Stuart England

Előszó

At the beginning of the present century, the accepted interpretation of English seventeentli-century history was disarmingly straightforward and sentimental, and at the same time perfectly self-assured. Naturally, since it was a distillation of nearly two hundred years of Whiggism, töpped up with Liberalism. According to this interpretation, disaster at once became inevitable when that remarkable woman Queen Elizabeth, who had maintained the equilibrium of Tudor government with consummate skill, gave way in 1603 to the feckless and incompetent Stuarts, who frittered away their money on unworthy ends, tried to establish an un-English despotism based on the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and by so doing broke the delicate compromise imposed by the Queen in politics as well as religion. However, the parliamentary gentry, fearless upholders of personal liberty and constitutiona] government, found in Puritanism not only an assurance of their individual rectitude but the morál authority to oppose the tyranny of the Stuarts and eventually defeat it; a process which was later dubbed 'The Puritán Revolution'. Unfortunately, these sterling men then made the mistake of executing Charles I, thus granting him a posthumous credibility to which he could not aspire in life, and not even Olivér Cromwell could fill the constitutional vacuum thus created, especially since he was beleaguered by risible religious cranks and unrealistic radicals. (Though these radicals were soon swept into the socialist pantheon as precursors of the Labour Party.) Vissza