Investigations of a Dog

My review of English Civil War historiography shoots forward 30 years (I’m not doing it any particular order) with a 2006 special issue of History Workshop Journal (issue 61) on ‘Rethinking the English Revolution’. The introduction by Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing briefly discusses the significance of terminology, noting that while Marxists assumed that there was a revolution in the 1640s, revisionists questioned that assumption and preferred to talk about the English Civil War. It would be naive to assume that “English Civil War” is any more neutral or objective than “English Revolution”, so I should write another post explaining why I habitually use the former. Whatever you call this period, I think Roper and Gowing are right that now is an exciting time to study it. The following essays, by Quentin Skinner, John Walter, Rachel Weil, and Ann Hughes, show how historians are breaking out of the Marxist vs revisionist dialectic by taking imaginative approaches which recognise diversity and complexity.

In ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, Quentin Skinner takes a look at the concept of liberty from a new angle. Whereas most historians have looked at the enjoyment of specific rights and liberties, Skinner finds a recurring idea in seventeenth-century political theory that the status of free man itself was under threat. He shows that this kind of talk was not based on ignorance or fear, but on the highly rational position that if the enjoyment of your rights depended on someone else then in theory you weren’t free, no matter how extensive those rights were in practice. Therefore, if the rights of the people depended on the goodwill of the king, the people were not free but slaves. A large part of the article applies this theory to the Levellers, who I can ignore for now, but Skinner also claims that it is vital to our understanding of the outbreak of war in 1642. Unlike some of the other contributors, Skinner opens by talking about “our understanding of the English civil war” and is very cautious about using the word “revolution”, but when he does use the word “revolutionary”, to describe the Militia Ordinance of March 1642, it has much greater impact. He suggests that it was the realisation that if the king could veto any legislation then nobody in England was “free” in the terms outlined above which made parliament determined to fight.

It’s probably obvious that I’m a big fan of John Walter, and the substance of his ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’ doesn’t disappoint me. My only complaint is that he habitually uses the word “revolution” without fully explaining what he means by it. Brief articles like this don’t allow much room for carefully defining terminology, but Quentin Skinner managed to be a bit more careful without looking too revisionist. However, what Walter really has to say is actually a lot more interesting than arguing about how to define a revolution and whether there was one in England in the 1640s. He is critical of Brian Manning’s attempts to impose class conflict onto the seventeenth-century, but also critical of revisionist claims that popular action was apolitical. Walter points out that because there was relatively little repressive force available to the state, it had to gain popular consent and encourage popular participation. Therefore “crowd actions were necessarily political”. That early-modern riots were often limited, deferential, and non-violent does not mean that they were apolitical. The elite could find their ideology thrown back at them by crowds: “Failure by monarch or magistrate to observe the self-imposed dictates of the public transcript could therefore lead to covert, and sometimes open, criticism”.

If, as Walter convincingly argues, popular political consciousness existed before the 1640s, that could partly undermine Marxist claims that there was a revolution, since the emergence of a new popular politics in the 1640s might be evidence of a revolution, but he doesn’t go that far, instead suggesting that “The Revolution opened up a new political space for popular politics”. Here he says that this revolution culminated in 1649, but implies that it had been going on throughout the 1640s, accompanied by an increase in popular violence. This violence is shown to be political, but not class warfare: “The argument that these attacks were an expression of a popular parliamentarian culture might be taken to mark the beginnings of a historiographical switch from class to culture in understanding popular roles within the Revolution”. While Walter believes that there was a revolution, he also believes that it was not as radical as it might have been. Relating to allegiance, he mentions that petitions and oaths are examples of popular participation which go beyond householders.

Finally (I haven’t looked at Ann Hughes’s article on Rowland Wilson) Rachel Weil is ‘Thinking About Allegiance in the English Civil War’. From my point of view this is the most exciting piece (although that’s partly because I was already familiar with the work of John Walter). Weil is critical of the way many previous historians have concentrated on allegiance as an internal state which people thought or felt, and have tried to discover it through examining words and actions. Obviously there is no way to get empirical evidence of what people really thought or felt, but too many historians have been too anxious to overcome this problem. Weil suggests that we don’t necessarily need to overcome it. Not only can the problem be avoided, it might not be a problem at all. Through examining testimony given to the Committee for Compounding she has found that the idea of allegiance as internal beliefs was not considered very relevant at the time. Although a few delinquents told stories of changing their convictions, most didn’t, preferring to concentrate on external circumstances and material actions. “The idea that allegiance existed in a person’s ‘heart of hearts’ may be anachronistic with respect to early-modern mentalities”. Also people constructed their stories depending on what the state wanted to hear, and different committees had different priorities, leading to different kinds of narratives. The Committee for Compounding existed to extract money, and didn’t much care what people thought as long as they paid up. If parliament wasn’t worried about why people contributed to the war effort, should historians be worried about it? Probably not as much as they have been, or at least not in the same way. This article strongly supports John Morrill’s objection to historians who try to put everyone into royalist and parliamentarian boxes. We should be careful not to essentialise these identities. But a major implication of this line of thinking might be that if we can’t know anything about why people really did what they did then we can’t really know what caused the civil war, or anything else. (Marxist economic determinist models avoid this problem, but are completely inadequate for other reasons.) But maybe I’m going too far here. Rachel Weil isn’t saying anything like that. While she points out that we can’t know what people were thinking, she also shows that people’s actions were influenced by external circumstances. At the very least it’s worth remembering that people’s decisions to act or not act could be highly contingent rather than stemming from an underlying commitment to one side or the other.

1. Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing, ‘Introduction’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), pp. 153-55.
2. Quentin Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), pp. 156-70.
3. John Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’, Hist Workshop J, 61 (2006), pp. 171-182.
4. Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Hist Workshop J, 61 (2006), pp. 183-191.