Nicholas Tyacke, ed. The English Revolution c.1590-1720: Politics, Religion and Communities. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. x + 212 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7190-9008-0.
Reviewed by Brian Cowan (McGill University)
Published on H-Albion (July, 2015)
Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth (Red Deer Polytechnic)
The Long Revolution Revisited
It happened in one way in France, in another way in England. -- E. P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English”
The notion that the experience of civil wars, regicide, and the abolition of monarchy in the 1640s and 1650s constituted an “English Revolution” was invented by historians who had lived through the French Revolution. Before the 1790s, when one spoke of the “English Revolution,” it was generally understood that one was referring to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-89, rather than to the tumultuous two decades of civil wars and regicide that marked the 1640s and 1650s. Those troubled decades could not be celebrated as a great revolution when they were generally regarded to have been marked by an unfortunate and illegitimate rebellion against the very idea of monarchy. By contrast, the endurance of the constitutional settlement that emerged in the wake of the Glorious Revolution provided an alternative model of a good (or “happy” in the parlance of the times) revolution.[1]
The French Revolution changed this. It was only in the wake of the fall of the Bourbon monarchy in France that the revolts against King Charles I could be understood as an English Revolution. Some scholars have argued that François Guizot was the first historian to use the term “révolution” to describe the events of the 1640s and 1650s.[2] Guizot certainly popularized the term in the titles of monumental works such as his twenty-six-volume Collection des Mémoires relatifs à la Révolution d'Angleterre (1823-25) and especially his narrative Histoire de la Révolution d’Angleterre (1826-27), but Rachel Hammersley has demonstrated that the practice of referring to the mid-seventeenth-century turmoil as an English Revolution “was commonplace in France from the early 1790s onward.”[3] The concept was adopted wholeheartedly in Marxist historical discourse during the nineteenth century, and the 1640s and 1650s soon took a prominent place in that tradition as the second of three great “bourgeois revolutions,” along with the Protestant Reformation in Germany and of course the French Revolution.[4] This English Revolution was imagined in the wake of, and as a weak prefiguration of the rather more ideal revolution enacted in France after 1789.
It took much longer for the concept of a mid-seventeenth-century English Revolution to become conventional in Anglophone historical thinking. The preferred term until the Victorian era was “The Great Rebellion.” Although “originating in the context of Tory and high-church reaction,” Nicholas Tyacke points out that “the idea of a Great Rebellion also came to be employed after the French Revolution as a way of denying any kind of equivalence between the two phenomena” (p. 7). If the French Revolution gained early acceptance as a valid and useful unit of analysis by proponents and opponents alike--even Edmund Burke was quick to refer to it as such in his condemnatory Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)--the concept of an English Revolution that encompassed the civil wars and the regicide took much longer to gain currency in the Anglophone historical imagination.
It was not until the later years of the nineteenth century that Samuel Rawson Gardiner, the author of the detailed (and still largely enduring) political narrative of the early seventeenth century, became comfortable with the concept of an English Revolution and began to use it interchangeably with his preferred sobriquet, the Puritan Revolution.[5] The last hundred years have seen a number of different terms used to characterize the mid-seventeenth-century crisis: the Great Rebellion, the Civil Wars and Interregnum, the Revolt of the Provinces, the Wars of the Three (or Four) Kingdoms, England’s Wars of Religion, even the last Baronial Rebellion, but by far the preferred term of art has remained the English Revolution. This remains true despite some valiant attempts by revisionist historians in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to question the revolutionary character of the crisis. While provocative in its day, the title of Conrad Russell’s Unrevolutionary England 1603-1642 (1990) now appears quaint, and not entirely convincing. By 2003, David Cressy would publish an article unashamedly titled “Revolutionary England, 1640-42.”[6] While Allan Macinnes has made a case for a “British” rather than just an English Revolution, the Anglocentric concept endures, as the recently published forums devoted to “Rethinking the English Revolution” in History Workshop Journal and the Journal of British Studies attest.[7]
The concept of an English Revolution is back, as Nicholas Tyacke’s collection of essays demonstrates. The book was published in 2007 (it was also recently paperbacked in 2013), and is based on a series of papers given at the Neale colloquium on “the English Revolution and its legacies” held at University College London in February 2004. Much of the work presented here is therefore over a decade old. Many of the chapters published in this work have been further developed by their authors in more detailed studies that have been published in the wake of the original Neale colloquium. Readers who wish to understand each contributor’s research in detail will want to consult these works with care.[8] For this reason, it is more productive here to consider the cumulative effect of the book as a whole as a statement about the concept of an English Revolution. Some of the most influential books on the history of the Revolution have in fact been collections of essays. Kevin Sharpe’s collection Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (1978) remains a testament to the early vigor of revisionism, while Richard Cust’s and Anne Hughes’s Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603-1642 (1989) figures prominently as the first and most strident assertion of a post-revisionist critique of early revisionist excesses. The current post-revisionist consensus very much exemplified by the works presented in Tyacke’s collection was perhaps prefigured by the collaboration between prominent revisionist and post-revisionist historians in Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe’s Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (1993).
