English Civil War Research Articles

Gary S. De Krey. Following the Levellers, vol. 1: Political and Religious Radicals in the English Civil War and Revolution, 1645–1649; Gary S. De Krey. Following the Levellers, vol. 2: English Political and Religious Radicals from the Commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution, 1649–1688.

G<scp>ary</scp> S. D<scp>e</scp> K<scp>rey</scp>. <i>Following the Levellers</i>, vol. 1: <i>Political and Religious Radicals in the English Civil War and Revolution, 1645–1649</i>; G<scp>ary</scp> S. D<scp>e</scp> K<scp>rey</scp>. <i>Following the Levellers</i>, vol. 2: <i>English Political and Religious Radicals from the Commonwealth to the Glorious Revolution, 1649–1688</i>.

János Priwitzer (c.1590-c.1665): migración, pintura y diplomacia

János Priwitzer fue un pintor barroco de origen eslovaco (Reino de Hungría), que emigró a tierras inglesas, donde encontró su lugar como retratista de la corte y de la aristocracia británica, bajo la impronta de la Anglo-Netherlandish School. En este círculo entroncó fuertemente con la embajada española de la de la época, particularmente con dos de sus diplomáticos, el conde de Gondomar –a quien retrató– y Virgilio Malvezzi, para quienes pudo trabajar también como agente. La Guerra Civil inglesa le obligó a huir forzosamente por su condición de católico, en plena efervescencia protestante. Tras un breve paso por Irlanda, llegó a España como víctima del corsarismo dunkerqués. Acabó sus días establecido en Bilbao, con una doble ocupación: la enseñanza de la pintura y la diplomacia mercantil del activo puerto vizcaíno. En resumen, una intensa trayectoria vital llena de azares, que destiló una personalidad artística, aún por completar.

Excavations at Basing Grange, Basing House, Hampshire, 1999–2006

This report describes excavations at Basing Grange, Basing House, Hampshire, between 1999 and 2006. It embraces the 'Time Team' investigations in Grange Field, adjacent to the Great Barn, which were superseded and amplified by the work of the Basingstoke Archaeological &amp; Historical Society, supervised by David Allen. This revealed the foundations of a 'hunting lodge' or mansion built in the 1670s and demolished, and effectively 'lost', in the mid-18th century. Beneath this residence were the remains of agricultural buildings, earlier than and contemporary with the nearby Great Barn, which were destroyed during the English Civil War. The report contains a detailed appraisal of the pottery, glass and clay tobacco pipes from the site and draws attention to the remarkable window leads that provide a clue to the mansion's date of construction. It also explores a probable link with what was taking place on the Basing House site in the late 17th and early 18th century.

The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe

The English and French Revolutions represent a turning point in history, marking the beginning of the modern rise of democracy. Recent advances in cultural evolution have put forward the idea that the early modern revolutions may be the product of a long-term psychological shift, from hierarchical and dominance-based interactions to democratic and trust-based relationships. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by analyzing theater plays during the early modern period in England and France. We found an increase in cooperation-related words over time relative to dominance-related words in both countries. Furthermore, we found that the accelerated rise of cooperation-related words preceded both the English Civil War (1642) and the French Revolution (1789). Finally, we found that rising per capita gross domestic product (GDPpc) generally led to an increase in cooperation-related words. These results highlight the likely role of long-term psychological and economic changes in explaining the rise of early modern democracies.

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

The Scholastique Catechisme of Tristram Sugge: Reconciling Ecclesial and Monarchical Authority During the English Civil Wars

ABSTRACT This article introduces a new manuscript written in c.1648, A Scholastique Catechisme, Wherein ye Mysteries of Christianity are unfolded by way of Dialogue, by Tristram Sugge (1610–1661), a Royalist and episcopalian divine at Wadham College, Oxon. It is argued that the catechism’s primary function was to promote both monarchical authority and an episcopal Church independent of the monarchy. This is achieved through an innovative deployment of established arguments of patriarchal kingship, and the writing of it was prompted by Sugge’s fears of a religious compromise between Charles I and the Covenanters and/or Parliamentarians in the later 1640s. The Scholastique Catechisme offers an insight into the key concerns of Sugge’s milieu at this time, and is testament to the radical potential of Royalist Anglican thought.

Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars

Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars

Images of Governing and Governability: A Case Study of the Propaganda during the 17th Century English Civil War

Images of Governing and Governability: A Case Study of the Propaganda during the 17th Century English Civil War

Swift, Secret History, and War

“Swift, Secret History, and War” argues that the relationship between Swift’s writing, reading, and his abiding interest in the English Civil Wars produced a distinctive contribution to the discourses that arose after the reestablishment of monarchy, called “secret histories.” These narratives claim to expose clandestine acts, to pull away veils that hide petty motives, and to expose abuses underlying the exercise of power. In Swift’s work, however, the impulse to dig up embarrassing or disillusioning secrets serves yet another purpose; it allows more painful realities to remain buried and thus provides a means of displacing, postponing, and avoiding direct confrontation with the devastation caused by war. The following discussion identifies and analyzes some of the ways in which traumatic conflict—especially within a nation in which neighbor has fought neighbor—requires indirection, delayed response, and the transference of the burden of representation onto succeeding generations. Literature can play a crucial role in the process of displacement when human history has proven (as Gulliver’s Houyhnhnm master observes) “capable of such Enormities, . . . worse than Brutality itself.” Swift’s distinctive deployment of secret history’s strategies allows an ironic historian a mechanism to look directly at and disclose some of the follies and vices of his culture, but also to remain cognizant, at some level, of what remains buried under “the heap” of a traumatic past.

Ballistic protective properties of material representative of English civil war buff-coats and clothing

One type of clothing system used in the English Civil War, more common amongst cavalrymen than infantrymen, was the linen shirt, wool waistcoat and buff-coat. Ballistic testing was conducted to estimate the velocity at which 50% of 12-bore lead spherical projectiles (V50) would be expected to perforate this clothing system when mounted on gelatine (a tissue simulant used in wound ballistic studies). An estimated six-shot V50 for the clothing system was calculated as 102 m/s. The distance at which the projectile would have decelerated from the muzzle of the weapon to this velocity in free flight was triple the recognised effective range of weapons of the era suggesting that the clothing system would provide limited protection for the wearer. The estimated V50 was also compared with recorded bounce-and-roll data; this suggested that the clothing system could provide some protection to the wearer from ricochets. Finally, potential wounding behind the clothing system was investigated; the results compared favourably with seventeenth century medical writings.

The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion and Record‐Keeping in the British Civil Wars. By Alexander D. Campbell. Bloomsbury. 2017. 131 + 259pp. £75.00.

The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion and Record‐Keeping in the British Civil Wars. By Alexander D. Campbell. Bloomsbury. 2017. 131 + 259pp. £75.00.

Republicans Resurrected: Memories of the English Civil War and Peaceful Transatlantic Resistance in the Beginning Of The American Revolution (1762–1765)

At the inception of the American Revolution a transatlantic network of Real Whig Dissenters worked tirelessly to prevent what they understood to be the resurgence of seventeenth-century tyranny. For this group, religion and politics were so intertwined that a threat to one posed a threat to the other. However, recent scholarship has underestimated the importance of religion as a leading cause of the American Revolution by diminishing the civil significance of the Bishop Controversy and downplaying the religious implications of civil policies such as the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Drawing from a rich collection of manuscripts from this transatlantic network, this paper not only shows that the Bishop Controversy had civil significance, but that Dissenters viewed imperial fiscal policy through a religious lens. This transatlantic group included John Adams, Jonathan Mayhew, and William Allen in the American colonies and Thomas Hollis, Catharine Macaulay, Micaiah Towgood, and William Harris in Great Britain. They mobilized memories of religious oppression in the seventeenth-century to forge a common identity for British subjects, and some even attempted to influence public opinion by writing histories of England. Appropriating memories of the battles Britons fought to secure religious and political rights in the seventeenth-century, Real Whig Dissenters argued that the Bishop Controversy and the Sugar Act marked the beginning of a new age of a transatlantic imperial tyranny that must be resisted at all costs.

John Austin and the Catholic response to the English Commonwealth

ABSTRACT The work of the seventeenth-century writer John Austin has often been side-lined when compared to fellow Blackloist contemporaries Thomas White and Henry Holden. Yet John Austin was a prolific author in the mid-seventeenth century, who commented on the political, theological, and social situations that befell English Catholics under Commonwealth rule, and he made some of the most provocative and well-publicised responses to the English Civil War. This article scrutinises Austin’s The Christian Moderator essays which were published between 1651 and 1653. It shows that Austin was at the forefront of addressing Catholic sequestration, oath-swearing, and Catholic loyalty under Commonwealth rule, and that he later re-published the essays under a new title in 1659, The Catholiques Plea, as the issues was still relevant. By examining Austin’s political essays, this article offers a new assessment of his work, and provides new analyses on the subject of Catholic loyalty, oath-swearing, and sequestration.

