Review : The English Civil War

Ever since I read Witchfinders last year, I've been hoping to find a more general social history of the Civil War. Gaskill did an excellent job of presenting Matthew Hopkins in his broader, blood-soaked context, of a country already in political and religious turmoil - but more interestingly, of a society going through an intense change of mindset. An all-pervading mythical, stereotypically medieval world view was giving way to a more rational, modern, materialistic perspective : but by no means uniformly or equally, let alone smoothly. 

Couple that with the political parallels to recent events depicted with brilliant prescience in the movie Cromwell, and this era becomes incredibly appealing. Everyone knows the basic outline of Roundheads versus Cavaliers, the absolute monarch versus a fledgling democracy, but this is at best simplistic. As in earlier eras, democracy was not born out of some grand ideological vision, but gradually and largely accidentally. What the Civil War did was unleash an explosion of new, unpredictable ideas. It was a moment of extreme flux, replete with tyrants, hypocrites and idealists alike - and as Diane Purkiss reveals, it could easily have ended very differently.

(I picked up the book without realising that Purkiss is that very strange historian from the telly who has an extremely annoying and bizarre accent. When I discovered this, I couldn't help but mentally read it in her weirdly pretentious voice. Fortunately, I was able to overcome this because she's a far better writer than an orator.)

The English Civil War isn't quite what I was looking for, but gosh(!) it's pretty darn close. It's a bit more haphazard as a sociological history, being more concerned with individual, anecdotal experiences than drawing grand narratives. Sometimes it's a bit of a mess, being needlessly unchronological, with characters introduced hundreds of pages before they actually become relevant, or accidentally referencing things that aren't explained until much later. Like many history books, it has too many named characters who only appear once, making it very hard to know who one should pay attention to, as well as using multiple names for the nobility (e.g. their first name, surname, and title interchangeably). A Cast of Characters and a timeline would have been very welcome, as would some better maps and colour plates.

But all of these are minor irritations. To its credit, it doesn't have a bewildering array of footnotes at the back which one must keep referencing because one in ten are actually worth reading, an all-too-common practise which ought to be punishable by beheading. And though Purkiss does tend to lapse into somewhat confusing descriptions or trivial minutiae, when she writes well (which is more often), she writes very well. Overall, the text is lively and engaging, interpretative and analytic as well as descriptive. This is an attempt to explain why as much as it is describe what. While I would have preferred a few less anecdotes and a bit more big-picture, it's got more than enough of the latter to satisfy me. I give it a very solid 8/10.

The biggest take-home message to me was to depict the war as an essentially religious conflict. Yes, says Purkiss, it did transmute into a conflict about the basic power structure of the kingdom (especially concerned with how rulers should be appointed more than who specifically they should be), and there were some strongly modern democratic leanings of the sort that Jeremy Corbyn would doubtless align with, but it didn't start off this way. Fundamentally, it began with a conflict of Catholics and Protestants - or perhaps more accurately, devout Protestants and some other people who weren't Protestant enough.

Purkiss describes at some length how the conflict began with reforms that were seen as largely too Catholic in a now fervently Protestant majority country. What she doesn't really do is explain what the initial armed rebellion was aiming at. What, in particular, was Charles doing when he left London and raised his standard ? Why was he allowed to leave ? How exactly were the armies mobilised ? With hindsight, letting the king leave seems really, really stupid, so it would have been nice to have some insight into what people were thinking and expecting when this happened. Similarly, one doesn't get much a feeling as to why apparent trivialities like a new prayer book invoked such feelings of extreme hostility - some modern analogies would have helped here.

Much better and more important are the descriptions of what changed. At various points Purkiss describes a sort of reactionary, conservative radicalism : a response to exceptional circumstances to restore normality with extraordinary methods; revolutionary means rather than aims. Only as the conflict evolved did truly radical ideas take hold, for new forms of government become inevitable rather than merely changing the head of state or forcing him to alter course. "They could talk and act radically while their reflexes remained conservative, even reactionary. They backed awkwardly into a revolution they did not intend."

And later :

"It was widely known that Charles had trusted Strafford completely... so Pym said that Strafford was guilty of treason not against the king, but against the constitution. Here again, Pym seems to have reversed accidentally into radicalism because of expediency... Strafford's indictment allowed the Commons to practise talking as if they and not the king embodied English sovereignty. It was to become an acceptable rather than an unthinkable idea."

