Since this book was first published fourteen years ago, in 1972, a flood tide of ‘revisionist’ scholarship has washed over the whole field. If the book were to be rewritten altogether today, how much would it have to be altered in the light of new information and new ideas?
Less political science jargon would certainly be used in Chapter I, and clumsy and ambiguous phrases like ‘multiple dysfunction’ would be dropped. On the other hand, nothing that has been written in the last fourteen years has in any way undermined the usefulness of these models of revolution taken from political science in making historians think conceptually. For example, the Relative Deprivation theory – if extended from economic conditions to symbolic capital and mental states such as social status, political participation, traditional liberties and religious beliefs – still makes very good sense. People become discontented with their situation, not if it gets objectively worse, but if it gets worse relative to previous expectations of improvement, or relative to the situation of those against whom they measure themselves, which usually means their neighbours.
In the past fourteen years a huge amount of ink – and blood (a good deal of it mine) – has been shed by ‘revisionist’ historians engaged in rewriting the political history of early seventeenth-century England according to a consensus model of the relations between Crown and Parliament.1 They stress four things. First, there was no such thing as a ‘winning of the initiative’ by the House of Commons. They argue that the Crown always kept the upper hand, as shown by Charles’s use of prorogation and suspension, and the inability of Parliament to pass much legislation; second, the procedural innovations once seen as crucial can all be traced back to Elizabethan times (a finding which of course in no way affects a judgment about the new uses to which they were put); third, there was no continuity in the various constitutional crises from the Apology of the House of Commons in 1604 to the Ship-money Case of 1636 and the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, all of which were merely isolated episodes; fourth, no one of these episodes constituted a direct challenge to royal authority, to which M.P.s always ostensibly expressed devotion and loyalty: thus there was not – and indeed conceptually could not have been – an ‘opposition’, much less an ‘opposition party’ systematically attacking an institution so universally revered.
A few have gone so far as to make a fifth argument that many of the leading trouble-making M.P.s were mere tools and clients of factious noblemen involved in court intrigues for personal advancement or revenge. ‘A good historian,’ one claims, ‘will expect to find members of the lower house acting as clients of peers.’2 This is a curious development since it is an adaptation, in the context of another century, of the old Namierite thesis about mid-eighteenth-century English politics, the inadequacies of which historians have been busy exposing in these last fourteen years. ‘Revisionist’ history of seventeenth-century politics has thus been proceeding in the opposite direction to ‘revisionist’ history of eighteenth-century politics. The argument is clearly untenable, although there is no doubt that the role of the House of Lords in the politics of the period has until recently been badly neglected. An up-dated revision of this book would allow greater weight to the growth of opposition politics in the House of Lords in the 1620s.3
Ignoring these extremist positions, almost everyone would now agree that the continuity and intensity of opposition feeling in Parliament may have been slightly exaggerated, and that the consensus school of ‘revisionists’ has performed a mildly useful service in drawing attention to both the continuing strength of loyalty to the regime and the contingency factor of day-to-day political developments. On the other hand, there is a strongly supported position, with which I concur, that the revisionists have thrown the baby out with the bath water, and have in consequence produced a wholly misleading historical interpretation.
