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Patrick Little (ed.), Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 256pp.
Something of a consensus has emerged amongst biographers of Oliver Cromwell in the last twenty years. They have seen Cromwell’s faith as crucial to understanding the man. Historians have emphasised the importance of a Bible-centric puritanism in his life: not just in prompting key decisions such as the rejection of the crown in 1657, but more widely in terms of Cromwell’s wish to heal and settle the nation in the 1650s. Historians have also taken Cromwell’s own words seriously. A great many of his letters and speeches survive, and have been pored over by those anxious to understand his motivations. The footnotes of most recent biographies are peppered with references to Wilbur Abbott’s collected edition of Cromwell’s writings and speeches. By contrast, retrospective accounts by contemporaries have tended to be marginalised. The extent of Cromwell’s power has also been downplayed. Even as Protector, it is argued, he was hemmed in by constitutions and the Council of State.
The Cromwell that emerges from this consensus remains as mercurial and hard to understand as any previous generation’s Cromwell: but he is a figure of faith, drive and integrity, by no means predestined to rise to the top but blessed with sufficient personal qualities to do so. Much of this picture of Cromwell reflects the impact of revisionism. The determination to take contemporary belief seriously; the return to manuscript sources; the emphasis on contingency and the rejection of an inevitable rise to greatness; all of these are hallmarks of a move away from Whiggish perceptions of Cromwell. Timing-wise, it was the late 1980s that saw the working out of many of these trends. A key staging post in this transformation was Blair Worden’s essay on ‘Oliver Cromwell and the sin of Achan’ from 1985. Another was John Morrill’s collected edition of essays on Cromwell in 1990. A third was Peter Gaunt’s essay on the Protectorate Council from 1989.
Two decades on, Patrick Little’s collected volume of essays on Cromwell marks a shift in this consensus. It is not an explicitly post-revisionist collection, but in many cases the case studies it gives are thick, multi-faceted descriptions that have at least something in common with more avowedly post-revisionist studies of the mid-seventeenth century. The volume starts with Simon Healy’s reassessment of Cromwell’s personal and spiritual life during the 1630s. In 1990, in an article called ‘The Making of Oliver Cromwell’, John Morrill carried out a fundamental reassesment of this period: what emerged was a picture of Cromwell down on his luck after the humiliating loss of a political dispute in Huntingdon, rescued only by an inheritance from his uncle, Sir Thomas Steward. Healy pointedly engages with Morrill’s assessment by titling his essay ‘1636: The Unmaking of Oliver Cromwell?’ He re-examines Cromwell’s financial connections to his uncle, concluding that it was the prospect of an inheritance that partly helped persuade Cromwell to sell his interests in Huntingdon. It seems that the wait for this inheritance was too long: in 1635 Steward was the subject of an inquiry by the court of wards into his mental health. A number of hostile contemporary accounts blame Cromwell for prompting the inquiry. These have never been taken seriously until now, but as Healy shows Cromwell had a significant amount to gain if Steward was deemed not to be in a fit state of mind. Steward still left a settlement for Cromwell on his death in 1636, but it was tied up with conditions and debts that took two years to sort out.
Healy argues that these events are of critical significance for understanding Cromwell’s famous letter to Mrs St John of 1638. This letter is suffused in biblical quotations and is conventionally seen as important evidence for Cromwell’s spiritual conversion into a godly member of the saints. But as Healy points out, there is potentially more to it. The timing of the letter was two weeks before the final settling of Steward’s estates, and given the likelihood that such letters were passed around networks of friends and family, the letter may have been a public apology for his conduct in 1635. Healy does not go so far as to say that it was a cynical apology: he argues that Cromwell’s conversion was still genuine. However, he argues that a conversion can still be genuine while also serving other ends. As he puts it, it “involved a great deal of what a post-modernist might politely term self-fashioning”.
