England on Edge

In 1656 James Harrington claimed that, so far from the Civil War itself producing a dissolution of Charles I's government, a dissolution had produced the Civil War. The implications of this challenging observation even now have not been fully explored. But clearly David Cressy's survey of England from 1640 to 1642 has been influenced by them. Loosely narrative in structure, the book depicts the breakdown in state, church and society as an overweening parliament took advantage of a hapless king. Cressy's argument emerges from an extensive expedition into a huge body of sources: from national down to parochial archives, private correspondence, manuscript newsletters, the proliferating output of an explosive press, ballads, popular songs, squibs, libels, reports of conversations and arguments, tongues loosened by drink (as ever) in alehouses and ordinaries. Much of this material is, like Hamlet, full of quotations. Cressy has as sharp an eye for telling examples as Christopher Hill. Similes and metaphors abound. In 1641 England had become either ‘a theatre of distractions’ or a haven of ‘singing birds’. It was ‘a year of jubilee’, of ‘a magnificent reformation as hot as toast’. But it was also an ‘annus horribilis’ as ‘a faultless king faces a perverse people’. It was a time of tumours, scabs, blains, and ulcers, crying out for surgery or medication, while the ship of state floundered, battered by tempests. Genuine concerns overlaid the clichés, pushing individuals and groups in City and parishes to action, which was reported with disdain or satisfaction. We hear of magistrates slighted, ministers too. Rents and taxes go unpaid. Poachers become bolder. Vagrants, ranks swollen by discharged unpaid soldiers returning from the Scottish wars, are blatant. Even the weather conspires with visitations of plague. It creates a topsy-turvy world which helps to explain why, during the troubled 1680s, men with long memories feared a recrudescence of ’41 rather than ’42. Leaving London early in 1642, Charles I had every intention of coming back. As his standard was raised symbolically at Nottingham in August 1642 skirmishes had already pushed the country on a slide into civil war. What Cressy succeeds in showing with panache and insight is not a Revolution but a revolutionary situation, the outcome of which, owing much perhaps to contingencies, was still uncertain. Charles would lose the Civil War, but, keeping England on edge, he did not give up, until his execution, on his determination to be king again. It was the Regicide itself that sealed the English Revolution, in turn to be wiped out by another, the Restoration of 1660. They were excited times, but do they really matter? Yes—and Cressy has already made notable contributions in his previous publications to showing why. England on Edge reinforces those points and certainly establishes a pre-war crisis. Yet, for all the intelligence, the scholarship, and the wealth of material, has the fact of an early Revolution emerging out of a full dissolution really been clinched

Art · Ballad · HAMLET (protein complex · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Parliament · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Scottish History and National Identity