First, they have totally ignored such long-term issues as the intrinsic weaknesses of the Elizabethan State and Church, or the economic, social, educational and administrative rise of the gentry, which was quietly but inexorably transforming the balance of political power. Second, they have ignored the growing cultural split between court and country which became such a marked feature of the England of Charles I. Third, they have seriously under-estimated the degree of continuity in the constitutional struggle from crisis to crisis, as proven by the constant harping back to previous episodes. Lastly, they have mistaken the medium for the message: they have stressed consensus on parliamentary procedure and the rhetoric of obedience to the sovereign, and in doing so have ignored or down-played evident signs of deep conflict about fundamental issues of principle concerning law, liberty, privilege and the preservation of the protestant religion. As Hexter and others have pointed out, these matters were not merely on everyone’s lips: there is good reason to believe they were also in their hearts. After all, even an unscrupulous local power-boss such as Sir Robert Phelips of Somerset made impassioned speeches on just such matters of principle, thereby exposing himself to imprisonment and loss of office. Why should he run such a risk and suffer such humiliations if he did not believe what he said? How can Russell argue that he ‘seldom dealt in ideals, but only the realism of politicking. That was his life-blood, not the sentiment bound up in the words liberty and privilege’. Unless we are to conclude that Phelips was a totally inept politician, his fate contradicts Russell’s conclusion about his motives.4
The result is a paradoxical one. Faced with overwhelming evidence of rising political tensions in the 1620s between an ambitious monarch and a Parliament and society unwilling to support it financially, Russell describes a situation of paralysis in government that, as J.H. Hexter has pointed out, differs hardly at all from my own concept of a society beset by ‘multiple dysfunctions’.5
After the dust has settled, my model has therefore been reinforced rather than undermined by the rush to consensual revisionism. This is because the general arguments about preconditions going back to the shaky foundation of the Early Tudor State, Church and society, have not been – indeed cannot have been – affected by a flood of scholarship exclusively devoted to the other two sectors of the problem labelled ‘precipitants’ and ‘triggers’. Since the book continually emphasized that Civil War and Revolution were not inevitable, the recent concentration on contingency factors leaves the model unaffected one way or the other. Thus, after a close study of the period 1640–2, Fletcher rightly concludes that civil war broke out as a result of ‘hopeless misunderstanding’, ‘irreconcilable distrust’ and ‘fierce ideological conflict’. But given his narrow time-frame and perspective he is quite unable to explain these psychological attitudes, whose origins stretch back in time.6
The basic division of opinion lies between those, like myself or Edward Gibbon, who believe that great events have great as well as trivial causes, and those who regard these great events as little more than ‘road accidents’, entirely the result of mistakes by careless or stupid drivers. This is not a new idea, for it goes at least back to the late nineteenth century. But the road accident model contains a basic philosophical flaw. It is one thing to reject determinism in history – almost all of us would agree on that – but another to deny any role whatever to impersonal forces, which is what the analogy implies. In 1955, Sir Herbert Butterfield had some sensible things to say on this subject: ‘The margin of choices made by individuals is like a small segment cut out of the great circle of necessity. If any such margin is granted at all, it is sufficient to alter the character of all history.’ On the other hand, he also asserted – evidently rashly – that ‘no one would challenge the ascription of a considerable area of human life to the sphere of law and necessity’.7
Around this central stem of ‘revisionist’ political historiography, there has also grown up a rich profusion of branches, some of them quite exotic. Some scholars have advanced a localist factional argument, about which there is also now a huge literature. The proliferation of local county or city studies has tempted some to argue that there was no such thing as national politics in the early seventeenth century, but merely a series of disconnected local political conflicts each closely limited to the affairs of a province or a county or a city, whose protagonists were united, if at all, only in a common antipathy to interference from the centre. Morrill has claimed that ‘each county reacted differently according to particular local burdens of particular policies. . . . Side-taking for the great majority was largely arbitrary . . . polarization . . . usually followed the lines of purely local groupings’. Everitt has argued that ‘Each county became more than ever a little self-centred kingdom on its own.’8 This theory held the field for a while until it became evident that local gentry and civic leaders had not only close county or urban loyalties, but also equally close connections with the central government, not only as the necessary source of jobs, licences, patents, monopolies, charters, etc. but also as the source of irksome taxation and political interference.9 There was indeed a growth of localism, but one which merely kept pace with the growth of local concern with national issues.10 The discovery of an outpouring in 1641–2 of local petitions to Parliament on purely national issues of religion, peace, administrative reform, the law, etc. finally demonstrated the intimate concern of local elites and the ‘middling sort’ for national politics at Westminster, and effectively put an end to the attempt to deconstruct the English Revolution into a series of petty, localized conflicts in which choice of side was often determined ‘by the accident of events’.11
