English Civil War, Wars & Conflicts
Standing
Concerns Religious Dimension
Currently States Whether the war was fundamentally religious remains argued: Morrill reads it as the last of Europe's wars of religion, moved by the Laudian ceremonies and the prayer book, while an older constitutional and a Marxist social reading each place religion downstream of politics or class
Morrill's religious reading, the constitutional reading descending from Gardiner, and the social reading associated with Hill are three live and named positions in the historiography of the period. The war's own immediate origin favors Morrill's case: armed Scottish resistance to an imposed prayer book escalated directly into the crisis that produced the fighting, King Charles's own church policy was the proximate grievance, and the war's outcome brought a decade of the widest religious liberty England had known before the Restoration reversed it by ejecting nonconforming ministers. On that reading, this war's basic cause and its basic outcome were both religious rather than religion merely accompanying an otherwise ordinary campaign, so this atlas records a death toll and period dates for it, while Gardiner's and Hill's readings, which place religion downstream of constitutional or social causes, remain live alternatives that would not reach the same conclusion.
Source The Nature of the English Revolution, John Morrill