Question
The Early History of England
2. In the paper, you must be sure you are able to address some controversy in your brief research. In other words, did the authors all agree? Did you find conflicting information or did some authors emphasize different points? (Just think about evolution v intelligent design v creationism etc. or the American view of the Boston Tea Party v the British view of the same event)
3. Be sure to include the SIGNIFICANCE, the CONSEQUENCE of your topic.
4. Also, include your opinion
Additional Info- Minimum of 4 sources and at least 2 must be “academic“ sources, not just websites.
Length- a minimum of Ten pages (not including title page or bibliography)
HINTS- As you can probably tell, you must address some controversy, some argument. So think of that for your (soon to be required) thesis statement. In other words, pick a general topic, then narrow it down, find controversy and take a stand. For example- The Presidency of Clinton may be the general topic but that is far too broad (and no pun intended). So you might go to Clinton and foreign affairs (again, no pun intended) and then say something like “Clinton’s grasp of foreign policy exceeded that of George Bush“. And then, you may find you need to narrow it even more to Clinton’s grasp of South American foreign policy…Do you see what I mean?
Answer
Student’s Name:
Name of Course:
Institutional Affiliation:
Date Submitted:
Contents
The role of the Middle Class in the English Civil War. 2
English Civil War: A turning point in English history. 3
The middle class (gentry and merchants) during the 16th and early 17th centuries. 5
Controversy on the role played by the middle class during the British Civil War. 6
The role of the Middle Class in the English Civil War
Introduction
The English civil war was fought between 1642 and 1648. It entailed a conflict between England’s King Charles I and a large section of his subjects, who are generally referred to as the ‘parliamentarians. The war culminated in the defeat, capture, and execution of King Charles I and the establishment of the republican commonwealth.
ORDER HISTORY PAPER NOW
The war has also been referred to as the Puritan Revolution, owing to the religious complexion of the majority of the king’s opponents, which was predominantly Puritan (Eales, 1991). Moreover, the defeat of this king led to the abolition of episcopacy. However, the name tends to overemphasize the religious aspects at the expense of a subtle constitutional issue. This constitutional issue arose between a king who was claiming to the role by divine right on the one hand and a parliament that continually professed itself to possess the rights and privileges that were independent of the crown. Parliament, by virtue of its actions, claimed to possess real sovereignty.
During this period, parliament was not representative of all the English people; it was composed of and only represented the country gentry, the nobility, the merchants and artisans. The 16th century had already witnessed a sharp decline in the nobility’s decline and a striking increase in the numbers, influence, and wealth of the merchants and gentry. This English middle class had been the main beneficiaries of the market and trade expansion in Tudor times. From this middle class of merchants and gentry emerged stiff opposition to the crown. The core ambition of this middle class was to do away with the commercial and financial restrictions as well as their desire to influence on matters relating to foreign and religious policies. Previously, this influence had been restrained by the Tudors. However, the middle class had begun reorganizing its strength since the 1603 accession to the English throne, of a Scottish king.
This paper explores the role that the British middle class played during the English Civil War. The paper highlights a long-running controversy among historians on the actual cause of the civil war, particularly with regard to the leaning of the gentry’s allegiances and sympathies. Two conflict arguments are propounded. One is that the civil a ‘functional breakdown’ in the British monarch, as Russell (1992) points out. The second strand of argument is that the increasingly economically influential gentry asserted its power through parliament, thereby rendering the monarch weak, a situation that made each side to start amassing armies.
English Civil War: A turning point in English history
The English Civil War is considered a turning point in English history since it took place during the revolution of 1640-1660. During the revolution, two social forces, the bourgeoisie, and the English working class were pitted in a bitter conflict against Charles I, the aristocracy and the High Church (Morrill, 1974). The bourgeoisie was led by Oliver Cromwell and was organized in the British parliament.
In 1942, the parliament and the king started amassing armies. Their goals differed. The parliament did not have a desire to dethrone the king in order to establish a republic. Most of the members of parliament saw the monarch as the natural order that the society should adhere to. All they wanted for King Charles to accept limitations on his power, which had evolved over many centuries in England. For his part, Charles wanted to destroy the nation’s parliament completely as a highly effective institution and continue ruling as in France, using an absolute monarchy.
