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Chapter Eight NEW ENGLAND AND PURITAN ENGLAND The first American Revolution against the British crown did not begin in the 1700s, but in New England in the 1640s. Colonial Puritans watched with anticipation the unfolding of the English Civil Wars and cast their support with the rebel Parliament and the emergent regime of Oliver Cromwell. They had come to New England to change the Old. Their crafting of communal life and ofnew forms of church structure and practice had all been done in part to influence England. The American Puritans felt themselves key participants in the English struggle, and their reaction to the unfolding of that event provided much of the structure to the colonies' history in the 1640s and 1650s. Civil War in England John Winthrop had come to American in 1630. Another country squire from East Anglia considered emigration on at least two occasions, but decided against it. Oliver Cromwell was not alone in deciding to stay; so did many Puritans, laymen and clergy alike. Some were members of the social elite and immune from serious harassment. Others were shielded from hierarchical surveillance by their obscurity. Some, clergy especially, were forced to live the lives of fugitives, but the call of the New World was not strong enough, God's intention not clear enough to bring them to emigrate . Yet they followed events in the Bible Commonwealths and drew highly unfavorable contrasts between the decline of godliness in England and its advance in America. The 163os was a decade of growing friction between Charles I and his English Puritan subjects. Having disbanded Parliament in 1628, the king launched the nation on a decade of rule by monarchical fiat. The imposition of legally questionable taxes and forced loans, the prosecution ofJohn 122 THE PURITAN EXPERIMENT Hampden and others, and continuing foreign friendships with Catholic powers were matched in the ecclesiastical realm by the disbanding of the Feofees for Impropriations, the increased persecution and deprivation of Puritan clergy, the growing ceremonialism of Anglican worship, and an attempt to impose the Prayer Book on Scotland. This last offense against the sensibilities of his oldest subjects brought opposition to Charles to the breaking point. The Scots signed a national covenant to fight for their faith, and the king was forced to call a Parliament to finance a military expedition against the northern kingdom. But the "Short Parliament" (1639) r e m s e d to approve taxes without a royal pledge to initiate reforms. Charles suspended it and once more resorted to forced loans—unsuccessfully. By 1640, when a truce brought an end to a second season of campaigning , the Scots were in possession of northern England and Charles was forced to put his cause at the mercy of a new Parliament. The "Long Parliament" assembled in November of 1640. Under the leadership ofJohn Pym, John Hampden, the earl of Warwick, and others, the legislature forced the king to acquiesce in the imprisonment and trial ofkey counselors (including Archbishop Laud) and the reversal ofthe toleration ofCatholics, and to promise the frequent convening of Parliament and the initiation of ecclesiastical reform. Reacting to the mounting criticism of his conduct of the realm's political and religious affairs, the king made an attempt in January 1642 to seize the leaders of the Parliamentary party. Failing in that ill-advised venture, he left London and declared Parliament in rebellion, thus initiating the English Civil Wars, or what others have called the Puritan Revolution and England's Wars of Religion. From 1642 to 1649 the kingdom was torn by military conflict. The royal forces won an early strategic triumph at the battle of Edgehill and occupied Oxford, but failed to take full advantage of their position. In 1643 the royalists won victories in the north and west, after which Parliament entered into the Solemn League and Covenant, a formal alliance with the Presbyterian Scots. The following year saw a Parliamentary triumph at Marston Moor; but overall inefficiency in the operation of their military affairs caused Parliament to restructure their forces in 1645 with the creation of a New Model Army under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax. The New Model's victory at Naseby (1645) precipitated the king's surrender . But after two years of fruitless negotiations for a constitutional settlement , during which the alliance between the Scots and the Parliament began to erode, Charles escaped from confinement and agreed in 1648 to a treaty with the Scots, who pledged themselves to restore him to the...

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