In the last half-century the historiography of the English Revolution has gone through four fairly well defined stages. First, we had the political narrative, worked out with meticulous care and scholarship by a great Victorian historian, S. R. Gardiner. This religio-constitutional interpretation came under massive attack from the Marxists just before the Second World War, and the comfortable old Whiggish paradigm collapsed to be replaced by a clear-cut conflict between rising bourgeoisie and decaying feudal classes. Next came a short post-war period of dazzling and wildly contradictory theorizing on the basis of the most slender of documentary evidence, until the areas of agreement on every aspect of the problem were reduced to almost zero, and the English Revolution lapsed into the sort of fragmented chaos in which the historiography of the French Revolution wallows today. With both revolutions, once historians have realized that the Marxist interpretation does not work very much better than the Whig, there has followed a period when there is nothing very secure to put in its place. The last twenty years, however, have seen the most remarkable efflorescence of specialized historical monographs, the work of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who have been prepared to take the infinite pains required for any historical research of enduring value, and who have also had the insight, imagination and intellectual capacity to marshal their findings and to generalize from them. Historians have also adopted more sophisticated models of historical explanation concerning both the nature of early modern society and the feed-back effect upon each other of economics, social structure, ideas, and institutions, to say nothing of the intervention of sheer chance. As a result a good deal of light is at last beginning to penetrate the fog: truth – partial, imperfect, provisional truth – is starting to emerge.
The problem of the social origins of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century was first brought to the attention of historians at large by R. H. Tawney in 1940.1 He saw a change in the ownership of property occurring in the century before the civil war, by which the old-fashioned landowners decayed and a new class of gentry rose to the top. He attributed this change mainly to differences in the degree of adaptability of estate management to rising prices, to new agricultural techniques and new market outlets, and partly to the presence or absence of non-agricultural sources of wealth. The events of 1640 he interpreted as a shift in the political structure to accommodate the power of the new class of risen gentry. His thesis of social change was supported by two sets of statistics, the one purporting to show a dramatic fall in the manorial holdings of the aristocracy compared with the gentry, and the other a shift in the size of manorial holdings away from the large and towards the medium-sized landowner.
Between 1940 and 1945 English scholars were otherwise engaged, and the issue lay dormant until 1948, when I inadvertently triggered off the controversy by publishing an article on the Elizabethan aristocracy.2 In this I picked up one element in Tawney’s thesis, that of the decline of the aristocracy, pushed it very much further, assigned the cause of decay not to inefficient land management but to over-expenditure, and produced some impressive-looking statistical data, particularly about indebtedness, to support my startling conclusion that ‘over two-thirds of the earls and barons were thus swiftly approaching or poised on the brink of financial ruin in the last few years of Queen Elizabeth.’ If this ruin was in most cases averted, I attributed it primarily to the largesse of King James.
Three years later this article was subjected to devastating criticism by H. R. Trevor-Roper, who pointed out the extravagance of the language used, the very serious mistakes made in interpreting the statistical evidence for debt, and the unscholarly treatment of much of the ancillary evidence.3 I replied, withdrawing from my previous exposed position, admitting many errors of statistical interpretation and of fact, but maintaining the general position by the use of some revised statistics of manorial holdings.4
Two years later, in 1953, H. R. Trevor-Roper published a full-scale assault on the Tawney thesis itself.5 So far from seeing the characteristic feature of the age as a rise of the gentry, he postulated instead a massive decline of the ‘mere gentry’ – small or middling landowners, hard-pressed by inflation and lacking alternative sources of income to maintain their accustomed way of life. Those who rose, according to Trevor-Roper, were, first, the yeomanry, who flourished on the profits of direct farming, rigorous austerity in spending, and systematic saving; and second, those gentry and nobility who had access to the cornucopia of gifts at the disposal of the Crown, or who practised trade or the law. The rising gentry were thus almost exclusively courtiers, court lawyers, and monopoly merchants. The ‘mere gentry’, who paid for all this largesse, were the ‘country party’, who in the 1640s overthrew the court system, who fought and defeated the King, and who finally emerged as the radical leaders of the New Model Army, the Independents. Their policy was decentralization, reduction of the costs of litigation, elimination of the detested Court, and destruction of its financial buttresses of state trading and manufacturing monopolies, sale of offices, wards and the like.
