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 英国的清教徒战争，是国王和议会的分裂造成的，最后国王被处死了！ |
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俺记得好象是议会从德国请来了一个皇帝, 趁其立足未稳, 立法剥夺了其权力. -- 诚灵 - (0 Byte) 2005-3-21 周一, 上午6:52 (98 reads) |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
The Puritan Revolution
The Puritan Revolution was an English and Scottish event that had great consequences for the rest of the world.
English and Scottish Puritanism was a branch of Calvinism. It was related also to the world of the Huguenots of France with their interest in business and capitalism. What made the English and Scottish Puritans special, however, was that in their case a middle class revolution was able to overcome a king and gain, for a while, complete political power. Only in Holland did similar events take place. And Holland, fighting for survival against Spain, could not afford the experiments in democracy made by the English.
It was the arrogant attitude of James I, the successor of Queen Elizabeth, which slowly pushed the Scots and the English toward revolution. Reacting against his Calvinist teachers, James insisted that monarchs were chosen by God, were accountable only to God, and were above the law. Monarchs, in King James' view were a combination of Old Testament king and Machiavellian prince.
From the very beginning of his reign James I quarrelled with his House of Commons, which consisted mostly of landowning gentleman farmers. After 7 years of arguments he stopped summoning Parliament and until 1621 ruled alone. During that time his power was challenged by the constitutional lawyer Sir Edward Coke. This challenge was defeated when King James dismissed Coke from his position as lord chief justice. Nevertheless, Coke's assertions that the king was not above the law have continued to be influential, and are especially important in the United States today. Under the US system final constitutional decisions, which not even the President can disobey, are made by the Supreme Court.
One reason for King James' hostility to the House of Commons was the fact that its gentleman members tended to sympathise with the Puritans. King James ordered the Puritans to conform to the teaching of the Church of England. He threatened that, if they did not conform, he would make them so miserable that they would want to leave Britain. In the end many of them did leave, at first for Holland and then for America. Though it was not his intention, James I is responsible for the fact that the USA, until very recently, has been an Anglo-Saxon dominated land.
James I died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles, a much more likeable man than his father. Believing that it was his duty, Charles often supported the common man against the noble and the rich. Unfortunately, this was because he too believed that kings were special and were chosen by God. He believed this even more strongly than his father and was ready to die for his beliefs. To make matters worse, Charles was told by his cowardly judges, who could be dismissed by the king at will, that he had complete legal control over his subjects and over their money. At the same time one of his chief political advisors told him that he did not have to obey the usual rules of law and administration.
To make matters even worse, Charles was a Catholic sympathiser and this made him even more anti-Puritan than his father. As in his father's case, his anti-Puritanism and his wish to control the House of Commons overlapped.
Inevitably Charles' quarrel with the House of Commons focussed on the tax money which was needed for fighting wars against France and Spain. Charles felt that he had an automatic right to such tax money. On the other hand, the House of Commons wanted to show the king that it too had power. The final result was the famous Petition of Right of 1628, which the king was forced to accept. Charles was forced to agree to observe various citizens' rights. In particular, he had to agree not to imprison or tax any citizen without the consent of Parliament. Only a year later, however, it was felt that Charles had not been sincere in his promises. The House of Commons passed resolutions declaring that anyone who tried to change the English religious system and anyone who recommended paying or actually paid taxes not approved by Parliament was an enemy of the country. This was the beginning of the process that eventually led to Charles being tried for treason and executed 20 years later.
It should be emphasised that the English Puritan revolution was simply a series of events. It happened without any plan, philosophy, or manifesto. The creative and dramatic political debates came later. The House of Commons wished only to maintain the traditional rights of the king, and of the Parliament, and also the freedom of citizens. In its opinion the king's power was limited by the ﾔcommon law.' James and Charles had disturbed the traditional balance by destroying the independent judiciary, by forcing property owners to loan them money, and by arbitrarily arresting citizens. The Civil War happened because the Parliament, in its efforts to turn the clock back, unintentionally overreacted and demanded too much.
Once the landowning gentlemen of the House of Commons had decided to resist him, it became difficult for Charles I to control either financial or administrative matters. He was, however, the direct head of the Church of England and he decided to use that power to attack the often Puritan gentlemen. That is the reason why the English Civil War became, on the Puritan side at least, a war carried out in the name of God.
Who were these Puritans? They were people who wished for greater changes in the Church of England, which, in the time of Henry VIII, had broken off its relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. They shared the basic beliefs of Calvinism, especially the belief in predestination. Within them there were two major groups, those who wished to reform the structure of church government and church ceremonies, and those who wished for complete liberty of conscience.
