The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642

Lawrence Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351732598
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Dividing the nation and causing massive political change, the English Civil War remains one of the most decisive and dramatic conflicts of English history. Lawrence Stone's account of the factors leading up to the deposition of Charles I in 1642 is widely regarded as a classic in the field. Brilliantly synthesising the historical, political and sociological interpretations of the seventeeth century, Stone explores theories of revolution and traces the social and economic change that led to this period of instability.

The picture that emerges is one where historical interpretation is enriched but not determined by grand theories in the social sciences and, as Stone elegantly argues, one where the upheavals of the seventeenth century are central to the very story of modernity.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by Clare Jackson, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Part I
Historiography

1
Theories of Revolution

In attacking the problem of revolution, as most others of major significance in history, we historians should think twice before we spurn the help offered by our colleagues in the social sciences, who have, as it happens, been particularly active in the last few years in theorizing about the typology, causes, and evolutionary patterns of this particular phenomenon. The purpose of this chapter is not to advance any new hypothesis, but to provide a summary view and critical examination of the work that has been going on.

The first necessity in any inquiry is a careful definition of terms: what is, and what is not, a revolution? According to one view, it is change effected by the use of violence in government, and/or regime, and/or society.¹ By society is meant the consciousness and the mechanics of communal solidarity, which may be tribal, peasant, kinship, national, and so on; by regime is meant the constitutional structure – democracy, oligarchy, monarchy; and by government is meant specific political and administrative institutions. Violence, it should be noted, is not the same as force; it is force used with unnecessary intensity, unpredictably, and usually destructively.² This definition of revolution is a very broad one, and two historians of the French Revolution, Crane Brinton and Louis Gottschalk, would prefer to restrict the use of the word to the major political and social upheavals with which they are familiar, the ‘Great Revolutions’, as George S. Pettee calls them.³

Even the wider definition allows the historian to distinguish between, on the one hand, the seizure of power that leads to a major restructuring of government or society, the establishment of a new set of values for distributive justice, and the replacement of the former élite by a new one, and on the other hand, the coup d’état involving no more than a change of ruling personnel by violence or threat of violence. This latter is the norm in Latin America, where it occurred thirty-one times in the ten years 1945–55. Merle Kling has arrived at a suggestive explanation of this Latin American phenomenon of chronic political instability, limited but frequent use of violence, and almost complete lack of social or institutional change. He argues that ownership of the principal economic resources, both agricultural and mineral, is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, very stable, élite of enormously wealthy monoculture landlords and mining capitalists. This élite is all-powerful and cannot be attacked by opposition groups within the country; externally, however, it is dependent on foreign interests for its markets and its capital. In this colonial situation of a foreign-supported, closed plutocracy, the main avenue of rapid upward social mobility for non-members of the élite leads, via the army, to the capture of the government machine, which is the only accessible source of wealth and power. This political instability is permitted by the élite on the condition that its own interests are undisturbed. Instability, limited violence, and the absence of social or institutional change are therefore all the product of the contradiction between the realities of a colonial economy run by a plutocracy and the façade of political sovereignty – between the real, stable power of the economic élite and the nominal, unstable control of politicians and generals.⁴

The looser definition of revolution thus suits both historians of major social change and historians of the palace coup. It does, however, raise certain difficulties. First, there is a wide range of changes of government by violence which are neither a mere substitution of personalities in positions of power nor a prelude to the restructuring of society; second, conservative counter-revolutions become almost impossible to fit into the model; and last, it remains hard to distinguish between colonial wars, civil wars, and social revolution.

To avoid these difficulties, an alternative formulation has recently been put forward by a group of social scientists working mainly at Princeton. They have dropped the word ‘revolution’ altogether and put ‘internal war’ in its place.⁵ This is defined as any attempt to alter state policy, rulers, or institutions by the use of violence in societies where violent competition is not the norm and where well-defined institutional patterns exist.⁶ This concept seems to be a logical consequence of the preoccupation of sociologists in recent years with a model of society in a stable, self-regulating state of perpetual equipoise. In this utopian world of universal harmony all forms of violent conflict are anomalies, to be treated alike as pathological disorders of a similar species. This is a model which, although it has its uses for analytical purposes, bears little relation to the reality familiar to the historian. It looks to a society without change, with universal consensus on values, with complete social harmony, and isolated from external threats; no approximation to such a society has ever been seen.

