Anne Laurence on The Wars of the Three Kingdoms

 

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms reviewed

Anne Laurence,  The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Open University, 2007)

 

      Anne Laurence is an historian with a long and distinguished career. Originally an undergraduate at York University, she undertook her doctoral research at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Christopher Hill. Her thesis on ‘Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 1642-1651’ was subsequently published. Since then, she has won recognition for her work on the lives of early modern women and, more recently, on women investors in the early eighteenth-century financial revolution.[1] Her long-term commitment to the Open University, where she now holds a chair, led to the composition of this work for its A200 course, Exploring History: Medieval to Modern, 1400-1900: it is primarily a teaching text carefully integrated with that course’s accompanying Anthology, Visual Sources Book, Course Guide and DVD.[2]

      The aims of this work focus upon the nature of the states within the British Isles, the fortunes and status of the evolving religious confessions within the Stuarts’ ‘multiple monarchy’ and the economic opportunities and restraints experienced by people in the seventeenth century. All of these shaped the development of constitutional monarchy, the rule of law and Parliaments and the emergence of Britain as a dominant trading power in the eighteenth century.[3] These formidable tasks have been undertaken in less than one hundred and fifty pages of lucid prose.

      Professor Laurence begins her analysis by linking the troubles of the Thirty Years’ War on the continent with their origins in religious conflicts, dynastic and territorial rivalries to the problems facing the Stuarts in the British Isles after James VI of Scotland came to rule England and Ireland from 1603. She is particularly helpful in explaining to students how religious differences between the three kingdoms and within them had destabilising effects although they were not enough in themselves to cause the collapse of Stuart rule before 1637-1641. Other factors – the opposition, for example, of the landed elite in Scotland to Charles I’s religious and secular policies, the alienation by Wentworth in Ireland in the 1630s of the ‘Old Irish’, ‘Old English’ and ‘New English’ alike, and the resentment in England over Laudian measures in the Church and fears for the subject’s liberties – were also necessary to set these realms on fire. She offers an elegant explanation on how these apprehensions interacted and fuelled the subsequent conflicts.

      Admittedly, her focus before, during and after the 1640s is mainly upon England. But she has a convincing account of Scottish attachment to Calvinist theology and to a Presbyterian form of Church government which that country’s rulers amongst the landed elite hoped to export in that crucial decade to England and Ireland within a federalist polity and of the difficulties which arose from the resistance of stricter Covenanters to the post-1660 restoration of Bishops to the Kirk. Similarly, in Ireland, she is illuminating on the importance of post-Tridentine Catholicism for the Confederation of Kilkenny’s rule and on the significance of land ownership right down to the end of this period. It is certainly difficult to think of a better succinct account of the divisions that emerged amongst supporters of the Long Parliament in the mid to late-1640s leading ultimately to the trial and execution of Charles I early in 1649. English conquest of Ireland and Scotland followed thereafter to create the first ‘union’ of these islands. Although she recognises the dependence of both the Commonwealth and Protectorate on military force, her account, perhaps, underplays the absence of active consent to the rule of these regimes. It was more than a crisis of legitimacy that led to the return of Charles II in 1660.[4]

      Her final chapter on the Restoration settlements in the three kingdoms and the tensions – political, religious and fiscal – with which Charles II and James II and VII had to deal over the next three decades is helpful in explaining how and why the Revolutions of 1688-89 in England and Scotland and the military defeat of James in Ireland by William of Orange left an enduring legacy in monarchs presiding over kingdoms ruled by laws which were made in Parliaments and over religious settlements that allowed for a degree of toleration unimaginable in 1600. Elements of these settlements, as Anne Laurence rightly points out, endure to this day.

      This combination of analysis and narrative covering the period from 1600 to 1700 is sustained by an acute sense of historiographical developments and by a clever use of documents from the accompanying Anthology and of illustrations from the A200 course’s Visual Illustrations Book. There can be no excuse for Open University students or anyone else not appreciating the significance of historians’ debates over the General Crisis of the seventeenth century or on the rise or fall of the gentry or on the views of Conrad Russell on the problems rulers of multiple kingdoms inevitably faced: the contrasting emphases of John Morrill on wars of religion and of Jonathan Scott on European comparisons  are highlighted in more than one place. On the other hand, it is difficult to maintain that Lawrence Stone’s hypothesis about the decline of the aristocracy is remotely tenable[5] or that Christopher Hill was in the 1960s and 1970s the leading historian of a Civil War period that resulted in the emergence of a ‘capitalist class’.[6]

      Some mistakes can be found in the text. The claim that early Stuart monarchs were dependent upon Parliamentary grants to rule even in peacetime is clearly wrong.[7] Illness, in fact, prevented the Earl of Northumberland from commanding English troops when the Covenanters invaded in the summer of 1640.[8] But these reservations should not detract from an interesting, well-crafted piece of writing. It meets the essential requirements for introducing students to this complex period and to the continuing debates amongst historians over the explanatory challenges.

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[1] http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/history/laurence.htm    15/09/2009.

[2] Rachel C.Gibbons, ed., Exploring History 1400-1900. An Anthology of Primary Sources (Manchester University Press. Manchester, 2007).

[3] Laurence, op.cit., p.6.

[4] Ibid., p.98.

[5] Ibid., p.40.

[6] Ibid., Pp.132-133.

[7] Ibid., p.21.

[8] Ibid., p.56.