“Lawless Tyranny” and “Destructive Accommodation”

This chapter explains how the outbreak of the civil war led to serious divisions within parliament’s camp. These divisions, over the nature of the war, the character and function of the king, and the propriety of negotiation and compromise with the royalists, reflected and further intensified shifts in the nature of political ideology. These emergent ideological shifts, first articulated in the petitions and pressure campaigns of hard-line supporters in the city, were bolstered by the publication of tracts and pamphlets, which revealed the increasingly radical tenor of the political thought gestating among pro-parliamentary militants. Examination of those tracts shows that, by early 1643, some parliamentarians were coming to reject Westminster’s official line on the war effort, along with fundamental features of the “ancient constitution” as it had been understood before 1642.