerce the divisions that had emerged during the civil war. Just as most Company members supported Parliament, so did their factors in the Levant back Bendysh, a known quantity, a clever negotiator, and a pragmatist. In his brief tenure, Bendysh had proven his ability to strike bargains with the Ottomans and stimulate commerce. He also personified the interests of the Council of State and the Levant Company directors, thereby linking the disparate but inter-dependent network of Levantine commerce.

Frontier Politics, Providentialism, and “Hobbism” in Bacon’s Rebellion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander B. Haskell
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The Other ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
Bacon's Rebellion ◽  
Measured Response

Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) was an uprising in the Virginia colony that its participants experienced as both a civil breakdown and a period of intense cosmic disorder. Although Thomas Hobbes had introduced his theory of state sovereignty a quarter century earlier, the secularizing connotations of his highly naturalized conceptualization of power had yet to make major inroads on a post-Reformation culture that was only gradually shifting from Renaissance providentialism to Enlightenment rationalism. Instead, the period witnessed a complicated interplay of providential beliefs and Hobbist doctrines. In the aftermath of the English civil war (1642–1651), this mingling of ideologies had prompted the Puritans’ own experimentation with Hobbes’s ideas, often in tandem with a Platonic spiritualism that was quite at odds with Hobbes’s own philosophical skepticism. The Restoration of 1660 had given an additional boost to Hobbism as his ideas won a number of prominent adherents in Charles II’s government. The intermingling of providentialism and Hobbism gave Bacon’s Rebellion its particular aura of heightened drama and frightening uncertainty. In the months before the uprising, the outbreak of a war on the colony’s frontier with the Doeg and Susquehannock peoples elicited fears in the frontier counties of a momentous showdown between faithful planters and God’s enemies. In contrast, Governor Sir William Berkeley’s establishmentarian Protestantism encouraged him to see the frontiersmen’s vigilantism as impious, and the government’s more measured response to the conflict as inherently godlier because tied to time-tested hierarchies and institutions. Greatly complicating this already confusing scene, the colony also confronted a further destabilizing force in the form of the new Hobbist politics emerging from the other side of the ocean. In addition to a number of alarming policies emanating from Charles II’s court in the 1670s that sought to enhance the English state’s supremacy over the colonies, Hobbes’s doctrines also informed the young Nathaniel Bacon Jr.’s stated rationale for leading frontiersmen against local Indian communities without Berkeley’s authorization. Drawing on the Hobbes-influenced civil war-era writings of his relation the Presbyterian lawyer Nathaniel Bacon, the younger Bacon made the protection of the colony’s Christian brotherhood a moral priority that outweighed even the preservation of existing civil relations and public institutions. While Berkeley’s antagonism toward this Hobbesian argument led him to lash out forcibly against Bacon as a singularly great threat to Virginia’s commonwealth, it was ordinary Virginians who most consequentially resisted Bacon’s strange doctrines. Yet a division persisted. Whereas the interior counties firmly rejected Bacon’s Hobbism in favor of the colony’s more traditional bonds to God and king, the frontier counties remained more open to a Hobbesian politics that promised their protection.

A New Sion? Reform, Rebellion, and Colonization c. 1625–1640

The Puritans ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 206-251
Author(s):  
David D. Hall
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
British History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Unique Event ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Politics Of Religion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil Politics ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter studies how, in the aftermath of his failure to subdue the Scottish insurgency by military means, Charles I authorized the election of two new parliaments. Its policies were so at odds with Charles I's understanding of monarchy and the true church that the outcome was civil war in England between supporters of the king and supporters of Parliament. Explaining this sequence of events tests every historian of 1630s and 1640s Britain. The puzzles are many. In the context of this book, the most significant of these is the relationship between civil politics and the politics of religion. Intertwined throughout the history of the English and Scottish reformations, their relationship tightened in the practice and rhetoric of Charles I and the party he favored, here known as the Laudians. Like his immediate predecessors, the young king took for granted that opposition to his version of true religion was equivalent to challenging his authority as king. At once, the religious and the political become inseparable. Before 1640, the political and the religious in Scotland had also become intertwined, but in a quite different manner. There, it was being argued that a monarch's policies were corrupting a perfect church. And there a unique event in British history unfolded.