Although Tyacke’s collection does not explicitly claim to make a unified historiographic statement, it is possible to discern a few salient points within it about the ways in which the concept of an “English Revolution” works for some of the most diligent and insightful historians of the long seventeenth century working today. While one could query the validity of studying the English Revolution as an independent experience, isolated from the turmoils that also engulfed and fundamentally transformed the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland as well as the rest of the far-flung Stuart dominions, I wish instead to focus here on the chronological remit of the work.[9] For one of the most interesting aspects of this book is the way in which it posits the existence and utility of a “long seventeenth century” beginning in the 1590s and ending around 1720.
Periodization in English history has been commonly linked to dynastic chronologies, and in this respect the seventeenth century has been conveniently linked with Stuart rule from 1603 to 1714. Although the rupture created by the Civil Wars and the Restoration has often divided students of the century into early and later Stuart historians, for scholars as divergent in their assessment of the period as Christopher Hill and Mark Kishlansky, the whole of the seventeenth remained a “century of revolution.”[10] Tyacke’s book proposes a somewhat different chronology, one that is not directly tied to the accession of James I and the death of his great-granddaughter Anne. Although not explicitly named as such, the chronological remit of this volume suggests that the English Revolution needs to be understood within the context of a long seventeenth century.[11]
The 1590s are identified by Tyacke and several other contributors to this volume as the point where the origins of the English Revolution can be clearly discerned (p. 14). It is in the later years of Elizabeth I’s reign that one can discern the antagonistic (and yet mutually constitutive) division of English Protestantism into puritan and conformist identities. This division would remain a major point of contention for the rest of the seventeenth century, even if the names used to identify the parties at odds would change with the times. The late Elizabethan “puritans” who gained their name from a term of abuse hurled at them by their enemies retained an identity and eventually a sense of history that would be drawn upon by post-Restoration era “dissenters.” Similarly, Tyacke argues that Elizabeth’s war with Spain and the Irish rebels exposed the fiscal weakness of the English crown and thus encouraged the queen’s ministers to begin experimenting with ever aggressive exploitation of the royal prerogative in the interest of increasing state revenues. Resistance to this expansive understanding of the royal prerogative, characterized in the later seventeenth century as vigilance against “arbitrary government,” would be another key casus belli that historians, revisionist and post-revisionist alike, have identified as key to understanding the animosity that motivated the civil wars and revolutions of the seventeenth century.
