[Just had an exhausting week in the archives but I found this old half-finished post on my hard drive:]

This week [actually last November] I’ve been reading Wallington’s World by Paul Seaver (probably no relation to the unknown stuntman). It’s all about Nehemiah Wallington (not to be confused with Nehemiah Wharton), a mid-seventeenth-century London wood turner who wrote lots of notebooks, some of which have survived. The notebooks are mostly about Wallington’s puritan faith, but they also include lots of incidental details of his life and family. Seaver analysed the surviving books to see what they could tell us about London tradesmen, puritanism and the English Civil War. Today his approach looks quite dated, but maybe that’s not surprising for a book published in 1985. In the introduction there’s a lot about “inward thoughts” and Wallington’s “mental world”. Although there’s no direct mention of Collingwood, his idealism seems to be a big influence on Seaver’s assumptions: that historians can and should find out what people in the past “really” thought. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning had already been published five years earlier, but I don’t think it was required reading for historians at this time. Greenblatt discussed the difference between inward and outward selves, but also argued that the very idea of the authentic inner man was constructed through writing. Even writing a private diary is an external act which doesn’t necessarily give us access to the author’s mind. Dan Todman pointed out in The Great War: Myth and Memory that a person’s memories can change every time they’re rehearsed. Therefore the act of writing down our experiences can influence our memories of them rather than just neutrally recording them.

In my forthcoming book I’m trying to get away from worrying about what people “really” thought by concentrating almost entirely on external actions (which includes speech and writing). I’m using horses as a case study to show how material objects and actions could be used to construct parliamentarian identities, arguing that it was actions which made the civil wars happen and that opinions without actions aren’t all that important, even if we could find out about them. Wallington makes an interesting case study here because his writings are all about the theory and practice of puritanism. By traditional definitions he was “a Puritan”. But he doesn’t seem to have done very much to help the parliamentary war effort other than paying his taxes. This was partly because he didn’t have much spare money and partly because he seems to have lacked the confidence and social skills to play an active role, but his writings don’t tend to advocate violent revolution. His puritanism seems to have been orthodox, conservative and introspective. While he criticized the cavaliers, he wrote that parliamentary armies were just as bad, and used phrases like “this uncivil war” and “world turned upside down”. His use of the latter phrase and his criticism of Independents and sectaries are surprisingly similar to John Taylor, whose writings were often conservative and favourable to the King. As Nick at Mercurius Politicus points out, trying to classify writers as royalist or parliamentarian can be tricky and counter-productive. Wallington’s writings also suggest that puritanism wasn’t a straightforward cause of the English Civil War. Although Wallington eventually represented himself as assured of elect status, he never represented himself as God’s instrument in the way that Oliver Cromwell did. He took an obsessive interest in God’s punishment of sinners, but apart from a few passive-aggressive letters to his neighbours he didn’t take much direct action against sinners himself. Wallington’s notebooks make quite a contrast with militant preacher Stephen Marshall’s bloodthirsty sermon Meroz Cursed, in which he insisted that everyone had to fight against the enemies of the true church or be cursed.

[Apparently I was going to write something about gender and sexuality here but I can't remember what. Half my readers will be disappointed and the other half will be relieved!]

Party on, Nehemiah…

1. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, New edition. (2005).
2. Stephen Marshall, Meroz cursed, or, A sermon preached to the honourable House of Commons, at their late solemn fast, Febr. 23, 1641 by Stephen Marshall … (London, 1642).
3. Paul S Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-century London (London, 1985).
4. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London, 2007).

When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.

The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.

The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.

1. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
2. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.

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).

This week I’m going through some anthologies of important articles about the English Civil War, still looking at definitions of war/revolution and approaches to allegiance. This post is a brief summary of some of the articles in Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (2000). Despite the title, Gaunt acknowledges in the introduction the problems of defining and naming whatever it was that happened in the 1640s and 1650s. However, he doesn’t pay much attention to the problems of defining when in 1642 war broke out, just asserting that it was the raising of the standard at Nottingham in August which marked the official start of the war. It’s interesting that Gaunt pays some attention to the neglected question of how and why the First Civil War ended as it did, attempting to redress the balance in the historiography which has been far more concerned with why it started.

John Morrill, Brian Manning, and David Underdown, ‘What Was The English Revolution?’, History Today, 1984.

