Religion, Memory and Civil War in the British Isles

Abstract

In 1679 the Reverend Ralph Josselin set about writing down 'Certaine remarkable things that fell out in my rememberance'. He cast his eye over the landscape of his memory, and found that the British Isles bore the scars of religious, political, social and cultural conflicts that had first erupted in the religiously driven military incursion of 1638-1639, the rebellious uprisings of 1641, the inevitable series of civil wars, and the implications for relations with European powers. At the time Josselin was writing, many of these religious conflicts continued to smoulder. Josselin reflected that 'the bloudy warre in England, the original betwixt the King and state ... first begun to smoke Jan: 4. 1641: ... so it smokt until it flamed and burnt almost in all of the kingdome.' The memory of religious tensions and biblical precedents were sparks that ignited the civil wars that engulfed the British Isles, justified the execution of Charles I, and spilt blood on land and sea. For many, the conclusion of the civil wars was a time for remembering and forgetting, for religious and political settlement, and also for retribution. Across the British Isles the sites of infamous massacres, relentless sieges, and bloody battlefields - simultaneously representing glorious victories and crushing defeats - were seared into the memories of seventeenth-century individuals and the cultural practices that utilised them in print and memorials. Women and men had acted according to their consciences regarding matters of religion. This Special Issue analyses how religion and memory were both catalysts for civil wars that ruptured and scarred seventeenth-century England and custodians of their 'rememberance'.