• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1081 0

questions not only about him, but about kingship, the normal form of government in seventeenth-century Europe (aside from city republics such as Venice that made do with a Doge). Over the coming decade the effort to make Charles see a different sense failed, and it became increasingly difficult to avoid asking what to do with a king who was unfit to rule, or to deal with. Fundamentally, that was a question about monarchy: a king governed by his subjects, or chosen by them, was a peculiar kind of king, perhaps no king at all; but a king who stubbornly led his people into religious error and civil war could hardly be said to be doing God’s work, which was surely the purpose of kings.

Three years after his surrender to the Scots, Charles chose martyrdom to an ideal of the Anglican church and sacred monarchy rather than a deal with his English subjects. A powerful minority among his subjects, supported by the army, chose to execute him and establish a kingless government, rather than try any longer to get a deal from him. Fired both by a Reformation certainty (that God had called them to take charge of the commonwealth) and by an idea more associated with the Enlightenment (that the purpose of government was the good of the people, and should be answerable to their representative), these militants put their king on trial, then abolished the monarchy and the House of Lords. Like many modern revolutionaries they made this a year zero: according to their supporters this was the first year of England’s freedom.

Out of a chaos of opinion and anxiety, and of the catastrophe and trauma of civil war, had come ideas about freedom and citizenship, religious toleration and the exclusion of secular power from matters of conscience. These arguments had deeper roots in the English past but were newly public, and newly in power. These English discussions about the origins and limits of political power were of profound significance for Enlightenment Europe – indeed, to the more celebrated revolutions in eighteenth-century America and France. But they were not, as far as we know, representative of average opinions: others sought resolutions to the crisis in astrology, the prosecution of witches, or the restoration of older forms of religious and political authority. Neither did this minority remain united, or command political power for very long – in 1660 a monarch was restored who indulged freely in the practice of touching for the King’s Evil, curing a tubercular disease by virtue of his divinely sanctioned power. In that sense the revolution was of limited significance, and civil peace might have been established on other terms sooner than 1660.

It is conventional to tell that constitutional story – of a republican failure ending in restoration – but to do so is to limit the significance of the 1640s to that single constitutional question. There is much more to say, and to remember, about England’s decade of civil war and revolution. Political and religious questions of fundamental importance were thrashed out before broad political audiences as activists and opportunists sought to mobilize support for their proposals. The resulting mass of contemporary argument is alluring to the historian since it lays bare the presumptions of a society very alien to our own. At the same time, by exposing those presumptions to sustained critical examination, this public discussion changed them. This was a decade of intense debate and spectacular intellectual creativity – not just in politics and religion, but in understandings of the natural world and in how political opinion was mobilized. The implications of this English experience reverberated around the world of the Enlightenment and English politics were permanently changed by the experience of popular mobilization: much more was at stake than the fate of Charles I and hence the restoration of his son did not settle the arguments, or erase the memory of what had been said.

England’s civil wars were components of a larger crisis, of all three Stuart kingdoms. Nonetheless, although English experience