God's Instruments

Although this is a collection of discrete essays, the volume is united by its central theme: ‘the synthesis of religious and political aspiration’ during the Cromwellian period (p. 400). Together, the chapters provide a rich and elegant account of the fruitful, but tense, relationship between theology and political thinking after the Civil Wars, offering the reader real insight into this complex conceptual world. Although all but one of the essays have been published before, many have been rewritten quite extensively—Blair Worden has used this opportunity to add texture and detail to his arguments, making this new work a valuable resource even for those familiar with the original essays. Some of Worden’s earliest writings, dating from the early 1980s, were highly influential in bringing religious ideas back to the forefront of historical scholarship of the mid-seventeenth century, and his clear, subtle analysis has ensured that these essays are still used by scholars and students today. The first three essays of this collection are perhaps the most important of those writings, on Cromwell and the sin of Achan, on providence, and on toleration; they are printed here without revision. Interested readers will find references in the introduction to some more recent works which complement and refine Worden’s account, but do not alter it fundamentally. These chapters, stressing as they do the power and the coherence of religious thought, are then balanced by two which focus instead on the practicalities of power in the 1650s, and which highlight the importance of the army in political life. These chapters—on Cromwell and his Councillors, and on the Protectorate more generally—portray a regime that relies on boots on the ground and which deals in the dark arts of spin, delay, and fudged compromises. Through these chapters, the reader is shown the several faces of the regime—and allowed, like Cromwell’s contemporaries, to try to make sense of this for themselves

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