Fleshing out a massacre: the storming of Shelford House and social forgetting in Restoration England*

Abstract This article investigates the circumstances behind the slaughter of a royalist garrison in Nottinghamshire in November 1645, using the case study as a window into wider issues regarding the relationship between the memorialization of the British civil wars and the fragility of Charles II’s regime in the years following the Restoration. Contemporary sources illustrate how the factors which led to the massacre gave both parliamentarian and royalist leaders impelling motives to wipe the incident from their respective narratives of the conflict.

“Fruits of Unrulie Multitudes”: Liberty, Popularity, and Meanings of Violence in the English Atlantic, 1623–1625

AbstractUsing neglected evidence of organized, state-like, internecine violence among English settlers in New England during the 1620s and 1630s, this essay engages with recent archipelagic approaches to the early modern English public sphere and with studies of the English state and political culture in order to argue for the existence of an important, semipublic Atlantic political discourse during the decades preceding the civil wars in the British Isles. It focuses on the distinctive political dynamics of Atlantic fishing stages during the early seventeenth century and on the violent confrontation between the Dorchester and Plymouth companies in 1625 over the control of the Cape Ann stage on Massachusetts Bay. The rumors, news, and formal reports that flowed from such incidents show how diffuse English ideologies assumed the form of opposed groups, armed and mobilized in the manner of free states, and confirmed fears of such violent episodes as threats to orderly governance in a political society conceived in Atlantic imperial terms. By examining the communication of and responses to this perceived threat during the late 1620s and 1630s, the essay reveals how an Atlantic discourse of “liberty,” “orderly commonweal,” and “popularity” influenced English political culture and policy and the institutions of Atlantic governance before the English Civil War.

Edward Legon. Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Pp. 235. $120.00 (cloth).

Edward Legon. Revolution Remembered: Seditious Memories after the British Civil Wars. Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. Pp. 235. $120.00 (cloth).

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars by David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper (eds.)

<i>Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars</i> by David J. Appleby and Andrew Hopper (eds.)

Alexander D. Campbell, The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars

Alexander D. Campbell, <i>The Life and Works of Robert Baillie (1602–1662): Politics, Religion and Record-Keeping in the British Civil Wars</i>

“Men Buy Their Slaves, Women Buy Their Masters”: Theories of Liberty in Thomas Middleton’s City Tragedy

This paper provides a feminist critique of theories of liberty in two of Thomas Middleton’s city tragedies. Expanding on the neo-Roman theories of liberty presented by Quentin Skinner in Liberty Before Liberalism, I connect Middleton’s city tragedies to feminist critiques from Mary Nyquist and Ellen Mieksins Wood. Close readings of Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy reveal connections between Middleton’s radical critiques of tyranny in later theories of liberty of the English Civil War. Because Middleton’s critiques are explored through both the state and marriage relations, I argue that Middleton exposes the same contradictions of liberty in the institution of the family, providing insight into notions of slavery, servitude, and coercion under the public rule of the sovereign and in the privacy of the home. Reading such contradictions back through Middleton, can, I argue, allow for a better understanding of feminist critiques of such theories of liberty.

Expanding the Narrative: The Reception of Ignatius of Antioch in Britain, ca. 1200–1700

Recent studies of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch have helpfully located seventeenth-century Ignatian scholarship in its ecclesial and political context. Of particular importance, these new works have demonstrated that seventeenth-century British analysis of the genuineness of Ignatius's letters coincided with debates about British ecclesial government and the English Civil War. This essay contributes to such studies by expanding the discussion in three ways. The first two ways extend the study of Ignatian reception backward from the seventeenth century. First, the article observes that the study of the middle recension (the earliest form of Ignatius's letters) can be found in late medieval English theological writings and manuscripts. Second, it addresses how, simultaneously, four Ignatian letters which record a correspondence between Ignatius, John the Elder, and the Virgin Mary were read in Britain. These letters highlight Ignatius's piety and apostolic links. Finally, this essay widens the scholarly narrative of seventeenth-century Ignatian studies by observing that seventeenth-century interpreters drew on late medieval citations of Ignatius and that they were concerned with Ignatius's piety as well as the interpretive puzzles in his letters.