A more fruitful development has been a shift of attention from Parliament’s relations with the Crown to closer examination of the royal administration itself. Here the stress has been first on the overwhelming problem of financing necessary military activity from a wholly inadequate and antiquated tax base; and second on the critical importance of the struggle for national unity which was simultaneously in progress in Britain, France and Spain in the 1620s and 1630s. Thus the Stuarts were undone, so the argument goes, by revolts in Scotland and Ireland, caused by their attempts to incorporate these fringe areas into a unified political and religious structure, just as the Spain of Olivares was brought to its knees by the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal against similar attempts at centralization. One enthusiastic exponent of this new line of thought has even attempted to rehabilitate the reputation of the Duke of Buckingham as a far-sighted national statesman – in the process running directly counter to his own evidence.12
How far do these new ideas about consensus parliamentary politics, neo-Namierite aristocratic factionalism, county community localism, and causal accidentalism dictate a radical reshaping of this book? In reviewing the original edition of 1972, G.R. Elton perceptively noted that there was not much in it that would have raised the eyebrows of A.F. Pollard or S.R. Gardiner. It was, he said, much the same old Whig interpretation in modern sociological and political science dress. At the time I was wounded (as I was intended to be), but I now see some slight justice in his point.13 The very recent renewed emphasis on religious conflict and the fear of Popery, and on the constitutional conflict over liberty and the law as the two break-points that shattered the legitimacy of the regime by 1640 merely confirm the continuing validity of the older model.14
Although my interpretation was indeed in some ways a fairly conservative one, nevertheless it broke new ground in a variety of ways. It was novel in its stress on the structural defects in the Tudor polity going back to the Reformation; and on long-term forces of social, economic and cultural change at work below the surface of particular events. It was also novel in the multiplicity of factors, social, economic, political, religious, military and ideological and personal, which were brought to bear on the problem. It was novel in its combination of the new findings of social history, used in a firmly non-Marxist and non-determinist fashion, with the more traditional Whiggish stress on political and religious conflict. Finally it was novel in the division of causes into long-term, short-term and triggers, which made this amalgam conceptually manageable.
Before describing how the book might usefully be modified today, it is best first to clear away those criticisms which are without substance. Some have argued that the tripartite division of causes into presuppositions, precipitants and triggers is an artificial construct that breaks the seamless web of history. This is indeed true enough, but no one has offered any better way of handling such diverse factors as the rise of the gentry, Puritanism, and a ‘country’ ideology; the policies of Buckingham, Charles and Laud, which succeeded in alienating almost all the political nation by 1640; and the particular day-to-day events and decisions which led to war in 1640–2. The tripartite model of preconditions, precipitants and triggers is not only useful but essential, on condition that it is treated merely as a convenient organizational device for sorting out a huge mass of very diverse factors. However arbitrary, the division of causes into long-term preconditions, short-term precipitants and immediate triggers, makes it possible to evade the false claims of Marxist economic determinists, neo-Whig progressive evolutionists, and ‘revisionist’ exponents of pure accidentalism.
Because about forty pages were spent on long-term causes, some critics have accused the book of arguing – or if not arguing, implying – that the English Revolution was inevitable. Readers need only examine pp. 56, 131–2 and 164–5 in order to judge for themselves whether or not this is true. As a good Weberian, my position has always been that there is a clear distinction between logically necessary consequences which derive from the abstract nature of given historical structures, and hypothetical propositions that link together actual events and people, and which are by their nature merely probabilistic, and dependent for their realization upon specific contingencies.
