"A
Civil War is not only the conflict of opposing principles but the shock of
material forces."[1]
Sir Charles
Firth.
The causes
of the Civil war have been fought over by historians for
centuries. So much so that not for
nothing did Lawrence Stone describe it as "a battleground which has been
heavily fought over…beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by
ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way."
Kenyon's
book, which is one of the better military histories, does not confine itself to
a straightforward, matter of fact description of the civil war. It is an
excellent piece of history, with a deep understanding of the politics and
economics of the conflict which he combined with his military understanding.
Kenyon's
work was praised by Christopher Hill who said Kenyon's narrative was "orthodox
Tawneyite: towns and cities 'solidly for Parliament', so much so that in 1643
Charles I insisted that he 'dared not trust his person inside any closed town';
the clothing areas were 'aggressively parliamentarian', Birmingham 'a solidly
parliamentarian industrial town'. Kenyon grasps the fact which 'revisionist'
historians ignore, that before 1642 social revolution was always potentially
present"[2]. As we
shall see later, Kenyon did not return Hill's compliment.
The book,
while being well researched, has the pace of an excellent novel. It is
methodically researched as to be expected of a historian of Kenyon's experience.
As one writer states, he had "scholarly attention to detail and ability to
extract every nuance from his sources. He distrusted fads and was sceptical of
theories not fully backed by the historical fact".
It is not for nothing he was described as "one
of Britain's leading scholars of 17th-century English history". Kenyon
sought to position himself between the two camps and tried to place his book
within the context of the civil war being a product of a general European
Crisis of the 17th Century. This view tends to cut across the mainly
nationalist English view of the civil war. (See Eric Hobsbawm-The General
Crisis of the European Economy Past and Present No 5 May 1954 pp 33-53).
Historiography
It is hard
as regards historiography to fit Kenyon into a discernable category. Robert Ashton
makes an interesting point on why some historians while not being Marxist did
use Marxist ideas saying "The idea of religious, political and
constitutional issues as an ideological superstructure based on foundations of
material and class interests has been influential far beyond the ranks of
Marxist historians. It has indeed been adopted, in part at least and with a
radically different emphasis, by some of their more formidable and determined
opponents".[3]
As
Christopher Thompson forcibly wrote Kenyon was not a Marxist or fellow
traveller but believed there was a "Great Rebellion" not an English
revolution. However, Kenyon’s use of this quote from Sir Charles Firth that "a
Civil War is not only the conflict of opposing principles but the shock of
material forces." tends to confirm Ashton's perceptive analysis.
Kenyon's
use of the quote by James Harrington, "the dissolution of this government
caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government"[4] is further confirmation that Kenyon was a very
thoughtful historian more than many have given him credit.
Harrington
is a significant figure if you are looking for a materialist understanding of
the English revolution. The writer and historian Gaby Mahlberg makes this
perceptive point "'Good laws', Harrington believed, could give the country
stability, and these laws had to be infallible, so that bad man would not be
able to corrupt the state. Harrington never saw his dream come true. The
Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 meant a return of many of the old problems. However,
his ideas of mixed government and a balance of power remained influential in
the writings of the Neo-Harringtonians of the later 17th and early 18th
century. They influenced both the American and French Revolutions, while his
materialist theory of political change would also strike a chord with Marxists
and modern economic and political thinkers"[5].
Kenyon was not a Marxist, but Harrington certainly struck a chord with him.
High Tide of
Revisionism
The fact
that Kenyon had no discernable historiography meant that many could claim him
for their brand of history. Leading one obituary writer to say "When he
appeared at Christ's in 1954, he cast himself in the role of mocking outsider,
offering caustic criticisms from the fringes of college power in the confident
and correct expectation that they would mostly be ignored. They were. College
meetings would be punctuated by Kenyon's heavy sighs and even heavier
disapproving sniffs and brief, dismissive comments, but the college men of
affairs went about their efficient business untroubled by these background
mutterings".
Kenyon's
book appeared when writing about the English revolution was an extremely
hazardous occupation. Kenyon was too independent of mind to call himself a
revisionist, but this did not stop the dean of revisionism John Morrill
claiming him for their side.
John
Morrill for one believed that Kenyon was close to the revisionists and made it
abundantly clear in his obituary for the British Academy that Kenyon had the "fundamental
disapproval of model-builders and systematisers. He had no time for social
determinism as a tool of the historian for explaining the past or of social
engineering as a tool of the politician in effecting the future". [6]
To say that
Kenyon was a mass of contradictions would be an understatement but sometimes he
went too far. His review of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down was
not only wrong, rude and disrespectful as this quote shows:" I think we
are entitled to ask where all this discussion of obscure left fanatics is
getting us. That some of them were mad, we have always impatiently known, but
Dr Hill positively glories in it. This was not a proletarian movement at all.
It was an unexpected opportunity for failed shopkeepers, lazy artisans and
eccentric historians to find their voice".
Kenyon
rejected being dragged into the Revisionist or post revisionist camp as his
article Revisionism and Post Revisionism in Early Stuart History[7] shows.
His attack on Conrad Russell's reluctance to see the revolution as a clash of social
classes scolding "to Russell, then, the crisis was one of central organisation:
how to control the three kingdoms in a war situation; how to solve the church
problem when each nation had a majority espousing a different faith from the
other two, each with a substantial minority inclined toward the faith of another
kingdom; and how to secure a financial settlement adequate for early modern
government. The effect was to create a bewildering number of new axes of
division. Russell has never allowed that this was a struggle between social
classes, constitutionalism and absolutism, between Court and Country, or
between "government" and "opposition".[8]
To conclude
it is perhaps fitting and generous on my part to allow John Morrill to have the
last word on Kenyon when he wrote" John Kenyon had the best historical
intelligence of his generation. He understood men and women in the past and
wrote about them with a rare precision, clarity and conviction. He was a
productive scholar, and all his works except one wore their learning with a
deep deceptive lightness. He fitted into no school, reacted against fashion,
came to look old fashioned in his interests. He was a magnificent historian who
could not quite build on the brilliance of his early promise, but who greatly
underestimated the magnitude of his own achievement and the continuing appeal
of his writing".[9]
[2]
The Civil Wars of England--John
Kenyon - Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988 - xvi + 272pp- https://www.historytoday.com/christopher-hill/civil-wars-england
[3]
The Civil War and the Class
Struggle-Robert Ashton-1970
[4] A History of England, Volume 1:
Prehistory to 1714- By Clayton Roberts, F David Roberts, Douglas Bisson
[6]Proceedings of the British Academy
(Volume 101 (1999), pages 441-461)
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/101p441.pdf
[8]
Review: Revisionism and
Post-Revisionism in Early Stuart History- The
Journal of Modern History, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 686-699
[9]
Proceedings of the British
Academy (Volume 101 (1999), pages 441-461)
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/101p441.pdf
