Historians of American revolutionary thought now generally trace the origins of eighteenth-century Anglo-American radicalism to the civic republican tradition imported from the English radical whigs. Although much attention has been given to the transmission of eighteenth-century English republican literature to the colonies in the decades before the American Revolution, there has been a tendency to overlook the religious context in which civic republican ideas first arose in England and which continued to supply much of their meaning in America. It can scarcely be overemphasized that radical whig ideology grew out of the experience of the English Revolution and Commonwealth of the 1640's and 1650's. Remembered with mixed feelings in both England and America, this event was nonetheless the source of many of the cherished political principles supposedly confirmed by the more openly celebrated and moderate Glorious Revolution of 1688–9. Far more than the 1680's, the 1640's and 1650's in England were also years of millennial expectation. Millennialism and civic republicanism gained ascendency together in revolutionary England, and together they also gave rise to American revolutionary ideology during the next century.

THE PURITAN REVOLUTION AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH RADICALISM

Although eighteenth-century English political dissent included a few Jacobites who mourned the end of the Stuart reign, the whig opposition always drew more conspicuously on seventeenth-century Puritan revolutionary thought.