There is one respect, however, in which the model itself is now in need of minor adjustment. The ‘revisionist’ work of Russell and others and the ‘anti-revisionist’ work of Hexter, Hirst and others, both suggest that it would be wise to push the beginning of the ‘Precipitants’ back from 1629 to 1626. If this were done, the latter could now include not only the debate over the Petition of Right in 1628, but also the raising of the forced loan of 1626, which led to the arrest of large numbers of respectable and respected squires. The significance of this deeply traumatic event on gentry psychology is down-played by Russell, but in fact it was in 1626, by raising illegal taxes, arresting many important gentry recalcitrants, and patronizing Arminians in the church, that Charles, Buckingham and Laud first gave English politics and religion a violent push to the right, and thus began a wholly new phase of political tension. It now begins to look as if the emphasis in the book (pp. 150–1, 155–6) on the folly, obstinacy and duplicity of Charles I in causing the catastrophe was if anything understated. Despite one unconvincing attempt in his defence,15 recent work has tended to strengthen the perception of a man who made every mistake in the book, and in consequence eventually brought disaster on himself and his country. Compared to his son, even the admittedly inept and foolish James I is beginning to look rather better.16
Many points made in the sections on precipitants and triggers in the original edition have been strongly reinforced by more recent scholarship. Examples are the nuanced stress on Court/Country conflict (pp. 118–21);17 on the revolutionary character of Laudian Arminianism which allowed members of Parliament in 1640 to see themselves as conservative defenders of the Elizabethan church (pp. 132–6);18 on the importance of the fear of Popery after 1628 in destroying the legitimacy of the Stuart monarchy (pp. 136–7);19 and on the significance of the illegal financial measures of 1626 to 1639 in stimulating opposition sentiments (pp. 137–9).20
There is one important statement in the book, however, which needs substantial correction (pp. 163–4): ‘the labouring poor . . . played no part whatever in the Revolution except as cannon fodder for both sides’. Recent work has indicated that the ‘middling sort’ of towns and villages played a growing part in the political and religious debates of the day. It has been argued that there was a dramatic increase in the size of the electorate in the decades before the Civil War, and there can be no question that the elections of 1640 were more hotly disputed than any that had gone before.21 Moreover, the flood of petitions from county assemblies of yeomen and gentry that poured into Parliament in 1641–2, asking for law, liberty, church reform and peace, indicates that there was a wide and articulate consciousness of national issues which penetrated surprisingly far down the social scale.22 The lords and gentry who were the main actors in the political arena were not entirely autonomous agents, but were being pushed or pulled by a larger constituency. It also seems that even the small tenant farmers and labourers developed political allegiances as the war progressed, and were far from being mere inert cannon fodder for the two armies.23 This was, perhaps, only to be expected, given the record of popular disturbances, minor but persistant, which had occurred over the previous half-century.24
Much new work has been done on the role of Puritanism, the ultimately, if unintentionally, subversive character of whose ideas was examined at some length in the section on preconditions (pp. 110–16). On the other hand, it was also argued that the Puritans ‘believed strongly in the preservation of traditional social and political hierarchies’, and that before the advent of Arminianism they were mostly content to stay within the Anglican Church. Both these themes have recently been developed in greater depth. The basic Calvinism of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church has been strongly emphasized, and the split between Puritans and Anglicans had been down-played.25 But this recent emphasis upon the overt and undeniable conservatism of Puritanism can be overdone, for unless its latent and unintentional radicalism is clearly understood, popular movements such as that of the Levellers or the thought processes of men like John Milton become unintelligible, while the emergence of Ranters, Diggers, Muggletonians, and other strange inhabitants of Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down remains wholly incomprehensible. The extraordinary effect of Puritan thought in stimulating moral introspection and political independence has recently been revealed in the voluminous writings of an early seventeenth-century London artisan, in whose closed world there was no place for consensus, compromise or comprehension.26
More important is the new work in local history, which has shown that a key to the growth of Puritanism as an ideology was its role among the emerging ‘better sort’ of the village or towns as a support of and justification for personal and social control. Economic and demographic pressures were fragmenting the village and urban communities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The emerging ‘better sort’ were increasingly disturbed by signs of social breakdown, such as growing vagrancy, unemployment, bastardy and petty crime. They took up Puritanism as an ideology of self-discipline, and having internalized its austere values, set out to use them to impose social order on the village labourers and the poor. Remaining within the Anglican church, in their capacities as churchwardens and overseers of the poor, they began to take severe punitive action against social and moral deviants such as vagrants, mothers and fathers of illegitimate children, those guilty of drunkenness or minor breaches of the ban on work on the Sabbath, and married couples proven guilty of pre-nuptial cohabitation by the birth of a child within eight months of marriage. For these ‘middling sort’ of the village, Puritanism was a form of moral discipline, both for themselves and for the community at large. The time would come, however, when the intensity of their faith would break through the bonds of what they came to perceive as a crypto-Popish and immoral church and state. When that moment came, in 1640–2, the adherents of this fundamentalist belief system demanded a thorough reformation of state, church, society and the law.27 This new work thus neatly ties together the conservative and the radical strains in Puritanism.
