A “High Road,” or “Low Road,” to Civil War? A selective review and introduction to the development of modern historiography on the English Civil War Sean Queenan 998364201 Class: His495: Britain’s Century of Revolution, 1603-1689 Instructor: Dr. Petrakos Word Count: 4,151 (15pgs) The seventeenth-century English “Civil War,” described by one historian as “[the] Mount Everest of British history” has for the last 300 years remained a dynamic source of historiographical interpretation. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden, Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007), xi. Scholarly views on the subject have shifted dramatically across this period in time, with various paradigms and perspectives rising to prominence only to be questioned by succeeding generations of scholars. Historiographical division over how the Civil War is to be interpreted continues to typify studies in seventeenth-century England, with one observant scholar claiming “there has not been a time since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in which so many radical irreconcilable views… have been competing for acceptance.” Glenn Burgess, “On Revisionism: An Analysis of Early Stuart Historiography in the 1970s and 1980s,” The Historical Journal Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sept 1990), 609. The following essay intends to survey the modern historiographical issues surrounding the English Civil War. I will analyze the differing schools of historical interpretations of British history between the years of 1640-1660. In other words, this paper explores, in broad-strokes, how the major schools of Civil War interpretation, the “Whig,” “Marxist,” “Revisionist,” “Post-Revisionist,” and “Neo-Whig,” have considered the question of what caused the English Civil War. The conception of the Civil War as an “English Revolution,” was first proposed, by Francois Guizot in his Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre depuis Charles I à Charles II (Oxford 1839). Lawrence Stone, “The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited,” Past & Present No. 109 (Nov., 1985), pg 44. Guizot’s description of an “English Revolution,” aroused relatively little attention, as he published his thesis in an era when the Whig paradigm dominated historiographical thought. For nineteenth-century Whig historians, the English Civil War was the result of long-term “political, constitutional, and religious causation[s]” which were characterized above all by a “political and constitutional power struggle between crown and parliament, particularly the House of Commons [and the Stuart monarchy].” Peter Guant, The English Civil Wars, 1642-1651 (Oxford, Osprey Publishing, 2003), 13. Whig historians in other words considered the English Civil War as the inevitable climax to a protracted struggle between parliamentary liberty, and Stuart tyranny. For nineteenth-century Whigs, the Civil War arose from parliament’s long-term struggle to prevent the Stuart monarchs from undermining England’s traditional liberties and rights. The immediate decades preceding the Civil War, especially after the ascension of James I, were considered by Whig historians as marked by an increasing degree of political polarization in England between the “court and country.” More specifically, the Whigs perceived political developments in early Stuart England as characterized by increasing contention between the country gentry, who sided with parliament, and the court aristocracy, who sided with the King. This Whig paradigm it should be stressed was in some sense a historiographical invention propagated by nineteenth-century Whig historians that grounded the principles of their Whig political party with the seventeenth century one. Whig historians wrote present centered history that employs the past to legitimize the present. These Victorian historians saw in the struggles of the seventeenth century not only the development of a parliamentary sovereignty but also the steady and sure growth of individual liberty and progress. To them, the seventeenth century was nothing less than a struggle between the liberal, progressive, and Protestant, parliamentary classes that embodied middle-class interests and a retrograde Catholic monarchy that was bent on destroying parliamentary government and establishing an Louis XIV style absolutist tyranny. With the stakes so high, it is no wonder that seventeenth-century political history is so contentious. See for instance, Herbert Butterfield. The Whig Interpretation of History. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964). The historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner is widely credited as a champion of nineteenth-century Whig historiography on the English Civil War. He focued on the Protestant/Catholic divisions between parliament and monarchy that led t the war. Since the days of Queen Elizabeth and the Protestant Reformation, the protestants in parliament chaffed under what they considered a “popish” monarchy. Gardiner couched his discussion in terms of the long-term causes of the Civil War. Gardiner argued that Calvinist Puritans amongst the landed gentry who made up much of parliament during the early 17th century. In The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution, 1603-1660 (1876) Gardiner presented the Civil war as a consequence of the development of English Puritanism, which he considered a force for progress, “not primarily…a doctrine or discipline but as the spirit of liberty.” The emphasis here is mine. See, Laird