Civil War London: Mobilizing for Parliament, 1641–1645, by Jordan S. Downs

Abstract

After a period in the doldrums, the past decade has seen something of a revival in local and regional studies of the English civil war, some of them placing (the roots or repercussions of) that conflict within wider chronological contexts, others focusing on the war years alone. Jordan Downs takes the latter approach and adopts a metropolitan perspective in examining developments in London from the Irish Rebellion and its immediate consequences through to the formation of the New Model Army. The image he paints is of a London that was both edgy and on edge, and of the inhabitants of parliament’s war-time capital, who could by turns be intensely politicised and strongly motivated, riven by faction or differing shades of allegiance and divided by varying degrees of radicalism and conservatism, but who generally pulled together in difficult times to get through the war and to defend themselves, their neighbourhoods and the metropolis from enemies without and within. As Downs’s subtitle suggests, his new narrative is built around the theme of mobilisation. In part, this is approached in the straightforward sense of examining how and how much manpower, money and other materiel were raised in the capital to support the parliamentarian war effort. But he also explores some wider and less quantifiable issues, such as expressions of popular will and support, morale in the capital and the secular and religious outlook of Londoners during the first half of the 1640s.