The third major modification concerns constitutional issues. Critics from the ‘anti-revisionist’ flank, like J.H. Hexter, were right to complain that the significance of the constitutional conflict in the late 1620s over the law, liberty and religion was underplayed in the book. Russell’s admirable parliamentary narrative (from which he draws what seem to many of us to be the wrong conclusions) and the monumental publication by a team put together by Hexter of the debates in the 1628 Parliament leading up to the Petition of Right, both show how central these issues were in the minds of the M.P.s at the time. It is not that constitutional issues were neglected in the book – they were certainly there – but merely that they were not given the even greater weight they clearly deserve.
Thus, despite the vigorous criticism by the ‘revisionist’ historians of the Whig teleology embedded in the older view of parliamentary proceedings in the 1620s, this ‘constitutional’ interpretation has been strengthened rather than weakened by the new documentation provided over the past years, partly by Russell, and partly by Hexter and his team of editors of the Parliamentary Diaries for that decade. Margaret Judson’s The Crisis of the Constitution reads as well today as it did on publication over thirty-five years ago.28 A revised version of this book would consequently have to devote rather more space to constitutional issues of law and liberty than it does at present.
In explaining the collapse into civil war in 1640–2, a mistake was made in attributing much significance to the death of the Earl of Bedford (p. 154). It now appears that distrust already ran too deep for there to have been much chance that he could have succeeded in bridging the gap, even if he had lived.29 Full weight was certainly given to the strains of dealing with first the Scottish and then the Irish rebellions, and it was pointed out that the two were related episodes in a general provincial reaction to centralizing moves by Charles, Strafford and Laud to unify ‘Great Britain’ under a single church and polity (pp. 151–2). In this respect the policies of Wentworth, Olivares and Richelieu were similar, and led to similar financial crises, but the results were strikingly different. Recent arguments that all Western European governments were faced with the same problem of financing large and longer wars are clearly true, but the conclusions are fallacious. In England, the wars remained relatively trivial in duration and scope, so that the burden of taxation under Charles I remained astonishingly light – that under Cromwell being about ten times larger. Thus England was the only monarchical state in Europe to suffer total collapse and yet it was the one which carried the lightest financial burden of war, a paradox which those like Russell who blame war and a niggardly Parliament for the breakdown have yet to explain. The truth is that the problem was not the growing cost of war, which was not severe in England, nor the primitive credit structure, which was common to all the great powers. It was above all the reluctance of the tax-payers to contribute to the cost of unpopular policies, and their political ability through Parliament to refuse supplies. Both these defects had deep structural causes, and they could only be solved by a psychological rallying of the ‘middling sort’, gentry and nobility behind the crown and its policies. Such unification did indeed occur after 1689 in the early stages of the wars against Louis XIV to defend the country from ‘Popery, Tyranny and Wooden Shoes’, resulting in a severe land tax, the beginnings of an excise tax and the foundation of the Bank of England. This financial revolution which solved the Stuarts’ financial problems was built on the concession of parliamentary control over both policies and the supplies to enforce them.30
Some criticism has been directed to the focus upon the end-product of the book, namely the collapse of the regime in 1640 and the outbreak of civil war in 1642, instead of on to the unleashing of a cultural revolution in 1647. It is certainly very misleading to make a division – as scholars on both sides often do – between those who talk about ‘the English Revolution’ and those who talk about ‘the English Civil War’. We can surely all agree that the period 1642–5 was indeed one of civil war not revolution, although there were already some clearly revolutionary undertones in sermon literature, the parliamentary army and London. We can surely also agree that the period 1647–53, on the other hand, was one of full political, religious and cultural revolution in which all the old landmarks were either destroyed or threatened. The Protectorate period 1653–60 was one of uneasy consolidation of gains and a revival of conservatism, especially in social policy.
