(This is an article written by Chris Thompson. I do not
know much about Wilson H Coates but I would like to publish Chris's article
here. The Storm over the Gentry is a complex debate and although it took place
over half a century ago the debate is still relevant to today's historiography
on the English revolution.)
The ferocious debates over the fortunes of the English
aristocracy and gentry that dominated historical debates over the origins and
course of the English Revolution in the 1940s and 1950s were played out by the
mid-1960s. They are now distant memories, best known probably for the
methodological issues they raised and polemical edge to the exchanges between
R.H.Tawney and Lawrence Stone on one side and Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper
on the other. Undergraduates and, perhaps, postgraduates are most likely to
come across this disputed territory when reading J.H.Hexter’s discussion of the
‘storm over the gentry’ and R.C.Richardson’s comments in his work on the
historiography of the Revolution. Assessments
by other scholars – by W.H.Coates, Christopher Hill and Perez Zagorin, for
example, - are less familiar or even forgotten.
This neglect of their views lends them interest. The
first of these figures, Willson H.Coates, contributed an essay on the ‘Analysis
of Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England’ to the festschrift published
in Wallace Notestein’s honour in 1960. It had originally been given at the
meeting of the American Historical Association in December, 1956 to which
Hexter and Zagorin had also given papers. It would have been fascinating to
have been present then as a fly on the wall. In its apparently revised version,
Coates began by addressing the claims of an American historian, Alexander
Thomson, on the significance of the crises through which England passed in the
seventeenth-century before moving on to discuss the rival claims of English
historians since then. I am not going to comment on his discussion of Alexander Thomson’s views but rather to
focus my attention on his analysis of the claims and counter-claims of Tawney,
Trevor-Roper and others, which formed the bulk of his essay.
Coates’s analysis focused initially on the Whig
interpretation of the English Revolution. Whigs, he argued, viewed it as
“essentially a war of ideas concerning religion and politics which rent
families and divided members of the ruling gentry class. The seventeenth
century was the crucial period in the emergence of constitutional government
and of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Whether or not such a
result was the intent of the Puritans, the Parliamentarians, the Cromwellians
or the Restoration Whigs, it was – partly because powerful opponents of their
particular views survived – their main historical achievement.” There is little
or nothing in this to which Whig historians from Hallam and Macaulay to
G,M,Trevelyan might have objected.
The most formidable assault on the Whig version of the
English Revolution had, however, been made by R.H.Tawney according to Coates.
He had found the cause of this political upheaval in antecedent social change
and had described the economic transformations in England after 1540 to which
political institutions had had to be adjusted to meet the requirements of a new
social structure. Coates was not, however, convinced by this argument. Tawney’s
hypothesis was not adequately linked in his view to the events in the
early-1640s it was meant to explain. Tawney himself had conceded as much in his
introduction to Brunton and Pennington’s book on the members of the Long
Parliament’s House of Commons when he admitted that, as far as the members of
the lower House were concerned, divisions between Royalists and
Parliamentarians had little to do with diversities of economic interest and
social class: even so, Tawney evidently still hankered after an explanation
based on economic divisions amongst the ruling elite in and after 1642.
Coates’s conclusion was that Tawney’s pre-occupation with underlying causation
prevented him from appreciating that there had been other possible outcomes to
the events of 1637-1642 and that he had thus failed to account for the English
Revolution.
Essentially, Coates stated or re-stated the standard
objection of historical empiricists to all forms of economic and social
determinism, namely, that the connection between events and their assumed
causes had not been made. Lawrence Stone’s progress from a view of the
Revolution as “inevitable” in 1948 to one in which the old regime was
overthrown peacefully in 1640-1641 and subsequently on to one in which the
political struggle could no longer be explained primarily in economic terms was
discussed more summarily. Despite his remaining reservations about Stone’s
approach to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Coates was apparently sympathetic to
this evolution in Stone’s thinking.
He was much more critical of Trevor-Roper’s hypothesis
about the fortunes of the declining and mere gentry. The idea that the
Country-house radicalism of the mere gentry might lead either to Catholic
desperation or Puritan Independency struck him as implausible. Indeed, the
historical irresponsibility of this kind of diagnosis deserved to be
‘anatomized’ itself in the Trevor-Roper manner. Moreover, neither the declining
gentry nor the Puritan Independents could be held to have controlled events
between 1637 and 1642. And those M.P.s recruited to the House of Commons after
the start of the Civil Wars were scarcely more radical than those elected in
the autumn of 1640. Changes in the composition of county committees in a more
radical direction after 1642 were hardly enough to vindicate Trevor-Roper’s
contentions. Once again, the substance of Coates’s objections appear to lie in
the inability of such claims to sustain a secure political analysis.
