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Example research essay topic: English Civil Part 1 - 1,680 words

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English Civil War English Civil War was the clash of two clearly differentiated social groups or classes: the fullest possible knowledge of men's social and economic background, if it leaves out the preaching available in their home parishes, tells us nothing about their likely allegiance in the Civil War. Yet even if the search for the causes of the Civil War has a distorting effect on historiography, the fact remains that the Civil War, like Mount Everest, is there, even though Professor Elton may occasionally be moved to doubt it. If we want to get back to real mountaineering, we must climb it first. The war casts a long shadow, and we will never have a clear view of the things which were not causes of the Civil War until we can identify the things which were. In investigating causes, the first necessity is to match them with effects, and it therefore seems a logical priority to begin by trying to establish the effects for which causes must be found. If the effects are wrongly postulated, the causes will be wrong also.

If we discuss causes without any investigation of effects, we are simply indulging in unverifiable speculation. The title of this chapter is derived from Perry Mason, and while it does not pretend to offer results as sensational as tend to follow Perry Mason's exclamation, 'your Honour, I object: the prosecution must first prove the corpus delicate', I think the logical principle involved in Mason's favorite rule of law is a very sound one. That is why this chapter is devoted to effects and not to causes. It is an attempt to summarize some of the findings of a very large book, completed but not yet sent to press. In this sort of summary, it is not always possible to outline the proofs as fully as would be desirable, but for any point which is not fully proved here, proof will be forthcoming at great length in the not too distant future. In due course I hope this book will stand as one of a pair with my forthcoming The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637 - 1642, and that the corpus of work will be judged as a whole.

A large part of the logical confusion on this subject results from taking the coming of the English Civil War as a single event, whereas in fact it was a somewhat unpredictable sequence of events and non-events. Since the war was the result, not merely of these events and non-events, but of the fact that they came in the order they did, it is hard to build up an orderly sequence of long-term causes for the King's raising his standard at Nottingham. However, if we think of explaining a sequence of events, we make the welcome discovery that different events in this sequence may be the results of different causes. It thus becomes possibly to match cause to effect with a precision impossible in tackling such a diffuse happening as the outbreak of the Civil War.

Moreover, even if we say that the precise sequence of events was, in Professor Koenigsberger's phrase, 'unpredictable even if we were to use game theory or a computer', the possibility still remains that many of the individual events may be the results of long-term causes of some standing. It thus becomes possible to accept that England was not on the edge of civil war in 1637, without being therefore forced to confine our explanation of the Civil War to events after 1637. The English Civil War was not an isolated event. Charles ruled over three kingdoms, and within three years he faced armed resistance in all three of them, Scotland in 1639, Ireland in 1641, and England in 1642. Even if we were to accept the improbable, but not a priori impossible, hypothesis that these three upheavals were initially unconnected, the close coincidence of dates inevitably makes the other two part of the events which led to the English Civil War, and therefore takes any study of the causes outside England.

In fact, the study of resistance in the three kingdoms overwhelmingly suggests the possibility that all three were connected, and therefore that we should be looking for causes in the things all three had in common: that they were members of a union of multiple kingdoms and that they were all ruled by Charles I. It may be that the main reason why the causes of the English Civil War have created so much difficulty is our insular error in looking for them only in the study of English history: we have been trying to discover the whole of the solution by studying a part of the problem. If we look at England in a British context, it shows two peculiarities: it was the last of Charles's kingdoms to resist him, and the one in which Charles gathered the largest party. What we should be explaining, then, is not why revolutionary propensities in England were so strong, but why they were so weak. The first of the individual questions for which we need answers is why the Bishops' Wars broke out in 1639; since there is no doubt that they started the immediate sequence of events which led to the English Civil War. In order to give this primacy to the Bishops' Wars, it is not necessary to engage with the question whether the English Civil War might have happened without them: the fact is that it did not, and that without them, it could not have happened in the way it did.

Since we are bound to explain what did happen, rather than what did not, we may safely say that the first thing we need to explain is why there were Bishops' Wars, and the acceptance of this point will immediately take our causal framework outside the borders of England. We cannot afford to treat the Bishops' Wars as some sort of irrelevant outside factor needing no more explanation than a storm of bad weather. Both sides were capable of foreseeing what sort of trouble they might be creating by fighting each other, since Hamilton had warned them both. He told the King in 1638 that if he tried to use England to suppress the Covenanters by force, he would risk provoking rebellion in England, and could not do it without hazarding his three crowns.

He told the Covenanter Earl of Rates that if the Covenanters fought Charles, they would never see peace again during their lifetimes, a prophecy which was barely exaggerated. The determination of both sides to ignore these warnings is evidence of a profound conflict which could not long continue on England's borders without becoming a polarizing force in English politics, and which must therefore be included among the things for which causes must be found. Moreover, the apparent predominance of the Covenanters in Scotland and of the King in England masks the very large extent to which the Bishops' Wars were, as the Covenanters constantly reiterated, not a national quarrel. They were a struggle between two Anglo-Scottish factions, and therefore a force in polarizing both kingdoms.

The next question we need to answer is why the Scots won the Bishops' Wars. The Scottish victory at Newburn was their first major success against England since Bannockburn, and so was unusual enough to cry out for scapegoats then, and for explanations now. The difficulty in explaining England's defeat in the Bishops' Wars is not that there are too few explanations, but that there are too many, and all of them may easily be made to look perfectly convincing. Any of these explanations take us well back in English history. The shortage of money, the weakness of the English military system, and the growing polarization of English opinion between pro- and anti-Scots all open up causes whose roots lie well back. So does the fact that the First Bishops' War in 1639 was (with the token exception of the Scottish campaign of 1400) the first war to be fought without a Parliament since 1323.

In 1639 it seems that the political explanation may be paramount: the King's army was still in pay when the Pacification of Berwick was signed. The Earl of Holland had, it is true, reported that it was unfit to fight, but the fact that Holland had for some time been employed as mediator by the Covenanters means that we should hesitate before taking his word for it. Many people were aware that, as the Countess of Westmorland put it, 'they know our divisions, and -they have a party amongst us, and... we have none among them'. The English party at Berwick had no need to scour the country to find the alarmingly divisive effect of what they were doing: it was perfectly visible in their own camp.

The Earl of Stamford, during the negotiations, described Alexander Henderson and the Scottish ministers as 'holy and blessed men, of admirable, transcendent and seraphic learning, and say grace longer and better than our campestral chaplains, that ride before our regiments taking tobacco'. Secretary Coke shared the admiration for Alexander Henderson: 'in all his speeches you may find as much devotion, wisdom, humility and obedience as can be wished for in an honest man and a good subject'. These are the voices of a Parliamentarian and a man whose angle of neutrality was distinctly Parliamentarian. In the Second Bishops' War, by contrast, it seems to be more important that English logistics broke down and something between a third and a quarter of the army reached Yorkshire without any arms. In explaining that failure, money, rather than politics, is likely to have been paramount, while the result of the battle itself reflects superior Scottish generalship. The English defeat at Newburn led inevitably to a Parliament, and that Parliament to the first of the non-events for which we need to find an explanation: the failure to conclude a political settlement.

A new political settlement, with scapegoats and an afforded Council, was a normal result of such political crises, and the belief...


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