Rise of the Modern West Assignment

By – Dias Mario Antony, B.A History (hons.)-II

Critically discuss the causes of the English Revolution and the various interpretations given by historians on it.

In this essay I have tried to put forward the causes of the English revolution by first giving a narrative of the period which led up to the revolution and then following it up with the interpretations given by various historians on the issue.

The term English Revolution is generally used to describe the period of the English Civil Wars and the commonwealth, where the parliament challenged King Charles I’s authority and engaged in military conflict with the royalists. This was followed by a period of bourgeoisie rule for the next ten years up to 1660 when monarchy was restored and Charles II was given the throne. But the years from 1640-1660 cannot be seen as the only period of the revolution, however it is true that the period was the defining years of the revolution, a revolution which had been growing in England for almost a whole century and it was at this time that it finally exploded.

There were many causes which ultimately led to the revolution and some of them were long term causes which had been around for almost a century. In dealing with the causes of the English revolution, Lawrence Stone has conveniently divided them into three broad categories. The first being the long term preconditions which had prevailed in England for the last century, the second was the medium term precipitants and finally the short term triggers which made a probable revolution an inevitable one.

With the reformation that had happened in the previous century, the crown had broken away from Rome and seized monastic properties. This had two main impacts – the first that the crown was now more dependent on the parliament mainly for financial aid, and the other was that a lot of land was now made available in the market.

Meanwhile the various wars that had been fought by England had drained its coffers and to meet its financial requirements, the crown sold the lands that it had seized to newly upcoming classes. Monopoly over certain resources like coal and the sale of titles were some of the other methods used to procure finances. The early Tudor monarchs had built up the authority of the gentry in the countryside over landed magnates of the medieval times. These classes as time passed acquired more wealth and land and became very powerful and eventually wanted more share in legislation and executive of the country.

Another cause was extreme religious oscillations that had been there during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary and this deepened the confusion in the minds of the people and also developed national hatred of Catholicism. This was the reason why the people were constantly suspicious of Charles I and his marriage to the Roman Catholic French princess Henrietta Maria. Furthermore, the crown could not maintain adequate control over the written and spoken word and these were the main instruments used by the opposition in later times to spread their ideas. A lack of essential troops also weakened the position of the crown as it had to depend on hired mercenaries who were very expensive.

There was an economic growth in the years before the civil war mainly due to the doubling of the population which forced them to expand cultivation, improve techniques and increase trading activities. The economic developments of the period dissolved the old bonds and maximization of the profits came to be the main agenda. There was also an enormous increase in the population of the landed and professional classes. Land was becoming a highly attractive field for investment and those with the capital acquired it. For example, the gentry were acquiring lands from both ends in the sense that it received land from the crown and from the small landholders who were being squeezed due to the constant price rise in the 16th century and resultant inflation and so were forced to sell their lands. The decline of the aristocratic classes saw the rise of the gentry and professional classes such as lawyers, doctors and merchants. This change occurred mainly due to the concession provided by the crown to these classes and also because of the extravagant lifestyles that were maintained by the aristocracy.

One of the main reasons that had led to the revolution was the erosion of the trust of the people in the main organs of the government. The 16th and the 17th centuries saw the loss of prestige and respect of such bodies among the public. As mentioned above, there was a decline in the aristocracy who began to sell titles in order to maintain their lifestyles. The courts also suffered a decline as it became a marketplace for the disposal of cash and granting favors. The bureaucracy had become corrupt as a result of the crown cutting down their pay when it incurred financial losses. A major example of this can be seen in the Duke of Buckingham who put up everything for sale in the 1620’s from bishopric to judgeship to nobility titles. The personal failings of the monarchs like James I of whom people were always suspicious of his foreign policies and his close association with the Spanish Ambassador further deteriorated the respect that the crown had commanded from the people.

The decades before the revolution saw a spread of new ideas especially that of Puritanism among the lower middle classes. Puritanism provided a basis and justification for challenging the existing orders. The different competing religions created doubts in the minds of the people and eroded the religious authority. It shattered the unquestioning and habitual faith of the past. Hobbs describes this as a period boiling hot with questions. One of the main reasons for the spread of new ideas was the increase in the numbers of those receiving education. A class of intellectuals thus arose as the universities were turning out more educated people that the available jobs.

