Lord Derby, Lancashire's highest-ranked nobleman and its principal royalist, once offered the opinion that the English civil wars had been a 'general plague of madness'. Complex and bedevilling, the earl defied anyone to tell the complete story of 'so foolish, so wicked, so lasting a war'. Yet attempting to chronicle and to explain the events is both fascinating and hugely important. Nationally and at the county level the impact and significance of the wars can hardly be over-stated: the conflict involved our ancestors fighting one another, on and off, for a period of nine years; almost every part of Lancashire witnessed warfare of some kind at one time or another, and several towns in particular saw bloody sieges and at least one episode characterised as a massacre. Nationally the wars resulted in the execution of the king; in 1651 the Earl of Derby himself was executed in Bolton in large measure because he had taken a leading part in the so-called massacre in that town in 1644.In the early months of the civil wars many could barely distinguish what it was that divided people in 'this war without an enemy', as the royalist William Waller famously wrote; yet by the end of it parliament had abolished monarchy itself and created the only republic in over a millennium of England's history. Over the ensuing centuries this period has been described variously as a rebellion, as a series of civil wars, even as a revolution. Lancashire's role in these momentous events was quite distinctive, and relative to the size of its population particularly important. Lancashire lay right at the centre of the wars, for the conflict did not just encompass England but Ireland and Scotland too, and Lancashire's position on the coast facing Catholic, Royalist Ireland was seen as critical from the very first months.And being on the main route south from Scotland meant that the county witnessed a good deal of marching and marauding armies from the north. In this, the first full history of the Lancashire civil wars for almost a century, Stephen Bull makes extensive use of new discoveries to narrate and explain the exciting, terrible events which our ancestors witnessed in the cause either of king or parliament. From Furness to Liverpool, and from the Wyre estuary to Manchester and Warrington...civil war actions, battles, sieges and skirmishes took place in virtually every corner of Lancashire.

Little integrates the latest research from younger and established scholars to provide a new evaluation and 'biography' of Cromwell. The book challenges received wisdom about Cromwell's rise to power, his political and religious beliefs, his relationship with various communities across the British Isles and his role as Lord Protector.

In October of 1563, 18-year old Anne Mylner was herding cows near her home when she was suddenly enveloped by a white cloud that precipitated a months-long illness characterized by sleeplessness, loss of appetite, convulsions, and bodily swelling. Mylner's was the first of several cases during the reign of Elizabeth I of England that were interpreted as demon possession, a highly emotional experience in which an afflicted person displays behavior indicating a state of religious distress. To most Elizabethans, belief in Satan was as natural as belief in God, and Satan's affliction of mankind was clearly demonstrated in the physical and spiritual distress displayed by virtually every person at some point in his or her life. This book recounts 11 cases of Elizabethan demon possession, documenting the details of each case and providing the cultural context to explain why the diagnosis made sense at the time. Victims included children and adults, servants and masters, Catholics and Protestants, frauds and the genuinely ill. Edmund Kingesfielde's wife, possessed by a demon who caused her to hate her children and to contemplate suicide, was cured when her husband changed his irreverent tavern sign (depicting a devil) for a more seemly design. Alexander Nyndge, possessed by a Catholic demon that spoke with an Irish accent, was cured by his own brother through physical bondage and violence. Agnes Brigges and Rachel Pindar, whose afflictions included vomiting pins, feathers, and other trash, were revealed as frauds and forced to confess publicly, their parents being imprisoned for complicity in the fraud. All these cases attest to a powerful need to ascribe some moral significance to humansuffering. Allowing the sufferer to externalize and ultimately evict the "demon" as the cause of his or her affliction bestowed some measure of hope--no mean feat in a world with such widespread human distress.

This book explores the measures taken by the newly re-installed monarchy and its supporters to address the drastic events of the previous two decades. Profoundly preoccupied with - and, indeed, anxious about - the uses and representations of the nation's recent troubled past, the returning royalist regime heavily relied upon the dissemination, in popular print, of prescribed varieties of remembering and forgetting in order to actively shape the manner in which the Civil Wars, the Regicide, and the Interregnum were to be embedded in the nation's collective memory. This study rests on a broad foundation of documentary evidence drawn from hundreds of widely distributed and affordable pamphlets and broadsheets that were intended to shape popular memories, and interpretations, of recent events. It thus makes a substantial original contribution to the fields of early modern memory studies and the history of the English Civil Wars and early Restoration.

