Comment from Christopher Thompson
I want to make some points from a few recent posts on your blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I am sure your readers will (or should) be aware that I am not a Marxist of any kind, so obviously, I am starting from a very different position. The rise of 'revisionism' in the early to mid-1970s was not, in my view, a response to a range of 'Conservative' political impulses. Its criticisms of Whig and Marxist explanations of the origins of the events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles arose from the weaknesses of the arguments of Tawney, Stone, Hill and others over the 'rise of the gentry': 'revisionism's' advocates were from a variety of political standpoints - Russell was then a Labour Party supporter before becoming a Liberal Democrat: John Morrill was not a Conservative and, in the early-1980s, was a Social Democratic Party member: Kevin Sharpe was no Conservative either nor, of course, was an American like Mark Kishlansky. But one of the consequences of this shift in the period's historiography was the divorce between political and religious history on the one hand and economic and social history on the other.
It persists if one, for example, reads Henry Reece's recent book on the fall of the Protectorate and the demise of the Rump in the period from 1658 to 1660. There is not much trace of it either in the recent studies of Oliver Cromwell's life. John Walter had some very important comments on this subject to make in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 2015. Nonetheless, the interaction between economic and social developments and political and religious history in the British Isles under the Stuarts cannot, in my opinion, be entirely neglected. These factors interact without the former determining the latter, as some believe.
I would also like to make two further caveats. London, which appears to be the major focus for radical activities, was not England, and historians who focus on the capital seem largely oblivious to the strength of the bonds between landowners and their tenants, neighbours and allies. There were complex local arrangements for dealing with bargaining over complaints from people below the landed elites for resolving problems in local and county communities, which do not appear to have been appreciated very much since the time of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group. Despite the late Lawrence Stone's claims, there is a case to be made that the position of the landed 'aristocracy' strengthened markedly in the early to middle of the seventeenth century. This is one of the factors that rendered the idea of a 'revolution' or, if one prefers, a 'bourgeois revolution' untenable. A 'great uprising, 'un grand soulevement', failed.
Mateo Ballester Rodriguez, Los Ecos de un Regicidio.La Recepcion de la Revolucion Inglesa y sus Ideas Politicas en Espana (1640-1660)
By Chris Thompson
How the events of the 1640s and 1650s and their consequences are to be assessed is one of the enduring issues that historians of the British Isles have to face. The analysis of their varying interpretations is in itself a subject of continuing interest. By and large, historians based in these islands and in English-speaking countries overseas have shown less interest in and devoted less time to the studies undertaken by historians, by historical sociologists and political scientists in other countries. Nonetheless, such studies do exist and throw an interesting light on how these events were seen and are now interpreted elsewhere.
Mateo Ballester Rodriguez’s essay published in 2015 is one such example. It is partly a bibliographical description of the limited printed publications that appeared in the Iberian peninsula and the apparently exiguous manuscript material dealing with the conflicts in England in the period from 1640 to 1660. But it has some opening remarks by Rodriguez himself on the significance of the disputes over sovereignty in England and some further remarks covering the observations of figures from the world of political science on the same subject. Many of the latter like Liah Greenfeld or Hans Kohn or John Breuilly have not appeared on my horizon before.
Rodriguez’s formulation of his own analysis is relatively straightforward. He held that there was a struggle between the supporters of traditional beliefs in the divine rights of monarchs who stood at the apex of English society and the adherents of novel ideas about the location of national sovereignty in the institution of Parliament. On the whole, Anglicans and Catholics supported King Charles I while radical Puritans were committed to religious toleration and thus to Parliament’s cause.Absolutist political theorists like Thomas Hobbes were rejected by advocates of legal equality like the Levellers and, later, by John Locke. Admittedly, the conflicts of the first and second Civil Wars divided English people of all ranks but Parliament’s victory on the battlefields ensured that the new concept of authority resting in the nation and embodied in Parliament was secured. Kings and the Church of England were disposed of. One or two echoes of Christopher Hill’s work were clearly reflected.
