The impact of the press in the English Civil War
The
impact of the press in the English Civil War
Quite by chance last week, I came across some very brief
comments by Ann Hughes (Keele) on the impact of the radical press on the Long
Parliament’s cause in the early stages of the English Civil War. She had been
asked by The Times Higher Education Supplement to specify the best books of the
season in December, 2018 and had responded by identifying David Como’s work,
Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford University Press) as
the one she had most recently enjoyed. Como’s research had, she observed, revealed
the centrality of a lively press to radical Parliamentarianism and how crucial
radical militancy was to Parliament’s eventual victory. It did, indeed, offer
some basis for optimism about democratic engagement in our own times.[1]
This was a very succinct commentary on a much longer work and
it would be unfair to make too much of it. Even so, it did and does raise some
interesting questions. One obvious one arises from the timescale being
discussed. It is perfectly true that the forces of the Long Parliament won the
first English Civil War and its much briefer sequel in 1648. English forces
later conquered Ireland and Scotland. But, as the late Barry Coward observed in
1980, the English Revolution was a failure: the supporters of the ‘Good Old
Cause’ had, by mid-1660, to face the fact that it had collapsed and been
brought down by its own political and religious divisions. For all its immense
legacy of intellectual and polemical controversy, which is still being explored
by historians, royal rule was restored, the established churches of England,
Ireland and Scotland were back in place and the key issues about where
sovereignty lay in the Stuarts’ realms lay and how far religious diversity was
compatible with political stability remained to be settled some decades later.[2]
Secondly, of course, the experiences of the 1640s and 1650s –
of rule by the Commonwealth and Protectorate – had been brutal enough to leave
an indelible mark on all three kingdoms. Many lives, human and animal, had been
lost or irrevocably altered and there had been immense damage to the buildings,
landscapes and economies of all three. Supporters of the restored monarchy and
of their established churches could and did cite these consequences as evidence
of radical misrule and as a warning to future generations. Although, in one
limited sense, they had been militarily defeated, the ‘Royalists’ had emerged
victorious from these struggles.
Finally, it is not at all clear what lessons for democratic
engagement in or after 2018 could be drawn from Como’s book or the English
Civil War.
All in all, Ann Hughes raised some interesting issues which
historians can continue to debate in the future.
25
August, 2022
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