Summary
During 2002 a major television series entitled ‘The Civil war’ was broadcast by the BBC. In the opening episode the presenter, Tristram Hunt, introduced the topic while sitting on a beach. Apparently playing with a couple of pieces of driftwood and a piece of string that he had found on his stage, Hunt began his narrative with the assertion that what has traditionally been called ‘the English Civil war’ was neither a single event nor a specifically English event, and should be thought of, rather, as ‘the British Civil Wars’. Moreover, he opined, they should be recognised as a part of a wider European conflagration. And then, with a flourish, he dramatically stabbed the driftwood – now lashed together into the form of a crucifix – into the sand and declared that the wars in Britain and the wider European conflict were all about religion. Visually, the image was striking, and the effect on the viewer was to suggest the newness of this vision of the events of the 1640s. Indeed, his introduction to the subject did present to the audience many elements of the current ruling orthodoxy in early Stuart studies – or, at least, set up the principal counter-argument to the previous prevailing orthodoxy, that of the Marxist historians of the 1960s and 1970s who, following Christopher Hill, talked of an ‘English Revolution’ caused by, and constitutive of, a particular social order. Hunt’s account, however, was not new – in a few short sentences, he had summarised the analysis provided by the first great historian of the period, the Victorian Samuel Rawson Gardiner.
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- Samuel Rawson Gardiner and the Idea of History , pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011