When it came down to the civilians they were more in favour of having some sort of settlement government with a Monarch, because the laws that were in place then and had been for years would be so hard to alter if there was no Monarch so they saw this as the easy option, many of them were mostly in favour of seeing the Duke of Gloucester to be king. So overall the relationship of what should be done about the republic was completely different between the civilian and military supporters.
- Source 2 is a picture from a royalist pamphlet showing Charles as a man who died for his beliefs. Straight away you have to recognise that since this is a picture source different historians might view it in different ways and see different things/ meanings.
From source 2 historians can see that since this was a pamphlet issued and bought by many in the Rump parliament itself showed that even then it was still not fully revolutionary and was still had some sort of monarchist feelings still there, so it meant that they might have not been fully committed to the actually cause of the rump parliament. So this is a good source in the sense that it shows us that there might have been some of the Rump who might have not been fully committed to what they were set out to do. But what one has to consider is that all we actually know from this source is that it was bought in the rump doesn’t generally mean that the rump was destined to fall apart, because as we know not many actually thought that in the end the king was going to get executed cause they still expected the king to be put back to the throne after the war, it was only actually a few radicals that wanted the king dead, so overall a historian would have to take all of this into account.
Source 4 is a letter written by the Venetian Ambassador in London to the ruler of Venice about the dissolution of parliament.
For a historian this source is useful because it show us an outsiders view on what it happening in England at the time, which means there is less chance of him being in favour of either sides than a parliamentarian or army personnel or royalist supporter. But also you have to consider that the ambassador from Venice was most likely a catholic so he was most likely in favour of royalist ideas, so he probably was pleased that the parliament had collapsed and had been wishing for it to fail from the start.
In source 4 it tells us that the general view over the country was that people were glad that parliament had collapsed, because they had failed to repay loan made during the civil war and fulfilling promises that they had made and also saddling the country with a war against the Dutch. So overall form the source we can see that the view is that collapse was meeting with appreciation, but when it come out how useful it was to explain the collapse of parliament it really isn’t that much useful because it mostly explains that people were happy it had happened, but it doesn’t really explain way it did happen so when it comes to how useful this source is a historian has to look beyond the face value of this source to try and find what they want to know.
