David Lawrence’s The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 is the most expensive book I’ve ever bought. At £118 it was more than twice the previous record holder, Barbara Donagan’s War In England, but I really need it and it’s not in any of the libraries I can borrow books from. It turned out to be worth reading because it’s really good and vindicates some of the things I’ve written about drill books and cavalry tactics.

Lawrence draws on a lot of recent work about print culture to show the links between military theory and practice. Although he doesn’t use the phrase “communication circuit”, he does pay a lot of attention to the people (well, men mostly, although Christine de Pizan does get a mention) who wrote, printed, sold, bought, owned, read, used and commented on military manuals. That there were so many military books suggests that there was enough demand to make printing them commercially viable.

The first two chapters set the scene by giving an overview of English military culture in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. Lawrence builds on the work of people like Mark Fissel and David Trim which shows that England was not isolated, peaceful or militarily backward in this period. Many English professional soldiers served on the continent, especially in the Netherlands. Lawrence adds to this picture by showing that books were an important part of the military profession. The insult “paper soldiers” was applied selectively to those who either lacked practical experience or were disliked for some other reason. It took combat experience and book learning to make a complete soldier. One was not considered an adequate substitute for the other. Lawrence shows that books were an important part of the military circles which revolved around the Earl of Leicester, the Vere brothers, and Henry Prince of Wales. The multi-talented John Dee was heavily involved in this culture. He was interested in fortifications and sieges, had many military books in his library, and was a tutor to the Earl of Leicester.

In 1607 Jacob de Gheyn published the first ever drill book to include step by step engravings of the postures for pikemen and musketeers. Gervase Markham, not known for originality, became the first author to use copies de Gheyn’s engravings in an English drill book. Although professional soldiers considered books to be important, the English militia was slow to catch on. The first printed drill instructions were not issued until 1623. Infantry were the main users of drill books in the first half of the 17^th century. Lawrence has identified 94 military books published in England after 1603 and before the outbreak of civil war in 1642, of which 41 covered infantry combat. Many of these were written by experienced soldiers. They were based on practical experience, and in turn influenced the practice of those who used them. The Honourable Artillery Company in London was at the centre of English military culture. Company members were highly proficient in infantry drill and several of them wrote books on the subject. Nearly all of the infantry drill books published in England before the Civil Wars followed de Gheyn in describing Dutch drill. The newer Swedish drill developed by Gustavus Adolphus in the 1630s appears to have had very little influence in England before 1642. This backs up everyone who says that Prince Rupert was wrong to insist on Swedish infantry formations at Edgehill, and that the Earl of Lindsey was right to defend the Dutch drill which would have been more familiar to English soldiers.

Things could hardly have been more different for cavalry. Of the 94 early Stuart military books only one, Cruso’s Militarie instructions for the cavallrie, was solely about cavalry. A few more covered cavalry as well as infantry, but these were a tiny minority. None of them bore much relation to reality. Gervase Markham is well known as a prolific hack who would publish ill-informed opinions about anything if there was any money in it. Although he had some military experience, it apparently did not inform his drill books, which were mostly copied from other books. They included obsolete and useless formations taken from ancient history which were almost certainly not used by early-modern cavalry. Lawrence seems to have cleared up some of the confusion over Cruso’s biography. Although he served in the Norfolk militia, he almost certainly hadn’t served overseas and probably had no combat experience. His book was an academic work which mostly copied from and commented on other books. It devoted too much space to ancient history and other obsolete things, such as heavy lancers. Despite this, his book was quite popular and often recommended, perhaps because there was nothing else available. Robert Ward also lacked combat experience, copied from other authors, and included obsolete ancient formations. Lawrence does consider Ward to be better than Markham, and believes that his book was reasonably consistent. I think that a careful reading of Ward reveals some serious inconsistencies, probably as a result of carelessly copying bits from multiple sources, but this isn’t a major point as I think we both agree that Ward’s work was unrealistic.

John Vernon, who published a new cavalry drill book in 1644, was different in that his work was more practical and might have been based on personal experience. Lawrence repeats the story that Vernon was a parliamentarian cavalry officer but gives no reference. I’m a bit sceptical because I’ve never seen any definite evidence of an officer by this name. He certainly didn’t hold the rank of captain or above in Essex’s or Manchester’s army. The best John Tincey could show was that there might have been another Captain Vernon in addition to the better documented Captain Francis Vernon, treasurer of Essex’s army. Lawrence points out that some parts of Vernon’s book are derived from Cruso and others, but suggests that the original parts are probably fairly realistic. The biggest weakness of the cavalry chapter is that it doesn’t really compare theory with practice. There are no detailed quotes from eyewitness accounts of battles. Instead Lawrence relies on some lazy clichés, using the phrase “decayed serving men and tapsters” not once but twice. At least he doesn’t buy into the myth of shock. Although he sometimes uses the word “shock” he seems to mean sword fighting rather than “equine battering rams”.

The shortage of cavalry drill books leaves space for a look at a wider selection of horsemanship manuals. The increasing popularity of haute ecole/dressage/manege in the late 16^th century was regarded with suspicion by English soldiers and military theorists because they thought it would distract from more warlike pursuits such as jousting. Citing many modern and early-modern authorities, Lawrence concludes that manege would have had little military value. I’d say that it might have been marginally useful in the close combat between individuals and small groups which usually ensued if neither side ran away during a cavalry charge, but very few horses and men would have had the necessary training. Even the gentleman Sir Richard Bulstrode had to admit that he couldn’t control his horse at Powicke Bridge.

(There’s also a chapter on sieges which I haven’t read, but it’s probably good.)

One thing that slightly annoys me is that, like too many historians, Lawrence uses the word “evolution” to mean gradual change rather than random variation and natural selection. Maybe it’s just my scientific pedantry, or maybe it’s Darwin’s fault for borrowing an existing word instead of making up a new one, but I wish they wouldn’t do it. To me evolution versus revolution is a false dichotomy.

Overall this is a really good book. It’s much more sophisticated than Barbara Donagan’s work on drill books. Lawrence has not assumed that drill books either were or were not related to practice, but has worked hard to find evidence and considered different possibilities. His conclusion that infantry drill books were closely related to practice and that cavalry drill books were not blows away the false dichotomy of sceptics versus enthusiasts and shows that things were more complicated than anyone previously suggested. Because of the outrageous price I can’t really recommend that you rush out and buy it, but if you’re interested in early-modern military history or print culture it’s worth getting out of the library if they’ve got it.