The brilliantly formulated argument at first swept all before it. Tawney attempted to defend some of his statistical methods, but he now lacked the vigour to take up the gage of battle which had been thrown down.6 In 1956 the way seemed to be cleared for general acceptance of the Trevor-Roper thesis, after J. P. Cooper had marshalled a battery of facts and arguments to demonstrate the worthlessness of the statistical methods of both Tawney and myself and had discredited the whole idea that somehow or other the counting of manors could be made to provide a useful indicator of social mobility.7
It was not until 1958 and 1959 that the Trevor-Roper thesis in turn came under serious criticism. Both J. E. C. Hill and P. Zagorin pointed out the extreme fragility – indeed, in some cases the nonexistence – of certain links in the chain of argument: the equation of ‘mere gentry’ with small gentry, and small gentry with declining gentry; the assertion that profit could not be made from agriculture in an inflationary era; the assumption that the Court was a smooth highway to riches; the explanation of religious radicalism as a refuge from economic decay; the failure to discuss the Parliamentary leaders of 1642; the identification of the Independents with the ‘mere gentry’ class; and the description of the policy of the Independents as one of decentralization.8
At about the same moment J. H. Hexter published a vigorous attack on both the Tawney and the Trevor-Roper theses;9 he asserted that Tawney was hypnotized by the Marxist theory of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the decline of feudalism and was trying to fit the events of seventeenth-century England into this pre-determined mould; that Trevor-Roper was obsessed with economic motivation at the expense of ideals and ideology, and saw politics merely as a struggle of the ‘Ins’ versus the ‘Outs’, the Court versus the Country, a version of the model set up by Sir Lewis Namier for mid-eighteenth-century England twenty years before. Hexter’s own explanation of the social changes prior to 1640 was a new version of my thesis of the decline of the aristocracy. He rejected my concept of financial decay, but argued that there had been a collapse of the military control by the aristocracy over the greater gentry. This meant that political leadership had shifted from the House of Lords to the House of Commons, though the immediate causes of the political breakdown of the 1640s he ascribed to the traditional religious and constitutional factors.
By now it was all too clear that fertility of hypothesis was running far ahead of factual research. What was needed was a massive assault upon the surviving records, economic and personal, of the landed classes of the period, and an examination of the footnotes to the various articles showed that no one had yet done very much work on these lines. Yet as it happened the material had just become available in bewildering profusion. After 1945 the rapid decline of the old land-owning classes caused a flood of private family papers to pour into the newly constituted County Record Offices, where they were catalogued and listed and made available for inspection. As a result the fifteen years 1955–70 saw a crop of doctoral theses upon the finances either of individual families such as the Percys or Hastings, or of a group of well-documented families in certain areas such as Northamptonshire or East Anglia, or of the gentry of a single county such as Yorkshire.10
In 1965 I published a book on the aristocracy, based on a lengthy study of private and public archives.11 In it I developed a new interpretation, an amalgam of some of my earlier ideas and those of J. H. Hexter. I argued that the aristocracy lost military power, territorial possessions and prestige; that their real income declined sharply under Elizabeth, largely due to conspicuous consumption, but recovered equally strongly in the early seventeenth century, largely due to buoyant landed revenues and lavish royal favours. These economic propositions I supported with a good deal of statistical evidence, some of it based on re-formulations of the previously discredited method of counting manors. But in my view, what was important was less the change in relative income than the change in the power and prestige of the magnates relative to that of the greater gentry. I argued that the change left the King and the Church in a dangerously exposed position when they started adopting highly unpopular religious and constitutional policies, and that the débâcle of 1640 was therefore made possible by this prior decline in the power and authority of the peerage.
This hypothesis has been subjected to vigorous criticism, primarily on the grounds that the category of peerage is a poor one for social analysis, since it includes both men whom the French called ‘Les Grands’, the handful of enormously rich and powerful court families, and also families which in terms of income and style of life were indistinguishable from the topmost levels of the squirarchy. The statistics upon which rests the case for a temporary economic decline have also been seriously questioned.12 On the other hand the main thesis of a temporary but severe decline of aristocratic prestige and power seems to have survived fairly well. More recently a number of doctoral dissertations on the gentry of particular counties have at last been published, which have been very helpful in eliminating certain hypotheses, and therefore in further narrowing the areas of disagreement. It is hardly possible any longer to regard the declining mere gentry as the backbone of the Revolution,13 or the Court as an important centre of attraction for the local gentry far from London,14 or bureaucracy or privateering as the royal road to riches for an aspiring gentleman.15 More and more the tensions within the society are seen to take the traditional forms of a political conflict between a series of local power élites and the central government, and a religious conflict between Puritans and Anglicans.16 What has begun to emerge is the social basis for these tensions in the transfer of power and property and prestige to groups of local landed élite, increasingly organized on both a national and a county basis to resist the political, fiscal and religious policies of the Crown; and the parallel shift to new mercantile interests in London, organized to challenge the economic monopoly and political control of the entrenched commercial oligarchy.
