Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: points of departure
- Introduction An uncommon tradition
- Part I The emergent commonalty
- Part II Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327–1549
- Part III The English explosion
- Part IV The empowered community
- 8 ‘The first pace that is sick’: the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
- 9 ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways
- Index
- References
9 - ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: points of departure
- Introduction An uncommon tradition
- Part I The emergent commonalty
- Part II Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327–1549
- Part III The English explosion
- Part IV The empowered community
- 8 ‘The first pace that is sick’: the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
- 9 ‘Boiling hot with questions’: the English revolution and the parting of the ways
- Index
- References
Summary
It so happened…that my country, some few years before the civil wars did rage, was boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and obedience due from subjects, the true forerunners of an approaching war.
[It] was because English society in 1642 was already different from that of other ancien regimes that the issue of radicalism came so quickly to the fore.
It is only necessary to think of Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of absolutism, the Levellers, Gerrard Winstanley the Digger – a kind of pantheistic Christian communist – James Harrington – the agrarian classical republican – or the secular-minded defenders of the Commonwealth, to become aware that most of the truly original ideas were produced by people in varying ways out of step with prevailing orthodoxies – Anglican, Puritan, royalist, parliamentarian. Such exciting new theories about the individual, the State, and society were in the fullest sense the product of their time, yet produced as it were against the grain.
To defend God's empire of England: ‘the empowered community’
We have noted the constancy of an underlying, taken for granted precept that the most essential function of a constitution was to defend the territory. Myths and records of past conquests were continuously reinforced by generations of raiders and traders from the west (Wales and Ireland), north (Scotland) and south (France, Spain and the Mediterranean world).
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Commonwealth of the PeoplePopular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649, pp. 416 - 464Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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