This book did not attempt to explain the causes of the revolutionary explosion of 1647–53 and its defeat at the hands of more conservative forces thereafter. It was frankly stated that ‘this essay is not concerned with the causes of the further stages of the Revolution’ after 1642 (pp. 164–5). Perhaps this decision was a mistake, but to go further would have involved a whole new chapter is order to explain in convincing detail these complex and wholly unexpected developments. It seemed enough to try to explain why civil war broke out in 1642 without going into why the revolution thereafter took the particular course it did. My unspoken model in the enterprise was of course de Tocqueville’s great book on the Ancien Régime in France, which sought to explain the collapse of the royal government in 1789 but did not pursue the unanticipated developments over the next five years.
With these significant modifications, however, the book can stand virtually unchanged today. The attempted historiographic revolution of the ‘revisionists’ has not succeeded in creating a plausible alternative model of political change based on a theory of consensus, although it has certainly forced a rather greater recognition of the basic conservatism of the bulk of the propertied classes, including the puritans, at least up to 1625 and the fatal accession to the throne of Charles I. But such a minor modification does nothing to affect the long-term structural forces which were pushing the country towards a loss of confidence in government, nor of the accelerating trend to crisis after 1626 generated by royal policies. The outcome might possibly have been either the establishment of a church-supported absolute monarchy, on the lines of the France of Louis XIV; or, more likely, a greater diffusion of power among the landed elite, greater political participation by the ‘middling’ sort of voters, greater influence over foreign affairs granted to the mercantile elite of London, and greater legal tolerance for, and local political power to, Protestant religious dissenters. Whichever the general direction of change, the process by which it was reached might result from a peaceful adjustment or from civil war and bloodshed. Neither the means nor the outcome of the struggle were inevitable.
What no one could have predicted in 1640, and virtually no one actually wished for, was the abolition of the monarchy, the church and the House of Lords, and the explosive and terrifying emergence for a brief period of all the more bizarre manifestations of a genuine cultural revolution from below. The fear engendered by this brief appearance on the stage of English history of ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ was to put a damper on most attempts at moderate reform for almost two centuries.
This fear of a recurrence of war and true revolution also caused the restoration to the Crown in 1660 of many, though not all, of its pre-war powers, as well as the restoration of the Laudian church, although in somewhat less aggressive disguise. As a result of these concessions made to the Crown, and the quite extraordinary folly and ineptitude of James II, the two specific issues that had provoked large numbers of the landed elite to go to war against the King in 1642 had to be fought for all over again. They were the preservation for the landed elite of the ancient balanced constitution, the law, personal liberties, and consent to taxation from arbitrary royal tyranny, and the preservation of their church from Popery. This time, the victory was decisive: the Crown was never again granted sufficient money to continue to function without further grants from annual parliaments; its legal powers were severely limited; its semi-divine charisma was destroyed by an arbitrary shift of the succession to the throne to the House of Hanover; and the church was swung into a strongly, even fanatically Protestant posture, where it remained until the nineteenth century.31 By 1720 England was a country run by, and in the interests of, a landed elite, a mercantile and banking elite, and a Protestant establishment, the whole supported by a broad-based middling sort and protected by legal safeguards for liberty, property and religious toleration.
1 G. R. Elton, ‘A high road to Civil War?’, and ‘The unexplained revolution’, in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, II, Cambridge, 1974; ‘Tudor government: the points of contact: I, Parliament’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 24, 1974; C. Russell, ‘Parliamentary history in perspective 1604–1629’, History, 61, 1976; Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629, Oxford, 1979; ‘The nature of a parliament in early Stuart England’ in Before the English Civil War, ed. H. Tomlinson, London, 1983; M. Kishlansky, ‘The emergence of adversary politics in the Long Parliament’, Journal of Modern History, 49, 1977; K. Sharpe, ‘Parliamentary history 1603–29: in or out of perspective’ in his Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History, Oxford, 1978. See also: R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution, London, 1977; J. Morrill, Seventeenth Century Britain, 1603–1714, London, 1980.