Cromwell’s self-fashioning is a theme that is picked up by other contributors. S.L. Sadler looks at Cromwell’s early military career in East Anglia, looking at the evidence provided by a manuscript in Huntingdon Record Office written by an opponent of Cromwell’s – in all likelihood, William Dodson. Sadler examines Cromwell’s record at the siege of Crowland in 1643 and concludes that his role in it was less important than has been assumed, and that without Dodson’s initial spade work he would not have been successful. Sadler links this to Cromwell’s early accounts to Parliament of his successes – for example the successful retreat at Gainsborough – and concludes that even at this early stage, he was skilled in manipulating public opinion to maximise his position. Sadler’s concept of ‘propaganda’ would benefit from further development and engagement with the work of historians of early modern print – for example, seizing royalist pamphlets in Cambridge in 1643 does not automatically make him a skilled propagandist, and it would be interesting to explore Cromwell’s role in and reaction to the Long Parliament’s early brushes with pamphlets and newsbooks during 1641 to see what his attitudes to print might have been. But Sadler’s main point – that even at this early stage of the civil wars, Cromwell was skilful at presenting himself in the best light – is of major importance for understanding why he rose to prominence so quickly.
Andrew Barclay looks at self-fashioning at a different stage of Cromwell’s career: during the Protectorate. From 1654 until his death, Cromwell lived in the same rooms at Whitehall as Charles I had done. Cromwell’s close friends and family filled the gap left by Charles I’s courtiers. His son-in-law John Claypole was made master of horse; his cousin once removed, John Barrington, was made a gentleman of the bedchamber. Reconstructing Cromwell’s court is difficult due to the paucity of sources, but as Barclay argues, by 1658 “those around Cromwell had started to act like courtiers. They had come to believe in both the concept and the reality of a Cromwellian court”.
A second theme that emerges is of Cromwell being in more control of events than historians have given him credit for. Stephen K. Roberts examines Cromwell’s activity in the Long Parliament between November 1640 to August 1642. In this period he has often been seen as a lowly backbencher on the fringes of the godly group led by Warwick, Bedford, Pym and Holles. But Roberts argues that during this period Cromwell quickly established himself as a trusted and effective parliamentarian, pursuing issues doggedly, acting as teller on committees and playing an important role in liaison between the Lords and the Commons. Speeches that have often been seen as gaffes are reconstructed by Roberts as deliberate attempts to provoke opposition or action. Some of this interpretation, it is true, depends simply on emphasis, but the energy and drive that emerges from Roberts’ account rings true.
Likewise, Patrick Little re-examines one of the most contested issues of Cromwell’s life – his decision over whether to accept the offer of the crown in 1657. Little looks at the often forgotten attempt on Cromwell’s life by Miles Sindercombe, a disaffected former soldier. He argues that John Thurloe, and by extension Cromwell, used Sindercombe’s plot as a means of underlining the need for stability and hence the virtues of accepting a new constitution. This is not to reject Blair Worden’s interpretation of Cromwell wrestling with his conscience and eventually concluding that he did not want to commit the sin of Achan, and allow his greed to risk the fall of the new Israel. Instead, Little modifies Worden’s interpretation and argues that it was not so much the failure of the Hispaniola expedition, but Cromwell’s guilt over being tempted by the crown, that led him to conclude that he would “not build Jericho again”.
