John Milton is a major author in the history of writing the nation in early modern England. A visionary Protestant writer with a keen sense of prophetic vocation, he aligned his authorial identity closely with England as an exceptional ’Nation chos’n before any other’. Yet in his works written before, during and after the English Revolution, Milton agonises over the godly nation’s susceptibility to political and religious servility, so that he vacillates between intense identification with England and strong repulsion. Milton’s evolving relation to the nation thus remains conflicted and volatile. England’s exceptionalism can never be taken for granted: it must be strenuously tested, reassessed and reimagined. Although the late Milton turns away from national exceptionalism and challenges Restoration’s cultural, religious and political values, the 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published close to the Glorious Revolution, tells another complex story about the posthumous creation of Milton as England’s exceptional national poet.

The nature of whatever ‘Political Education’ was imparted to students at the inns is difficult to determine. While possibly enhancing their political awareness, it did not simply operate in one direction. Historians have been impressed by links between the inns and parliament, but contemporaries were probably more aware of their ties with the royal court. ‘Court Connections’ were manifest in masques presented at court, and associations between prominent courtiers and the inns, as well as between the central government and the inns’ rulers. The most spectacular demonstration of this affinity was the 1634 joint masque, The Triumph of Peace, an extravaganza presented by all four inns in repudiation of William Prynne and his alleged libel against women actresses, including Queen Henrietta Maria.

But ‘Towards Civil War’ shows that the rapprochement between the inns andCharles I’s court was never complete. The inns lay low during the political struggles before the outbreak of hostilities, although an armed band of 500 students offered their services to the king just before his attempted arrest of the 5 members in January 1642.When war did come, the inns’ allegiance was effectively determined by their location in parliamentarian London.

Chapter 5 illuminates the literary, political, and ecological significance of Milton’s depiction of contentment. In Eikonoklastes, Milton responds directly to the appropriation of contentment discourse in Eikon Basilike. Charles I had identified his opponents as malcontents and positioned himself as a contented martyr-king. By contrast, Milton describes Charles’s discontent as the immediate cause of the English Civil War and as the epitome of tyranny. In Paradise Lost, he adds an environmental dimension to the religious and republican significances of content and discontent. The language of self-containment has limited applications for unfallen Adam and Eve, who interact harmoniously with their environment. Satanic discontent reconstitutes the experience of selfhood as a space defined in opposition to the natural world. Satan perverts contentment and finds it impossible to relate to the world around him in any way other than as a conqueror. When Adam and Eve choose to sin, they emulate diabolic discontent and subject all of creation to imperialism. Milton’s revision of Christian contentment reveals his efforts to endure, lament, and resist the Restoration.

This chapter describes the long, revolutionary period in which majoritarian patterns of decision-making predominated and matured but were never clearly institutionalized. The House of Commons regularly faced status-related crises that perpetuated majoritarian practices during this period, but these practices were never routinized to the point where they became devoid of profound status implications. If the ultimate question of the English Revolution is the question of why Parliament failed to protect its institutional prerogatives, this chapter provides an answer. Consensual decision-making utterly collapsed amid the disintegration of Parliament’s authority under revolutionary conditions in the later 1640s. The explosion of majoritarian dynamics undermined Parliament’s legitimacy and made its composition subject to the dictates of the army and Oliver Cromwell from the late 1640s to the end of the Interregnum. Majoritarian patterns of decision-making continued up to the Restoration, not necessarily because majority voting had become institutionalized, but because so many questions before the Commons had profound constitutional and status implications in a period of fundamental instability.

The introduction explains the global-historical, interdisciplinary, and historiographical importance of this topic; sketches the history of decision-making in popular assemblies prior to the seventeenth century; and describes how the book will conceptualize and measure consensual and majoritarian forms of decision-making in the English House of Commons and the colonial lower assemblies. Majority decision-making is taken to be either natural or automatic in politics. This is short-sighted. The dominance of majority decision-making as a global standard for political decision-making is therefore something to be explained, not assumed. It is impossible, therefore, properly to address the promise and pitfalls of majority rule today without a history of its rise at the ready. This book is the first such history. It describes and explains the crucial moment in the majority’s global rise to power: its embrace by the elected assemblies of Britain and America in the age of the English, Glorious, and American Revolutions.

The Conclusion demonstrates the global-historical and interdisciplinary importance of early modern developments in the history of majority rule. It sketches the modern history of majoritarian decision-making in the elected assemblies of the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and the postcolonial polities that emerged from their empires and the tumult of the two world wars. It then explains the basic ways in which the history of the rise of the majority in early modern Britain and its empire recasts majority rule as a political problem in a way that has important implications for political science, political theory, and wider public debate. It shows that all of the basic maladies identified today in debates over the state of representative democracy were present, identified, and discussed in the seventeenth century. In particular, contemporaries experienced and described the threat that majority rule posed to the role of rational, informed argument and inclusion in national decision-making.

This chapter explores literary representations of believers’ baptism published during the English Revolution. It focuses, in particular, on two surviving testimonies recounting participation in the ordinance originating in Fifth Monarchist communities: Anna Trapnel’s prophetic commemorations of her baptism recorded in 1654 and 1657-8, and the spiritual experiences of twelve-year-old Caleb Vernon published in 1666 as a spiritual antidote to the plague. The recounting of believers’ baptism in Fifth Monarchist communities was shaped by various political, social and doctrinal concerns originating both inside and outside the movement. The ordinance became a nexus of various imaginative affirmations of dissenting identity, including the connection of a present, commemorative act with a triumphant vision of the victorious saints in the near future. Baptisands recognised the commemorative function of baptism as a visible demonstration of their own spiritual regeneration and Christ’s resurrection (as well as other biblical models). However, this chapter will also explore how these surviving testimonies verge on bringing the past into the present, sometimes invoking divine presence through the physical gestures they describe. In such accounts, partly designed to urge fellow dissenters to undergo the ordinance, some believers appear to have transposed the pre-Reformation focus on immanence and sensory experience required by ritual acts.

Chapter 1 examines the early university career of Locke, detailing his proximity to Oxford Independents during the Interregnum and to more conformist figures after the Restoration. The chapter charts Locke’s possible exposure to Hobbes’s Leviathan and to debates over sovereignty and conscience that were strongly coloured by Hobbesian themes. Central to the chapter are Locke’s connection to figures such as John Owen and Henry Stubbe and early evidence of his political reading. These researches contextualize Locke’s early correspondence and his unpublished ‘Two Tracts’ and suggest the influence of Hobbes on both. The young Locke emerges as a figure versed in the new contractual theories of sovereignty and their implications for religious governance. The chapter also makes a case for deploying the categories of ‘civil’ and ‘prophetic’ religion in historical analysis of the period.

The ability of ancient biofiction to become actively political comes to the surface in this chapter. It focuses on biofictional receptions of Lucan’s Bellum ciuile (sometimes called Pharsalia), an epic written under Nero about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, in and around periods of revolutionary politics, and in particular in early modern England in the period leading up to and following the English revolution and in peri-revolutionary France. At the centre of the ancient and Renaissance biographical tradition about Lucan was the story of how the poet was forced to commit suicide by Nero crudelis (Martial 7.21.3) following his involvement in a plot to assassinate the emperor. For readers working through ideas of republicanism, reading Lucan’s text through the lens of the Life transformed the poet’s death into a function of his own epic, inscribed in the textual discourse of the Bellum ciuile itself.