SOURCE: "Puritanism, Armenianism, and the Counter-Revolution," in The Origins of the English Civil War, edited by Conrad Russell, Macmillan Press, 1973, pp. 119-43.

In the following essay Tyacke argues that the religious conflict that became a central issue of the English Revolution during the 1640s was largely due to the growth of Arminianism (the belief in God's universal grace) in the 1620s.

I

Historians of the English Civil War all agree that Puritanism had a role to play in its origins. Beyond this however agreement ceases. For some, particularly the Marxists, Puritanism was the ideology of the newly emergent middle classes or bourgeoisie, as they are sometimes called. Puritan ideas, it is argued, complemented and encouraged the capitalist activities of 'progressive' gentry, merchants and artisans alike. On the assumption, again made by those most under the influence of Marxism, that the English Civil War was a 'bourgeois revolution' the...