Investigations of a Dog

An article that I’m working on involves getting on top of the debates over the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. This is something that I avoided like the plague during my PhD, partly because it wasn’t vital to my study of the development of administrative systems, and partly because it was too big and complicated (and, let’s be honest, too scary – Conrad Russell wasn’t entirely joking when he called it “bloodsport”). Now all that’s changed and I’m getting stuck into the historiography. In a way I feel like I need to prove myself by taking a position on these issues rather than ignoring them, but it’s also necessary to make what would otherwise be some dull empirical data seem exciting and relevant. To help me get things straight in my mind, and also to increase the frequency of my posts, I’m trying to write some thoughts on some of the major works and post them here. Today I’m kicking off with John Morrill’s Revolt in the Provinces, the 1998 edition of his similarly titled 1976 work Revolt of the Provinces, with a new introduction and epilogue assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the book and how subsequent research has changed things.

I had read Revolt of the Provinces during the early stages of my PhD but couldn’t remember very much about it. Morrill probably added to my general impression that historians took too negative a view of the war, focusing almost entirely on the suffering of civilians, although in the introduction to my thesis I think I picked on John Wroughton as the main example of this kind of thinking. However, it turned out that the first draft the of the article I’m writing was almost unconsciously channelling John Morrill, with his view that the outbreak of the First Civil War was down to small but committed minorities at both extremes. That immediately makes my data not quite as exciting as I thought it was but I think I can still make a worthwhile contribution to the debate. Perhaps the best critic of Morrill’s 1970s work is the author himself. In the new epilogue, Morrill abandons some parts of his former position in the light of newer research but stands by others. Therefore I’m mostly going to look at the parts of his argument which he still maintained, and how research in the last 10 years might affect his point of view.

Morrill says that he set out to show two things about the outbreak of the civil war in 1642: that grievances against Charles I’s personal rule did not determine allegiance in 1642, and that the war was brought about by a small minority when most people didn’t want it. Furthermore, he remains opposed to simple concepts of allegiance, stressing the contingency of allegiance and criticising historians such as B. G. Blackwood for trying to force everyone into royalist or parliamentarian boxes. I definitely agree with him here, and wonder if “allegiance” is really a useful category at all. There’s a recent article by Rachel Weil in History Workshop Journal which looks at the constructedness of concepts of allegiance – I haven’t read it yet but it looks very interesting and important.

One thing I’m particularly looking out for is how historians have defined “the English Civil War”, “the English/Puritan Revolution”, and concepts of “war”, “revolution”, and “rebellion” in general. In 1976 Morrill asserted that there was not a revolution in the 1640s, and implicitly stood by this in 1998. He characterised Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone as assuming that there was a revolution without properly defining what they meant by revolution or presenting any arguments that events in England in the 1640s met these criteria. While Morrill saw Stone and Hill as concentrating mostly on “explaining the isolation of Charles in 1640″ he didn’t find them explicitly saying when the revolution occurred, or acknowledging that there were major differences between 1640 and 1642. However, Morrill seems to be assuming that 1649 was the crucial year. While he denies that this was a “revolution”, he calls it “a transforming moment” and “an earthquake”. Nobody can deny that trying and executing the king and abolishing the monarchy was important, but Morrill doesn’t explain why he thinks it was more important than the legislation of 1641, or the Militia Ordinance of 1642, which some people might call revolutionary. While Morrill is right to criticise anyone who assumes the existence of a revolution without saying what they mean by that, he didn’t satisfactorily define revolution himself. He questioned whether England experienced anything “comparable with the French, Russian, Chinese (etc) Revolutions”. I’d agree there, if only because I don’t think anything in history is quite like anything else, and because those events happened in different parts of the world at different times under different circumstances. Unless you subscribe to an old-school Marxist view it’s very hard to link such disparate events together. But Morrill seems to be assuming that what are called the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions did have something in common, but that thing, whatever it was, was not shared by anything that happened in England in the 1640s. So what is that thing? All he offers, two pages later, is that “To have been a ‘revolution’ there would have had to have been a transforming of provincial consciousness as well as those of the Army and of aspiring revolutionary courtiers. I found no evidence of such transformations…”. This seems a bit vague to me, and exceptionally difficult to prove one way or the other. It certainly isn’t the only way you can define a “revolution”.

The figures that form the empirical “meat” of my work in progress definitely support Morrill’s contention that it was a militant minority which started the war in 1642. This is pretty much the opposite of what I thought the same figures proved when I wrote my PhD thesis, which just shows how heavily subjective interpretation can influence even the most empirical number crunching work. However, I’m not sure that I agree with Morrill’s contention that the neutral majority feared, and were determined to obey, both sides. Among the new work he cites in support of his old argument is Andy Wood’s article on the Derbyshire lead miners. While Wood’s work certainly proves that the miners were not ideologically committed to either side, and that pre-war feuds contributed to civil war allegiance, it doesn’t really show the miners living in fear or trying to obey both sides. The miners seem to have had their own agenda, and were prepared to negotiate with either side in order to further their own interests, but wouldn’t commit themselves without gaining reciprocal concessions.

