REVIEWS
"John Donoghue is a gifted writer with an impressive ability to re-create the poignancy and drama of the Atlantic world of the seventeenth century. Essential reading for historians of England and the Atlantic world, Fire under the Ashes integrates religious, political, and labor history in a pathbreaking reinterpretation of the revolutionary Atlantic."
— Alison Games, author of The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660
“In Fire under the Ashes, John Donoghue demonstrates the Atlantic dimensions of the English Revolution and the complex intersections of religious and political thought that grew out of Atlantic involvements. Fire under the Ashes transforms our understanding of how political transformation came to England and the meaning of these events for participants.”
— Karen Ordahl Kupperman, author of The Atlantic in World History
In Fire under the Ashes, John Donoghue leads his readers from the radical puritan communities of London’s Coleman Street Ward to the New England colonies and back again to paint a portrait of an English world reimagining itself. Donoghue’s bold, important reinterpretation of the Atlantic of the early 1600s offers precise evidence and far-reaching implications for how the movement of people, ideas, and goods shaped the religious, political, and imperial thoughts of a world in flux.”
— Matthew Taylor Raffety, author of The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America
“Compelling. . . . Donoghue presents an empirically-rich work of passion and insight into the paradoxes of the English Revolution and its legacies.”
— Canadian Journal of History
“Donoghue has mastered an impressive range of sources and writes with verve and passion. Perhaps his greatest contribution is not in explaining the origins or course of the English Revolution but in confronting readers with the injustice upon which the Atlantic world rested.”
— Journal of American History
“Donoghue’s excellent book is transatlantic history at its best: The author gives a gripping account of the political, economic, social, and religious dimensions of the English Revolution in virtually all parts of the English Atlantic world. . . . With its gripping way of storytelling, impressive body of annotations, and truly transatlantic scope, Fire under the Ashes is a fascinating read for anyone interested in Puritanism, the English Revolution, or colonial America.”
— European Journal of American Studies
“Donogue’s engaging monograph explores the connections between Coleman Street Ward in London and the revolutionary English Atlantic. Donogue gives a voice to a number of members within this group and presents a superb demonstration of how local and global forces interacted. . . . this book does offer an interesting and visceral account of a radical Atlantic world.”
— Europe & the Wider World
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0001
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Reformation Work - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0002
[antinomianism, humanism, puritan, commercial expansion, colonization, colonial transportation, Reformation, Coleman Street]
Chapter One discusses the reformation work of the Coleman Street godly in local, national, and global settings, illustrating the multiple yet inter-connected contexts that brought puritans into conflict with one another even as they joined in common cause against the religious and political policies of the Stuart Dynasty. In reaction to the perceived apostasy of the Stuart Court, Coleman Street’s elite, public-spirited puritans engaged in Atlantic piracy and colonization to promote a militant Protestant, anti-Spanish foreign policy. Even godly efforts aimed at domestic social reform assumed Atlantic horizons through the policy of forced transportation of the poor into plantation bondage. The transportation policy originated in a strain of humanism that translated easily into an early political economy of colonization, inter-relating the public good and the glory of Protestant England to the mastery of the poor and profitable colonization and commercial expansion in the Atlantic and beyond. In contrast, the famous 1639 sermon in Coleman Street’s Nag’s Head tavern by the cobbler and lay preacher Samuel How moved the private world of puritan disputation into literal public houses, transforming antinomianism into a potent vehicle of social criticism on the eve of the English Revolution. (pages 11 - 44)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Colonization and Its Discontents - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0003
[English Atlantic, Providence Island, New England, magisterial reformation, radical reformation, Antinomian Controversy, sedition, savagery, patriarchy, racialization]
In order to advance the Reformation through economic gain in a West Indian plantation colony, Providence Island evolved into the first slave society in the English Atlantic. New England’s development in the 1630s proved very different, as it opened up a new theater of conflict, most notably in the Antinomian Controversy, between the proponents of radical and magisterial reformation. But religious controversy here devolved quickly into a political crisis that revealed how the saints disagreed about how to apply the fundamental tenet of their faith, the golden rule or “royal law,” both within their own community and in relation to their native American neighbors. Supporters of the magisterial reformation ultimately refused their radical opponents Christian charity, exiling them as a heretical and seditious fifth column that weakened the bonds of a patriarchal community of saints as it began racializing a “savage” enemy, the Pequot Indians, on the colonial frontier. The colonial creation of the interdependent foils of sedition and savagery thus guided the magisterial faction’s first foray into defining puritan orthodoxy in America, an attempt that made the preservation of the patriarchal sensibilities of early modern English society indispensable to advancing the Kingdom of God beyond the seas. (pages 45 - 82)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
“To Engage You All to Rise Up in Your Might” - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0004
[English Revolution, Coleman Street Ward, Isaac Pennington, John Goodwin, Richard Overton, Samuel How, revolutionary crowd, political labor, printing press, petitioning]
This chapter recovers how the godly elite of Coleman Street, the revolutionary crowd that mobilized in the Ward, and the illicit press that radicals operated there, played instrumental parts in the outbreak of the English Revolution. At the level of high politics, Isaac Pennington’s petitioning campaigns of 1640-1642, in conjunction with the republican tracts published by his pastor John Goodwin, built a political bridge between the power brokers in Parliament and the mass opposition organizing against the King in London. With their peers in the Long Parliament, the Ward’s revolutionary elite also aspired to use the crisis with the King to further advance the Reformation through English expansion into the Spanish West Indies. But beyond the circles of the political elite, Coleman Street radicals such as John Lilburne, Katherine Hadley, and Richard Overton organized crowd actions and an underground press from the bottom up. Fashioning the cobbler Samuel How as an inspirational symbol of radical wisdom, Overton’s press transformed the cobbler into “the Cobbler” and ultimately into a revolutionary prophet. Organized largely in Coleman Street Ward, the political labor of poor commoners, whether on the streets, in conventicles, or through petitioning and the printing press, made the English Revolution possible. (pages 83 - 119)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