Okie, “Daniel Neal and the ‘Puritan Revolution,’” Cambridge University Press Vol. 55, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), 466. For Gardiner, English Puritanism represented “free Protestantism” and “a religious belief for individual men,” whose Protestant principles justified resistance to an un-Godly, Catholic ruler. Okie, 465. As a result, Puritanism emboldened the parliamentary cause and was a long-term influence contributing towards “the good fight for liberty and property against tyrannical monarchs and papists.” Okie, 466. With the ascension of the absolutist monarch James I in 1603, in Gardiner’s words, the “high road to civil war” was set in motion, “sow[ing] the seeds of revolution and disaster.” S.R. Gardiner, A History of England from the Ascension of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603-1642, Volume 5 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1833-4), 316. These years leading up to the Civil War, for Gardiner, were characterized by a contestation for political and legislative sovereignty between Parliament and King. Despite striving to present a history of the civil war that departed from “Whig myth making,” Gardiner’s history of the Civil War “was strongly political and constitutional in character… [maintaining] the older Whig obsession with determining where moral blame for the outbreak of the Civil War should be laid.” Ronald H. Fritze, William B. Robinson, Historical Dictionary of Stuart England, 1603-1689 (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996), 37. Like other Whig historians like Thomas Babbington. Macaulay, Gardiner considered the Civil War as inevitable in this contest for sovereignty: a truly revolutionary event in British history, ushering in the supremacy of parliament, and Protestant liberty.. Fritze, 37. The traditional Whig interpretation became contentious in the 1950s and 1960s when a new generation of Marxist historians began to criticize the Whig narrative. The Whig emphasis on the long-term causes and impact of the Civil Wars would be reiterated by Marxist historians during the first half of the twentieth century, but for different reasons. In one sense, Marxist interpretation of the Civil War can be considered to be largely “attempts to modernize the Whig paradigm.” Like the Whigs, Marxists embraced the idea that the Civil War was inevitable and caused by long-term social tensions. Instead of considering religion as the source for the long-term causes and consequences of the Civil War, Marxists emphasized that the discontents of the English bourgeoisie, or rising middle class, made the conflict between “court and country” inevitable. Marxist historians saw the Civil War as a class conflict, the consequences of which would facilitate the rise of the early-modern bourgeoisie to power in seventeenth-century England. The historian Christopher Hill is credited to have championed the Marxist school of Civil War interpretation. Hill’s arguments were structured by Marxist theory and grounded mostly upon analysis of political division and populist treatises. Elizabeth Sauer, Paper-Contestations and Textual Communities in England, 1640-1675 (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2005), 4. Hill was the first twentieth-century historian to propose, in The English Revolution 1640, that the years of the Civil War constituted an “English Revolution” and “a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789.” Christopher Hill, The English Revolution (Lawrence and Wishart, 1940), 2. Hill’s Marxist interpretation of the Civil War presented the conflict as being primarily a class war, between the merchants and landed gentry who supported the parliament, and the aristocratic feudal court nobility who fought for the King. According to Hill, “the English Revolution of 1640, like the French Revolution of 1789, was a struggle for political, economic and religious power,” fought from the “bottom up,” and led “by the middle class, the bourgeoisie.” Hill, 4. With Parliament’s victory over the Royalists, Hill asserts, the “freer development of capitalism was made possible,” ushering in a new era in British history. Hill, 2. For both Whigs and Marxists, the Civil War was largely the result of long-term conflicts in society and politics, which found their origins in the first half of the seventeenth century. For Hill and other Marxist historians, this period witnessed the rise of “class hostility in England before 1640” corresponding with the emergence of the early-modern bourgeois in parliamentary politics and the increasing presence of “masterless-men” in urban areas. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 22, 39. Hill conceptualized the seventeenth century pre-Civil War period in class terms, considering the interactions between Parliament and King as precipitating the rise of the “gentry and merchants [who] supported the parliamentary cause” and wished to “reconstruct the institutions of society as they wished; to impose their values” against the constrictions of the Stuart Kings.” Hill, 14. Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution, published in 1972, is considered by several scholars as the apotheosis of the traditional narrative approach to understanding the Civil War and its causes. Fritze, 88. Although it was considered as a “revisionist” history by contemporaries, Stone’s book is more accurately understood as an attempt “to present a basically Whig interpretation in sociological garb.” Burgess, 612. Stones’ most original, and controversial, contribution to Civil War historiography was his theory of “status inconsistency,” which held that “a society with a relatively large proportion of persons undergoing high mobility is likely to be in an unstable condition.” Stone, 54. According to this theory, Stone forwarded the claim that the English Civil War was caused not by conflict between classes, but by infighting within one: the gentry. In much the same sense as Hill and Gardiner, Stone affirmed that the decades preceding the Civil War entailed [a] marked tendency for ‘the yeomen in the countryside and middling groups in the towns and industrial areas to side with Parliament, and a much less marked tendency for the aristocracy and merchant oligarchies to side with the King’…[It was] a complex struggle of orders and status groups, largely confined to members of various elites which were fissured and fragmented by differences about constitutional arrangements, religious aspirations and cultural patterns…conflicts of interests and conflicts of loyalty, as well as by the unsettling effects of rapid economic development and social change. Before civil war could break out, it was necessary for the major institutions of central government to lose their credibility and to collapse… [and such a development] must necessarily range backwards over a long period of time and be multi-causal in its approach. Stone, 56-57. In sum, Stone held that the “dissolution of [the] Government caused the War, not the War the dissolution of [the] Government.” Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York: ARK, 1972), 48. As the following passages will demonstrate, this interpretation is profoundly "reductionist" approach, because his primary focus is on one social group thereby leading to a lopsided interpretation. By the 1970s and 1980s both the Marxist and Whig school of thought would be increasingly called into question by scholars. A new wave of historians, self-titled as “revisionists,” would lambaste what they considered the “teleological” and “holistic” determination of the Marxist and Whig interpretation to the Civil War. The Whig argument, the revisionists argued, was built around notions of “progress” and the historical development of parliamentary sovereignty. The Marxist argument was built around the inevitability of class warfare and revolution. Mary Fulbrook, “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt,” Social History Vol. 7, No. 3 (Oct., 1982), 250. Revisionist historians, like Stone, largely discarded ideas of “long-term” causes and consequences to the Civil War, preferring instead to emphasize the “role of contingency, accident, individual personality, and … ‘the momentum of events.’” S. K. Baskerville, “Puritans, Revisionists, and the English Revolution,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2 (1998), 155. Revisionist historians would argue that the Civil War was not the inevitable outcome of a protracted struggle between Parliament and King, but was instead a largely inconsequential, unintended, unexpected event, unwanted by all English people. In general, revisionist historians sought “a rejection of a dialectical framework for history, a disinclination to see change as always happening by means of a clash of opposites.” Conrad Russell, Unrevolutionary England, (London: The Hambledon Press, 1990), viv. Generally speaking, the revisionist approach can be summarized as [focused on a] detailed week by week, day by day investigations of what happened. Generally they have been most interested in high politics, in short-term factors, in the shifting basis of politics, in factions, bureaucratic failings, and in the ramifications of patronage. For Revisionists there was no swelling crescendo of constitutional issues between 1604 and 1642. Consensus politics not adversary politics were the order of the day; the House of Commons was not ambitiously power seeking. R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 1998), 219. Arguably the first and most prominent revisionist historians of the English Civil War was G.R. Elton. In 1965, Elton published “A Highroad to Civil War, which laid the groundwork for later revisionist scholars.. Directly confronting both the Whig and Marxist position, Elton argued that “in 1640 the one thing quite out of the question was civil war… the gentry – the political nation – were remarkably united, and the king had no party to speak of.” G.R. Elton, “A High Road to Civil War?,” in Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946-1972 ed. G.R. Elton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167. Elton targets sources that Marxist and Whig historians commonly used in arguing the long-term inevitability of the Civil war, such as the Common’s Apology and Satisfaction of 1604. The Apology is widely considered by Whig and Marxist historians as the first volley in the protracted long-term struggles between king and parliament. In refuting the notion that the Apology embodied the “authoritative pronouncement of the reforms and changes deemed necessary” at the beginning of James’ reign, Elton instead asserted the inherent conservative nature of the English parliament.” Elton, 169. In discussing the events surrounding the emergence of the document, Elton stresses that One thing is beyond dispute: the Apology was never presented to the king because it was never adopted by the House. All the praise bestowed on its manly language and assertion of profound principle misses the mark. Faced with these excellences, many of the Commons had the gravest doubts, and