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The puritan piety of members of the Long Parliament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Although most historians of the English Civil War pay lip service to Puritanism as one of its main ingredients, as a matter of fact, the analysis of religious conviction is rarely undertaken except, perhaps, in regard to the ministers. How deeply Puritanism impinged on the laity is either ignored or treated in an imprecise fashion or explained as rationalisation of deeper economic or social concerns. The Whig historians, who coined the phrase ‘Puritan Revolution’, really see Puritanism playing a general political role, leading to toleration, with the advanced exponents of liberty, like Cromwell, or as causing the opposition to clerical episcopal tyranny in the case of people like Prynne. Even so careful an historian as W. A. Shaw fails completely to understand Pym’s use of biblical imagery and, I think, basically underplays the religiosity of the Parliament men.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1972
References
page no 187 note 1 Shaw, W. A., A History of the English Church during the Civil War and under the Commonwealth (London, 1900) 1, p 50 n 1 Google Scholar. Perceptive as he is, he fails to take full account of the biblicism or piety of the members of Parliament and so tends to read back the nineteenth-century politico-religious concerns into the seventeenth century.
page no 187 note 2 B[ritish] M[useum] Add[itional] MSS 25,285.
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page no 194 note 3 I am indebted to the Numeld Foundation, the Ian Potter Foundation and the Australian Humanities Research Council for grants to visit England for two periods of three months in 1967-70 when most of the research on this theme in preparation for a larger work was done.