Fri, 21 Jul at 19:35
R. Malcolm Smuts
5 days ago
It is interesting that
Gardiner anticipated Everritt's argument about the insularity of county
communities. Both historians raise issues that not only deserve serious
consideration but have received considerable attention since the 1970s. On
common sense grounds we might expect that members of a predominantly
agricultural society, in which wealth and social position derived primarily
from ownership of land, and in which travel was also much slower and more
difficult than today, to adopt a localist outlook. And if their participation
in governance took place within the framework of a county, and their social
alliances also tended to remain county-centered (as Everitt claimed to
demonstrate), that would further reinforce their localism. The issue is how far
these assumptions were actually true, and to the extent that they were not
true, what features of early modern society broke through the insularity? Post
1970s historiography offers a number of answers, beginning with the stress of
Clive Holmes and others on the importance of the centralized legal structure of
English government, which made it impossible to ignore the political center
entirely, and extending to the work of a number of scholars on printed
controversy, the circulation and packaging of news, and the putative emergence
of a 'post-reformation public sphere'. We might add other facets of early
Stuart society that arguably have not received enough attention: the role of
great nobles and their affinities, whose horizons transcended county boundaries;
the importance of professional groups like lawyers and clergymen -- but
arguably also clothiers, sailors and even peddlars, whose work brought them
into contact with wider environments; the importance of London and other
trading cities as hubs of information and nodal points of wider networks. While
acknowledging the undoubted contributions of Gardiner and Everitt, we need to
recognize that in important ways the discussion of the issues their work raises
has moved on since the 1970s. What we now need to evaluate is how far these
newer layers of historiography provide convincing answers to our questions
about the reputed insularity of local communities, how they may still be
lacking, and what new questions and avenues of research we ought to be
pursuing.
Christopher Thompson
5 days ago
This is a very
interesting and challenging comment, Malcolm. In the late-1960s, I took the
view that a revised account of the Court-Country scheme of analysis was needed.
One could look at the Court (a) as the centre of policy making in secular and
religious matters (b) as the administrative apparatus stretching out from
Westminster to the counties, corporations and localities of England and Wales
and (c) as a cultural and social institution. Those who were involved with the
Court in one of these senses might have been opposed to it or critical of it in
another. It seemed to me then that this might avoid some of the analytical
difficulties arising from the work of Trevor-Roper, Stone, Zagorin and others.
I still think this approach has some utility. Within local communities, there
was a range of responses to the demands of the 'political Court' which involved
bargaining and negotiation, complaint, conflict and compromise. Conrad Russell
was mistaken in supposing that Parliament was alone in its involvement in these
relationships between successive monarchs and the Court on the one hand and the
Country, including local communities, on the other. As Caroline rule became
more authoritarian, opportunities for bargaining and negotiation narrowed by
1640. Clive Holmes, whom I first met in 1966 or 1967, was actually heavily
influenced at that time by Everitt's approach although, by c.1980, he was much
more critical. News was clearly conveyed across the country not just by
newsletter writers but by other means as well, including oral transmissions as
the cases in many Assize Court and Quarter Sessions' cases show. London as the
major urban centre in the country clearly differed in its social composition
and reactions to royal policies from many other localities. Obviously, the
areas of historical enquiry have altered greatly since 1884 or 1967. But I was
surprised to see how far Gardiner almost one hundred and forty years ago had
anticipated what Everitt was to claim. These issues need further consideration.
(My piece does not seem to have been reproduced as I uploaded it.)
