The English Civil Wars 1640-1660
by Blair Worden
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99
The English Civil War of 1642-1646 was fought along the fault lines of class, religion and ideology right across this country. It was, in fact, a revolution rather than a civil war (as Paul Foot once wryly observed, only the English could describe a bloody revolution as a civil war) as the people of this country rose up in defence of, among other things, parliamentary democracy and cut off the head of a despotic and devious little man who was trying to rule as an absolute monarch. All this almost 300 years before the revolutionaries in Russia did the same to the tsar.
This revolution – or civil war, if you must – and the decision three years later to execute King Charles I was a pivotal moment in English history. It changed for ever the balance of power between the monarch and Parliament – well, it would, really, wouldn’t it? – but it did much more than that. The revolutionaries and the regicides, together with those who worked for Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth, established many of the rights and freedoms which we still take for granted today. The extraordinarily liberating act of cutting off the head of the king in 1649 changed the people of this land from subjects to citizens, as it did in revolutionary France 140 years later.
As David Cressy points out in his book England On Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640-1642 it was a revolution with political, constitutional, religious, cultural and social dimensions. He reminds us what happened during and immediately after the Civil War: “Parliamentary Presbyterians abolished episcopacy and the prayer book, effectively dismantling the Church of England. They also abolished the Courts of Wards and Liveries and put an end to feudal tenure. Parliamentary soldiers and their artisan allies developed the proto-democratic ideas of the Levellers. Radicalised army officers took independent political action. The very institution of kingship was abolished and England became a republican Commonwealth. The Diggers emerged soon after the regicide, proclaiming communal ownership of the land. Ranters took religious radicalism to extremes. Seekers, Muggletonians and Quakers contributed to the religious ferment while Baptists and Independents built congregations, Anglicans went underground and Cromwell made arrangements to welcome back the Jews.”
That is, if you like, the conventional view and certainly one put forward by such eminent historians as RH Tawney, Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill. But it is not one to which Blair Worden, Professor of History at Royal Holloway College, London, subscribes in his new book The English Civil Wars 1640-1660.
Worden was much influenced as a young undergraduate by Hugh Trevor-Roper, the right-wing historian and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford who became in 1979 the first life peer created by Margaret Thatcher, who in 1983 mistakenly “authenticated” the Hitler Diaries for Rupert Murdoch, and who spent much of his career ranting against the left in general and Hill, the Marxist master of Balliol College, Oxford, in particular. Worden and Trevor-Roper struck up a close personal as well as professional friendship – he became the older man’s literary executor when Trevor-Roper died in 2003 – and Worden has carried on Trevor-Roper’s work by denouncing left-wing historians and “Marxist determinism” at every opportunity.
He says: “I don’t think of myself as a Tory, certainly not in a party political sense, but the historical views I’ve always been against have been left-wing. If you look back to Tawney, Hill and Trevor-Roper you can see something of the battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers but now it’s a matter of professional pride not to have that kind of approach.”
Worden is the author of three substantial works on this period of English history – The Rump Parliament 1648-1653; Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity and Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Needham – and this short (165-page) romp is really an argumentative primer for the period drawing on and distilling his previous research. It examines the immediate causes of the English revolution; the course of the first and second civil wars; the execution of Charles I; the establishment of a modern republic, which abolished the House of Lords; and the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 with Charles II.
Worden’s view is, basically, that the upheavals of these tumultuous years were unnecessary and that, when the dust had settled and the “natural order” had been restored, we are entitled to wonder what all the arguments and all the deaths had been about. He writes: “Viewed in retrospect, the year 1660 is one of the clear dividing lines of English history, in company with 1066, 1485 and 1832. Yet the rejoicing which accompanied the return of the crown obscured the uncertainty of the political future.”
I’ll say. But then he ends his book by arguing: “When the passions subsided, what goals of the participants had they profited? Royalists at least regained the throne which their king had needlessly lost. But the Parliamentarians who defeated him and demolished the nation’s institutions, and whose exploits were swiftly and emphatically reversed in 1660, would have no persuasive answer to a poem of 1700 by John Dryden, in which the writer’s fancy delivered an address to the departing century and contemplated the conflict of its central decades. He had walked, with Milton and Marvell, in Cromwell’s funeral procession. The years had made him a Tory and Jacobite, but there is more wisdom than disdain in his assessment: ‘Thy wars brought nothing about’.”
But it’s not true. The revolutionary ideas – and actions – of the English working and middle classes in the 1640s undermined the mystique of monarchy and established church and ushered in a new and modern era of democracy. It was an extraordinary decade of political, religious and cultural upheaval which, with its exuberantly unfettered press, saw the old world turned upside down. The people of England were swept up, in William Haller’s memorable phase, by “a cyclonic shattering storm of the spirit” and those ideas – and actions – informed the revolutionaries in America in 1776 and in France in 1789 and still echo down the centuries to us today.
Keith Richmond