Whatever you do don’t ever get yourself a reputation for writing snarky blog posts about dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell. If you do, people will start giving you other dodgy old books about Oliver Cromwell in the hope that you’ll write something funny about them. Which is how I acquired the novelization of the film Cromwell (while searching for that link I found that there’s also a 2008 film called Cromwell that’s about a serial killer and a stripper!). If you’re at all interested in the English Civil War you’ve probably seen the film. I haven’t seen it for a long time but I assume that the structure of the book is quite close to the film (ie bears very little relation to anything historians have ever written, but doesn’t make much sense as a film plot either). Dipping into it at random throws up all kinds of weird things, like John Hampden and Thomas Hammond seem to have been conflated into the same character for no reason other than having some of the same letters in their surnames. But there are some things that are unique to the book. First of all, you’ve got to love the cover:

Is this a historical novel or a heavy metal album? Why hasn’t the image of a fist defiantly holding up a lobster helmet been more widely used on the covers of history books? It’s much more exciting than some of the usual clichés.

Then there’s the style of writing. In the opening scene, Arthur Bates has tried very hard to avoid the usual novelization trap of just tacking “he said” onto every line of the script:

A pair of horsemen made their way slowly across the bleak, lifeless fens of Cambridgeshire, their heads bent against the biting wind that was piling masses of dark clouds in the sky above them. Nothing else in that wintry landscape moved; it was as though the world had paused to gird itself against the onslaught of the bitter season, and even the old Norman church that loomed in the distance seemed to be hunching its shoulders against the wind.

Bates also has the kind of obsession with people’s ages that you normally only find in local newspapers: “Henry Ireton, a lean, keen-eyed young man of 29”; “His [John Pym] 56-year old eyes were blurred and made watery by the relentless wind”; “A pretty, dark-haired girl of 16 [Bridgett Cromwell] looked up from across the room”. He’d probably be very bad at telling the 28-years-old joke: “A 28 year old man strode across the desolate fens, vigorously doing something you would never expect a 28 year old man to do on the desolate fens…”.

Overall this is probably a bit more sensible than the Ladybird book – Arthur Bates at least knows that women have names and that Cromwell didn’t live in Lincolnshire – but somehow I miss the monkey, and the sheer insanity of L. du Garde Peach. It was said that his “only virtue was speed”, and I wouldn’t be surprised if speed was also his main inspiration. I can imagine him knocking out a Ladybird book in one long, frantic night, fuelled by purple hearts and a bottle of gin.

I could have been writing a serious post for the horse history blog, working on my book proposal, planning an article, sorting out my Zotero collections, uploading PRO documents to Flickr, or lots of other things. But the other day my brother took me on an expedition into the attic to look for old toys and books. We found this:

It’s the Ladybird book Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History by the fantastically named L. du Garde Peach. This must surely have been a formative influence on me, and was quite possibly my first ever encounter with the English Civil War. But I can’t remember it at all. That might be just as well because it turned out to be completely insane. Maybe it isn’t fair to laugh at a children’s book first published in 1963 (it wouldn’t have been new when I got it – I’m not that old!), but I’m going to do it anyway. And there’s a serious point here: too many people assume that children are stupid and unimportant, and that therefore it’s OK to give them all sorts of patronising rubbish.

The book starts with the story that as a baby Oliver was carried onto the roof by his grandfather’s pet monkey. I have no idea if this is true but I don’t really care because it’s just so cool. He was nearly dropped off a roof! By a monkey! I don’t think there’s any biography which couldn’t be improved by the protagonist nearly being dropped off a roof by a monkey. Apart from anything else, the cause of death “kild by a monkey” would make the best parish register entry ever. As the author says “it is impossible to imagine what England might have been like to-day if the monkey had dropped him”. It is pretty hard to imagine what England might have been like in 1963 if Cromwell had been killed by a monkey as a baby. But try to imagine it anyway. Maybe you could write a story about it…

The story on the next page almost certainly isn’t true:

Oliver’s uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was an important man, and lived on an estate much larger than the farm belonging to Oliver’s father. He was in fact so important in the county that on more than one occasion he was visited by the King, James I. On one of these visits the King was accompanied by his son Charles, and whilst Sir Oliver was entertaining the King, the two boys, Oliver Cromwell and Prince Charles, were sent into the garden to play. According to the story, the boys quarrelled and fought, and Oliver was the winner.

If this had actually happened I like to think that Oliver would have got his ass kicked by Prince Henry, who is strangely absent from the story. Maybe he was off somewhere being a good protestant.

The same page states that: “Oliver had six sisters but no brothers, so his friends were the boys of the little town, who were his schoolmates”. God forbid that he would ever be friendly with his sisters. That could have made him effeminate and stopped him from becoming A Great Man. You’ll also notice that his sisters don’t have names. In fact no woman is ever named anywhere in the book. Even Elizabeth Cromwell is just introduced as “the daughter of Sir James Bouchier”. Once they’re married she’s just “his wife”.

At this time in England there were in England a large number of people known as Puritans. We have come to think of these people as disliking any sort of happiness and always going about with gloomy faces, intent on preventing others from enjoying themselves. This is wrong. They were not all like that.

Unfortunately no-one told the artist, as the accompanying picture features the gloomiest puritans ever:

Unless the people dancing round the maypole are supposed to be non-gloomy puritans.

Oliver Cromwell was a Puritan, but he liked music and dancing and was fond of going to horse races. There were many like him.

This is true. Cromwell and others like him were perfectly able to combine music, dancing and horse racing with an obsessive hatred of altar rails, transubstantiation and the Book of Common Prayer. No wonder that “when James I followed Elizabeth, he demanded that all Puritans be driven out of the country”!

But on the next page the stereotypes come right back:

If we had lived in England in Cromwell’s time we would have noticed that there was a wide difference between the clothes worn by the Puritans and those who were on the side of the King and the Church. It was a time when wealthy people mostly dressed in coloured velvets and silks, with lace collars and cuffs, and rich embroidery on their coats and dresses. Many of the men wore lace or coloured ribbons at their knees, and all wore their hair very long. The King and his court must have been a very gay and colourful sight.

No laughing at the word “gay” please. It’s just the emptiness of the signifier.

The Puritans did exactly the opposite. They wore simple clothes in dull colours, with plain white collars. The women wore dark dresses and no jewellery. What chiefly distinguished the Puritan men from the Royalists, as the King’s men were called, was the fact that the Puritans cut their hair shorter. Because of this, they were later known as Roundheads. The Puritans were quiet and sober in their speech and habits, and always strictly observed the Sabbath day.

Oh yes, all those quiet and sober speeches about Shibboleths, and curse ye Meroz, and to your tents O Israel. Let’s face it, puritan preachers were what John Sinclair would have been like if he abandoned the radical counter-culture and became a right-wing christian fundamentalist.

