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Essay on English Revolution
Intellectual Origins
The causes of the conflict can be traced to social, economic, constitutional, and religious developments over a century or more. Closer at hand were questions of sovereignty in the English state and Puritanism in the church. The immediate cause, however, was Charles’s attempt (1637) to impose the Anglican liturgy in Scotland. The Presbyterian Scots rioted; then they signed the National Covenant and raised an army to defend their church. In 1640 their army occupied the northern counties of England.
The Long Parliament, summoned by Charles to raise money in support of his war against the Scots, met on November 3, 1640, and demanded reforms as the price for aid. It arrested and ultimately executed for treason the king’s chief advisers, Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, and William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury. It also put limits on the king’s prerogatives (Nigel, 1997). The members split over the Root and Branch Bill to abolish bishops in the Anglican Church, over raising an army to quell an Irish rebellion, and over the Grand Remonstrance, by which Parliament would control the choice of the king’s ministers. The political quarrel became an armed conflict in 1642. Most of the Lords and some members of the House of Commons sided with the king (thus making it technically incorrect to call it a war between king and Parliament).
Casual Factors
The English Revolution and the struggle for tolerance, which was a fundamental cause of the Revolution itself, did not end in 1649 with the execution of King Charles I. Surely, the "British civil wars" would be over two years later, but the issue of the status of English church remained the battlefield for a new and different conflict. The first crucial moment came in 1652 with a public campaign for the widest freedom of conscience......
