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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. Many of those who supported the Good Old Cause were also Independents who advocated local congregational control of religious and church matters.

Those who disagreed with expediant political compromises made during the Interregnum, went back to the Army's own declarations during the wars, to republican pamphlets like those produced by John Lilburne, Marchamont Needham 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 Toland for instance which sought to radicalise the memory of the English Civil War.^{[citation needed]}

Important work on the republican imagination includes Jonathan Scott on Algernon Sydney and seventeenth-century republicanism, Nigel Smith on the radical John Streater, and Blair Worden on the memory of the Civil Wars.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] External links

• To the Parliament, the Army, and all the Well-affected in the Nation, who have been faithful to the Good Old Cause (1659)

fr:Good Old Cause