ABSTRACT
Recognizing the subjectivity with which John Foxe's thought was received produces an ironic result. It suggests that William Haller's argument that Foxe's Acts and Monuments (A & M) promoted a view of the English as 'a peculiar people set apart from the rest of mankind', with a special providential destiny, emerges as less questionable than has been claimed by historians. Henry Barrow and John Lilburne appealed to A & M as a model for dissent from the Magistrate with as much conviction as Thomas Brightman used it to justify seventeenth-century apocalytic expectations of the millennium as a new age on earth before a long-postponed end. When the Stuarts failed to meet the expectations raised by this tradition it metamorphosed again into a more universal emphasis on Gustavus Adolphus as the Protestant standard-bearer against Antichrist, a shift reflected in the 1632 A & M.
