Investigations of a Dog

Conrad Russell’s The Causes of the English Civil War (1990) is part of his magnum opus which was intended to be read alongside The Fall of the British Monarchies (1991). The former book is an outline of his argument, while the latter is a detailed narrative containing more evidence to back up the arguments. At this stage I don’t think I’ll be reading FBM as I’m mostly interested in how the problems have been defined rather than whether the evidence supports the arguments, and also because if I have to read a long, detailed narrative John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt is a higher priority (my copy arrived today and I’m truly shocked at how big and thick it is!).

Conrad Russell was very strongly associated with revisionism, but if The Causes of the English Civil War is representative of his work, his position has often been misrepresented by his critics. First of all, he doesn’t so much deny that there was a revolution as completely ignore the question. His aim in this book was to explain why civil war broke out in England in 1642. He clearly thought that there was no revolution in 1641-42, but the question of whether there was one in 1647-49 is left open as it isn’t relevant to what happened in 1642. His statement that “what we are dealing with in 1642 is a civil war not a revolution” (p. 8) is slightly disingenuous, since more people have argued that there was a revolution in 1649 than in 1642. However, his point (followed by Norah Carlin) that the label “revolution” makes disparate events seem more generic than they were (p. 9) is a good one, although I’m still going to have to look at some of the sociological studies at which it was aimed. I’m probably going to have to look at the essays in Unrevolutionary England to find more on his ideas about revolution. The first chapter stresses the importance of defining the problem clearly but despite this no concrete definitions of “the English Civil War” or “allegiance” are offered. In particular, the start of the civil war isn’t defined to begin with, although he later points out that the outbreak of war was a complex series of events rather than a single event. Russell claimed to be explaining not the causes of the civil war, but the causes of the events which led to the civil war. This might sound like hair-splitting, but it’s an important distinction which his critics haven’t always understood. While he saw the immediate causes of the war as seven contingent events, he also acknowledged that at least some of these events had long term causes. In fact a large part of the book goes right back to the sixteenth century to explain religious divisions and the British problem.

Religion was particularly important for Russell, and one of the book’s main strengths is a sophisticated analysis of divisions in the Church of England which dispenses with the words “Arminian” and “Puritan”. However, this never goes as far as John Morrill’s belief that the civil wars were the last wars of religion. Russell’s position seems to be that although religion created the parties that fought the war, it was not a cause of the war. People’s decisions to join one side or the other were heavily influenced by religion but they weren’t fighting for religion. It seems like this depends very heavily on how you define “cause” and “fighting for”. I think he was saying that although religion made civil war possible it didn’t make it inevitable: these divisions had existed for a long time but war didn’t break out until the period 1637-42. However, he finds fear of Catholicism to be a major factor in the outbreak of war.

The link between religion and allegiance is an important part of Russell’s argument, but his model of allegiance doesn’t look very sophisticated, especially in the light of John Morrill’s earlier objections to putting people in boxes. Russell was quite happy to put MPs and peers into royalist or parliamentarian boxes. Although the list in the appendix is preceded by careful qualifications about how being for or against further religious reform have been defined, and how subjective these classifications are, there is absolutely no explanation of how and why the same people have been classified as “royalist” or “parliamentarian”. Maybe this is less of a problem with MPs and peers than for the rest of the population, but even that shouldn’t be assumed without some explanation. Even the religious taxonomy is justified on the grounds that there are enough exceptions “to prevent the picture from being too tidy to be credible”! (p. 21) This could be seen as quite a subtle construction of the truth effect to support a taxonomy which is no less arbitrary than any other. The focus on high politics is perhaps the greatest weakness of this work. Although Russell acknowledges that both factions needed wider support in order to fight, he maintains that the war was “not the result of an outburst of anger in the localities, but of a failure of the political process at the centre” (p. 14). Here he relies very heavily on Buchanan Sharp to maintain that popular violence was apolitical but more recent work by John Walter and others has made that argument look doubtful. It might be correct to say that the division into parties at Westminster did not make war inevitable (p. 20), but this leaves open the question of the relationship between the division into sides in the provinces and the outbreak of war. Some attention is paid to allegiance in the provinces but not much. Russell follows John Morrill in pointing out that choice of sides was contingent and often made under duress (p. 21), but doesn’t explicitly agree with Morrill that the war was started by small minorities against the will of the majority. This is implied by the focus on high politics (MPs and peers are about as small a minority as you can get) and the lack of attention to popular participation, but Russell doesn’t seem to have explicitly said how many people he thought it took to start a civil war. He has little to say about neutralism and, despite the qualifications about contingency and duress, is quite happy to put people into royalist or parliamentarian boxes. Even Sir Thomas Knyvett is classified as a royalist, something which many historians, including John Morrill, would disagree with. There is also a list of towns which sent volunteers to the parliamentarian army which I don’t quite understand. I might have to look for more detail in FBM, but the way it’s presented in Causes I can’t really tell what it’s supposed to prove or how. Nevertheless, Russell’s recognition of the importance of explaining the emergence of a royalist party is an improvement over David Underdown’s dismissal of popular royalism as being mostly based on deference.

The sections on religion contain some points which might be relevant to Rachel Weil’s work on allegiance. Oaths and religious beliefs were considered vital to 17th century society because they governed people’s inner thoughts, whereas laws only governed their outward actions (pp. 65-6). Furthermore, the fear of catholics found among the hotter protestants was partly based on doubts about the sincerity of conversion, and anxiety that outward conformance to the Church of England masked inner popery (p. 77). However, this fear was not universal, and on the royalist side at least some people were able to take a more legalistic view and accept outward conformance. Clearly the Compounding Committee was only there to screw money out of people, not to bring about sincere conversions.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Clarendon Press, 1990).
3. Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (Hambledon Press: London, 1990).
4. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 (Clarendon: Oxford, 1991).
5. Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1980).
6. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).
7. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
8. Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Hist Workshop J, 61 (2006), pp. 183-191.