AN UNKNOWN POLICY PROPOSAL BY THOMAS HOBBES

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
NOEL MALCOLM
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Policy Proposal

ABSTRACTAn undated document survives, in Thomas Hobbes's hand, urging the royalist side in the Civil War to win over Robert Rich, the second earl of Warwick (the parliamentarian naval commander). By this means, Hobbes argued, not only would the royalists win the war, but also England would be defended against a Swedish invasion, which he expected to accompany or follow the Scottish invasion of the country. This communication presents the text of the document and gives reasons for dating it not to 1648 (when an attempt to win over Warwick was in fact made) but to late 1643 or early 1644. It also discusses the basis of Hobbes's concern with Scottish–Swedish relations, and his misinterpretation of Swedish policy. It comments on his estimate of Warwick's character, in the light of his earlier connections with him; and it briefly discusses both Hobbes's assumption in this document of the role of a counsellor to the king, and the interpretation of the nature of the Civil War that the document implies.

The Emergence of the Royalist Conspiracy in England in 1649-1650

2020 ◽  
pp. 30-34
Author(s):  
K.S. Bacherikov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Control Center ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
King Charles I ◽  
Charles Ii

This article investigates the processes that took place among the English royalists after their defeat in the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I Stuart, as well as the emergence of their conspiracy movement for the restoration of the monarchy in England, namely, it examines the activities of such organizations of supporters of the monarchical form of government in England, as the “Western Association of Royalists”. In addition, the article studies the factors contributing to the failures of royalist organizations at the beginning of their activity against the regime of the Independent Republic, such as: passivity of supporters of King Charles II, their indecision, lack of a single control center, which entailed a low level of the participants’ actions coordination in the movement, lack of intelligence network, the refusal of France and the Netherlands to support the royalists, as well as the active opposition to their activities by the authorities of the Commonwealth of Eng-land. The role of the head of intelligence of the Independent Republic - Thomas Scott, who created the intelligence network, which carried out its activities against royalists not only in England, but also in royalist circles in exile in the kingdom of France, as well as in the Netherlands, stands out separately.

Presidents and the Dissolution of the Union

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred I. Greenstein ◽  
Dale Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Organizational Capacity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Personal Strengths ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
American Leader ◽  
Policy Vision

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. This book assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. The book evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. The book looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, the book provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. The book sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. The book reveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times—and what caused others to fail.

Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kolchin
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil War Era

Rethinking the Civil War Era: Directions for Research

Editor's Note

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kaliel
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Public Memory ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Red River ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relationship Of

The articles published in our Fall 2016 edition are connected loosely under the themes of public memory and the uses of identity in the past. We are thrilled to present to you three excellent articles in our Fall 2016 edition: The article "Dentro de la Revolución: Mobilizing the Artist in Alfredo Sosa Bravo's Libertad, Cultura, Igualdad (1961)" analyzes Cuban artwork as multi-layered work of propaganda whose conditions of creation, content, and exhibition reinforce a relationship of collaboration between artists and the state-run cultural institutions of post-revolutionary Cuba; moving through fifty years of history “’I Shall Never Forget’: The Civil War in American Historical Memory, 1863-1915" provides a captivating look at the role of reconciliationist and emancipationist intellectuals, politicians, and organizations as they contested and shaped the enduring memory of the Civil War; and finally, the article “Politics as Metis Ethnogenesis in Red River: Instrumental Ethnogenesis in the 1830s and 1840s in Red River” takes the reader through a historical analysis of the development of the Metis identity as a means to further their economic rights. We wholly hope you enjoy our Fall 2016 edition as much as our staff has enjoyed curating it. Editors  Jean Middleton and Emily Kaliel Assistant Editors Magie Aiken and Hannah Rudderham Senior Reviewers Emily Tran Connor Thompson Callum McDonald James Matiko Bronte Wells

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