It is safe to say that no historical controversy in the last fifty years has attracted so much attention. Why is this? In the first place the area of disagreement appeared to be all-embracing: disagreement over the definition of terms by which to explain the phenomena under discussion; disagreement over what had happened; disagreement over the way it had happened; disagreement over the consequences of what had happened. Such total lack of common ground is very unusual, and its appearance seemed to cast doubt upon the right of the historian to be regarded as an empiricist who bases his enquiries upon reason and proof. Second, the protagonists mustered a prodigious array of talent. The three main contestants, R. H. Tawney, H. R. Trevor-Roper and J. H. Hexter, are all, in their different ways, very distinguished stylists; they are also that very rare thing, men who are capable of dealing in broad and original conceptual generalizations about the past. Third, the dispute soon developed into a kind of academic gladiatorial show, in which no quarter was offered. There have been few more brutally savage assaults in academic journals than that in which H. R. Trevor-Roper demonstrated the exaggerations and inaccuracies in my first article about the decline of the Elizabethan aristocracy. ‘An erring colleague is not an Amalekite to be smitten hip and thigh’,17 protested R. H. Tawney as he nursed his own wounds. Perhaps; but the debate was conducted with a ferocity which not only appealed to the sadism in us all but also gave it a sharp cutting edge.
There were, however, more important grounds for public interest. Many of the younger generation of historians, in France, in England and in the United States, believe that the future of history lies in a cautious selective cross-fertilization with the methods and theories of the social sciences, particularly politics, economics, sociology, social anthropology and social psychology. The problems that arise from any such attempt were brought sharply into focus by the gentry controversy. In the first place it raised, in an acute form, some fundamental problems of methodology. Today every historian, whatever his political persuasion, lays great stress on social forces as operative factors in history. We all talk glibly about social mobility, the rise of the middle classes and so on. This being so, the problem arises of how we are to demonstrate social change in a way that will carry conviction. Social historians of an earlier generation, such as G. M. Trevelyan, constructed their hypotheses on the basis of readily accessible personal documents – the Paston Letters, Pepys’s Diary, and so on – bolstered by a certain amount of contemporary comment and by quotations from the imaginative literature of the day from Chaucer to Dickens.18 These methods were applied, by all parties, to the debate about the gentry. Individual examples of rising peers, decaying peers, rising courtiers, decaying courtiers, rising gentry, decaying gentry were batted triumphantly to and fro. The stream of contemporary comment was quoted extensively, or dismissed as biased and misguided, as the occasion suited. The poets and playwrights were conscripted into the lines of battle. In the hands of dexterous polemicists the result was a bewildering variety of contradictory evidence which to an outside observer above the smoke and noise of conflict seemed to prove precisely nothing at all.
This was a superficial judgment; but what the controversy did bring out more clearly than has ever been apparent before was the shoddy basis of much traditional historical methodology. Plausible rational grounds were found for quite contradictory hypotheses; since the proponent of each theory was free to choose his own evidence, and since there were too many individual facts pointing in too many different ways, this theorizing could not be – and here demonstrably was not being – controlled by facts. This criticism was extended by philosophers to historical methodology as a whole, not without some signs of quiet satisfaction at the humiliation of a sister profession.19
It was to meet this objection of the futility of quoting individual examples to demonstrate a sociological proposition that R. H. Tawney attempted to give some scientific basis to his theories by applying the methods of the social sciences: quantitative measurements, systematic sampling and statistical testing. And it is on the reliability or otherwise of the statistical method employed – the counting of manors – that a good deal of the controversy has focused. As a result, a second conclusion of some general significance has emerged; namely, that the use of such methods enormously improves the quality of the evidence, but that in the last resort it is human judgment which determines its reliability: judgment about the meaning of the data, judgment about the way it is handled, judgment about the degree of error involved, judgment about the significance of the conclusions. Though hideous errors have been exposed, though disagreement continues, the whole level of the debate has been raised to a higher plane by the introduction of new, and potentially more empirical, evidence. This part of the debate has pointed the way to a fresh approach to the problems of establishing the direction and measuring the speed of social change in the past; it has also high-lighted the danger of embarking upon statistical calculation without statistical training or advice.
