Investigations of a Dog

Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

Diane Purkiss has built up a reputation for bringing new ideas and approaches to early-modern history. One side effect of this was that Richard J. Evans identified her as one of the “postmodernists” from whom history supposedly needed defending (In Defence of History, 2001; ISBN: 1862073953). Knowing all this, my expectations were confounded by the first few pages of A People’s History:

We owe our state of government to the English Civil War, but most of its beneficiaries have little idea who fought whom or when or why. Nor do most of us care; what little we know seems remote and difficult to grasp, with stiff figures on battlefields and stiffer constitutional debates. Yet actually, the English Civil War was the making of our country. It made us the nation we are, the countries we are, the people we are. It also created those more permanent revolutions by influence: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recalled and revered the Good Old Cause against the king’s tyranny, and the French revolutionaries had read their Milton. The glories and liberations of that long-ago conflict still benefit us today; so too its failings and limitations are with us, part of our blood, setting the horizon of our expectations. And to understand ourselves, we have to understand the people we were, the people who fought in the war.

Essentialism? Nationalism? Whiggish metanarratives of progress? What’s going on here? Don’t worry, there’s a perfectly good explanation.

In the preface Purkiss addresses three types of reader: first, general readers who know little or nothing about the civil war; second, enthusiasts who know an awful lot of detail about the military aspects of the war; and third, academics (which is the group I fall into). The book will look very different to each group. I expect many of the second type of reader will hate it, but there are more than enough books which cater for their interests. The first type of readers are likely to be most numerous and are the real target audience. Since this is popular history, it necessarily has to follow at least some of the conventions of the genre. Ignoring or challenging too many of those conventions is likely to alienate both publishers and readers. Purkiss gives them enough to make them feel comfortable. Her prose is entertaining and easy to read. Some academics might find some of it irritating and patronising, but that would be missing the point. Underneath the chatty and sometimes novelistic style, and the anachronistic analogies, Purkiss shows that she really knows what she’s talking about.

Soon enough, the soldiers of up to date academic studies slip out of the Trojan horse, but they come to seduce rather than conquer by force. The first chapter opens in new-historicist style with a fascinating anecdote rather than a dry historiographical survey. Although Freud is the only theorist mainstream enough to be mentioned by name, there are obvious traces of many kinds of critical theory at work here despite the complete (and welcome) absence of intimidating jargon. Purkiss offers a constructivist explanation of the formation of protestant identity in which Catholics were identified as a binary opposite Other. Her examination of the Cornish, drawing on recent work by Mark Stoyle, also hints at postcolonial concerns. Women’s stories recovered by feminist historians are told alongside the more well known stories of men, with childbirth and childhood figuring prominently. Queer theory meets psychoanalysis in Archbishop Laud’s homoerotic dreams. Eco-criticism is represented by the inclusion of the suffering of horses in battles, iconoclastic animal baptisms, and the cultural symbolism of hunting representing man’s control of nature, as well as the King’s control of a hierarchical society. Masculinity studies are brought in to explain some of the behaviour of soldiers. Although the word “epistemology” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, the problems of knowing what really happened are illustrated with examples such as conflicting accounts of John Smith’s recapture of the standard at Edgehill. Propaganda is examined for what it tells us about cultural beliefs rather than to get at the reality it distorts.

This isn’t to say that the book is just another outpost of theory’s empire. Purkiss has also kept up with all the latest empirical research, such as Ben Coates on the economy of London, and Eric Gruber von Arni on the care of wounded soldiers. Not all of this is explicitly mentioned in the further reading, but that’s understandable since few general readers will be willing and able to pay £55 for these. Meanwhile, if the cutting edge of humanities research abandons French philosophy in favour of cognitive science, Purkiss’s work will still not look too dated, since she uses experimental psychology to illustrate the effects of hunger on soldiers.

While the main focus is on England, Purkiss makes plenty of room for the “Three Kingdoms” approach which has dominated civil war historiography since the 1990s. I like the way parliamentary opposition to Charles I in the arly 1640s is presented as more reactionary than progressive. This is something that is often missed in popular oversimplifications which still haven’t escaped from the Whig view. The diversity of protestant opposition to Laud’s reforms is also emphasised, as is the modernity of both Arminianism and Catholicism. It’s all too easy to be taken in by puritan propaganda which portrayed Catholics as backwards and ignorant, but both the Protestant reformation and Catholic counter-reformation were linked to the renaissance ideology of rejecting the medieval and getting back to something imagined to be older and purer. Bonus points should be awarded for highlighting the Earl of Essex’s reputation as an impotent cuckold, and for not being unfairly critical of his leadership. There’s certainly plenty of room for speculation about why most other (predominantly male) historians of the civil wars have done the exact opposite!