The Puritan Revolution escaped the control of its creators. The parliamentarians who went to war with Charles I in 1642 did not want or expect the fundamental changes that would follow seven years later: the trial and execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the creation of the only republic in English history. There were startling and unexpected developments, too, in religion and ideas: the spread of unorthodox doctrines; the attainment of a wide measure of liberty of conscience; new thinking about the moral and intellectual bases of politics and society. God's Instruments centres on the principal instrument of radical change, Oliver Cromwell, and on the unfamiliar landscape of the decade he dominated, from the abolition of the monarchy in 1649 to the return of the Stuart dynasty in 1660. Its theme is the relationship between the beliefs or convictions of politicians and their decisions and actions. Blair Worden explores the biblical dimension of Puritan politics; the ways that a belief in the workings of divine providence affected political conduct; Cromwell's commitment to liberty of conscience and his search for godly reformation through educational reform; the constitutional premises of his rule and those of his opponents in the struggle for supremacy between parliamentary and military rule; the relationship between conceptions of civil and religious liberty. The conflicts Worden reconstructs are placed in the perspective of long-term developments, of which historians have lost sight, in ideas about parliament and about freedom. The final chapters turn to the guiding convictions of two writers at the heart of politics, John Milton and the royalist Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon. Material from previously published essays, much of it expanded and extensively revised, comes together with freshly written chapters.

In the first ever book on the Agreements of the People, the essays explore the origins, impact and legacy of the attempt to settle the nation by a written constitution at the height of the English Revolution. The volume sheds new light on the Levellers, the army, the nature of civil war radicalism and the fragmentation of the Parliamentarian cause.

Clarendon Reconsidered reassesses a figure of major importance in seventeenth-century British politics, constitutional history and literature. Despite his influence in these and other fields, Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674) remains comparatively neglected. However, the recent surge of interest in royalists and royalism, and the new theoretical strategies it has employed, make this a propitious moment to re-examine his influencecontribution. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Chancellor and author of the History of the Rebellion (1702-1704), then and for long afterwards the most sophisticated history written in English, his long career in the service of the Caroline court spanned the English Revolution and Restoration. The original essays in this interdisciplinary collection shine a torch on key aspects of Clarendon's life and works: his role as a political propagandist, his family and friendship networks, his religious and philosophical inclinations, his history- and essay-writing, his influence on other forms of writing, and the personal, political and literary repercussions of his two long exiles. Pushing the boundaries of the new royalist scholarship, this fresh account of Clarendon reveals a multifaceted man who challenges as often as he justifies traditional characterisations of detached historian and secular statesman.

John Owen was one of the most significant figures in Reformed Orthodox theology during the Seventeenth Century, exerting considerable religious and political influence in the context of the British Civil War and Interregnum. Using Owen's sermons from this period as a window into the mind of a self-proclaimed prophet, this book studies how his apocalyptic interpretation of contemporary events led to him making public calls for radical political and cultural change. Owen believed he was ministering at a unique moment in history, and so the historical context in which he writes must be equally considered alongside the theological lineage that he draws upon. Combining these elements, this book allows for a more nuanced interpretation of Owen's ministry that encompasses his lofty spiritual thought as well as his passionate concerns with more corporeal events. This book represents part of a new historical turn in Owen Studies and will be of significant interest to scholars of theological history as well as Early Modern historians.

The French Wars of Religion were more than a battle for outright military victory. They were also a battle for the hearts and minds of the population of France. In this struggle to win over public opinion, often apparently peripheral issues could be engaged to make partisan points. Such was the case with the polemical literature surrounding Mary Queen of Scots. Based on major new bibliographic research, this study charts the evolving relationship between Mary and French public opinion. MARKET 1: Students studying courses in English Monarchical History; Sixteenth-Century English History; Sixteenth-Century French History; Sixteenth-Century European History.

One of the iconic moments in English history, the trial and execution of King Charles I has yet to be studied in-depth from a contemporary legal perspective. Professor Ian Ward brings his considerable legal and historical acumen to bear on the particular constitutional issues raised by the regicide of Charles, and not only analyses the unfolding of events and their immediate historical context, but also draws out their wider importance and legacy for the generations of historians, politicians, and writers over the ensuing three and a half centuries. This is a book about constitutional history and thought, but also about the writing of constitutional history and thought and the forms they have taken -whether as scholarship, polemics, or literary experiments - in collective British memory. Chapters range from the events leading up to and through the trial and execution of Charles; to their theatricality, legality, and constitutionality; to the political writings such as Milton's Tenure of Kings and Hobbes' Leviathan that followed; and finally trace the various subsequent histories and trials of Charles I that presented him either as martyr, Tory or -- in the 18th and 19th centuries -- the Whig.

