The Corpus Delicti 1637-1642

Abstract

Abstract ‘These are times for historians to write who seek to avoid all calm narrations as a dead water, to fill their volumes with cruell wars and seditions. I desire not employment at these times’. So wrote Sir Henry Slingsby at the beginning of the Bishops’ Wars. As James Bond put the point in the inimitably different idiom of the late twentieth century, ‘it reads better than it lives’. Interesting times are often more interesting to those who do not suffer the misfortune of living in them. In these days of social history, it is no longer clear that historians, as a profession, deserve Sir Henry Slingsby’s reproaches, but we have certainly spilt enough ink on the causes of the English Civil War. Contemplating the umpteenth assault on this subject, I feel bound to echo Eric Shipton on Mount Everest: ‘for God’s sake let’s climb the bloody thing, and then get back to real mountaineering’. The hunt for the causes of the Civil War has not, on the whole, had a beneficial effect on seventeenth-century historiography: not all the most important developments in the early seventeenth century can be assumed to be causes of the English Civil War. There is a risk that important themes may be either ignored, or strait-jacketed in order to turn them into causes of the Civil War when they are not. To take a couple of examples, the fact that England reached the top of the demographic curve sometime around 1640 is clearly of the highest long-term importance. The coincidence of dates makes it tempting to see whether this can be turned into a cause of the Civil War, but though it is possible to make a connection by way of resistance to taxation, such a connection is highly tangential, and it is hard to make it of the first importance. In the long term, the slow growth of cultural diversity is also of the highest importance. This at first sight looks a little more promising, but in fact it turns out that only those manifestations of diversity which can be directly related to religion, such as maypoles or the sabbath, will fit at all accurately into the jigsaw.