Analogous methodological argument has arisen from the attempts of D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington and of G. Yule to use the mass biographical technique to analyse the composition of the various political groupings in the 1640s.20 What has become all too clear is that in inexpert or timid hands this tool can become useless or positively misleading. J. E. C. Hill’s criticism of the methods of Brunton and Pennington, and D. Underdown’s of that of Yule, prove once again that it is necessary to ask the right questions and to employ the right categories if the new techniques of the social sciences are to contribute to the historical discipline more than jargon, obfuscation and a false sense of certainty.21
The most serious charge that can be levelled against the protagonists in the debate over the gentry is not so much that they were premature in formulating hypotheses, but that they gave inadequate thought to problems of classification, and that they were unwilling to recognize the large number of questions which had yet to be answered satisfactorily. Like the standard of living of the English worker in the early nineteenth century, or the quality of education in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the dispute has thrown up a vast mass of contradictory evidence and disputed statistics. Of the latter controversy Professor Bailyn has written: ‘We seem to be dealing here with one of those “questions mal posées” that need restatement before they can be answered.’22 This is equally true of the gentry controversy, and the search for new definitions of terms and new categories has been in progress for fifteen years or more.
If the historian is to reduce his evidence to intelligible order he is obliged to use abstract concepts and collective nouns. In discussing society he deals in groups labelled peasants, yeomen, gentry and aristocracy; or tenants and landlords, wage-labourers and capitalists; or lower class, middle class and upper class; or Court and Country; or bourgeois and feudal. Some of these categories, like titular aristocracy, are status groups; some, like capitalists, are economic classes with similar incomes derived from similar sources; some like ‘Court’, describe groups whose income, interests and geographical location are all temporarily based on a single institution. Every individual can be classified in many different ways, and the problem of how to choose the most meaningful categories is particularly difficult when dealing with mobile societies like that of seventeenth-century England. In 1640 do the divisions between titular status groups bear any statistically significant relation to divisions between classes based on differences of wealth, prestige and sources of wealth; has the category of gentlemen been expanded to such a degree as to be valueless for analytical purposes; if so, what is to be put in its place, how is the gentry to be subdivided? It was failure to clarify these issues in the first place which led to so much misunderstanding and recrimination as the debate proceeded. There is, moreover, the danger of treating these abstractions as personalized entities. In assessing the motives of the single individual, the precise admixture of calculation and emotion, the effects of heredity and environment, are difficult enough to determine even when the evidence is available in unusual quantities. How much more complicated it all becomes when it is a question of handling these abstract nouns, of dissecting them and of perceiving the precise relevance of the various threads which make up the pattern not of individual but of collective behaviour.
This is not exclusively a problem that besets the social historian, since it applies equally to the handling of religious or political history in this revolutionary age, for terms like Royalist or Parliamentarian, Presbyterian or Independent, have been shown to be applicable to individuals only with respect to certain issues at certain specific times.23 To very few men active in public affairs can a single political or religious label be attached which remains valid from, say, 1638 to 1662. This is because the English Revolution, like all others we know of, tended to devour its own children. The alignment of forces of 1640 was quite different from that of 1642, by which time a large block of former Parliamentarians had moved over to reluctant Royalism; it was different again in 1648, when the conservative element among the Parliamentarians, misleadingly known as the Presbyterians, swung back to the side of the King. In 1640 or 1642 virtually no one was republican; in 1649 England was a republic. In 1640 or 1642 virtually no one favoured religious toleration; by 1649 wide toleration for Protestants was achieved. One of the major causes of the muddled thinking about the causes of the English Revolution has arisen from the failure to establish precisely which stage of the Revolution is being discussed. Since each stage was triggered off by different immediate issues, since each was made possible by different long-term movements of society and ideology, and since each was directed by a different section of society, these distinctions are vitally important. It is a measure of the insularity of English historians that they have failed to profit from the lessons to be drawn from studies on the French Revolution, where the need for strict periodization when advancing theories of social causation has been obvious for over a century.