History Today asked three big names to answer the eponymous question. The title clearly begs the question of whether there was a revolution or not, but not even John Morrill seems to be worried about that. While he rejected the idea of revolution in Revolt of the Provinces (1976), he had already come round to thinking there was a revolution by 1984. However, he doesn’t specify any particular revolutionary event, implying that it was the cumulative effects of the experience of civil wars and interregnum which brought about “the modern secular state” after the restoration. As you’d expect he finds religion to be the main thing which motivated militants to fight each other, but suggests that this kind of militancy had become irrelevant by 1660.

Brian Manning offers a clear, succinct and sensible definition of “revolution”: “A revolution involves the replacement by force or threat of force of one political or social system by another”. However, he maintains that this had not happened by 1642, whereas John Adamson’s recent work suggests that the political system had changed significantly in 1641, and that threat of force played a large part in these changes. Manning places a political, but not social, revolution in 1649. That can’t be argued with as the regicide and creation of the republic easily meet his criteria. On allegiance, he suggests that parliament had more popular support and the king more elite support, although he also points out that most members of all classes were neutral. Manning argues that the most important long-term effect of the revolution was the growth of capitalism, although he is a bit vague about the links between the two. There is no teleology here: “It would all have been very different if Charles I had not been obliged to summon that Parliament to meet at Westminster on November 3rd, 1640″.

David Underdown rejects the English Revolution, finding three revolutions rather than one: a moderate constitutional revolution in 1641, a violent republican revolution in 1648-9, and a failed democratic revolution. This raises the question of whether failed attempts at revolution count as revolutions, something which doesn’t seem to have been discussed very much. Underdown finds that even the violent republican revolution was limited and that the patriarchal order survived. He argues that the revolution was a moral battle between two cultures (something he expanded on in Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, which I haven’t posted about yet). Like Morrill he sees the ultimate outcome as a more secular society in which religion became more of a personal matter.

Both Morrill and Manning suggest that the power of the state was weakened but I think they’re both confusing the state with the king. It’s true that the royal prerogative was more limited in 1660 than it had been in 1640, but the state was arguably more powerful than ever. J. S. Wheeler’s The Making of a World Power (2000) suggests that new forms of taxation, a standing army, and efficient bureaucracy, all of which had their origins in the parliamentarian war effort, put the English state in a strong position in the 1660s and laid the foundations for world power status.

Mary Fulbrook, ‘The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt’, Social History, 1982.

More proof that revisionists and Marxists will never understand each other because they just don’t want to understand each other. Fulbrook points out that revisionists have misrepresented Marxist views without bothering to find out much about Marxist theory (fair enough), but falls into the same trap by misrepresenting revisionist views. She concludes that while the events of the 1640s were not inevitable and that teleology and determinism must be avoided, historians need to pay more attention to the structural conditions which determined what was possible. I don’t think anyone can argue with that and a lot of revisionist work has been along those lines, but Marxists and revisionists continue to hate each other. Incidentally, Fulbrook’s dichotomy between empirical revisionism and theoretical Marxism now looks quaint in the light of the subsequent influx of continental philosophy.

John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: the Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637-1641′, Historical Journal, 1988.

Woodford was an obscure member of the Northampton middling sort. Fielding’s discovery of his diary gave an exciting new insight into what non-elite people thought about the personal rule, throwing a big spanner into the revisionist view that Charles’s policies worked reasonably well without causing too much resentment. Woodford outwardly conformed to the personal rule but secretly hated it and agonized about it in his diary. This is a perfect illustration of James Scott’s “hidden transcript”, a concept which Steve Hindle and Andy Wood have made good use of. My only reservation is that Fielding assumes Woodford to be a typical example. This was acceptable 20 years ago but the idea of typicality is now looking more dubious.

Conrad Russell, ‘Why Did Charles I Fight the Civil War?’, History Today, 1984.

Russell points out a dangerous consequence of using the word “revolution”: “Revolutions are thought of as things done to the head of state and not by him”. He reminds us that it takes two sides to start a civil war. Since this article is entirely about why civil war broke out in 1642, Russell has no more to say about revolutions (but the constitutional changes of 1641 were done to the king, so Russell’s reservations don’t preclude a revolution there). The main argument is that it was Charles who made the running towards war. While I agree that the king was repeatedly prepared to use force (the Bishops’ Wars, the Army Plot, the Incident, the Five Members) I think Russell understates the extent to which his opponents also relied on force or the threat of force and were prepared to take unprecedented steps, whereas John Adamson makes the ruthlessness of both sides very clear, particularly the threat from the Scots army. To say that raising the standard at Nottingham legally began the war is a bit of an oversimplification which ignores the Militia Ordinance, the raising of a parliamentarian army and commissioning of the Earl of Essex as Lord General (and on the king’s side the attempt on the five members, the Commissions of Array, and the raising of a “bodyguard” at York).

