SOURCE: "Pamphleteering, the Protest Consensus and the English Revolution," in Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature, edited by R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden, Manchester University Press, 1986, pp. 72-92.

In the following essay, Lamont explores several phases of the English Revolution in order to pinpoint the religious conflicts that fueled it. Lamont argues that liberty was "an unintended consequence of the activities of revolutionary Puritans," but that it was neither their cause, nor their inspiration.

Nearly twenty years ago C. H. George wrote an enjoyably bad-tempered article on the nature of English revolutionary Puritanism. He savaged, in the process, nearly all past historians who had written on the subject. In his view, they had perpetrated three major errors. First, they had been guilty of 'manic abstractionism'. He instanced the ease with which they related 'the undefined abstract "Puritanism"' to such 'undefined or...