Investigations of a Dog

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!

(more…)

My review of English Civil War historiography shoots forward 30 years (I’m not doing it any particular order) with a 2006 special issue of History Workshop Journal (issue 61) on ‘Rethinking the English Revolution’. The introduction by Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing briefly discusses the significance of terminology, noting that while Marxists assumed that there was a revolution in the 1640s, revisionists questioned that assumption and preferred to talk about the English Civil War. It would be naive to assume that “English Civil War” is any more neutral or objective than “English Revolution”, so I should write another post explaining why I habitually use the former. Whatever you call this period, I think Roper and Gowing are right that now is an exciting time to study it. The following essays, by Quentin Skinner, John Walter, Rachel Weil, and Ann Hughes, show how historians are breaking out of the Marxist vs revisionist dialectic by taking imaginative approaches which recognise diversity and complexity.

(more…)

An article that I’m working on involves getting on top of the debates over the causes and outbreak of the English Civil War. This is something that I avoided like the plague during my PhD, partly because it wasn’t vital to my study of the development of administrative systems, and partly because it was too big and complicated (and, let’s be honest, too scary – Conrad Russell wasn’t entirely joking when he called it “bloodsport”). Now all that’s changed and I’m getting stuck into the historiography. In a way I feel like I need to prove myself by taking a position on these issues rather than ignoring them, but it’s also necessary to make what would otherwise be some dull empirical data seem exciting and relevant. To help me get things straight in my mind, and also to increase the frequency of my posts, I’m trying to write some thoughts on some of the major works and post them here. Today I’m kicking off with John Morrill’s Revolt in the Provinces, the 1998 edition of his similarly titled 1976 work Revolt of the Provinces, with a new introduction and epilogue assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the book and how subsequent research has changed things.

(more…)

Over at Victoria’s Cross, Gary Smailes posted a link to an article about the history of memorialisation from the Imperial War Museum. The article includes a photo of the memorial to the royalist officers Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle, who were executed on the orders of Sir Thomas Fairfax after the siege of Colchester in 1648. The article presents English Civil War memorials in terms of “deeds of heroism”, and by omitting the background to their execution perhaps unintentionally implies that Lucas and Lisle were victims or even martyrs. It’s worth pointing out that they were both executed for breaking their parole — they had previously surrendered to Parliament and promised not to fight again. Even so, this is quite an unusual case, and might be explained by the bitterness and frustration engendered by the siege of Colchester. Another interesting aspect which the article doesn’t mention is that there was a long running feud between the Lucas family and the borough of Colchester, which makes it ironic that the town now has a memorial to Sir Charles.

(more…)