The ideology of the country was also an important factor as it was presented as the exact opposite of the court. The country was seen as an ideal, environmentally superior, peaceful and clean whereas the court was just the opposite being corrupt and filthy. There was discontent among many due to the huge social mobility, both geographically and vertically, mainly from the 1540’s to the time of the revolution.

Moving on to the precipitants which were the causes just a few decades before the revolution Christopher Hill says that the Tudor monarchy was backed by the politically effective classes because they benefitted from it. On the other hand the Stuart monarchs with their pro-foreign policies were disliked by the people and lost the support of those who had been in favor of the Tudors. Another reason was that the crown refused to respond positively to criticisms.

The support which the crown showed for the Arminian church also became a serious issue of clash. The puritans were opposed to it and they held opposite views on predestination and clashed over forms of worship. With William Laud being appointed as archbishop, the crown totally supported Lauds goals to restore the power and prestige of the bishops and to bring back old forms of worship. Those who opposed Laudian reforms were persecuted and many fled the country. The people were suspicious of Laud’s reforms as it could lead to the restoration of Catholicism. Such policies caused an increase in the numbers of puritan supporters as the Anglican laity and the gentry were now forced into the opposition camp.

With Charles dissolving the parliament in 1629, it marked the beginning of the eleven years of tyranny. The crown was now forced to raise money in an arbitrary manner which lost its support of different groups. Tunnage and Poundage continued to be collected without parliamentary approval and the Ship Money was also imposed, a tax which was initially imposed on the merchants living in the port towns and then to those living inland. It had not been used for a long time and so when it was imposed, a lot of merchants joined with the opposition. Also the gentry were now fined for their failure to take up knighthood.

There was also an economic reaction when the guild organization was imposed from above by the crown to maintain control over the different industrial and artisan classes. These merchants were supporters of the crown and were now annoyed with the constant interference. So when the crown turned to them for help, they refused causing the downfall of the regime. The crown committed a major blunder when it brought up Strafford and Laud as now all the hatred and the grievances of the nation was now focused on these two.

The short term triggers were the causes that gave the final push to the revolution. A trigger was pulled when Charles and Laud attempted to impose on the Scottish clergy the English system of worship and organization with the introduction of the ‘Common Book of Prayer’. This led to a full scale war with the defeat of England and the crown losing control over its military. This was followed by the Irish rebellion in 1641. The king granting permission to the parliament to hold nationwide fasts on the last Wednesday of every month until the end of the war with Ireland was a big blunder. The parliament chose the preachers who were to speak in these meetings and so managed to spread their ideas and influence over a large number of people.

The king drove the final nail into his coffin as he planned a coup with 400 soldiers on 4th January, 1642. His visit to Scotland in the vain hope of buying their support resulted in him being now seen as a traitor and the civil war began in full swing. It culminated in 1649 with the defeat and execution of Charles I.

Historians over the years have found the causes of the English revolution highly complex and inconclusive. From the simple interpretation that it was rebellion against unpopular kings as suggested by Clarendron, the debate has taken several complex turns since then.

The first major historian to write on the issue was S.R Gardiner from the Victorian period. In his work the History of England 1603-1656 he explains it as a Puritan revolution. This view has however drawn a lot of criticism from the Marxist writers. E.J Hobsbawm and Maurice Dobb, has seen it as revolution which was responsible for bringing down the feudal structure in England and replacing it with a capitalist structure. They called it a bourgeois revolution. According to them as the present restrictive production system hampered the growth of the emerging social classes, a class-war was inevitable and it took the form of English Revolution.

With the fall of the twentieth century writing on the subject has become more complex with historians like R.H Tawney, Trever-Roper, Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill giving us various interpretations of the English Revolution. According to R.H Tawney, the rising gentry, because of the redistribution of land a century before the civil war and the decaying older landowners, because of the inefficient management of land led to an upset in the balance of property. He regards the civil war as an instrument to accommodate the power of these new gentry in the political system of the time. Lawrence Stone who shares a somewhat similar view however elaborates on it by adding the argument that the decline of the traditional landowners was primarily due to their over-expenditure and not inefficient land management as suggested by Tawney. Stone also stresses on how the aristocracy lost its military powers, its territorial positions and their prestige. Their real income had declined drastically and this left the crown and the church isolated.

