Revolutionary Calvinist Parties in England Under Elizabeth I and Charles I

1958 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-239
Author(s):  
Leo F. Solt
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Charles I ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
Resistance Theory ◽  
Scottish History ◽  
Recent Monograph

Some of the comparative ideas that Mr. Kingdon has dealt with in the foregoing article are elaborations of views that he suggested in his recent monograph, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion, 1555–1563. In a recent review of this book by Sir John Neale the author is praised for claiming that the “highly-organized subversive conspiracy from Geneva,” which was so important in the French wars of religion, “has a bearing on Dutch and English, not to mention Scottish, history.” What is more, Neale indicates that he “certainly finds it illuminating for an appreciation of the Puritan Classical movement in Elizabethan history.” It might be worth-while, therefore, to extend the discussion by briefly examining Mr. Kingdon's criteria for “revolutionary Calvinist parties” in connection with England in the age of Elizabeth and, later, with the period of the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. Those criteria include a synodical organization, noble leadership, and a resistance theory.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosamund Oates
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
James I ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Turbulent Times ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
The Church

Tobie Matthew (c.1544–1628) lived through the most turbulent times of the English Church. Born during the reign of Henry VIII, he saw Edward VI introduce Protestantism, and then watched as Mary I violently reversed her brother’s changes. When Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, Matthew rejected his family’s Catholicism to join the fledgling Protestant regime. Over the next sixty years, he helped build a Protestant Church in England under Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. Rising through the ranks of the Church, he was Archbishop of York in the charged decades leading up to the British Civil Wars. Here was a man who played a pivotal role in the religious politics of Tudor and Stuart England, and nurtured a powerful strain of Puritanism at the heart of the established Church....

George Fox, Millenarian

1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Larry Ingle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Small Step ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
Divine Intervention ◽  
George Fox ◽  
Widespread Interest

“Friends, take heed of setting up that which God will throw down, lest you be found fighters against God.”The nearly two decades comprising the period of the English Revolution were marked by a widespread interest in the timely appearance of the millennium, the thousand year period of Christ's promised earthly reign. From scholarly biblical studies of Daniel and Revelation to omens such as total eclipses of the sun and rumors of a Nottingham girl returning from the dead to warn a sinful world of approaching destruction, people in revolutionary England were bombarded with “evidence” of divine intervention and the expected arrival of the new kingdom. Parliament's victory in the English civil wars and its execution of Charles I in 1649 dramatically blew away the aura of divinity surrounding the monarchy and promised a new and glorious age. As they read prophecies in Revelation about a New Jerusalem where God would dry all tears and banish death, sorrow, and pain, enthusiasts of the seventeenth century anxiously looked for the Christ who promised, “Behold, I come quickly.” So prevalent were such notions that, as one authority has stressed, popular millenarianism seemed only a small step beyond received orthodoxy.

Where Two Crosses Met: Religious Accommodation between a Reformed Protestant Community and a Commandery of the Order of Malta (Loudun, circa 1560–1660)

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 815-851
Author(s):  
Edwin Bezzina
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Local Study ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
Religious Accommodation ◽  
The Relationship

This article represents a local study investigating the relations between the commandery of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem and a Reformed Protestant community from about 1560 to 1660. The chosen locality is the French provincial town of Loudun and the article spans the French Wars of Religion and the period of recovery and reconstruction beyond. The relationship between Loudun's commandery and Reformed community manifests the sometimes astonishing interplay of conflict, accommodation, and necessity. The Protestant use of the commandery's church enabled the Reformed community to entrench itself in Loudun and remain there until the Crown revoked all the civil and religious prerogatives that it had granted to this religious minority. For its part, the commandery's fortunes and misfortunes became tied to that Reformed Protestant presence. The commandery's recovery in the first half of the seventeenth century in part drew upon the momentum of the Catholic resurgence, but the earlier Protestant use of the commandery's church and the repairs that the Protestants effectuated on the edifice gave the commandery a foothold in that process of recovery. This at times begrudged interdependence between commandery and Reformed community allowed for something resembling cross-confessional relations where one would least expect to find them.

‘The More Posed and Wise Advice’: The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the English Civil Wars

1991 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-829 ◽  
Author(s):  
David L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Over Time

‘To me he was always the embodiment of Cavalier romance.’ Thus Vita Sackville-West on her seventeenth-century ancestor, Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset. Such labelling indicates the problems which still bedevil any study of Civil War royalism. Brian Wormald'sClarendonbrilliantly revealed that the men who joined Charles I in 1642 represented a broad range of opinion. Above all, he made us aware of a coherent group of moderate (‘constitutional’) royalists who throughout sought accommodation. There was a palpable difference of strategy between these people, who favoured royal concessions in order to prevent further military initiatives, and others who favoured military initiatives in order to prevent further royal concessions. Within these two basic matrices, there were further subtle inflections of attitude between individuals and within the same individual over time. But many such inflections remain murky. Wormald's lead was never followed through. Charles's supporters have consistently received less attention than those who remained with parliament; and among the royalists, moderates have attracted fewer studies than ‘cavaliers’ and ‘swordsmen’. There is thus an urgent need to clarify different varieties of royalism and especially to bring the constitutional royalists into sharper focus. However, before we can assess their wider aims and impact, we must first identify them; and here the inappropriate labels bestowed on so many of Charles's supporters create real problems. Anne Sumner has recently ‘de-mythologized’ John Digby, first earl of Bristol, revealing him as more complex and less intemperate than the ‘hawk’ of legend.

