Clare Jackson's introduction to the 2017 edition of Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution

Just over a week ago, I read Clare Jackson’s introduction to the Routledge Classics edition of Lawrence Stone’s 1972 book, The Causes of the English Revolution. Dr Jackson is a distinguished historian at the University of Cambridge, the Senior Tutor at Trinity Hall and probably best known as the presenter of a well-received television series on the Stuart kingdoms between the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 and the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty after Queen Anne’s death in 1714. As an Anglo-Scot born in the year of the publication of Stone’s essay, she was and is as well-qualified as any early modern historian to assess the impact of the work.

Her introduction began with the observation that Stone’s Causes was and is a well-deserved ‘classic’, a work that analysed in less than 150 pages the economic and social changes, the cultural and literary developments, the fiscal, religious and political tensions that led to the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642. Stone had devised a way of dealing with these in terms of long-term preconditions, medium-term precipitants and short-term triggers to explain what had happened. He had borrowed some of his terminology from the social sciences to add weight to his arguments and , as he put it, to construct multiple helix chains of causation more complex than DNA itself. As a result, she concluded that, despite a stormy reaction upon publication, the essay had permanently changed the way historians thereafter studied seventeenth-century England.

Much of the rest of her piece dealt with the rise of ‘revisionism’ in reaction to the claims of Stone and others like Christopher Hill who favoured explanations based on economic or social determinism, whether soft or hard, to some degree. Figures like Conrad Russell, an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1950s, or later ones like Kevin Sharpe or John Morrill considered that the political and religious conflicts of the seventeenth century had to be studied independently, that a degree of consensus marked English affairs too, that short-term contingencies had to be taken into account as well and that Stone’s approach was too parochial, i.e. that the problem of multiple kingdoms was a vital part of any explanatory framework to be utilised. Even so, Dr Jackson remained keen to understand why the publication of The Causes of the English Revolution caused such a sensation and why it remains irresistible to readers.

This is where my difficulties with her introduction begin. I was not aware in 1972 or in the years immediately afterwards that Stone’s essay had permanently changed the way in which historians studied English history in the years up to the Civil Wars of the 1640s. Most reviews in and after publication, including that by G.R.Elton, were relatively friendly, praising Stone’s powers of organisation and the utility of the work for undergraduates beginning their reading on the antecedents or causes or origins of the ensuing conflicts. Some quite naturally baulked at his adoption of sociological jargon. The one notable exception was Blair Worden’s review in The New Statesman which articulated the scepticism of a growing number of early career researchers and postgraduates about the dominant Whig-Marxist synthesis on explaining the English Revolution. Of course, there were other more specific reservations expressed at the time. But the one thing that did not happen was any permanent or significant change in the way historians studied seventeenth-century England. It is impossible to find any widespread adoption of Stone’s analysis in the historiographical literature of the post-1972 period. On the contrary, as Dr Jackson’s introduction indicates, his analysis stimulated the appearance of an entirely new analytical and narrative approach that eschewed Stone’s chosen form of explanation and ushered in an historiographical sea-change in the mid-1970s that left Stone beached high and dry.