JEFFREY R. COLLINS
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199237647
- eISBN:
- 9780191708442
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199237647.003.0004
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter further advances the book's account of the English Revolution as a religious war. It offers a reinterpretation of the Independents: that group of religious thinkers who rejected all ...
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This chapter further advances the book's account of the English Revolution as a religious war. It offers a reinterpretation of the Independents: that group of religious thinkers who rejected all clerical forms of national church hierarchy and defended a church of independent congregations supervised by magisterial authority. It argues that Revolutionary Erastianism and Independency shared more political and intellectual common ground than is traditionally conceded. Thus, the Independents emerge as the heirs of the Long Parliament's staunchly Erastian religious project. In the Westminster Assembly of Divines, they cooperated with the Erastians grouped around John Selden. Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike were affronted by this, and royalism increasingly came to be wedded to a staunch defence of episcopacy. The chapter also describes Hobbes's early exposure to the Independent way, and begins to place him within the various factions at the royalist court in exile.Less
This chapter further advances the book's account of the English Revolution as a religious war. It offers a reinterpretation of the Independents: that group of religious thinkers who rejected all clerical forms of national church hierarchy and defended a church of independent congregations supervised by magisterial authority. It argues that Revolutionary Erastianism and Independency shared more political and intellectual common ground than is traditionally conceded. Thus, the Independents emerge as the heirs of the Long Parliament's staunchly Erastian religious project. In the Westminster Assembly of Divines, they cooperated with the Erastians grouped around John Selden. Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike were affronted by this, and royalism increasingly came to be wedded to a staunch defence of episcopacy. The chapter also describes Hobbes's early exposure to the Independent way, and begins to place him within the various factions at the royalist court in exile.
