The Red Brick Times

I was researching the English movement in the mid-1600s known as The Diggers, an egalitarian land-reform effort, and came across this paragraph about the English Civil War between 1642 and 1651 led by The Army of Parliment under Oliver Cromwell that led to Charles' I beheading in 1649 and the defeat of a heretofore sacred royal right of rule. It dovetails with current US Constitutional evolutionary questions by highlighting the development of the poplular voice in England that led to the basic precepts of our own government.

"The conflict itself, its causes, and its outcome have been variously interpreted. As a revolution in government, it was defined by common lawyers, energized by Puritan enthusiasm, and motivated by widespread hatred of Stuart autocracy. As a religious and cultural struggle, it has been described as the War of Three Kingdoms, comprising the resistance of Scots Presbyterians and Irish Catholics to the centralizing control of the English church and government. But whatever its historical character, the Civil War marked England's transition to a society in which the absolute rule of a monarch was no longer a possibility. The people themselves had acquired a political voice. To some extent, this was a religious voice: Puritans who professed a belief in congregational church government were generally proponents of republican rule. Their dedication to the ideal of a society of equals under the law was shared by men and women of other sects: the Levellers, led by John Lilburne, who argued for a written constitution, universal manhood suffrage, and religious toleration; the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who proposed to institute a communistic society in the wastelands they were ploughing and cultivating; the Quakers, led by George Fox, who rejected all forms of church order in deference to the inner light of an individual conscience and, insisting on social equality, refused to take off their hats before gentry or nobility; and the Ranters, who denied the authority of Scripture and saw God everywhere in nature. Without widespread acceptance of the egalitarian concept that had initiated the Protestant reformation—all believers are members of a real though invisible priesthood—it is hard to see how the move from a monarchy to a representative and republican government could have taken place."

The complete text is © 1999 by Addison Wesley Longman, A division of Pearson Education and is found at History and Epic in a student resources site presented by Pearson Education (Pearson Education group includes Prentice Hall, Longman, Scott Foresman, Addison Wesley, NCS Pearson, Skylight Professional Development and other publishers).


Posted 4:24 PM by Andy (0) comments

       Comments:

Post a Comment


---