A third theme is to re-examine Cromwell’s life and career from ‘unusual’ perspectives. That most of these are in fact not at all unusual reflects the perspectives that previous historians have focused on – Cromwell himself , and his actions at the political centre. Lloyd Bowen looks at Cromwell from a Welsh viewpoint. After 1648 Cromwell received significant lands in Monmouthshire and Glamorgan, and had strong links with godly communities in Wales from early in the 1640s onwards. Bowen reconstructs a godly network centred on William Wroth and Walter Cradock, tied together by Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire. Kirsteen M. MacKenzie looks at Cromwell from a Scottish perspective, tracing his transformation from ally and God’s instrument to enemy and harbinger of the millennium. Philip Baker uses Cromwell’s stormy relationship with John Lilburne to examine his radicalism. Cromwell is often seen as the breaker of the Levellers, not least because of his conflict with them at Putney over the extension of the franchise. Baker, by contrast, traces the consistency of ideas between Cromwell, Lilburne and other Levellers well into the 1640s, and argues that it was only when army discipline was threatened that Cromwell turned against them. This is a very different portrait of Cromwell to the political conservative we are used to. Finally, Jason Peacey looks at Cromwell from the perspective of his son and successor, Richard. Richard Cromwell has not been treated kindly by historians, who have followed the lead of contemporaries who saw him as ‘Tumbledown Dick’. But as Peacey shows, Richard’s education at Felsted School was not at all unusual for the third son of a minor member of the gentry. After the death of his elder brothers Robert and Oliver, there was still no reason to “groom him for greatness”, but he was made a member of Lincoln’s Inn, married the daughter of a respectable Hampshire gentry family, and generally went down the path that many county squires would have done. As the 1650s progressed, though, much bigger steps were made by Cromwell and Thurloe to equip him for government. Peacey argues that if we avoid seeing Richard’s protectorship as inevitable, his education and previous career make much more sense.
The Cromwell that emerges from this book is both more powerful and more reckless than previous historians have portrayed him. Cromwell’s willingness to take significant risks emerges early on his life: some did not pay off, but as the contributors to this volume argue, many did. They are also less willing to take Cromwell’s word for it. Careful readings of hostile sources reveals grey areas over many of his actions. As they argue, his actions should not be read completely cynically, but but a more nuanced reading of Cromwell’s beliefs shows many cases where his beliefs justified his actions rather too handily. This collection does not pretend to give a completely new or integrated account of Cromwell’s career: but it does an extremely good job of suggesting some likely areas for reassessment, and suggests that we still have much further to go to understand Cromwell’s complex personality.
Shardlake, Matthew (b. c. 1500), lawyer, was the son of a yeoman farmer from Lichfield. Early in his childhood he developed severe kyphosis, a disability that would go on to have a significant impact on his adult life. In 1518 he moved to London to attend Lincoln’s Inn, going on to practice as a lawyer. In the late 1520s he was introduced to Thomas Cromwell, at the time a lawyer associated with Cardinal Wolsey. In 1533 Shardlake was able to use these connections to find a post under Cromwell for Mark Poer, son of his father’s steward William Poer.
In the winter of 1537 Shardlake was sent by Cromwell to investigate allegations of corruption at the Benedictine monastery of St Donatus the Ascendant of Scarnsea. The visit became a criminal investigation after another of Cromwell’s officials was found dead. While at Scarnsea, Shardlake was introduced to Guy Elakbar (known by his monastic name of Guy of Malton), a Spanish Muslim and apothecary who had fled Spain after the reconquista. Shardlake appears to have maintained an association with Malton after this meeting. Meanwhile Shardlake’s links with Poer seem to have ended after Scarnsea. After 1537 Poer disappears from the historical record, although correspondence recently unearthed suggests he may have eloped to France. In 1538 the monastery at Scarnsea was razed to the ground by Giovanni Portinari, Cromwell’s engineer.
The Scarnsea incident appears to have established Shardlake’s reputation as a fixer, particularly where crimes were involved. In 1540 Shardlake was asked by Cromwell to recover what was rumoured to be a recipe for ‘Greek fire’, the liquid weapon used by the Byzantine army. At the same time he was also involved in defending a young girl against a false charge of murder. It was during this time that Shardlake also met Jack Barak, a servant of Cromwell’s with whom he would go on to have a long association.