"[Pym] connected the religious menaces of popery with menaces to Parliament, to property. That afternoon, although it was not obvious to him or anyone else, Pym created the Parliamentarian cause that was to be so bloodily disputed over the next nine years."

What seems to have happened was that there was sufficient alignment between Catholicism of the king and his supporters (or more accurately, insufficiently zealous Protestantism rather than genuine Catholicism) as to cause the initial rift, but once the two sides were separated, it became ever easier to view the conflict itself as being about mode of government. Yet the initial split, according to Purkiss, was based on religion - not on political ideology. The idea of Parliament was not yet formulated enough, nor its actual institution robust enough, to drive the wedge by itself. That was a consequence of the war, not its primary initial cause. 

Likewise did the war spill over into class warfare rather than originally having much to do with egalitarianism versus the elite. Charles' obsession with the Divine Right of Kings (which I was taught in school as being central to the whole conflict) doesn't get even much of a look-in; according to Purkiss, it's all about religion (which, vice-versa, was barely mentioned to me in school).

"The people did not know they were about to fight an 'English Civil War'. Some thought they were beginning a religious war against the Antichrist. A subset of these thought they were fighting a vast conspiracy of Catholics... others that they were fighting to protect Church and State... still others thought that the war was merely a simple and obvious matter of honour... others that they were witnessing Parliament about to curb the excesses which had grown upon the king... others that what was happening was a chance for regions normally excluded from the process of government to make their voices heard... a very few thought the end of the world was coming."

Of course none of this means that the war didn't eventually define itself as the king versus Parliament, or the commoners versus an elite : it certainly did. It's just that that happened very indirectly. In particularly, the enormous relaxation of censorship allowed for the unprecedented mass dissemination of of ideas. It allowed the discussion of completely new ideas, radical alternatives to the centuries old system of government. It also allowed for fake news and propaganda - if anything, even more so than today, since fact-checking was enormously more difficult.

What this led to was a feedback effect. Lack of censorship drove new ideas which gave the prospect of a more egalitarian future a life of its own, which became a self-driving movement against the monarchy more than the Catholics (indeed, many radicals supported religious toleration, in varying degrees). One of the most interesting examples of this self-perpetuating change is... cookbooks :

"The relaxation of censorship and the resulting expansion of print and reading during the war years did not only open the way for political discussion; it also allowed tradespeople to sell their once-secret knowhow to a wider reading public. It might seem odd to describe cookbooks as a product of political liberation, but Hannah Wolley's works were to open a new way of learning to those not born to the trade. They were part of a democratization of knowledge which in turn may have had political impact. Monarchy makes sense in a world where younger servants learn from older servants in a strict hierarchy. Once print made it possible to learn outside that hierarchy, the existence of privileged knowledge and even privilege itself could be called into question." 

Such ideas eventually manifested themselves in movements like the Levellers, a sort of proto-socialist, anti-monarchy ideology, and the Diggers, a more cult-like proto-communism. But while eventually Britain was to get a far more constrained monarchy and more representative society, this was not its moment : not even close. The complex interplay between ideas and events led to a far less linear sequence of events than the popular narrative. Though created by Parliament, the New Model Army became an independent actor in its own right, at one point even occupying London. It was in victory, not instigation, that the war became cast as a drive for the end of monarchy and the rights of the people.

Unsurprisingly, this highly complex (though not truly chaotic) situation actually makes it very hard indeed to establish any heroes and villains. The anti-monarchy Independents were hardly a model of democratic ideals, having far more in common with modern Brexiteers* than genuine parliamentarians :

* The book was published in 2006, so Purkiss herself doesn't make this analogy.

"They were not a majority in any institution except the army. Perhaps they were not even a majority in any town or city. But they made their views known through a bold willingness to challenge anything that ran up against their opinions. They were immeasurably strengthened because they had now achieved their aim of winning the war. True, they did not quite command the Commons, but they were more numerous than they had been... Ideas that had once been unthinkable and certainly unsayable were now held by a significant, vocal, and very active minority."