Another methodological difficulty arises from the lamentable fact that a single individual may be classed as gentry, bourgeois, country, capitalist and puritan, each valid for certain analytical purposes, none adequate as a single all-embracing characterization. Under each label, moreover, the individual will find himself lumped together with others, only some of whom will be his companions under other labels, and only a few under all of them. It is this multiple variability of categorization which makes the task of the social historian so extremely difficult. J. H. Hexter has been particularly active in demonstrating the dangers and confusions which may arise from the use as opposing categories of concepts like middle class and feudal class, gentry and aristocracy, court and country, Presbyterian and Independent.24 His demolition work is invaluable, but the historian must perforce work with some such collective vocabulary; other words, other concepts have therefore to be invented in their place, or the old ones have to be used with greater sophistication and a greater awareness of their artificiality. As R. H. Tawney observed: ‘Categories so general are not useless and cannot be discarded. Apart from their serviceableness as missiles in the mutual bombardment of historians, they have the virtue of suggesting problems, if at times they increase the difficulty of solving them.’
Political ideas are equally liable to misinterpretation, and J. Shklar has brilliantly demonstrated how Harrington has been refashioned generation after generation to suit the preconceptions and preoccupations of the commentators.25 A more striking example of the subjectivity of scholarship could hardly be found. Similarly, it is necessary to be particularly careful when handling the evidence of contemporaries. For example, Royalists’ propaganda, repeated subsequently by Clarendon, was concerned to cast doubts on both the purity of the motives and the social standing of their opponents. They therefore put it about that the Parliamentarians were activated by selfish ambitions for profit and office, and that they were men of inferior status, many of whom gained a living from disreputable trades. It is noticeable that both these ideas (which are part of the stock official line about any group of rebels, from the Pilgrimage of Grace to the Essex Rebellion) are reflected in the Trevor-Roper thesis of a declining ‘mere gentry’ driven on by a desire to become the ‘Ins’ rather than the ‘Outs’. This hypothesis has striking similarities to the modern assumption of a decaying petit-bourgeois base to Nazism, Fascism and such later manifestations as Poujadism, McCarthyism and Agnewism.
Lastly, there is the question of objectivity. It seems clear that in history, as in the social sciences, the hypothesis of the rigid segregation of facts and values is quite unrealistic. E. H. Carr believes that the first question a student must ask is what are the political and religious beliefs and the social background of the historian he is reading.26 The validity of this hypothesis is raised obliquely by the widely differing interpretations of the social origins of the Civil War and of the aspirations of the rebel leaders advanced by a conservative anti-clerical like H. R. Trevor-Roper, by a Christian socialist like R. H. Tawney, by a highly sophisticated Marxist like J. E. C. Hill of the late 1950s and 1960s, by an American liberal like J. H. Hexter and by an agnostic English liberal (which is not quite the same thing) like myself. How far has the way we look at the seventeenth century been affected by our political and religious attitudes towards the twentieth?
As well as these questions of methodology, the controversy has also raised important issues of substance, which are of general application over a wide field of historical studies. In one way or another they are all tied up with the question of what causes revolutions. And since it looks as if the twentieth century above all others is going to be the age of revolutions and counter-revolutions, this is a matter of some interest to politicians and planners as well as to historians. In the first place, is it possible to construct a ‘model’ of a revolutionary situation, or is P. Zagorin correct in arguing that ‘there is not, in fact, any model pattern of a bourgeois revolution, and while the investigation of analogies can be most illuminating, there are far more differences between the English and the French Revolutions than analogies’?27 Assuming that there are uniformities, what sort of a revolution was that of seventeenth-century England? Is it a revolution of a class in full decline, or of a class whose expectations were rising even faster than its objective situation? Is it a protest movement of socially frustrated and economically stagnant or declining mere gentry or of rich and rising gentry temporarily thwarted in their aspirations by the arbitrary taxation, the religious policy and the authoritarian rule of the Eleven Years’ Tyranny? On the other side, was there a court group whose ever-increasing size, wealth and arrogance provoked the outsiders to rebellion? Or were Crown, Court, Church and Aristocracy all sinking – either absolutely or relatively – in power, wealth and prestige, and so tempting the outsiders to seize control? Can the two sides of the Civil War really be equated, as the Marxists would have it, with the rising bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the declining feudal classes on the other?
