Good Old Cause
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The Good Old Cause was the name given by the soldiers of the New Model Army for the reasons they fought for the Parliament of England against King Charles I and the Royalists during the English Civil War and the support they gave to the English Commonwealth between 1649 and 1660.
Those who disagreed with expediant political compromises made during Interregnum, went back to the Army's own declarations during the wars, to republican pamphlets like those produced by John Lilburne, Marchamont Nedham and John Milton. In the disappointment of the moment, they imagined that there had been a moment of revolutionary purity when all these writers had agreed on something intrinsically republican and good – this entity shifting as the sands depending upon the writer was often labelled the good old cause and became in the hands of radicals in the 18th and 19th Centuries one of the main supports to agitation within England by linking their cause to the cause of the English Civil War radicals. This memory was sustained by the publication of various tracts about the civil war across the 18th Century – Edmund Ludlow's memoirs famously in 1701 by John Tolland for instance which sought to radicalise the memory of the English Civil War.[[Citing sources citation needed]]
Important work on the republican imagination includes Jonathan Scott on Algernon Sidney and seventeenth-century republicanism, Nigel Smith on the radical John Streater, and Blair Worden on the memory of the Civil Wars.[[Citing sources citation needed]]
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