The Meaning of "Revolution" in the English Revolution (1648-1660)

Abstract

Admittedly, the heading of this paper consists of an anachronistic play on words. The English is a term gradually devised by modem historians: first by the French Fran9ois Guizot in his Histoire de la revolution d'Angleterre (1826), then by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, who in 1889 coined the phrase Puritan to distinguish it from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and finally by twentieth-century historians, who meant to express by this term the wide ranging changes-political, economic, social, religious, and ideological-that took place in England from 1640 to 1660.1 Contemporaries employed other terms for the events, terms which reflected their concern for principles of legitimate government. Thus the (Great) Rebellion, proclaimed by supporters of the royal cause, was balanced by the Interregnum and by the matter-of-fact Civil War. During the 1640s find men employing a variety of words and verbal constructions to characterize their political situation. The times are called turbulent and conditions are dubbed distractions. As early as 1642 one member of Parliament declared that we are at the very brink of combustion and confusion. In 1644 James Howell, that virtuoso of words, lamented the destruction brought about by the civil war with the following lush imagery: And when I consider further the distractions, the tossings, the turmoilings, and the tumblings of other regions round about me, as well as my own, I conclude also, that kingdoms and states, and cities, and all bodies politick, are subject to convulsions, to calentures, and consumptions, as well as the frail bodies of men, and must have an evacuation for their corrupt humours....2