Liah Greenfeld apparently argued that the idea of the nation as the repository of political authority, as the basis of political authority and the object of loyalty was first embraced in England during its Revolution. Hans Kohn came to the view that the Revolution represented the first example of modern religious, political and social nationalism. On the other hand, John Breuilly thought that it was difficult to make the nation the repository of the principle of sovereignty or to figure out how that principle could be institutionally embodied in the Rump and the Parliaments of the Protectorate. In any case, the phenomenon disappeared when political stability was re-established after the Restoration in 1660. Very little of the intriguing and intense debates in the British Isles ever found their way into the hands of the subjects of the Iberian Habsburgs in print or in manuscript as Rodriguez went on to show. Ideological considerations and the practice of self-censorship undoubtedly played a part in this outcome even though, in Holland and Venice, interest in such events was much more obvious.
It is tempting to criticise some of these contentions. How far printed publications in the British Isles reflected the balance of contemporaries’ opinions is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. Highly interesting though they are, the views of groups like the Levellers and Diggers may not be as indicative of wider political opinions as their admirers in more modern times believe. Puritans were not in any event all of one kind nor were they uniformly advocates of religious toleration. All the regimes in England after 1646, in Scotland and Ireland after 1651 depended on military force to remain in power. Once the confidence of the soldiery was lost and the supporters of Protectoral or republican rule became too divided, the return of monarchical rule and of the pre-1640 state churches was increasingly likely. Historical sociologists and political theorists alike need to look more closely at the historical evidence before they venture onto the turf of historians.
Comment: Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World Los Angeles Review of Books. August 31, 2023
Christopher Thompson
Every now and then, Google’s alert system turns up unexpected results. Yesterday was a case in point when I was made aware of Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s relatively new work, The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972). Echoes of that seventeenth-century world in songs and poetry can still be heard according to Simon even though its theological disputes, puzzling political arrangements and problematic scientific theories remain difficult to explain to modern readers. Nonetheless, as Healey explained and Simon agreed, this world had been transformed by 1700 by the growth of trade and consumption, the development of political parties and the press, the appearance of coffee houses, concert halls and theatres. But it had its obverse side too in the spread of liberal scientific positivism and religious pluralism, in the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and the beginnings of a market view of the world that may yet prove apocalyptic as the record of the start of the industrial revolution powered by coal buried in the ice cores of the Antarctic shows. The period and the book thus have important implications for the world in which we now live.
For support for these contentions, Simon appealed to Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1972. Hill’s study encompassed a range of groups like the Levellers and Diggers, the Ranters, the Seekers and Familists, who were participants in an alternative, abortive Revolution that never happened but with which Hill found sympathy. Even so, Hill was inclined to regard these groups as crypto-liberals disguised as religious sectaries whereas the truth was the other way round. But right now, the liberal underpinnings of the state, of the sovereignty of the individual and the need for the market are being seriously challenged from the left and the right in our time. The seventeenth century is over but it is not yet done with us if Ed Simon is correct.
There is no doubt that Stuart England in 1700 was profoundly different from Tudor England in 1600. Its economy like its trading and colonial links had been transformed: it had reached constitutional and legal arrangements, political and religious settlements that transcended the quarrels of the mid-seventeenth century. Its public finances had been transformed and it had become a military and naval power comparable to any in Europe. It was recognisably a modern society on its way to becoming the most advanced country in the world for just over a century and a half. That the legacy of these developments are still apparent in the modern world is quite another matter altogether.
Behind these disputable propositions, there is another, more serious issue at stake. There is no doubt either that the events of the 1640s, i.e. of the English Civil Wars or Revolution or, as more recent historiography has it, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, appeal particularly to people with radical political convictions.
The idea of an older order being overthrown, of traditional forms of government and rule collapsing, of novel ideas about how states should be run or economies and societies organised , and the appearance of groups dedicated to these ends has had an enduring attraction. Sitting in great archive depositories and libraries - in the Huntington Library in San Marino or the Bodleian Library in Oxford or the British Library in London - it is all too easy to forget the immense suffering that followed from these ‘grands soulevements’: many lives, human and animal, were lost; many thousands of people were maimed; the destruction of property was on a huge scale; in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, old institutions were torn down; military power supported successive regimes from 1646 until the Restoration in 1660.