John Morrill, ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion’, Journal of British Studies, (1985).

Like Fielding on Woodford this is an examination of one man, in this case the Cheshire MP who took the lead in the parliamentarian war effort in the county, but Morrill presents this case study as a single instance. While it demonstrates his hypothesis that religion was then main motivation of militants, he doesn’t claim that he can generalise from one example or that this example is definitive proof. Morrill argues that Brereton cared far more deeply about religion than about the constitution and that this is what led him to take up arms. The evidence of his activities in the Long Parliament (lots of involvement in religious issues, on which he took a radical position, but not much apparent interest in constitutional issues) seems convincing. However, Morrill makes too much of the fact that Brereton conformed to Charles I’s policies during the personal rule. Fielding’s subsequent work on Woodford’s diary raises potential problems with this.

Christopher Hill, ‘A Bourgeois Revolution?’, (1980).

This essay illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of Christopher Hill. He could tell a really good story, and his writing is bursting with enthusiasm which carries you along, but if you stop and think for a few seconds you notice that he’s being a bit careless with the evidence (to put it politely). Sometimes these are minor points, such as putting Sir William Brereton in charge of the wrong county, but some have bigger implications for his argument. It’s hard to see the Self Denying Ordinance as introducing promotion by merit rather than birth. “The war was won by artillery (which money alone could buy) and by the disciplined morale of Cromwell’s yeomen cavalry”. Although Cromwell’s cavalry were important, “disciplined morale” and “yeomen” are just clichés. Goring’s cavalry seem to have been just as disciplined at Marston Moor, and nobody really knows enough about the social background of cavalry troopers to make any generalisations. As for artillery, it wasn’t quite as important as Hill implies, and the bit about money is a half-truth as most other things that armies needed could only be bought with money. Hill twice stresses the importance of a standing army and bureaucracy for absolutism but this undermines his argument that the revolution made absolutism impossible. As Wheeler has stressed, Charles II had the standing army and bureaucracy which Charles I lacked. James II did try to move towards absolutism and it was a Dutch invasion that stopped him, not the legacy of the 1640s. The assertion that church courts had ceased to matter by the 1680s couldn’t be more wrong: they kept control of probate until the 19th century, something which probably mattered a great deal to capitalists.

But anyway… Hill at least defines what he means by bourgeois revolution (it’s interesting that it’s usually the Marxists who are willing to give an explicit, testable definition of “revolution” while revisionists are notoriously vague about it). He makes it clear that his “bourgeois revolution” does not have to be consciously willed by the bourgeoisie, does not have to be carried out wholly or mainly by the bourgeoisie, and does not have to result in bourgeois capitalists directly taking control of the government. The crucial point is that the revolution created conditions which were more conducive to bourgeois capitalism. Hill is surprisingly close to John Morrill’s position described above, that the revolution wasn’t a single point but a process lasting 20 years whose unintended consequences only became fully apparent after the restoration. He emphasises the end of feudal tenure and the Court of Wards, the passing of the Navigation Acts (supported by a strong navy), and the breakdown of guilds and monopolies as the main economic effects, and also points to increased rationalism at the expense of superstition.

England after the Restoration certainly looks very different to England before the civil wars, but I’m not convinced that all of the changes Hill points to are consequences of the wars. Some trends were already in evidence before the wars, such as the breakdown of guild control. Peter Edwards’s work on the horse trade shows that while the demands of war accelerated the decline of markets and fairs, this was already underway. The strong navy had its origins in Charles I’s ship money fleet, something emphasised in Wheeler’s work. Hill cites the Navigation Acts and Adam Smith as examples of modernity but he can’t have it both ways. Smith opposed mercantilism and was proved right in the aftermath of the American Revolution, when the British government accepted that you didn’t have to rule a country in order to trade with it. Ultimately changes in economy, society and culture might just have had economic, social and cultural causes (although the way they interacted might well have been very complicated). Do we really need a revolution to explain them?

