Investigations of a Dog

Like Alan Harris’s marking, the background reading must be done. English Civil War causes and allegiance posts now have their own category, and this is the latest addition. This week I’ve been reading Anthony Fletcher’s The Outbreak of the English Civil War, published in 1981. This is a very detailed look at what happened in England from 1640 to 1642. In some ways it’s a product of its times, as it’s very heavily influenced by the revisionism of Conrad Russell and John Morrill, but Fletcher added a lot of new evidence and some ideas of his own.

The thing which makes this book look most dated is Fletcher’s belief that S. R. Gardiner’s narrative of events was “still authoritative”. Following Gardiner, he puts John Pym at the centre of things, and sees the Earl of Bedford as not much more than an intermediary between Pym and the King. These assumptions don’t look so safe in the light of John Adamson’s recent work. The Noble Revolt is a much better account of high politics up to January 1642 than the first half of Fletcher’s book. Adamson also does a better job of demonstrating the relationship between political events in the three kingdoms. Fletcher’s work is noticeably Anglocentric (which isn’t surprising for 1981), paying very little attention to the Incident.

But it’s not all high politics. Fletcher pays a lot of attention to what was going on in the provinces, and how the centre and localities interacted, whereas Adamson focuses almost entirely on high politics. Unlike John Morrill, Fletcher argues that people in the provinces were highly aware of and interested in national issues, and that localism could co-exist with commitment to one side or the other to a certain extent.

In true revisionist fashion Fletcher asserts that there was no revolution without really discussing the question in very much detail. He offers no definition of “revolution” which can be tested against the evidence. He argues that people were not conscious of a constitutional revolution in 1641, but John Adamson suggests that the king and his supporters at least were very aware of how the monarchy had been Venetianized. The closing sentence (”The gentry could not know at this point that there would be no English revolution”) seems to beg the question. Shouldn’t we expect some argument about why 1649 doesn’t count as a revolution?

Maybe not, because Fletcher’s main aim was to explain how and why war broke out in England in 1642. He has very little to say about possible long term causes, briefly dismissing them in the introduction and conclusion, following Russell and Morrill very closely. I tend to agree with his view that “great events do not necessarily have great causes”, and that the outbreak of the civil war was very complex. Because of this complexity, there is no attempt to pin down the start of the war at a certain point (like that old cliché the raising of the standard, for example). The outbreak of war is shown to be a slow, uncertain and messy process which was dragged out over several months. Most people were reluctant to fight, and even those who executed the militia ordinance and fortified their towns didn’t necessarily see themselves as getting involved in a war against the king.

This is where allegiance comes in. Strangely Fletcher says “Allegiance is much too large a problem to be tackled comprehensively in a book which is solely directed towards investigation of the outbreak of the war”. I would have thought that allegiance and the outbreak of war were exactly the same problem - how could war break out without people to start it, and how can you explain why they started it without fully explaining allegiance? This could be down to the way that Fletcher conceptualized allegiance, but he wasn’t alone in that. First it has to be pointed out that he has a lot of good things to say about allegiance. Again there is an emphasis on complexity: different people had different reasons for doing things, and their motives can be “inscrutable”. He points out that actions are not a good way of judging intentions, and that commitment was not the same thing as activism. So far so good, but then he reveals that he thinks there is such a thing as “true allegiance” hidden in people’s “deepest feelings” in their “heart of hearts”. Following Rachel Weil, I’m increasingly sceptical about whether this is the case, and anyway if there was such a thing it would be impossible to prove. However, he does recognize a lot of confusion in discussions of allegiance, and doesn’t seem to imply that allegiance could be fixed for a long period.

Like John Morrill, Fletcher concludes that religion was the most important factor in the outbreak of the civil war. Parliamentarian militants tended to be puritans, and royalists tended to be religious conservatives. However, he allows much more agency to parliamentarians than royalists. Royalist allegiance is assumed to be based more heavily on deference and tenant loyalty, but I don’t Fletcher produced enough evidence to show that this was definitely the case, or that it wasn’t the case for parliamentarians. One of the new avenues of research suggested by John Adamson’s work (which he might well address further in the next volume) is the question of how many active parliamentarians were tenants or clients of the dissident peers. The Noble Revolt already suggests powerful networks around puritan peers such as the Earl of Warwick.

Also like John Morrill there is more on the reluctant localists and neutralists than on the violent militants. This is justified in terms of numbers, since the people who didn’t really want a war were almost certainly a large majority of the population. However, if your intention is to explain how the war started then you first need to account for the people who started it as well as the people who failed to stop them from starting it. The “cavaliers” who surrounded Charles are particularly neglected here. Although Fletcher mentions their actions and the way they were perceived, he doesn’t really try to explain who they were or what they wanted. It’s just assumed that they were violent and hot-headed because that’s what cavaliers were.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (Edward Arnold: London, 1985).