BOOKS: Subjects into citizens

Michael Braddick, Professor of History at Sheffield University, has written a splendid new history of the civil wars in Britain in the 1640s. The book is in three parts: what he calls the crisis of the three kingdoms from 1637-42; war from 1642-46; and revolution from 1646-49.

by Tribune Web Editor
Thursday, July 30th, 2009

Michael Braddick, Professor of History at Sheffield University, has written a splendid new history of the civil wars in Britain in the 1640s. The book is in three parts: what he calls the crisis of the three kingdoms from 1637-42; war from 1642-46; and revolution from 1646-49.

Part one describes the Scottish Prayer Book rebellion and the politics of reformation, the structure of society in Charles I’s England, the Bishops’ Wars, the Long Parliament, the Irish rising, the struggle for the provinces and the slide into war.

Part two studies the Battle of Edgehill, the English war efforts in 1643, the Irish cessation and the Solemn League and Covenant, the Battle of Marston Moor, death and its meanings, the Battle of Naseby and the New Model Army, the costs and benefits of civil war, and the politics of the parishes at war.

Part three describes post-war politics, attempts at settlement, the Putney Debates, the Engagement and the vote of No Addresses, Charles starting the second Civil War, his defeat, trial and execution.

The people opposed the king’s party on the issues of royal powers, his religious policies, his idea of taxation, his foreign policy and his Roman Catholic advisers. Charles sought to uphold his divine right to rule and his supreme power over the people. He refused to work with Parliament or to be subject to its authority. People noted that Charles tried to stay out of war in Europe against Catholics but was ready to go to war against his own Protestant subjects.

Public opinion was such that, as Braddick writes, “Military mobilization by prerogative power in order to enforce Laudian ceremonialism would have plenty of opponents.” Yet in 1649 the king was still unrepentant and uncompromising, and still bent on another war: defeated in England and Scotland, he was as yet unbeaten in Ireland.

Braddick recounts the organised, disciplined and popular assertions of traditional common rights – throwing down enclosures in forests and fens, tearing up hedges, and breaking open the Earl of Middlesex’s deer park and killing his deer. Tactically astute, people gathered in groups of two, thus evading the legal definition of a riot.

More and more people became active citizens. People fought for the idea that: “All power is originally and essentially in the whole body of the people of this Nation.”

As Braddick writes: “What was really new and radical was that fundamental questions were being debated before a public audience.” It was “a decade of intense debate and spectacular intellectual creativity… the beginnings of a passage from the world of Reformation to the world of Enlightenment’.

Will Podmore

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  • Christopher Thompson

    Podmore, “the people” and the English Revolution

    Eighteen months ago, Michael Braddick’s book, God’s Fury, England’s Fire. A New History of the English Civil Wars, was published to general acclaim. Last Thursday, it received this review from Will Podmore in the Tribune magazine. His comments claimed that “the people opposed the king’s party on the issues of royal power, his religious policies, his idea of taxation and his Roman Catholic advisers” as well as observing that Charles I “refused to work with Parliament or be subject to its authority.” Podmore argued that the King tried to stay out of the Thirty Years’ War against Catholics in Europe but was nonetheless ready to wage war against his own Protestant subjects. The assertion of traditional common rights and the throwing down of enclosures are positively mentioned as a prelude to celebrating the involvement of more people as active citizens and the principle that power derived from the whole body of the people of this nation.

    This is a curious review for a number of reasons. The Civil Wars were fought, as academic historians have long known and demonstrated, by committed minorities: most people probably hoped or wished to remain neutral. After 1646, the desire for a negotiated constitutional and religious settlement was increasingly obvious. The Royalists, moreover, like the supporters of the Long Parliament were drawn from across the population and were not distinct from “the people”. Charles had attempted to intervene – initially against Catholic Spain in alliance with Catholic France – in the Thirty Years’ War between 1625 and 1630 but had failed to secure the co-operation of his Parliaments to win the necessary financial support. It is perfectly true that his policies in Church and State had elicited opposition well before 1640 but so, too, did the policies of his post-1640 critics. Constitutional right was not just on one side. Nor were ordinary men, if not women, quite so passive participants in government before the 1640s as Mr Podmore supposes: their work was critical to the functioning of parochial and urban government well before then. They had opinions on national and international politics and rights as subjects that they were prepared to defend. Despite the coercive nature of many Caroline policies, England still depended on the co-operation of its inhabitants in their self-government if it was to function at all. All the regimes after the end of the first Civil War lacked this element of consent, which is why the Revolution’s supporters were never able to consolidate their hold on power despite their military prowess.

    The Civil Wars undoubtedly stimulated a ferment of ideas on forms of government, on matters of religion, in literature, and so on. But the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s were brutal experiences, ones that were immensely costly in human lives and to the fabric of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. None of the issues over which they had been fought were settled then or for several decades as Blair Worden has recently pointed out.

  • Christopher Thompson

    Podmore, “the people” and the English Revolution

    Eighteen months ago, Michael Braddick’s book, God’s Fury, England’s Fire. A New History of the English Civil Wars, was published to general acclaim. Last Thursday, it received this review from Will Podmore in the Tribune magazine. His comments claimed that “the people opposed the king’s party on the issues of royal power, his religious policies, his idea of taxation and his Roman Catholic advisers” as well as observing that Charles I “refused to work with Parliament or be subject to its authority.” Podmore argued that the King tried to stay out of the Thirty Years’ War against Catholics in Europe but was nonetheless ready to wage war against his own Protestant subjects. The assertion of traditional common rights and the throwing down of enclosures are positively mentioned as a prelude to celebrating the involvement of more people as active citizens and the principle that power derived from the whole body of the people of this nation.

    This is a curious review for a number of reasons. The Civil Wars were fought, as academic historians have long known and demonstrated, by committed minorities: most people probably hoped or wished to remain neutral. After 1646, the desire for a negotiated constitutional and religious settlement was increasingly obvious. The Royalists, moreover, like the supporters of the Long Parliament were drawn from across the population and were not distinct from “the people”. Charles had attempted to intervene – initially against Catholic Spain in alliance with Catholic France – in the Thirty Years’ War between 1625 and 1630 but had failed to secure the co-operation of his Parliaments to win the necessary financial support. It is perfectly true that his policies in Church and State had elicited opposition well before 1640 but so, too, did the policies of his post-1640 critics. Constitutional right was not just on one side. Nor were ordinary men, if not women, quite so passive participants in government before the 1640s as Mr Podmore supposes: their work was critical to the functioning of parochial and urban government well before then. They had opinions on national and international politics and rights as subjects that they were prepared to defend. Despite the coercive nature of many Caroline policies, England still depended on the co-operation of its inhabitants in their self-government if it was to function at all. All the regimes after the end of the first Civil War lacked this element of consent, which is why the Revolution’s supporters were never able to consolidate their hold on power despite their military prowess.

    The Civil Wars undoubtedly stimulated a ferment of ideas on forms of government, on matters of religion, in literature, and so on. But the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s were brutal experiences, ones that were immensely costly in human lives and to the fabric of England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. None of the issues over which they had been fought were settled then or for several decades as Blair Worden has recently pointed out.

  • http://thestoryandthetruth.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/the-people-opposed-the-kings-party/ The People Opposed The King’s Party? « @Number 71

    [...] about a rather strange review of Michael Braddick’s God’s Fury England’s Fire, published in Tribune (itself the focus of some interest today). I wrote some very brief thoughts on the book [...]

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