In 1541 Shardlake rose to prominence due to his involvement in the Progress by Henry VIII to York. By this time Sharlake had become associated with Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, who sent Shardlake to York to handle petitions to the king from the citizens of York. However, there are suggestions that while there, Shardlake was also involved in trying to bring an important prisoner, Sir Edward Broderick, safely to London for questioning. In 1543 Shardlake again acted on Cranmer’s behalf in investigating a series of murders that included the brutal killing of Shardlake’s friend Roger Elliard.
Throughout what is known of his career, Shardlake continued to practice law. No evidence survives of him having been married. He maintained a substantial London household and appears to have been close to his servants. He was also a horse enthusiast, holding particular affection for his first horse called Chancery.
Other events in Shardlake’s life and the date of his death remain unknown, although it is to be hoped that ongoing research by his biographer, C.J. Sansom, will uncover more details.
Sources C.J. Sansom, Dissolution (Basingstoke and Oxford, 2003); Dark Fire (Basingstoke and Oxford, 2004); Sovereign (Basingstoke and Oxford, 2006); Revelation (Basingstoke and Oxford, 2008).
(All of which is a roundabout way of saying how much I’ve been enjoying working my way through the Shardlake series recently. I hope I haven’t given away any of the plots).
© The Trustees of the British Museum
Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Boydell, 2007). 218pp.
David L. Smith and Patrick Little, Parliaments and Politics During the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 352pp.
The engraving above is from a Dutch satirical print, and shows Oliver Cromwell in armour, wearing a crown and ermine cloak and holding the sword of justice and orb of sovereignty. Behind is a depiction of the execution of Charles . The print encapsulates one of the key tensions behind the English Commonwealth: a revolutionary event in British history was succeeded by successive attempts to restore stability and, in many spheres, traditional political and cultural forms.
Negotiating and explaining these tensions is one of the key tasks for any historian of the 1650s. But untl recently, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate have attracted less scholarly attention than the early and later Stuart periods. The 1640s in particular have had significant attention from revisionists and post-revisionists alike. By contrast, the 1650s have been reassessed in less detail.
In recent years this has started to change. There has been a significant cultural turn in the historiography of the 1650s. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Sean Kelsey have studied the iconography both of the Commonwealth and its critics. Roy Sherwood has examined the monarchical trappings of the Protectoral regime. Jason Peacey and Blair Worden have extended analysis of mid-seventeenth century print culture into the 1650s. There has also been a move towards more local studies. For example, Christopher Durston has reconstructed the impact of the major-generals in the localities and analysed why their attempt at godly rule failed. Now two additional studies, one edited by Patrick Little on various aspects of the Protectorate, and one by Little and David Smith on the parliaments of the Protectorate, have been added to this body of work.
At first glance Smith and Little’s work on the Protectorate parliaments looks like a move away from these historigraphical trends, choosing a very traditional parliamentary and constitutional topic for study. However, the authors bring a decidely revisionist twist to their analysis, looking at a familiar subject from new angles. One such twist is a re-examination of the core constitutional documents of the Protectorate. There were six different constitutional documents produced between 1653 and 1657: not just the Instrument of Government and the Humble Petition and Advice, but also the failed parliamentary constitution; the failed monarchical Remonstrance; the Protectoral constitution; and the Additional Petition and Advice. Smith and Little analyse the twists and turns of these texts in detail, drawing out the implications of each document for parliamentary politics.
Smith and Little also examine the factions of the various Parliaments. For example, they analyse the loose “court” group associated with Cromwel during 1654-55, which included Sir Charles Wolseley, Walter Strickland, John Lambert, John Disbrowe, Broghill, Henry Cromwell, John Claypole, Edward Montagu. This mixture of civilians and soldiers makes it misleading to think in terms of broad divisions between soldiers and statesmen. The book concludes by agreeing, to an extent, with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s argument that Cromwell’s problems with his parliaments were of his own making. However, they look not to his disposition as a “natural back-bencher” and instead to Cromwell’s desire to see England converted to godly rule, with no fixed vision for the political form that might take. In joining this with a desire for parliaments that supported his vision, they argue Cromwell was setting himself an impossible task.