R. Malcolm Smuts
5 days ago
I agree that the
court-country thesis needed more careful parsing and analysis. In addition to
your comments, which I find persuasive, I've also stressed the distinction
between the actual court and the court as an image or cultural trope, which
figured in contemporary polemic but which also did not correspond to actual
conditions in any simple manner. One of the glaring problems with Stone's
account was his failure to make this distinction. I'd also add (and suspect you
would agree) that 'country' opposition to higher taxation was not perfectly
aligned with 'puritan' resistance to Laudian innovations and unhappiness with
the absence of a more active policy in support of Protestant interests in
Europe. If anything, 'country' desire for a cheaper and less intrusive court
was implicitly at odds with the European ambitions of people like Warwick (and
many of the Scottish Covenanters, for that matter). And in terms of personnel,
we need to keep reminding ourselves that the groom of the stole and two
successive lord chamberlains backed Parliament in 1641-2: the court was as
divided as many counties. Indeed the fact that the court was internally
divided, with many of its key members convinced that Charles needed to be
forced to change course, was crucial to the strategy of the parliamentary
leadership in the early months of the Lond Parliament. They did not want to
replace the court but hoped instead to take it over, and thereby to hem Charles
in to a point at which he would have no choice but to conform to their demands;
and for a time they appeared to be succeeding. Seeing the Civil War as the
outcome of a binary contest between the king, court and reactionary aristocracy
and a gentry, puritan, country opposition leads to all kinds of distortions.
Christopher Thompson
4 days ago
I do agree, particularly
on the point you make about the role of the 'Court' and the distinction to be
made with its image. Hexter made the comment many years ago that opposition to
royal policies in the State did not necessarily align with opposition to royal/Laudian
policies in the Church. But gaining control of the direction of policies in
Church and State could only be done by reducing the role of Charles I to that
of a Doge of Venice, something the King would and could never accept. The
peerage was by no means reactionary in my view but had benefited from a notable
strengthening of its economic position since the 1580s - here I prefer
W.R.Emerson's analysis - a point that Lawrence Stone's incidental comments in
The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 actually appear to support. The recent
research on the subject of neutralism and coat-turning in the Civil Wars of the
1640s does confirm your observations.
R. Malcolm Smuts
4 days ago
I think we are in
substantial agreement. Part of the problem in 1641 was that the only way to
control Charles was to hem him in completely, isolating him from anyone who
might encourage and help carry out an effort to re-assert his total control and
punish his enemies. (It's tempting to compare him to Donald Trump in this way,
even if Charles was a far more cultivated man on a personal level). To do that,
in turn, required ruthless tactics to eliminate or intimidate strong royalists,
including the use or threat of impeachment and the encouragement of crowd
actions that implied a physical threat to the safety of the royal family. This
in turn provoked a backlash that extended even to some people initially
supportive of the Long Parliament's agenda, while lessening inhibitions against
the use of equally ruthless tactics by the king's partisans. That created a
dynamic that corroded, even if it never entirely eliminated, commitment to the
rule of law, non-violent forms of governance and civic peace, while empowering
men on both sides who were prepared to mobilize and use coercive force. On one
level this was a new version of the old problem of how to control an
unacceptable king without creating even worse problems and more chaos than his
misrule had produced. Parliament's leaders tried to erect institutional and
legal safeguards, in ways that went far beyond any of the baronial rebellions
of the Middle Ages. But these failed to prevent a ruthless political contest
that ultimately had to be decided by the sword, and that ultimately destroyed
the existing system of English governance, including the role of Parliament,
producing a military state lacking in any sense of legitimacy beyond a
shrinking cohort of its own followers. And then to the attempt to put Humpty
Dumpty back together again after 1660.
Christopher Thompson
4 days ago
This is undoubtedly
correct. I have some suspicions that the deployment of mob violence against
supporters of the King, the Bishops and recalcitrant supporters of the royal
regime in London was rather less spontaneous than Manning or later Marxists
supposed. Valerie Pearl did not thinks so and there is a body of evidence to
show that the 'great contrivers' were better acquainted with more radical
Londoners than usually supposed. The major figures in the Long Parliament knew,
pace Kishlanky, that Charles I was untrustworthy and would not keep to any
settlement that might have been reached. In due course, the violence of the
Civil Wars and Irish/Scottish imbroglios led to an outcome in which the
post-1646 regimes rested in the last resort on force and lacked the degree of
consent necessary to consolidate their rule. This problem was never resolved
and led in 1660 to the Restoration. The constitutional and religious problems
exposed after 1640 took several more decades to resolve.