A related problem, first posed in this particular form by H. R. Trevor-Roper, is whether or not the English revolution is part of a general European movement.28 The nation state, with its complex bureaucratic structure, its extensive interference in the private lives of its subjects and its huge financial and military resources, is perhaps the most striking, if not the most admirable, contribution of Western civilization to the world over the past five hundred years. It is generally agreed that decisive steps forward in this evolution took place towards the end of the fifteenth century, and that the middle of the seventeenth century saw a major crisis of some sort in most of the great European states: England, France and Spain were all wracked by revolutionary movements on a considerable scale. Are these revolutions similar in character and causation; and, if so, what is it they have in common? H. R. Trevor-Roper believes that they are similar, and that their basic characteristic is a revolt of the under-privileged and over-taxed ‘country’ against the expanding, oppressive, corrupt and authoritarian courts and bureaucracies of the age; that it was in fact the last, futile attempt to stop the process of national centralization before the age of absolutism set in. This thesis has since been developed for England on a large scale by P. Zagorin, but what is still in dispute is whether England possessed a bureaucracy and court on a scale at all comparable to those of Brussels, Paris, or Madrid, and whether the aspirations of the Parliamentary opposition of 1640–2 were in fact anti-Court and decentralizing in character.29 This raises the question of whether England between the mid-sixteenth and mid-twentieth century should be considered as a normal part of the European scene, or as an idiosyncratic sport best studied in isolation.
Not all historians are agreed that great events must necessarily have great causes. There are those who see the breakdown of 1640 and the war of 1642 as the product merely of a series of political blunders by certain individuals in positions of power.30 If one takes this view, the whole controversy over the trend of social movement in the previous half-century becomes totally beside the point. The objection to this, however – and to my mind a decisive objection – is that it muddles up two quite different things: the preconditions, the long-term social, economic and ideological trends that make revolutions possible, and which are subject to comparative analysis and generalization; and the triggers, the personal decisions and the accidental pattern of events which may or may nor set off the revolutionary outbreak, and which are unique and unclassifiable.
Finally there are serious differences of opinion about three propositions put forward by Karl Marx (indeed, at one stage the discussion threatened to get mixed up with the battle of Cold War ideologies). One theory, first advanced by Aristotle, revived by Harrington in the seventeenth century and reformulated by Marx in the nineteenth, is that a constitution is a direct reflection of the distribution of social and economic power; consequently, the two must alter in step together if major upheavals are to be avoided. The main weakness of Harrington’s doctrine, and the aspect which distinguishes it most sharply from that of Marx, is his obsessive preoccupation with landed property to the exclusion of all other forms of wealth. But this was not altogether unrealistic in the seventeenth-century English context, despite the growing resources and political influence of the London mercantile and financial community. This view, moreover, was not merely confined to a handful of members of the Rota Club, as H. R. Trevor-Roper has suggested.31 The prolonged parliamentary debate on the revival of a second chamber in 1659 shows that there was considerable agreement in the House of Commons on the Harringtonian thesis of the relationship of the constitution to the balance of property, though only the Republicans thought – wrongly as it turned out – that the peers had lost most of their property and that the balance had consequently been destroyed rather than modified.
We can see today that this hypothesis needs to be qualified in various ways, and in particular that very much greater weight needs to be given to ideological enthusiasm, military force and traditional habits of obedience, which together or in isolation may often outweigh crude economic pressures. Like Hobbes, Harrington had little understanding of the complex web of social relationships which bind man to man, quite apart from the economic and physical necessity for co-operation and obedience. He failed altogether to recognize the force of passion and prejudice, even though his own political theories and actions were in large measure dictated by an impractical admiration for the Roman Republic. He did realize that in certain cases, such as the Norman Conquest of England or the Spanish Conquest of Central America, violence has been used to redistribute wealth and power in a manner appropriate to the new – and extremely tenacious – political establishment. More frequently, political power has been manipulated to channel wealth into the hands of the ruling élite, thus keeping the social structure and the political constitution in line by adjusting the former to the latter, rather than vice versa. It was Sir Thomas More who produced the disillusioned judgment:32
when I consider and weigh in my mind all these commonwealths, which nowadays anywhere do flourish, so God help me I can perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely, without fear of losing, that they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labour of the poor for as little money as may be. These devices, when the rich men have decreed to be kept and observed under colour of the commonality, that is to say, also of the poor people, then they be made laws.