“Monsters,” “Savages,” and “Turbulent Carriages” - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0005
[radical reformation, magisterial reformation, constitutional revolution, prerogative government, republicanism, United Colonies, Committee for Foreign Plantations, liberty of conscience, Indians, heresiography]
Although religious turmoil enveloped the colonies at the outset of the Revolution, only in New England did these conflicts spark radical reformation-inspired, constitutional revolutions against prerogative forms of civil government. Outrunning the pace of political change set by the “honest party” in England, settlers in Connecticut and Rhode Island established republican governments to preserve the people’s political and spiritual sovereignty in a reformed commonwealth. Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton returned to London to defend Rhode Island’s religiously tolerant, radical reformation experiment from violent annexation by their magisterial enemies in Massachusetts and the United Colonies. Despite the best efforts of New England and Old England’s most talented heresiographers, the pair convinced Parliament’s Committee for Foreign Plantations that the Bay Colony’s persecution of antinomians and Indians had forestalled the progress of the Reformation on the American strand. In this way, colonial emissaries in revolutionary London made the Parliamentary-sanctioned founding of a democratic commonwealth contingent upon a concept of liberty of conscience that encompassed the civil and spiritual sovereignty of native Americans and colonists alike. Coleman Streeters dominated this history, both on New England’s southwestern frontier and in Massachusetts, where Richard Saltonstall became a leader of radical reformation opposition and an exponent of republican structures of colonial government. (pages 120 - 160)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
“An Arrow against All Tyrants” - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0006
[Coleman Street Ward, Levellers, New Model Army, gathered churches, republicanism, English Revolution, impressment (or “conscription”), liberty of conscience (or “toleration”), petitioning, underground press]
This chapter links Coleman Street Ward London to the rise of the Leveller movement. Saints from the Ward’s network of gathered churches and their members serving in the New Model Army travelled widely across the country, preaching antinomianism and demanding liberty of conscience as they fulminated against kingly government. Simultaneously, they organized Leveller mass petitions and operated an underground press in Coleman Street Ward that became the Leveller’s unofficial publishing house. Former New Englanders figured prominently among the Coleman Street churches, which supplied the New Model Army with soldiers and the cause of liberty of conscience with its popular base of support. Although the Bay Colony’s agents in Old England decried the Levellers, other former Bay colonists who subscribed to radical reformation principles heralded the Leveller movement and were elected officers in one of the New Models’ most militantly republican regiments. In 1647, they led a mutiny against the army high command to promote the Leveller constitution, The Agreement of the People.The mutiny arose in part from ideological cleavages between Levellers and the army commanders over how to interpret the republican principle of government by consent, which the Levellers articulated in their attempts to abolish the embodied, political “slavery” of military impressment. (conscription). (pages 163 - 197)
This chapter is available at:
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“That Crimson Stream of Blood” - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0007
[English Revolution, English Commonwealth (or “English Republic”), English Empire, Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland, Western Design, impressment (conscription), servant rebellions, slave rebellions]
This chapter discusses the imperial turn of the English Revolution, when the English state, through legislation and force of arms, undertook the first systematic attempt to consolidate Ireland and the Atlantic colonies into a profitably organized and politically potent empire. The discussion here focuses on how saints returned from the colonies and from the ranks of the Coleman Street elite worked in concert as moving forces behind the Revolution’s imperial turn. From the top down, they designed and executed imperial initiatives and colonial projects that relied upon innovative legislation and sophisticated forms of financing as well as naval warfare, landed conquest, military conscription, slave trading, and a spectrum of unfree, mostly coerced plantation labor. But from the bottom-up, we see that hundreds of thousands of people from around the Atlantic world were swept unwillingly into the violent vortex that powered England’s expansion into the Americas. But these human beings did not go without a fight. Army and navy mutinies, republican insurgencies, crowd actions, slave and servant rebellions, and slave ship revolts arose around the English Atlantic, where commoners, servants, soldiers, sailors, and slaves strove to secure their lives and liberties, all of which England’s imperial expansion threatened to make forfeit. (pages 198 - 238)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
“The Axe Is Laid to the Root” - John Donoghue
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.003.0008
[English Revolution, English Empire, republicanism, millenarianism, indentured servitude, bond slavery, slavery, abolition, Fifth Monarchists, Coleman Street Ward]
Chapter Seven follows Coleman Street Ward’s merchant revolutionaries as they helped steer the Republic on its westward course of empire, a journey that accelerated the rise of slave societies in the colonies well before the terrible transformation to a plantation labor force dominated by enslaved Africans. But the rise of slave societies in the English Atlantic also provoked an abolitionist response in the colonies led by Samuel Gorton, who, following his stint in the mid-1640s as a Coleman Street Leveller, fused the struggle against political slavery to the struggle against economic slavery in New England. Back on Coleman Street, the former Bay Colonist Thomas Venner emerged as a leader of the Fifth Monarchist movement, as it rose to revive “the good old cause” of the English Revolution in the face of its imperial degeneration. These millenarian radicals wished to restore the Republic from the corrupting effects of slavery and slave-trading as they proliferated around England’s Atlantic empire. The chapter concludes that trans-Atlantic radicals led by Venner and Gorton linked the progress of republican freedom in England and its colonies to the end of slavery and slave-trading, thus making abolition an indispensable instrument in the realization of the apocalyptic project of the Protestant Reformation. (pages 239 - 276)
This chapter is available at:
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