Second Hand England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited

A collection of scholarly essays reassessing the role of religion in the origins, development and political culture of the English Civil War.

Edited by Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess, England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited returns to John Morrill’s influential argument that the conflicts of the 1640s should be understood, at least in significant part, as wars of religion. The contributors reconsider the relationship between religious belief, political allegiance, constitutional thought and local conflict, challenging interpretations that treat the Civil War primarily as a secular or political revolution.

Individual chapters examine subjects including royal sacred kingship in England and France, the Counter-Reformation and fears of Catholic conspiracy, William Laud, canon law and constitutional thought, anti-popery and anti-Puritanism, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, Royalist political thought and the religious dimensions of political allegiance.

The volume also explores the longer-term legacy of the Civil War, including attitudes towards Oliver Cromwell, religious liberty and the ways in which seventeenth-century religious and constitutional disputes were subsequently remembered and interpreted.

The collection emphasises the close interrelationship between secular and religious law and demonstrates how apparently national political crises were shaped by confessional identities, local loyalties and deeply held assumptions about church and state. It remains a useful specialist work for readers researching the English Civil War, seventeenth-century religion, Royalism, Parliamentarianism and early modern political thought.