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. John Fielding, ‘Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: the Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637-1641’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988).
3. Mary Fulbrook, ‘The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt’, Social History, 7 (1982).
4. Peter Gaunt (ed.), The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Blackwell Publishers,: Oxford ;, 2000).
5. John Stephen Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (Allen and Unwin: London, 1976).
6. J. S Morrill, ‘Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), pp. 311-32.
7. J. S Morrill, Brian Manning, and David Underdown, ‘What was the English Revolution?’, History Today, 34 (1984).
8. Conrad Russell, ‘Why Did Charles I Fight the Civil War?’, History Today, 34 (1984).
9. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).
10. James Scott Wheeler, The Making of a World Power (Sutton: Stroud, 1999).

Yet more English Civil War historiography. The Nature of the English Revolution (1993) is a collection of essays by John Morrill, mostly published over the previous 20 years, with some previously unpublished or hard to find material, and new essays to introduce each section. This work gives a different perspective from both the original 1976 Revolt of the Provinces and the 1998 rewrite Revolt in the Provinces (here he gives a different story about the original title, claiming that it was entirely his own fault – presumably it still wasn’t safe to blame Geoffrey Elton in 1993!). The most obvious difference is given away by the title: in 1993 Morrill had come round to thinking that there was a revolution. He placed it in 1649, considering that the regicide and republic brought about the change in consciousness which he had made the defining characteristic of a revolution. However, he maintains that the First Civil War was more a war of religion than a revolutionary war, and that it was the strains of war which led to revolution rather than any long term social or economic changes. Claiming that his model has been misrepresented as monocausal by his critics, Morrill offers plenty of qualification. He does not claim that religion was the only source of division in England in 1642 but that it was the one factor above all others which made the militant minorities want to fight each other. The rest of this post will focus on the issues of allegiance, particularly with Morrill’s critiques of David Underdown and B. G. Blackwood.

Chapter 9 is a review of B. G. Blackwood’s book The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640-1660 (1978). Morrill’s review mentions that this book is an overview of Blackwood’s work but that historians who want to know more about his methodology will need to consult his earlier articles. I’ve already made some criticisms of Blackwood’s quantitative approach to allegiance here. In some ways I agree with Morrill, but there are also important differences between our criticisms.

First of all, Morrill and I agree that Blackwood’s three types of religion obscure an awful lot of diversity and complexity. He also points out that no two county studies are directly comparable because each historian has used different definitions of “gentry” and “allegiance” and different standards of proof. He regrets this and calls for more standardisation so that meaningful comparisons can be made. This now looks incredibly naive, but it’s quite understandable considering that it was written in the 1970s. All of these taxonomies are arbitrary. If everyone agreed to use the same one it wouldn’t necessarily get us any closer to how things really were. I’d cautiously agree with Morrill that Malcolm Wanklyn’s approach of dividing things into sub-categories is more satisfactory because it allows the reader more choice, but Morrill’s admiration of Wanklyn’s grids raises suspicions of a truth effect at work.

In Revolt of/in the Provinces Morrill was quite negative about Blackwood’s approach without suggesting exactly what he’d like to put in its place. In this review he acknowledges some advantages of Blackwood’s work and also offers his own alternative approach to allegiance. This approach is almost the exact opposite of Rachel Weil’s recent work. Morrill suggests ignoring actions and focusing on inner beliefs because actions could be unwilling. He recognises some problems with this approach but I think he massively underestimates them. First there’s the impossibility of getting empirical evidence of what people really thought. While Morrill rejects actions as evidence of intentions, he doesn’t say what he’d use instead. Presumably words, but there are now increasing doubts about whether texts unambiguously reflect authorial intentions. Accepting that there is no evidence of most people’s thoughts, Morrill still argues that if we can find out about the motivation of a few militants and see what they have in common we can make generalisations about the militant minorities of both sides which explain why they wanted to fight. Ultimately this is still just putting people into boxes, but slightly different boxes from the ones Blackwood is using.

(To be fair, this is an old piece and I don’t think Morrill necessarily believes all of it now. I used the present tense because it seemed a bit less awkward than using the past tense but it’s possibly a bit misleading.)