Anyway, “Many things were happening in England during the eleven years of the King’s government without a Parliament”. (Apparently not in Scotland or Ireland, but we’ll get to that later.) This is one of those things:

It’s William Prynne in the pillory. Surely the most famous thing about Prynne’s ordeals at the hands of Star Chamber is that in addition to being pilloried, whipped, and branded, he had his ears cut off. Twice. But in this picture he’s surprisingly unmutilated. I know it’s a children’s book, but surely children love all that stuff. I feel cheated that we never had Horrible Histories when I was little. The text describes Prynne as “Another brave Englishman… who had written against the illegal taxes”. That and saying actresses were whores. Such a brave man. Misogynistic above and beyond the patriarchal standards of his time, but brave nevertheless.

Cromwell’s involvement in the enclosure dispute around St Ives in the 1630s gets a mention. His role is exaggerated way beyond the evidence, but there’s another problem: it’s described as “another battle for freedom in Lincolnshire”. This is the start of a weird obsession with Lincolnshire. Later we’re told that Cromwell raised his first cavalry troop in Lincolnshire, and that after that “he was put in charge of the whole of Lincolnshire”, where he had to search the house of his uncle Sir Oliver Cromwell. Look L. du Garde Peach, Huntingdon just isn’t in Lincolnshire and never has been.

After eleven years, during which the King had governed the country as he pleased, he found that even the illegal taxes did not bring in enough money. So he was forced again to summon a Parliament.

No mention of the Scots Covenanters or the Bishops Wars. Anglocentrism is pretty standard for the time this was written, but it’s taken to a really absurd degree here. At the battle of Marston Moor “The Parliament army had been joined by some Scottish soldiers”. Either this is a serious understatement, or it’s an unorthodox counting system in which “some” means “about 20,000″. But they weren’t there for long: “The Cavaliers on the right scattered the Scots and thinking that the battle was won, rode after them as they ran away”. That would be the right wing commanded by well-known Scotsman Sir Thomas Fairfax, with his Scottish Yorkshire cavalry. Meanwhile David Leslie and his cavalry, who actually were Scottish, were on the left helping Cromwell and didn’t run away. “Many brave Englishmen were killed on both sides at the battle of Marston Moor”. No, the Scots weren’t brave. They ran away, remember? And you might be surprised to learn that they changed sides as early as 1646. When Charles I escaped from Oxford “He finally reached Newark, which was held for him by a Scottish army”.

But if you think the Scots have it bad, spare a thought for the Irish.

Cromwell was also a good man. He was deeply religious, and neither greedy nor – except in Ireland – cruel. He was a good father to his children and the friend of all honest men.

See, he was only cruel in Ireland. And that doesn’t count.

In Ireland, Cromwell was the most hated of all. There were still men in Ireland who were ready to fight for King Charles II after Charles I had been executed. In order to crush them Cromwell crossed to Ireland with an army. The Irish were no match for trained and experienced soldiers. The two towns of Drogheda and Wexford, which tried to hold out against them, were besieged and quickly captured. All the defenders were killed without mercy. To this day the people of Ireland hate Cromwell’s memory. They have never forgotten Drogehda and Wexford.

They’re so unreasonable. Can’t they see what a Great Man he was? And it was only Ireland. But surely the Irish armies were also trained and experienced soldiers. Maybe it was just their essential Irishness that made them lose.

But the greatest Anglo-bombast comes in the 1620s with a description of Cromwell’s journey to London to study at the Inns of Court (which have no record of him, according to the DNB): “Although the English roads were bad, English inns were at that time among the best in the world”.

I’m probably oversensitive to cavalry myths, but you have to admit this is pretty stupid:

The foot soldiers of the seventeenth century had not got the weapons to stand up to a charge by soldiers on horseback. Prince Rupert, the King’s nephew, commanded the Royalist cavalry and often charged right through the Parliament army of foot soldiers.

Yeah, those 18 foot long wooden poles with big metal spikes on the end. What were they called again? Pikes? I don’t think those would have been any use for fending off horses. Or maybe they didn’t really exist. But the Great Man knew exactly what to do about this:

So Cromwell and Hampden decided after the battle of Edgehill, that they must have more mounted soldiers to fight Prince Rupert’s cavalry. Cromwell immediately set to work to raise more troops of horse soldiers. These men were known as the New Model Army.

Just forget about the Self-Denying Ordinance,  Sir Thomas Fairfax, Philip Skippon, Robert Scawen, the Army Committee, the monthly assessment and all that crap. The New Model Army was created by Cromwell and Hampden. Just after Edgehill. And it was all cavalry. It is true.

Cromwell was so good that he didn’t really want to execute the king or expel the rump. He just had to. Maybe it was his destiny as a Great Man.

Cromwell now found himself obliged to do what King Charles had done earlier: he went to the House of Commons with a regiment of soldiers at his back. But where Charles had failed Cromwell succeeded.

See, the real problem with Charles wasn’t that he went into the Commons with soldiers, it was just that he did it wrong. As we’re told on the page about the Five Members: “King Charles was a very stupid man”. That might sound harsh but it’s not so very different from what lots of proper historians have said.

The book ends:

It is a blot on the history of our country that when Charles II returned, Cromwell’s body was taken from the tomb and his head set upon a pike [you know, those things that didn't exist] for all to see. It was a mean and unworthy revenge on the part of those whom he had beaten in a fair fight, whose country he had preserved from tyranny, and whose freedom he had ensured.

Bastards. They’re almost as bad as the Irish. But for a final thought, let’s go back to the very first paragraph:

Oliver Cromwell is one of the most important figures in English history. In the time in which he lived, a great man was needed to lead the people of England in their fight for freedom, and to-day we still enjoy freedoms which he won for us.

There’s a cookie for anyone who can name a freedom we enjoy today (sorry I mean to-day) which Cromwell won for us. Come on, there must be at least one. And don’t forget to thank the monkey for not dropping him.

Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.

Wanklyn says this is not a postmodern book, but he is clearly open to new ideas and able to put them to good use. Citing Keith Jenkins, he reiterates that history is not the reconstruction of the past but a narrative created by a historian using traces of the past and heavily influenced by the historian’s circumstances and the expectations of the audience. He also reminds us that meaning is likely to be in the mind of the reader, not in the text. This is an encouraging sign that theory is not as controversial as it used to be, and that it can be incorporated into military history without an influx of impenetrable jargon. Wanklyn still believes that fact and fiction are absolute, but places a sliding scale of opinion in between. He makes it clear that in practice most of what we “know” about battles is somewhere on this scale. This is close enough to what I think. Although I don’t accept that there can be absolute facts, the sliding scale of probabilities can sometimes get close enough for it not to matter in practice.

In the past it has been all too easy to dip into an accepted canon of easily accessible primary sources to extract battle accounts without thinking too carefully about the origins of the text. We’ve all done it. I know I have. Wanklyn points out that many of these canonical sources are untrustworthy for various reasons. The frequently used printed sources are not always accurately transcribed from the original manuscripts and have sometimes been abridged or altered. The most dramatic example is Edmund Ludlow’s memoirs which were dealt with at length in Blair Worden’s Roundhead Reputations, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are doubts about the often cited memoirs of Sir Richard Bulstrode since only part of the original manuscript survives. Like many pamphlets in the Thomason Tracts, Lionel Watson’s account of Marston Moor was edited before being published. Drill books have also been used too trustingly to fill in the gaps in the primary accounts. Wanklyn points out that they were an ideal which was not necessarily achieved in practice. I might go even further than this as I have my doubts about whether cavalry drill books in this period influenced, or were influenced by, reality at all.

