The Origins of the English Civil War
Edited by Conrad Russell (1981)
Macmillan Press Limited
PDF: The Origins of the English Civil War
Book Review
A collection of academic essays, this book challenges conventional assumptions about the English Civil War (1642-51). The authors seem to agree that the war, in which Parliament replaced King Charles I with senior parliamentary army commander Oliver Cromwell, was really a bourgeois revolution rather than a civil war. It paralleled similar bourgeois civil revolutions during Europe’s 30 Years War (1618-1648), yet was the only one to succeed in toppling the hereditary monarch.
These essays also challenge common assumptions about the causes of England’s civil war. The Western educational system tends to blame Charles I’s religious (Catholic-influenced) conservatism at loggerheads with a Puritan parliament
The facts point to just the opposite: a conservative parliament resisting Charles I’s economic, political and religious innovations. As the leading figurehead for the emerging Arminian religious tradition, Charles I rejected the Calvinist doctrine of predestination common to both the Church of England and the Puritans.*
A severe economic downturn aggravated the king’s longstanding battle with parliament. England first experienced runaway inflation under the Tudor monarchs. Although Henry the VIII was able to compensate for rising food and governmental costs by confiscating monasteries, Elizabeth I left a debt of £500,000. By the time Charles assumed the throne in 1600, the royal debt had increased to £900,000. Because of this massive indebtedness, Charles I was totally unable to borrow money from the conventional banking/merchant sources** and had to rely on Parliament to raise taxes in 1642 for to fight both an impending Scottish invasion and an Irish rebellion.
For me the most interesting part of the book related to Charles’ efforts to enforce anti-enclosure laws against nobles who expelled peasant farmers from the common lands they had farmed for generations. Charles I had a remarkable enthusiasm for improving the condition of the poor (which didn’t endear him to the gentry and merchants who controlled parliament). He rigorously enforced an Elizabethan law that prosecuted landowners for unapproved enclosures.
Although landowners found guilty of illegal enclosures paid a fine, the king was ultimately powerless to reverse the enclosures.
*The Arminians believed that salvation wasn’t preordained at birth but determined by the moral quality of a believer’s life.
**Charles I’s predicament was aggravated by a steep decline in trade due to the Thirty Years War
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