English Civil War

The term English Civil War (or Wars) refers to the series of armed conflicts and political machinations which took place between Parliamentarians and Royalists from 1642 until 1651. The first (1642–1645) and the second (1648–1649) civil wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of the Long Parliament, while the third (1649-1651) was between supporters of Charles II and supporters of the Rump Parliament. The third war ended with the Parliamentary victory at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651.

Theories relating to the English Civil War

Throughout the greater part of the 20th century, two schools of thought dominated theoretical explanations of the Civil War: the Marxists and the 'Whigs'. Both of them explained the English seventeenth century in terms of long-term trends.

Related Topics:
20th century - Marxist

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Whigs explained the Civil War as the result of a centuries-long struggle between Parliament (especially the House of Commons) and the monarchy. Parliament fought to defend the traditional rights of Englishmen, while the monarchy attempted on every occasion to expand its right to dictate law arbitrarily. The most important Whig historian, S.R. Gardiner, popularized the idea of describing the civil war as a 'Puritan Revolution' which challenged the repressive nature of the Stuart church and paved the way for the religious toleration of the Restoration. Puritanism, in this view, became the natural ally of a people seeking to preserve their traditional rights against the arbitrary power of the monarchy.

Related Topics:
S.R. Gardiner - Religious toleration

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The Marxist school of thought, which became popular in the 1940s, interpreted the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. In the words of Christopher Hill, "the Civil War was a class war". On the side of reaction stood the landed aristocracy and its ally, the established church. On the other side stood (again, according to Hill) "the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, the yeomen and progressive gentry, and wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about". The Civil War occurred at the point in English history at which the wealthy middle classes, already a powerful force in society, liquidated the outmoded medieval system of English government. Like the Whigs, the Marxists found a place for the role of religion in their account. Puritanism as a moral system ideally suited the bourgeois class, and so the Marxists identified Puritans as inherently bourgeois.

Related Topics:
1940s - Bourgeois - Revolution - Christopher Hill - Landed aristocracy - Established church - Middle class

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Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of historians began mounting challenges to the Marxist and Whig theories. This began with the publication in 1973 of the anthology The Origins of the English Civil War (edited by Conrad Russell). These historians disliked the way that Marxists and Whigs explained the Civil War in terms of long-term trends in English society. The new historians called for, and began producing, studies which focussed on the minute particulars of the years immediately preceding the war, thus returning in some ways to the sort of contingency-based historiography of Clarendon's famous contemporary history of the civil war. As a result, they have demonstrated that the pattern of allegiances in the war did not fit the theories of Whig and Marxist historians. Puritans, for example, did not necessarily ally themselves with Parliamentarians, and many of them did not identify as bourgeois; many bourgeois fought on the side of the King; many landed aristocrats supported Parliament.

Related Topics:
1970s - 1973 - The Origins of the English Civil War - Conrad Russell - Clarendon

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The new generation of historians (commonly called 'Revisionists') have discredited large sections of the Whig and Marxist interpretations of the war. Many of these historians (such as Jane Ohlmeyer) have discarded the title 'English Civil War' and replaced it with the 'Wars of the three Kingdoms' or even the geographically arguable but politically incorrect 'British Civil Wars'. This forms part of the wider trend in British history of studying the whole of the British Isles (IONA), in the same history, a reaction against perceived 'Anglocentric' history, which only concentrates on England and ignores or marginalizes other parts of the British Isles. These revisionist historians argue that one cannot fully understand the English civil war in isolation; it needs to stand as just one conflict in a series of interlocking conflicts throughout the British Isles. They see the causes of the war as a consequence of the problems arising from one king, Charles I, ruling over multiple kingdoms. For example, the wars unfolded when Charles I tried to impose an Anglican prayer book on Scotland; when the Scots resisted he declared war on them, but had to raise heavy taxes in England to pay for campaigning, which triggered off the Civil War in England. Therefore this history sees the civil wars as a series of conflicts in each of Charles' three kingdoms which seem like separate conflicts in some respects, but at the same time interrelate closely.

Related Topics:
Jane Ohlmeyer - British Isles - IONA

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