Investigations of a Dog

This is my second post on R. C. Richardson’s edited collection The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), but it’s really just about B. G. Blackwood, ‘Parties and Issues in the Civil War in Lancashire and East Anglia’, first published in Northern History in 1993. That date is quite surprising as Blackwood’s approach seems very old fashioned even for the early 90s.

John Morrill picked on Blackwood as a typical example of historians who put people into royalist and parliamentarian boxes. I need to look at more of his work to get a better idea of his methodology and definitions, but the impression given by this essay is that Morrill’s characterisation was accurate. In Blackwood’s taxonomy there are four kinds of people (not three, not five and a half…): royalists, parliamentarians, neutrals/unknowns, and side-changers/divided familes. Royalists and parliamentarians are further divided into “active” and “passive” groups. The reluctant and faint-hearted “passives” would probably be classified as “neutral” by John Morrill, which demonstrates the arbitrariness of taxonomies. The way we choose to classify people in the past reflects our own assumptions more than how things really were. Therefore there is a danger that the taxonomies we construct just lead us to find what we want to find. In fact Blackwood’s criteria for royalists don’t directly reflect his own prejudices, but something even more dangerous: contemporary parliamentarian definitions of delinquency. At its worst this goes as far as using lists of suspected royalists compiled by the Major-Generals in 1656 as evidence of royalism in the period 1642 to 1648! This strongly implies an assumption that “royalism” and “parliamentarianism” were fixed states, almost essential characteristics, with changes explained away by a third category of “side-changer” which is presumably just as fixed. The use of the word “predilictions” (p. 278) reinforces this impression. Even lumping together the first and second civil wars seems dubious. Blackwood justifies it by quoting Brian Lyndon to the effect that the second civil war was “the perpetuation of ideological and political conflict which, since 1642, had divided Royalist and Parliamentarian”! This is hardly a mainstream view and isn’t supported by generally accepted basic facts about who fought on which side, unless you think that Edward Massey and a large number of Scots Covenanters were “side-changers” all along.

Side-changers and divided families are dismissed as statistically insignificant because they include only 3.1% of the Lancashire gentry. However, that 3.1% amounts to 24 families which, while a small minority of the county gentry, seems a bit too large to be completely ignored. This is an example of how thinking in terms of the “county community” can deny diversity and exclude the experiences of people who are not considered “typical”. Blackwood is strongly committed to making generalisations, asking whether counties and social groups were predominantly royalist or parliamentarian. These generalisations are seriously undermined by the qualification “if we ignore the very large Neutral/Unkown majority” (p. 264; a similar phrase is used again on p. 267). Therefore being “predominantly” for one side in effect means that the minority which supported that side was twice the size of the minority which supported the other, while the neutrals were more numerous than both sides put together! For example, out of 774 Lancashire gentry families, 192 are classified as “royalist”, 106 as “parliamentarian”, and 452 as “neutral/unknown”. Despite an apparent obsession with quantitative methods, Blackwood often falls back on vague generalisations made by contemporaries to back up figures which don’t really support his argument.

One advantage that Blackwood has over the earlier work of John Morrill and other work on neutralism, is that he is not just limited to the gentry. However, below the level of the gentry the generalisations get worse. Although he quotes Philip Styles to the effect that classifications of towns can only be about military control not public opinion he then ignores this qualification and goes on to classify towns as “royalist” or “parliamentarian”. Ironically he attempts to refute John Kenyon’s generalisation that all towns and cities were “solidly for Parliament” by making a generalisation of his own: that “Salford was royalist”. It’s fairly clear that he’s not following Styles by talking about military control, because he goes on to say that King’s Lynn was “Royalist in terms of military occupation but Parliamentarian in terms of opinion” (p. 270). Maybe in some of his other work he explains how it might be possible to know the opinion of a town (or even of the majority of its inhabitants) but on the strength of the evidence presented here I have to suspect that he’s making unfounded assumptions. It’s also noticeable that he’s jumped from actions to opinions without any explanation. The gentry are classified almost entirely in terms of what they did even if, as in the case of the “passives”, there is evidence that they did it without much conviction. If towns are being classified by opinion then they are being judged by different criteria from the gentry and therefore shouldn’t be put in the same boxes.

Out in the country, pensions paid to maimed royalist soldiers in the 1660s are used as evidence for popular royalism. That there were 500 in Lancashire and only 7 in Norfolk is an interesting pattern which needs to be explained, but it isn’t safe to generalise from such a tiny minority of the population. Some of the difference might be explained by tactical contingencies. For example, a particular regiment raised in Lancashire might have suffered very heavy casualties in a particular battle. We can’t assume that maimed soldiers are evenly distributed. Can we assume that place of residence in the 1660s reflects place of residence in the 1640s? I haven’t looked at the quarter sessions records myself, so it could be that they allow the distinction to be made. However, I’m also wondering whether sessions in different counties had different criteria for granting pensions. If some were more generous than others it would make the figures even less useful. There is even room for doubt about the assignment of gentry to a particular county. For example, Philip Skippon is counted as one of the Norfolk gentry because of his family connections and estate there, despite the fact that at the outbreak of war in 1642 he was a resident of London and Captain of the Artillery Company.

Pre-war feuds, such as the rivalry between Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, are acknowledged as a source of local division and violence, but it seems to be assumed that they inevitably led to taking sides in the war. “Indeed it is not too fanciful to suggest that, had Yarmouth been Royalist, Lowestoft might well have been Parliamentarian through local cussedness” (p. 275). John Morrill, for one, would dispute the identification of Lowestoft as “royalist”. In any case, this kind of explanation has a big hole in it because it only explains one half of the problem. If one faction supported the royalists only because its rivals supported parliament, why did those rivals choose parliament in the first place? Andy Wood’s work on Derbyshire shows that local feuds didn’t necessarily lead to a simple and automatic choosing of sides - the lead miners negotiated for concessions from the king before agreeing to join him. Meanwhile, John Walter’s work on Colchester shows that at least sometimes the link between a local feud and national issues was established as early as the 1630s.

Blackwood’s three party religious taxonomy (Papists, Protestants, and Puritans) is also very dubious, particularly in making Protestants synonymous with Anglicans and defining them as satisfied with the Church of England. Conrad Russell offered a far more sophisticated view of religion, pointing out the ambiguities in the Elizabethan church which left huge potential for division even without any movements for further reform.

So it looks like Morrill was right to pick on Blackwood. At the very least he’s an easy target. However, I’m not sure that he’s entirely typical of approaches to allegiance in the civil wars. It might not be fair to generalise about other historians from what Blackwood writes. I think there are problems with the ways allegiance is generally conceptualised, but not everyone is as extreme as Blackwood.

1. Roger Charles Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars (Sutton: Stroud, 1997).
2. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
3. Andy Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism?’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 23-40.