Suchergebnisse

The Rump Parliament was brought to power in 1648 by Pride's Purge and forcibly dissolved by Oliver Cromwell in 1653. This book is a detailed account of the intervening years. Dr Worden concentrates particularly on the Rump's policies in the contentious fields of legal, religious and electoral reform; its attempts to live down its revolutionary origins, to disown its more radical supporters, to conciliate those Puritans alienated by the purge and the King's death, and to re-create the Roundhead party of the 1640s. He examines the Rump's struggles for survival in the face of the Royalist threat between 1649 and 1651, and its fatal quarrel with the Cromwellian army thereafter. A concluding chapter deals with the Rump's forcible dissolution. This novel and challenging interpretation of the most dramatic phase of the English Revolution will interest all specialists in seventeenth-century political and constitutional history

The clamour for 'a free parliament' in the winter of 1659–60, the most widely articulated public demand since the outbreak of civil war, has not received attention proportionate to its significance. Here the contours and chronology of the movement are reconstructed. Its goal was the summoning of an assembly which, through the restoration of parliamentary representation and the emancipation of the electorate from voting restrictions and military interference, would possess the authority to speak for the nation and secure a national settlement. The outcome was that essential instrument in the peaceful return of the monarchy, the Convention. The term 'a free parliament' was a slogan, used for a variety of political ends. Yet it was a unifying phrase which allowed the two parties opposed to the republic, the royalists (who had been denied parliamentary representation in 1642) and the presbyterians (who had been forcibly removed from parliament in 1648) to suspend their differences. The movement also connected national politicians of both parties to intense grievances in the regions. Local sentiment was voiced in a cascade of manifestos, published in the names of counties and towns, which illustrate the hold of parliament on public feeling.