Militant Protestantism and British Identity, 1603–1642

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Jason White

Warfare, Society and Culture

Focusing on the impact of Continental religious warfare on English, Scottish and Irish Protestantism, this study is concerned with the way in which British identity developed in the early Stuart period. Still debated today, the question of British national identity first emerged in 1603 when James VI of Scotland succeeded to the thrones of England and Ireland, uniting the three kingdoms under one monarch. What followed was conflict between the dynastic vision of a Britain defined by loyalty to the king, and a new collective identity, characterized by military ambition and anti-popery.

White examines what militant Protestants in England, Scotland and Ireland thought about ‘Britain'. British identity and foreign policy are studied as one, allowing a greater understanding of the role of religious fervour on national and international politics of the time; the focus being on what brought British Protestants together, rather than what kept them apart.

Sample pages

• Introduction
• Index

Readership

Seventeenth-Century History, History of Religion and Politics

Contents

Introduction: The Union of the Crowns, the Public Sphere and Great Expectations
1 Militant Aspiration and British Identity in Jacobean Britain, 1603–18
2 Aspiration Deferred: The Spanish Match, the Outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War and Domestic Political Polarization, 1619–29
3 The British Soldier Abroad: Robert Monro, Militant Protestantism and the Personal Rule of Charles I
4 The Protestant Cause and the British Context of Covenanter Propaganda, 1637–40
5 Long Parliament, Britain and the Protestant Cause, 1641
6 The Irish Rebellion, the Palatinate and the Descent into Civil War, 1641–2

Related titles

• The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion
• Anglo-German Relations and the Protestant Cause: Elizabethan Foreign Policy and Pan-Protestantism
• English Catholicism, 1680–1830
• The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England
• Religious Space in Reformation England: Contesting the Past
• The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza

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