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1. AMERICA'S MORAL-SPIRITUAL INHERITANCE

THE IMPACT OF THE WARS OF RELIGION ON ENGLAND

CONTENTS

English religious neutrality under Elizabeth

James I

Charles I and the English Civil War

England's Puritan Commonwealth ... and the Stuart Restoration

 The "Glorious Revolution" and the "Human Enlightenment"

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 43-46.
ENGLISH RELIGIOUS NEUTRALITY UNDER ELIZABETH

England, at this time (second half of the 1500s) under the rule of Queen Elizabeth, managed to avoid this turmoil, due to Elizabeth's ambiguous stance on the subject of Catholics and Protestants (she was seemingly sympathetic to both parties to the dispute).  However, "The Most-Catholic Defender of the Faith" Philip II, in his failed attempt to send his mighty naval Armada to crush Protestantism in England in 1588, did not help the Catholic cause in England any.  He in fact strengthened the Protestant national character of England when his mighty Armada went down to humiliating defeat at the hands of the British sailors, and God's winds which blew the Spanish Armada into a trap it could not escape.   From this point onward, English Catholics – fairly or not – would find themselves under suspicion as being less than loyal to their crown and country.

JAMES I

Elizabeth died in 1603, leaving no heirs of her own to inherit the throne, a cousin, Scottish King James Stuart, was called on to serve also as English King.  With James being a "Presbyterian" Protestant, the Calvinist Puritans were hoping to see their sought-after church reforms taken up by the new king.  They were to be greatly disappointed.  Being now King of England, James was also the head of the Church of England, presiding over its episcopal hierarchy of archbishops, bishops and priests – and James was in no mood to have his ecclesiastical authority challenged by the mostly middle-class and lower-level-gentry Puritans.  But at least he learned to tolerate them.

CHARLES I AND THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

When James died in 1625, his place was taken by his son, Charles I.  But Charles had distinct Catholic sympathies – and tensions thus grew between his supporters and the rising group of English Puritans.  Many Puritans – by the thousands – chose to simply leave the growing field of conflict in England and head to America (New England principally, but also the islands of the Caribbean) to build a society there according to their Puritan ideals.  But those Puritans that remained behind ultimately fell into full rebellion against Charles, producing a very bloody Civil War which pitted their own Puritan "New Model Army" (created in 1645 by the heavily Puritan Parliament) against the king's royal army.  Ultimately, in 1649, Charles was defeated and executed, the remaining members of the Stuart family and their Tory supporters fled to continental Europe, and the Puritans took full control of England for the next decade (1649-1660), and governed the country, now operating as a Puritan Republic or Commonwealth. [1]

[1]Actually, the American Puritans kept their distance from the Puritan developments occurring back in England during the mid-1600s.

ENGLAND'S PURITAN COMMONWEALTH ... AND THE STUART RESTORATION

But England's Puritan Commonwealth, under the strict rule of Oliver Cromwell and his powerful Puritan army, did not find its way into the hearts of the majority of the English.  Thus also failing to find a potentially popular leader after Cromwell died in 1658 (his son was proving to be a big disappointment), the decision was finally made by Parliament in 1660 to call the Stuarts from exile – and turn the crown over to Charles I's son, Charles II.  Thus the Stuart monarchy was restored in England (the "Restoration").

But the years of parliamentary rule during the Commonwealth had changed considerably the rules of English politics – so much so that the King and his Tory supporters had to proceed carefully in the presence of the strongly Whig Members of Parliament.  The party of Whigs, although no longer Puritans by spiritual inclination, were nonetheless certainly Puritan offspring in terms of their quite post-feudal attitudes about government.[2] 

Charles II however was careful to watch his step in dealing with the Whigs – and managed to conduct a fairly successful reign as English (and Scottish) King.  But his brother James II, who took over at Charles' death in 1685 – was not so wise.  He got caught up in the trendy fashion set by French King Louis XIV, who not only reigned over the most glamorous court in all of Europe, but also set the example of what truly autocratic rule should look like.  Trying to imitate that dictatorial style of government in England would ultimately force James II's expulsion from his throne in 1689.  Subsequently the Protestant Dutch governor, William of Orange, and his wife (and James' Protestant daughter!), Mary Stuart, were called on by Parliament to take the English throne as joint sovereigns.

[1]These labels "Whigs" and "Tories" were terms of contempt that one party assigned to the other:  Tories, the name for Irish Catholic bandits, assigned to those who stood with their Stuart king and his pro-Catholic sympathies, and Whigs, the name first for Scottish horse thieves and then later for Scottish Presbyterian rebels, eventually assigned to those pressing for a law which would exclude a Catholic from the English or British throne!

Eventually those terms would also be used to describe the groups in America in the 1770s who either supported, as "Patriots," full independence from England (Whigs) or those "Loyalist" colonials who thought it criminal to rebel against their English king (Tories).

THE "GLORIOUS REVOLUTION" AND THE "HUMAN ENLIGHTENMENT"

But Parliament's success in establishing its own dominance in English affairs was not merely a political matter.  It also had a tremendous intellectual, moral and spiritual impact on English society and culture.  Just as the European continent turned away from divisive religious matters after the mid-1600s, so a similar development occurred in England at the end of the 1600s.

Replacing the old religious idea of God controlling all events in life, a new, quite Secular, worldview (ultimately religion) was coming into place, one which instead saw life as operating under rather fixed mechanical laws of "natural" cause and effect.  Things just happened the way they did because they were designed by their very nature to operate that way.  Thus "natural philosophers" began the study the "nature of things" (or "natural law") in all realms of life, from the physical universe around them to the natural workings of man's society, even the workings of the human mind itself.  Consequently, the later 1600s became a time of intense social inquiry – in the quest of an improved natural design of society, one supposedly that would work better than the ones around them that had simply evolved over time through a brutal process of social struggle.

God did not factor into this rising intellectual world except perhaps as its ancient originator.  But God no longer was involved – nor needed to be called on – in helping Europe's enlightened natural philosophers engineer and direct what was expected to be a quickly improving world – a world soon to be brought under human mastery in this new "Age of Reason."

Although people still attended church (at least one or the other of its major ceremonies, such as Christmas and Easter, but also weddings and funerals) and still considered themselves Christian, the reality was that Christendom was dead.  Western culture by the end of the 1600s had stepped into the natural world of mechanically-operating materialism or Secularism – and its social-moral counterpart, Humanism.  Leading the way were a number of famous natural philosophers, but most notably in England at the time, the physicist Isaac Newton and the social/psychological philosopher John Locke.  These men would have a huge impact on their times, as significant as the impact that Luther and Calvin had on the previous century.



Go on to the next section:  Getting Started in America

  Miles H. Hodges