ABSTRACT
The elder Blackwell and his wife were part of a network of Puritans in London. In 1641 the elder Blackwell led his fellow parishioners in destroying the symbols of Charles’ religious authority in the London church of St Thomas the Apostle. The younger Blackwell can therefore be set in the context of the wealth and Puritanism of his parents. From this the 18-year-old Blackwell joined the parliamentary war effort with his father in 1642. This commitment to Parliament’s cause and then, more specifically, to the New Model was based on Blackwell’s upbringing in London with his Puritan parents. Blackwell’s skills as an administrator and a broker were also rooted in his upbringing in the capital and relationship with his father, a financier and merchant in the competitive London markets of the 1620s and 1630s, who sided decisively with Parliament in 1641 as a Puritan zealot. The idea of the younger Blackwell, as with most Puritans in the early modern world, as rooted in religion above all else, should not be lost to us because of the predominant image of him that has come to us as one of the state’s servants.