Chapter 11 is a response to David Underdown’s groundbreaking 1985 book Revel, Riot, and Rebellion. Morrill was very excited by this work and considered it the best book of the 1980s, but was ultimately unconvinced by Underdown’s argument that civil war allegiance was determined by two rival cultures which were in turn determined by ecology. I’ll have more to say about Underdown in a future post (I read the book last year but I need to go over it again) but this is a brief summary of Morrill’s criticisms. First, he is not convinced that there really were two easily definable kinds of agricultural region such as Underdown identifies (wood-pasture and sheep-corn) or that this model can easily be applied to any part of the country. Following Martin Ingram’s work he suggests that clothing districts are more directly relevant to parliamentarian allegiance, and that links between economic conditions and Puritanism are more problematic than Underdown assumes. Second, he argues that if we accept that there were two rival cultures, one puritan and one Anglican, it isn’t clear that they led directly to wartime allegiance. Finally, Morrill takes issue with Underdown’s use of pensions paid to maimed soldiers in the 1660s and suspect lists drawn up by the Major-Generals in the 1650s as evidence of popular royalism. The pensions might have been paid for fighting against the Catholic rebels in Ireland rather than fighting for the king in England; the soldiers might have settled in these parishes after the war rather than going back home; some regiments might have seen more action and suffered heavier casualties; some areas might have been more generous with pensions than others. The suspect lists do not necessarily reflect allegiance in the 1640s because so much had changed by then; different Major-Generals had different criteria.

The introduction to the section on allegiance, newly written for this collection, qualifies some of the views expressed in the older essays. Morrill still insists that we need to differentiate between the militants who made the civil war happen and the majority who were drawn into it against their will. However, he no longer assumes that each group was homogenous, concluding that “there would be as many patterns of choice as there were people”.

1. B. G Blackwood, The Lancashire gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60 (Manchester University Press for the Chetham Society,: Manchester :, 1978).
2. John Stephen Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces (Allen and Unwin: London, 1976).
3. J. S Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Longman: London, 1993).
4. John Stephen Morrill, Revolt in the provinces (Longman: London, 1998).
5. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).

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.

The English Civil War historiography goes on and on. This week I’ve been looking at R. C. Richardson (ed.) The English Civil War: Local Aspects (1997), a collection of articles on local history previously published between 1969 and 1994. Not all of these are directly relevant to the questions I’m focusing on: how is the problem of the civil war/revolution defined? How is “allegiance” conceptualised? How many people did it take to start the war?

Richardson’s introduction to the collection is mostly a straightforward descriptive survey of the historiography (much like his Debate on the English Revolution). He suggests that the approaches used by local historians have become increasingly important to our understanding of the period. In some ways this depends on how you define “local history”. Is microhistory always a subset of local history, or can it be something entirely different? Richardson seems to be assuming that anything less than national history is necessarily local. Maybe this was more or less true at the time he was writing, although even then he lumped in a couple of books which sought to reconstruct the experiences of one individual (Alan MacFarlane on Ralph Josselin and Paul Seaver on Nehemiah Wallington). You can argue that such a narrow focus is necessarily local, but you could just as easily argue that it’s both more and less than local history. Things have only got more complicated in the last ten years. For example, John Adamson’s recent work The Noble Revolt is hardly local history (even though most of the action takes place in Westminster) but its narrow focus is hardly national either.

I’m not going to go through the rest of the collection in order, as I haven’t looked at all the essays, and some needed more comment than others. B. G. Blackwood is getting a whole post to himself tomorrow. Below are some thoughts on John Webb ‘The Siege of Portsmouth in the Civil War’, and Alan Everitt, ‘The Local Community in the Great Rebellion’.

Webb’s article on the siege of Portsmouth is a straightforward narrative of events, with some analysis of the reasons for Goring’s failure to hold out. The siege of Portsmouth is interesting to me in this context because it was one of the first (arguably the first) examples of formal warfare taking place in England in the summer of 1642 (well before the raising of the standard at Nottingham). Therefore it’s crucial for any account of when, how, and why fighting broke out. I now think I might be able to exclude it from my calculations, but then again I might not. According to Webb, the numbers of soldiers involved in the siege were quite small – two horse troops and one foot regiment from Essex’s army plus the Hampshire trained bands and some sailors, against a garrison of only a few hundred. The involvement of the trained bands is noteworthy here as I’ve tended to assume that they weren’t very important on the grounds that they didn’t form part of Essex’s army in 1642. While Portsmouth and trained bands have no bearing on the battle of Edgehill – a point at which everyone can agree war was happening even if they can’t agree on how long it had been going on – they could be quite important in their own right.