A terrible price was paid for the political and religious speculations, the constitutional and legal quarrels of the 1640s and 1650s which ended not as Christopher Hill would have liked in rule by tiny groups of sectaries and radicals but in what turned out to be the victory of the Royalists. Blair Worden’s verdict on these conflicts was fundamentally right. Imputing responsibility to the issues that preoccupy modern societies and current thinkers to the outcome of struggles in seventeenth-century England is a fallacious argument. No such lessons can legitimately be drawn.
Comments on academia.edu on Gardiner and Everitt
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.
S.R.Gardiner’s anticipation of the ‘county community’ hypothesis-Christopher Thompson
Several decades ago, Alan Everitt argued in his study of the county of Kent that its rulers formed a community of their own, that this community was distinct from that of other counties and that, when its leaders spoke of their ‘country’ they meant Kent rather than England. It was in reaction to the demands of the King and his Privy Council that the community of Kent shaped its political and religious responses and that this form of localism helped to explain the antecedents and outbreak of the English Civil War or Revolution.
There is no doubt about the stimulus that this hypothesis gave to the investigation of county histories across the period. The works of Anthony Fletcher, John Morrill and the late Clive Holmes testify to its impact. In historiographical terms, it was highly significant in the late-1960s and 1970s, even though its influence has now faded.
At that time, I was sceptical partly because this argument did not appear to have medieval antecedents and did not feature in the case of the counties I was then studying. What I had not appreciated was that, in some respects, Everitt’s argument had been anticipated by S.R.Gardiner in his volume on the History of England between 1639 and 1641. He had written there that, in 1639. Both Charles and Wentworth under-estimated the strength of the opposition against their policy too much, to make them even think of recurring to violence. Nor is it at all likely that even those who felt most bitterly against conscious the Government were aware of how strong was their position in the country. In the seventeenth century, when Parliament was not sitting, our ancestors were a divided people. Each county formed a separate community, in which the gentry discussed politics and compared grievances when they met at quarter sessions and assizes.
Between county and country, there was no such bond. No easy and rapid means of communication united York with London, and London with Exeter. No newspapers sped over the land, forming and echoing a national opinion from the Cheviots to the Land's End. The men who begrudged the payment of ship-money in Buckinghamshire could only learn from uncertain rumour that it was equally unpopular in Essex or in Shropshire. There was therefore little of that mutual confidence which distinguishes an army of veterans from an army of recruits, none of that sense of dependence upon trusted leaders which gives unity of purpose and calm reliance to an eager and expectant nation.
Gardiner’s claim anticipated the arguments that Everitt was to put seven decades later. I am not sure that either was correct. Similar demands were made of each county from the ‘political Court’ at the centre and were the subject of bargaining and negotiation, of compromise and conflict. These common experiences were felt across England and Wales. Newsletter writers like Mede, Pory and Rossingham made them widely known as the testimonies of men like John Rous and Walter Yonge showed. The carriers of goods and people conveyed news more widely than Gardiner appreciated in this passage.
When I was a postgraduate, I was often doubtful about the analysis of the past in the works of previous generations of historians. Since then, I have come to understand how perceptive they often were and that important insights remain to be found in their works. Gardiner and Everitt may not have been precisely right in their conclusions but it is striking how similar their formulations were. I shall go on reading the works of previous historians in the hope of gaining better insights into the lives of early modern people in the future.
16 July, 2023
First of all, let me make it clear that I am not now and never have been a "revisionist". I am actually a critic of the work of Conrad Russell, work which I believe to be fundamentally wrong although not for the reasons Mr Sturza holds. Secondly, he will find in Valerie Pearl's 1961 book on the City of London from 1625 to 1643 careful research that shows that the violence in the streets of London reported in Royalist news books was more carefully controlled and organised than figures like Brian Manning or Christopher Hill believed.
