Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War
Rachel Weil is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She is the author of Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714, Manchester University Press, 1999.
Correspondence: Rjw5{at}cornell.edu
It was during the Civil War that political allegiance came to be conceived of as a problem or category in its own right, distinct if not divorced from confessional identity. This paper uses the narratives offered by ‘delinquents’ to the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents to interrogate discourses of allegiance in the civil war. Rather than try to determine the ‘true allegiance’ of individuals, this paper explores the claims within these narratives about inner conviction, outward behaviour, and financial circumstances to elucidate what contemporaries thought allegiance was, and how they thought it could be known. The problem of defining and determining allegiance itself has a history, and factors ranging from religious mentalités to the financial needs of the state determined how allegiance could be narrated at particular historical moments.