R. Malcolm Smuts
4 days ago
Yes, the parliamentary
grandees sought to use crowd actions and threats of crowd violence as weapons
to intimidate the king, queen and others. I strongly suspect they also hoped to
ramp up or tramp down religious hostility to the queen to pressure her into
pressuring Charles to acquiesce to their demands. But it must have been very
hard to keep control of the crowds and religious passions once they had been
unleashed. My reading is that some people -- especially those involved in the
First Army Plot -- were initially inclined to advice Charles and HM to
compromise but drew back when they concluded that the parliamentary leadership
had unleashed mob violence it would be unable to restrain, leaving a royalist
counter-strike as the only viable option. U developed this interpretation in my
contribution to the collection on Royalists and Royalism edited by Jason
McElligott and David Smith with CUP in 2007.
Christopher Thompson
2 days ago
I see the force of this
argument and why the members/leaders of the Junto felt it necessary to use
force to compel the King to make concessions that would have left him
effectively powerless in a revised constitution. Whether they judged that
Charles would ever have accepted such a settlement is another issue. Mobs could
be mobilised and de-mobilised as some of the work on the French Revolution has
shown. Your essay in the McElligott-Smith volume is an impressive analysis - I
have been working on its immediate predecessor for some while.
R. Malcolm Smuts
19 hrs ago
I'll be interested to
see what you come up with. Up to a point mobs could be mobilised and
demobilised, but they were also capable of taking on a life of their own (like
armies), as contemporaries realized. I do wonder how far the 'revised constitution
(a term no one in the seventeenth century would have used) was considered an
end in itself, rather than a set of improvised measures to deal with the
problem of a wayward king. No doubt a bit of both. I've long felt that the
traditional historiography on the outbreak of the Civil War over-emphasizes the
reasoned pursuit of constitutional measures, while understating the degree to
which contemporaries knew they had been drawn into a ruthless and dangerous
political contest, in which their lives were often at stake, whose ultimate
outcome was very hard to foresee because the measures needed to deal with the
immediate crisis risked generating new crises down the road. The
constitutionalist view makes the contest seem more polite and principled but
also less fraught and exciting than it really was. Russell and Adamson have
gone some way to redress the balance.
Christopher Thompson
7 hrs ago
Let me begin by
commenting on how well connected the 2nd Earl of Warwick was with the leaders
of the radical cause in London. Of its four M.P.s in the 1640s, Cradock and
Venn were almost certainly known to him because of his and their role in
founding the New England and Massachusetts Bay companies: Samuel Vassall held
land of Warwick in south-east Essex and Isaac Pennington was, like Warwick, one
of the people who supported Samuel Hartlib. Warwick's brother-in-law from 1625
to 1645 and associate in the affairs of the Somers Island Company was Owen
Rowe. Warwick had owned a house in Hackney until at least 1634 and did own one
at Stoke Newington. His shipping interests gave him extensive contacts with the
seamen of London before and after 1640. I suspect there are grounds for
thinking that Warwick and his allies like Saye and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke
had the contacts to concert demonstrations in and around Whitehall. All three
men had been prepared in principle to support the use of armed resistance to royal
authority since 1634 as their contacts with Connecticut and Massachusetts
indicated. We can find expressions of deep hostility to royal and
ecclesiastical authority in the works of Warwick's clerical allies like
Nathaniel Barnard and Jeremiah Burroughs well before 1640. They were, moreover,
careful to cover their tracks in their dealings with Irish and Scottish
opponents of the Caroline regime but left just enough traces elsewhere to offer
indications of their plans. I am sorry to say that Conrad Russell's analysis of
the pre-1640 schemes of these men is fundamentally implausible and completely
untenable. That their lives were on the line after the spring and summer of
1640 was, I would maintain, clear to them and their allies: they were well
acquainted with King Charles I's vindictiveness towards critics and opponents
of his rule. As a result, they had to bind him so fast that he could never free
himself from the restraints they aimed to impose on him as Pym's remarks in the
Plume Mss indicate.
