The causes of the English Civil War (review)

146 Reviews Moreover, some of the words in the translation which are asterisked as being extended in the Latin are in fact not extended at ah, but rather reflect a better and freer translation. Twice, explanations are duplicated. Alan Crown Department of Semitic Studies University of Sydney Hughes, Ann, The causes of the English Civil War (British history in perspective series), London, Macmillan, 1991; paperback; pp. vii, 211; R.R.P. £7.99. Anyone who tries to explain the causes of the English Civil War in a mere hundred and eighty pages is very brave. Fortunately Ann Hughes is master of the major post-war scholarship on the subject and she avoids the obvious trap of tedious recital by anatomizing, assessing, and reinterpreting the material from a distinct viewpoint. She attacks the 'revisionist' view that social and religious consensus prevailed in England before the functional weaknesses of the English monarchy caused it to be overwhelmed by the 'British Problem': tbe interactive political and religious differences of the three kingdoms maladroidy ruled by Charles I. She finds instead deep-seated social, cultural, and religioustensionswithin early Stuart society, producing conflicting and mutually reinforcing conspiracy theories that ensured increasingly divided responses to the pressure of events. It scarcely does justice to the intricacies of her argument to acknowledge its focus on the regional complexities of incremental social and economic change, especially the way in which the varying responses of different social ranks to that pressure contextualized the conflicting types of political leadership possible in 1642. T w o very dUferent lifestyles and world-views emerged from the contrast between the communal, paternalistic outlook of the lowland sheep-com country, where enclosure reordered social relationships and increased social differentiation between an anxious but profiting eiite and a dispossessed peasantry, and the more egalitarian outloook of the upland wood-pasture areas, dominated by independent cattle-raisers and small craftsmen. In the former, Puritanism, a specification unashamedly used by Hughes, threatened order by its emphasis on independent thought and its criticism of that practical, ceremonial religion, centred on communal parish rituals and entertainments licensed by the Book of Sports, which held an increasingly Reviews 147 disparate society together. In the latter, Puritanism offered a remedy for a chronically unruly society through its emphasis on internalized godliness. Crucially, Hughes links this contrast with national politics by emphasizing how the wood-pasture provided the environmental context for the 'country' outlook, the distinctive world-view of Protestants w h o sought broad political participation to establish the N e w Jerusalem in then locality, and to encourage the Stuart kings to advance and protect Protestantism nationally and internationally against the popish Plot they believed surrounded them. Hughes also delineates a 'court' outlook which, while it nostalgically constructed the 'country' as a place of traditional communalism and hierarchy bolstered by the 'lawful recreations' set out in the Book of Sports, felt threatened by the rabble-rousing 'popularity' of Puritan lecturers, who incited interference by the lower orders in matters of the royal prerogative and misrepresented the king's policies as crypto-papist tyranny. Such paranoid delusions appealed to the politically limited Charles I, whose subsequent responses in the Forced Loan and the 'new counsels' of the 1630s confirmed exactly the worst fears of zealous Protestants. The events of 1638-42 were therefore perceived by both sides through the distorting lenses ofrivalconspiracy theories. W a r seemed the only defence against the threats of popish tyranny on the one hand and popular tumult and anarchy on the other. Does the explanation of the CivU war therefore 'lie in the soil'? Such a question underestimates the subdety of Hughes's interpretation, but one wonders whether this excellent survey of recent historiography succeeds because it accepts David Underdown's environmental argument as its starting point without enough cautious awareness that the local contradictions that Underdown himself admits m a y limit the usefulness of this conceptual generalization. It depends upon the level of generalization that historians can accept. For example, Hughes cites S h Thomas Smith's account of the 'degrees of men' as evidence that even 'the fourth sort of men' at the bottom of the heap participated in politics through minor...