As a whole, the country remained apathetic, relatively small armies were involved, only about 13,000 for each side by 1642. The areas of support for both sides varied, with the royalists getting the strongest support in the north. The parliament’s support was in the highly prosperous East, including London, and South. The majority of the gentry lent a lot of support to the parliamentarians.
Ports were dominated by merchants, upon which the entire country was depending on for commerce. For the most part, merchants tended to view their interests as being served better by parliament. This is because parliament had greater access to many resources, dominating the most populous and richest regions of England. The parliament also had the authority to collect taxes. King Charles was forced to depend on his personal resources as well as donations from his partisans.
In the course of the conflict with the king, the movement had managed to empower and politically mobilize the masses in demand for true democratic reforms. The war appeared to be a response to the various effects of the Reformation. Similarly, it was largely a response to the emerging needs of the country’s middle class, who were composed of merchants and the landed gentry.
Before the 1640s, the middle class was largely disillusioned. The golden age of literature and drama was long over and censorship was becoming severe. With the lawyers increasingly becoming the consumers of art, energies that had previously been devoted to literature were now being channeled towards theological and political concerns (Heal, 1996). In other words, the war was as much religious and political as it was social and economic. In another aspect, it was also a legal battle between the British king and all his subjects. In all these perspectives of the war, the middle class played a crucial role in the ensuing revolution.
The middle class (gentry and merchants) during the 16th and early 17th century
During the late 16th century, various economic forces had completely transformed English society. The nobility no longer possessed the vital military role they used to have in England. The nobility was also gradually losing their government authority whereas the House of Commons was increasingly becoming of equal significance to the Parliament’s House of Lords. Finally, the nobility, it seemed, was losing out with regard to England’s increasing prosperity. All these changes were being contributed to largely by the entry of new entrants, mainly the gentry and merchants into the scene.
The gentry was a rather broad group of people that had not been doing very well during the early 16th century. During this time, they had purchased the land that the English crown had confiscated upon the closure of monasteries. During the late 16th century, the gentry found out that they were thoroughly involved in the nation’s commerce. All of a sudden, they were at odds with the nation’s nobility, who, traditionally speaking, were aloof from business matters.
The gentry, who were now integral to the administrative tasks of local parishes, started demanding a voice in parliament. Their claim was based on the simple argument that since they had helped increase the nation’s wealth, they too needed to share in the nation’s governance. The mere existence of the gentry during the 17th century was not enough to be a stimulant to the civil war. Rather, the foundation of the civil war was achieved after many of the gentries became sympathetic to the Puritans. Puritans argued that the Anglican Church that Elizabeth had established was doctrinally far too close to Roman Catholicism (Eales, 1991). So, they felt a need to reduce the hierarchy and ritual within the Church, something Elizabeth refused to do.
Controversy on the role played by the middle class during the British Civil War
Many historians agree that there were many fundamental flaws in the monarch in the early 17th century with regard to the existing financial and administrative systems (Heal, 1996). However, there are significant disagreements in the explanations of the causes of the English civil war, particularly the role that was played by the middle class. Most of the controversies are on the causes of the problems that England faced during the early 17th century and how best these problems could be solved.
Conrad Russell is one of the historians who have laid most stress on the various problems that the country faced and how these problems were the long-term cause of the various political crises that were experienced in the 1620s and the eventual breakdown of 1640-1642. Russell (1992) draws on European parallels as well as the controversial topics on the nature of the central-local relationships within the English polarity, and the members of parliaments’ attitudes towards the financial problems of the crown. Russell (1992) sees these financial problems as being rooted in the monarch’s local preoccupations.
Fundamental to Conrad’s arguments is the work of various historians, who have continually emphasized the importance of the gentry of the 17th century England and the inevitable tensions between local and national interests. Allan Everitt, a pioneer of such an approach, put forward the argument that local and national awareness was increasing in the 16th and 17th England, though there were inevitable tensions between national and local concerns. In this case, argued Everitt, local interests took priority almost all the time. The landed gentry in provincial England focused their attention on their county as the arena where the most important aspects of their lives played out.