Battlefield archaeology has offered new evidence to add to our narratives, but there are dangers here too. Wanklyn is sceptical about patterns of recovered musket balls since they could have been dropped without being fired, and many might have disintegrated, been removed without being recorded, or moved from their original positions.

Having blown some big holes in what previous historians have written, Wanklyn goes on to offer his own versions of events at a selection of major battles. Since most of what happened in these battles doesn’t meet the criteria which he sets for fact, he offers only hypothetical narratives. Instead of creating a truth effect, he is honest about the limitations of the evidence and his interpretations of it. He refuses to speculate on some points, such as the number of soldiers at First Newbury, because a reliable answer is impossible to find. On other points, such as the length of the cavalry fight on the western flank at Naseby, he makes tentative conclusions but points out that the sources are too contradictory to allow any certainty. I would much rather see this kind of caution than overambitious and unsupported claims.

For a book with this title, there is surprisingly little discussion of decisiveness, but this is not particularly relevant and was dealt with in Wanklyn and Jones’s A Military History of the English Civil War (2005). For the purposes of critiquing previous reconstructions and offering new hypotheses, it doesn’t necessarily matter how decisive the battles were. This is more of a look at the canon of famous civil war battles. Therefore Marston Moor is included despite Wanklyn’s doubts about how much long-term impact it had, and Adwalton Moor is left out, despite David Johnson’s claims for its importance (see David Johnson, Adwalton Moor 1643 The Battle That Changed A War (2003; ISBN: 0954053583). I was slightly disappointed that Roundway Down didn’t make it in, as I would have thought it was both famous and important.

Too many previous historians have been too hostile to the earls of Essex and Manchester and over-estimated the genius of Cromwell. Wanklyn does not make this mistake, offering a balanced assessment of all the generals which recognizes the extent to which rival commanders tried to assassinate each others’ characters. There is still some blame for things that went wrong, but less than in most books. He also refuses to pour scorn on Prince Rupert for the defeat at Naseby, arguing that re-forming cavalry for a second charge was extremely difficult, and that even Cromwell only definitely achieved it once and possibly by accident. Furthermore we can’t be certain that it was Rupert who summoned the baggage train to surrender, and the royalist cavalry might have been trying to get to the other wing to attack Cromwell when they found their way blocked.

Wanklyn still maintains that the historiography is too dominated by determinism. While I’m not convinced that everyone is a determinist or that the people identified as determinists in A Military History all think the same things, we certainly agree that anyone who thinks that resources made the outcome of the civil war inevitable is wrong. In this book Wanklyn acknowledges that by 1645 the royalists were short of infantry, but he also points out that the decisions of their commanders made the situation worse, and that sometimes both sides threw away numerical advantages through bad decisions or bad luck. There is a lot more work to be done to explain the result of the war, and Wanklyn is dead right that it has been scandalously neglected compared to the amount of work on its causes.

Finally there is little sign of the “equine battering rams” interpretation of cavalry charges which I thought was the weakest point of A Military History. Wanklyn now argues that changes in cavalry tactics were less dramatic and less significant than Frank Jones suggested. This book makes infantry at least as important as cavalry.

Wanklyn’s conclusion that a definitive account of any civil war battle is unattainable is exactly the sort of thing I like to see. This is far from being a pessimistic view. There will always be room for more battle narratives, and that is an opportunity not a problem. It’s really exciting to see a historian relatively late in his career still coming up with new ideas and pushing the boundaries. This book, especially the first three chapters, should be read by anyone interested in military history. I’m really looking forward to the next volume, on generalship, which will complete the trilogy.

1. Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (Routledge, February 2003).
2. David Johnson, Adwalton Moor 1643 the battle that changed a war (Blackthorn Press,: Pickering :, 2003).
3. Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War (Pen & Sword Military, October 2006).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).
5. Blair Worden, Roundhead reputations (Allen Lane: London, 2001).

Michael Howard, Liberation Or Catastrophe? Reflections on the History of the Twentieth Century, (London, Hambledon Continuum, 2007; ISBN: 9781847251596).

Before I start this review I have to point out a couple of things. This is the first time that I’ve been sent a review copy of a book rather than reviewing something that I’ve bought myself. For some bloggers this situation is an ethical dilemma, but I’ve had enough experience of PR from the other side (the thankless task of sending CDs to fanzines who ignore you or slag you off) that I wouldn’t hesitate to kick the author and publisher in the teeth if I thought that the book was a load of rubbish. I know that I’m doing them a favour even by mentioning the book on a highly Google ranked blog, and that no review is ever so bad that you can’t get a good selective quote out of it.

Second, this book is by Michael Howard the eminent military historian and founder of the War Studies department at Kings College London, not Michael Howard the former Tory leader.

Liberation Or Catastrophe? is a collection of 18 essays which were originally given as lectures at various times from 1992 to 2003, covering war and diplomacy from the First World War to the War On Terror. While there are inevitable inconsistencies in such a collection, the overall theme which ties it together is a consideration of the big strategic and political problems of modernity, which Howard sees as consequences of, and reactions against, the Enlightenment. He places both liberals and Marxists on the side of the rational enlightenment, while Fascists and Islamic fundamentalists are presented as the irrational enemies of Enlightenment (the focus on realpolitik means that he has nothing to say about Lyotardian postmodernism). The story is not a metanarrative of inevitable progress, and Howard was pouring well deserved scorn on Fukuyama’s assertion that history had ended long before 11/9. Howard sees history as a Hegelian dialectic in which solutions create new problems of their own. He warns against assuming that the Third World will experience the same kind of progress that has happened in Europe and North America, and concludes that different cultures will have to find their own solutions to the problems created by social, economic, and cultural change.

Rather than putting individual wars into discrete compartments, Howard takes a perspective which stresses long term continuity, particularly between the First and Second World Wars. He concurs with revisionists that far from being a tragic accident, the First World War was an unavoidable consequence of Germany’s increasing power and increasing willingness to use it, pointing out that many previous Balkan crises had not led to world war. Like Gary Sheffield he stresses the clash of culture and ideology between Britain and Germany: this was a war that Britain had to fight and had to win. The Treaty of Versailles failed to solve the underlying problem of German power and the war broke out again in 1939. Howard sees the watershed between the First and Second World Wars as the German invasion of Russia in 1941. He argues that Hitler might have maintained his 1940 conquests indefinitely if he hadn’t gone any further, and that the genocidal motives behind eastward expansion marked a major break with previous German policy. For the allies, the only solution to this problem was the complete destruction of the German state, but this created problems of its own, and Howard suggests that the issues at stake in the Second World War were not really settled until 1990.

