Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of the English Civil War

Abstract

This article integrates the concept of sovereignty with religious perceptions of misrule in the years leading up to the English Civil War. Existing revisionist narratives have emphasized the consensual nature of early Stuart political culture, especially the central role of the 'common law mind' in determining the proper place of potentially rival political vocabularies of natural law, civil law and absolutism. This article argues alternatively that the concept of sovereignty and in particular the contested relationship of sovereignty to ecclesiastical governance stood at the centre of the emerging conflict. The primary mode of 'opposition' to the policies of Charles I's personal rule (1629-40) was erastian: it presumed that control over the doctrine and discipline of the established church was for all intents and purposes a mark or right of sovereignty in the same manner as power of war and peace, power of appointing magistrates, or coinage. Seen in this light the ecclesiastical innovations of the personal rule constituted a treasonable attempt on the part of the Laudian episcopate to erect an ecclesiastical state within a state. The English Civil War was a war of religion in the sense that a significant number of those who waged it operated under the assumption that religion was the rightful provenance of the civil magistracy of king in parliament.

Religion, Political Thought and the English Civil War

“…68 In the context of the English civil war, this debate over ecclesiastical supremacy took on added importance, as power over the church was included among the 'marks' of sovereignty that were claimed by the Crown, and on which the legitimacy of its rule depended. 69 However, a problem arose when the religious policies of the Crown seemed to take the church in directions not sanctioned by the statutes that codified the Reformation, or when ecclesiastical censures seemed to stray into the sovereign jurisdiction of the common law. 70 Even after the Long Parliament managed to capture many aspects of ecclesiastical sovereignty within its own jurisdiction, the argument about the proper relationship of religion and the state continued, underpinning a range of arguments -between Presbyterians, Independents and Congregationalists -on issues such as the limits of civil power over religion, toleration, and discipline.…”

Rethinking church and state during the English Interregnum

“…In so doing they trespassed upon the sovereignty of the crown, and violated a purely civil view of ecclesiastical supremacy, lodged with king and parliament. Similarly, Jeffrey Collins has argued that the ‘religious war waged by the Long Parliament was at heart a fight to preserve England's Erastian church settlement against the first overtly clericalist Protestant monarch since the Reformation’. For Collins, the church settlement of the Reformation was ‘Erastian’ rather than ‘Calvinist’, and hence the events of the sixteen‐forties were defined as a ‘struggle to protect the ecclesiological legacy of the Reformation’.…”