it was the doubters, not the promoters, who won the day. The Commons not only never got around to endorsing the draft; they may, in all fairness, be said to have deliberately rejected it. Elton, 176. Instead of ushering the beginning of a long-term struggle between parliament and King, as Whig historians suggest, Elton asserted that the Apology “came to nothing” and “represented a minority opinion rejected by the House as too extreme.” Elton, 181. As a contemporary to Elton, Conrad Russell did, and has done, more to bolster the revisionist cause than any other historian writing on English Civil War historiography. From the early 1970s to the late 80s, Russell advocated a new perspective on the causes of the English Civil War. Instead of being primarily a class-conflict, as Marxist historians suggested, Russell considered the Civil War to be based upon the failings of the monarchy, particularly the monarchy of Charles I (1625-1649). Throughout a series of political, financial, and religious crises Charles I proved to be an imcompetant and feckless king. David Underdown, “The Causes of the English Civil War by Conrad Russell,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992), 331. The Civil War, for Russell, was not inevitable and was not caused by the growing influence of the parliamentarian classes, whom he asserts were too weak and uninterested in challenging the King.. Underdown, 332. Instead, Russell and other revisionists emphasized that “seventeenth-century England was ‘unrevolutionary,’ characterized by consensus [between parliament and the monarchy] rather than ideological conflict.” Su Fang Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22. For Russell, parliament showed no signs of becoming a rival in political sovereignty in the decades preceding the Civil War. Evidence hinting at the inability of Parliament to gain concessions from the King prompted Russell to call into question the survival of parliament itself as an institution. In his approach, Russell adopted the research of H.G. Koenigsberger, who proposed that “a Parliament which failed to insist on the redress of grievances before supply had no chance of winning its struggle with [a] monarchy.” Upon such a premise, Russell concluded, “by this test, the English Parliament before 1629 was headed for extinction.” Conrad Russell, “Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604-1629,” History Vol. 61, No. 201 (February 1976), 5-6. Even the Petition of Right of 1628, which had often been cited by Whig historians as a pivotal moment between the power of parliament and King, Russell reveals to be only a temporary setback for Charles. According to Russell, Charles’ acceded to the Petition of Right…[only] because he was confident of being able to evade its intention… [and, with his ‘first answer’ attached,] it left Charles under no more legal restriction than he had been under before. The evasion was of course noticed in the Parliamentary session of 1629, but members could do no more than threaten to punish the King’s printer. Russell, 11. Russell’s later writings would attempt to invalidate the traditional approach to seventeenth century history altogether, arguing that the Marxist and Whig belief in inevitability had dangerously skewed previous understandings of the Civil War. Conrad Russell, The Origins of the English Civil War (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973), 4. Other revisionist historians would reiterate similar arguments to those of made by Russell, which relied heavily on legal and political documents from the decades before the Civil War, especially journals and notes from Parliamentary members. Sauer, 36. John Morrill’s book, The Revolt of the Provinces, traded the Whitehall/Westminster-centric approaches of previous revisionist scholars for an extensive study of seventeenth-century developments in the localities. According to Morrill, the Civil War was unexpected and unwanted by most in England. In contrast to older traditionalist theories, Morrill asserted [that] local conservatism, not constitutionalism, was the dominant cast of the seventeenth-century mind…the neutrality in the communities was so pervasive-there were "neutrality pacts in twenty-two English counties and in many boroughs' that it enabled the few committed extremists on both sides to plunge the nation into war. The war did not result from the snowball of constitutional or legal crises rolling downhill; it was an accretive process. Mark Kishlansky, “The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630-1650 by J. S. Morrill,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 1 (March., 1978), 134. The success of revisionist argumentation in undermining the rhetoric and credibility of “old guard” Marxist and Whig approaches, led several scholars to assume by the late 80s that Russell’s thesis had “won…by default.” Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1661-1624 (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2. By presenting fresh research into his argumentation, and in the absence of satisfactory rebuttal from neither Whig nor Marxist writers, Russell himself declared in 1987 that the “revisionists” had “won the debate.” Conrad Russell, “The Prisoner of His Documents?,” Times Higher Education Supplement (January 9th, 1987), 16. Yet, despite their apparent victory, the arguments of Russell and other revisionist historians prompted new debate scholarly research pertaining to Civil War historiography. A notable number of historians came to accept the major principles of Russell’s arguments whilst simultaneously questioning the reliability of revisionism’s exclusive emphasis on the short-term, un-revolutionary nature of the Civil War. Defining themselves as “post-revisionists,” this new wave of historians rekindled debate over what exactly caused seventeenth century Englishmen to engage in Civil War. The work of two particular historians, Thomas Cogswell and Richard Cust, exemplify the general approach of a large majority of the post-revisionist movement in their “application of revisionist methods and assumptions [without leading to] anything like revisionist conclusions.” Peter Lake, “The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621-1624 by Thomas Cogswell,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 65, No.2 (Jun., 1993), 392. In particular, the research of both historians has questioned the extent to which parliament did not play an important role, or that there existed little indication of contention, amongst contemporaries, over the King’s role in seventeenth century English politics. Cogswell took issue with Russell’s “top-down” approach, claiming his fixation with events and politics at Whitehall limits the extent to which he adequately discusses how parliament reflected the social milieu at a national level. Cogswell, 3-4. Cogswell also contested Russell’s assertion that pre-Civil War Parliament represented “an event and not an institution” by noting the passing of the 1624 subsidy bill, passed only after Charles’ government pledged to resolve parliament’s grievances, as evidence to the increasing authority of parliament in matters of state. Cogswell, 321 According to Cogswell, this event suggests that pre-Civil War Parliament was “no mere epiphenomenon in which the course of events was dictated by events outside the chamber. On the contrary, it… [operated] as a central [component in England’s] political arena.” Lake, 392. The post-revisionist scholars thus stress the continued importance of parliament that provided a check on the powers of the king. In re-examining the effect Charles’ forced loans had on the population of England in 1626, Richard Cust questioned the extent to which common Englishmen were apathetic to the monarchy’s actions. Cust argues that records documenting the protests of Charles’ policies demonstrate the extent to which local opposition derived from concerns that constitutional principles were at stake. Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626-1628 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 549-551. In The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626-1628, Cust directly confronted Russell over the notion that Charles’ move to collect extra-parliamentary taxation had been “overblown” by previous scholars as an instance of increasing contention between the power of the King and Parliament. Thomas Cogswell, “Coping with Revisionism in Early Stuart History,” The Journal of Modern History Vol. 62, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), 550. Instead, through a systematic analysis of local archives, Cust demonstrated that Charles’ actions alarmed a considerable number of contemporaries in both the political nation as well as on the local, grass-root level. Cogswell, 550. Far from being unimportant and uneventful, Cust argues that, in light of the King’s actions, “hardly anything could have been more calculated to alarm the sensibilities of ordinary Englishmen and upset the delicate balance of faith and trust on which the constitution rested.” Cust, 89. In sum, both Cogswell’s and Cust’s research suggest that Parliament may not have been as weak, nor the monarchy’s actions so uninflammatory to constitutionalist sentiment, as Russell had previously asserted. We come full-circle in the debates surrounding the English civil-war with a revival of the Whig school of thought. Following on the near-hegemony of the revisionist school, championed by Russell, in the 1970s and 80s, a new wave of “Neo-Whig” historians have sought to re-establish the authenticity to the theory that the Civil War was indeed revolutionary, and that it had long-term causes stretching back into the reign of James I. Despite their reciprocal acceptance of certain aspects of revisionist theory, Neo-Whigs, above all, have continued to emphasize “a political rather than… an economic or social, theory of the nature of historical change.” William H. Dray, “J.H. Hexter, Neo-Whiggism and Early Stuart Historiography,” History and Theory, Vol. 26, No. 2 (May, 1987), 136. What largely differentiated this new wave of Whig historians from traditional discourses, like Gardiner and Macaulay, was a rejection of holistic approaches and an astute imitation of revisionist methods in incorporating new archival research, on seventeenth-century political and legal developments, into their argumentation. Dray, 138. In other words, Neo-Whigs place more emphasis on the role of “uncertainty and choice” than “inevitability” in their historical interpretation. Dray, 147. Harold J. Berman is one of the more recent Neo-Whig historians whose book, Law and Revolution, challenges aspects of revisionism through research into the legal transformations that the English Civil War entailed. Despite acknowledging the revisionist notion that “the civil war… could have been avoided,” Berman stresses that early-Stuart England was typified not by consensus, but by “parallel tensions… between country and court [which] gradually increased… [when] certain features royal rule challenged both by the House of Commons and by