Interestingly enough, Coates had relatively little, if
anything, to say about the validity of manorial counts as guides to changing
economic fortunes or on the relative rewards of Court office compared to those
from landownership that had preoccupied his colleagues in England. He was not opposed
in principle to deploying insights gained into the operation of economic and
social forces but thought that the dialectical methods of Tawney and
Trevor-Roper belonged to “a kind of scholastic world of twentieth-century
economic history.” Coates preferred the complex analysis to be found in
C.V.Wedgwood’s narrative works and seventeenth-century realities presented in
those of William Haller. “Major historical changes can be analysed only on
assumptions of multiple causation and the intricate interdependence of a
succession of events.”
Coates did, however, have his own analytical framework to
suggest. Three categories of conflict in seventeenth-century England might be
distinguished. First of all, there was the “continuous social conflict” of
interest to economic historians. A good deal was known about the price
revolution of 1540-1640, about the expansion of banking, commerce and industry,
the sale of Crown and former monastic lands and the shifting patterns of
property ownership among the aristocracy and gentry, industrialists, merchants
and yeomen. “Innumerable shifts in property divided members of a class, cut
across the well-demarcated class lines and effected new combinations of
interest” even if the social revolution was a silent one incapable of large-scale
organization. Such vast social changes did not culminate in one single
historical event but could be seen, for example, in the political legislation
of the Long Parliament in 1641 and in the uncontested sway of mercantilist
doctrines later in the century. This category of social conflict had strong
economic roots and was “closely related to the emergence of modern Western
capitalism.” Calvinism, as Weber and Tawney had argued, placed an emphasis of
prudence, industry and frugality, which were the appropriate ideological tools
for the accumulation of wealth, including land. It was, Coates claimed, “a
moulding factor in economic conflict and change.”
The second distinct category identified by Coates
concerned the issues contemporaries thought they were fighting about, i.e. over
the roles of the royal prerogative, of Parliament and the judiciary as well as
the character of the State Church. In essence, the nineteenth-century picture
of the conflict was right although the part of the Tories in the post-1688
settlement needed to be recognised alongside that of the Whigs.
Finally, there was “the real class conflict that loomed
up in the mid-seventeenth century” with rising demands from the lower classes
articulated by the Levellers and the Diggers. Behind these radical movements
lay social and economic discontent. But they were premature and hopeless: the
threat of social revolution was easily crushed. Even so, these movements had
drawn on intellectual and social circumstances that permitted free discussion
and the democratic tendencies of English Puritanism. Religious ideas and
concepts of natural law as well as a selective reading of history and law
fashioned Levellers’ demands.
What remained to be explained was the relationship
between the two main factors in these conflicts, the political and the
religious. In 1641, men were concerned with both: by 1688, they were obviously
more secularly minded.
The ground upon which Coates chose to stand was clearly
demarcated. He saw the economic and social changes of the period up to the
English Revolution as critical to its explanation and focused on the influence
of Calvinism and the rise of Capitalism as fundamental. Broadly speaking, he accepted
the Whig interpretation of political and religious conflicts in the course of
the seventeenth-century and an explanation in terms of class conflict for the
appearance of the Levellers and Diggers in the late-1640s. The idea of an
abortive revolution from below would have appealed to Christopher Hill.
But the objections Coates had made against Tawney’s case
for the ‘rise of the gentry’ could have been made with equal validity against
his own analytical framework. The economic and social changes he postulated in
the century before 1640 were not linked either to the key events of 1637-1642
or to the subsequent period. His approach was based on the old claims of Marx,
Weber and Tawney for Calvinism and the rise of Calvinism. This was the Tawney
thesis shorn of its untenable statistics and without its analytical failings.
Secondly, of course, Coates gave succour to the Whig
interpretation that economic and social explanations were supposed to have
rendered redundant. He himself shared the presuppositions of economic and
social determinism at the same time as he protested against such
preconceptions. Logically, he could not begin by making such a protest and then
end by offering a synthesis of the two.
Finally, there is the matter of his use of the language
of ‘class’ and of ‘class conflict’. Contemporaries did not use such terminology
and the consensus of historical opinion is that attempts to apply these terms
to seventeenth-century English society have failed, although some, if not very
many, historians believe they can be deployed in this way. When Coates wrote
that Royalists and Parliamentarians alike found “the rising demands from the
lower classes were ominous” and that the Levellers and Diggers constituted a
“social revolutionary movement”, he was using anachronistic language and
testifying to his own antique intellectual equipment.
This is why this essay from a mature historian in his
prime was so conservative. It is in part confused. It is in part confusing
because it has nothing new to offer. The powerful stimulus that the ‘storm over
the gentry’ had already given to studies of the origins and course of the
English Revolution in economic and social history, in county and urban history
was never recognised by Coates. That, perhaps, more than anything explains why
his comments have languished in obscurity for so long.
