ABSTRACT
This chapter describes political consequences that cause when reality fails to meet great expectations, when promise is not met and when leaders are blamed for the gap between the real and the imagined. Ethan Shagan argues that Russell's British problem and revisionists approach to the Civil War is mechanical that provides a structural framework and short-term explanations for the collapse of the Stuart monarchy in a political atmosphere. The most important articulations of the implication of the public sphere for understanding the politics in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England/Britain are from Peter Lake and Steve Pincus. The chapter traces the long process of militant Protestant public discourse and consensus formation culminating in the collapse of Charles I's authority from 1638 to 1642. While militant Protestantism is not the sole contributor to the collapse, it plays an important role to provide a common language of criticism in the process of forming political coalitions and articulating oppositional ideology.