the judges of the common law courts.” Harold J Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformers on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 213 For example, Berman demonstrated that the legitimacy of royal prerogative was bitterly contested between a coalition of judges (from what would later be known as “courts of common law”) under Sir Edward Coke against James’ executive courts between 1606-1616. By asserting the supremacy of “common law as an Ancient English tradition” and that of the common law courts over the King’s prerogative courts, Berman argues that Coke “helped to define one of the main issues which were ultimately fought over… [in] the Civil War: the issue of Royal Absolutism.” Berman, 214-215. For Berman, the legitimacy of royal absolutism was an important source of contention in early-Stuart England that, over the long-run, may have contributed towards an escalation to Civil War. Berman argues that the Civil War was ultimately a progressive event that led to the modernization of aspects if English law and government. With the entirety of England’s legal system under the control of Parliament during the Revolution, radical modifications to the law were made to address the goals of the Parliamentarians, popular grievances, and widespread calls for reform. One of most important modifications to the Law Berman notes was the abolishment of the courts of royal prerogative and the supremacy of the common law and common courts over all others. Established under the Tudors, and abused under the Stuarts, these popularly detested courts were terminated by the Long Parliament. As a result the English common-law courts, and common law itself, became supreme “over [the courts of] Chancery, Admiralty, and the ecclesiastical courts,” and took over most of their civil, and all of their criminal, jurisdiction. Berman, 277. This in effect established the modern legal doctrines of “the historicity of English law” and “Precedent,” developed by Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, and Matthew Hale, as practiced and time-honoured principals of the common law across England. Berman, 277. In emphasizing these changes in English law during the Revolution, Berman asserts a Neo-Whig position by arguing, through legal history, for the progressive nature of the Civil War and the conflicts in politics and law that led to its oncoming. As this paper has sought to demonstrate, the vast and contested field of English Civil War historiography continues today to be a topic of intensive research and discussion. From the mid nineteenth century until the present day, historians have considered the causes and implications of the English Civil War within a plethora of contested and divergent paradigms. As this paper has tried to show, the long-term versus short term causes of the war are central to this debate. Whilst Whigs and Marxists sought to demonstrate that long-term political and social developments contributed towards the oncoming of the English Revolution, Revisionists conversely emphasize that the Civil War was unexpected and unwanted by the King, parliament, and English populace. In the wake of revisionist controversy, “Post-Revisionism” has largely been characterized by both a critique of aspects of revisionism and an emphasis on divergent fields of seventeenth-century research. As it relates to this essay, “Post-revisionists” are important for their recognition of a certain degree of truth in Whig theory (i.e. the existence of discontent against the crown amongst the lower orders and parliamentarian members during the early-Stuart period). Acknowledging the criticisms of revisionists, and emerging out of the ashes the traditional Marxist and Whig interpretations, “Neo-Whiggism” has reasserted the existence of long-term causes to the English Civil War through research into relatively neglected areas of seventeenth-century history. In closing this historiographical analysis, the nature of Civil War historiography can be neatly summarized in the words of Lawrence Stone, “there is a grain of truth in each of these theories. Each author displays one facet of a many-sided whole.” Stone, 48. This “whole,” of course, continues defy simplistic explanation. Bibliography Baskerville, S. K. “Puritans, Revisionists, and the English Revolution.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 2 (1998): 151-171. Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformers on the Western Legal Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. 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Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Social History Vol. 7, No. 3 (Oct., 1982): 249-264. Fritze, Ronald H, William B. Robinson. Historical Dictionary of Stuart England, 1603-1689. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1996. Gardiner, S.R. A History of England from the Ascension of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603-1642, Volume 5. London: Cambridge University Press, 1833-4. Gentles, Ian, John Morrill, and Blair Worden. Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Guant, Peter. The English Civil Wars, 1642-1651 .Oxford, Osprey Publishing, 2003. Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution. Lawrence and Wishart, 1940. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Kishlansky, Mark. “The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630-1650 by J. S. Morrill.” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 1 (March., 1978): 133-135. 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