Alan Everitt’s 1969 article comes with a postscript in which he wishes to abandon a couple of over-optimistic paragraphs but says he stands by most of what he said. Although he makes some claims about local communities in general, the core of the article focuses on the very different experiences of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire in the civil war, emphasising that generalisations are difficult because no two counties are the same. He makes an excellent point that the civil war added to the complexity of local government, something confirmed by my own work.

On allegiance, Everitt describes “royalist” and “parliamentarian” as “conventional categories” which only apply to a small minority of gentry (this article only considers the gentry – not unusual for the period when it was written). Everitt finds that the government of Leicester was not strongly committed to either side (suggesting that this contributed to the sacking of the town by the king’s army in 1645) while Northampton “from the outset, was decisively on the side of parliament” (p. 23). This is not a claim about public opinion in Northampton, but about the fact that a puritan minority was in control of the town government, the parish church, and the county committee.

Everitt finds a long running feud between rival families over control of the county government to be a major influence on allegiance in Leicestershire. No explanation is offered as to why the Hastings family chose to support the king and the Grey’s chose parliament, but it seems to be assumed that once they had made their choices it was almost inevitable that their factions would follow them. Sequestration and Compounding records are used quite uncritically here, but Everitt is interested in actions more than inner thoughts and uses the delinquency charges as evidence for localism rather than royalism, contrasting Leicestershire royalists who fought predominantly in local garrisons with Northamptonshire royalists, who were more likely to fight outside their county. He suggests that the Leicestershire royalists included members of the moderate majority who were forced by circumstances to take sides (p. 25), and that abstract ideals had to compete with the complex realities of life when decisions were made (p. 30). However, the reliance on parliamentarian definitions and evidence of delinquency is a potential weakness, particularly as parliamentarians are identified by very different criteria: mainly having served on the county committee. This is not comparing like with like. Therefore the inferences which Everitt makes from the evidence about relative numbers of royalist parliamentarian gentry, concentrations of each in certain parts of the county, and whether they tended to come from older or newer families, are all unsafe.

Finally a couple of interesting points which are not entirely relevant to what I’m working on at the moment. Everitt suggests that there might have been a certain (although not decisive) economic influence on Northampton’s parliamentarianism, because the town supplied large numbers of shoes and horses to parliament’s armies. This is a flawed argument for a couple of reasons. For one thing, Everitt generalises from a couple of examples of horses being bought at Northampton. More recent work by Peter Edwards (confirmed by my own work) has shown that the Eastern Association commissaries visited several places to buy horses and that Northampton was by no means the most important, while Essex’s army and the New Model got thousands of horses from dealers in London. Peter Edwards does support the view that Northampton was the most important centre of shoe making, although this has been questioned by Ben Coates. But above all, it should be obvious that the royalists needed just as many shoes and horses as the parliamentarians (and since they had no access to London they relied even more heavily on provincial towns to supply their needs), so there is absolutely no reason why the town couldn’t have benefited from the war if the corporation had supported the king instead. However, it’s interesting that Everitt is prepared to talk about the potential benefits of war. He also suggests that the war might have had little impact on day to day life in the provinces, and that its effects were nowhere near as bad as harvest failure. This is in strong contrast to John Morrill and others who have seen the war as a major disaster for ordinary people.

There’s also a huge mistake about the New Model Army, but I can’t be bothered to go into that now (and maybe it was just what everyone thought in 1969).

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3. Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000).
4. Ralph Josselin, The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616-1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (OUP for the British Academy: London, 1976).
5. Roger Charles Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars (Sutton: Stroud, 1997).
6. R. C. (Roger Charles) Richardson, The debate on the English Revolution (Manchester University Press,: Manchester :, 1998).
7. Paul S Seaver, Wallington’s World (Methuen: London, 1985).
8. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
9. Andy Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism?’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 23-40.

So I’ve finally finished reading John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt (2007). Mercurius Politicus has already posted a review of the book, having read it twice. That’s quite an achievement as it’s huge: an extremely detailed narrative of English and Scottish politics from May 1640 to January 1642. The main text alone is over 500 pages, and there are nearly 200 pages of endnotes after that! Fortunately Adamson’s style is very readable, making the story atmospheric and exciting, and the outstanding colour plates provide some much needed eye-candy as well as adding to the atmosphere. Whether or not Adamson’s argument stands up, this is a very nice book to own (and I’m not normally into book porn!), and since it’s the most recent major contribution to the debate on the origins of the English Civil War, it can’t be ignored.