With these important qualifications – with some of which Harrington is not altogether in disagreement – the view that there must be a direct relationship between social structure and political institutions and that the former tends to dictate the latter, is widely accepted today, even by historians and politicians of a strongly anti-Marxist cast of mind. It is generally agreed, for example, that land reform is a necessary preliminary to the introduction of democratic institutions and ideals in Latin America.
The notion that constitutional or administrative history can be studied in a social vacuum, as an isolated story of the growth of liberty or bureaucracy or whatever, is one that few historians are now prepared to countenance. The problems of power and its distribution are seen to be entangled with the whole complex of nurture, education and the family system, social norms and ethical values, religious beliefs and ecclesiastical organization, the land law, status hierarchy and economic structure of the society as a whole. The major problem is to explain how, and to what extent, the various parts all fit together.
The second of Marx’s theories is that the first major shift in European society was from the feudal to the bourgeois phase, which occurred in the seventeenth century in England and in the late eighteenth century in France. It was Engels who produced the first full-blown explanation of how the English Revolution fitted into the Marxist interpretative framework. He achieved this by some brisk legerdemain which changed nobles and gentry into ‘bourgeois landlords’, and thus made it possible to regard the Revolution as a ‘bourgeois upheaval’. The end result was the creation of a state based on the compromise of 1689, by which ‘The political spoils of “pelf and place” were left to the great landowning families, provided that the enormous interests of the financial, manufacturing and commercial middle class was sufficiently attended to.’33 This theory of Engels lies at the back of Tawney’s definition of the rising gentry as progressive-minded and capitalist and of the Royalist supporters as old-fashioned and feudal. It was not until the 1950s that this old equation of the gentry with the bourgeoisie was severely criticized by J. H. Hexter and P. Zagorin, on both logical and factual grounds.34
The third proposition of Marx which is involved in the controversy concerns the relationship of social and economic forces on the one hand, and ideology on the other. Marx tended to see the latter as a sociologically motivated superstructure and H. R. Trevor-Roper similarly seems to regard religion as economically determined.35 Tawney took a far more sophisticated view of the relationship between ideas and interests, but his interpretation also laid great stress on material motives. It is doubtful whether he was prepared to give much weight to the ostensible issues of political liberty and religious reform in assessing the causes of the upheavals of the 1640s. Hill has moved from an assumption that ideas are largely mere superstructure to a position where they loom larger and larger as historical forces in their own right.36 So complex is the human personality that materialism and idealism, reason and emotion, interests and morals, are constantly confused, first one and then the other rising to the surface. There is no final solution to this problem, and every historian must work according to his private judgment. At bottom it seems to come down to whether he takes an optimistic or a pessimistic view of human nature: optimists stress ideals, pessimists material interests.
Looking back on the controversy today, it seems clear that all parties in the early stages were taking an indefensibly narrow view of the causes of revolution. They paid too much attention to changes in the distribution of wealth, and too little to less tangible factors, such as changing ideals, aspirations and habits of obedience. They confused two different things: a material and moral weakening of the ruling élite, and a strengthening of the size and intensity of the dissident elements. Above all they failed to see that revolutions have extremely complicated origins, and that social causes are only one among many. What can be said in defence of the protagonists, however, is that it is in no small part because of their pioneer efforts and blunders that a more sophisticated view of the causes of the English Revolution is beginning to emerge.
1 R. H. Tawney, ‘Harrington’s interpretation of his age’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 27, 1941. R. H. Tawney, ‘The rise of the gentry, 1558–1640’, Economic History Review, 11, 1941.
2 L. Stone, ‘The anatomy of the Elizabethan aristocracy’, Economic History Review, 18, 1948.
3 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy: an anatomy anatomised’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 3, 1951.
4 L. Stone, ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy: a restatement’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 4, 1952.
5 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The gentry, 1540–1640’, Economic History Review, Supplement 1, 1953.
6 R. H. Tawney, ‘The rise of the gentry: a postscript’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 7, 1954.
7 J. P. Cooper, ‘The counting of manors’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 8, 1956.
8 C. Hill, ‘Recent interpretations of the Civil War’, in Puritanism and Revolution, London, 1958. P. Zagorin, ‘The social interpretations of the English Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 19, 1959.
9 J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History, London, 1961.
10 G. R. Batho, ‘The finances of an Elizabethan nobleman: Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 9, 1957.
G. R. Batho, ‘The household papers of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland’, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 93, 1962.
C. Cross, The Puritan Earl, 1536–1595, London, 1966.
M. E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640, Northants Record Society Publications, 19, 1955.
A. Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry, 1540–1660, Chicago, 1961.