If the late Elizabethan era established the terms of debate that would make the English Revolution so potent and so difficult to resolve, the book also argues that a resolution to this dilemma cannot be discerned until long after the Restoration in 1660. Chapters by Dan Beaver, Mark Knights, and Justin Champion demonstrate that the debates engendered by the Civil Wars and the regicide continued to animate post-Restoration politics. The question of when to identify the terminus ad quem for the long English Revolution is less satisfactorily explained here. The date 1720 appears in the title, but no justification for this particular choice appears in the text. Tyacke suggests that the Septennial Act of 1716 put a damper on the rage of party that had plagued parliamentary politics since at least the Exclusion Crisis of 1678-81 (p. 20). Elsewhere, Champion suggests that the suspension of the convocation of the clergy in 1717 “brought to a conclusion an attack on the church that had been initiated in its most bloody form by the execution of Archbishop Laud in 1645” (p. 196). Arguments along these lines echo those made many decades ago by J. H. Plumb and Geoffrey Holmes for seeing the early years after the Hanoverian succession as the moment when political stability ushered in a new age of Whig oligarchy.[12]
There is much to recommend in this concept of a long seventeenth century defined by studying the origins, character, and consequences of the regicidal revolution that turned the traditional worlds of so many English (as well as Scots, Irish, and others) people upside down. One virtue is that it helps us see the ways in which the problems posed by the so-called origins of the English Revolution were in fact not resolved by the Revolution itself.[13]
If anything, the Revolution exacerbated those problems as well as creating new ones. Sean Kelsey’s chapter here on the Eikon Basilike (1649) brilliantly points out how this most influential text was from its very inception a forward-looking document even as it purported to explain the origins of the king’s tribulations when faced with the challenge of governing his recalcitrant subjects. It was a text designed to justify the royalist cause in the unfortunate event of a regicide. He also argues that the publication of the text was delayed until the last possible moment because of the work’s strident anti-presbyterianism. The possibility of a royalist alliance with Scots Presbyterians, a much-vetted possibility in 1648-49, would become much more difficult after the publication of the Eikon Basilike. We see here how the publication of a retrospective narrative purporting to explain the origins of the king’s troubles could close down opportunities for future royalist strategies as well as open up new ones for a cult of King Charles the Martyr.[14]
It is unfortunate that more was not made of the regicide in this volume, for the judicial execution of Charles I along with the legislative abolition of the monarchy was perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the English Revolution.[15] Regicide was the most obvious point of comparison between the English and French Revolutions, and this correspondence helped encourage people to consider the depositions of King Charles I and King Louis XVI as the decisive moments of the two great revolutions. Indeed, it is fair to say that without regicide, it is unlikely that either the English 1650s or the French 1790s would be considered revolutions at all.
Despite its centrality to the concept of an English Revolution, the regicidal fact has always sat uneasily in histories of the seventeenth century. For historians such as Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky, the regicide was the great tragedy of early modern politics, and the judicial murder of the king forever shattered the magic hold that English monarchs used to manufacture and maintain consensus amongst their subjects. Despite attempts by the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes to appropriate the trappings of monarchy to legitimate their rule, and even more tragically, despite the eventual restoration of the Stuart dynasty, the English crown could not be successfully “rebranded” in a way that would restore the organic harmony of pre-regicidal political culture. For this reason, their interpretations of early Stuart politics could remain wedded to a revisionist paradigm, while their narratives of the latter half of the seventeenth century took on a more whiggish hue, in which the “rise of adversary politics” would overwhelm the centripetal force previously maintained by the monarchy. In histories such as these, we find a long seventeenth century cut in half by the experience of regicide.[16]
The regicide is also possibly the most obvious point of distinction between the mid-century Revolution and the Glorious Revolution. Attempts to draw comparisons between the “wet martyrdom” of Charles I and the “dry martyrdom” of James II were generally regarded with abhorrence at first. The ever provocative Daniel Defoe did so in a pamphlet published soon after the death of King William III. He claimed that “the difference only lyes here; the Whigs in 41, to 48, took up arms against their king, and having conquer’d him, and taken him prisoner, cut off his head, because they had him: The Church of England took arms against their king in 88, and did not cut off his head, because they had him not. King Charles lost his life, because he did not run away; and his son, King James, sav’d his life, because he did run away.”[17]
