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What Does the English Revolution Mean? Recent Historiographical Interpretations of Mid-Seventeenth Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

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Review Essay
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Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1986

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References

1 Zagorin, Perez, The Court and the Country: The Beginning of the English Revolution (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Russell, Conrad, ed., The Origins of the English Civil War (London, 1973; hereafter cited as OECW)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fletcher, Anthony, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Pennington, Donald, “The Making of the War, 1640-1642,” in Pennington, Donald and Thomas, Keith, eds., Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; Hirst, Derek, Authority and Conflict: England 1603-1658 (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Hutten, Ronald, The Restoration. A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658-1667 (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar.

2 MacCormack, John R., Revolutionary Politics in the Long Parliament (Cambridge, Mass., 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Underdown, David, Pride's Purge (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Worden, Blair, The Rump Parliament 1648-1653 (Cambridge, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woolrych, Austin, From Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar; Glow, Lotte, “Political Affiliations in the House of Commons after Pym's Death,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pearl, Valerie, “Oliver St. John and the “Middle Group’ in the Long Parliament,” English Historical Review 81 (1966): 490519CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Christianson, Paul, “The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament,” Journal of Modern History 49 (1977): 575–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roots, Ivan, “The Tactics of the Commonwealth Men in Richard Cromwell's Parliament,” in Pennington, and Thomas, , Puritans and RevolutionariesGoogle Scholar. See also Hirst, Derek, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kishlansky, Mark, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Upper House is described institutionally, although not politically, in Foster, Elizabeth Read, The House of Lords, 1603-1649 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983)Google Scholar. The lack of discussion of the latter subject remains a serious omission. See also Hart, James S., “The House of Lords and the Appellate Jurisdiction in Equity 1640-1643,” in Parliamentary History: A Yearbook, 2 (London, 1983)Google Scholar. Primary source material has also been published in Cope, Esther S., ed., Proceedings of the Short Parliament of 1640, Camden Soc., 4th ser., 19 (1977)Google Scholar; Jansson, Maija, ed., Two Diaries of the Long Parliament (New York, 1985)Google Scholar; and Coates, Willson H., Young, Anne Steele, and Snow, Vernon F., eds., The Private Journals of the Long Parliament (New Haven, 1982)Google Scholar. The Cromwellian parliaments of 1654 and 1656 remain neglected; see Oliver Cromwell and His Parliaments,” in Trevor-Roper, H. R., Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London, 1967)Google Scholar, Roots, Ivan, “Lawmaking in the second Protectorate Parliament,” in Hearder, H. and Lyon, H. R., eds., British Government and Administration (Cardiff, 1974)Google Scholar; and Gaunt, Peter, “Law-Making in the First Protectorate Parliament,” in Jones, Colin, Newitt, Malyn and Roberts, Stephen, eds. Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

3 Kishlansky, Mark, The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar.

4 See Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher and Reay, Barry, The World of the Muggletonians (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Capp, Bernard S., The Fifth Monarchy Men (Totowa, N.J., 1972)Google Scholar; Morton, A. L., The World of the Ranters (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Smith, Nigel, ed., A Collection of Ranter Writings (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Davis, J. C., Fear, Myth and History. The Ranters and their History 1649-1684 (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar.

5 Reay, Barry, The Quakers in the English Revolution (London, 1985)Google Scholar; see also idem, ed., Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1984).

6 The literature here is immense, and continues to proliferate. See particularly Everitt, Alan M., The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1966)Google Scholar; idem., Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (Leicester, 1969); Howell, Roger, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar; Cliffe, J. T., The Yorkshire Gentry: From the Reformation to the Civil War (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Ketton-Cremer, R. W., Norfolk in the Civil War (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Andriette, Eugene A., Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot, 1971)Google Scholar; Underdown, David, Somerset in the Civil Wir and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973)Google Scholar; idem., “‘Honest’ Radicals in the Counties, 1642-1649,” in Pennington and Thomas, Puritans and Revolutionaries; idem., “Community and Class: Theories of Local Politics in the English Revolution,” in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia, 1980); idem., Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford, 1985); Morrill, John S., Cheshire 1630-1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; idem., The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War (London, 1976); Holmes, Clive, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; idem., Seventeen-Century Lincolnshire (London, 1980); idem., “The County Community in Recent Stuart Historiography,” Journal of British Studies 19 (1980): 54-73; Fletcher, Anthony, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600-1660 (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Blackwood, B. G., The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion (Chetham Society, 1978)Google Scholar; Woods, T.P.S., Prelude to Civil War: Mr. Justice Malet and the Kentish Petitions (Wilton, Salis., 1980)Google Scholar; Hunt, William, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution to an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar. A more exhaustive list would have to include the work of Peter Clark on municipalities, Keith Wrightson on the structure of provincial society, Buchanan Sharp and Keith Lindley on popular disorder, and others. Journals of provincial and regional history are very active. Some guidance through the maze is offered by Aylmer, G. E. and Morrill, John S., eds., The Civil Wars and Interregnum: Sources for Local Historians (1979)Google Scholar.

7 Reprinted in Elton, , Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946-1972, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1974), 2: 164182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Elton, , The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Long sacrosanct, Elton's views on the nature of Tudor administration have recently come under attack. See also Coleman, Christopher and Starkey, David, eds., Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

9 See also Elton, “The Stuart Century” and The Unexplained Revolution” in Studies, 2: 155163Google Scholar; 183-189, and the series of essays on Points of Contact” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vols. 24-26 (19741976)Google Scholar.

