¹ Hill, Christopher, ‘Irreligion in the “Puritan” revolution’. In McGregor, J. F. and Reay, B. (eds.) Radical religion in the English revolution, p. 194 (and p. 206)Google Scholar.

² Ibid. p. 196.

³ See Davis, J. C., Fear, myth and history; the Ranters and the historians (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

⁴ This is well done by McGregor, J. F., ‘Seekers and Ranters’ in Radical religion, pp. 121–3Google Scholar.

⁵ The special status of Edwards's work at the heart of this vision is underlined by Hill's, remark (Radical religion, p. 206)Google Scholar that ‘Gangraena…seems to stand up quite well to examination: we need a critical edition’. Perhaps in the same way historians of American communism need a ‘critical edition’ of Senator McCarthy's Works but it's not clear here what standards of ‘criticism’ would suffice.

⁶ Sharp, Andrew (ed.), Political ideas of the English civil wars 1641–1649 (New York, 1983), p. 185Google Scholar.

⁷ McGregor, J. F., ‘Seekers and Ranters’, in Radical religion, p. 123Google Scholar.

⁸ Reay, Barry, The Quakers and the English revolution (London, 1985), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

⁹ Hill, Christopher, The experience of defeat: Milton and some contemporaries (London, 1984), p. 150Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Ibid. p. 159.

¹¹ Finlayson, Michael, Historians, puritanism and the English revolution: the religious factor in English politics before and after the interregnum (Toronto, 1984), p. 35 and ch. 2 in generalGoogle Scholar.

¹² Jones, J. R., Country and Court, 1658–1714 (London 1978), p. 3Google Scholar. ‘It is quite inappropriate to talk of a structure of politics in Restoration England’, p. 1.

¹³ This was the thesis of Jones, J. R. The first whigs (London, 1961)Google Scholar and is repeated in Country and Court, see for instance page 198. See previous footnote.

¹⁴ On this theme see Hibbard, Caroline, Charles I and the popish plot (North Carolina, 1983), esp. pp. 9–10Google Scholar; Lamont, W., Richard Baxter and the millenium (London, 1979), pp. 77, 82–3, 106–7, 330–2Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Grey, Antichell, Debates VII, 200–3Google Scholar.

¹⁶ An account of the bloody massacre in Ireland (December 1678); reprinted in W. Scott (ed.), Tracts… of the late lord Somers (London 1808–15), vol. 8 pp. 89–96, was based on Sir John Temple's Account of the Irish rebellion (1645).

¹⁷ Sidney, Algernon, Discourses concerning government in works (London, 1772) p. 5Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Locke, John, Two treatises of government, first treatise, para 5 (ed.) Laslett, P. (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1967), p. 161Google Scholar. Note also the similarity of the placing of the point in Sidney's and Locke's respective works.

¹⁹ This is a large claim which will be argued fully in my Algernon Sidney and the Restoration crisis, 1677–83, forthcoming.

²⁰ The settlement of 1688–9 seems to have provided the basis for a change in the structure of English politics by removing (or externalising) the principal ingredient of volatility: the religious problem. Only from this point onwards could the divisions of the seventeenth century be subsumed into a formal apparatus of division; the ‘rage of party’ superseding the clash of steel. And with the real ground for religious panic removed the historians of the eighteenth century and their descendants set about rewriting the crises of 1640–2 and 1678–83. Firstly to make their causes primarily secular (not popery but arbitrary government) and secondly to portray their religious dimensions (e.g. the Popish plot of 1678) as the baseless effects of credulous hysteria. In reality the plots were devices for the expression of fears which were only too well founded in fact. The earl of Halifax – no credulous hysteric – made this point when he remarked in 1678 that Oates' story ‘must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or not…[though it were] vain to hope it will ever be confessed by those that say still there never was any such thing as the Massacre of Paris, or the Gunpowder Treason in England.’ Quoted in Reynolds, F. S., The attempted whig revolution of 1678–81 (Urbana, 1937), p. 18Google Scholar.

