Scotland, Ireland and the English Civil War

1975 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Charles L. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
The Political ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
Northern Kingdom ◽  
The Church ◽  
Church Government

Historical orthodoxy has long recognized the fervent belief of the Scottish Covenanters that their successful revolution against Charles I “stood or fell” with that of their brethren in England. Although by the end of 1641 the Godly Party in the northern kingdom had temporarily destroyed the foundations of Stuart government, many of the King's Scottish opponents no more trusted Charles to accept a permanent curtailment of his power than did their English counterparts. Should the King triumph over his enemies in London, it was assumed that backed by the power of a still episcopal England he would quickly attack the revived presbyterian establishment in Scotland. Concurrently, the political revolution—completed in the Scottish Parliament in 1641—would also be reversed, for the connection betweeen the leading Covenanting politicians, led by the Marquis of Argyll, and the reformed Kirk was very close. It should be remembered that while the clerical estate was abolished in the Scottish Parliament, laymen could sit in the General Assembly and participate in the most important decisions of the Church. Indeed, the aristocratic element in the Glasgow Assembly was large and the meeting's attack on episcopacy and the five articles of Perth may in fact have reflected lay opinion more than clerical. Caroline bishops, favored in Scotland as well as in England for high political positions, were unpopular with the Covenanting nobility for whom presbyterian church government not only restored God's True Kirk but also eliminated dangerous secular rivals. To undermine presbyterianism would, therefore, remove much of the strength from the political hand which Argyll had so shrewdly played since allying with the Covenanters in the Glasgow Assembly.

Office under Queen Elizabeth: the Case of Lord Hunsdon and the Lord Chamberlainship in 1585

1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Stone
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Political Evolution ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Advancement ◽  
Stuart England ◽  
Similar Letter

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the role played by the Court and government office in the social and political evolution of Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Professor Trevor-Roper has treated office under the Crown as a smooth highroad to economic advancement, one of the principal causes of such rise of the gentry as may have occurred. According to this view, the political antecedents of the English Civil War are best interpreted in terms of the polarities of Court and Country: it was reaction against an overgrown and corruptly lucrative Court that inspired the opposition in 1640; it was desire to dismantle the whole centralizing apparatus which inspired the policy of the Independents in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Others, including Professor Aylmer and myself, have subjected officialdom to detailed inspection and have concluded that its rewards were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth and Charles I, its personnel was restricted in numbers, and its more spectacular beneficiaries were a very small minority. The recently published letter of Sir Edward Stanhope to Thomas Viscount Wentworth, advising him to refuse the Deputyship of Ireland in 1631, has cast a flood of light on contemporary attitudes towards the acceptance of at least one high office. Forty-six years before, when Henry Carey, 1st Earl of Hunsdon, was offered the Lord Chamberlainship of the Royal Household, he received a similar letter of warning from a close follower.

Parliament, print and the politics of disinformation, 1642–3

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (258) ◽  
pp. 720-736
Author(s):  
William White
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Charles I ◽  
Important Link ◽  
Formed Part

Abstract This article explores the political uses of disinformation during the English civil war. It argues that forged and falsified publications formed part of a sophisticated propaganda strategy employed by the parliamentarian war party, aimed at discrediting Charles I during the first months of the conflict. It therefore offers an important corrective to traditional emphases on the anxieties that partisan print engendered. Furthermore, by showing that this strategy drew on both the practices and texts associated with early Stuart scribal opposition to Caroline rule, the article suggests an important link between pre-war manuscript culture and the print practices of the sixteen-forties.

Ecclesiastical Reparations and the Soldiers of “The Anarchy”

1978 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 300-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Callahan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
John Of Salisbury ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Strategic Location ◽  
The Church

In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of theGesta Stephaniaccused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from hisPolicraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

THE CURSE OF MEROZ AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORDAN S. DOWNS
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Printed Text ◽  
Irish Rebellion ◽  
Charles Ii

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to uncover the political significance of the Old Testament verse Judges 5:23, ‘the curse of Meroz’, during the English Civil War. Historians who have commented on the printed text of Meroz have done so primarily in reference to a single edition of the parliamentarian fast-day preacher Stephen Marshall's 1642Meroz cursedsermon. Usage of the curse, however, as shown in more than seventy unique sermons, tracts, histories, libels, and songs considered here, demonstrates that the verse was far more widespread and politically significant than has been previously assumed. Analysing Meroz in its political and polemical roles, from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and through the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, sheds new light on the ways in which providentialism functioned during the Civil Wars, and serves, more specifically, to illustrate some of the important means by which ministers and polemicists sought to mobilize citizens and construct party identities.