What makes it slightly frustrating for me is that the narrative stops with Charles I’s attempt to arrest the five members in January 1642. The period I’m trying to write about – summer and autumn of 1642 – will be covered by the next volume, to be published in 2009. I’m going to have to submit my article long before then, so I won’t know exactly what Adamson is going to say about the outbreak of war in England in 1642 (he’s also bringing out a new synthesis on the origins of the civil wars in May next year, but that’s also likely to be too late). Because of this chronological scope, the choosing of sides in 1642 isn’t covered, beyond the habitual classification of peers and MPs as future royalists or parliamentarians (those boxes again). However, The Noble Revolt makes some highly relevant points and at least hints at Adamson’s position on the causes of the war.

The most important thing is that he directly addresses the question of how many people (and to a lesser extent what sort of people) it took to start a civil war. Arguing against both Marxist ideas of class war and John Morrill’s idea of a war of religion, Adamson suggests that in order to start a civil war it wasn’t necessary for the whole nation to be polarised, or for factions to exist in the provinces. “At its most minimal, all that a civil war needed were two rival parties of fellow Englishmen, each with recourse to a substantial force of armed men, and each with the willingness to resort to violence in order to achieve their political ends” (p. 79). Therefore, Adamson points out, civil war could have broken out in England much earlier than it did. He identifies several points in 1640 and 1641 when this almost happened. This is directly opposed to Conrad Russell’s view that war was impossible before 1642, and that even then it was resorted to slowly and reluctantly. Adamson’s detailed examination of the evidence finds some major errors in Russell’s version of events and undermines his argument that England was united against the king in 1640.

The Noble Revolt leaves little doubt that there were rival parties who were prepared to fight each other throughout the period covered by the book. Furthermore, they could call on the Scottish Covenanter army and the royal army raised to fight the Covenanters, until both were disbanded in 1641. This could suggest that it was more difficult to start a war in 1642, when there were fewer forces available, but we’ll have to wait until 2009 to see where Adamson stands on that. He ends The Noble Revolt with the suggestion that war was almost unavoidable by January 1642. While he presents a convincing case that the king’s army in the north turned against parliament and would have been prepared to fight for the king, I’m not so convinced that dissident peers could have raised an army from the English trained bands. Would they have automatically obeyed their Lord Lieutenant? Adamson is very strong on high politics, but tends to be a bit vague about anything outside Westminster. In some ways this works quite well, because it powerfully suggests that although the peers needed wider support, the masses were an unknown quantity to them. However, it doesn’t lead to a satisfactory explanation of the interaction between elite and popular politics. Adamson shows how crowd action played a crucial role but doesn’t really explain how it came about. He says that the peers needed to appeal to the public sphere (using vaguely Habermasian terminology), but doesn’t explain exactly what he means by this. Who was in this public sphere? What did they want? How could they be won over? These aren’t questions which The Noble Revolt attempts to answer. It works very well as a microhistory of a small group of peers and MPs, but if it’s intended to be a general statement about the causes of the English Civil War it’s too narrow. If the next volume has a similar scope, it isn’t likely to explain how civil war broke out the way it did, only why the elite wanted to fight.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).

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).

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!).

Conrad Russell was very strongly associated with revisionism, but if The Causes of the English Civil War is representative of his work, his position has often been misrepresented by his critics. First of all, he doesn’t so much deny that there was a revolution as completely ignore the question. His aim in this book was to explain why civil war broke out in England in 1642. He clearly thought that there was no revolution in 1641-42, but the question of whether there was one in 1647-49 is left open as it isn’t relevant to what happened in 1642. His statement that “what we are dealing with in 1642 is a civil war not a revolution” (p. 8) is slightly disingenuous, since more people have argued that there was a revolution in 1649 than in 1642. However, his point (followed by Norah Carlin) that the label “revolution” makes disparate events seem more generic than they were (p. 9) is a good one, although I’m still going to have to look at some of the sociological studies at which it was aimed. I’m probably going to have to look at the essays in Unrevolutionary England to find more on his ideas about revolution. The first chapter stresses the importance of defining the problem clearly but despite this no concrete definitions of “the English Civil War” or “allegiance” are offered. In particular, the start of the civil war isn’t defined to begin with, although he later points out that the outbreak of war was a complex series of events rather than a single event. Russell claimed to be explaining not the causes of the civil war, but the causes of the events which led to the civil war. This might sound like hair-splitting, but it’s an important distinction which his critics haven’t always understood. While he saw the immediate causes of the war as seven contingent events, he also acknowledged that at least some of these events had long term causes. In fact a large part of the book goes right back to the sixteenth century to explain religious divisions and the British problem.

