MARK STOYLE. Soldiers and Strangers: An Ethnic History of the English Civil War. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 297. $45.00

Abstract

In his introduction, Mark Stoyle explains that his aim in this book is to “fully explore” the “Englishness” of the English Civil War: the conflict between parliamentary and royalist forces that raged for much of the 1640s, and that has attracted an astonishing amount of historical attention ever since. Stoyle wishes to argue that, although many historians now concur that “the Civil War was primarily a conflict about religion,” “to many English, Welsh and Cornish people it was about ethnicity and identity as well” (p. 8). This is an important and potentially fruitful furrow to plow, and the story unfolds clearly and simply. Part one considers the early years of the civil war—when parliamentary forces were largely on the defensive—in relation to what Stoyle regards as the five “ethnic” groups that were “strangers” to England and whose members, once transformed into “soldiers,” became a catalyst for a peculiarly paranoid sense of Englishness. To this end there are chapters on Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Scottish participation in the conflict within England, as well as that of mercenary soldiers who flocked from Europe at the outbreak of war. In each instance a particular concern is the treatment of these groups in royalist and parliamentary propaganda. Part two then considers what Stoyle describes as “England's Recovery”: the manner in which these “strangers” and “soldiers” were defeated and purged from the English body politic and how, as a result, the paranoid nationalism of 1642–1644 mutated into a kind of triumphant imperialism by 1644–1646. Stoyle argues in chapter six that central to this process was the formation of the New Model Army, a fighting force that was, among other things, profoundly self-conscious of its Englishness. The final four chapters then describe how parliamentary forces reconquered England, Wales, Cornwall, and the remaining royalist garrisons and strongholds that survived the capitulation of the king.