scholarly journals Thomas Willis, the Restoration and the First Works of Neurology

2015 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 525-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Caron
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Book Of Common Prayer ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Neural Anatomy ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Brain

This article provides a new consideration of how Thomas Willis (1621–75) came to write the first works of ‘neurology’, which was in its time a novel use of cerebral and neural anatomy to defend philosophical claims about the mind. Willis’s neurology was shaped by the immediate political and religious contexts of the English Civil War and Restoration. Accordingly, the majority of this paper is devoted to uncovering the political necessities Willis faced during the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, with particular focus on the significance of Willis’s dedication of his neurology and natural philosophy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon. Because the Restoration of Charles II brought only a semblance of order and peace, Willis and his allies understood the need for a coherent defense of the authority of the English church and its liturgy. Of particular importance to Sheldon and Willis (and to others in Sheldon’s circle) were the specific ceremonies described in theBook of Common Prayer, a manual that directed the congregation to assume various postures during public worship. This article demonstrates that Willis’s neurology should be read as an intervention in these debates, that his neurology would have been read at the time as an attempt to ground orthodox worship in the structure of the brain and nerves. The political necessities that helped to shape Willis’s project also help us to better understand Willis’s innovative insistence that philosophical statements about the mind should be formulated only after a comprehensive anatomical investigation of the brain and nerves.

Independents and Revolutionaries

1968 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Yule
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Established Church ◽  
Westminster Assembly

Who were the Independents? This is one of the unsolved puzzles of the English Civil War. Contemporaries gave differing answers. To some they were the godly; to others they were “the godly gang.” They were both a Puritan group and a political segment of the Long Parliament. S. R. Gardiner and the Whig historians tended to make a clear connection. Religious Independency was for toleration, and the political Independents were, simpliciter, the party of toleration opposed to the intolerant Presbyterians. This view was broadly accepted until 1938 when it was permanently shattered by J. H. Hexter, whose penetrating article showed that many political Independents (and for this purpose he defined them as the Regicides and those who survived Pride's Purge) were elders in the established church which after the Westminster Assembly had a Presbyterian form of government. He therefore urged that the term Independent was really a label for the most ardent political Puritans applied to them by the more conservative.Then in 1953 H. R. Trevor-Roper in his brilliant essay on “the Gentry” introduced a new approach by equating the Independents with the lesser and declining gentry who had been shut out from the spoils of court office and therefore pursued a policy of decentralization.It was at this stage that I wrote an introductory study on the problem of the Independents that questioned in part the suggestions put forward in both these works. Against Hexter I urged that the term Independent had a greater religious content that he allowed, for many of his “Independent” Presbyterian elders in fact became Independents in religion or certainly veered in that direction.

The Career of John Abernethy (1680–1740) Father of Nonsubscription in Ireland and Defender of Religious Liberty

1985 ◽  
Vol 78 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 399-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard B. Barlow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Religious Liberty ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Presbyterian Church ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
The University ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity

The British theological world was stirred at the beginning of the eighteenth century by what the learned and staunchly orthodox Presbyterian historian James Seaton Reid has called “latitudinarian notions on the inferiority of dogmatic belief and the nature of religious liberty.” In the 1690s John Locke had published his Reasonableness of Christianity and Letters on Toleration, followed by John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious. In 1710 “Honest Will” Whitson, Sir Isaac Newton's successor as Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was expelled from the University for embracing Arian views. His departure was accompanied by rumors—long since substantiated—about his great predecessor's heterodox theology. Traditional theologians were shocked next by the appearance of Dr. Samuel Clark's Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity which resulted in the author's arraignment before Convocation of the Church of England in 1714. The very same year John Simson, Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow, was first tried before the General Assembly of the Scottish Presbyterian Church for teaching Arian and Pelagian errors. In 1729, after three more trials, Simson was suspended from his professorship for denying the numerical oneness of the Trinity. Fierce doctrinal contentions also began to occupy English Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists, erupting during the famous Salters’ Hall meeting early in 1719.

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