²¹ Grey, Antichell, Debates, VII, 328Google Scholar. ‘[There is] A universal design against the Protestant Party. We see France has fallen upon the Protestant Party there. The Emperor has martyred them in Hungary, and what has been done in Bohemia, they say, broke the Prince Elector's heart…every Session of Parliament we are still troubled with Popery. In the descent of four Kings [sic], still the Parliaments have been troubled with Popery. [Now the French King is great]…whereas in Queen Elizabeth's time, she would not suffer him to set out a cock-boat.’

²² On this theme see Halifax's remark, fn. 20 above. Miller, J., Popery and politics in England 1660–1688 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Again see fn. 20 above. For this reason I cannot agree with Michael Finlayson that seventeenth-century English anti-popery can be usefully compared (as an irrational phobia) to anti-Semitism. (Finlayson, , Historians, pp. 122–3)Google Scholar. The struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism in the Early Modern period was not only real but extraordinarily brutal and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives; the fate of protestant Germany in the Thirty Years War provided a stark illustration of what was at stake. Historians have to appreciate the extent to which seventeenth-century England felt itself to be at the centre of this struggle; to take proper account of the European context of this century in English history. In English terms Catholicism was an insignificant minority; in European terms it was a militant and advancing majority. This is one reason that successive Stuart kings felt it desirable to seek some rapprochement with the Counter-Reformation powers. There is no question that most contemporaries saw the religious situation in these apocalyptic terms; as a struggle, not only of life and death, but of eternal life or death.

²⁴ See previous footnote.

²⁵ See Somerville, M. R., ‘Independent thought 1603–48’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, 1982Google Scholar.

²⁶ Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha, ed. Laslett, P. (Oxford, 1949), p. 54Google Scholar.

²⁷ Hill, , The experience of defeat, p. 214Google Scholar (and see p. 219). In general Hill's treatment of his ‘Conservative Puritan Ministers’ is quite different from that of his ‘radicals’. Whereas the latter, no matter how silly, receive the last word in indulgent sympathy, the former have their beliefs systematically undermined. This is a pity since Baxter's opinions were both more constructive and probably more widely shared than those, for instance, of the ‘plebian’ Muggleton, whose theology of egotism seems to have expressed itself principally via orders of excommunication.

²⁸ Ibid. The Counter-Reformation origin of these theories has been stressed by Skinner, Quentin, The foundations of modern political thought: vol. II: the age of reformation (Cambridge 1978)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Sidney, , Discourses, p. 4Google Scholar.

³⁰ This point is underlined by the fact that (along with Ashcraft's work) the best discussion of the ideological context of the Filmer vs. Locke and Sidney exchange is a study of early Stuart political thought: Sommerville's, J. P.Politics and Ideology in England 1603–40 (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

³¹ Ashcraft first took issue with this claim in an earlier work; see Ashcraft, R. & Pocock, J. G. A. (eds.), John Locke (Los Angeles, 1980), pp. 34–5Google Scholar.

³² Behrens, B., ‘The whig theory of the constitution in the reign of Charles II’, Cambridge Historical Journal, VII, 1 (1941)Google Scholar.

³³ Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary politics and Locke's two treatises of government (Princeton, 1986) pp. 179, ix–xiGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Ibid. p. 172.

³⁵ See footnote 19.

³⁶ Ashcraft, , Revolutionary politics, pp. 178–9Google Scholar.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid. p. 289.

³⁹ Burnet, Gilbert, History of his own times (London, 1906), p. 176Google Scholar; Burnet's account was echoed by the French ambassador Barillon: see Foxcroft, H. C., The life and letters of Sir George Savile (London, 1898), I, 246–7Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ Ashcraft, Revolutionary politics, ch. 4, ‘The basis of radical politics’.

⁴¹ This was certainly true of Algernon Sidney, who probably holds the record for election attempts in this period; he made five; though there were only three elections held. One was a by-election; in the other he ran for two seats simultaneously. The Case of Algernon Sidney (1680), British Library Casebook, ref. 105e–60(7); The case of the borough of Agmondesham (1680), Buckinghamshire Record Office D/DR/12/38; cf. Hirst, DerekThe representative of the people (Cambridge, 1975), pp.132–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² On which see Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, commerce, and history (Cambridge, 1985), p. 226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Clifton, Robin, The last popular rebellion: the western rising of 1685 (London, 1984), pp. 44–5Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Ibid. pp. 158–160.