Never has republicanism attracted so much interest among students of seventeenth-century England as in recent years, and never has so much confusion surrounded the word. Terms of ideological description are useful only if there is a common perception of their meaning or meanings. Here I shall examine the principal applications of the word ‘republicanism’ (or ‘republican’) to the period before and of the English civil wars, and test them against the ideas they are intended to describe. Secondly I shall ask how far those usages help us to understand the revolution of 1649 which brought the execution of king Charles Iy and the abolition of monarchy.

No single definition of republicanism can claim historical authenticity for itself. No one in or before the Puritan Revolution called himself or herself a republican. ‘Republican’ and ‘republicanism’ were terms of abuse and caricature. That does not necessarily make them useless to us. ‘Puritanism’ was a smear too, rejected by those to whom it was applied. Yet its usages corresponded, however indiscriminately, to a movement of belief at the centre of the civil wars for which we need a word and for which Puritanism, provided we know what we mean by it, is a good and perhaps the only one. Only the very loosest definitions of republicanism would award it a comparable centrality. Yet that word too, provided we know what we mean by it, has its purpose and perhaps even its necessity.