The English Civil War: The War of Bibles, Puritan Hebraism, and the Regicide of Charles I

I. Scope: The English Revolution as a Biblical War

The English Civil War (1642–1651), the execution of King Charles I in January 1649, and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth transformed England into a Puritan republic. Far from being merely a constitutional struggle over taxation and royal prerogatives, the conflict was an intense hermeneutical and theological war fought with rival translations of the Bible, Old Testament Hebraism, and apocalyptic prophecy ^[1].

Puritan parliamentarians viewed England as an elect nation—a 'New Israel' bound by national covenant to purge idolatry, high-church Laudian episcopacy, and royal tyranny. Royalist Anglicans countered by deploying the King James Bible to establish the inviolable divine right of kings under Romans 13:1–7 and 1 Peter 2:13–17 (see Section III: Geneva Margins vs. KJV Absolutism) ^[2].

II. Chronological Spine (1603–1660)

↑ Jump to: Scope | Geneva vs KJV | Soldier's Bible | Bibliography

III. The War of Bibles: Geneva Margins vs. KJV Absolutism

The ideological architecture of 17th-century England was defined by the competition between two landmark translations ^[2]:

IV. The Soldier's Pocket Bible (1643) & New Model Army

In August 1643, for the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell’s Eastern Association cavalry (the nucleus of the New Model Army), Puritan divine Edmund Calamy published The Souldiers Pocket Bible. This two-page fold-out pamphlet contained 125 carefully chosen verses, almost exclusively from the Geneva Old Testament, organized under tactical combat headings ^[3]:

• 'A Souldier must not feare his enemies' • Deuteronomy 20:3–4: "Heare, O Israel... let not your hearts fainte, feare not, and do not tremble, neither be terrified because of them; for the Lord your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you."
• 'A Souldier must love his enemies as they are his enemies, and hate them as they are God's enemies' • Psalm 139:21–22: "Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?... I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies."
• 'A Souldier must consider that sometimes God's people have the worst in battle' • Joshua 7:4 & 1 Samuel 4:10: Reminded troops that military setbacks were divine chastisements for secret sins.

Armed with this biblical manual strapped inside their buff coats, Cromwell's 'Ironsides' charged at Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645) singing the Psalms of David, convinced they were enacting the righteous judgments of God against the Canaanite hosts.

V. The Westminster Assembly & Textual Canon (1646)

Convened by Parliament in Westminster Abbey in July 1643, 121 Puritan divines gathered to reform the doctrine and liturgy of the British Isles. In 1646, they completed the Westminster Confession of Faith. Chapter 1 (*Of the Holy Scripture*) stands as the most rigorous scholastic formulation of biblical authority in Protestant history ^[4]:

"8. The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as, in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them."

The Westminster divines established that while translations were essential for lay believers, original Masoretic Hebrew and Greek texts remained the sole final court of theological appeal, rejecting both Catholic papal infallibility and radical sectarians who claimed new revelations above the written Word.

VI. The Biblical Trial & Regicide of Charles I (1649)

When Parliament brought Charles I to trial in January 1649, President of the High Court John Bradshaw and prosecutor John Cook framed their legal case not upon English common law precedents, but upon the Mosaic law of blood-guiltiness (Numbers 35:33) ^[1]:

"So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it."

Designating the King as 'that man of blood', the court held that Charles had waged war against his own covenant people, shedding innocent blood that cried to heaven. The execution of the King on 30 January 1649 outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall was conceived by the regicides as an act of national expiation necessary to avert God's wrath from the Commonwealth.

VII. Radical Sects: Diggers, Levellers, and Fifth Monarchists

The collapse of press censorship and episcopal courts during the Civil War allowed unprecedented radical biblicism to flourish ^[1]:

VIII. The Restoration & The 1662 Liturgical Settlement

Following the collapse of the Protectorate and the restoration of King Charles II in May 1660, the Church of England moved swiftly to re-establish episcopal uniformity and suppress sectarian biblicism. The Cavalier Parliament enacted the Act of Uniformity 1662, requiring all clergy to subscribe unreservedly to the newly revised Book of Common Prayer ^[2].

Crucially, the 1662 liturgical revision permanently standardized the King James Authorized Version as the sole official Bible for the Epistle and Gospel readings in Church of England services (retaining only the Miles Coverdale translation for the Psalter). The Geneva Bible, forever tainted in royalist memory by its association with Cromwell, regicide, and rebellion, was ceased from domestic printing, leaving the King James Version as the unquestioned national Bible of the British Empire for the next three centuries.

IX. Primary Sources & Selected Bibliography

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