The 'Court', the 'Country' and the Northamptonshire Connection: Watching the 'Puritan Opposition' Think (Historically) about Politics on the Eve of the English Civil War

Abstract

This article is about how the puritan opposition thought about politics. It reads Thomas Ball's Life of John Preston not merely as a godly life but as a politick history — a political tract which uses an account of Preston's conduct during the late teens and twenties as a guide to how the puritan opposition should behave in the late 1630s. The local (Northamptonshire) milieu in which the life was both produced and read is reconstructed and the immediate political and polemical questions to which the life was addressed are delineated. The article addresses the use of history (here of the very recent past) to think about the present and immediate future; the connection between religion and politics, and in particular between politique and providential modes of political analysis in puritan political thinking; the valence of 'court' and 'country' as immediately contemporary categories of analysis; and the origins of English Presbyterianism as a 'moderate puritan' reaction against the populist (indeed republican) tendencies of the New England way, a sort of puritanvia media between separatism and Laudian prelacy.