The Last English Civil War

Daedalus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Fukuyama
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Normative Factors ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This essay examines why England experienced a civil war every fifty years from the Norman Conquest up until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, and was completely stable after that point. The reasons had to do with, first, the slow accumulation of law and respect for the law that had occurred by the seventeenth century, and second, with the emergence of a strong English state and sense of national identity by the end of the Tudor period. This suggests that normative factors are very important in creating stable settlements. Rational choice explanations for such outcomes assert that stalemated conflicts will lead parties to accept second- or third-best outcomes, but English history, as well as more recent experiences, suggests that stability requires normative change as well.

Chapter Eight The Evolution and Dissemination of Historical Knowledge

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bentley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This chapter discusses the nature and development of historical knowledge and understanding in Victorian Britain. It describes the pervasive tendencies within the period as a whole with respect to what needed to be taught and learned. Historians preserved an eighteenth-century tradition throughout the 1820s — the parliamentary history and Catholic vision of English history from the Romans to the Glorious Revolution. Narratives concentrated on the Norman conquest, Magna Carta, the reign of Henry VII, the seventeenth-century constitution, the English Civil War and the apotheosis of whiggery in the eighteenth century. Later versions faltered in face of the need to demonstrate deeper knowledge of events and a denser narrative texture. Thereafter, histories of England, written in the grand manner and across many centuries, petered out until after the turn of the century, and prompted treatments of more modern periods.

The Fruits of the Reformation

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-144
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
New World ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

The Reformation inaugurated great accomplishments. The Scientific Revolution depended on the biblical understanding of nature by Protestant scientists, and Protestantism led to the great arts of the age. These curricula discuss possible and actual New World explorers, all motivated by their desire to spread Protestantism. The textbooks argue that the Reformation brought not only religious but also political liberty. They cannot easily incorporate the period of the English Civil War into their tale of English post-Reformation virtue. Since the Reformation neither had political ramifications nor sanctioned political revolt, the English Civil War cannot be a political revolution; it is thus construed as a religious quest or a minor Parliamentary dispute. These curricula cannot recognize French power and influence during the seventeenth century. Instead, French economic policies, Catholicism, and immorality foretell the coming demise of the French Revolution. England, in contrast, was inexorably moving toward the Glorious Revolution.

The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Just War ◽  
Political Process ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

John Company Armed: The English East India Company, the Anglo-Mughal War and Absolutist Imperialism, c. 1675–1690

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
James M. Vaughn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Mughal Empire ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

During the 1670s and 1680s, the English East India Company pursued an aggressive programme of imperial expansion in the Asian maritime world, culminating in a series of armed assaults on the Mughal Empire. With important exceptions, most scholarship has viewed the Company's coercive imperialism in the later seventeenth century and the First Anglo-Mughal War as the results primarily, if not exclusively, of political and economic conditions in South Asia. This article re-examines and re-interprets this burst of imperial expansion in light of political developments in England and the wider English empire during the later Stuart era. The article contends that the Company's aggressive overseas expansion was pursued for metropolitan and pan-imperial purposes as much as for South Asian ones. The corporation sought to centralise and militarise the English presence in Asia in order both to maintain its control of England's trade to the East and in support of Stuart absolutism. By the eve of the Glorious Revolution, the Company's aggressive imperialism formed part of a wider political project to create an absolute monarchy in England and to establish an autocratic English empire overseas.

Religion, Politics, and Oaths in the Glorious Revolution

1948 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 462-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Mullet
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Although at the end of the seventeenth century men were shifting their political terminology from the spiritual to the secular, from God to nature, they still invoked the absolutes of history, law, and scripture. They did not lightly overturn their monarch, but when the necessity for such action arose they sought absolution in concepts which the most rigorous and learned mediaeval theologian would have understood. They appealed to the law of nature but they meant the law of God; and the shift involved no betrayal of absolute standards, no withdrawal from the same ethical doctrines that had nourished their forebears. The time was soon to come when secular phrases expressed a secular outlook, but in 1689 they continued to cover the religious convictions of centuries. As soon as the bars were down and men grappled in hectic controversy, the secular side of their politics diminished and the ethical and spiritual aspects became pronounced.