While the essays help to make sense of very big and complicated problems, the resort to generalisation can sometimes be a weakness. Almost everything Howard says about the pre-Enlightenment world seems designed to annoy medieval and early-modern historians. For example, the link between early-modern Protestantism and modern Euro-scepticism seems dubious at best. The likes of David Trim and Steve Murdoch might not know whether to laugh or cry at the suggestion that Protestantism led to isolationism, and assuming continuity between English non-conformists and Euro-sceptics wilfully ignores the dominant and very conformist Church of England. I also suspect that Africanists would take issue with the assertion that most post-colonial African governments have failed. Maybe they have, but surely to different extents, in different ways, and for different reasons. The suggestion that perhaps all men are natural born fascists but that women aren’t will probably annoy almost everyone! Most of these slips occur when Howard steps out of his own territory. He is on much safer ground when he writes about what he knows, although his emphasis on strategy sometimes obscures tactical and operational contingency. For example, he implies that the balance of forces made German victory in May 1940 almost inevitable, something that many military historians would dispute.

Because of these limitations, I found that the best essays are the most specific. A comparison of how Angell’s The Great Illusion and Bernhardi’s Germany and the Next War were received in Britain and Germany illustrates how the very different cultures of the two countries made war more likely, and also suggests the difficulty of artificially influencing cultural beliefs. Another essay explores relations between the British government and German opponents of Hitler before and during the Second World War, concluding that it was not necessary, desirable or practical for Britain to help the German opposition. Howard suggests that it was for the best that Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators failed. Their suffering created an ideal that post-war Germany could aspire to, whereas if they had succeeded they might have turned out to be not much better than the Nazis. My favourite chapter is the most personal, in which Howard reminisces about his own experiences of the Cold War. His recollections bring out the importance of perceptions and show that things look very different without the benefit of hindsight. Like most people in the west, Howard admired the Red Army in 1945 and did not see Stalin as an enemy (although his unit had a tense stand-off with Tito’s partisans near Trieste in 1945). His descriptions of devastation and deprivation in the aftermath of the war emphasise that no-one was willing or able to fight another war to liberate Eastern Europe. With both East and West exhausted and prepared to accept the status quo, the Cold War only emerged slowly. Howard remembers how the horror of what was happening dawned on him in meetings with Soviet apparatchiks who “included some of the nastiest, most ruthless and intellectually dishonest men that I have ever met” (p. 102), and Dr. Strangelove-like American analysts: “At the Stanford Research Institute I sat in on a seminar on ‘Soviet Intentions’ in which the speaker gave an expert analysis first, of the tenets of Marxist-Leninism and then of nuclear weapons technology. From these premises he derived the apparently incontrovertible conclusion that Soviet nuclear surprise-attack was inevitable within the next few months, if not indeed the next few weeks. When I suggested that some knowledge of Russian history might also be relevant, not least of their experiences during the past forty years, I was wondered at like a man from the moon” (pp. 100-1). Howard vividly remembers his own dread of nuclear war, although he accepts that this threat, and the suffering of Eastern Europe, were necessary to maintain stability (at least once the Cuban missile crisis showed that sane people were in charge) and could not have been avoided.

The last three chapters look at America’s War on Terror. Howard’s level headed and realistic assessment is welcome, but it’s perhaps depressing that the Bush administration has gone against all of his advice. As early as October 2001 Howard could write:

To declare that one is ‘at war’ is immediately to create a war psychosis that may be totally counter-productive for the objective that we seek. It will arouse an immediate expectation, and demand, for spectacular military action against some easily identifiable adversary, preferably a hostile state; action leading to decisive results. The use of force is no longer seen as a last resort, to be avoided if humanly possible, but as the first, and the sooner it is used the better. The press demands immediate stories of derring-do, filling their pages with pictures of weapons, ingenious graphics, and contributions from service officers long, and probably deservedly, retired. Any suggestion that the best strategy is not to use military fore at all, but more subtle if less heroic means of destroying the adversary are dismissed as ‘appeasement’ by ministers whose knowledge of history is about on a par with their skill at political management. Figures on the Right, seeing themselves cheated of… a short jolly war in Afghanistan, demand one against a more satisfying adversary, Iraq; which is rather like the drunk who lost his watch in a dark alley but looked for it under a lamp post because there was more light there. As for their counterparts on the Left, the very word ‘war’ brings them out on the streets to protest as a matter of principle. The qualities needed in a serious campaign against terrorists – secrecy, intelligence, political sagacity, quiet ruthlessness, covert actions that remain covert, above all infinite patience – all these are forgotten or overridden in a media-stoked frenzy for immediate results, and nagging complaints if they do not get them. (pp. 175-6)

The book’s title Liberation Or Catastrophe? is taken from chapter 2, a general overview of the 20th century, but it might be even more appropriate for the final chapter, a critique of the US invasion of Iraq, written in June 2003. Howard recognised that this was a no-win situation: either American forces would have to stay in Iraq for years to maintain order while breeding resentment among Islamic terrorists, or rapid withdrawal would lead to civil war. Either would be bad enough, but it turned out to be the worst of both worlds: US occupation and civil war are now going on at the same time. However, he urges that Europe should help mend the fences rather than indulge in Schadenfreude. Everyone needs to accept that US power is necessary for global stability, while the US needs to accept that it cannot act alone.

Overall this is an interesting and engaging collection, written in a very readable style, which is highly relevant to both history and current affairs. If you’re a follower of Lyotard on the one hand, or if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of weapons and tactics on the other, then it isn’t for you, but anyone with an interest in international politics will find it worth reading.

1. Michael Howard, Liberation or Catastrophe (Hambledon Continuum, September 2007).
2. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (Headline Review, June 2002).

I’ve just read two of the most important recent books on the First World War: Gary Sheffield’s Forgotten Victory (ISBN: 0747264600), and Dan Todman’s The Great War: Myth and Memory (ISBN: 1852855126). This post is somewhere between a review and a collection of random thoughts on these books and the First World War in general. It will also allow me to use the word “metanarrative”, which I seem to have been neglecting lately.

I’ll start with Forgotten Victory. It’s so self-evidently good that I’m not sure what I can say about it that hasn’t already been said. Gary Sheffield summarises the “revisionist” military history of the Great War which has been gaining ground (a strangely appropriate metaphor, even though I didn’t consciously think about it beforehand) since the 1980s. I first encountered it during my MA in 1996, by which time it was already widely accepted by academic military historians, so the arguments were already mostly familiar to me. Forgotten Victory pulls all this work together and summarises is it an accessible form, providing a strong and coherent argument against popular misinterpretations of the war. It has to be stressed that this isn’t the bad kind of revisionism — just disagreeing with what everyone else thinks in order to generate publicity, with controversy being used as an integral part of the marketing strategy. Gary Sheffield instead offers a reasonable and balanced assessment of the war, showing that when original sources are examined using empirical methodology they do not generally support the Blackadder Goes Forth view of the Great War.

