This episode looks at the collapse of trust between Charles I and anti-Puritan royalists and clerics, on the one hand, and Parliament, Puritans, anti-Catholic Anglicans, and lawyers and others concerned with resisting the expansion of royal power on the other, in the second half of the 1620s. The collision would end in a final and very dramatic session of the House of Commons, and would ultimately persuade tens of thousands of Puritans that they had no choice but to leave England. It would be the catalyst for the Puritan Great Migration to New England.

Before we get to any of that, however, we briefly address the Twitter kerfuffle I unwittingly set off with a tweet about a BBC story on Sir Francis Drake, and the circumstances under which I do, and do not, support the renaming of things named after people who have fallen out of favor.

The Twitter thread regarding Sir Francis Drake’s famous change of heart

Twitter: @TheHistoryOfTh2

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Selected references for this episode

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham

Michael B. Young, “Charles I and the Erosion of Trust, 1625-1628,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Summer 1990.