In this collection, leading scholars address John Morrill's suggestion the constitutional conflict that wracked the British Isles in the mid-seventeenth century was fuelled primarily by religious beliefs, rather than secular political ideas. The essays revisit concepts of the culture of allegiance, looking at what motivated minorities to fight, whilst emphasising the many elements of fundamental agreement that existed between the warring factions.

1: Introduction: Religion and the Historiography of the English Civil War; 2: Sacred Kingship in France and England in the Age of the Wars of Religion: From Disenchantment to Re-enchantment?; 3: The Continental Counter-Reformation and the Plausibility of the Popish Plots, 1638-1642; 4: The Mind of William Laud; 5: Cannons and Constitutions; 6: Prayer Book and Protestation: Anti-Popery, Anti-Puritanism and the Outbreak of the English Civil War; 7: Sir Simonds D'Ewes: A 'respectable conservative' or a 'fiery spirit'?; 8: Wars of Religion and Royalist Political Thought; 9: Natural Law and Holy War in the English Revolution; 10: Oliver Cromwell on Religion and Resistance; 11: Oliver Cromwell and the Cause of Civil and Religious Liberty 1; 12: England's Exodus: The Civil War as a War of Deliverance; 13: Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion; 14: Renaming England's Wars of Religion

Charles W. A. Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, and is author of A Confusion of Tongues: Britain's Wars of Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2012). Glenn Burgess is Pro-Vice Chancellor of Learning and Teaching, and Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Hull. His most recent book is British Political Thought, 1500-1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation (Palgrave, 2009).