John Walter’s book on the Stour valley riots (published in 1999; I wrote about it in more detail here), is also mentioned as promising a “fundamental breakthrough in our understanding”. It surely was, but maybe not in the way that Morrill hoped. In 1998 John Morrill came down firmly on the side of the revisionist view that rioters in this period were generally apolitical, a reaction against the Marxist determination to find class struggle everywhere. Walter’s work on Colchester doesn’t synthesise the Marxist/revisionist dialectic but renders it totally irrelevant. While the Colchester rioters were not quite class warriors (their targets were mainly gentry but only catholic/royalist gentry), they were highly politicised. They lived in fear, but only of the royalists. They were determined to obey, but only the parliamentarians. Walter convincingly showed that the riots against Sir John Lucas were at least partly motivated by a desire to disarm him before he could join the King, and that the rioters were following the precedent of Ordinances of Parliament. Furthermore, the pre-war feud between the Lucas family and the people of Colchester, while it had its origins in land disputes, was exacerbated by Charles I’s policies in the 1630s. Sir John Lucas was a zealous ship money sheriff and supporter of Arminianism. Therefore grievances from the 1630s did feed into the outbreak of violence in 1642 in this case. While Michael Braddick and J. S. Wheeler have both confirmed Morrill’s view that ship money collection was largely a success, the resentment it bred might deserve more attention. However, the violence in the Stour valley was not quite official parliamentarian violence and went much further than parliament intended the disarming of delinquents to go. The reaction of the gentry, even those who were strongly committed to parliament, supports Morrill’s argument that there was a widespread fear of disorder in 1642.

Morrill acknowledged that he was originally too dismissive of anti-catholicism. In the original 1976 edition, there was only a brief paragraph stating that Keith Lindley had disproved the idea that the royalist army was full of catholics as parliamentarian propaganda. By 1998 he had realised that that was hopelessly naïve. Although the new edition doesn’t mention work by Peter Newman which shows that the northern royalist army did include many catholics, it does recognise the importance of false beliefs. If people believed that the king was in league with evil papists then that’s important even if it wasn’t true. The Colchester rioters were equally afraid of royalists and catholics, assuming them to be pretty much the same thing. If anything, this way of looking at perceptions has become even more prominent in the last 10 years, as more and more historians have borrowed the concept of Othering from postcolonial criticism and taken more interest in the cultural construction of identities. Morrill’s approach was always very empirical, and his 1998 additions don’t mention the p-word, although they acknowledge the importance of cultural history. It’s still hard to reconcile RitP, which Morrill now sees as too Anglocentric, with his later calls for a holistic British history. In the 1998 epilogue he hints that English provincial perceptions of the Irish catholic threat might be different from, and more important than, what was really happening in Ireland, but he doesn’t quite follow this through to its logical conclusion: that you don’t necessarily need to know anything about what was really going on in Ireland in order to write about how it affected ordinary people in England.

Although Malcolm Wanklyn didn’t cite Revolt in the Provinces in his critique of the “determinist” school in A Military History of the English Civil War, Morrill’s view is very close to that kind of determinism. For example, he says that “financial thrombosis killed the royalist cause” and that London made the raising and financing of an army possible. Ben Coates has shown that while London was important, it was not exactly an instant win button for parliament. There isn’t enough definite evidence of royalist finances to allow a proper comparison with parliament, but Martyn Bennett has found that the royalists did have workable revenue raising systems. This is important because Morrill considers the chapter on how the war was fought and won to be the most important part of RitP, even though it has gained less attention than the parts on the causes of the war. In his view parliament developed a system which ignored traditional rights but was more effective than the King’s system which attempted to work within traditions and customs. These stereotypes now look a bit crude, and there’s an awful lot of work still to be done here. How did parliament extract enough resources to fight the war without suffering clubman rebellions in areas such as East Anglia? Were the royalists significantly less successful before the New Model Army started destroying their field armies, capturing their garrisons and occupying their territory? I might have some answers in the future, but this article is going to be about how the war started, not how it finished.

1. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
2. John Stephen Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (Allen and Unwin: London, 1976).
3. John Stephen Morrill, Revolt in the provinces (Longman: London, 1998).
4. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
5. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).
6. Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Hist Workshop J, 61 (2006), pp. 183-191.
7. Andy Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism?’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 23-40.