ABSTRACT This thesis aims to (re)examine the breakdown of consensus that led to the outbreak of the English Revolution. It aims to do so from the particular perspective of a group of moderate godly laymen, commonly known as the 'Junto', who played a prominent role in the religious and political machinations of the Long Parliament before the outbreak of hostilities in 1642. Of particular concern is an exploration of the ideological background of these men in order to delineate possible contours of continuity of thought and action extending from the 1620s to the Long Parliament; an objective which has been facilitated via the deployment of a kind of micro-prosopographical methodology which focuses more on qualitative rather than quantitative 'ties of association'. With a view towards charting such contours of continuity, the 1630s provide the crux of the thesis. To this purpose, a number of ties of association have been interrogated including the involvement of these men in colonisation schemes (in particular the Providence Island Company); their resistive action to prerogative taxation; the efficacy of godly communitarian and social ties; and their association with the irenic schemes of John Dury and Samuel Hartlib. Deeply contextualised analysis of such ties of association has the potential to reveal and reframe previously obscured contours of continuity. Furthermore, this focus not only sheds light on this important yet relatively neglected decade but also contributes to a growing body of post-revisionist research by reappraising the revisionist emphasis on short-term and non-ideological causes of the English Revolution. This thesis demonstrates that, for these men at least, there can be discerned a continuity of dissident ideological thought and action stemming from the mid-1620s and receiving its fullest expression in the Grand Remonstrance of November 1641. Moreover, although this dissident ideological framework had political/constitutional implications, it was fundamentally religious in origin and nature, stemming as it did from a reaction to the Arminianism of the Caroline ecclesiastical establishment in the 1620s and its subsequent Laudian efflorescence in the 1630s. Thus this thesis demonstrates that for these men the causes of the English Revolution were essentially religious in nature.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/258344 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Van Duinen, Jared Pieter, History & Philosophy, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. History & Philosophy |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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