Tim Harris on the Causes of the English Revolution

 

Tim Harris on the Causes of the English Revolution

The resources of the internet continue to offer surprises, often pleasant surprises. Yesterday, I used Google’s news search facility to look for comments on Lawrence Stone’s 1972 publication on The Causes of the English Revolution. Doing so brought up some reflections by Tim Harris (Brown University) on the Oxford University Press’s blog in January, 2014 on the challenges historians have faced in explaining the origins or causes of the English Civil War that began in 1642. How far back should they go? To the Reformations of the sixteenth century or to the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603 or to the start of Charles I’s reign in 1625? What, in any case, constituted a ‘cause’? Was Stone right to think in terms of a scheme covering preconditions, precipitants and triggers or were the so-called ‘revisionists’ correct to favour short-term explanations for the collapse of the Stuart monarchy in 1640-1642?

Harris was sympathetic up to a point with the revisionists’ contentions. No one in 1641 wanted a revolution: Charles I’s critics wanted reform and a peaceful settlement. But this left open the question of Charles’s decision in August, 1642 to raise his standard at Nottingham and to initiate the formal armed conflict. This was where Harris had problems with the revisionists’ position. There could be factors, he argued, that lacked causal significance but possessed explanatory significance.  If they thought the English state was fundamentally sound in the 1630s, that was not true in the case of Scotland where religious tensions existed over the role of Bishops in the Kirk and over the Caroline Prayer Book. Similarly, in Ireland, the policy of plantation after 1607 was an enduring grievance. As a much larger and wealthier state, England ought to have been able to deal with the Covenanters’ rebellion in Scotland and the Irish rising of 1641 but could not do so. Why was the English regime so unpopular by the late-1630s that many people preferred not to support Charles I and why did they find themselves divided in their response to the Irish rebellion?  Longer-term contexts did have explanatory significance even if they had little causal significance: there had been a latent hostility towards Puritanism in English society since the late-sixteenth century into which Charles I had been able to tap in 1641-1642 in creating the Royalist cause. All in all, the cultural, political and religious contexts needed to be examined in all three Stuart kingdoms in the longer term to explain why a crisis point was reached in 1642.

This is an extremely clever piece of analysis by-passing the differences between Stone’s position and that of a figure like Conrad Russell by c.1990. It probably has not had the attention it deserves. The distinction between the requirements of ‘explanation’ and the identification of ‘causes’ is a subtle one for which Tim Harris can claim credit.

                                                                                                                                                9th July, 2021

                                 

 

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