Investigations of a Dog

This week I’ve been looking at some general works of synthesis/survey on the causes of the English/British Civil War/Revolution: R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (1998); Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (1999); and Gerald Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? (1986). Strangely enough Richardson has the same cover picture as the copy of Aylmer that I owned as an undergraduate, but the copy of Aylmer I have now has a different design. Carlin certainly has the best cover of the three: a contemporary woodcut showing stereotypical roundheads and cavaliers setting their dogs on each other. I’d like to track down the pamphlet it came from as it’s very relevant to my interest in animals, but the book doesn’t give a reference for it so all I know is that it was printed in 1642: not very helpful considering the size of the Thomason collection!

Richardson is a very straightforward survey of the historiography from the 17th to 20th century. This makes it very useful, but also means there isn’t much I can say about it as it mostly just summarizes what other historians have said. For this reason Richardson doesn’t try too hard to define the “revolution” mentioned in the title, although it’s clear that he’s looking at something wider than just civil war in England.

According to Richardson, Norah Carlin is a “hardline Marxist” who finds Christopher Hill too tame! (p. 139) Maybe The Causes of the English Civil War was written by a different Norah Carlin, or maybe Richardson is completely wrong, because it doesn’t read like the work of a hardline Marxist at all. While there are a couple of pages where a slight bias in favour of Marxism might be suspected (pp. 134 and 162), Carlin is suspicious of monocausal explanations and economic determinism, and critical of the tendency to see all revolutions as being the same kind of thing. Furthermore she is not particularly interested in revolution, instead following Conrad Russell in focusing entirely on the reasons for the outbreak of war in England in 1642. If she had to be forced into a box in B. G. Blackwood style then postmodernist might be more appropriate. She acknowledges the immense problems of causation and explanation, and is not willing to discount any explanations. Although this is reasonably close to my own current views, I can’t help thinking it might be a bit vague and not very well thought out. Carlin denies that any explanation can be proved or disproved, but also denies that this leads to scepticism or relativism, where either nothing can be accepted or everything has to be accepted. Can you have your cake and eat it here? I can imagine Keith Jenkins, whom Carlin cites a lot, taking her apart on this. Maybe her position requires more explanation than can be accommodated in a textbook of this length, but leaving it unclarified is only likely to confuse the students at whom the book is aimed.

Although Carlin is careful to explain that she is focusing only on the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642, she doesn’t do much to define that war or when it started. The Militia Ordinance is not treated as revolutionary. She also has surprisingly little to say about allegiance, devoting only 4 pages to the choosing of sides. This seems like a missed opportunity, as the newer theoretical approaches which she brings in could give some interesting perspectives here. In particular it’s surprising that someone who cites Keith Jenkins so much never mentions the arbitrariness of taxonomies. John Morrill objected to royalist and parliamentarian boxes on empirical grounds. Theory offers even more scope to point out how these classifications don’t reflect reality. However, she acknowledges popular involvement in the events of the 1640s, pointing out that this was the first civil war in England to involve more than a tiny minority. The extent of this involvement is left open (was it a majority or just a bigger minority?), and she also acknowledges neutralism and unwillingness to choose sides. Although writing just before John Walter’s book on the Stour valley riots, she doesn’t make the mistake of treating popular violence as apolitical, pointing out that the very sophistication of English rioting made it more dangerous (p. 133). Carlin also makes an interesting point that although most debate was framed in conservative terms of keeping things the same or moving back to the past, this has tended to obscure the extent to which a return to a past which had never existed would in practice have been very radical (p. 132). Maybe we need to get rid of the “conservative” and “radical” boxes too. Finally, the point that puritans valued intellectual conviction over what they saw as the external practice and blind devotion of catholics (p. 69) suggests that Rachel Weil’s model of allegiance based on the Compounding Committee might not be transferable to other contexts.

Aylmer’s Rebellion or Revolution? is frustrating because the title raises a question which is only answered in a single paragraph at the end of the text, saying that while there was no social or economic revolution, there was more than a rebellion. Aylmer’s conclusion that “there had also, if only temporarily and partially, been a middle-class as well as a Puritan revolution” is not quite satisfactory because he refuses to enter into “sterile arguments about definitions” pp. 204-5). If you don’t define what you mean by “revolution” then you won’t get very far with proving or disproving that a revolution happened! We can deduce from the chapter titles that this revolution was in 1647-49, not in 1641-42. Aylmer does acknowledge problems in deciding when in 1642 war actually broke out, describing the period February to August 1642 as a “cold war” (p. 35) and saying that war began gradually in the summer and autumn (p. 46). On allegiance he recognises that “what we have to account for is a huge number of personal and group decisions” (p. 43) but still ends up making generalisations (a greater proportion of the elite were royalist, and a greater proportion of the middling sort were parliamentarian) and defending these by claiming that they are not invalidated by exceptions. In particular he denies popular agency, suggesting that below the middling sort deference, conscription and personal rivalries were more likely to influence which army men ended up fighting for.

That’s about all I need to go into for the project I’m working on, but I couldn’t help noticing that Aylmer’s account of the First Civil War now looks very weak. I wouldn’t be surprised if this work contributed to Malcolm Wanklyn having “been irritated by the flagrant disregard for factual accuracy that marred some of the book-length studies of the war and by the failure to apply the tools of critical analysis to some of the most venerated primary and secondary sources” (A Military History of the English Civil War, 2005, p. x). That Aylmer gets the Earl of Bedford’s rank slightly wrong, and puts the Earl of Essex’s commission in the wrong month are fairly minor errors. But to believe that Essex’s infantry at Edgehill was composed of the London Trained Bands and led by Philip Skippon seems really bizarre. We can forgive Aylmer for his view that the Earl of Manchester was unwilling to win the war and was responsible for the failure at second Newbury, because everyone in print subscribed to that myth until Wanklyn recently demolished it (although we have a spectacular case of special pleading here: Manchester lacked the will to win, but Cromwell was sensible not to waste lives! p. 59). However, the account of Goring’s actions at Marston Moor seems to owe more to a vague generalisation made by Clarendon than to any detailed work on primary or secondary accounts of the battle. Wanklyn has also convincingly challenged the idea that the Committee of Both Kingdoms was a hindrance to commanders in the field. Aylmer is not quite one of the “determinists” as he states that resources did not make the outcome of the war inevitable, but he does seem to assume that parliament did have superior resources. However, he deserves respect for wondering how the armies got enough horses. This is a question which no-one had asked since C. H. Firth wrote Cromwell’s Army and which wasn’t properly answered until Peter Edwards started working on it.

1. G E Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? (Oxford U P: Oxford U P, 1987, 1987).
2. Norah. creator Carlin, The causes of the English Civil War (Blackwell Publishers,: Oxford :, 1999).
3. Peter Edwards, ‘The Supply of Horses to the Parliamentarian and Royalist Armies in the English Civil War’, Historical Research, 68 (1995), pp. 49-66.
4. Charles Harding Firth, Cromwell’s Army (Methuen: London, 1962).
5. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (Routledge, February 2003).
6. R. C. (Roger Charles) Richardson, The debate on the English Revolution (Manchester University Press,: Manchester :, 1998).
7. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.
8. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).
9. Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Hist Workshop J, 61 (2006), pp. 183-191.