Conrad Russell's review of Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution

 

Conrad Russell's review of Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution

Conrad Russell’s review of Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 (The English Historical Review. Volume 88, No.349 October, 1973. Pp.856-861) I recently re-read this review in the EHR and was struck by a number of its claims. One might have expected Russell to have been highly critical of this work which reflected many of the assumptions, whether Whig or Marxist, upon which early modern historians had been constructing their analyses of the origins and causes of the English Revolution since Tawney’s work in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, Russell proved to be surprisingly complimentary, describing Stone’s work as ‘brilliant’ and praising him for his contribution to the production of “a high proportion of our most interesting new ideas” on Tawney’s century (i.e. from 1540 to 1640). Indeed, he welcomed the synthesis of Stone’s ideas that he now offered and the careful qualifications with which its author had hedged it. Russell did not spend much time on the opening chapter of Stone’s work, which dealt with sociological models of revolution, or on his comments on the historiography of the English Civil War. The ‘gentry controversy’, Russell thought, could now be dismissed since the divisions in England in 1642 were not along any recognizable economic lines. What engaged his interest much more was Stone’s attempt to explain the events of the 1640s by analysing their long-term preconditions, their medium-term precipitants and the immediate triggers for conflict. One of the critical preconditions for the Civil War was undoubtedly the financial weakness of the Crown which made it dependent upon the co-operation of the country’s landowners: there was no bureaucratic apparatus or army at its disposal. Stone’s new hypothesis was that England was experiencing a high degree of social mobility which increased the numbers of those in its middle and upper ranks and stimulated competition for office and status. But this argument had, according to Russell, a crucial weakness. It did not explain how the social changes Stone discussed led to political changes. How, he asked, did insecurity over status lead to changes in political behaviour? Stone’s case lacked the illustration from events that it needed even though the careers of figures like Sir Robert Phelips, Sir John Saville and Sir Thomas Wentworth had been analysed by Thomas Barnes and J.T.Cliffe in ways that would have permitted Stone to use them for this purpose. Russell went on to deny that any ‘Crisis of the Aristocracy’ was visible in the 1620s and cited the Duke of Buckingham as a “skilled political operator [who] appears to have acted on the assumption that members of the aristocracy were the dominant force in the Parliamentary politics of the period.” He was more content with Stone’s discussion of Puritanism, in particular of Queen Elizabeth’s failure to make concessions over Church worship to Archbishop Grindal and his allies, and of Court-Country divisions in general. However, the Common Law and Common Lawyers were not so invariably hostile to the Crown as Stone had supposed (and recent publications showed) and Stone’s views on the peerage and on parish clergy employed archaic terminology in combination with sociological jargon. Finally, Russell was concerned over the issue of determining what Stone was trying to explain. Was it the events of 1640-1642 or the nature of the more clearly ‘revolutionary’ period of 1647-1649? Were the gentry in control in 1642 when armies were raised on behalf of the King and the Long Parliament? And what about the incursions of the Scots? Social explanations had not been related to the political story. Even so, he concluded that Stone’s was “the best book on the origins of the Civil War, but it must still be read in conjunction with the work of S.R.Gardiner.” It was and is striking how much less critical Russell was than, for example, Blair Worden was in his review of the same work in The New Statesman. Russell was, moreover, willing to allow that economic and social explanations for the events of the 1640s might be – perhaps, in this instance, were – plausible and tenable. “ It is easy to say that the Civil War may have been caused by social mobility, or by an overcrowding of the ranks of the gentry, but if this proposition is to be accepted it must be possible to illustrate it through the behaviour of individual gentlemen. How, when, and for what people was insecurity about status reflected in political behaviour, and what type of political behaviour resulted? If a general law is sound, it must have particular examples. It is, of course, hypothetically possible that social change may influence people's political behaviour in a way which is invisible, but if the process is invisible, we have no scholarly reason for believing in it. In this context, one must deplore Mr. Stone's failure to illustrate his propositions through political history, and in particular through Parliamentary history.” This could have been done through case studies of the three figures – Phelips, Saville and Wentworth – he identified but had not been achieved by Stone. Stone, moreover, was still wedded to his implausible hypothesis about the relative decline of the peerage by 1641 and to his belief in long-redundant terminology about over-mighty medieval nobles, feudal landlord-tenant relations and the fiscal weaknesses of the Crown. There are hints too in Russell’s comments about his insistence on the primacy of narrative history and just a suggestion about the importance of external military intervention by the Scots in England’s affairs. Just as Stone’s kind of analysis was dying, so Russell’s was on the cusp of being born. Admittedly, the two men had some features in common. Both had been educated at Oxford and both were, by the early-1970s, well away from what had been in the preceding two decades the most important centre for studies in early modern history in the English-speaking world. Stone, a former don at Oxford, had left for Princeton in 1962 where his liking for large ideas and big books was given full rein. In the decade that followed, he became increasingly out of touch with the currents influencing research in the early to mid-seventeenth century in England and the rest of the British Isles. Russell, who had been an undergraduate when Stone’s fulminations in the gentry controversy were in full flow but who had failed to complete his doctoral work, was at Bedford College in the University of London where Joel Hurstfield (of UCL) had become his patron. If he had been able, Russell would have liked to return to Oxford but its major figures suspected his scholarship was unsound and were unsympathetic to him. But there were differences of substance too. Stone believed that it was possible using the tools provided by Marxism and sociology to penetrate below the surface of events and to offer deep explanations for what had happened in the past. Russell, on the other hand, while not ruling out such possibilities, insisted that explanations of this kind had to be compatible with the evidence of events and that, with respect to the English Civil Wars, no fully convincing arguments based on class or economic or social change had yet been advanced. In his case, he was coming to the view, a generation after Hexter had done so, that neither Whig nor Marxist hypotheses could be sustained. Others shared this view but proved to be more accurate scholars than either man.