Internal Revolutions

This chapter examines the private, manuscript writings of three parliamentarian laymen. It explores the ways in which the ideas and experiences of the 1640s were internalized by devoted supporters of the cause. The diaries of Nehemiah Wallington (a presbyterian) are read alongside the journal of Thomas Juxon and the letters of Cheney Culpeper (supporters of the “independent” political coalition). The chapter demonstrates that Juxon and Culpeper were united by a series of political opinions—skepticism about monarchy and the House of Lords, belief in transnational, divinely sanctioned political change, and acceptance of a degree of religious toleration—which set them apart from Wallington and help to explain the revolutionary trajectory that parliamentarian politics assumed from 1645. Indeed, some of the more radical ideas eventually expressed by political theorists in print were being canvassed in private by ordinary supporters of parliament’s cause before they were projected into the public sphere.