I have spent just over half an
hour this morning watching a video recording of Professor Ann Hughes talking to
an audience at Cheadle and Marple College on 29th September, 2018 on the
subject of the choices people made on which side to support in the conflicts of
the 1640s in England. England was her main focus although she did have comments
to make on the Scottish revolt against Charles I of 1638 and the Irish
Rebellion of 1641 later in her remarks.
She had some very sensible remarks
to make about the nature of English society in the pre-Civil War period, on the
importance of the spread of literacy and of the availability of news in print,
on economic and social changes affecting the fortunes of the upper ranks of
society, on the prosperity of the ‘middling sort’ and the difficulties of the
poor.
There was also guidance on
divisions over how far the Church of England had been fully or partially
‘reformed’ and on reactions to Charles I’s ecclesiastical policies that aroused
fears of a return to Popery. Ann Hughes made some important comments too on the
degrees to which the Long Parliament and the King succeeded in appealing to
potential supporters in the country via print and oath-taking.
One or two of her claims did
strike me as questionable. It was not just in Holland in the late-sixteenth
century that print played a vital role in fuelling conflict: the same was true,
for example, in the French Wars of Religion and, indeed, in the Frondes of the
period between 1648 and 1653 in the same country. But I do have more
fundamental issues to raise which might not, perhaps, have been appropriate for
an audience of sixth-formers.
First of all, there is the issue
of economic and social change before 1640 or 1642. One of the key features of
English society was the strengthening of the position of large landowners from
c.1580 first analysed by W.R.Emerson: their dominance had increased, not
diminished. This had profound implications because of the links of family and
locality, political and religious affiliation upon which she remarked in the
case of the 2nd Lord Brooke’s influence in Warwickshire. These linkages lay
beyond the reach of the Parliamentary, Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes of
the 1640s and 1650s and made ‘revolution’ in the sense in which she and many other
historians have used the term impossible. There were ‘grands soulevements’ in
this period but, whatever else may be said, no revolutions in the Marxist
sense.
The second major point I should
like to make is that, in England as in Ireland and Scotland, there was a
significant retreat from government by bargaining and consent under Charles I’s
rule. There was more emphasis on central direction and less willingness to
respond to local objections. The Book of Orders, Forest boundary extensions and
Ship Money testify to this in England: the failure to observe the Graces in
Ireland and the attempt to recover Church property there; and the Act of
Revocation, the Book of Canons and the revised Prayer Book in Scotland testify
to these processes. There was more in common between the Stuart kingdoms than
could be acknowledged in so brief a compass.
The events of the 1640s and 1650s
exacted a terrible price in human and animal lives and the destruction of
property. No one denies the legacy of political, philosophical and religious
speculation that they left. But, if these conflicts were highly likely by 1640,
so, too, was the failure of the protagonists to create a new ‘reformed’ world.
by Chris Thompson