2 P. Christianson, ‘The causes of the English Revolution: a reappraisal’, Journal of British Studies, 15, 1976, p. 67; J. E. Farnell, ‘The aristocracy and leadership of Parliament in the English Civil War’ , Journal of Modern History, 44, 1972; J. S. Flemion, ‘The nature of opposition in the House of Lords in the early seventeenth century: a revaluation’, Albion, 8, 1976; P. Christianson, ‘The peers, the people and parliamentary management in the first six months of the Long Parliament’, Journal of Modern History, 49, 1977.
3 D. Hirst, ‘Unanimity in the Commons, aristocratic intrigue, and the origins of the English Civil War’, Journal of Modern History, 50, 1978; E.R. Foster, The House of Lords, 1603–49, Chapel Hill, 1983.
4 C. Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629, pp. 55–6, 136, 139, 143, 243, 250, 348, 379, 397; The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. C. Russell, London, 1973, pp. 9–10.
5 The best overall critiques of the revisionist position are J. H. Hexter, ‘The early Stuarts and Parliament: old hat and the Nouvelle Vague’, Parliamentary History Yearbook, I, 1982; ‘Power struggle, Parliament and liberty in early modern England’, Journal of Modern History, 50, 1978; T. K. Rabb and D. Hirst, ‘Revisionism revised: two perspectives in early Stuart Parliamentary history’, Past and Present, 92, 1981; C. Hill, ‘Parliament and people in seventeenth century England’, op. cit., 92, 1981; S. D. White, ‘Observations on early Stuart Parliamentary history’, Journal of British Studies, 18, 1979; P. Lake, ‘Constitutional consensus and Puritan opposition in the 1620s’, Historical Journal, 25, 1982.
6 A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, London, 1981, p. 415.
7 Herbert Butterfield: Writings on Christianity and History, ed. C. T. McIntyre, Oxford, 1979, p. 26.
8 A. Everitt, ‘The county community’ in The English Revolution, ed. E. W. Ives, London, 1968, pp. 48–9; Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century, Leicester, 1969; A. Everitt, The Local Community and the Great Rebellion, London, 1969; J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650, London, 1976, pp. 30, 46; Cheshire 1630–1660, Oxford, 1974; P. Clark, English Provincial Society from the Reformation to the Revolution: Religion, Politics and Society in Kent, 1500–1640, Hassocks, 1977.
9 C. Holmes, ‘The county community in Stuart historiography’, Journal of British Studies, 19, 1980; D. Underdown, ‘Community and class: theories of local politics in the English Reformation’ in After the Reformation, ed. B. Malament, Manchester, 1980; A. Hughes, ‘The King, the Parliament and the localities in the English Civil War’, Journal of British Studies, 24, 1985; A. Hughes, ‘Warwickshire on the eve of the Civil War: a county community?’, Midland History, 7, 1982; C. Herrup, ‘The counties and the country: some thoughts on seventeenth century historiography’, Social History, 8, 1983; D. Hirst, ‘Court, country and politics before 1629’ in Faction and Parliament, ed. K. Sharpe; C. Holmes, Seventeenth Century Lincolnshire, Lincoln, 1980; A. Hassell-Smith, Court and Country: Government and Politics in Elizabethan Norfolk, Oxford, 1974.
10 A. Fletcher, ‘National and local awareness in the county communities’, in H. Tomlinson, op. cit.; A. Woolrych, ‘Court, country and city revisited’, History, 65, 1980; D. Hirst ‘Court, country and politics before 1629’ in K. Sharpe; R. Cust and P. G. Lake, ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the rhetoric of magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 54, 1981; G. G. Durston, ‘London and the province: the capital and the Berkshire county gentry in the early seventeenth century’, Southern History, III, 1981.
11 A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, ch. 6; J. Morrill, op. cit., p. 46.
12 H. G. Koenigsberger, Dominium Regale or Dominium Politicum et Regale: Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe, London, 1975; C. Russell, ‘The nature of a Parliament . . .’ in H. Tomlinson, op. cit.; ‘Monarchies, wars and estates in England, France and Spain, c. 1580 – c. 1640’, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 7, 1982; ‘Parliament and the King’s finances’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. C. Russell; D. Thomas, ‘Financial and administrative developments’ in H. Tomlinson, op. cit.; L. L. Peck, ‘Problems in Jacobean administration: was Henry Howard, earl of Northampton, a reformer?’, Historical Journal, 19, 1976; R. Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham 1592–1628, London, 1981.