R. Malcolm Smuts
1 hr ago
I find this entirely
persuasive. These connections need more emphasis. Adamson's book seems to me to
do a better job than Russell's in bringing out the role of the aristocratic
opposition to Charles, but I'm sure there is more work to be done in this area.
I've long thought -- and I wonder if you would agree -- that someone needs to
bridge the perspectives of Adamson's __Noble Revolt__ and Cressy's __England on
Edge__. I once said this to Cressy and he seemed to agree. Asking whether the
revolt against Charles was popular or aristocratic in nature is the wrong
question. It was obviously both at once and the challenge is to explain how the
two dimensions were integrated. But I would also continue to maintain that no
matter how extensive and effective the networks of Warwick and his allies
undoubtedly were in mobilizing and steering popular protests, crowd actions
were always inevitably difficult to control in the long run, and the process of
tying a king's hands was fraught with all sorts of risks, as earlier English
history demonstrated in ways that people like Warwick would have appreciated.
As I'm sure you know, Warwick told the Dutch envoys who accompanied William to
London for his marriage with Princess Mary that he was too busy trying to
prevent the outbreak of civil war to attend on them properly. He knew he was
playing with fire, because he had no choice, but that didn't make his actions
any less dangerous. The return of soldiers from European campaigns to fight on
both sides of the Bishops' Wars compounded the problem.
Peter Paccione
4 days ago
It's my impression that
it was common throughout early modern England for people to refer to their
counties as "countries." It wasn't unique to Kent.
Christopher Thompson
4 days ago
Yes but Everitt's
argument that this put Kent's interests before those of England was not
convincing then or now.
Fortunately, there is surviving evidence on Warwick's ability to control very large crowds with a propensity to some violence. In the 1628 county election for Essex, about 15,000 freeholders assembled at Chelmsford (according to JohnPory) and returned the candidates Warwick supported despite the efforts of the Privy Council and the J.P.s of the county. If Pory was right about the numbers present, this would have represented about a quarter of all the adult men in Essex. In March, 1640 at the county election again in Chelmsford to the Short Parliament, it was clear a very large number of men were present and that threats of violence were made against the candidate or candidates endorsed by Lord Maynard, Henry Neville of Cressing Temple and probably by Sir Humphrey Mildmay of Danbury. Sir William Masham's very brief reported comments in the House of Commons suggest that Neville had had the support of the Privy Council and of the magistrates in an attempt to defeat Warwick's allies. Warwick himself played a key role in managing the outcomes in both cases. It is likely that the supporters of his candidates were mobilised across Essex by his gentry allies, by his and their tenants, sympathetic clergymen and figures in the county's boroughs. Warwick's manor of Moulsham Hall was probably the base where these supporters were fed and watered. These outcomes hint at a degree of co-ordination across the county. The petition submitted to the Short Parliament from Essex in April, 1640 may have been signed then: that for Hertfordshire (and just conceivably the summary one from Northamptonshire) is clearly related. Later petitions from Essex to the Long Parliament were presented with a significant number of supporters brining them up. I have had some interesting conversations over the years with John Walter on how Warwick's control of the county was exercised in the 1640s. It also seems likely to me that Warwick's mercantile and clerical contacts were brought into play in the petitioning manoeuvres and demonstrations in 1641-1642 in the capital. He was undoubtedly aware of Charles I's deep antagonism to critics and opponents of his authoritarian rule as the case of Sir John Eliot indicates. That Charles would take revenge if he could must have been obvious to the Junto from the summer of 1640 if not before. They had to tie his hands so firmly that that would never be possible as Pym's recorded comment in the Plume Ms. notebook suggests. Warwick, Saye and Sele, the 2nd Lord Brooke and their allies in the House of Commons and beyond were at risk of their lives as you rightly state.
