Appendix C—The English Civil War and the Founding of the United States
As we learned from our study of Rom 13, the duty of a magistrate is to restrain evil, and whether that evil is internal or external to a nation, it is not an option for us to ignore it. Revolutionary action is the “last resort” as is going to war; but as it was necessary to go to war against a Hitler, a Mussolini, or a Stalin, for the purposes of restraining their evil, so it is necessary to resist the evil of our own leaders. Indeed, this is not unusual in the history of the Protestant church and was a feature of the movement around Puritan Oliver Cromwell (the English Civil War) that spawned egalitarian groups, such as the Levelers and the Diggers, who prefigured many of the policies that became associated with the later labor and trade union movements.
The history around these groups and their relationship to Cromwell is contested history and all did not go well, but there was a strong element of novel, egalitarian Christian political thinking in all these groups, and religious tolerance was a distinctive of Cromwell’s general political philosophy (being the first to explicitly grant the Jews protection and religious freedom) despite his conflict with the Catholic forces. The English Civil War was actually three conflicts between 1642–51; the final conflict of 1650–51 was probably the most significant event that was a catalyst for the Puritan migration to the New World, as it marked the period of the betrayal and brutal suppression of King Charles II, who had fought Cromwell with the support of the Scots Presbyterians on the promise of spreading Scots Presbyterian influence through the realm in preference to the English Puritan republicans supporting Cromwell.
Owing to the historic alliance of Scotland with France against England, the “moderate” Scots Presbyterian party had chosen a political alliance with Charles (who had exiled to France) over a spiritual one with Cromwell. The Scots were deceived in this matter, considering the English republic a bigger threat to Scotland as a nation than the compromising Charles II, who had clear Catholic sympathies, even seeking assistance from the pope to get him back into power after Cromwell had executed his father (Charles I) and established the protectorate. They took what they believed was a political shortcut to the propagation of Presbyterianism throughout the realm by the royal patronage of Charles in return for their support. Charles had initially been crowned King of Scotland as an act of defiance against the new English republic under Cromwell but was quickly defeated by Cromwell and went into exile until the restoration of the monarchy following Cromwell’s death. Scotland had been incorporated into the English protectorate under Cromwell, so the desire to reassert political independence was a strong stream in Scots’ thinking amongst the political leaders.
Furthermore, the alliance of the Scots with Charles was a paradoxical alliance, as the Scots Presbyterians and English Puritans were of a common spiritual ancestry: both stood against the Catholic hegemony, were reformers of nominal state Protestantism, and should have been unified against Charles and with Cromwell in common cause to create a new British republic with its common law constitution, much like the United States was to become. Like his father (and most of the other European monarchs, who were intriguing against one another as well as against the Pope, who was constantly looking to reassert his authority throughout Europe through alliances with the local potentates), Charles II lied and, after his victory and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, brutally suppressed both his Scots Presbyterian supporters and the English Puritans, exhuming Cromwell’s body from Westminster Abbey, beheading it, and placing his severed head on a spike (where it remained for twenty-five years) as a sign of the new regime’s triumph.
The failure of the strategy of compromise for Scots Presbyterianism to maintain independence from England was completed when the Scots parliament was dissolved on May 1, 1707, following the Act of Union, which created the kingdom of Great Britain.[1] To complete his iniquity, Charles later entered a secret treaty with Catholic Louis XIV of France, gaining subsidy in return for publicly converting to Catholicism (reopening the door for papal subjugation of the entire realm); but he only publicly converted to Catholicism on his deathbed when there was no political risk of conflict with parliament. He had obviously only indicated support for Presbyterianism as a means to his desired end: his restoration to the throne and the restoration of the monarchy. To this point, the British monarchy and its hegemony have remained ever since, with only the post-WWII settlement and the subsequent loss of the empire seeing a reduction in the political influence they exerted behind the scenes, despite the alleged ascendency of parliament. Even now, any bills passed in the British Parliament still need “royal assent” before they pass into law. Often thought of as merely a formality, it was only a few years ago that senior figures of the British establishment and army argued that such assent be withheld if radical leftist Jeremy Corbyn had come to power in 2019.[2] British democracy has only ever dangled by a thread, quickly washed away should the people dare to speak too loudly.
However, taking the long view, the ascension of the US as the premier Christian nation with its republicanism, traditions of religious freedom and tolerance (after Roger Williams, a reformer of Puritanism), in preference to the European nations with their state churches, has its roots in this period as the Puritans struggled to reform English and Scottish Protestantism; many of them later became key voices in the Puritan colonies. Nevertheless, it pains me to think, as a Scot, that the Scots betrayed the Protestant cause for Britain and probably the rest of Europe, but our betrayal did lead to the foundation of the American republic and its vision of a free people under God; we can rest in this marvellous example of divine providence that we see in the foundation of that new republic of the United States.
I also talked about this on YouTube[3] and combined some further comment into a blog post.[4]
[1] Though I am generally critical of Stark’s Prophets, one emphasis of her thinking is to avoid the unholy political alliances in preference to the purposes of God, a principle that should be considered carefully and might well apply in this scenario, but which I have also argued in the book can too easily lead to an indifferent agnosticism regarding fighting for just political government.
[2] Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly elected leader of the British Labour Party in 2015 as the Labour Party “lurched to the left” (as it had often done in the past) after its electoral defeat. Corbyn was incredibly popular with the grassroots of the party and dramatically increased party membership, but he was loathed by the Parliamentary Labour Party who were “uniparty” loyalists—a true democratic socialist but also a member of the Christian socialist movement, an exceptionally unusual combination for a British democratic socialist. He was later ousted in a party coup, nominally over the failure to deal with antisemitism in the party and was ejected from the party altogether in 2024. He has, however, remained as an MP and has just formed a new socialist party in the UK but suffered the immediate humiliation of the cofounder metaphorically knifing him in the back on all sorts of party structure issues, policy issues, and even the party name—welcome to the world of democratic socialism!
[3] Macneil, “American Thanksgiving.”
[4] Macneil, “English Civil War.”