The economic activities of the gentry were mostly based in their county, where they revolved around estates that had been acting as their families for many generations; all their wives were chosen from among the daughters of their neighbors, such that the gentry of the county such as Kent were ‘one great cousinage’ (Hughes, 1990).
Those historians who view the gentry as the most important contributor to the English Civil war explain the nature of friendships and rivalries that were being carried out within county boundaries (Heal, 1996). The crown did not have an extensive bureaucracy. For this reason, a great dependence of the local elites was a high priority in areas such as a collection of taxes and mobilization of troops for a foreign war.
Russell (1992) while contributing to the gentry-English-civil-war controversy argues that the parliaments that existed in the 1620s put local gentlemen as their first priority. Perhaps their service within parliament suggested some concern for more wide-reaching issues that historians had previously thought. However, Russell believes that their attitudes towards foreign war or domestic affairs were structured, mainly by a desire to continually spare their constituents and neighbors’ heavy or disruptive exactions. In other words, the parliamentarians are described as incapable of addressing the problem of ‘functional breakdown’.
In contrast, Hughes, A. (1990) the growing wealth of the gentry and merchants was the sole contributor of the English civil war. This middle class formed the House of Commons majority, and for this reason, were demanding a proportionately larger influence on the way in which the country was being governed. Hughes (1990) is of the opinion that the dwindling king’s hereditary finances were the main driving force behind the House of Commons’ renewed vigor in demanding for a larger share in the power to determine the way in which the country was governed. Hughes argues that the Commons were confident of opposing the monarch because the Crown was always dependent on the House of Commons whenever he wanted to participate in foreign wars. Hughes even points out to the fact that Charles governed without a parliament in order to avoid involvement with the Commons. However, the rebellion in Scotland forced the king to summon the Short parliament, followed by the Long parliament in 1640.
For Hughes, the role of gentry leaned towards a national and international perspective with regard to the role of the parliament. For Russell, however, local, county allegiances were more critical than far-reaching national and international interests for the gentry, and therefore, it could not have formed a formidable basis for the English Civil War.
The ‘functional breakdown’ perspective of the cause of the civil war as proposed by Russell provides justification for the argument that the insolvency of the monarch created a leadership vacuum that resulted in the English Civil War. Russell’s argument appears very charitable to monarchs while appearing pessimistic about the role that the increasingly powerful parliament played.
However, according to Tom Cogswell, a 19th-century American philosopher, educator, psychologist and pacifist, the Commons, in most cases, did insist on the redress of all grievances before demanding for accountability from the monarch. The failure to adhere to these grievances between 1621 and 1625 is explained by various political factors, and not by the inexorable process of the monarch’s decline.
David Thomas, a historian emphasizes that the enormous sums that were voted by the parliaments during the 1620s, the five subsidies that were granted in 1628, following the forced loan as well as the expenses of billeting, are especially noteworthy. Another historian, Richard Cust, observes that it was possible for England to engage in a war during the 1620s, thereby proving the truth of the proposition that the problems that arose during this time were not an integral part of the monarch’s functional breakdown. This is because money and men were raised by various local governors as well as through borrowing, but simple incompetence on the part of the government’s deployment of these resources was the main cause of structural weaknesses.
ORDER HISTORY PAPER NOW
The ‘common consent’ about the English civil being a source of inordinate pride to the British has disappeared. In its place is a trend of ‘revisionist’ scholarship that cuts the English civil war down to size, seeing it as a more commonplace struggle and not a ‘great revolution’. In particular, Russell stresses that the Scots were the ones who first provided the fiercest challenge to Charles I, and that the English king’s predicaments were similar to the ones that his continental counterparts were facing. Like the Spanish king, Charles I was ruling over multiple kingdoms, and he was facing revolt in each one of them.
It has been argued by some historians that the English civil war would not have taken place if risings did not take place in 1638, and soon after, in Ireland in 1641. Some historians understand the civil war as the ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’. In other words, they understand the civil war as part of the ‘British problem’. If this problem is viewed through the lens of contemporary events, it made the ‘General European Crisis’ manifest itself clearly.
