Investigations of a Dog

Mark Stoyle’s Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005) offers a very new and different perspective of the war in England between 1646. Stoyle shows how the separateness of Welsh and Cornish identities, and the involvement of soldiers from Scotland, Ireland and many other European countries makes the name “English Civil War” potentially misleading, but also argues that the New Model Army’s reconquest of England was a reassertion of Englishness. This work has important implications for my current project, as it offers a new interpretation of allegiance and the outbreak of war in 1642 (the question of whether there was a revolution is completely outside its scope, but Stoyle dates the outbreak of war roughly to the spring and summer of 1642). While Stoyle doesn’t claim that ethnic divisions or nationalism were long term causes of the civil war, he argues that along with the anti-Scottish sentiment identified by Conrad Russell, Welsh and Cornish concern to protect their own traditions from an aggressively English parliament made a major contribution to the emergence of a royalist party which made it possible for the king to fight in 1642.

Considering the importance of the concept of allegiance to this work, it isn’t very clearly defined (perhaps I need to go back to Stoyle’s earlier work Loyalty and Locality to get a better idea of what he means by allegiance). He seems to use the royalist and parliamentarian boxes which John Morrill complained of and doesn’t identify any neutralism in Cornwall or Wales in 1642. Maybe that’s because there genuinely wasn’t any, but I still find the claims that Welsh support for the king in 1642 was “near unanimous” (p. 13) to be a bit hyperbolic on the strength of the evidence offered. Stoyle mostly uses signing petitions and volunteering for the army as signs of allegiance. These do show that Welsh royalist sentiment was unusually strong and appeared unusually early compared to England, and that compared to the population the military participation rate was very high (the population of the whole of Wales was roughly similar to the population of London!). Stoyle acknowledges that there were pockets of parliamentarian support but gives the impression that everyone chose one side or the other. If there is strong evidence that Wales doesn’t conform to John Morrill’s model of small minorities forcing war onto a reluctant majority, that probably deserves a lot more discussion. I’m just slightly suspicious because Stoyle’s generalisation that south-eastern England was mostly parliamentarian in 1642 doesn’t agree with detailed work on Kent and Essex by the likes of Alan Everitt and John Walter.

Finally I was surprised that Stoyle didn’t make much of the relative anthropocentrism of propaganda which described foreigners as bestial, although this leaves an opportunity for further research. Also on the theme of animals the cover illustration is worth a mention. Like the cover of Carlin’s Causes of the English Civil War it shows a contemporary woodcut with interesting depictions of animals which isn’t discussed in the text and isn’t properly referenced. In this case it shows Prince Rupert, along with his horse and his dog, burning Birmingham (I think this one will be easier to track down). The horse is definitely a stallion (you can see its testicles and what might be an unrealistically small penis!), so that’s another piece of evidence for my project on war horses and gender.

1. Norah. creator Carlin, The causes of the English Civil War (Blackwell Publishers,: Oxford :, 1999).
2. Alan Milner Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Leicester UP: Leicester, 1966).
3. Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality (University of Exeter Press: Exeter, 1994).
4. Mark Stoyle, Soldier and Strangers (Yale University Press, August 2005).
5. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).