Overview

This book offers an alternative interpretation of pre-Civil War England, challenging the standard narrative that English presbyterianism was successfully extinguished from the late sixteenth century until its prominent public resurgence during the English Civil War. From their emergence in the 1570s, English presbyterians posed a threat to the Church of England, and, in 1592, the English crown arrested the leaders of the presbyterian movement. Ha shows that, during the ensuing half century of apparent silence, English presbyterians remained continually active. They made a concerted effort, for example, to build an alliance with common lawyers against episcopal authority. Yet they also sought to prove the compatibility of their church government with royal supremacy. They agitated for further reformation of the Church of England, but by the early seventeenth century they had contributed to the birth of 'independency' and to puritan appeals to neo-Roman views of liberty.

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9780804759878

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Reviews

Polly Ha's discovery and identification of previously unknown manuscripts related to Walter Travers is ingenious and important. Her account of the religious history of the period with presbyterianism 'put back in' will be a valuable corrective and require that historians rethink their answers to a host of significant questions. No one who studies early modern English religious and political thought and culture or the history of New England can afford to ignore it. —J. Sears McGee, University of California, Santa Barbara

Author Information

Polly Ha is Lecturer at the School of History, University of East Anglia. She is co-editor, with with Patrick Collinson, of The Reception of Continental Reformation in Britain (2010).

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