"Charles I at the Hunt", c.1635, by Anthony Van Dyck
Book Details
David Cressy
CHARLES I AND THE PEOPLE OF ENGLAND
447pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $49.95).
978 0 19 870829 2
Reconnecting social and political history
MICHAEL BRADDICK
Charles I and the People of England is the latest in a number of attempts to reconnect the social and political history of seventeenth-century England. During the 1970s and 80s, historians challenged the dominant Marxist and progressive view that political alignment depended on social and economic characteristics, and that political upheavals had materialist explanations. One effect was that social and political history became separated. Political historians began to analyse political conflict in seventeenth-century terms, emphasizing the importance of individual experience and resisting attempts to "reduce" politics to the expression of material interest. At the same time a "new social history" developed, concerned with the realities of everyday life defined in conscious distinction from a dominant "national story": these historians focused on the politics of subsistence, household and village; of humble men and women, and their children, and social relationships among them.
Over the past decade or more, historians have tried to reconnect the social, political and economic history on new terms. Different areas in which this attempt has been made include the study of political communication and engagement, the communication of national politics to wider publics, and the influence of those publics on political life. Others (including me, I should confess) have attempted what might broadly be called "historical sociologies" of abstract political processes like state formation, the experience of authority, and the exercise of power. And the history of religious change now takes very full account of social and symbolic life in the parishes.
David Cressy has himself contributed to this literature, for example in books on how ordinary people spoke about politics, how religious change affected life-cycle rituals, and how parishioners reacted to that, and on how monsters and wonders might be interpreted in political (among other) terms. In his new book, however, he approaches the problem differently, setting out to explore the direct engagement of ordinary people (the 98 per cent of the population below the gentry) with the politics of Charles I's kingship.
Cressy writes evocatively, giving fluent snapshots of individual reactions to particular issues or events. But many of the most powerful descriptions rely on the reactions of the kind of elite figures who already occupy "standard" political histories of the period. In fact in several chapters the ordinary people hardly figure at all – for example, those on the coronation, and royal progresses – or are present as the silent participants in failed military expeditions or financial expedients.
In other places, the social status of those we are hearing is not clear. To take one random but unexceptional example, a single paragraph cites Robert Woodford, William Bisbey, Margaret Grigge and a source telling us what "many" were thinking. Only Grigge is accorded a social status (an "Essex countrywoman", in trouble for her opinions). This treatment gives a flavour of some of the discussion in the provinces rather than a systematic study of the responses of the 98 per cent to the doings of the 2 per cent.
Chapters on petitioning, reactions to the King's religious policies, and rebellion in Scotland in 1637, rest more squarely on the responses of the more humble. Here, as others have done, Cressy isolates an issue or episode which illuminates the relationship between ordinary people and high politics through relevant archival material. This is a less grand ambition than Cressy's introduction might suggest, however. There he promises to give an account of the reign in its totality, attending "to the religious aspirations and political expectations of a wide variety of men and women as they went about their everyday affairs".
He does this, moreover, almost exclusively on the basis of his own archival knowledge, hardly drawing on the wider secondary literature at all to supplement his own direct findings. This seems a disservice to his colleagues and a missed opportunity. Many local histories contain a wealth of material on the local impact of, for example, militia reform and forest regulation, as do studies of those things in and of themselves. Inevitably, Cressy is not familiar with all of the relevant sources – notably administrative sources. Without a grounding in this material, and without drawing on the existing secondary literature, his discussion of the social impact of some of these policies becomes impressionistic.
In other places the text seems led by a juicy example, rather than an argument developed from a more comprehensive sample. For example, the awareness of ordinary people of the expanding world of English trade and settlement is illustrated through the story of a sermon in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. It is not, though, explored in a sustained way in the religious debates of the late 1630s and (especially) 1640s, although in those debates reformation in England was discussed with close and explicit reference to the experiences of settlers in the New World.
Cressy's political narrative is also built around the primary sources directly under his command, with a similar result. He says, for example, that the constitutional implications of recruitment, billeting and wartime finance have not been fully explored, but his footnote does not refer to the literature on constitutional conflict during the 1620s. The rest of the chapter sets out examples of resistance to billeting and impressment, important issues, certainly, but has little to say directly about the forced loan of 1626, levied after Parliament refused to vote money to Charles, which gave rise to arguments of the highest constitutional importance. Cressy does not draw on the definitive study of the loan, by Richard Cust, either, (although that study contains important insights into the loan's impact on local society). When Cressy does turn to the Petition of Right of 1628, the discussion is very brief.
Cressy's subject is England, the largest of Charles's kingdoms, and the scene of most of the action that has been the stuff of conventional political history. This is a legitimate but unfashionable choice: it is now conventional that the political history of each of Charles's kingdoms (Scotland, Ireland and England) can only be fully grasped in the light of developments in the others. While Cressy is interested in ordinary English people's reactions to events in Scotland, his treatment of Ireland is more limited, despite the fact that the rising there in 1641 caused local panics in England and a crescendo of anti-Catholic feeling which played no small part in the outbreak of the English Civil War. The chief cost of his English focus, though, is that we learn little about how the reactions of ordinary Scots and Irish to Charles I's rule drove politics in all three kingdoms.
As Cressy says, "everybody knows" that the reign "ended in turmoil, regicide and revolution", but these final nine years of the reign are barely discussed. Eight chapters deal with the first fifteen years of the reign and the bulk of the remaining chapter deals with the period 1640–42. It would be a quite different project of course, but between 1642 and 1649 the relationship between Charles and his subjects was very clearly illuminated, and the actions of those normally outside the political nation can be seen to have had a clear effect on his fate. This is a big gap in the literature – as many others have noted, we lack a social history of the wars and revolution, although the materials for much of that history are available in existing studies, and the rich records of individuals, the presses and the parliamentary administration. Cressy, however, does not really attempt to fill that gap.
The distance between the conventional political narrative and the wider social context remains visible in much of the book. Charles I and the People of England offers overall a less reliable guide to the political history of Charles I's reign than Tim Harris's recent book Rebellion (TLS, July 11, 2014) , a study which also makes very effective connections between national politics and the lives of ordinary people. What David Cressy does very well, though, is give a series of lively illustrations illuminating aspects of what it was like for people of various sorts to live in these turbulent times.
Sent from HP Tablet
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