ABSTRACT
Francis Rous implies that while the Reformation had been England's Exodus, the Personal Rule had taken the nation back to Egyptian bondage. In England, the Exodus story was used to dramatise the fear that the English had been enslaved to arbitrary power. In the opening debates of the Short Parliament, Sir Francis Seymour delivered a speech in which he compared our affairs to the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. In a series of recent publications, Quentin Skinner has argued that from the parliamentary perspective, the civil war began as a war of national liberation from servitude. According to the University's Professor of British and Irish History, the Civil War was a post-Reformation tragedy, a war of religion spearheaded by Bible-pounding Puritan zealots. The language of slavery and liberty is every bit as prominent in the 1640s as Skinner suggests, and draws its strength from classical, biblical and Anglo-Saxon roots.