"They removed ecclesiastical authority altogether. Learning - and especially and Oxford degree, once a passport to a clerical living - became hated signs of Royalist sympathies... Through this process, it came to seem normal to many members of London radical sects to be addressed by people who had no particular qualifications, people who would not get a hearing in the Commons, in town meetings, or in trade guilds. It even came to seem meritorious that a speaker had no qualifications : a sign of purity and even of election.... They had an open structure, too, which itself served as a model for the removal of hierarchy in other arenas. If bishops and priests could very well be abolished, why did anyone need kings and magistrates ?"

The people have had enough of experts ! With delectable irony, Michael Gove would surely feel at home among the Independents. And on this occasion they were, of course, ultimately proven right in some ways : the country of the 17th century was (by modern standards) too elitist and hierarchical by far. 

Not only that, but Parliament seriously buggered things up. Its ill treatment of its own victorious army led the army itself to radicalise and take matters into its own hands. Parliament remained an old boy's club : it was in the Independents and the Levellers where real social change was fomenting. The Army came to see itself as defending liberty not on behalf of Parliament, but actively protecting the people from Parliamentary oppression :

"...early Leveller tracts... almost identified with the king on the grounds that he too had been scorned and dishonoured by Parliament, who 'make the king their scorn and us their slaves.'"

Ultimately, this dealt a hammer blow to the fledgling British democracy :

"A war that had begun when Charles had tried to remove unruly MPs ended with the Army deciding to do the same. Colonel Thomas Pride, with a group of musketeers, forcibly removed one hundred and forty-five Presbyterian MPs, leaving a group of fifty who supported the Army. This was an extraordinary event, an armed coup. It was the end of 'Parliament' as a cause, the end of law and order, but also the beginning of true populism. After all its moderates were removed, the House of Commons was transformed into a kind of kangaroo court."

Here unfortunately is where the book's lack of focus becomes its greatest weakness. While Purkiss gives a good biographical overview of Charles, Cromwell* gets a walk-on part. Purkiss provides only the briefest outline of what happened after the war, so if and how the revolutionary concepts unleashed by the war translated into the later concept of a constitutional monarchy is frustratingly left unexplored - as too are the effects of life under Cromwell's tyranny. This feels almost like a cliffhanger ending : with the dominating narrative by the end having at last become the mode of government, to not explore what happened next is downright strange. 

* And unfortunately what he did in Ireland, which is almost glossed over completely. English history books badly need to cover this.

What is interesting is how much chance seems to have played a role in events. Nothing about the evolution of the war was inevitable. Leveller ideas could have been accommodated to a more reasonable degree than Parliament or Cromwell were willing to tolerate. The Army could have been treated more fairly and so avoided its mutiny. And indeed, Charles could actually have won - or even avoided war altogether :

"Nevertheless, despite all these doubts and difficulties, the terrifying thing about Charles' personal rule is not that it was bound to fail, but that it nearly succeeded. There were tensions, there were fears, even panics; there was also opposition. But these things were common, and had accompanied the Tudor reforms of the monarchy, too; indeed, Elizabeth I was threatened with far greater outbursts of popular dissent than Charles faced before 1642. The Civil War was not bound to occur; it would take a special, exceptional set of circumstances to make it happen."

And this is very much in line with my own take that political rhetoric is often concerned more with what could potentially happen than what actually has happened already. It's not that we fear, say, some merely dislikeable change of legislation, it's that we fear where this will lead. The frightening lesson of history is that sometimes these fears do indeed prove well founded. 

Democracy, for all its flaws, is a precious thing, and its greatest weakness is that it's all too easy to throw away. History sometimes gradually creeps forward and other times lurches spasmodically, sometimes driven by mass revolutionaries and sometimes it's dragged kicking and screaming by the elites - but the moral arc of the universe bends not in any particular direction but only where we will it. So while we would do well not to collapse in despair whenever politics takes a more authoritarian leaning, so too would be do well to point back into history and say, "Look, we're not making this up. We know our concerns are justified because we've seen this happen before. Yes, there are differences between now and then, but there are also similarities. The freedoms we have were hard-won in blood and battle, and we ought to be deeply concerned whenever anyone decides we should surrender them. History isn't an instruction book, but it would be foolish indeed not to consult it at all."