Revolt in the Provinces

The People of England and the Tragedies of War 1634-1648

J.S. Morrill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138155923
• eBook ISBN: 9781317890683
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This text caused a major stir when it was first published in 1976. Redirecting scholarly attention to the county communties, it reassessed their role in the events of the 1630s and 1640s, claiming they were far more independent of London and the national leadership than usually supposed, and that provincial opinion was itself a powerful actor in the countdown to civil war. Much work has since appeared to confirm or modify these findings. In this reset second edition the original survives largely untouched; but now includes entirely new histiorographic commentary on the text and supporting documents.

CHAPTER ONE The Coming of War

DOI: 10.4324/9781315843049-2

Introduction

There could be no civil war before 1642 because there was no royalist party. The origins of the English civil war are really concerned less with the rise of opposition than with the resurgence of loyalism; loyalty to a King who appeared to have disregarded the rights of his subjects, and support for a Church which had combined the persecution of an old nonconformity (puritanism) with the championship of another (Arminianism).

Most historians have in effect concerned themselves with the crisis of 1640; with the isolation of Charles I from the great majority of his people. The events of 1640–42 are treated as of secondary importance, the falling away of the faint-hearted as the crisis worked itself out. The royalists are portrayed, even by those without ideological axes to grind, as men lacking both vision and the stomach for a fight – men unable to overcome an inbred respect for authority and the hierarchy of values expressed in the Great Chain of Being.

Furthermore, the events of 1640–42 are still interpreted almost entirely in terms of a succession of crises at Whitehall and Westminster, as though the political convulsions there were neatly counter-pointed by parallel crises in provincial communities. It will be the primary task of this section to examine what was happening in the partially autonomous shires and boroughs of England and Wales before and during the years 1640–42. It will also attempt to show that while men – above all those prominent gentry families who ran local government – shared many assumptions about the nature of the crisis, their response was largely conditioned by local events and local power structures. It will be about the interaction of national and local politics.

Alan Everitt is the leading exponent of the concept of ‘provincialism’ and its significance for an understanding of early modern England. In several persuasive works he has argued that ‘most towns and counties were more interested in living a life of their own, in which politics played merely an intermittent part…’.¹His theme has been taken up and developed by other historians and incorporated into their more general treatment of the period. Thus Lawrence Stone has written:

1.A.M. Everitt, ‘The County Community’ in E.W. Ives (ed.), The English Revolution, 1600–1660 (1968), p. 49; see also by him, Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (1969): ‘The Local Community and the English Civil War’, in Historical Association Pamphlet, G. 70 (1969). He has also written a brilliant case study, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (1966).

when an Englishman in the early seventeenth century said ‘my country’, he meant ‘my county’. What we see in the half century before the civil war is the growth of an emotional sense of loyalty to the local community, and also of institutional arrangements to give that sentiment force. The county evolved as a coherent political and social community, with reference to – and potentially in rivalry with – both other counties and the central executive and its local agents.²

2.L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (1972), p. 106.

I am not, of course, going to argue that this provincialism excluded concern for general or national political and constitutional issues, but rather that such issues took on local colours and were articulated within local contexts. The gentry did not consider dispassionately such problems as those arising from the Book of Orders, ship money or the Nineteen Propositions. They did not attempt to weigh their legality or necessity in the light of abstruse general constitutional principles. Rather, they evaluated the effect such measures would have on the peace and security of their local communities. Only occasionally did county factions adopt positions in relation to national issues based on local opportunism rather than on conviction. However, they did often reshape the points involved and invested them with a more local significance. It is in this light that I accept Alan Everitt’s assertion that ‘though the sense of national identity had been increasing since the early Tudors, so too had the sense of county identity, and the latter was normally the more powerful sentiment in 1640–60’.³

3.Everitt, ‘The Local Community’, p. 5.

Court and Country

One dominant theme of work in the 1970s on the origins of the English civil war was the attempt to tie in the sentiment of provincialism with the notion of twin polarities in English politics in the period 1621–42, the polarities of Court and Country.