(The fall of the Bastille in Paris is irrelevant in this context.) I have indeed read Mr Sturza's book which offers a commentary based on secondary works rather than original research into the sources for the early-1640s. The protagonists on both sides in the events of the 1640s were drawn from all sections of English (and Welsh) society but this was not a "class-based" society in the Marxist sense at all.
The English Civil Wars were 'un grand soulevement' - 'a great uprising' in English - more analogous to the revolt of the Low Countries post-1566/7, to the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598 and the Frondes of 1648-1653 and the Revolt of the Catalans in 1640 rather than to any Marxist paradigm based on the Russian Revolution of 1917. Mr Sturza is perfectly entitled to elaborate his hypothesis but it has almost no credibility amongst contemporary academic historians. He may be surprised too to learn that I am not a reactionary in any sense.
I am afraid that Sturza’s account of the events of the 1640s and your analysis of its merits (and faults) is not correct, Keith. First of all, the historiography of this period is wrong. The problems with a materialist or Marxist explanation were apparent well before the rise of so-called ‘Revisionism’ in the mid-1970s. The debates over the fortunes of the gentry between Tawney and Stone on one side and Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the other had stimulated a raft of research into the condition of landowners In many counties across England but also the growth of county studies and the hypothesis first advanced by Alan Everitt about the importance of localism in the ensuing conflicts.
John Morrill cut his historical teeth in this area and has never, to my knowledge, subscribed to the view that the English Civil War or Revolution came as a bolt from the blue.) In Cambridge, the work of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group called into very serious question whether any classes in the Marxist sense existed at all.
The idea that capitalist merchants and farmers had come by 1640 to find themselves temporarily aligned with the interests of artisans and peasants against the Caroline regime, which was Christopher Hill’s view in 1940, does not hold water if only because the early Stuart monarchs were keen on promoting economic innovation, new industrial inventions and overseas trade: if you look at the papers of Lionel Cranfield or Arthur Ingram (or those of Sir John Bankes in the Bodleian Library), you will see what I mean.
There is certainly no evidence whatsoever that, as a result of the events of the 1640s and 1650s, the rule of one class was replaced by that of another, whatever Ann Talbot claimed. The larger landowners were predominant after 1660 as they had been before 1640. (W.R.Emerson’s account of the growth of large landowners’ fortunes is better than that of Lawrence Stone in 1965 or 1972.) Nor should it be forgotten that Valerie Pearl and Keith Lindley have shown how closely aligned the groups in the Long Parliament were to their allies in the urban area of London: mob activities and riots were much less important than figures like Hill or Manning, or Sturza supposed.
Furthermore, London was not the entire kingdom: beyond its bounds, there were important groups of supporters of the Long Parliament in counties, towns and villages, just as there were neutrals and supporters of the Royalist cause. The links between landowners, their tenants, allies and supporters in the countryside were critical too in the Long Parliament’s military victories by 1646 and the period between 1648 and 1651.
I should add that Christopher Hill did not fail to take on the ‘Revisionists’. If you look at his Open University A203 course, England: A Changing Culture 1618-1689 (Block 3, Pp.72-78), you will see one of his attempts to reply to Conrad Russell’s post-1975 work. In fact, ‘revisionism’ had a long pre-history stretching back into the 1960s and was over by the early-1990s. It was not the product of a capitalist attack on the working class, nor did it have any links with Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan’s political views. This contention is completely untenable.
Similarly, the grounds for thinking that what happened in the British Isles or in England in the 1640s was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ are not tenable. Those events can be more clearly seen as comparable to the revolt of the Low Countries or the French Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century, the revolts of Portugal and Catalonia in 1640 or the Frondes in France in the years between 1648 and 1653. ‘Les grand soulevements’ in these places and times never fitted into the framework postulated by Marx, Engels and their successors. Marx et al. asked interesting questions but their answers were never convinced.