13 Historical Journal, 16, 1973, pp. 205–8.
14 J. Morrill, ‘The religious context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., 34, 1984; P. R. Newman, ‘Catholic royalist activists in the North’, Recusant History, 14, 1977; J. H. Hexter, ‘Power, struggle, Parliament and liberty in early Stuart England’, Journal of Modern History, 50, 1978.
15 K. Sharpe, ‘The personal rule of Charles I’ in H. Tomlinson, op. cit.; for a convincing analysis of how Charles succeeded in temporarily alienating his natural supporters the civic leaders of London, see R. Ashton, The City and the Court, 1603–43, Cambridge, 1979.
16 M. L. Schwartz, ‘James I and the historians: towards a reconsideration’, Journal of British Studies, 13, 1974.
17 New work on Court and Country ideology includes P. W. Thomas, ‘Two cultures? Court and Country under Charles I’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. C. Russell; S. Orgel, The Illusion of Power, Berkeley, 1975; P. Thomas, ‘Charles I of England: the tragedy of Absolutism’, in The Courts of Europe, ed. A. G. Dickens, London, 1977.
18 N. Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. C. Russell; P. White, ‘The Rise of Arminianism reconsidered’, Past and Present, 101, 1983.
19 K. J. Lindley, ‘The part played by the Catholics’ in Politics, Religion and the English Civil War, ed. B. Manning, London, 1973; R. Clifton, ‘Fear of Popery’ in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. C. Russell; C. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, Chapel Hill, 1983; M. L. Schwartz, ‘Lay Anglicanism’, Albion, 14, 1982.
20 D. Hirst, ‘The Privy Council and the problem of enforcement in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies, 18, 1978; R. Cust, ‘Charles I, the Privy Council and the Forced Loan’, Journal of British Studies, 24, 1984; H. H. Leonard, ‘The distraint of knighthood: the last phase 1625–1641’, History, 63, 1978; R. J. W. Swales, ‘The Ship Money Levy of 1628’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 50, 1977; P. Lake, ‘The collection of Ship Money in Cheshire during the 1630s’, Northern History, 17, 1981; R. Ashton, op. cit.
21 D. Hirst, The Representative of the People?: Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts, Cambridge, 1975.
22 A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War.
23 C. Hill, ‘Parliament and the people in seventeenth century England’; B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649, London, 1976; D. Underdown, ‘The chalk and the cheese: contrasts among English clubmen’, Past and Present, 85, 1979; ‘The problem of popular allegiance in the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., 31, 1981; J. L. Malcolm, ‘A King in search of soldiers: Charles I in 1642’, Historical Journal, 21, 1978.
24 B. Sharp, In Contempt of all Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England 1586–1660, Berkeley, 1980.
25 P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, Cambridge, 1982; R. T. Kendall, Calvinism and English Calvinism to 1649, Oxford, 1979; P. Collinson, ‘Lectures by combination: structures and characteristics of Church Life in 17th century England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 48, 1975.
26 P. S. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth Century London, Stanford, 1985.
27 K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling 1525–1700, New York, 1979, chs. 5–7; W. Hunt, The Puritan Moment: the Coming of Revolution in an English County, Cambridge, Mass, chs. 3–6.
28 Commons Debates in 1628, ed. R. C. Johnson, M. F. Keeler, M. J. Johnson and W. B. Bidwell, New Haven, 1977; M. A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: an Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought 1603–45, New Brunswick, 1949.
29 C. Roberts, ‘The Earl of Bedford and the coming of the English Revolution’, Journal of Modern History, 49, 1977.
30 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England 1688–1756, London, 1967; C. Brooks, ‘Public finance and political stability: the administration of the Land Tax 1688–1720’, Historical Journal, 17, 1974; C. Roberts, ‘The constitutional significance of the financial Settlement of 1690’, op. cit., 20, 1977.
31 L. Stone, ‘The results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century’ in Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock, Princeton, 1980.