Modern use of the terms derives first from the writings of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has employed them to illustrate a basic flaw in the structure of the states of early modern Europe, including England. He sees the concept of Court and Country as representing ‘the tug of opposite interests’ within the ruling orders, between the ‘Renaissance state’, that ‘ever-expanding bureaucracy which, though at first a working bureaucracy, had by the end of the sixteenth century become a parasitic bureaucracy’, and the Country, ‘that undeterminate, unpolitical, but highly sensitive miscellany of men who mutinied not against the monarchy … nor against economic archaism, but against the vast, oppressive ever-extending apparatus of parasitic bureaucracy which had grown up around the throne and above the economy’.⁴The attractiveness of the idea for historians of England was greatly enhanced by Perez Zagorin’s demonstration that the terms had been widely used at the time to describe the polarisation of the political world, particularly in the 1620s. Zagorin argues that the terms represent the essential conflicts of political interest in pre-revolutionary England. He described the polarities as ‘diffuse, yet real, not fictitious collectivities [between which] … only hostility could prevail’.⁵A further important dimension has recently been added by Peter Thomas, who sees the two terms as reflecting the disintegration of the cultural latitudinarianism of the Elizabethan Court and the emergence of an élitist court aesthetic in the reign of Charles I.⁶Court and Country represented the distinction between the adherents of the new and the old cultural tastes and forms.

4.H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’ in T. Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (1965), pp. 114, 78, 94. 5.P. Zagorin, ‘The Court and the Country: A Note on Political Terminology in the Seventeenth Century’, EHR, Vol. 77 (1962); The Court and the Country (1969), p. 32. 6.P.W. Thomas, ‘Court and Country’ in C. Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (1973).

All these writers, and others who have taken to employing the terms, have been more interested in the Country than in the Court; the concept of the Court has never been fully worked out. In general, historians have been content to take the opposition’s view of the Court at face value. In reality, however, the Court was pursuing a coherent, if irresponsible, programme of economic, political and ecclesiastical reform throughout the 1630s. The programme proved to be beyond its administrative resources, but it was neither ineffectual nor hand-to-mouth (at least not until 1638 or 1639).⁷

7.The chapters by Hawkins and Tyacke, and to some extent Hill and Corfield, in Russell (ed.), Origins, largely remedy this. But we still await a more up-to-date account of Court faction and policy-making in the 1630s the match that written nearly fifty years ago by H.R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud (1940).

Furthermore, with the exception of Hugh Trevor-Roper, historians have tended to assume that Court and Country were synonymous with the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’, between whom rugged barriers were fixed. Thus, for Perez Zagorin the Court ‘was the traditional collective designation of the monarch, his residence, council, officials and courtiers. But coupled as a term with the Country, it meant [they] … had become recognised partisans in a political struggle.’⁸There has been a tendency to overlook the ease with which men who had been leaders of the Country opposition in Parliament moved into office, and also to ignore the number of men within the bureacracy who shared the views (or even enjoyed the patronage) of the leading Country lords. Sir Thomas Wentworth was a leading ‘Country’ politician in the 1620s and an architect of ‘Thorough’ in the 1630s, and William Noy, who designed the ship money writs, had earlier acted as a legal and constitutional adviser to the Country party in Parliament. Some of those (like Sir Benjamin Rudyerd or Sir Henry Vane) who spoke out most forcefully about the policies and practices of the Court in the parliaments of 1640, had remained office-holders within the Court throughout the earlier period.

8.Zagorin, ‘The Court and the Country’, p. 310.