J. T. Cliffe, The Yorkshire Gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War, London, 1969.
11 L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, Oxford, 1965.
12 D.C. Coleman, ‘The gentry controversy and the aristocracy in crisis, 1558–1641’, History, 51, 1966.
J. H. Hexter, ‘The English aristocracy, its crisis, and the English Revolution’, Journal of British Studies, 8, 1968.
E. L. Petersen, ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy anatomized, atomized and reassessed’, Scandinavian Economic History Review, 16, 1968.
13 J. T. Cliffe, op. cit., p. 351.
W. G. Hoskins, ‘The estates of the Caroline gentry’, in Devonshire Studies, ed.
W. G. Hoskins and H. P. R. Finberg, London, 1952.
14 J. T. Cliffe, op. cit., p. 85.
W. T. MacCaffrey, ‘Place and patronage in Elizabethan polities’, in Elizabethan Government and Society, ed. S. T. Bindoff et al., London, 1961.
G. E. Aylmer, ‘Office-holding as a factor in English history, 1625–42’, History, 44, 1959.
15 G. Aylmer, op. cit.
L. Stone, ‘Office under Queen Elizabeth: the case of Lord Hunsdon and the lord chamberlainship in 1585’, Historical Journal, 10, 1967; P. Zagorin, ‘Sir Edward Stanhope’s advice to Thomas Wentworth, Viscount Wentworth, concerning the deputyship of Ireland’, Historical Journal, 7, 1964.
A. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, Cambridge, 1964.
16 T. G. Barnes, Somerset, 1625–1640, Cambridge, Mass., 1961.
J. T. Cliffe, op. cit., chs 12, 13.
A. Everitt, Suffolk and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660, Suffolk Records Society, 3, 1960.
A. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, Leicester, 1966.
A. Everitt, Change in the Provinces: the Seventeenth Century, Leicester, 1969.
17 R. H. Tawney, op. cit., 1954, p. 97.
18 G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History, London, 1942.
19 P. Gardiner, The Nature of Historical Explanation, Oxford, 1952. W. H. Walsh, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History, New York, 1960.
20 D. Brunton and D. H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament, London, 1954.
G. Yule, The Independents in the English Civil War, Cambridge, 1958.
21 C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, London, 1964.
D. Underdown, ‘The Independents reconsidered’, Journal of British Studies, 3, 1964; See also G. Yule, ‘Independents and Revolutionaries’, loc. cit., 7, 1968, and D. Underdown, ‘Independents again’, loc. cit., 8, 1968.
22 B. Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society, New York [n.d.], p. 80.
23 J. H. Hexter, ‘The Presbyterian Independents’, Reappraisals in History, London, 1961.
G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles 1,1625–42, London, 1961, p. 393; V. Pearl, ‘The “Royal Independents” in the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 18, 1968.
24 J. H. Hexter, op. cit., chs 5, 6, 7.
25 J. Shklar, ‘Ideology hunting: the case of James Harrington’, American Political Science Review, 53, 1959.
26 E. H. Carr, What is History?, London, 1962, p. 48.
27 P. Zagorin, ‘The social interpretations of the English Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 19, 1959, pp. 389–90.
28 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The general crisis of the seventeenth century’, Past and Present, 16, 1959; 18, 1960.
29 P. Zagorin, The Court and the Country, London, 1969.
30 C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace, 1637–41, London, 1955.
31 H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The gentry, 1540–1640’, p. 46.
32 T. More. Utopia (Everyman edition), London, p. 112.
33 F. Engels, Introduction to the English Edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, London, 1892; reprinted in Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. S. Feuer, New York, 1959, p. 57.
34 J. H. Hexter, op. cit., ch. 5. P. Zagorin, op. cit., pp. 381–87.
35 H. R. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., p. 31.
36 The shift can be traced through: J. E. C. Hill, The English Revolution, London, 1940; The Economic Problems of the Church, Oxford, 1956; ‘La Révolution anglaise du XVIIe siècle (Essai d’ interprétation), Revue Historique, 221, 1959; The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714, Edinburgh, 1961. In a recent statement of his position, he perceptively describes ideas as the steam of history: ‘Steam is essential to the driving of a railroad engine; but neither a locomotive nor a permanent way can be built out of steam.’ (C. Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, Oxford, 1965, p. 3.)