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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
In our history, the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 are, at first sight, years of desperate, even meaningless change. It is difficult to keep pace with those crowded events or to see any continuity in them. At the time, men struggled from day to day and then sank under the tide. Even Oliver Cromwell, the one man who managed, with great agility, but spluttering all the time, to ride the waves, constantly lamented his inability to control them. When all was over, men looked back on the whole experience with disgust. It was a period of ‘blood and confusion’ from which no one had gained anything except the salutary but costly lesson of disillusion. How different from the Glorious Revolution of 1688: that straightforward aristocratic revolt against a king who had so considerately simplified the issues, and ensured a quick neat result, by seeking to convert the nation, like himself, to Catholicism!
1 The phrase in quotation marks is from Clark, J. C. D., Revolution and Rebellion (Cambridge, 1986) p. 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I hope I have not misrepresented the argument of this lively and stimulating book.
2 Roe to Queen of Bohemia. Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), 1635, 9.
3 I have dealt with this episode in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (1987) 100–1.
4 The Diary of Thomas Burton Esq. ed. Rutt, J. T. (1828) II 214, 218–9, 227–31Google Scholar.
5 The Earls of Pembroke, Leicester and Northumberland insisted on pressing for the inclusion of the ‘Arminian’ Henry Hammond in the Assembly of Divines (Commons Journals II 595; Lords Journals V 84, 95–7). Northumberland's father had greatly valued Richard Montagu, Augustine Lindsell, and others whom Montagu regarded as ‘honest men’ (e.g. Francis Burgoyne). See The Correspondence of John Cosin DD (Surtees Society, 1868) I 68Google Scholar, 73n.
6 (Viscount Saye and Sele) Vindiciae Veritatis (1654) 33.
7 Harrington, James, Oceana in Works, ed. Toland, J. (1700), 129–30Google Scholar.
8 Clarendon, , History of The Rebellion ed. Macray, W. D. (Oxford, 1888) I, 93Google Scholar.
9 Clarendon, op. cit. I, 199Google Scholar.
10 Bedford's notes of his projects are among the MSS of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, by whose courtesy I have seen them. His discussions with Sir John Harrison are recorded in British Library, Stowe MS 326 fos. 71–7.
11 Letters and Papers of Robert Baillie, ed. Laing, D. (Edinburgh 1841–1842) I. 186Google Scholar.
12 One of the ‘extravagant particulars’ referred by the House of Commons to its standing committee for the recess in the autumn of 1641 was the setting up of a West India Company on the Dutch model (Commons Journals II 288; Clarendon, op. cit. I 386–7Google Scholar). The Dutch Calvinist scholar Johannes de Laet, who was a governor of the Dutch West India Company, was called in to give advice but found the proposals very amateur. See his letters to Sir William Boswell in the Boswell MSS (British Library, Addit. MS. 6395 fos. 120, 126, 131), and cf. the Grand Remonstrance, 3rd grievance.
13 Bacon's supposed millenarianism was found in his Novum Organum and New Atlantis, and was explicitly cited by the millenarian prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly in his opening address.
14 Webster, Charles, The Great Instauration (1975)Google Scholar.
15 William Welles to John Dury, 20 Sept. 1930, cited in Turnbull, G. H., Hartlib, Duty and Comenius (1947) 136Google Scholar.
16 The Lords' Journals show that Williams was one of the most active of peers in committee—far more than any other bishop.
17 The Autobiography of Richard Baxter (Everyman edition) 71, 80.
18 The correspondence of Henry Hammond and Gilbert Sheldon in British Library, Harleian MS 6942 shows the concern of the orthodox at these developments.
19 For Bacon's plans of law reform see Niehaus, C. R., ‘The issue of Law Reform in the Puritan Revolution’. (Ph.D. thesis, Harvard 1957)Google Scholar.
20 Bacon, , Works, ed. Spedding, J. A., (1857–1874) xi. 252Google Scholar.
21 Vincent, W. A. L., The State and School Education 1640–1660 (1950)Google Scholar.
22 Webster, , op. cit. 232–42Google Scholar, Appendix II.
23 Hartlib emerged from his long obscurity, thanks to the dedication to him of Milton's treatise Of Education, in Masson, D., Life of John Milton (1859–1894)Google Scholar. His papers, last recorded in 1667, were rediscovered in a solicitor's office in Chester in 1945.
24 The Percy earldom of Northumberland was extinct in 1670, but the family tradition was very consciously maintained by the last Earl's grandson, the Whig martyr Algernon Sidney (see Scott, Jonathan, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623–1677 (Cambridge 1988)Google Scholar.
25 Locke's real radicalism and its relation to Leveller ideas is well brought out by Ashcraft, Richard, Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton 1989)Google Scholar.
26 As is elegantly shown in Adamson, J. S. A., ‘Eminent Victorian, S. R. Gardiner and the Liberal Hero’, Historical Journal (1990)Google Scholar.