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  • God's Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell by Blair Worden
  • Marlin E. Blaine
Worden, Blair . God's Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. xi + 421 pp.

Of the ten essays collected under the title God's Instruments, only two are entirely new, although several of those previously published have undergone extensive revision. What makes this book valuable, then, is not the novelty of its material; rather, the very act of gathering important studies by a pre-eminent historian of the Interregnum makes it a valuable and convenient resource for students of the period, and the expansions and new work are, on the whole, an added bonus.

As a collection of essays composed over a span of more than three decades, God's Instruments does not have an explicit, overarching thesis, but readers will see thematic connections between the chapters. Still, some might wish the relationships between the pieces were more frequently articulated. Worden does, however, explain in the introduction that the essays "can loosely be divided into five successive pairs" of topics (4): the "political power of Puritan beliefs" (4); "the conversion of beliefs into practical policy" (5); "the political setting of that endeavour" (5); beliefs that "informed" political action, once more (8); and finally, "the minds of two men, John Milton and Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon" (11). Worden helpfully recounts the genesis of each piece and offers his rationale for changes made and not made in this incarnation. Historiographically minded readers will enjoy his discussion of his work's place in the changing "perspectives of historical enquiry" since the early 1980s (4).

Worden's investigations of intersecting political and religious ideologies and discourses will greatly serve historians and scholars of the literature and rhetoric of the Interregnum. The first two essays, which explore Puritans' use of providentialist arguments to make sense of their world, are mutually illuminating: the first, through analysis of Puritan leaders' frequent allusions to the Book of Joshua's "sin of Achan," illustrates the saints' belief in a God who regulates the course of history by rewarding or punishing the actions of his chosen people, while the second looks more broadly at the relationship between providentialist thinking and politics in the period. Pairing these essays thus balances the specificity of a case study with a larger perspective on religious belief and political action.

Several chapters are exemplary for their precise delineations of Interregnum political terms. Chapter 3 defines "toleration" in seventeenth-century terms and explains its limits from the "godly" perspective. Other useful vocabulary lessons come in chapter 7, which maps shifts in the words "commonwealth" and "republic" from "benign" to "derogatory" meanings, and chapter 8, which shows how, between 1640 and 1660, the phrase "civil and religious liberty" came to identify a closely related pair of principles—something unthinkable before the civil wars. These essays should deter scholars from importing twenty-first century assumptions into Interregnum use of these words and allow them to distinguish their application in the 1640s from that of the 1650s.

Worden's analyses of the structures of Interregnum regimes are also illuminating. Chapter 5 outlines the work of Cromwell's councils, their importance in the functioning of government, the similarities and differences between them and their pre-civil war equivalents, and the degree of their subordination to Cromwell. Chapter 6 explores the [End Page 85] ambiguity of the protectorate—was it a monarchy or republic? A temporary expedient or a permanent institution?—and the political utility of that ambiguity within the ideological conflicts of the 1650s. One of Worden's most interesting points in this chapter is that a commitment to the rights and freedom of Parliament led some politicians (somewhat paradoxically, no doubt, to modern eyes) to support the movements to crown Cromwell and, later, to restore the monarchy under Charles II. Chapter 7, one of the two previously unpublished essays, lucidly explains that even those who effected the change in government in 1649 did so not out of a desire for a republic per se but to preserve Parliamentary sovereignty. The juxtaposition of these two essays allows the reader to perceive the complexity of...

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