This book is about the transformation of England's trade and government finances in the mid-seventeenth century, a revolution that destroyed Ireland. In 1642 a small group of merchants, the 'Adventurers for Irish land', raised an army to conquer Ireland but sent it instead to fight for parliament in England. Meeting secretly at Grocers Hall in London from 1642 to 1660, they laid the foundations of England's empire and modern fiscal state. But a dispute over their Irish land entitlements led them to reject Cromwell's Protectorate and plot to restore the monarchy. This is the first book to chart the relentless rise of the Adventurers and their profound political influence. It is essential reading for students of Britain and Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century, the origins of England's empire and the Cromwellian land settlement. -- .

After the Restoration, parliamentarians continued to identify with the decisions to oppose and resist crown and established church. This was despite the fact that expressing such views between 1660 and 1688 was to open oneself to charges of sedition or treason. This book uses approaches from the field of memory studies to examine 'seditious memories' in seventeenth-century Britain, asking why people were prepared to take the risk of voicing them in public. It argues that such activities were more than a manifestation of discontent or radicalism - they also provided a way of countering experiences of defeat. Besides speech and writing, parliamentarian and republican views are shown to have manifested as misbehaviour during official commemorations of the civil wars and republic. The book also considers how such views were passed on from the generation of men and women who experienced civil war and revolution to their children and grandchildren. -- .

After the Restoration, parliamentarians continued to identify with the decisions to oppose and resist crown and established church. This was despite the fact that expressing such views between 1660 and 1688 was to open oneself to charges of sedition or treason. This book uses approaches from the field of memory studies to examine 'seditious memories' in seventeenth-century Britain, asking why people were prepared to take the risk of voicing them in public. It argues that such activities were more than a manifestation of discontent or radicalism - they also provided a way of countering experiences of defeat. Besides speech and writing, parliamentarian and republican views are shown to have manifested as misbehaviour during official commemorations of the civil wars and republic. The book also considers how such views were passed on from the generation of men and women who experienced civil war and revolution to their children and grandchildren. -- .

Analyses the role of long-term continuities in the political and religious culture of Wales from the eve of the Civil War in 1640 to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 In Royalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640-1688, Sarah Ward Clavier provides a ground-breaking analysis of the role of long-term continuities in the political and religious culture of Wales from the eve of the Civil War in 1640 to the Glorious Revolution. A final chapter also extends the narrative to the Hanoverian succession. The book discusses three main themes: the importance of continuities (including concepts of Welsh history, identity and language); religious attitudes and identities; and political culture. As Ward Clavier shows, the culture of Wales in this period was not frozen but rather dynamic, one that was constantly deploying traditional cultural symbols and practices to sustain a distinctive religious and political identity against a tide of change. The book uses a wide range of primary research material: from correspondence, diaries and financial accounts, to architectural, literary and material sources, drawing on both English and Welsh language texts. As part of the 'New Regional History' this book discusses the distinctively Welsh alongside aspects common to English and, indeed, European culture, and argues that the creative construction of continuity allowed the gentry of North-East Wales to maintain and adapt their identity even in the face of rupture and crisis.

Throws much new light on questions of gentry honour, the nature and prevalence of early modern elite violence, and the process of judicial investigation in Shakespeare's England This book offers an analysis of Jacobean duelling and gentry honour culture through the close examination and contextualisation of the most fully documented duel of the early modern era. This was the fatal encounter between a Flintshire gentleman, Edward Morgan, and his Cheshire antagonist, John Egerton, which took place at Highgate on 21 April 1610. John Egerton was killed, but controversy quickly erupted over whether he had died in a fair fight of honour or had been murdered in a shameful conspiracy. The legal investigation into the killing produced a rich body of evidence which reveals in unparalleled detail not only the dynamics of the fight itself, but also the inner workings of a seventeenth-century metropolitan manhunt, the Middlesex coroner's court, a murder trial at King's Bench, and also the murky webs of aristocratic patronage at the Jacobean Court which ultimately allowed Morgan to secure a pardon. Uniquely, a series of dramatic Star Chamber suits have survived that also allow us to investigate the duel's origins. Their close examination, as Lloyd Bowen shows, calls into question the historiographical paradigm which sees early modern duels as matters of the moment and distinct from, as opposed to connected to, the gentry feud. The book throws much new light on questions of gentry honour, the nature and prevalence of early modern elite violence, and the process of judicial investigation in Shakespeare's England.

This meticulously-researched book sets out in vivid detail the story of the conflict between Scotland and England in 1542-1560, one of the most violent and colourful episodes in British history. After the death in 1542 of King James V of Scotland, his wife Mary of Guise, mother of the future Mary Queen of Scots, was left to rule over a kingdom in torment. Powerful political, regional and feudalistic forces began to battle for the heart and soul of Scotland, while the great families chose - and changed - sides in their hunger for power. Trust was thrown to the wind. Clan was set against clan, France and the Habsburg Empire stormed into the conflict, and loyalties were strained and often broken. In battle after battle men were slaughtered by the hundred, while the opposing sides laid waste to each other's towns and territories. By the time it was all over the Scotland we know today had begun to emerge from the wreckage, the first nation in Europe to revolt successfully against the established church and a constitutional monarchy.