Above all, this book is about diversity, complexity, ambiguity, and the chaos of war. Purkiss shows that everyone had their own unique experiences of the civil wars. While giving enough of a broad outline of events for newcomers to get their bearings, she tries to bring out varied and engaging stories of individual experience. We get to hear the voices of ordinary men and women, but no class is privileged here because kings and aristocrats were people too. Familiar figures such Charles I and Henrietta Maria still figure prominently in the narrative, but they are seen from unfamiliar angles, demonstrating that the personal and the political were inextricably linked. Purkiss sympathetically explains the hopes and fears of people on both sides (while making it clear that a simple binary opposition doesn’t do them justice) in a way which is emotionally engaging but never biased. I haven’t seen this done so well since Ken Burns’s (much sneered at by some academics) documentary on the American Civil War.

Nearly everyone who reads this book will find something new and surprising in it, whichever of the three groups they belong to. Some of the stories, like the soldier with his face shot off, seem like familiar old friends to me, but many other people will find it as shockingly new as Natalie Bennett did. Even with my experience of researching the civil war, I found things which I didn’t know about, and new ways of looking at things I did know about. I knew the name Jeremiah Abercromby from its frequent occurrences in the military records, but I had no idea that he married one of the occupants of Hillesden house shortly after capturing it!

Sometimes details can be a bit vague, but since even I’m turning against books which are packed with masses of empirical facts I can see how other readers would be bored by too much clarification. I found a few outright errors, but not too many. Charles I impeached Lord Mandeville for high treason along with the five members of the Commons in January 1642, so it isn’t quite right to say that “his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords” (p. 123). Denzil Holles’s foot regiment, with which Nehemiah Wharton marched out of London in the summer of 1642, was a regular regiment raised for Essex’s army, and wasn’t part of the London Militia, so “trained bands” isn’t an accurate description (p. 185). I seem to remember that David Underdown made the same mistake in Revel, Riot and Rebellion (1985; ISBN: 0198227957), but only the second group of readers will really care about it. According to Conrad Russell in the Oxford DNB, John Hampden was mortally wounded at Chalgrove on 18th June 1643, but died of his wound six days later at Thame, so the statement that “on 17 June 1643, John Hampden lay dead on Chalgrove field” is doubly wrong. That Sir Charles Lucas was executed by firing squad in 1648 is correctly stated on page 541, so there isn’t any excuse for page 311’s assertion that he was hanged. These are all minor points, and in the interests of balance I promise to post some of the embarrassing mistakes from my PhD thesis. Ultimately, someone as pedantic as me couldn’t have made a 600 page book so readable.

The English Civil War: A People’s History is an experimental work, and I think it mostly succeeds. I found Tim Hitchcock’s similarly experimental Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London (2004; ISBN: 185285281X) more suited to my taste, but that’s more about style than substance. Both books encourage people to think differently about the past and both do it very well. Some of the people who are drawn into The English Civil War: A People’s History by the stirring metanarrative of national identity at the beginning might well be questioning such a simplistic and exclusionary view by the end of the book. While the confrontational style of popular revisionism works all too well at generating publicity and sales, I doubt that it really changes anyone’s mind about anything. Purkiss shows how the conservatism of seventeenth-century English people led them to think, say, and do some surprisingly radical things. Her own writing might work in the same way, gently and subtly leading conservative readers into more radical ways of thinking about the past. There are many more stories to be told about the civil wars, and other ways we can test the boundaries between academic and popular history, but The English Civil War: A People’s History is a big step in the right direction and a worthy successor to Charles Carlton’s Going To The Wars (1992; ISBN: 0415032822).

Bibliography

1. Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars (Routledge: London, 1992).
2. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta: London, 2001).
4. Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the maimed soldier (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002).
5. Tim Hitchcock, Down and out in eighteenth-century London (Hambledon: London, 2004).
6. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War (Harper Collins: London, 2006).
7. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).