ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on the politics of the earlier 1650s, to point to those who resisted the seemingly inexorable drive towards the further integration of the four nations. In the ultimate irony of the mid-seventeenth century, the pressures of war and the nature of the politics of the Commonwealth dictated that for these politicians, closer and more institutionalized union became a reality, something which their own political ethos resisted. In tracing the ideology of the protagonists of republicanism, it is necessary to retrace some aspects of wartime politics, for their attitude towards Scotland and Ireland was not only a central tenet of their thought but also a reaction to the events of the 1640s. Commonwealth downgraded the religious issue, since it was more important to them that the peoples' of Ireland and Scotland lived in peaceful allegiance to a republican regime, under which, they rather naively believed, individual liberties would be protected.
