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!).

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Things that happened in the British Isles between about 1637 and 1660 have been given lots of different names: Great Rebellion, English Revolution, Puritan Revolution, English Civil War(s), British Civil War(s), War(s) of the Three Kingdoms, and probably some others that I’ve forgotten. Choosing a name implies choosing an ideological position. Anything involving “revolution” tends to be associated with Marxism, whereas revisionists prefer “civil war” to stress what they see as its unrevolutionary character. In this context, “civil war” is no more neutral than “revolution”. However, revisionists have also been increasingly interested in the British dimensions of what was previously know as an English event, leading to the increasing use of “British Civil War(s)” or “War(s) of the Three Kingdoms”. This all makes the titles of books on this period particularly significant, although you can’t necessarily read too much into them about the author’s position, because authors don’t always get the titles they want. For example, it’s now well known that John Morrill didn’t want Revolt of the Provinces to have that title, while Ronald Hutton would have preferred to qualify the title of his The Royalist War Effort.

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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!

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