Abstract
If politics is the art of the possible, then political thought made politics a difficult activity in the years before the civil war. The aspirations of the political nation were not hopelessly utopian. The men of 1640 wanted a solvent king and frequent, financially responsible parliaments. They wanted an adequately financed church, reformed to suit the spiritual and social needs of the laity. They wanted quiet tenants and peaceful towns, and knew they would get neither if the common people were aggrieved. Taken in themselves, these aims were quite unexceptionable.
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Bibliography
M. A. Judson’s The Crisis of the Constitution, 1603–1645 (New Brunswick 1949, rep. 1971) remains the finest general work on political thought in the period.
The common law mind, along with royalism the common denominator of moderates on both sides, was anatomised brilliantly by J. G. A. Pocock’s Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge 1957; New York 1967).
F. D. Wormuth sketched the other side of the coin suggestively though rather un-chronologically in The Royal Prerogative, 1603–1649 (Ithaca 1939).
I prefer William Lamont’s Marginal Prynne (1963) to his more recent Godly Rule (1969).
Another fine study is B. H. G. Worrrald’s Clarendon (Cambridge 1951).
Gardiner is well worth reading for political thought, a point which would have saved C. C. Weston in English Constitutional Theory and House of Lords 1556–1832 (1965) from marring a useful contribution.
C. H. Firth’s House of Lords during the Civil War (1910) is durable and pertinent.
See also an article by Brian Manning, ‘The Outbreak of the English Civil War’ in R. H. Parry (ed.), The English Civil War and After (1970).
S. R. Gardiner’s Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 3rd edn (Oxford 1906).
The Harleian Miscellany and the Somers Tracts have good pamphlet material for the period. The Catalogue of the Thomason Collection, 2 WAS (1908) remains the most useful guide to the available pamphlet literature.
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© 1973 Conrad Russell, Michael Hawkins, L. M. Hill, Nicholas Tyacke, Robin Clifton, P. W. Thomas, Penelope Corfield, M. J. Mendle, J. H. Elliott
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Mendle, M.J. (1973). Politics and Political Thought 1640–1642. In: Russell, C. (eds) The Origins of the English Civil War. Problems in Focus Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15496-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15496-8_9
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