The puritan piety of members of the Long Parliament

Abstract

Although most historians of the English Civil War pay lip service to Puritanism as one of its main ingredients, as a matter of fact, the analysis of religious conviction is rarely undertaken except, perhaps, in regard to the ministers. How deeply Puritanism impinged on the laity is either ignored or treated in an imprecise fashion or explained as rationalisation of deeper economic or social concerns. The Whig historians, who coined the phrase ‘Puritan Revolution’, really see Puritanism playing a general political role, leading to toleration, with the advanced exponents of liberty, like Cromwell, or as causing the opposition to clerical episcopal tyranny in the case of people like Prynne. Even so careful an historian as W. A. Shaw fails completely to understand Pym’s use of biblical imagery and, I think, basically underplays the religiosity of the Parliament men.

Parliament and the Committee for Accommodation, 1644–6*

“…16 My analysis of these crucial aspects of the MPs' active engagement with religious policy making, which was an outward expression of their piety and erastian frame of mind, will be made based on close textual reading of the debates themselves. 17 This will, in turn, show that the scope of religious liberty as envisioned by the majority of MPs was decidedly limited and that the committee proceedings were intricately bound up with the wider Westminster politics.…”