To say that this parallel did not go down well with his contemporaries is to put it mildly. Defoe’s comparison between the regicide and the Glorious Revolution was rejected by both Whigs and Tories alike. The notion was explicitly condemned as political heresy at the trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell in 1710, and few would dare to take it up again in the eighteenth century.[18] The Glorious Revolution would be considered to be the real enduring (and good) revolution, while the regicide would be consigned to an unfortunate history of royal mismanagement, rebellion, or a combination of both. There would be little to be gained in comparing the two, at least until the outbreak of new revolutions in America and later in France made the question relevant once more.[19]
Readers will not find sustained comparisons between 1648-49 and 1688-89 in Tyacke’s collection. This is another missed opportunity, for the last decade has seen a serious revival of interest in the Glorious Revolution, and a variety of different cases have been made for seeing it as a real revolution, rather than a coup d’état effected by “reluctant revolutionaries” or a Dutch invasion imposed on England from abroad.[20] Tim Harris has argued for the enduring significance of the Glorious Revolution when compared with the defeat experienced by the revolutionaries of the 1640s and 50s. He explicitly denies François Guizot’s narrative of a long seventeenth-century revolution that began with the accession of Charles I and ended with the accession of William III and Mary II: “The transformation that was wrought between the 1680s and the 1720s owed little to what had transpired in the 1640s and 1650s. The mid-century revolution had been defeated, and although it had left a legacy of problems to be addressed it can scarcely claim credit for the type of polity that had emerged in the British Isles by the reign of George I. What transformed the British polity, and what made the political inheritance of the Hanoverians so different from that of the Stuarts, was not the mid-century revolution but the later seventeenth-century affair that we traditionally refer to as the Glorious Revolution.”[21]
For Harris, there were two revolutions: the first ended in defeat, but the second was victorious and enduring. Which revolution was more significant? Until Guizot, most English historians would have readily agreed with Harris, but by the end of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Engels would provide a new historical orthodoxy for the political Left when he denounced “the relatively puny event entitled by Liberal historians, ‘the Glorious Revolution,’” in comparison to the great revolution that abolished the monarchy.[22] We have reached a historiographic juncture where questions such as these are interesting again. One can tease out the inklings of a riposte to Harris’s plump for the greater importance of the Glorious Revolution in Tyacke’s volume, but the case is not made explicit.
We should beware of getting caught up in a parlor game debate about which revolution was the more important one. Just as the search for the “origins” of the Civil Wars became an interpretative cul-de-sac, the game of comparative revolutions is not likely to ever result in an enduring consensus.[23] The value of a long seventeenth-century perspective does not lie in the promise of finally figuring whether 1648-49 or 1688-89 constituted the “real,” or even the most important, revolution. It comes from the ways in which it helps unsettle established narratives and promotes an understanding of the English Revolution as a long-term process rather than as a clearly defined event. Just as the series of religious and political problematics set in place by another long-term process--one we now consider to be the “English Reformation”--established many of the mental structures in which the Civil Wars would be fought, so too did the series of religious and political problematics created by those Civil Wars, along with their regicidal consequences, establish yet another set of mental structures that would shape the emergence of a post-revolutionary British state and social order.[24] Here we may find the basis for a new dialogue between historians of the “long seventeenth century” and historians of an often-overlapping, but largely historiographically distinct “long eighteenth century.”
Notes
I am grateful to Joanna Innes and Steven Pincus for some helpful guidance relating to aspects of this review.
[1]. Kathleen Wilson, “Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics,” Journal of British Studies 2, no. 4 (1989): 349–386; Edmund Rogers, “1688 and 1888: Victorian Society and the Bicentenary of the Glorious Revolution,” Journal of British Studies 50, no. 4 (2011): 892-916. On the memory of the civil wars and interregnum after the Restoration, see Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013); and Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and Passions of Posterity (London: Allan Lane, 2001).
[2]. R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution, 3rd edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 87, 240; J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37.
[3]. Rachel Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 159. See also Olivier Lutaud, “Emprunts de la Révolution française à la première révolution anglaise: De Stuart à Capet, de Cromwell à Bonaparte,” Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 37, no. 4 (1990): 589-607.
[4]. See Friedrich Engels, “Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft” (1880), translated into English as “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” (1892) and published in The Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1975-2001), 27: 291-94.
[5]. The concept of a Puritan Revolution had considerable currency in twentieth-century historical writing, but it is rarely invoked today. J. P. Kenyon called it S. R. Gardiner’s “greatest disservice” to scholarship in The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 7; Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51; John Morrill, “The Puritan Revolution,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 67-88.
