‘No King but Jesus’: The Fifth Monarchists’ Idea of a Christian Commonwealth.

Abstract

The thesis explores the engagement of the Fifth Monarchists with English republican debates of the 1650s. The study challenges the dominant historiographical viewpoint that characterises the Fifth Monarchists as religious radicals rather than republicans. Leo Solt and Bernard Capp argued that Fifth Monarchists only adopted republican rhetoric to garner support for their declining movement. The notion that the Fifth Monarchists were insincere in their republicanism is reinforced by the approach to civil war republicanism, which emphasised the influence of classical texts and portrayed the ideology as primarily secular. In recent years historians of early modern republicanism have begun to acknowledge the cross-over with religious radicalism, but our sense of republican thought continues to be influenced by the overreliance on a limited canon of thinkers. By examining the contribution of Fifth Monarchists, the study expands the boundaries of republican thought. The thesis analyses the writings of five Fifth Monarchists: John Rogers; Mary Cary; William Aspinwall; John Spittlehouse, and John Canne. The findings show that each author engaged with neo-Roman liberty and republican virtue to justify commonwealth rule. However, their approaches varied. For example, Rogers, Aspinwall and Spittlehouse drew on the model of the Hebrew Commonwealth to assert that sovereignty lay with God, whereas Canne used it to reveal that sovereignty originated with the people. Cary employed examples from prophecy to demonstrate the loss of liberty and to justify commonwealth rule. She also placed greater emphasis on virtue than the other writers, leading to innovative schemes to benefit the people and the Commonwealth. The thesis suggests that the authors created a distinct language of godly republicanism based on interpreting contemporary events through millenarianism. The implications of this argument extend beyond the thesis, advocating for broader recognition of the impact of the interrelationship between politics and religion during the early modern period