The book concludes with an intriguing hypothesis about Cromwell’s successor as Protector, his son Richard. He has often been seen as an ineffective ruler – the nickname “Tumbledown Dick” says it all. The woodcut below, with Richard as the “meek knight” in the middle, sums up his traditional reputation. (AN352990001, © The Trustees of the British Museum).
But Smith and Little argue instead that Richard tried to entrench the rise in power of the Presbyterian faction during the 1650s, spotting which way the tide had been turning during Oliver’s last years. They suggest that Richard’s failure as Protector was actually prompted by the army’s fears that he and his parliament were too strong.
A re-evaluation of Richard’s time as Protector is also one of themes addressed by the contributors to Patrick Little’s edited collection on the Protectorate. Jason Peacey re-examines the Humble Petition and Advice, pointing out that its intention as a monarchical constitution for a system of rule that never materialised left Richard at a profound disadvantage when he inherited the Protectorship. This revisionist focus on central government during the Protectorate is shared by a number of essays in this volume. Blair Worden, for example, looks at Cromwell’s Council of State and reassesses its importance, arguing that it mattered politically only because the army generals were represented on it. Lloyd Bowen and Patrick Little begin a process of bringing out the British context of the English Protectorate, with Little looking at the Irish and Scottish councils and Bowen examining the impact of the Protectorate in Wales.
Perhaps the highlight is a brilliant essay by Paul Hunneyball on Cromwellian architectural style. This extends Sean Kelsey’s findings about the extent to which the Commonwealth drew on and recycled monarchical ritual and iconography. Many state buildings saw significant repairs and improvements.
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For example, in 1656 a fountain of Diana designed by Inigo Jones and executed by Hubert Le Sueur was brought from Somerset House to the garden at Hampton Court. The statue of Diana on the top was surrounded by Venus, Cleopatra, Adonis and Apoollo, with sea monsters, boys on dolphins and scallops around it. The statue, depicted to the left, was moved to Bushy Park in 1690.
As Hunneyball argues, the effect of this was to restore the architectural tastes of Charles I in the 1630s. Similar efforts were made to restore Whitehall to its former state. The Banqueting House was requipped with lavish tapestries, with Cromwell personally overriding objections by the Council of State to the high expenditure.
A number of themes emerge from these two books. One is the return to constitutional documents as a focus for study, and the impact that these had on high politics. Another is a more negative depiction of Cromwell’s period as Protector. Smith and Little argue for more emphasis on his failings to manage his parliaments, whilst Worden analyses a number of “senior moments” during his final years. Richard Cromwell, by contrast, emerges as a more sympathetic figure. It will be interesting to see whether these themes are developed in further works on the Protectorate in the coming years.
There was a devastating review by Peter Conrad of Lisa Jardine’s new book on the influence of Holland on early modern English culture in the Observer this weekend . Noel Malcolm in the Telegraph had a slightly softer critique.
However, others seem to have liked Going Dutch better. Peter Ackroyd in the Times and Keith Thomas in the Guardian are both worth a read.
Update – John Adamson has also given Jardine a glowing review in the Literary Review .
God’s Fury, England’s Fire. A New History of the English Civil Wars.
by Michael Braddick.
London: Penguin Books, 2008.
In the summer of 1642, the bookseller Nathaniel Butter [DNB] put on sale a quarto pamphlet about a strange fish caught at Woolwich. A relation of a terrible monster [EEBO] told the story of a fish shaped like a toad, but with the hands and chest of a man. It was five feet long, with the tail alone a foot long, with two huge fins on each side. The wife of a butcher was so terrified by it that she swooned and exclaimed: “Oh the devil in the shape of a great fish”.
