Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs - by Mark Goldie (Paperback)

About the Book

Mark Goldie's authoritative and highly readable introduction to the political and religious landscape of Britain during the turbulent era of later Stuart rule.

Book Synopsis

'An exceptionally significant monograph, and without doubt one of the most important to appear in the field of Restoration history in the last twenty years. Mark Goldie has done more than anyone else to illuminate the political and religious assumptions of late seventeenth-century Englishmen.' Dr Grant Tapsell, University of Oxford. Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs explains a movement, illuminates the world of its emblematic representative, and explores one of the most remarkable documents of the seventeenth century. Morrice's Entring Book was supremely well-informed, passionately committed, and relentlessly opinionated. Chronicling the years 1677 to 1691, nearly a million words in length, it is the fullest surviving record of the tumultuous final years of the Stuart regime, from the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis to the Glorious Revolution. The Entring Book covers not only politics and religion but also culture and society, gossip and rumour, and manners and mores in the teeming metropolis. Morrice was a Puritan clergyman turned confidential reporter for leading Whig politicians, a barometer of opinion, for whom reliable information was vital for public action. Just twenty years after Pepys's Diary, the Entring Book depicts a darker England, gripped by a new crisis of 'popery and arbitrary government'. Mark Goldie's deeply considered book examines the fortunes of Puritanism in the later Stuart age. It offers a story of disillusion and diminuendo, of struggles for survival in the face of intolerance, and of self-understanding among those who hoped to transform England through 'Godly rule'. Yet the book also tells a countervailing story of revitalized and transformed Puritanism. Puritans worked through parliament, the royal court, and the households of gentry, merchants, lawyers, and clergy. Setting out to galvanize civil society, they mobilized public opinion, organized electorates, and deployed the arts of journalism, influence, and persuasion. Thus the Long Reformation entangled with the First Age of Party, and the Puritan became the Whig. Mark Goldie is Professor of Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College.

Review Quotes

[Mark Goldie] and his team have done a tremendous service to make the study of this period easier and more rewarding.-- "A TRUMPET OF SEDITION"

Goldie's work transcends its genre and takes on an importance of its own. . . . The reader of this book, which covers so elegantly and clearly material on biography, theology, politics (both in and out of doors), and political thought, is left with deep admiration for its author, and the slightly depressing question: could anybody else possibly have written it?-- "H-ALBION"

Mark Goldie's book...is one of the best treatments of the complexity and conflicts of the later Stuart period....[It] illuminates the thinking of people beyond just Puritanism and therefore is essential reading for any student of the late seventeenth century.-- "JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, LITERATURE AND CULTURE"

Will be of immense interest to specialists of the period and it is accessible to others.... Overall this is a very well-crafted monograph, which contains profound insights on the nature of political and religious shifts in late-Stuart England, and a sense of the intricacy of individual trajectories, group identities, and social practices.-- "CERCLES"