Print, Censorship, and Ideological Escalation in the English Civil War

Abstract

H istorians continue to be captivated by the English civil wars. The period has stimulated enduring fascination because, whatever scholars may think about the causes, conduct, and consequences of the wars, any sober assessment of the seventeenth century cannot fail to reckon with the sheer disruptiveness of the conflict and the ways in which it devoured lives and shattered the seemingly solid bedrock of English social and political existence. And while this upheaval was traumatic for large numbers of people, it also undeniably forced upon many of its victims a necessary recalibration of ideas, values, and religious assumptions, resulting in considerable ideological ferment and change on all sides of the political divide. Although many royalists (and the nonaligned) partook of this vertiginous process of ideological change, the effects of the disruption are most obvious among committed parliamentarians, for whom the relatively conservative rhetoric of loyalty to the king, measured godly reformation, and enmity to evil council, so apparent in 1640 and 1641, quickly gave way to all manner of religious and political fragmentation. This fragmentation was accompanied in some circles by parallel processes of radicalization, ultimately allowing for a bloody regicidal denouement and a constitutional upheaval that would have been unthinkable for most English subjects in 1640. Knowing that such radicalization took place, however, is quite different from charting it, still less explaining it. In part because of the sheer weight of material generated during the civil wars and interregnum, and the dizzying and accelerating pace of changing circumstance that confronts any would-be historian of the period, it has proved