What has this got to do with a history of the English civil wars? An obscure tale to us, the significance of the fish to contemporaries was easier to see. Toad-fish and other monstrous births were omens: Pliny the Elder, for example, had said that toad-fish only came ashore in exceptional circumstances. The only time known to Pliny was during the year Nero was born. The Jewish historian Josephus likewise told a story about a heifer giving birth to a lamb in Jerusalem, six months before the city was sacked by Vespasian. There were also more recent examples, such as a whale being beached at Dieppe just before Francis I was taken prisoner at the battle of Pavia. The author of the pamphlet did not mince his words about the possible significance of the toad-fish:
These unnaturall accidents though dumbe, do not withstanding speake the supernatural intentions and purposes of the Divine Powers, chiefely when they meete just at that time when distractions, jars and distempers are a foote in a Common-weale or Kingdome.1
The fish was landed at Woolwich on 15 July 1642. Three days earlier, Parliament had resolved to raise an army for the defence of the king and for the preservation of true religion. The pamphlet underlines the fact that England stood on the brink of military conflict by bundling the toad-fish story with an account of a skirmish at Hull, which was being besieged by the king’s forces. The immediate question of any reader would have been whether Pliny and Josephus were right: was the ominous creature a sign of destruction to come?
The story of the toad-fish helps to give us some of the social context as England went to war. It’s the kind of story that would never feature in a straightforwardly political or military history of the civil wars. But it’s just one of a huge range and number of sources that Michael Braddick uses to write his history of the wars, a history which shows the renewed influence of social history on the study of early modern politics. In recent decades, English seventeenth century historiography has been split between the two: revisionist historians of the politics of the civil wars moved away from Marxian analysis in a rejection of interpretations like that of Christopher Hill and Brian Manning, but in doing so arguably lost some of the wider social context to the period. By contrast, although the “new” social history of early modern England also moved away from Marxian historiography, it did so by finding inspiration in other disciplines, like anthropology and sociology. As a result, the two became for a time rather separate. God’s Fury marks a growing trend to reconnect the two strands. It firmly answers Patrick Collinson’s call in 1990 for “social history with the politics put back in, or an account of political processes which is also social”.2
Braddick’s structure is both chronological and thematic. The narrative starts with a summary of Reformation politics in the three kingdoms, and a character sketch of the Personal Rule, before proceeding through the Bishops’ Wars, the politics of the Long Parliament, the Irish rebellion, and then into the war and its key landmarks – Edgehill, Marston Moor, Naseby, the Putney debates, the trial of Charles I. So far, so traditional. But Braddick breathes new life into this structure by using each chapter as a jumping-off point for wider social or political themes.
A chapter on the Irish rebellion, for example, allows him to dwell on the construction of factional politics in print, as pamphlet and newsbook writers sought to counter each other with increasingly lurid stories. Braddick analyses some of the atrocity stories that started to circulate once news of the rising broke in London. He also carries out a close reading on a pamphlet that relates how John Pym was sent a plague-sore plaster in the post, and how he unwrapped it theatrically on the floor of the Commons. The pamphlet carried a large woodcut of Pym on the front and generally does much to impress on its readers Pym’s importance to the defence of the kingdom. The pamphlet was printed for W.B., who Braddick deduces to be the bookseller William Bowden. Bowden had published a number of tracts about Catholic plots, and was quick to stock pamphlets about the alleged atrocities carried out during the rising. Braddick hypothesises, convincingly, that Bowden was part of a network of printers and booksellers publishing rumours about the rising but also bolstering Pym’s position within the Junto. But he goes further than this, too, linking the incident in to a wider treatment of the development of the newsbook, something which would transform the political and public sphere in the 1640s and onwards. Braddick is particularly strong on the importance of print culture more generally. Joad Raymond and Jason Peacey are both thanked in the acknowledgements and the influence of their work is clear – Braddick is very good at analysing print culture as a thing in itself rather than just as a source for other themes, in other words as something that was one of the drivers of events.
