Political Landscape of 17th Century England
The 17th century in England was defined by a fundamental question: where does political authority come from? The answer split the nation. Supporters of the Crown argued that kings ruled by divine appointment, while Parliamentarians insisted that governing power required the consent of the governed. Religious divisions made everything worse, as competing visions of the English church became inseparable from competing visions of the state.
Writers stood at the center of this conflict. Figures like Hobbes, Milton, and Filmer didn't just comment on the crisis; they shaped how people understood it. Their treatises, pamphlets, and poems gave both sides the intellectual ammunition they needed, and the ideas they put forward outlasted the war itself.
Debates on Divine Right vs. Parliament
The divine right of kings held that monarchs received their authority directly from God, making resistance to the king equivalent to resistance against God. James I and Charles I both leaned heavily on this doctrine to justify ruling without Parliamentary approval.
Parliament, however, had been steadily gaining power. Key moments of pushback include:
- The Petition of Right (1628), which asserted that the king could not levy taxes without Parliament's consent or imprison subjects without cause
- The Long Parliament (1640–1660), which refused to dissolve at the king's command and eventually became the legislative body that opposed him in war
Religious conflict intensified these political divisions. The established Anglican Church, with its emphasis on hierarchy and the Book of Common Prayer, aligned naturally with royal authority. Puritans wanted to strip away what they saw as Catholic remnants in the church, and their push for reform mapped onto broader demands for political change. The result was a society where your theology often predicted your politics.
Underlying all of this were competing theories of sovereignty. Traditionalists invoked the Great Chain of Being, a worldview in which God, king, and subjects each occupied a fixed, divinely ordained rank. Reformers countered with ideas about a mixed constitution, where power was distributed among the monarch, the Lords, and the Commons.
Works of Hobbes and Milton
Four writers stand out for their influence on the period's political thought:
Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, right after the Civil War. He argued that without a strong, centralized authority, human life would devolve into a "war of all against all." His solution was the social contract: people surrender their individual freedoms to an absolute sovereign in exchange for order and protection. Hobbes wasn't defending the divine right of kings exactly; he was defending absolute power on purely rational grounds, which made his argument unsettling to both sides.
John Milton wrote Areopagitica (1644), one of the most important defenses of freedom of the press in the English language. He argued that truth emerges through open debate, not censorship. His later epic Paradise Lost (1667) operates on multiple levels: it's a retelling of the Fall of Man, but its portrayal of Satan's rebellion against God carries unmistakable political overtones for readers who had just lived through a rebellion against a king.
Robert Filmer took the opposite position in Patriarcha (written in the 1620s–1630s, published 1680). He defended absolute monarchy by arguing that kings inherited their authority from Adam, the first father. Political obedience, in Filmer's view, was simply an extension of the Biblical commandment to honor your father.
John Locke responded directly to Filmer in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Locke argued that people possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and that government exists only to protect those rights. When it fails, the people have a right to replace it. Though published after the Civil War period, Locke's ideas grew out of it and went on to shape Enlightenment thought and, eventually, the American Revolution.
Impact of Writing on the Civil War
Print culture exploded during the Civil War. With censorship weakened after 1641, London's presses churned out pamphlets, broadsides, and newsbooks (early newspapers) at an unprecedented rate.
- Mercurius Aulicus was the main Royalist newsbook, published from Oxford (the king's wartime capital). Mercurius Britannicus countered it from the Parliamentarian side in London. These were openly partisan, designed to rally supporters and discredit the enemy.
- The sheer volume of printed material raised literacy and political awareness across social classes. People who had never engaged with political theory before were now reading arguments about sovereignty and rights.
- Writers on both sides served as propagandists, framing the conflict in terms their audiences would find compelling. Parliamentarian writers used religious language to argue that resisting a tyrannical king was not just permitted but required by conscience.
The long-term effects were profound. The political debates of the 1640s and 1650s laid the groundwork for the constitutional settlements that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701), which permanently limited royal power and established Parliamentary supremacy.
Royalist vs. Parliamentarian Perspectives
These two camps didn't just disagree on policy; they operated from fundamentally different assumptions about how society should work.
Royalist writers like Robert Filmer and Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon) emphasized:
- Order and tradition as the foundations of a stable society
- Social hierarchy as natural and God-ordained, not something to be questioned
- The danger of mob rule if royal authority were weakened
- The king's role as defender of the established church and faith
Parliamentarian writers like John Pym and Henry Parker emphasized:
- Representation and consent as the basis of legitimate government
- Critique of absolutism as inherently prone to corruption and tyranny
- The argument that they were not creating new rights but recovering ancient English liberties that the Crown had trampled
- Church reform as a moral and spiritual necessity, not just a political goal
Religious rhetoric ran through both sides. Royalists cast themselves as protectors of the true faith and the established order. Parliamentarians framed their cause as purifying a corrupted church and state. Each side believed God was on theirs, which helps explain why compromise proved so difficult.