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Chapter 5 Dealing with the Interregnum T he execution of the king sent shock waves through the royalist community. But it also posed important questions for the route that royalists should now take. With Charles II an absent and uncrowned monarch, and no prospect of negotiations with the newly created English republic, royalists faced a difficult dilemma as to what their course of action should be. Through its offer of the Engagement the new regime presented royalists with a means of affirming their loyalty to the new regime, while the 1652 Act of Oblivion
Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic Chapter 12 The Restoration episcopate and the interregnum: autobiography, suffering and professions of faith Sarah Ward Clavier1 R estoration bishops came in all flavours: Laudians, Calvinists and those who have apparently left so little indication of their religious views that they still remain a mystery to posterity. They ranged from authoritarian micromanagers to those who seemed barely interested in the business of their individual dioceses. On the whole, however, it is difficult to imagine the events of
the historic magnitude of England’s decision to leave the European Union and the effects of this on the rest of the UK, the Englishness of this moment made it seem like a ‘leap into the known’. Brexit could be portrayed as reclamation of British sovereignty in the face of decades of European integration. By necessity as much as choice it came with a reassertion of the Atlantic and Commonwealth ‘circles’ of Churchill’s political cosmology. It was an English restoration after a European interregnum articulated in the language of Anglosphere Britishness. Yet
Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic Chapter 9 The association movement and the politics of church settlement during the interregnum1 Joel Halcomb F ew issues plagued the Commonwealth and Protectoral regimes more than religious settlement. The rise of new religious sects fractured the unity of the national church, and questions over how far to tolerate these new groups, many of which were key supporters of the interregnum regimes, kept the cases for a ‘state church’ and for ‘liberty for tender consciences’ at the centre of parliamentary and of
authority, ‘consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying out and the new cannot be born’ ( Gramsci, 1971: 276 ). The same is true of the current ‘interregnum’, during which a struggle for meaning, narrative and reason is constitutive of the struggle for power that will eventually give birth to ‘the new’. Humanitarianism has been a defining feature of liberal order. But it is not simply a pillar of liberal ideology. Indeed, essential to any universalist politics of the human , its liberal character is contingent. Amid the crisis of
they have no choice in the longer run but to follow the existing norms and rules. The Coming World The transformation of global rules and norms creates several possible scenarios. One is a renegotiation between the two dominant powers. A second is the rise of an alternative set of rules to those with which we have been familiar since 1945 – new rules that reassert more firmly the primacy of sovereignty against the claims of rights, for example. And another is that there will be a void – an interregnum, a vacuum – where no
For women writers, the decades of the English Civil War were of special importance. This book presents a complex and rewarding poetic culture that is both uniquely women-centred and integrally connected to the male canonical poetry. It brings together extensive selections of poetry by the five most prolific and prominent women poets of the English Civil War: Anne Bradstreet, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Lucy Hutchinson. All these five women were attracting new and concerted attention as poets by seventeenth-century women. Bradstreet's poems first appeared in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, and the later volume of Several Poemsincluded revised texts of those poems and several new ones. Each version of the poems spoke more directly on the context of the English Civil War. Pulter's poems construe Broadfield as a place of unwelcome isolation: she describes herself as 'shut up in a country grange', 'tied to one habitation', and 'buried, thus, alive'. Philips's poetry was first printed in 1664, her state-political poems, on members of the royal family and events of the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration, suggest Philips as a poet writing on matters of political significance. Cavendish's two major editions of Poems and Fancies in 1653 and 1664 each have strongly competing claims both to textual authority and to the more resonant political moment. Across poetry and prose, print and manuscript, Hutchinson's writing bears the marks of her fervent hostility to corrupt rulers and her remarkably broad education, adventurous reading habits, and energetic intellect.
Parliamentarians continued to identify with the decisions to oppose and resist Crown and established church after the Restoration. By expressing these views between 1660 and 1688, these men and women were vulnerable to charges of sedition or treason. This book examines these ‘seditious memories’ and asks why people risked themselves by expressing them in public. It does so without dismissing such views as evidence of discontent or radicalism, showing instead how they countered experiences of defeat. As well as in speech and writing, these views are shown to have manifested themselves as misbehavior during official commemoration of the civil wars and Restoration. It 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.
The debate on the polity of the church was at the centre of the religious debates in the British Atlantic world during the middle decades of the seventeenth-century. From the Covenanter revolution in Scotland, to the congregationalism of the New England colonies, to the protracted debates of the Westminster assembly, and the abolition of the centuries-old episcopalian structure of the Church of England, the issue of the polity of the church was intertwined with the political questions of the period. This book collects together essays focusing on the conjunction of church polity and politics in the middle years of the seventeenth century. A number of chapters in the volume address the questions and conflicts arising out of the period’s reopening and rethinking of the Reformation settlement of church and state. In addition, the interplay between the localities and the various Westminster administrations of the era are explored in a number of chapters. Beyond these discussions, chapters in the volume explore the deeper ecclesiological thinking of the period, examining the nature of the polity of the church and its relationship to society at large. The book also covers the issues of liberty of conscience and how religious suffering contributed to a sense of what the true church was in the midst of revolutionary political upheaval. This volume asserts the fundamental connection between church polity and politics in the revolutions that affected the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world.
Staging the Revolution offers a reassessment of drama that was produced during the commonwealth and the first decade of the Restoration. It complements the focus of recent studies, which have addressed textual exchange and royalist and republican discourse. Not all parliamentarians were opposed to the theatre, and not all theatre was illegal under the commonwealth regimes. Equally, not all theatrical experience was royalist in focus. Staging the Revolution builds upon these findings to examine ways in which drama negotiated the political moment to explore the way in which drama was appropriated as a means of responding to the civil wars and reinventing the recent past and how drama was also reinvented as a consequence of theatre closure. The often cited notion that 1660 marked the return to monarchical government and the rebirth of many cultural practices that were banned under an austere, Puritan, regime was a product of the 1650s and 1660s and it was fostered in some of the dramatic output of the period. The very presence of these dramas and their textual transmission challenges the notion that all holiday pastimes were forbidden. Covering some of the work of John Dryden and William Davenant as well as lesser-known, anonymous and non-canonical writers, the book examines contemporary dramatic responses to the civil war period to show that, far from marking a new beginning, the Restoration is focused upon the previous thirty years.