The Religious factor in the origin of the English Revolution

Abstract

The article deals with interconnection and close interlacing of religious and political issues in the origin of the English Revolution. The author of the article shows the connections and interactions between principal trends in English religious and political history in 16th and early 17th centuries. We also examine the particular circumstances and the content of the political struggle between parliamentary opposition and royal power during pre–revolutionary decades of 17th century, as well as the influence of immediate pretexts arising from religious sphere for the beginning of the English Revolution. The principal foundations for the revolutionary events of mid-17th century England are bound together with the influence of religious Reformation. The gradual root-taking of Protestantism in England led to much more active participation of more broad circles of people in social and political life. Discussions of religious questions became the constant theme of proceedings of literally every Parliament. The most important component of religious and political struggle in pre–revolutionary England was the maintenance of reformed religion and defense from encroaching on it as a part of popular freedom. The aggravation of the religious and political situation in England began in the second half of 1620s and 1630s. A whole series of proofs demonstrates that during these years the Parliamentary opposition saw the threat to preservation of Protestant religion in England in the policy pursued by the ruling monarch Charles I Stuart (1625–1649), and in the actions of church administration as led by William Laud (1633–1645), Archbishop of Canterbury, who ruled in church’s affairs upon the monarch’s approval. Parliamentary opposition to royal power resorted to revolutionary methods of action in the early 1640s and were moved by precisely religious assurance in Parliament’s rightness. Refs 45.