Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- 2 Taking contemporary belief seriously
- 3 The unreformed polity
- 4 Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
- 5 Counter-reformation England
- 6 Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
- 7 Restoration memory
- 8 Restoration crisis 1678–83
- 9 Invasion 1688–9
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
4 - Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: experience other than our own
- 1 The shape of the seventeenth century
- Part I England's troubles 1618–89: Political instability
- 2 Taking contemporary belief seriously
- 3 The unreformed polity
- 4 Reformation politics (1): 1618–41
- 5 Counter-reformation England
- 6 Reformation politics (2): 1637–60
- 7 Restoration memory
- 8 Restoration crisis 1678–83
- 9 Invasion 1688–9
- Part II The English Revolution 1640–89: Radical Imagination
- Part III Restoration 1660–1702: Reconstruction and Statebuilding
- Sources cited
- Index
Summary
To learn the true causes, the rises and growths of our late Miseries … had I not gone so far back as I do, I had not reached the Fundamentals … finding those proceedings to have their rise in the year 1618.
John Rushworth, Historical Collectionsno man less belov'd, no man more generally condemn'd then was the King; from the time that it became his custom to break Parliaments at home, and either wilfully or weakly betray Protestants abroad … All men inveigh'd against him.
John Milton, Eikonoklastes (1649)INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION POLITICS
In the foregoing chapters we have sought to understand two sets of political anxieties. These have close parallels to contemporary religious fears. These, too, were for the survival of an insufficiently reformed domestic institution within the context of a European situation fraught with danger.
That the parallel was close is hardly surprising, since religion and politics were intertwined. Elizabethan counsellors managing the war against Spain made no distinction between defending the country's religion and the state. Later John Vicars wrote of a plot ‘for the … utter subverting of the fundamentall laws and principles on which the religion and government of the kingdom were firmly established’. Sir Walter Erle explained in 1629: ‘I dare boldly say, never was there … a more near conjunction between matter of Religion and matter of State in any Kingdom in the world than there is in this Kingdom at this day.’
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- England's TroublesSeventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, pp. 89 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000