The crude opposite model is based on pure interest theory and postulates that the social order rests on physical coercion of the majority by a minority in order to distribute material rewards and power in an inequitable way. The state claims a monopoly of violence, and the consequent suppression of internal disorder is its raison d’être. Societies become unstable only because the relation between authority and force becomes unstable. It is obvious that this model bears no more relation to reality than its opposite, since society is in fact both a moral community held together by shared values, which give the state legitimacy, and also a system of control, employing in the last resort the force necessary to prevent deviance and disorder. A more reasonable model is one which accepts that all societies are in a condition of uneasy equilibrium, whose stability is always threatened by a host of political conflicts, but which is usually held in balance partly by social norms and ideological beliefs and partly by physical sanctions.⁷ Instability may arise from material conflicts over the distribution of scarce economic resources or political power; or from a breakdown of values due to inadequate socialization of the young, exacerbated conflict between mutually incompatible roles, or group dissensus over norms. Such conflicts are usually settled by suitable adjustment mechanisms, and it is only in rare moments that a society is sufficiently shaken to undertake major structural alterations.

The first objection to the all-embracing formula of internal war is that, by covering all forms of physical conflict from strikes and terrorism to civil war, it isolates the use of violence from the normal process of societal adjustment. Though some of the users of the term express their awareness that the use of violence for political ends is a fairly common occurrence, the definition they have established in fact excludes all times and places where it is common. It thus cuts out most societies the world has ever known, including Western Europe in the middle ages and Latin America today. Second, it isolates one particular means, physical violence, from the political ends that it is designed to serve. Clausewitz’s famous definition of external war is equally applicable to internal war, civil war, or revolution: ‘War is not only a political act, but a real political instrument; a continuation of political transactions, an accomplishment of them by different means. That which remains peculiar to war relates only to the peculiar nature of its means.’⁸

It is perfectly true that any means by which society exercises pressure or control, whether it is administrative organization, constitutional law, economic interest or physical force, can be a fruitful field of study in its own right, so long as its students remain aware that they are looking at only one part of a larger whole. It is also true that there is something peculiar about violence, if only because of man’s highly ambivalent attitude towards the killing of his own species. Somehow he regards physical force as different in kind from, say, economic exploitation or psychological manipulation as a means of exercising power over others. But this distinction is not one of much concern to the historian of revolution, in which violence is a normal and natural occurrence. The concept of internal war is too broad in its comprehension of all types of violence from civil wars to strikes, too narrow in its restriction to normally non-violent societies, too limited in its concern with one of many means, too arbitrary in its separation of this means from the ends in view, and too little concerned with the complex roots of social unrest to be of much practical value to him.

The most fruitful typology of revolution is that of Chalmers Johnson, set out in a pamphlet that deserves to be widely read.⁹ He sees six types, identified by the targets selected for attack, whether the government personnel, the political regime, or the community as a social unit; by the nature of the carriers of revolution, whether a mass or an élite; and particularly by the goals and the ideologies, whether reformist, eschatological, nostalgic, nation-forming, élitist or nationalist. The first type, the jacquerie, is a spontaneous mass peasant rising, usually carried out in the name of the traditional authorities, Church and King, and with the limited aims of purging the local or national élites. Examples are the English Peasant Revolt of 1381, Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk of 1549, and the Pugachev Rebellion in Russia in 1773–5. The second type, the millenarian rebellion, is similar to the first but with the added feature of a utopian dream, inspired by a living messiah. This type can be found at all times, in all parts of the world, from the Florentine Revolution led by Savonarola in 1494, to the Anabaptist rebellion in Munster led by John Mathijs and John Beukels in 1533–1535, to the Sioux Ghost-Dance Rebellion inspired by the Paiute prophet, Wovoka, in 1890. It has attracted a good deal of attention from historians in recent years, partly because the career of Hitler offered overwhelming proof of the enormous historical significance of a charismatic leader, and partly because of a growing interest in the ideas of Max Weber.¹⁰ The third type is the anarchistic rebellion, the nostalgic reaction to progressive change, involving a romantic idealization of the old order; the Pilgrimage of Grace and the Vendée are examples of this.