C Thompson
Inside and Outside Academic Life
For this reason, I was interested to see Dr S.J.Ainsworth’s suggestion on Twitter in the middle of April asking if anyone might be interested in forming a network of independent scholars.[1] I have tried in the past to suggest a similar idea with the creation of a website offering items of news on early modern subjects, details of jobs that have become available, links to sites with academic articles (like CORE), to repositories for theses (like the DART-etheses portal), to databases (like the Internet Archive), and other facilities like discussion forums, audio and video recordings, reviews of books, early modern blogs, etc. Admittedly, such a project would need in my view at least half a dozen people to be committed to contributing and making it successful over a period of time. I have made an overture detailing these suggestions to Dr Ainsworth and shall be interested to get a response.
The news that Aston University and the South Bank University of London will both be abandoning the teaching of history courses in the autumn makes positive action to bridge the gaps between academics teaching the subject and those outside their ranks more urgent. One of my long-standing friends has, as I have mentioned before, expressed his apprehension that history may not survive as a discipline in higher education in the foreseeable future. I do understand why accountants, administrators and politicians find business courses, science and technology courses so appealing: the demand for them is obvious in the interests of the development of modern economies. Politicians often view higher education as a primary instrument for feeding the growth of this and other countries economies. More growth means more resources in tax revenues which they can then use to re-allocate to objectives they approve of. The humanities, including history, serve no such obvious purpose. But history is the major discipline for explaining how we in this society have come to be where we are and the appetite for historical knowledge is immense. Phasing it out of higher education institutions would be self-defeating and highly damaging to a civilized society.
Joe Saunders’s account of the British Association of Local
History’s discussion of the Civil War in the Localities held on 19th April[2]
makes this point very effectively since it attracted an audience of just over
180 people. Dr Charlotte Young and Tim Hasker made a presentation that clearly
engaged the interest of those attending and stimulated some intriguing
questions. The only puzzling feature was the local bibliography on county
histories that cited works by R.C.Richardson, Alan Everitt, Ann Hughes, Anthony
Fletcher, John Morrill, David Underdown and William Hunt, all of them by now
somewhat long in the tooth. But county histories, pace the recent work by
Richard Cust and Peter Lake on Cheshire, has been out of fashion for a
considerable period of time.
[1]
https://twitter.com/S_J_Ainsworth/status/1382613368180211712
[2]
https://www.balh.org.uk/blog-report-from-local-history-hour-the-english-civil-war-in-the-localities-2021-04-19
Ann Hughes’s paper to the Dugdale Society’s Conference held on 16th May, 2021 on the subject of studies of counties during her academic career
I spent part of yesterday morning watching and listening in to Ann Hughes’s comments on the transformation of county studies in the period up to and including the English Civil War during the course of her academic career. She had been an undergraduate and then a postgraduate at Liverpool University where she completed a doctoral thesis on Warwickshire before moving on to the Open University, to Manchester University and then to Keele University where she occupied a professorial chair until her retirement. In the course of her talk, she paid tribute to the influence of the late Brian Quintrell and reflected on the evolution of county studies since the 1960s.
Early work tended to be focused on the role of the gentry within counties, work that illuminated the lives of the gentry as a landed elite and which contributed to understanding the administrative, constitutional and political activities of local governors within such a framework. J.T.Cliffe’s work on the Yorkshire gentry was a good example of the first kind and Tom Barnes’s study of Somerset between 1625 and 1642 exemplified the second. Her slightly older contemporary, Robin Silcock (like Brian Quintrell’s unpublished study of Essex) evaluated the record of King Charles I’s period of personal rule and how this contributed to the causes of the English Civil War.
Hughes herself was less influenced by localist approaches emphasising the introspection of county communities and the importance of local interests reacting to central pressures. Alan Everitt’s work on Kent was of this kind but rather less important to her than David Underdown’s study of Pride’s Purge. She did not believe that a rigid central-local analysis was helpful and, in any case, there were areas within counties where the focus would not necessarily be on the gentry. The work of John Walter and others on popular politics and culture suggested interaction between different social groups. These contrasting approaches, she believed had resulted in a victory for her contemporaries amongst historians as the collection published by Jackie Eales and Andrew Hopper in 2012 showed.