In order for the role of the middle class to be understood better, it is important to focus on the financial situation in England in the 16th century to be described. The country was facing a myriad of financial problems, chief among them inflation. During this time, the royal income doubled although grain prices rose six-fold. The prices of various industrial products more than doubled. The general expenses of governance must have increased more than five-fold.
The need to focus on the financial aspects of the English political system is that there is an inextricable connection between the inadequacy of finances and administrative weaknesses. During the early 17th century, when the practice of customs ‘farming’ was first introduced, a syndicate of courtiers and merchants always collected the duties and in return, they paid rent to the crown. This practice was beneficial to the government because of the fixed and guaranteed revenues it brought in. However, the negative side was equally obvious –only private individuals and not the ‘state’ benefited from all additional profits. Through this practice, farmers could no longer rely on the traditional custom officials of the crown, who, nonetheless, continued to keep their positions and their salaries. This empowerment of individuals contributed greatly to the development of a strong, burgeoning middle class, which ended up rebelling against the king.
The government found itself in a vicious circle mainly because of a lack of money for paying adequate salaries to its servants. It was forced to pay these servants using miscellaneous concessions and pensions as well as turn a blind eye to many corrupt practices. This state of affairs marked the beginning of the weakening of the crown’s financial basis. Resentment and resistance were stiff among those who were left out of the spoils of the office.
In the run-up to the war, the crown had been doubly weakened after unpopular exactions had ended up bringing up little profits to the king. Monopolies remained controversial revenue-raising devices. Monopolies offered the best means through which regulations could be enforced by the monarch in the absence of a convoluted bureaucracy. The monarch became increasingly unpopular both in parliament and among the increasingly influential gentry and middle class. This is the reason why historians like Russell think that it was the main long-term cause of the war. They argue that without a weakened crown, it was impossible for the gentry to exert their influence in parliament.
However, contemporaries believed that many gentries were more loyalists than parliamentarians throughout the English civil war. As Richard Baxter, a renowned Puritan divine observed, outside the East Anglia and Home Counties, majority of Knights and Gentlemen remained the king’s adherents, and that the main source of support for parliament came from ‘the smaller section of the gentry in majority of the Counties, and the greatest section of Tradesmen and the Free-holders’ (Eales, 1991).
Moreover, there is uncertainty over the categorization of about 482 Gentry families in terms of their allegiances and sympathies. The overwhelming majority of this population belonged to the minor gentry, that is, plain gentlemen and only a mere 6% were in the category of the greater gentry, that is, the knights, baronets, and esquires. Out of the 482 families, 237 of them were earning an average landed income of only 115 pounds per annum. This is an indication of abject poverty among this gentry. As Professor W. G. Hoskin puts it, these people can be termed as belonging to the category of ‘peasant gentry’. Like the common people, the majority of the ‘peasant gentry’ owing to their circumstances, remained neutral throughout the duration of the Civil War. Although this scenario highlights is restricted only to the gentry of Lancashire, it is an indication of a long-running controversy among historians (Blackwood, 2000).
Conclusion
In summary, the English Civil War was a turning point in the nation’s history. The gentry played a significant role, owing to the changes that this group was undergoing. During the late 16th century and early 17th century, the gentry had played a crucial role in uplifting the nation’s economy. The gentry was gaining entry into the middle class and their assertiveness in parliament was being greatly felt. However, historians are not in agreement on whether the gentry was the main long-term cause of the civil war, or even where the sympathies and allegiances of the majority of the gentry lay in the course of the parliament-crown conflict.
References
Blackwood, B. (2000) The Lancashire gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640-60, New York: Macmillan.
Eales, J. (1991) Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the outbreak of the English Civil War, History: Reviews of New Books, 19(4), 160-173.
Heal, F. (1996) The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500-1700, History: Reviews of New Books, 24(3), 116-120.
Hughes, A. (1990) The causes of the English Civil War, New York: Macmillan.
Morrill, J. (1974) Cheshire, 1630-1660: County Government and Society During the English Revolution, History: Reviews of New Books, 2(10), 236-273.
Russell, C. (1992) The Causes of the English Civil War, History, Reviews of New Books, 20(2), 1-46.