The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640-49, ed. John Adamson

Abstract

The title could mislead some people, for this book goes far beyond being just another collection of essays on the English Civil War, or whatever these days we choose to call the series of convulsions that distracted the three Stuart kingdoms for twenty years. For this is a challenging and important book that makes a number of valuable contributions to our understanding of that complex but perennially favourite subject. Both John Adamson's introduction and the different essays support the editor's claim for ‘the subject's vitality and enduring power to fascinate’. The introduction is particularly valuable, as it presents a lucid and incisive survey of the whole complex historiography of the Civil War. Beginning with a consideration of the extraordinarily impressive achievement of S.R. Gardiner, working at the high tide of Gladstonian and Victorian Liberalism, Adamson traces the once dominant interpretations and influences of Gardiner, Weber, Marx, Tawney, Hill and others, continuing his survey down to the current fluid state of a wide-ranging and sometimes controversial reconfiguring of issues and debates by a new generation of historians. For long periods, certain favoured groups—the godly but also bourgeois capitalist Puritans, the gentry (whether rising or falling), the ‘county communities’, the House of Commons, the radical Levellers and Diggers—basked in the spotlight of historical interest, while other key players in the conflict, notably the royal court, the nobility and the royalists, languished in outer darkness, in what the editor calls ‘a scholarly No Man's Land’. Viewed as standing in opposition to the progressive march of history, they may have enjoyed some colourful or romantic appeal, but they were essentially inconsequential, not deserving of the attention of serious historians.