English Civil War - Historiography and Explanations of The English Civil War

Historiography and Explanations of The English Civil War

In the early decades of the 20th century the Whig school was the dominant theoretical view. They explained the Civil War as resulting from a centuries-long struggle between Parliament (especially the House of Commons) and the Monarchy, with Parliament defending the traditional rights of Englishmen, while the Stuart monarchy continually attempted to expand its right to arbitrarily dictate law. The most important Whig historian, S.R. Gardiner, popularised the English Civil War as a 'Puritan Revolution': challenging the repressive Stuart Church, and preparing the way for religious toleration in the Restoration. Thus, Puritanism was the natural ally of a people preserving their traditional rights against arbitrary monarchical power.

The Whig view was challenged and largely superseded by the Marxist school, which became popular in the 1940s, and which interpreted the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. According to Marxist historian Christopher Hill:

The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords, Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about. —Christopher Hill

In the 1970s, a new generation of historians, who would become known as Revisionists challenged both the Whig and the Marxist theories. In 1973, a group of revisionist historians published the anthology The Origins of the English Civil War (Conrad Russell ed.). These historians disliked both Whig and Marxist explanations of the Civil War as long-term socio-economic trends in English society, producing work focused on the minutiae of the years immediately preceding the civil war, thereby returning to the contingency-based historiography of Clarendon's famous contemporary history History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. This, it was claimed, demonstrated that factional war-allegiance patterns did not fit either Whig or Marxist history. Parliament was not inherently progressive with the events of the 1640 a precursor for the Glorious Revolution, or that Puritans, for example, did not necessarily ally themselves with Parliamentarians. Many members of the bourgeoisie fought for the King, while many landed aristocrats supported Parliament. Thus, revisionist historians claim to have discredited some Whig and Marxist interpretations of the English Civil War .

Jane Ohlmeyer discarded and replaced the historical title "English Civil War" with the titles the "Wars of the Three" and the "British Civil Wars", positing that the civil war in England cannot be understood isolated from events in other parts of Great Britain and Ireland; King Charles I remains crucial, not just as King of England, but also because of his relationship with the peoples of his other realms. For example, the wars began when King Charles I tried imposing an Anglican Prayer Book upon Scotland, and when this was met with resistance from the Covenanters, he needed an army to impose his will. However, this forced him to call an English Parliament to raise new taxes to pay for the army. The English Parliaments were not willing to grant Charles the revenue he needed to pay for the Scottish expeditionary army unless he addressed their grievances. By the early 1640s, Charles was left in a state of near permanent crisis management; often he was not willing to concede enough ground to any one faction to neutralise the threat, and in some circumstances to do so would only antagonise another faction. For example, Charles finally agreed upon terms with the Covenanters in August 1641, but although this might have weakened the position of the English Parliament, the Irish Rebellion of 1641 broke out in October 1641, largely negating the political advantage he had obtained by relieving himself of the cost of the Scottish invasion.