Religion was particularly important for Russell, and one of the book’s main strengths is a sophisticated analysis of divisions in the Church of England which dispenses with the words “Arminian” and “Puritan”. However, this never goes as far as John Morrill’s belief that the civil wars were the last wars of religion. Russell’s position seems to be that although religion created the parties that fought the war, it was not a cause of the war. People’s decisions to join one side or the other were heavily influenced by religion but they weren’t fighting for religion. It seems like this depends very heavily on how you define “cause” and “fighting for”. I think he was saying that although religion made civil war possible it didn’t make it inevitable: these divisions had existed for a long time but war didn’t break out until the period 1637-42. However, he finds fear of Catholicism to be a major factor in the outbreak of war.

The link between religion and allegiance is an important part of Russell’s argument, but his model of allegiance doesn’t look very sophisticated, especially in the light of John Morrill’s earlier objections to putting people in boxes. Russell was quite happy to put MPs and peers into royalist or parliamentarian boxes. Although the list in the appendix is preceded by careful qualifications about how being for or against further religious reform have been defined, and how subjective these classifications are, there is absolutely no explanation of how and why the same people have been classified as “royalist” or “parliamentarian”. Maybe this is less of a problem with MPs and peers than for the rest of the population, but even that shouldn’t be assumed without some explanation. Even the religious taxonomy is justified on the grounds that there are enough exceptions “to prevent the picture from being too tidy to be credible”! (p. 21) This could be seen as quite a subtle construction of the truth effect to support a taxonomy which is no less arbitrary than any other. The focus on high politics is perhaps the greatest weakness of this work. Although Russell acknowledges that both factions needed wider support in order to fight, he maintains that the war was “not the result of an outburst of anger in the localities, but of a failure of the political process at the centre” (p. 14). Here he relies very heavily on Buchanan Sharp to maintain that popular violence was apolitical but more recent work by John Walter and others has made that argument look doubtful. It might be correct to say that the division into parties at Westminster did not make war inevitable (p. 20), but this leaves open the question of the relationship between the division into sides in the provinces and the outbreak of war. Some attention is paid to allegiance in the provinces but not much. Russell follows John Morrill in pointing out that choice of sides was contingent and often made under duress (p. 21), but doesn’t explicitly agree with Morrill that the war was started by small minorities against the will of the majority. This is implied by the focus on high politics (MPs and peers are about as small a minority as you can get) and the lack of attention to popular participation, but Russell doesn’t seem to have explicitly said how many people he thought it took to start a civil war. He has little to say about neutralism and, despite the qualifications about contingency and duress, is quite happy to put people into royalist or parliamentarian boxes. Even Sir Thomas Knyvett is classified as a royalist, something which many historians, including John Morrill, would disagree with. There is also a list of towns which sent volunteers to the parliamentarian army which I don’t quite understand. I might have to look for more detail in FBM, but the way it’s presented in Causes I can’t really tell what it’s supposed to prove or how. Nevertheless, Russell’s recognition of the importance of explaining the emergence of a royalist party is an improvement over David Underdown’s dismissal of popular royalism as being mostly based on deference.

The sections on religion contain some points which might be relevant to Rachel Weil’s work on allegiance. Oaths and religious beliefs were considered vital to 17th century society because they governed people’s inner thoughts, whereas laws only governed their outward actions (pp. 65-6). Furthermore, the fear of catholics found among the hotter protestants was partly based on doubts about the sincerity of conversion, and anxiety that outward conformance to the Church of England masked inner popery (p. 77). However, this fear was not universal, and on the royalist side at least some people were able to take a more legalistic view and accept outward conformance. Clearly the Compounding Committee was only there to screw money out of people, not to bring about sincere conversions.

1. John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2007).
2. Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Clarendon Press, 1990).
3. Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (Hambledon Press: London, 1990).
4. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 (Clarendon: Oxford, 1991).
5. Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1980).
6. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).
7. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
8. Rachel Weil, ‘Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War’, Hist Workshop J, 61 (2006), pp. 183-191.