William Lamont

Richard Baxter, ‘Popery’ and the Origins of the English Civil War

Richard Baxter (1615–91) was a puritan who reflected over a lifetime why he, and his fellow puritans, had opted for parliament in the Civil War. He made in 1681 an important distinction between fundamentum (the causes of the Civil War), which he discussed in his memoirs, and finis (the reasons why he had fought), which he explained in chapter 13 of his A Holy Commonwealth. The explanations are different, because fundamentum and finis are not the same. The Irish Catholic rebellion of October 1641 gave him his finis. This article shows that the belief (shared with many fellow puritans), that Charles I had secretly commissioned the Earl of Antrim and other Irish Catholics in their rebellion, was the justification, on Protestant imperial lines, for puritans to take up their arms against the king in 1642 – and for the same reasons again in 1688.