One of the reasons why political life in the 1620s and 1630s was more deeply troubled than hitherto was that Charles I, unlike his predecessors, excluded from office representatives of some of the main currents of political and religious opinion. One of Elizabeth’s greatest achievements, surely, had been to contain within her Court and administration representatives of every significant current of thought. Through her careful handling of patronage, she had prevented (until 1601) any group from feeling isolated and left out. Conservatives and radicals in Parliament all felt that they had allies at Court, and the result was that struggles there mirrored those at Court and were one element in an institutionalised contest in which each group sought to win the Queen over to its views. Opposition was ‘earthed’ to Court faction. It was directed not against the Court, but at promoting particular policies and groups already represented within it. It is not the case that political conflicts in the 1620s were more dangerous than those which divided Leicester and Walsingham from Cecil in the 1570s and 1580s. By the reign of Charles I, however, groups were forming around prominent Lords who were excluded from the Council and from positions of influence. The leaders of these groups held deeply felt political viewpoints not represented by any of the cliques in power. Yet despite a growing divergence over constitutional questions, the key to the 1620s lies in the belief of the opposition groups that the solution to misgovernment lay not in constitutional change but in their own attainment of office. Unlike Elizabethan factions, they could only make themselves heard by adopting a strategy of confrontation. The extent to which the parliamentary politics of the period revolve around the tactical use of parliamentary power has recently been elucidated by Mr Thompson. He has argued that at least one opposition group used its strength in the Commons as a platform from which to negotiate its way to office, and he has shown that it nearly succeeded. Much the same group, which included men like the Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Bedford and John Pym, made another bid for power in 1640–41. It is not surprising that such men, excluded from office for so long, should add a hard constitutional edge to their political beliefs.⁹It is about such groups as this that Zagorin is thinking when he writes: ‘the Country was the first opposition movement in English history whose character transcended that of a feudal following or a faction…. If faction and party be considered as alternative types of political structure then the Country approximated more nearly to party.’¹⁰The papers of the Earl of Bedford are full of schemes for fiscal, economic, social and political reform. What he represents is an alternative Court, a shadow cabinet; he represents the articulate minority whose interests were power and the just exercise of power. I shall call such men the ‘official’ Country.¹¹

9.For the 1620s, see C. Thompson, ‘The Origins of the Politics of the Parliamentary Middle Group’, TRHS, 5th ser., Vol. 22 (1972); for the same group’s pursuit of office in 1640–41, see Russell (ed.), Origins, pp. 110–16 and passim; and ‘The Aristocracy and the Downfall of Charles I’ in B.S. Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (1973). 10.Zagorin, ‘The Court and the Country’, pp. 74–5. 11.For Bedford’s schemes, see Russell (ed.), Origins, pp. 112–15.

But those historians who have used the concept of Court and Country want it to mean more than this small number of frustrated courtiers. They want it to mean a broad coalition of interests within the ruling class. Alongside the ‘official’ Country was to stand a ‘pure’ Country, an alliance of provincial squires fed up with misgovernment and with the corruption and expense of the Court. The concept of a ‘Country alliance’ has been most clearly laid out by Lawrence Stone. He sees the Country as a yearning for a rustic arcadia, a vision of the moral superiority of the simple country life over the diseased, venal, degenerate Court; it was loyalty to and affection for ‘particularist local interests and institutions’. This mentality was combined with ‘an increased sense of national identity and an increased respect for its head, the Tudor monarchy, and for its most representative institution, Parliament’. From here, however, Stone makes a great leap to the claim that this ‘pure’ Country mentality found expression in ‘a national programme’ put forward by articulate and politically sophisticated spokesmen.¹²

12.Stone, Causes, pp. 98–117.

I object to this final leap. I shall argue that if the term ‘Country’ is useful at all it can be applied only with the proviso that it comprehended two distinct things: a mentality shared by a large number of gentlemen and others (a majority of the political nation by 1640), and a political designation for those groups prepared to use Parliament as a path to office. The former involved an aversion to all politicians. Had Bedford become Lord Treasurer, this great Country party leader would have implemented policies which...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements (1976)
• Acknowledgements (1998)
• List of Maps
• Introduction: The Intellectual Origins of The Revolt of the Provinces (1998)
• 1 The Coming of War
• 2 The Progress of War
• 3 Reactions to War, 1643-49
• Conclusion: The Revolt of the Provinces Revisited (1998)
• Maps
• Index