The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 by Jonathan Healey

Author:Jonathan Healey [Healey, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

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In the beginning, many had fought for religion – to protect a Church in danger from either papists, sectaries, Laudians or Puritans. Others had fought for the ‘ancient constitution’: they believed it had become unbalanced by the tyranny of the king or the pretentions of Parliament or populace. Thomas Fairfax, shown a copy of Magna Carta in 1647, had announced that this was what the Army had shed so much of its blood for. Cromwell, later, would say, ‘Religion was not the thing at first contested for’ – rather, it was matters of secular government, although no lesser figure than Thomas Hobbes would disagree: ‘the cause of the civil war,’ he wrote, was ‘nothing other than the quarrelling about theological issues’.[46]

But even if religion was always a major issue, the question had also evolved into one of lawful government: where did it come from? What can the people do if their leaders break the law? By the end of the 1640s, many on the more radical wing of the old Parliamentarian cause had come to the conclusion that laws and government originated in the people, and that kings were only useful if they protected the people. The first part had been implicit much earlier, notably in Henry Parker’s famous polemic against the king’s response to the Nineteen Propositions and in anti-absolutist writers well before even that. The second part, which implied that a wronged people might actually depose a tyrant king, was the more fundamental breach. The king, the Rump declared in March, had been set up as a ‘public officer for the common good’, by ‘Agreement of the People’, yet this system had evidently failed in its fundamental purpose of protecting that common good. All government, wrote the republican John Parker the following year, ‘is in the people, from the people, and for the people’.[47] What had happened, so the theory went, was that the chief officer of the state had become a danger to the people, so they had exercised their right to depose him.

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