Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- PART ONE THE RESTORATION CRISIS
- PART TWO THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
- PART THREE THE OLD CAUSE
- 10 Discourses (1) First principles
- 11 Discourses (2) Rebellion, tumult and war
- 12 The self-defence of protestants
- 13 The Tower
- 14 The reckoning
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
12 - The self-defence of protestants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- PART ONE THE RESTORATION CRISIS
- PART TWO THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
- PART THREE THE OLD CAUSE
- 10 Discourses (1) First principles
- 11 Discourses (2) Rebellion, tumult and war
- 12 The self-defence of protestants
- 13 The Tower
- 14 The reckoning
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
For God's sake have a strict eye to Mr S[ydney]. The Whigs have great Expectations of him.
(Secretary Jenkins to Lawrence Hyde, 1 May 1682)And when the Protestants of the Low-Countries were so grievously oppressed by the duke of Alva, why should they not make use of all the means that God had put into their hands for their deliverance? … by resisting they established a most glorious and happy Commonwealth, the strongest pillar of the Protestant Cause now in the world.
Somme say the protestants of Holland, France, or … Piedmont were guilty of treason, in bearing arms against their princes, but [this] is ridiculous … when it is certaine, they sought noe more than the security of their own lives.
Noblemen, Cittyes, Commonaltyes have often taken armes … to defend themselves, when they were prosecuted upon the account of religion.
SIDNEY'S CAUSE
The beginning of the end of the Restoration crisis came, as we have seen, with a re-establishment both in the King's Declaration and in the minds of most people of the historical necessity of the Restoration. What followed, from 1681 to 1684, was a replay in miniature of many elements of that earlier event. One of these was the punishment of protestant dissent, and it was this which re-established for the Discourses, and the practical design underlying it, the same general context as for Sidney's Court Maxims.
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- Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 , pp. 265 - 291Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991