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.

‘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.

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.

The First “Royal”: Charles I as Celebrity

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (4) ◽  
pp. 912-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Fourth Part ◽  
Famous Person

The seventeenth-century royalist book Eikon Basiliké (1649), probably the most successful political tract of the English revolution, was unlike any other royalist work published in the period. Its unique qualities suggest that it did something genuinely new. Those qualities may be best appreciated from the perspective of celebrity. While celebrity is ordinarily considered a modern phenomenon, the reception of Eikon Basiliké shows that the idea of celebrity arises in the early modern period, when a new relation between text and audience presented a commodified image of a famous person, an image that was consumed by its audience in a democratized marketplace. Ironically, Eikon Basiliké achieved commodification by relying on the traditional techniques of the art of memory—the fourth part of rhetoric—to create the illusion of closeness between king and subject that converted the king into a celebrity.

Legal Agency as Literature in the English Revolution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Common People ◽  
New Model ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
The Common ◽  
Legal Understanding

The literary canon of the mid-seventeenth century has always included works of argument in various spheres—religious, political, philosophical, and juridical—that make up the polemic of the civil wars and the experiment with non-monarchical government that followed. This very large body of usually printed literature was often in the form of a legal plea. One area in which law was reconceived in the name of the common people and exemplified in public and courtroom protest, on the printed page and in the internal politics of the New Model Army, was the Leveller movement, most famously exemplified in the career and expression of John Lilburne. The broader impact of Leveller revisions to legal understanding is exemplified in the activities of the 1650s popular republican and Restoration law publisher John Streater.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 456-462
Author(s):  
Michael Questier
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Other ◽  
Charles I ◽  
To Come ◽  
Personal Rule

Historians have often seen the advent of the personal rule of Charles I as the product of failure, and a harbinger of bad things to come. But it was equally possible for contemporaries to argue that things were the other way around and that the move towards an assured succession in the direct line, on the basis of alliance with a major European power, was the best way to guarantee civil peace, a peace which could not in the end be secured by the cause of pan-European Protestantism or by anything that looked like puritan zeal. Of course, such a view was brought into radical question during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. At the very least, however, this adds a new dimension to the discussion of the causes of that conflict and for an analysis of the politics of the Interregnum and the Restoration.

Yorkshire’s Godly Incendiary: The Career of Henry Darley During the Reign of Charles I

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 435-464
Author(s):  
David Scott
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Charles I ◽  
New Jerusalem ◽  
The Church

The Puritans of northern England have been well served by modern historians. The work of J. T. Cliffe and R. C. Richardson has shed a considerable amount of light on the Yorkshire and Lancashire godly in the seventeenth century, while case-studies of prominent northern parliamentarians, such as Claire Cross’s recent biography of Alderman Hoyle of York, have contributed much to our understanding of how the region’s Puritans reacted to the Laudian ‘captivity’ of the Church and the endeavours after 1640 to build a new Jerusalem.

Orthodox Radicals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Infant Baptism ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Baptist Identity ◽  
Ongoing Project

Orthodox Radicals explores the origins and identity of Baptists during the English Revolution (1640–1660), arguing that mid-seventeenth century Baptists did not, in fact, understand themselves to be part of a larger, all-encompassing “Baptist” movement. Contrary to both the explicit statements of many historians and the tacit suggestion embedded in the very use of “Baptist” as an overarching historical category, the early modern men and women who rejected infant baptism would not have initially understood that single theological move as being in itself constitutive of a new group identity. Rather, the rejection of infant baptism was but one of a number of doctrinal revisions then taking place among English puritans eager to further their ongoing project of godly reformation. Orthodox Radicals thus complicates our understanding of Baptist identity and addresses broader themes including early modern religious toleration, the mechanisms by which early modern groups defined and defended themselves, and the perennial problem of historical anachronism. By combining a provocative reinterpretation Baptist identity with close readings of key theological and political texts, Orthodox Radicals offers the most original and stimulating analysis of mid-seventeenth century Baptists in decades.

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....

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