Sheffield explains that the war needed to be fought because it was in Britain’s interest to stop German aggression, and that the war can be seen as a clash of ideologies. The difference between militaristic authoritarian Germany and (more or less, by the standards of the time) liberal democratic Britain is crucial for explaining the conduct as well as the causes of the war. Having never had universal conscription, Britain had few reserves to call on in 1914 and no generals with experience of commanding large formations. What followed was the “learning curve”: the British Army adapted to new conditions of warfare and overcame its own limitations. There were costly failures along the way, but by 1918 the British Army had become the most effective fighting force in the war, epitomised by the spectacular achievement of breaking through the Hindenburg Line in September 1918.

This kind of success was achieved by developing new technology and tactics, and combining them in an all arms approach to fighting. Improvements in artillery were the key development from which everything else flowed. Industry in Britain and North America was geared up to produce artillery pieces and ammunition in sufficient quantities and of sufficient quality, allowing staggering amounts of firepower to be concentrated on key areas of the Western Front. Guns were carefully calibrated in order to predict more accurately where the shells would fall; new fuses allowed more efficient destruction of barbed wire; sound ranging and flash spotting techniques allowed devastating counter-battery fire. Perhaps even more important was a change in the way artillery was used to support attacks. Week-long bombardments destroyed the element of surprise far more effectively than they destroyed German positions. By 1918, they had been replaced by short, intense bombardments designed to suppress the enemy while the infantry advanced. Therefore a recognition of artillery’s inherent limitations allowed it to play to its strengths in combined arms attacks.

The increased effectiveness of artillery forced a reduction in the force to space ratio, with defence in depth replacing the more linear trenches and redoubts of earlier years. This in turn made more flexible infantry tactics possible, fixing and flanking the enemy rather than massed head on assaults. I think Sheffield is right to be sceptical about tanks. Although they were useful for breaking into first line trenches, they were simply not capable of the kind of mobile warfare later advocated by Fuller and Liddell-Hart.

I do have a couple of criticisms. The first is that, while convincingly demolishing just about every myth associated with the First World War, he perpetuates one from the Second World War by frequently referring to something called “Blitzkrieg”. As I said in my post about Mobile Warfare, this is something that went out of fashion among academic military historians around the same time as the old view of the Great War. At the same time as learning about the revisionist reassessment of the First World War, I was also learning that the Germans did not have a coherent or radically new operational doctrine in the early years of the Second World War, and that they rarely used the word “Blitzkrieg” themselves. The other problem is that he is too dismissive of cultural history, contrasting empirical historians who scientifically examine archival sources to get at the facts (looks like I’m not the only one who can unconsciously channel Geoffrey Elton!) with literary critics who study fiction. If you want to get at Paul Fussell you can easily condemn him for privileging the canon, or for using outdated formalist methodology (it’s funny how many betes noires of traditionalists turn out to be followers of the innocuous Herman Northrop Frye rather than Lyotard or Derrida), but to condemn him for studying something which isn’t “true” makes no sense.

Dan Todman doesn’t make either of these mistakes. He consistently points out that what happened in May 1940 was an aberration, and that the German gamble could easily have failed. But more important, he effortlessly bridges the gap between empirical military history and cultural history, recognising that what people believe is just as important as what is actually true. If there is a big difference between what people believe and what the empirical evidence suggests to be true, that raises a very interesting question. Rather than dismiss it, Dan Todman sets out to investigate. Therefore his use of the word “myth” is very different from Gary Sheffield’s, acknowledging that while myths can distort the truth they aren’t necessarily all lies, and that myths are an important part of individual and group identity.

Todman shows that the development of the myths of mud, blood, donkeys, and futility which had completely obscured the forgotten victory by the 1980s had a long and complicated genesis, and that their hegemony was not necessarily inevitable. Even putting it down to 1960s counter-culture now looks anachronistic and over simplified. Instead he shows how the meaning of the war was contested during the inter-war period, with the need to avoid offending grieving parents putting limits on what could be said. Living memory is placed at the centre of the analysis, with the demography of the survivors playing a key role in how the war was remembered. The deaths of the majority of the parents, and later the deaths of the majority of the veterans, changed the ways in which the war was perceived and discussed.

There is no privileging of the canon here, with a very wide range of sources being used to try to get a more representative view than one based solely on Wilfred Owen. Although I knew all too well that basing your whole view of a historical event on one person’s poems is a recipe for disaster, I hadn’t previously realised what an atypical alienated loner Owen was (hello, trolls!). That he is somehow reminiscent of a Camus anti-hero, and perhaps even a prototype for Morrissey, might suggest why he is held in much higher regard now than he was then.

I hate it when reviewers criticise a book for something it didn’t include, but I have to say that I was left wanting more. I would have liked to see a whole chapter on executions, which have arguably become one of the most powerful parts of the myth. That the amount of attention they get is out of all proportion to how many there actually were is exactly the kind of thing this book sets out to investigate and explain. Gas is another thing which metonymically stands for the Great War in the popular imagination, but maybe the fact that its use was genuinely widespread and its effects were genuinely terrible disqualifies it from being enough of a myth to get a chapter of its own. I would also have liked to see more explanation of the cognitive science which was hinted at in the text but not fully brought out into the open. On the other hand, I can see how many readers would be put off by that sort of thing.

Both of these books made me think that popular perceptions of the First World War turn a lot of critical theory on its head. In the popular myth we can certainly identify a hegemonic metanarrative which determines which stories can and can’t be told, contains and silences dissent, privileges some views and delegitimates others. But it’s the opposite of what you’d expect. Far from serving the interests of the state or the elite, it excludes patriotism and militarism, placing the horror and futility of war at the centre. The other ranks are celebrated, or at least pitied, while the generals are condemned. The (admittedly large) minority of 1 million men who died are privileged over the 5 million or so who fought and survived. Perhaps the most privileged group is the 300 executed men who might be expected to be the most marginalised. Feminist and queer expectations are confounded as well. Another popular myth of the Great War is that it dramatically improved the rights of British women. Popular perceptions have been far more heavily influenced by homoerotic poetry than by the Official History. There’s still room for postcolonial criticism to lament the lack of attention paid to Indian, African, and West Indian contributions to the British war effort, but even here it’s worth noting that the Australian contribution can seem to be more highly valued than the British (even Gary Sheffield doesn’t dare to challenge the consensus that Australian divisions were elite!).

