Zugl.: Halle, Wittenberg, Univ., Diss., 2006

This thesis investigates the origins of the political and religious movement which developed within the New Model army between March 1647 and May 1649, by examining the preceding period (1644-1647) when the army was formed and began its activity. It tries to elucidate how an army, raised with strictly military aims and subjected to a particularly rigorous discipline, could develop representative structures (General Council, agitators) and constitutional programmes. As there is relatively little direct evidence concerning the army's religion and politics before 1647, I have analysed the influences to which the soldiers would have been subjected. Two main factors have been isolated, which contributed to the process of politicisation in the New Model. One concerns the army more directly and specifically: the propaganda addressed to soldiers by Parliament (newsbooks, declarations) army commanders and especially preachers. By instilling a sense of personal commitment to a cause and justifying resistance of subjects to their King, this propaganda encouraged the soldiers to think and decide for themselves. This, in turn, tended to conflict with the unquestioning obedience required by the military code. The other factor is more long-term and tends to involve English society at large. It is a complex of processes taking place in church and state on the eve and during the civil war. In both spheres a greater participation of common people in public affairs began to develop. The spreading of "gathered churches" and the campaign of popular petitions and demonstrations in 1640-1642 are the most significant examples. Finally, some attention has been paid to the early manifestations of a political or religious radical consciousness, in the New Model and other parliamentary armies. The experience of the latter may also have had an influence on Fairfax' s army.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914. / "A private edition distributed by the University of Chicago libraries." "The trade edition [without thesis note] is published by the American historical association, Washington, 1916." "To this essay was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams prize in European history for 1915." Bibliography: p. 365-383.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 331-345). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR19803

Thesis (PH. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914. / "A private edition distributed by the University of Chicago libraries." "The trade edition [without thesis note] is published by the American historical association, Washington, 1916." "To this essay was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams prize in European history for 1915." Bibliography: p. 365-383. Also available in digital form on the Internet Archive Web site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 1914. / "A private edition distributed by the University of Chicago libraries." "The trade edition [without thesis note] is published by the American historical association, Washington, 1916." "To this essay was awarded the Herbert Baxter Adams prize in European history for 1915." Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-383) and index.

In assessing the relationship between theology and politics in the writings of the three major Leveller pamphleteers of the 17th century, scholars have tended to search for, and focus upon, individual aspects of one or other of the Levellers' respective theological positions which they consider to have had democratic implications - as, for example, the notion of congregational church government, or a universalist understanding of salvation - which are then deemed to have been foundational to their political theories. But this approach is too abstract. The development of the Leveller platform can best be understood if it is seen as the attempt to answer a question posed by the Presbyterian opponents of religious liberty, and in particular, by William Prynne. In effect, the question was this: how can a society avoid anarchy and continue to exist in any civilised form if the social cement of established religion is removed? Prynne asked this of the Independents and sectaries in civil war England in the belief that there could be no satisfactory answer. Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn sought to provide one by appealing to principles drawn from the law of nature. The major influence on the development of their political thinking was the revolutionary theory of natural rights which underpinned Parliament's struggle against the King Theology was but a secondary factor. It was the fundamental secularity of the Levellers' approach which led to its rejection in 1649 by leading Independents and sectaries, whose own separatism was modified by millennialism and notions of 'godly rule'. Thus, while the Levellers' political platform developed as an attempt to translate into reality the separation of church and state that was at the heart of separatist ecclesiology, it failed because of the opposition of the very people whose ideas it was intended to reflect and embody.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 164-179). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This thesis seeks to develop our understanding of ideas about political liberty in the English Revolution by way of focusing on the issue of property, a topic unduly neglected in the secondary literature. Most writers of the period conceived of liberty as absence of dependence, but what has been little examined is the extent to which it was believed that the attainment of this condition required not only a particular kind of constitution but a particular distribution of property as well. Here the central ideal became that of self-ownership, and the thesis is largely devoted to tracing the rise, eclipse and re-emergence of this way of thinking about the connections between property and liberty. Chapter 1 considers the emergence, in the ‘paper war’ of the early 1640s, of the radical Parliamentarian view that all property ultimately resided in Parliament. It was to oppose this stance, Chapter 2 argues, that the Levellers began to speak of ‘selfe propriety’, transforming the Parliamentarian notion of popular sovereignty into an individualist doctrine designed to protect subjects and their property from not only the king but also Parliament. Elements of both the Parliamentarian and Leveller discussions of property were taken up by John Milton and Marchamont Nedham (Chapter 3), while James Harrington offered an alternative theory that eschewed the notion of self-ownership (Chapter 4). After a chapter considering the relationship between property and freedom in Henry Neville and Algernon Sidney, the final chapter focuses on John Locke’s revival of self-ownership in his attempt to ground property rights in the individual’s ownership of his ‘person’. Although Locke is shown to offer a theory of private property, the Locke that emerges is not a proto-liberal defender of individual rights but a theorist of neo-Roman freedom whose aim was to explain the connection between property and non-dependence.

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