The fourth is that very rare phenomenon, the Jacobin Communist revolution. This type of revolution can occur only in a highly centralized state with good communications and a large capital city, and its target is government, regime, and society – the lot. The result is likely to be the creation of a new national consciousness under centralized, military authority, a re-distribution of property and authority, and the erection of a more rational, and hence more efficient, social and bureaucratic order on the ruins of the old ramshackle structure of privilege, nepotism, and corruption.

The fifth type is the conspiratorial coup d’ état, the planned work of a tiny élite fired by an oligarchic, sectarian ideology. This qualifies as a revolutionary type only if it in fact anticipates a mass movement and inaugurates social change – for example, the Nasser Revolution in Egypt or the Castro Revolution in Cuba; it is thus clearly distinguished from the palace revolt, assassination, dynastic succession-conflict, strike, banditry, and other forms of violence, which are all subsumed under the ‘internal war’ rubric.

Finally, there is the militarized mass insurrection, a new phenomenon of the twentieth century in that it is a deliberately planned mass revolutionary war, guided by a dedicated élite. The outcome of guerilla warfare is determined by political attitudes, not military strategy or material, for the rebels are wholly dependent on broad popular support. In all cases on record the ideology that attracts the mass following has been a combination of xenophobic nationalism and Marxism, with by far the greater stress on the former. This type of struggle has occurred in Yugoslavia, China, Algeria, and Vietnam.

Although, like any schematization of the historical process, this six-fold typology is concerned with ideal types, and although in practice individual revolutions may sometimes display characteristics of several different types, the fact remains that this is much the most satisfactory classification we have so far; it is one that working historians can recognize and use with profit. The one obvious criticism is semantic, an objection to the use of the phrase ‘Jacobin Communist revolution’.¹¹ Some of Johnson’s examples are Communist, such as the Russian or Chinese Revolutions; others are Jacobin but not Communist, such as the French Revolution or the Turkish Revolution of 1908–22. It would be better to revert to Pettee’s category of ‘Great Revolutions’, and treat Communist revolutions as a sub-category, one type, but not the only type, of the modernizing revolutionary process.

Given this classification and definition of revolution, what are its root causes? Here everyone is agreed in making a sharp distinction between long-run, underlying causes – the preconditions, which create a potentially explosive situation and can be analysed on a comparative basis – and immediate, incidental factors – the precipitants, which trigger the outbreak and which may be nonrecurrent, personal, and fortuitous. This effectively disposes of the objections of those historians whose antipathy to conceptual schematization takes the naïve form of asserting the uniqueness of each historical event.

One of the first in the field of model-building was Crane Brinton, who as long ago as 1938 put forward a series of uniformities common to the four great Western revolutions: English, French, American, and Russian. These included an economically advancing society, growing class and status antagonisms, an alienated intelligentsia, a psychologically insecure and politically inept ruling class, and a governmental financial crisis.¹²

The subjectivity, ambiguity, and partial self-contradiction of this and other analyses of the causes of specific revolutions – for example the French Revolution – have been cruelly shown up by Harry Eckstein.¹³ He has pointed out that commonly adduced hypotheses run the spectrum of particular conditions, moving from the intellectual (inadequate political socialization, conflicting social myths, a corrosive social philosophy, alienation of the intellectuals) to the economic (increasing poverty, rapid growth, imbalance between production and distribution, long-term growth plus short-term recession) to the social (resentment due to restricted élite circulation, confusion due to excessive élite recruitment, anomie due to excessive social mobility, conflict due to the rise of new social classes) to the political (bad government, divided government, weak government, oppressive government). Finally there are explanations on the level of general process, such as rapid social change, err...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
• PREFACE
• PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
• PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHY
• PART II: INTERPRETATION
• INDEX