Another very effective example is a section looking at astrology and prophecy. Braddick uses a foray into the works of William Lilly as a wider exploration of the importance of astrology: how astrologers took sides, how the popular market for astrology developed, and the importance of prophecy too. He explores the influence of Mother Shipton, as well as looking at the royalist George Wharton’s famously inaccurate prediction about the battle of Naseby. Braddick uses thematic passages like this extremely effectively to place the political, military and religious conflicts in a wider social context. They are interesting in themselves as self-contained summaries of the latest academic thinking on particular points – some of the footnotes are discursive essays in themselves. But they are never digressions. They serve to explain not just the course of events, but why things happened as they did: what it was about 1640s England that meant the wars turned out in a particular way.
It’s significant that Braddick starts his book with a summary of Reformation politics. Even the title immediately makes it clear that religion is going to play a central role in his narrative. The narrative that Braddick is outlines is of a religious crisis with political implications – Charles I’s mishandling of the Personal Rule may have been a trigger in the shorter term, but for Braddick the conflicts of the 1640s hark back to the crisis of the 1620s, and even before that to the unfinished business of the Elizabethan settlement. 25 years on from John Morrill’s seminal lecture to the Royal Historical Society about Britain’s wars of religion, Braddick’s account picks up and expands these themes.3 He combines this with a strong sense of popular agency and ideology in explaining why it was that those outside Westminster went to war. He is sensitive in dealing with the fact that views held in one year could mean one type of allegiance, whereas the same views held 12 months later might mean choosing an entirely different allegiance. And (drawing on John Walter and Andy Wood) he unpicks the complexities of popular allegiance exceptionally well, sketching out how local political and religious ecologies could drive allegiance in particular directions while not making it inevitable – a good example being the Derbyshire tin miners, who on paper ticked all the boxes to side with Parliament, but who supported the king in return for remission on the tithe of tin. The political turn in social history makes its influence felt here, with Braddick being careful to suggest that what might on the face of it look like economic motives to choose sides should not be dismissed as non-political.4
If I have any criticisms, one is that the book, for me, slightly fails to capture fully the military aspect to the wars. Descriptions of battles fall slightly flat, although they are certainly detailed and comprehensive. Another slight letdown is that the book does not fully engage with the arguments of John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt, although this is not Braddick’s fault: The Noble Revolt emerged as God’s Fury was going to press. But Adamson’s book is likely to change the high political narrative of the early 1640s, as well as make historians think further about the connections between the Junto and London crowds. It will be interesting to see what future works of synthesis make of Adamson’s arguments.
But this is a rich and rewarding book. I learned a lot from it, and it has made me reconsider my approach to some of the key issues in this period (for instance my views on the politics of the Personal Rule). And I suspect I will be dipping in and out of it for some months to come. It manages to combine an incredibly comprehensive synthesis of current scholarship with a pacy narrative and strong arguments. If you’ve got any interest in the period at all, it’s a must-buy.
If you’re interested in getting some other opinions about the book, there have been a number of reviews elsewhere:
- Guardian. Keith Thomas liked the book but felt let down by Braddick’s post-modern conclusions.
- Spectator. Robert Stewart praised it for marrying an account of high politics with a dissection of why the English people went to war.
- FT. Diane Purkiss gave it a mixed review, criticising the book for summarising topics she would rather have seen more on, but acknowledging the book’s usefulness for undergraduates.
- THES. R.C. Richardson disagreed with Purkiss, arguing that it was unlikely to be used as a textbook but praising the narrative and its coverage.
References:
1. A relation of a terrible monster taken by a fisherman neere Wollage, July the 15. 1642. and is now to be seen in Kings street, Westminster (London, 1642), p. 3.
2. Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum: or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990), p. 14.
3. John Morrill, The Religious Context of the English Civil War, in Morrill (ed.), The Nature of the English Revolution, (London, 1993), ch. 3.
4. Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: the Peak Country, 1520-1770 (Cambridge, 1999), and Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999).
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