Hobbes's Behemoth and the Argument for Absolutism

1982 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 837-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Kraynak
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Science ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Human Choice ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

Hobbes's history of the English Civil War, The Behemoth, has been neglected by contemporary scholars, yet it provides the clearest statement of the problem that Hobbes's political science is designed to solve. In Behemoth, Hobbes shows that societies such as seventeenth century England inevitably degenerate into civil war because they are founded on authoritative opinion. The claim that there is a single, authoritative definition of Tightness or truth which is not an arbitrary human choice is an illusion of “intellectual vainglory,” a feeling of pride in the superiority of one's opinions which causes persecution and civil strife. By presenting Hobbes's historical and psychological analysis of this problem, I illuminate his argument for absolutism and show that Hobbes is not a precursor of totalitarianism but a founder of liberalism.

John Bramhall and The Theoretical Problems of Royalist Moderation

1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. W. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
British History ◽  
English History ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Conscious Level

It is a truism that the most distinctive features of the peculiarly English genius in politics are moderation and compromise. The sources of this spirit must be sought throughout the whole fabric of English history, but it should be easier to examine some of the stages by which it emerged onto the conscious level of political thought. How long have Englishmen spoken of political moderation as a good in itself? Herbert Butterfield awards to the Whigs the honor of contributing to modern British history their instinct for compromise. Locke has often been thought of as doing the same. But Toryism has come in for its share of the credit, and a student of John Dryden's thought has suggested that the Tory Dryden well illustrates the tradition of avoiding political extremes and reconciling liberty and authority. This is a fruitful suggestion, and it may be carried further by seeking evidence of this tradition in the predecessors of the Tories, the royalists of the Civil War period. These latter, far from being diehards or extremists, were the advocates of a political mean, and tried to defend at once the king's authority and the subject's liberty. In some degree, this is now widely conceded, but the significance of this moderation is not as clear as it ought to be, because its nature is not understood. When it is understood, it will be possible to say that the most important characteristic of seventeenth-century English royalism was not its defense of the king, but its defense of political moderation and limited government.

Battlefields, burials and the English Civil Wars

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ian Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Social Memory ◽  
English History ◽  
Mass Graves ◽  
The Social ◽  
Civil War Soldiers ◽  
Parish Registers

Twentieth-century practices of battlefield preservation construct war graves as sites of memory and continuing commemoration. Such ideas, though they have led archaeologists in a largely fruitless hunt for mass graves, should not be read back into the seventeenth century. Hitherto, little attention has been paid to the practices of battlefield burial, despite the suggestion that the civil wars were proportionately the bloodiest conflict in English history. This chapter analyses the evidence for the treatment of the dead of the civil wars, engaging with debates about the nature and preservation of civil-war battlefields, and the social memory of the civil wars in the mid and later seventeenth century. It concludes that ordinary civil-war soldiers were typically excluded from parish registers as a sign that they were branded as social outcasts in death.

‘The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-185
Author(s):  
Paulina Kewes
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Direct Attack

This chapter explores the seventeenth-century afterlife of the most daring political tract of the Elizabethan era, A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594/5) by the Jesuit Robert Persons. The chapter begins by explaining what is distinctive about A Conference, notably its direct attack on the hereditary principle and on the pre-eminence of the monarchy itself, and gives an overview of its transmission, reception, and appropriation. It goes on to trace the text’s signal and varied influence on Protestant writers from Henry Walker and Henry Parker during the Puritan Revolution and John Somers and Algernon Sidney during the Exclusion Crisis, to the defenders of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution. It thus invites a rethinking of the republican and Whig traditions in English political thought by revealing their dependence on the work of an Elizabethan Jesuit.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document