10 The Decline of Parliamentary Government under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts,” Cambridge Historical Journal 13 (1957): 116132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604-1629,” 61 (1976): 127Google Scholar.

12 (Oxford, 1979). For a fuller discussion of Russell's views, see Zaller, Robert, “The Concept of Opposition in Early Stuart England,” Albion 12 (1980): 223229CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem., “Dr. Russell and Mr. Hyde,” unpublished paper presented to the Conference on British Studies, 1981.

13 See Snow, Vernon F., “The Concept of Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Journal (1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zagorin, The Court and the Country, ch. 1, and Hill, Christopher, “The Word ‘Revolution’ in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Ollard, Richard and Tudor-Craig, Pamela, eds., For Veronica Wedgwood These Studies in Seventeenth-Century History (London, 1986)Google Scholar.

14 Zagorin, pp. 9, 5.

15 Morrill, John S., ed., Reactions to the English Civil War (New York, 1982), p. 2Google Scholar (hereafter cited as RECW).

16 The Restoration, p. 289.

17 Zagorin, , The Court and the Country, p. 7Google Scholar.

18 Cf. Coward, Barry, “Was There an English Revolution in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century?” in Jones, Colin, Newitt, Malyn and Roberts, Stephen, ed., Politics and People in Revolutionary EnglandGoogle Scholar.

19 From Morrill's The Revolt of the Provinces, a title that has now become a phrase.

20 Morrill, RECW, p. 1.

21 OECW, p. 2

22 Puritanism as History and Historiography,” 41 (1968): 77104Google Scholar. Christopher Hill and J. P. Kenyon also disavowed the term. Rowse, A. L. (Reflections on the Puritan Revolution, [London, 1986])Google Scholar appears never to have heard the band stop playing. Cf. Hall, Basil, “Puritanism: The Problem of Definition,” Studies in Church History 2 (1965): 283296CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clancy, T. H., “Papist-Protestant-Puritan: English Religious Taxonomy 1565-1665,” Recusant History 13 (1976): 227253CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 But for a contrary view, see Liu, Tai, Discord in Zion: The Puritan Divines and the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660 (The Hague, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McGee, J. Sears, The Godly Man in Stuart England (New Haven, Conn., 1976)Google Scholar; Greaves, Richard L., Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981)Google Scholar; Wallace, Dewey D., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525-1695 (Chapel Hill, 1982)Google Scholar; Hunt, William, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar, and especially Yule, George, Puritans in Politics: The Religious Legislation of the Long Parliament 1640-1647 (Sutton Courtenay Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Yule's important but neglected book is particularly valuable in calling into question the secularist and intellectually patronizing if not dismissive attitudes of even those revisionist studies that seek to “rehabilitate” the religious element in the Revolution. A good recent specimen is the concluding chapter of Hirst's Authority and Conflict, which opines that the single most important consequence of the Revolution was the final eclipse of the Puritan dogmatic which, already in disfavor before 1640, was laughed into the dustbin of history by the scorn of Hobbes and others. The inability of most present-day historians to take Puritanism seriously as a belief system which gave intellectual coherence and moral direction to some of the most impressive minds of the seventeenth century has had an inevitably trivializing effect on efforts to understand its most important political upheaval.

24 Richardson, , The Debate on the English Revolution (London, 1977), pp. 137, 181Google Scholar.

25 RECW, p. 15.

26 In his Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution: The Religious Factor in English Politics before and after the Interregnum (Toronto, 1983)Google Scholar.

27 OECW, pp. 23-24. Fletcher cites this passage with approval (Outbreak of the English Civil War, p. 415). Cf. his judgment: “Now it is plain there was no high road to civil war” (ibid., p. 407).

28 It would be tedious to offer citations to a matter argued long past the point of cliché by commentators of every stamp in the years 1640-42. But the perception was already fully formed by the latter 1620s; see, e.g., the speech by Sir Walter Erie in the House of Commons in January 1629, in Notestein, Wallace and Reif, Frances H., eds., Commons Debates for 1629 (Minneapolis, 1921), pp. 1819Google Scholar.

29 Conrad Russell's new book on the years 1637-42 and Nicholas Tyacke's full-length study of Arminianism are especially to be anticipated in this regard.

30 Manning, , The English People and the English Revolution 1640-1649, p. 317Google Scholar.

31 Quoted in Aylmer, G. E., Rebellion or Revolution?, p. 99Google Scholar.

32 Cf. the comments by Underdown on the significance of the period 1540-1640 in English class formation (Revel, Riot and Rebellion, p. 20), and references cited; see, more generally, the work of Alan MacFarlane and R. S. Neale.

33 Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 150Google Scholar. See also the companion article by Hirst, Derek, “Unanimity in the Commons, Aristocratic Intrigues, and the Origins of the English Civil War,” pp. 5171Google Scholar.

34 The contributors were Paul Christianson, James Farnell, John Gruenfelder, Mark Kishlansky, and Clayton Roberts. Hexter also considered Russell's “Parliamentary History in Perspective” and Christianson's, The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal,” Journal of British Studies 15 (1976): 4075CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 See particularly the comment on pp. 326-327.

36 Stone, Lawrence and Stone, Jeanne C. Fawtier, An Open Elite?: England, 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984)Google Scholar.

37 The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited,” Past and Present 109 (1985): p. 53Google Scholar. Cf. Hill's, A Bourgeois Revolution?” in Pocock, J. G. A., ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J., 1980)Google Scholar.

38 Dunn, John, Rethinking Modern Political Theory (Cambridge, 1985), esp. pp. 150151Google Scholar.