Investigations of a Dog

Over at Victoria’s Cross, Gary Smailes posted a link to an article about the history of memorialisation from the Imperial War Museum. The article includes a photo of the memorial to the royalist officers Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, who were executed on the orders of Sir Thomas Fairfax after the siege of Colchester in 1648. The article presents English Civil War memorials in terms of “deeds of heroism”, and by omitting the background to their execution perhaps unintentionally implies that Lucas and Lisle were victims or even martyrs. It’s worth pointing out that they were both executed for breaking their parole — they had previously surrendered to Parliament and promised not to fight again. Even so, this is quite an unusual case, and might be explained by the bitterness and frustration engendered by the siege of Colchester. Another interesting aspect which the article doesn’t mention is that there was a long running feud between the Lucas family and the borough of Colchester, which makes it ironic that the town now has a memorial to Sir Charles.

On 22nd August 1642, Sir John Lucas, brother of Sir Charles, was attacked by a mob from Colchester as he attempted to take horses and arms to join the King’s army. This incident is examined in unprecedented detail in John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers, which I just happen to have been reading this week. It’s one of those books which is both exciting and depressing at the same time — I don’t think there’s much chance of me ever writing anything as good as this. The breadth and depth of Walter’s research is amazing. He’s tracked down some very obscure sources and looked at familiar sources in new ways, making connections which are surprising and yet seem like they should have been obvious.

The attack on Lucas, and the widespread rioting which followed it, have been seriously misunderstood by previous historians. Walter’s work highlights the danger of trying to force evidence to fit preconceived ideas. Marxists have seen the riots as proof of class conflict, and revisionists have stressed short term economic factors to dismiss the idea of popular political consciousness. Others have characterised the riots as simply another outbreak of anti-catholic violence, even going so far as mistakenly identifying the protestant Lucas as a catholic!

The problem here is that historians have mostly tried to divide causation into discrete factors (religion, class, politics etc) and then picked one factor and argued that it was the cause. John Walter goes beyond this reductionism and shows that to the extent that we can know anything about why things in history happened, the causes are very complex and interrelated. Applying this to the Colchester riots, he shows how the usual suspects put forward by other historians combined with each other and with other factors which his research has thrown up. The aforementioned feud between the Lucases and the borough of Colchester is one of these new ideas, and even this can’t be reduced to something simple. Long term structural factors such as the dissolution of the monasteries, urban growth, and economic change contributed to the disputes over land, but so did Sir John Lucas’s personality and his enthusiastic support for Charles I’s authoritarian policies.

Hostility to the Lucas family was only one of the factors which helps to explain the outbreak and subsequent course of the violence. Walter shows that there was popular support for puritanism and hostility to catholicism and arminianism in the cloth producing areas of the Stour valley, and that the structure of the cloth industry led to extreme poverty, especially during economic depressions. But these are not unrelated causes. Historians who have asked whether the cause of the riots was economic or religious are missing the point. Walter shows that the depression of trade on the early 1640s was popularly blamed on catholics and royalists. This belief was encouraged by parliamentarian propaganda, and ultimately parliament’s policy of disarming these “delinquents” gave legitimacy to the actions of the crowd. Here the book chimes in with my own research, as I know all too well that throughout the summer of 1642 parliament was concerned with stopping horses, arms, and money going to the King. As well as ordering action against royalists and searches for arms, parliament retrospectively gave approval to local officials, such as mayors, who had impounded war horses on their own initiative. Walter convincingly argues that the crowd which assembled at Sir John Lucas’s house, while diverse and probably including people with ulterior motives, was following this lead in stopping Lucas taking his horses and arms to the king.

Walter’s explanation is much more convincing than anyone else’s, but we still can’t be certain that he’s right, and his arguments sometimes seem to be a bit too close to conjecture. The nature of the surviving sources makes it very difficult to find out what the crowd really did and said, let alone what they thought. We only have accounts written by the elite, who all put their own spin on the events. Neverthelss, Walter’s careful reading of Bruno Ryves suggests that simply dismissing a source as “biased” is a mistake. All sources are biased. If we dismiss some as biased it just creates a spurious “truth effect” for the ones we choose not to dismiss. Above all this work shows the stupidity of reducing history to one thing or the other. We need more historians who realise that it’s always more complicated than that.

1. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).