Dan Todman points out that in some ways the myth does serve the interests of governments which want to start wars, because they can portray their wars as good wars which can’t possibly be as bad as the Great War. Nevertheless it’s interesting that many soldiers’ stories which have been excluded from the dominant metanarrative are being recovered by amateur historians who are either unaware of, or actively hostile to, “postmodernist” theory. This relates to my last post about the relative strengths and weaknesses of academics and amateurs. I hate to be pedantic here, but it seems that Dan Todman, his editor, and everyone else who read the manuscript all agree that CWGC and “Soldiers Died” are the same thing. To most of the regulars at the Great War Forum, this would be a schoolboy error. They’re actually two different sources, which don’t always agree with each other. On the other hand, I doubt that any of the badge collectors or service number experts could have thought of writing a book as ambitious as Myth and Memory, let alone written it as well as Dan Todman has.

Bibliography

1. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (Headline Review, June 2002).
2. Dan Todman, The Great War (Hambledon Continuum, January 2007).

Review of Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (2006; ISBN: 000715061X).

Diane Purkiss has built up a reputation for bringing new ideas and approaches to early-modern history. One side effect of this was that Richard J. Evans identified her as one of the “postmodernists” from whom history supposedly needed defending (In Defence of History, 2001; ISBN: 1862073953). Knowing all this, my expectations were confounded by the first few pages of A People’s History:

We owe our state of government to the English Civil War, but most of its beneficiaries have little idea who fought whom or when or why. Nor do most of us care; what little we know seems remote and difficult to grasp, with stiff figures on battlefields and stiffer constitutional debates. Yet actually, the English Civil War was the making of our country. It made us the nation we are, the countries we are, the people we are. It also created those more permanent revolutions by influence: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recalled and revered the Good Old Cause against the king’s tyranny, and the French revolutionaries had read their Milton. The glories and liberations of that long-ago conflict still benefit us today; so too its failings and limitations are with us, part of our blood, setting the horizon of our expectations. And to understand ourselves, we have to understand the people we were, the people who fought in the war.

Essentialism? Nationalism? Whiggish metanarratives of progress? What’s going on here? Don’t worry, there’s a perfectly good explanation.

In the preface Purkiss addresses three types of reader: first, general readers who know little or nothing about the civil war; second, enthusiasts who know an awful lot of detail about the military aspects of the war; and third, academics (which is the group I fall into). The book will look very different to each group. I expect many of the second type of reader will hate it, but there are more than enough books which cater for their interests. The first type of readers are likely to be most numerous and are the real target audience. Since this is popular history, it necessarily has to follow at least some of the conventions of the genre. Ignoring or challenging too many of those conventions is likely to alienate both publishers and readers. Purkiss gives them enough to make them feel comfortable. Her prose is entertaining and easy to read. Some academics might find some of it irritating and patronising, but that would be missing the point. Underneath the chatty and sometimes novelistic style, and the anachronistic analogies, Purkiss shows that she really knows what she’s talking about.

Soon enough, the soldiers of up to date academic studies slip out of the Trojan horse, but they come to seduce rather than conquer by force. The first chapter opens in new-historicist style with a fascinating anecdote rather than a dry historiographical survey. Although Freud is the only theorist mainstream enough to be mentioned by name, there are obvious traces of many kinds of critical theory at work here despite the complete (and welcome) absence of intimidating jargon. Purkiss offers a constructivist explanation of the formation of protestant identity in which Catholics were identified as a binary opposite Other. Her examination of the Cornish, drawing on recent work by Mark Stoyle, also hints at postcolonial concerns. Women’s stories recovered by feminist historians are told alongside the more well known stories of men, with childbirth and childhood figuring prominently. Queer theory meets psychoanalysis in Archbishop Laud’s homoerotic dreams. Eco-criticism is represented by the inclusion of the suffering of horses in battles, iconoclastic animal baptisms, and the cultural symbolism of hunting representing man’s control of nature, as well as the King’s control of a hierarchical society. Masculinity studies are brought in to explain some of the behaviour of soldiers. Although the word “epistemology” doesn’t appear anywhere in the book, the problems of knowing what really happened are illustrated with examples such as conflicting accounts of John Smith’s recapture of the standard at Edgehill. Propaganda is examined for what it tells us about cultural beliefs rather than to get at the reality it distorts.

This isn’t to say that the book is just another outpost of theory’s empire. Purkiss has also kept up with all the latest empirical research, such as Ben Coates on the economy of London, and Eric Gruber von Arni on the care of wounded soldiers. Not all of this is explicitly mentioned in the further reading, but that’s understandable since few general readers will be willing and able to pay £55 for these. Meanwhile, if the cutting edge of humanities research abandons French philosophy in favour of cognitive science, Purkiss’s work will still not look too dated, since she uses experimental psychology to illustrate the effects of hunger on soldiers.

While the main focus is on England, Purkiss makes plenty of room for the “Three Kingdoms” approach which has dominated civil war historiography since the 1990s. I like the way parliamentary opposition to Charles I in the arly 1640s is presented as more reactionary than progressive. This is something that is often missed in popular oversimplifications which still haven’t escaped from the Whig view. The diversity of protestant opposition to Laud’s reforms is also emphasised, as is the modernity of both Arminianism and Catholicism. It’s all too easy to be taken in by puritan propaganda which portrayed Catholics as backwards and ignorant, but both the Protestant reformation and Catholic counter-reformation were linked to the renaissance ideology of rejecting the medieval and getting back to something imagined to be older and purer. Bonus points should be awarded for highlighting the Earl of Essex’s reputation as an impotent cuckold, and for not being unfairly critical of his leadership. There’s certainly plenty of room for speculation about why most other (predominantly male) historians of the civil wars have done the exact opposite!

Above all, this book is about diversity, complexity, ambiguity, and the chaos of war. Purkiss shows that everyone had their own unique experiences of the civil wars. While giving enough of a broad outline of events for newcomers to get their bearings, she tries to bring out varied and engaging stories of individual experience. We get to hear the voices of ordinary men and women, but no class is privileged here because kings and aristocrats were people too. Familiar figures such Charles I and Henrietta Maria still figure prominently in the narrative, but they are seen from unfamiliar angles, demonstrating that the personal and the political were inextricably linked. Purkiss sympathetically explains the hopes and fears of people on both sides (while making it clear that a simple binary opposition doesn’t do them justice) in a way which is emotionally engaging but never biased. I haven’t seen this done so well since Ken Burns’s (much sneered at by some academics) documentary on the American Civil War.

Nearly everyone who reads this book will find something new and surprising in it, whichever of the three groups they belong to. Some of the stories, like the soldier with his face shot off, seem like familiar old friends to me, but many other people will find it as shockingly new as Natalie Bennett did. Even with my experience of researching the civil war, I found things which I didn’t know about, and new ways of looking at things I did know about. I knew the name Jeremiah Abercromby from its frequent occurrences in the military records, but I had no idea that he married one of the occupants of Hillesden house shortly after capturing it!

