Power to the people | 27 February 2008

In July, 1642, as the English House of Commons debated whether to raise an army against the king, a dismayed MP, Bulstrode Whitelocke, wondered how parliament had

‘insensibly slipped into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another [so that] we scarce know how, but from paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances, protestations, votes, messages, answers and replies we are now come to the question of raising forces.’

Historians have come up with a variety of explanations. The beauty of Michael Braddick’s book is that he does not feel compelled to deliver one. At the war’s end England had neither a king nor a House of Lords. At its beginning almost no one had such an outcome in mind. The salient, perhaps extraordinary, fact about the descent into armed conflict was that both sides, the king’s party and the Puritan parliamentarians, spoke the same anti-revolutionary language and pledged themselves to the same objectives, the maintenance of true religion and the security of liberty under the law.

Religion was the key and, after an opening chapter which as a summary of the complex, nuanced meanings of the words ‘Reformation’ and ‘Protestantism’ could scarcely be bettered, Braddick does not let us forget it. One effect of the Reformation, and the spectrum of Christian species that it spawned, was to change European conflicts by raising ideological and national quarrels above dynastic ones. The English civil war coincided with the Thirty Years War on the continent. Underlying both was the same disturbing question, ‘whether,’ as John Knox had asked in 1544, ‘obedience is to be rendered to a magistrate who enforces idolatry and condemns true religion’. Even if the answer were ‘no’, there remained a more perplexing question.