The Development of Locke's Political Thought

Locke was 17 when Charles I was executed. It is unlikely that he or his fellow-students at Westminster School were witnesses to what their staunchly Royalist headmaster, Richard Busby, must have regarded as an injudicious murder. We do not know what Locke thought of that particular event, but his remarks on the Civil War, recorded a decade later in his correspondence and notebooks, are decidedly negative. According to Locke, ‘those tragical revolutions’, including the English Civil War, which have caused ‘such havoc and destruction’ in recent years, are the consequence of the ‘zealous mistakes and religious furies’ perpetrated upon a gullible multitude by a few ‘crafty men’ (FTG, 118).