Consensus or Conflict? Politics and Religion in Early Stuart England

Abstract

Laurence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution, published more than twenty-five years ago, provided a summation of the best existing work on the period, as well as providing its own subtle and intellectually dazzling contribution. Stone’s book indicated very aptly the broad thinking of historians on the role of political and religious division in bringing England to civil war. The ‘Rise of opposition’, ‘New ideas and values’ are amongst his section headings; he writes of Puritanism creating ‘a burning sense of the need for change in the Church and eventually in the State’. Intensifying religious and political divisions were exacerbated by the prevailing atmosphere of insecurity: social mobility amongst elites and the vulnerability of poorer groups wrenched men away from ‘familiar associations and surroundings’.1 Since the publication of this book, almost all of its presuppositions and many of its conclusions have been subject to searching and wide-ranging criticisms, as this and the following chapter will show. In the place of a polarized society and politics, many historians have presented England as a deeply hierarchical and deferential society with political practices and attitudes to match. The role of the monarch, the peers and the court have all been stressed in recent work.2 It has been argued by Mark Kishlansky that the political process was marked above all else by a hatred of division and a desire to preserve harmony and consensus; Kevin Sharpe and Conrad Russell have denied that there were sharp, long-term divisions over political principle in the early seventeenth century; Russell has questioned the validity of the term ‘opposition’. And, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, it is the monarchy that has often been credited with the adoption of new ideas and values and those who obstructed Charles I seen as conservative.3 There has been extensive debate about the nature, or even the existence of something called ‘Puritanism’. For some commentators, Puritanism has disappeared into a broader Protestant consensus, united by Calvinist theology and staunch opposition to popery; its social and political implications have been linked to a concern for hierarchy and order, rather than to any burning zeal for change. Puritan ‘resistance’ to monarchy was a conservative and defensive response to the novel and fashionable Arminianism. It is sometimes argued that ‘Puritan’ was a label given to the more godly by their enemies and that it had little subjective meaning. Others have agreed with Charles and Laud that Puritans were a small band of unpopular zealots with little political or religious influence until the breakdown of 1639–40.4