“The Most Glorious Church in the World”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s

2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Winship
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Antinomian Controversy ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Government

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.

Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the civil wars and Interregnum

2004 ◽  
Vol 77 (197) ◽  
pp. 358-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Charles I ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
High Politics

Abstract This article examines how Wales and the Welsh were represented in the pamphlet literature of the civil war and early Interregnum. It considers the historical construction of the Welsh image in English minds, and traces how this image came to be politicized by Welsh support for Charles I during the sixteen-forties. An examination of the public controversies surrounding the state-sponsored evangelization programme in Wales during the early sixteen-fifties shows how the contested image of Wales in the public sphere interacted with high politics at the centre. This study contributes to our understanding of the interplay between ethnicity, identity and politics during the sixteen-forties and fifties, and demonstrates how imagery and representation informed political discourse in the mid seventeenth century.

scholarly journals The Biblical Image of the Providential Ruler in the Protestant Propaganda on the Eve of the French Wars of Religion

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 596
Author(s):  
Andrei Constantin Sălăvăstru
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
The People ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

French Protestantism has remained famous in the history of political thought mostly for its theories regarding popular sovereignty and the right of the people to resist and replace a tyrannical ruler. However, before the civil wars pushed them on this revolutionary path, French Protestants stressed the duty of obedience even in the face of manifest tyranny. The reasons for this were ideological, due to the significance placed on St. Paul’s assertion that all political power was divinely ordained, but also pragmatic, as Calvin and his followers were acutely aware of the danger of antagonizing the secular authorities. More importantly, they were fervently hoping for the conversion of France to the Reformation and, in their mind, the surest way such a process could take place was through the conversion of the king and the royal family. Therefore, Protestant propaganda of that time constantly urged the most important French royals to convert to the Reformation, and, for this purpose, they deployed a language full of references to the pious Biblical rulers who led their people towards the true faith—whom the addressees of these propaganda texts were advised to emulate, lest they incur God’s wrath. This paper aims to analyze the occurrences and the role of these references in the Protestants’ dialogue with the French monarchy.

Forced witnessing of pain and horror in the context of colonial and religious massacres: the case of the Irish Rebellion, 1641–53

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolás Kwiatkowski
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Economic Factors ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
Irish Rebellion ◽  
Violent Events

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms in Seventeenth Century Britain were determinant for the development of the English Revolution of 1640-1660, and they have received thorough attention by recent historiography. The conflict was particularly violent during the Irish Rebellion, between 1641 and 1653, something that could be explained by the combination of religious, colonial, political and economic factors. The consequence of these radical oppositions was the perpetration of massacres and deportations, of Protestants first and later of Catholics, which were exceptional in comparison to contemporary clashes in England and Scotland. Soon, depositions, books, engravings and pamphlets represented those violent events. Kwiatkowski’s contribution examines the afore-mentioned sources, following their focus on the torments inflicted upon the victims and on the fact that those horrors were performed ‘in sight’ of their families. It will also consider various visual and textual references to other violent religious and colonial conflicts, such as the French Wars of Religion, the Thirty Years War and the Spanish conquest of America. This comparative approach could allow for a better understanding of early modern forms of representing violence, pain, suffering and the witnessing of atrocity in the context of historical massacres.

The Roots of Modern Political Satire

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-65
Author(s):  
Meredith McNeill Hale
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
Text And Image ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Dutch Revolt ◽  
Animal Imagery ◽  
French Wars Of Religion ◽  
The Reformation

This chapter considers the evolution of the political print from 1500 through the mid-seventeenth century. This discussion examines satirical strategies employed by printmakers working at four key historical moments—the Reformation in Germany, the Dutch revolt from Spain, the French wars of religion, and the Commonwealth in England—in order to provide a larger context for the assessment of Romeyn de Hooghe’s innovation of the genre. Two strategies dominate the political prints considered in this chapter: (i) those that employ animal imagery, such as the animal fable and the animal hybrid; and (ii) those that feature individual human protagonists. This chapter introduces three themes that feature prominently throughout the book: (i) the elision of boundaries between man and animal; (ii) the treatment of the satirized body; and (iii) the inter-relationship between text and image. It is shown that the finished, closed, and choreographed body of formal portraiture that dominates earlier political prints gives way in De Hooghe’s satires to the expansive, gaping, and uncontrollable body that has been associated with the genre ever since.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document