Sometimes details can be a bit vague, but since even I’m turning against books which are packed with masses of empirical facts I can see how other readers would be bored by too much clarification. I found a few outright errors, but not too many. Charles I impeached Lord Mandeville for high treason along with the five members of the Commons in January 1642, so it isn’t quite right to say that “his shortlist of ringleaders omitted many key figures, including all Pym’s supporters in the Lords” (p. 123). Denzil Holles’s foot regiment, with which Nehemiah Wharton marched out of London in the summer of 1642, was a regular regiment raised for Essex’s army, and wasn’t part of the London Militia, so “trained bands” isn’t an accurate description (p. 185). I seem to remember that David Underdown made the same mistake in Revel, Riot and Rebellion (1985; ISBN: 0198227957), but only the second group of readers will really care about it. According to Conrad Russell in the Oxford DNB, John Hampden was mortally wounded at Chalgrove on 18th June 1643, but died of his wound six days later at Thame, so the statement that “on 17 June 1643, John Hampden lay dead on Chalgrove field” is doubly wrong. That Sir Charles Lucas was executed by firing squad in 1648 is correctly stated on page 541, so there isn’t any excuse for page 311′s assertion that he was hanged. These are all minor points, and in the interests of balance I promise to post some of the embarrassing mistakes from my PhD thesis. Ultimately, someone as pedantic as me couldn’t have made a 600 page book so readable.

The English Civil War: A People’s History is an experimental work, and I think it mostly succeeds. I found Tim Hitchcock’s similarly experimental Down and Out in Eighteenth Century London (2004; ISBN: 185285281X) more suited to my taste, but that’s more about style than substance. Both books encourage people to think differently about the past and both do it very well. Some of the people who are drawn into The English Civil War: A People’s History by the stirring metanarrative of national identity at the beginning might well be questioning such a simplistic and exclusionary view by the end of the book. While the confrontational style of popular revisionism works all too well at generating publicity and sales, I doubt that it really changes anyone’s mind about anything. Purkiss shows how the conservatism of seventeenth-century English people led them to think, say, and do some surprisingly radical things. Her own writing might work in the same way, gently and subtly leading conservative readers into more radical ways of thinking about the past. There are many more stories to be told about the civil wars, and other ways we can test the boundaries between academic and popular history, but The English Civil War: A People’s History is a big step in the right direction and a worthy successor to Charles Carlton’s Going To The Wars (1992; ISBN: 0415032822).

Bibliography

1. Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars (Routledge: London, 1992).
2. Ben Coates, The impact of the English Civil War on the economy of London, 1642-50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
3. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta: London, 2001).
4. Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the maimed soldier (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2002).
5. Tim Hitchcock, Down and out in eighteenth-century London (Hambledon: London, 2004).
6. Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War (Harper Collins: London, 2006).
7. David Underdown, Revel, riot, and rebellion (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985).

Beginning Shakespeare (2005; ISBN: 0719064236) is a brief and accessible introduction to Shakespeare criticism aimed at first year undergraduates. I had high hopes for it because it’s in the same series as Peter Barry’s excellent Beginning Theory (2002; ISBN: 0719062683), which I found very useful and informative despite (or perhaps because of) it being written for first year English Literature undergraduates. Beginning Shakespeare turned out to be not quite as good. Although I got some valuable things out of it, there are some shortcomings which can’t all be explained away by it being a basic introduction for 18 year olds.

The biggest problem with Lisa Hopkins is that she allows her own opinions too much influence. While I accept that true neutrality and objectivity are not necessarily attainable or desirable, I think that a book of this kind needs to take extra care to explain a wide range of opinions without privileging some over others. Peter Barry is very good at this. In Beginning Theory he admits that he finds structuralism more interesting than post-structuralism or postmodernism but still manages to present a balanced view of the strengths and weaknesses of a wide range of theoretical approaches. In contrast, Hopkins dismisses computer based analysis of texts apparently because she finds it boring and doesn’t understand it. By her own admission, seeing numbers makes her “feel faint” (p. 124), and after quoting Thomas Merriam she responds (p. 122):

Few literary scholars will be able to respond to this, because most will be hopelessly lost after the first sentence. Certainly when Merriam goes on to suggest, on the basis of this methodology, that the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus may well be by Marlowe rather than by Shakespeare, I have no idea whether this is plausible or not.

Ignorance is nothing to be proud of. If Merriam is wrong (and the hypothesis that Shakespeare used the letter O more frequently than Marlowe has some obvious limitations) then he needs to be refuted by a critical examination of his evidence and methodology.

Hopkins fails to mention post-structuralism despite its very obvious influence on her thinking. She repeatedly points out that readers can find many different meanings in Shakespeare’s plays, and that the texts do not necessarily tell us anything about the author, but the theory behind this is never explained. The absence of structuralism is more understandable, because it isn’t a very fashionable theory now. Although it’s an important ancestor of many other branches of theory it’s covered adequately in Beginning Theory and isn’t directly relevant to current Shakespeare criticism. However, I find it quite shocking that a book on literary criticism published in 2005 doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of eco-criticism. Peter Barry managed a whole chapter on it in 2002, and Bruce Boehrer’s Shakespeare Among The Animals (also published in 2002; ISBN: 0312293437) made a direct link between eco-criticism and Shakespeare.

Overall I find a disappointing lack of eclecticism in this book. Hopkins is very deeply entrenched in her own discipline and dismissive of anything outside it. After asking students to stop and think whether history and literature are separate categories, she confidently states that they are and falls back on the holocaust (does Godwin’s law apply here?) to “teach us the dangers of failing to realise that some things are facts” (p. 82). This seems like a very old fashioned liberal humanist view (history is about facts, literature is about fiction). Some historians have started adapting literary theory and applying it to their work, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between documents and reality. The growth of cultural studies shows that there are many potential benefits of merging history and literature. Cultural history arguably makes literary texts more important than a purely aesthetic approach does.

One final limitation is that the book is mostly about what other critics have written. It offers little practical advice about how to apply theory to Shakespeare’s texts yourself. This will be useful for undergraduates who need to know who has written what in order to discuss it in their essays, and provides plenty of further reading. However, Peter Barry goes much further by providing helpful examples of critical theory in action which show you how to do it.

This is definitely a useful book for the target audience, but I didn’t get as much out of it as I hoped. I would recommend Beginning Theory much more highly because it covers a wider range of theories, providing a balanced view of each one, and practical examples of how to apply them. Given all this it doesn’t take much imagination to transfer any of these theories to Shakespeare, or to history.

Bibliography

1. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2002).
2. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Shakespeare among the animals (Palgrave: New York, 2002).
3. Lisa Hopkins, Beginning Shakespeare (Manchester University Press, March 2005).