Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism and the Political Nation, 1553 1682

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXII; Issue: 498 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cem245

1477-4534

Blair Worden,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

The focus of Edward Vallance's book is the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century: their causes, their course, their legacy. In the idea of covenants between God and elect nations he finds a dynamic and revolutionary force that has been alternately underestimated and misunderstood. It has, he argues, been obscured and distorted by Perry Miller's emphasis on God's covenants with individual believers; belittled by social and economic interpretations of the civil war that have considered spiritual contracts only as analogies to commercial or political ones; and overlooked by historians to whom the religious causes of the wars are secondary to secular ones. Vallance's work recalls the perspectives of J.R. Knott, John Hale and Timothy George, who have insisted on the militancy or belligerence of pre-war Puritan Biblicism. Not only must an elect nation purge its individual and communal sins; not only must it ally with others of its kind and fight God's battles against popery abroad; it must also bring its own idolatrous rulers to account. That obligation enables Vallance to link his subject to vindications of political resistance to the magistrate which he traces back to the Marian exiles and which he believes to have persisted in the earlier seventeenth century. After examining sixteenth-century precursors (the Bond of Association of 1584 prominent among them), Vallance takes us through the national pledges of the 1640s: the Protestation of 1641, the Vow and Covenant of 1643, and then, in the same year, the document on which the book centres, the Solemn League and Covenant. He explores the challenges which it posed to its subscribers when conflicting demands were made on their allegiance, first by the ‘engagement’ imposed by the Rump, and then by the restored monarchy, whose identification of the Covenant with disloyalty coloured the politics not only of the early Restoration but of the exclusion crisis. Vallance challenges the supposition that the idea of national covenants was essentially a Presbyterian one. It appealed, he maintains, to Congregationalists and sectaries and even to Levellers (whose plans for an ‘agreement of the people’ he traces to it), and Diggers. An epilogue, which looks at the Association of 1696 and the anti-Jacobite associations of 1715 and 1745, demonstrates the persistence of the idea, but also its secularisation as apocalyptic language lost its hold. The same process, he concludes, came to pervade the historiography of the civil wars, in which ‘England's Covenant with God’ was ‘forgotten’. Commendable as the chronological sweep of the book is, there are limits to Vallance's ambition, an understandable feature of a work that derives from a doctoral thesis. He does not explore the theological premisses of the idea of national covenants in much depth. A bolder approach might have engaged more fully with the neighbouring subjects that it illuminates: attitudes to the monarchy; to the political and intellectual relations of England with that supremely covenanting nation, Scotland; to idolatry; to the hold or the limits of the obligation of believers to their nation. This is nonetheless a most interesting and useful book, sustained by a clear line of argument and by a lucid prose. No student of political Puritanism will henceforth be able to ignore Vallance's subject.