Acquisitions
Thanks to Amazon I’ve just picked up very cheap second hand copies of:
- Sarah Barber, A revolutionary rogue Henry Marten and the English republic (Sutton,: Stroud :, 2000).
- Ivor Waters, Henry Marten and the Long Parliament (Chepstow Society: Chepstow, 1976).
I’m planning to write an article about Henry Marten’s attempt to raise a cavalry regiment in 1643, so I want to read everything that’s been written about him. That seems to be surprisingly little considering how interesting he is. The RHS Bibliography only returns 8 results for titles containing the words “Henry Marten”. He was arguably the most radical member of the Long Parliament, but perhaps he’s difficult to deal with because he doesn’t fit the puritan stereotype. That’s always a problem for arguments that the English Civil War was a war of religion, and it’s not really enough to say that he was just the exception that proves the rule.
This project was going to be my third article, but now it’s been promoted as the Difficult Second Article is officially dead. It was just too difficult to give it a strong enough argument to stand up as an article, but I haven’t given up on my analysis of horse donations. I think it would work better as a sample chapter for a book proposal. Then it would fit in with bigger arguments about negotiation of property rights and authority, and the construction of identities. And it won’t have to take in the causes of the civil war, which is a relief. As I mentioned before I’ve realised that I’m really not very interested in that question, and there’s no point trying to write about things you’re not interested in. That’s probably one of the reasons why it was so difficult. Also I have a theoretical problem with causation in general: in order to explain why things happened we need to know why people did things. But other minds are unknowable. Therefore we can’t really explain any historical events if the causal chains pass through people’s minds.
Comment by Ian Masters — 5:06 pm, 17 November 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
He also raised a regiment for the second civil war with a colonel Eyres, later involved in the Burford Mutiny. I have found it very difficult to find any details on this – they are certainly not mentioned in Sarah barbara’s book ‘a revolutionary rogue’.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 8:34 am, 18 November 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
According to my notes she mentions it briefly on pages 18-19 and 152, but she doesn’t go into much detail about military stuff. Ivor Waters mentions it on pages 40-41, but again there’s not much detail. Maybe part of the problem is that the regiment was auxiliary (and according to Barber not officially sanctioned at all) so it doesn’t show up in the administrative records of the New Model Army. But it also seems that his biographers so far haven’t been very interested in his military career. The 1643 regiment is hardly mentioned by Barber, and she doesn’t say anything about him taking horses for it, even though this caused major political problems.
(btw both articles mentioned above are now going to be part of my forthcoming book)
Comment by Ivor Carr — 11:48 am, 19 November 2010 [permanent link to this comment]
Sarah Barber gives some details of Martin’s military activity during the second civil war in her essay “‘A bastard kind of militia’, localism, and tactics in the second civil war”. In Gentles, Morrill and Worden (eds) Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution. (Cambridge University Press, 1998)