The focus of county studies had now changed. There was more attention now to the consequences of the civil war, on, for example, casualties, on memories, and on trauma as the work of David Appleby and Andrew Hopper at Leicester showed. She did, however, have some doubts about the level of casualties in the period and thought that the exhilaration and excitement of a radicalised revolution needed to be taken into account. Like other historians too, she had moved on beyond 1660. There had been important work by Simon Osborne on popular politics in the midland counties, on cultural differences – most importantly by Mark Stoyle under the inspiration of Underdown, on communications, personal relationships and religion. Peter Lake’s works on Northamptonshire with Isaac Stephens and, later with Richard Cust, on Cheshire, testified to this change and to an interest in micro-history.
But the most stimulating way in her view of looking at the Civil war lay in the notion of state formation: this had been little noticed in the 1970s and 1980s but Michael Braddick’s work had brought it to wider attention. State formation had been driven by internal conflicts rather than by foreign wars. This had occurred at a time of political fragmentation and was recorded in the growth of self-conscious documentation. Warwickshire was particularly well-documented at county, city and parish levels as local communities responded to the demand of central authority, i.e. of Parliament. Their accounts and reports were shaped by local concerns nonetheless as the bills from one of Coventry’s parishes showed.
She was now looking at the ambiguities of the wartime English state where the records illustrated the cost to local inhabitants of the free quarter for soldiers, of damage to the environment, e.g. in the loss of trees, and how narratives of the conflict would be made richer. Individuals’ senses of identity had been affected as the experiences of George Medley, gardener, civilian and soldier, showed: he had been employed as a gardener before becoming a relatively well-paid soldier. Ann Hughes was now involved in working with Andrew Hopper on the Greville family accounts and on the evidence they provided for consumption and household links.
In answer to questions, Ann Hughes elaborated on some of the points she had made earlier. She was now working on the Gell family of Hopton in Derbyshire and the archive of sermon notes they had kept over three generations. A book, moreover, on the career of the 2nd Lord Brooke would, in her view, be extremely useful. As far as Alan Everitt’s work was concerned, his assessment on the politics of Kent reflected the view of the centre: he had too readily considered the county as cohesive and had been unable to accept that the late-1648 petition demanding justice against the King was genuine. In fact, as Jackie Eales had shown, it was associated with a radical group in the county. William Dugdale’s work on Warwickshire was, however interesting and multi-faceted it proved to be, the partisan account of a Tory Royalist looking back at the events of the Civil War. Her conclusion was that, in the 1640s and 1650s, roles could be blurred and identities become fragmented.
I found this talk very interesting and certainly concur in
thinking that Brian Quintrell was a much under-recognised and important figure
in early modern historiography. In one sense, studies of counties initially
grew out of the ancient controversy over the fortunes of the gentry as an arena
in which competing hypotheses could be tested as the studies by Joyce Mouseley,
Gordon Blackwood and others showed. Like Ann Hughes, I found Alan Everitt’s
1968 study of Kent as an illustration of provincial insularity and localism
improbable: no such phenomenon could be found in medieval Kent. But it did have
some appeal and, to a degree, influenced the study of the Eastern Association
by Clive Holmes: John Morrill’s study of Cheshire was, in part, a response to
it. Where I differ from her analysis can be found in two unmentioned gaps in
her analysis. It did not touch upon the collapse of the ‘good old cause’ by
1660, on the divisions that grew between the military victors themselves and on
the failure of post-1646 regimes to secure widespread consent to their rule.
More important still is the point that the post-1660 Stuart regimes were not,
in my view, effectively engaged in state formation: they were fiscally and
militarily weak by comparison with France or even with the Dutch, a weakness
only remedied after 1688/1689. She is, of course, entitled to express her view
as, indeed, am I.
Christopher Thompson
2021.christhomps84388@aol.com
