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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 expedient 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" in 1701 by John Toland for instance that sought to radicalise the memory of the English Civil War.^[1]

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.^[2][3][4]

• Barbour, Reid; Recent Studies in Seventeenth-Century Literary Republicanism English Literary Renaissance Volume 34 Issue 3 Page 387-417 - November 2004.

• To the Parliament, the Army, and all the Well-affected in the Nation, who have been faithful to the Good Old Cause (1659)
• Woolrych, A. H.; The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1957), pp. 133-161

1. ^ Barbour References in the section "K. Edmund Ludlow (c. 1617–1692)", cites A. B. Worden's edition, A Voyce from the Watch Tower: Part Five: 1660–1662 (1978) and writes "Worden elaborates on 'two claims made in 1978': 'that the reviser of the manuscript is likely to have been the deist and republican John Toland; and that the Memoirs were prepared, and need to be read, with an eye to the political circumstances of the later sixteen-nineties.' "
2. ^ Barbour References in the section "H. Algernon Sidney (1622–1683)", cites Jonathan Scott Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (1988), and writes "Scott shows that 'Sidney not only produced a powerful and influential revolution ideology, but did so with insights which mark a crucial development between the sixteenth-century skepticism of Machiavelli, and the eighteenth-century idea of progress.' "
3. ^ Barbour References in the section "T. John Streater (fl. 1642–1687)", cites Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994) and wrties "Smith ... defines Streater's pamphleteering critique of Cromwellian autocracy as 'an example of an indigenous classical republicanism.' "
4. ^ Barbour References in the section "B. Critical Studies", mentions several works which Blair Worden contributed to. In other sections Barbour notes that Wotton has written about Algernon Sidney (in The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney, JBS 24 (1985), 1–40) and about Edmund Ludlow (in Whig History and Puritan Politics: The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow Revisited, Historical Research 75 (2002), 209–37).

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