[6]. David Cressy, “Revolutionary England, 1640-42,” Past and Present 181 (2003): 35-71; see also Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[7]. Allan Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629-1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing, “Rethinking the English Revolution,” History Workshop Journal 61 (2006): 153-55, featuring articles by Quentin Skinner, John Walter, Rachel Weil, and Anne Hughes; Brian Cowan and Elizabeth Elbourne, “Editors’ Introduction,” Journal of British Studies 53, no. 4 (2014): 831-34, featuring articles by Thomas Leng, John M. Collins, Caroline Boswell, and Mark Williams. See also Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Michael Braddick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
[8]. See Michael Braddick, God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Penguin, 2008); Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Ann Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 2011); Dan Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[9]. For some studies of the “British” and extra-English aspects of the revolution, see, in addition to Macinnes, The British Revolution: Derek Hirst, Dominion: England and Its Island Neighbours (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart Kings, 1567-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Micheál Ó Siochrú God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber & Faber, 2008); Carla Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); John Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Laura Stewart, Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637-1651 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2015).
[10]. For complaints regarding this mid-seventeenth-century divide from both political and social historians, see Mark Goldie, Tim Harris, and Paul Seaward, eds., Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, “What Have Historians Done With Masculinity? Reflections on Five Centuries of British History circa 1500-1950,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (April 2005): 274-280. Compare Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York: Norton, 1961) and Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714 (London: Penguin, 1996).
[11]. Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000) studies the English Revolution as part of a short seventeenth century ranging from the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 until the passage of the Triennial Act of 1694.
[12]. J. H. Plumb, The Origins of Political Stability: England 1675-1725 (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1967); Geoffrey Holmes and Daniel Szechi, The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 1722-1783 (London: Longman, 1993); see also Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a survey of this historiography, see Brian Cowan, “Geoffrey Holmes and the Public Sphere: Augustan Historiography from the Post-Namierite to the Post-Habermasian,” Parliamentary History 28, no. 1 (2009): 166-178.
[13]. On the problems with searching for the “causes” of the revolution, see Peter Lake, “Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War,” in The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. Michael Braddick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 22-39. Previous generations had something like an obsession for identifying causes of the mid-century crisis, whether they were characterized as a full-blown revolution or just an unfortunate train wreck. Compare Lawrence Stone, Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (1972 reprint; London: Routledge, 2002) with Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
[14]. Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003); Kevin Sharpe, “ ‘So Hard a Text’? Images of Charles I, 1612-1700,” in Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England, (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 153-172.
[15]. The most sustained study is Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001); see also Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold (London: Chatto, 2006); and Philip Baker, “The Regicide,” in Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, 154-169. Krista Kesselring, ed., The Trial of Charles I (Peterborough: Broadview, forthcoming) will provide a new edition of accounts of the regicide proceedings.
[16]. Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603-1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), and Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Compare Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Charles I: An Abbreviated Life (London: Penguin, 2014). The centrality of the regicide to English history has been a centerpiece of Jacobite historiography since at least Thomas Carte’s General History of England, 4 vols. (1747-55). See Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 142-43.
[17]. Daniel Defoe, A New Test of the Church of England’s Loyalty (1702) in Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, ed. W. R. Owens and P. N. Furbank, 8 vols. (London: Pickering, 2000), 3: 65. For the wet and dry martyrdom imagery, see John McVeagh, ed., Defoe’s Review, 9 vols. (London: Pickering, 2003-11), no. 123 (Dec. 18, 1705), 2: 804.
[18]. Brian Cowan, ed., The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 228; T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols. (London: Hansard, 1809-28), 15: 213, 324, 341.
[19]. The influence of the mid-century revolution on the political thought and culture of the American Revolution has only recently begun to be investigated seriously. See especially Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
[20]. To be sure, most of these studies were published after the Neale colloquium at which the papers in Tyacke’s volume were presented. See especially Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720 (London: Penguin, 2006); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); and Scott Sowerby, Making Tolderation: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
[21]. Harris, Revolution, 514-515. Compare also Tim Harris, “The Legacy of the English Civil War: Rethinking the Revolution,” European Legacy 5 (2000): 501-514.
[22]. Engels, “Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus,” in Collected Works, 27: 291-92.
[23]. The 1970s saw a flurry of interest in the comparative history of revolutions, as in Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene, eds., Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970); and J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
[24]. See Nicholas Tyacke, ed., England’s Long Reformation 1500-1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998); for the Reformation’s influence on the Civil Wars, see Peter Lake, “Post-Reformation Politics.”
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Citation:
Brian Cowan. Review of Tyacke, Nicholas, ed., The English Revolution c.1590-1720: Politics, Religion and Communities.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=42073
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