King Charles and Archbishop Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had different ideas. They wanted, for the sake of national political unity, to standardise church design and church worship. For example, they wanted every church to have an altar at its eastern end. Since, in the 17th century, people defined themselves by their religious ideas and not by their economic or social status, the campaign of the King and his Archbishop was the most direct challenge that could have been made to the Puritan gentry. In later years, people of all social levels who did not wish to belong to the Church of England were called ﾔnon-conformists.' In modern English this expression often simply means ﾔsocial rebel' or ﾔindependent thinker.'
The efforts of the Archbishop Laud to make worship in Scotland similar to that in England caused a rebellion to begin among the Scottish Calvinists. As a consequence the King was forced to summon Parliament to get the money to fight them. From there events escalated to civil war between the Parliament and Charles with the King being forced to send his wife abroad to sell the crown jewels in order to buy arms and ammunition.
It was not a coincidence that the leaders of the Parliament side were businessmen/farmers involved in sheep farming, and in the cloth and furniture making industries. Nor was it a coincidence that Archbishop Laud was a man very like Thomas More who applied medieval ethical standards to commercial life. In other words he did not care for the new capitalist way of doing business.
It was the country gentlemen, the Puritans, who eventually won the Civil War, in part thanks to the personality and military skill of their leader Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was not a revolutionary. He was a member of the ruling class, believed that a great country should be divided according to class, and that the three main classes should be noblemen, gentlemen, and yeoman farmers. Cromwell opposed King Charles firstly because as a gentleman farmer he felt that under Charles his property was not safe. His second motive for resistance, however, was much more positive and powerful. Cromwell believed there should be freedom of conscience in religion. But because Cromwell's religious feelings were very strong, this was not a gentle belief. His attitude to God was that of a mystic. Cromwell believed that God had chosen him as his instrument. Like Luther he believed that God spoke to him through his prayers. Without that certainty he could never have pushed for the trial and execution of King Charles. Faith made him strong.
The beheading of Charles in 1649 horrified all of Europe and shocked even the men who had ordered it. What was shocking was not so much the killing of the king but the fact that he had been put on trial by the middle classes. This was something which would not happen again until the French Revolution. The execution of a king by his subjects was felt to be like the murdering of your own father, or even, in some people's opinion, of your own god.
The execution was not, however, the only new taboo breaking aspect of the Puritan Revolution in England. A new type of army had come into existence. Oliver Cromwell's victorious New Model Army was the first mass, democratic army. Its soldiers were volunteers not mercenaries or men looking for plunder. They were fighting, they said, to ﾔdefend their own and the people's just rights and liberties.' In the New Model Army all soldiers wore the same coats and anyone with talent could become an officer. Some members of the army had particularly advanced political ideas. They advocated the right to vote for all men, equal electoral divisions, and new Parliaments every two years, as well as freedom of religion and equality before the law.
In addition to these army radicals there were other Puritans with even more extreme views. They are usually called ﾔlevelers' because they wanted a more egalitarian society. They wanted not royal or even parliamentary government but direct rule by the people. The most radical of the levelers were called the Diggers and they advocated communism, that is to say the owning of property not by individuals but by society as a whole.
These levelers, however, had very little influence at the time, and their ideas did not flower until much later. It was the thinking of Cromwell and the relatively small group of Puritans, called the Independents, to which he belonged, which most powerfully influenced the social and political ideas of the next century. Cromwell and the Independents believed in the idea of the free church, that is to say, that people should be free to start their own churches if they wanted to, and that they should tolerate others who wished to do the same. Cromwell is particularly famous for his generous treatment of the Jews. While complete religious toleration was not achieved until 1871, it was the Independents who pointed the way.
The free church was, of course, a kind of voluntary group. As a voluntary group, it became a model for the way not only English religion but English society as a whole would be organised in the 18th century. Lloyds the insurers and the London Stock Exchange began as freely gathered groups. Early English colonization was undertaken by freely formed companies ﾐ company after all means ﾔa group of companions.' And political parties, which began in the 18th century, also may be said to be groups of freely gathered men of similar views.
Under Cromwell and the New Model Army, the Puritan Revolution itself became dictatorial. For this reason, soon after Cromwell's death, the monarchy was restored. In a way the Puritan Revolution had failed. But its ideas did not die. Those ideas, that is to say a desire for tolerance, the belief in a free church within a free state, and the conception of a limited state, are central to modern Western civilization. The Puritan Revolution may be said to have developed and extended the Reformation belief in religious, political and economic individualism.
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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