The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 by Stone Lawrence;

Author:Stone, Lawrence;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

New ideas and values

A true revolution needs ideas to fuel it – without them there is only a rebellion or a coup d’état – and the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the opposition to the government are therefore of the first importance. Some of these intellectual currents, like devotion to the common law, were very old but became more widespread, while others, like Puritanism or ‘Country’ ideology, were relatively new; some like Puritanism and legalism, created polarities, while others, like scepticism, were vaguely corrosive of belief. But all helped to undermine confidence in the central institutions of Church and State and there is therefore little need to emphasize any further the undoubted differences in their origins and character.

The most far-reaching in its influence on men’s minds, although very difficult to pin down in precise detail, was Puritanism, here interpreted to mean no more than a generalized conviction of the need for independent judgment based on conscience and bible reading. The quintessential quality of a Puritan was not the acceptance of any given body of doctrine, but a driving enthusiasm for moral improvement in every aspect of life, ‘a holy violence in the performing of all duties’, as Richard Sibbes put it.123 In practice this zeal found expression in a desire to simplify the services of the Church and to improve the quality of its ministers, to reduce clerical authority and wealth, and, most significant of all, to apply the strictest principles of a particular morality to Church, society and State. These attitudes were held by some nobles, many influential gentry, some big merchants, and very many small tradesmen, artisans, shopkeepers and yeomen. The sociological roots of Puritanism are still obscure, but in England, as elsewhere, there was some correlation between cloth-working and religious radicalism. The spread of Puritanism among the lower middle class may therefore be related to the unusual size of England’s prime industrial activity.124 Other groups which seem peculiarly susceptible to radical religious influences are artisans in sedentary trades in which conversation is a natural accompaniment to work: tailors and shoemakers are cases in point. Among these lower classes the key agents of diffusion were the printed Bible and the spoken sermon, which between them carried the message to thousands of newly literate men and women with an insatiable appetite for moral and religious instruction.

At the level of the gentry and nobility, economic explanations of religious opinions carry no conviction. Social explanations are little better, since there was always tension between the acceptance of existing gradations of rank and privilege and the potentially socially disruptive idea of a hierarchy of the godly. But the landed élite was desperately seeking some new moral justification for its privileged existence, to replace the chivalric ideal of a warrior aristocracy, and the ideal of public service in administration was sanctified by the Puritan concept of the calling. If the gentry could only convince themselves and others that they were also the godly, their position was secure. Secondly, Puritan ideology, by its resolutely

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