H.R Trever-Roper however contends by putting forward the interpretation that there was no substantial rise of the gentry but in fact they suffered a massive decline due to the inflation in the 16th century. He puts forward that it was the yeomen who moved up the ladder. He further elaborates his argument by saying that it was the mere gentry or the rural gentry and small and middling farmers who had interests different from those attached to the court and these were the people who tried to overthrow the court system in the 1640’s and emerged as the radical leaders of the New Model Army. Christopher Hill however objects to the inclusion of lawyers by Trever-Roper in the list of those who were attached to the court. He cites evidence to prove that the larger sections of the lawyers had actually supported the parliament.

Hill traces the origins of the English revolution to the social and economic consequences of the period of Henry VIII. He puts forward that the wealth and the economic power which the church lost as a consequence of the reformation was shifted to the hands of the crown. Hill thus argues that there was no major land transfers during the reformation era as most of the wealth remained within the landed ruling class and the politically influential people at the time of dissolution of monasteries. However within the court of Henry VIII there were lesser gentries who were gaining sympathy from the crown compared to the older aristocracy who were losing the favor. Thus there was a shift of power within the ruling landed classes. The newly acquired wealth failed to strengthen the monarchy as most of it was soon dissipated from spending on the construction of naval fleet and war with France.

The Social revolution according to Hill was taking place independently related to the expansion of trade, manufacturing activities and changes in agriculture. Towards the close of the 16th century, while the gentry and the yeomen strengthened their economic position by following capitalist means, the aristocrats were again facing economic problems and appealed to the crown for help which in turn conferred them with court offices and gave them rights of industrial and commercial monopolies. This came as a blow to the bourgeoisie and the gentry who saw their interests being threatened and brought the rival groups into open conflict with each other. For Hill it was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ as far as English Revolution was concerned. Hill however in his later works; he suggests that the new political, social and intellectual concepts of the so called middling-class comprising merchants, artisans and yeomen motivated them towards radical experiments between 1640 and 1660. He calls it the ‘Puritan Revolution’, the term Puritanism however was not used by him in a strictly religious sense. The major limitation of Hill’s work is that he fails to provide reasons for why the feudal landlords did not mend their households to cope up to the economic pressures in spite of sufficient opportunities to benefit from the existent economic conditions.

J.H. Hexter around the same time came out with a vigorous attack on both Tawney and Trever-Roper Thesis. He accused them of trying to fit the events of the 17th Century England into the pre-determined mould of Marxist theory while ignoring the ideals and ideology of the period. He saw politics as merely a struggle of the ‘Ins’ versus the ‘Outs’, the court versus the country. However Hexter’s own explanation of the social changes prior to 1640 was a new version of Lawrence Stone’s Thesis. He declined Stone’s idea of the financial decay of the old aristocracy but argued that there had been a collapse of the military control by the aristocracy over the greater gentry. This meant that the political leadership had shifted from the House of Lords to the House of Commons, though the immediate causes of the political breakdown of the 1640’s was ascribed by him to the traditional religious and constitutional factors.

There are also several other historians like P. Zagorin who have written extensively on the origins of the English revolution. He created a model which showed the English Revolution as a result of the attempt on part of the under-privileged and over-taxed ‘country’ against the expanding, oppressive, corrupt and authoritarian courts and bureaucracies of the age. But the larger question is whether England at the time processed such a large bureaucracy and court which could inflict such an influence.

As we have seen there are numerous causes which have been suggested for the beginning of the English revolution by various historians. The debate can however be broadly divided into the Whig historians who have given a political narrative of the revolution, the Marxist historians who have given us a socio-economic interpretation of the English Revolution, Revisionist Historians who have challenged the idea that the Civil War was inevitable because of ideological or class struggle. They emphasize the role of short-term factors, such as Charles’ personality and the divisive effects of his religious policies and the more recent Post-Revisionist historians who also challenge the idea that the Civil War was inevitable. They often focus on the English Civil War as part of a larger British perspective stressing the importance of events in Scotland and Ireland. Some also admit that long-term causes before the reign of Charles I may have an important place in provoking conflict. The vastness and complexity of the society, polity and economics during the period has left Historians perplexed and the debate continuing.

Bibliography
1. Stone, Lawrence, The causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.

  1. Hill, Christopher, the English Revolution 1640, Lawrence and Wishart Ltd, London.
  2. Hill, Christopher, edt. Geoff Eley and William Hunt, Reviving the English Revolution, Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill, Verso, London.
  3. Sinha, Arvind, Europe in Transistion, From Feudalism to Industrialization, Manohar, Delhi, 2014.