The Compendium of World Sovereigns series contains three volumes Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern. These volumes provide students with easy-to-access 'who's who' with details the identities and dates, with ages and wives, where known, of heads of government in any given state at any time within the framework of reference. The relevant original and secondary sources are also listed in a comprehensive bibliography. Providing a clear reference guide for students, to who was who and when they ruled in the Dynasties and other ruler-lists for the Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern worlds - primarily European and Middle Eastern but including available information on Africa and Asia and the pre-Columbian Americas. The trilogy accesses and interprets the original data plus any modern controversies and disputes over names and dating, reflecting on the shifts in and widening of focus in student and academic studies. Each volume contains league tables of rulers' 'records', and an extensive bibliographical guide to the relevant personnel and dynasties, plus any controversies, so readers can consult these for extra details and know exactly where to go for which information. All relevant information is collected and provided as a one-stop-shop for students wishing to check the known information about a world Sovereign. The Early Modern volume begins with Eastern and Western Europe and moves through the Ottoman Empire, South and East Asia, Africa and ends in Central and South America. Compendium of World Sovereigns: Volume III Early Modern provides students and scholars with the perfect reference guide to support their studies and to fact check dates, people, and places.

Originally published in 1987, this book compares and contrasts the characters and careers of two great protagonists in the English Civil War and its aftermath. The book shows how Charles I and Oliver Cromwell were confronted with the same problems and therefore, to a surprisingly large extent, were obliged to deal with them in much the same kind of way. The book re-examines their military methods, their approaches to religion, their diplomatic manoeuvres, their domestic policies and the manner in which they handled their parliaments. Above all, it considers how their vastly different personalities determined their actions. Finally it debates how far a revolution, of which Cromwell was the instrument and Charles the victim, can be said to have taken place in the mid-seventeenth century or whether what occurred was simply a political rebellion sparked off by religious passion.

Originally published in 1915, the essays in this book deal with 9 English writers - as diverse in outlook and temperament as Bunyan and Boswell; poets and Puritans and men who were neither. The book examines each writer in his historical and social context - facing problems in art or religion and life in general.

Originally published in 1968, the documents collected in this volume (all re-set for ease of reading), trace the history of the Puritan Revolution from its roots in the early seventeenth century to the Restoration. They show how the causes and the course of the upheaval were reflected immediately and polemically in the torrent of books, tracts and pamphlets, letters, speeches, sermons, petitions, paper constitutions and government instruments that accompanied and often precipitated events. The documents substantiate the conviction of many scholars that the English Revolution represented a shaking of society comparable to the French and Russian revolutions. The Introduction discusses the work of historians of modern-day historians of the period and contributes to the debate about the underlying causes of the crisis.

Originally published in 1910, this book traces the political role of the House of Lords during the first half of the seventeenth century, from its early years of defending the constitution against the crown, and the subsequent conflict with the Lower House during the Civil War, to its abolition in 1649 and restoration eleven years later.

Originally published in 1991, this book traces the evolution of the House of Lords as a court for private litigation during the critically important years from 1621 to 1675. It offers new insights into contemporary politics, government and religion, adding an important dimension to our understanding of the House of Lords. This book is primary reading for advanced undergraduates and postgraduate students on courses on early Stuart England, the Civil War and Restoration history.

Although there have been many studies of the English revolution and its more dramatic trials, until this book was published in 1971, little attention had been paid to the Long Parliament's attempts to impeach a number of judges. This book describes how the judges became unpopular, selecting a number of themes - from the development of unanimous decision and opinions, to the role of the judges as agents and supervisors of government policies. The Long Parliament viewed them as the great instrument behind evil policies and believed they had attempted to usurp the power of legislation. Charles I is seen as placing too much reliance on his judges and his failure to realize that legality could not be a perpetual answer to political dissent in the end cost him his throne. The book is intended as an introduction for undergraduates.

Originally published in 1930 and reprinted in 1966 this book focusses on the social and economic developments of the Puritan revolution - aspects which are often overlooked in favour of the political. Using archival resources, this study shows that the period 1640-1660 was one of change and experiment in the social as well as political sphere. Particular focus is given to the depression in industry and agriculture and the resultant increase in poverty and unemployment. The extent to which the traditional authority of church and state was weakened, is also discussed.