ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the new ideas about consensus parliamentary politics, neo-Namierite aristocratic factionalism, county community localism, and causal accidentalism. The very recent renewed emphasis on religious conflict and the fear of Popery, and on the constitutional conflict over liberty and the law as the two break-points that shattered the legitimacy of the regime by 1640 merely confirm the continuing validity of the older model. The chapter expresses that the tripartite division of causes into presuppositions, precipitants and triggers is an artificial construct that breaks the seamless web of history. The basic Calvinism of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church has been strongly emphasized, and the split between Puritans and Anglicans had been down-played. More important is the new work in local history, which has shown that a key to the growth of Puritanism as an ideology was its role among the emerging 'better sort' of the village or towns as a support of and justification for personal and social control.
