‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways

David Rollison

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511807541.012

9 - ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

David Rollison

Show author details

David Rollison: Affiliation:
University of Sydney

Book contents

Get access

Summary

It so happened…that my country, some few years before the civil wars did rage, was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war.

[It] was because English society in 1642 was already different from that of other ancien regimes that the issue of radicalism came so quickly to the fore.

It is only necessary to think of Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of absolutism, the Levellers, Gerrard Winstanley the Digger – a kind of pantheistic Christian communist – James Harrington – the agrarian classical republican – or the secular-minded defenders of the Commonwealth, to become aware that most of the truly original ideas were produced by people in varying ways out of step with prevailing orthodoxies – Anglican, Puritan, royalist, parliamentarian. Such exciting new theories about the individual, the State, and society were in the fullest sense the product of their time, yet produced as it were against the grain.

To defend God's empire of England: ‘the empowered community’

We have noted the constancy of an underlying, taken for granted precept that the most essential function of a constitution was to defend the territory. Myths and records of past conquests were continuously reinforced by generations of raiders and traders from the west (Wales and Ireland), north (Scotland) and south (France, Spain and the Mediterranean world).

Type: Chapter
Information: A Commonwealth of the People
Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649
, pp. 416 - 464

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511807541.012 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Wootton, David, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: the Crisis of the Winter of 1642/3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’, English Historical Review, 105:416 (July 1990), 657–8Google Scholar

Aylmer, G.E., Rebellion or Revolution: England from Civil War to Restoration (Oxford 1987), 103–4Google Scholar

The State of England Anno Dom. 1600 by Thomas Wilson, ed. Fisher, F.J. (London 1936)

Sacks, D.H., ‘Private Property and Public Good: the Problem of the State in Elizabethan Theory and Practice,’ in Schochet, Gordon J. (ed.), Law, Literature and the Settlement of Regimes (Washington DC 1990), 141Google Scholar

Sommerville, J.P., ‘Absolutism and Royalism’, in Burns, J.H. (ed.), Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700' (Cambridge 1994), 348–9Google Scholar

Kishlansky, Mark, ‘Charles I: a Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past and Present 189 (November 2005), 41–80CrossRef Google Scholar

Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England, ed. Molesworth, William (London 1840), 146

Corbet, , An Historicall Relation of the Military Government of Gloucester (London 1645), 8–9Google Scholar

Rollison, , The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London and New York 1992)Google Scholar

Hoyle, R.W. (ed.), The Military Survey of Gloucestershire, 1522 (Stroud 1993)

Gwyn, Peter, The King's Cardinal (London 1990)Google Scholar

Smyth, John, Men and Armour for Gloucestershire in 1608 (Gloucester 1980)Google Scholar

Cooper, J.P., ‘Ideas of Gentility’, in Aylmer, G.E. and Morrill, J.S. (ed.), Land, Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early Modern History (London 1983)Google Scholar

Dewar, Mary (ed.), A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, attributed to Sir Thomas Smith (Charlottesville 1969), 25–30Google Scholar

Wood, Andy, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge 2007)CrossRef Google Scholar

Macintosh, Marjorie K., Controlling Misbehaviour in England 1370–1600 (Cambridge 1998), 69CrossRef Google Scholar

Eley, Geoff, ‘Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century’, in Calhoun, Craig (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass. 1992, repr. 1996), 290Google Scholar

Harriss, Gerald, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford 2005), vii, 650Google Scholar

Walter, John, ‘The English People and the English Revolution,’ History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 174CrossRef Google Scholar

Sharpe, Kevin, ‘Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England,’ English Historical Review 349 (April 1986), 323–4Google Scholar

Sharpe, Kevin, Remapping Early Modern England (Cambridge 2002), pp. 47–8Google Scholar

Valente, Claire, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot 2003), 1, 249–50Google Scholar

Hill, Christopher, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (1971, repr. London and New York 1990)Google Scholar

Fincham, Kenneth and Lake, Peter, ‘Popularity, Prelacy and Puritanism in the 1630s: Joseph Hall Explains Himself’, English Historical Review 111:443 (September 1996) 857Google Scholar

Holstun, James, Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London and New York 2000), 17Google Scholar

Cressy, David, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford 2006), 320–9Google Scholar

Cust, Richard, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present 112 (August 1986), 75CrossRef Google Scholar

Fox, Adam, ‘Rumour, News and Popular Political Opinion in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Historical Journal 40:3 (September 1997), 599CrossRef Google Scholar

Friedman, Jerome, Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution: the Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies (London 1993), xiiGoogle Scholar

Lake, Peter with Questier, Michael, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven 2002), 130Google Scholar

Donegan, Barbara, ‘Halcyon Days and the Literature of War: England's Military Education before 1642,’ Past and Present 147 (May 1995), 68, 71–2, 76–7Google Scholar

Fox, Adam, ‘Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England’, Past and Present 145 (November 1994), 56, 66CrossRef Google Scholar

Wood, Andy, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke 2002), 131CrossRef Google Scholar

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Macpherson, C.B. (Harmondsworth 1968), 727Google Scholar

Hill, Christopher, ‘The Word “Revolution”’, in Hill, A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth Century England (London 1990), 100–20Google Scholar

Skinner, Quentin, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 158CrossRef Google Scholar

Martinich, A.P., Hobbes: a Biography (Cambridge 1999), 162Google Scholar

Glover, Denis, ‘The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elite Republicanism’, Past and Present 164 (August 1999), 57CrossRef Google Scholar

Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge 2008)Google Scholar

Pincus, Steve, ‘Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, American Historical Rewiew (June 1998), 720Google Scholar

Bacon, Francis, ‘Of Unity in Religion’, Essays (London 1906)Google Scholar

Bossy, John, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford 1985)Google Scholar

Manning, Brian, The English People and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth 1978)Google Scholar

Cressy, David, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford 2006), 292–3Google Scholar

McKenzie, D.F., ‘The London Book Trade in 1644’, in Horden, John (ed.), Bibliographia: Lectures 1975–1988 by Recipients of the Marc Fich Prize for Bibliography (Oxford 1992), 152Google Scholar

Barnard, John and McKenzie, D.F. (ed.), Cambridge History of the Book in Britain IV (Cambridge 2003)

Raymond, Joad, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge 2003), 163–70, 194–5Google Scholar

Underdown, , Fire from Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London 1993), 197–8Google Scholar

Rainborough, Colonel, ‘The Putney Debates: the Debate on the Franchise’, in Wootton, David (ed.), Divine Right and Democracy: an Anthology of Political Writings in Stuart England (Harmondsworth 1986), 288–9Google Scholar

Laslett, Peter with Harrison, John, ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, in Bell, H.E. and Ollard, R.L., Historical Essays presented to David Ogg (Cambridge 1963)Google Scholar

Wrightson, Keith and Levine, David, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, Terling 1525–1700 (London 1979)Google Scholar

Levine, David and Wrightson, Keith, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford 1991), 179CrossRef Google Scholar

Leeson, F., Travelling Brothers (London 1979)Google Scholar

Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth (Chicago 1994)Google Scholar

Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago 1998)CrossRef Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel, Society Must Be Defended, trans. Lacey, David (London 2003)Google Scholar

Warr, John, The Privileges of the People of England, or, Principles of Common Right Against Freedom (London 1649)Google Scholar

Scott, Jonathan, England's Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge 2000), 45CrossRef Google Scholar

Book contents

9 - ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive