Underdown on Cressy, England on Edge

 

David Underdown on Cressy, ‘England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642.’ H-Albion (November, 2007)

The late David Underdown was one of a distinguished cohort of Oxford-educated historians who made his postgraduate career in the United States of America. His works covered the fortunes of the Royalists in the period after the English Revolution of the 1640s, the causes and consequences of Pride’s Purge of the Long Parliament in 1648, the experiences of the county of Somerset and of the free-born people of England in this tumultuous time. Late in his career, he was drawn by his second wife, Susan Amussen, into reflecting upon the issues of gender which had attracted much more historiographical attention after 1970. In many ways, he was well equipped to reflect on the work of another early modern historian, David Cressy, originally from Cambridge, also living and working in the United States, on the collapse of the Caroline regime in the years between 1640 and 1642 in his book, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640-1642, published in 2006.

Underdown found much to praise in Cressy’s industry in ransacking the resources of the British Library, of the National Archives, of remote county record offices and of obscure local history societies. He was equally complimentary about Cressy’s flair for telling anecdotes and apposite quotations as England, not Scotland or Ireland, fell into chaos and confusion. It was the decay of royal rule and the dissolution of government that precipitated the crisis of 1642. Mutinous soldiers in the countryside, mobs in London and demonstrations in support of those victimized by Charles I’s regime were symptoms of this crisis even if areas of the Celtic fringe and of the southern downlands were relatively undisturbed.

Nonetheless, Underdown had reservations about some aspects of Cressy’s approach. Cressy, for example, might have given more attention to whether there were underlying cultural or economic or social reasons why the post-Tudor state was no longer sustainable. Rural rioting against enclosures and fen drainage might have been considered at greater length and strengthened his case. Similarly, he thought that Cressy had probably downplayed the strength of rural conservatism that provided Charles I with an army to fight a Civil War and misjudged the appeal of the Protestation of 1641 to neutralist movements amongst the peasantry. Even so, he was able to commend Cressy for his “lively and graphic account” of the events of those two years.

What is also striking about Underdown’s analysis is his initial claim that historians had come to be told that there was no revolution in the 1640s and certainly not one with deep, long-term economic and social causes. There had been in his view a risible interpretation advanced that the whole affair was no more than an old-fashioned baronial revolt and that the ‘English Civil War’ needed to be looked at as part of the ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’ and, indeed, in the wider context of the whole Atlantic world. Cressy had accepted none of these theories and, like Lawrence Stone, had concluded that there had been a revolution in England in 1640-1642 rather than at the end of that decade. The targets of Underdown’s criticisms were almost certainly the works of Conrad Russell and the developing output of John Adamson, neither of whom to be fair subscribed to these precise propositions.

Two different agendas were involved here. One was that of the post-Second World War period when it was taken as axiomatic that profound economic and social changes alone explained political and religious conflicts, cultural and intellectual developments and the transformation of England in the course of the seventeenth century. Underdown clearly subscribed to this school of thought as his comments on Cressy’s book showed. He was unsympathetic towards the challenges that had developed from the early-1970s onwards to the old Whig-Marxist hypothesis and to the changes in the historiographical climate that had followed. Figures like Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone had been dethroned from their places of eminence while younger historians like John Morrill and Blair Worden had risen to prominence. It may have been possible to express regrets over this re-shuffling of the historical order and to wonder why it had happened so rapidly and comprehensively but it had occurred in the British Isles, in Eire and, to an extent, in the U.S.A. itself. Underdown’s review testified to that fact and echoed the apprehensions of an earlier generation of seventeenth-century historians.