English Civil War = failed Counter-Revolution?

[bailey_187]

Most Marxists seem to agree that the English Civil war in the 1600s was the capturing of state power by the Bourgeosie.

However, i have heard that some think that the bourgeosie had already captured state power, and the civil war was an attempt by King Charles I at a counter-revolution by his dissolving of parliament, arresting of MPs etc.

I would like to hear more about this theory. Who agrees with it? What do comrades on the forum think of it?

So, was the English Civil a failed attempt at counter-revolution or a bourgeois-revolution?

[BAM]

the real bourgeois revolution in England was the 1688 "Glorious Revolution". It was at the point that the bourgeoisie - such as it was - fully captured political power.

I studied the civil war as my special subject in history at university. I don't know of any theories which argued that the bourgeoisie had already taken political power by 1640. There was a rise in the power of the merchant class before then, but Britain at that time was still ruled by the gentry, whose wealth and power derived from the land.

The causes of the civil war are complex. And what follows is a massive simplification.

Broadly it was precipitated by divisions within the ruling class, but its character was shaped by the intervention of the "middle sort" of society - artisans, smallholders and rising capitalists who employed wage-labour - though this is not to be confused with the bourgeoisie. This section of society went through enormous changes as the pattern of trade and production was being transformed.

The Crown, to finance unpopular wars abroad, went to levy taxes on this rising section of society. It also implemented a series of deeply unpopular religious reforms. There was a huge climate of unrest all over the three kingdoms (England/Wales, Scotland and Ireland). Charles I had ruled without a Parliament for most of his reign. When he did call one, in order to raise money to invade Scotland (of which he was already king!), he was faced with a mass of protest. He quickly dissolved it but the popular protest did not go away: if anything it intensified.

Another Parliament was called in late 1640 and this would rule for over the next decade. It began to try to get rid of all the King's ministers and bishops, spurred on by huge angry crowds of protesters. When it became clear that the king was prepared to use force to silence his opponents, a division within Parliament now aimed to limit the power of the king by wresting control of the militia from him. By 1641 members of Parliament loyal to the King had all but gone, but Parliament still ruled.

There couldn't be a counter-revolution against Parliament, for the simple fact that there had been no revolution - as yet. There was indeed a revolution, but this only came as a result of two civil wars. The King's execution and the abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords were the price paid for King's treason against the people in starting a second civil war in 1648. Before 1640 such a thing would have been unimaginable. By 1648, the old upper gentry and peers were removed from political power. A new ruling class emerged but it lacked the economic base to sustain itself for very long. It took another generation or two for this to happen. If anything, there is good evidence that the pace of social change increased after the civil war, even if the aristocracy held onto their landed wealth. Thus the civil war is one important great event in the transformation of Britain.

[S.Artesian]

Most Marxists seem to agree that the English Civil war in the 1600s was the capturing of state power by the Bourgeosie.

However, i have heard that some think that the bourgeosie had already captured state power, and the civil war was an attempt by King Charles I at a counter-revolution by his dissolving of parliament, arresting of MPs etc.

I would like to hear more about this theory. Who agrees with it? What do comrades on the forum think of it?

So, was the English Civil a failed attempt at counter-revolution or a bourgeois-revolution?


Revolution. The counter-revolutionary forces were being driven from power, not attempting a restoration after a period of successful bourgeois rule.

You might want to take a look at Brenner's Merchants and Revolution-- pretty comprehensive [at least to this New Yorker], but it is massive, and not an easy read.

[BAM]

You might want to take a look at Brenner's Merchants and Revolution-- pretty comprehensive [at least to this New Yorker], but it is massive, and not an easy read.

Yeah, the Brenner is huge and complex. Brian Manning wrote a short book entitled Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England, 1640-1660, which forms a good overview of the period. Also, his best-known book, The English People and the English Revolution is good too. Manning was a student of Christopher Hill, whose work you cannot avoid if you look at the seventeenth century. James Holstun's Ehud's Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution has the advantage of being up-to-date but the author lays it on thick with the literary theory shtick.

There are many hundreds of books on the civil war, most of them not worthy, but there are some non-Marxist accounts that are worth reading, such as John Morrill's Revolt of the Provinces, Ann Hughes's The Causes of the English Civil War and Conrad Russell's very different book of the same name.

[ckaihatsu]

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Harman, _People's History of the World_, p.203


The English Revolution

In January 1649 an executioner’s axe cut off the head of the king of England and Scotland, Charles I. The event shocked the whole of Europe.102 Rulers throughout the continent—Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist—severed diplomatic relations with the English government.103 It had committed sacrilege against a principle they shared—the right of some to rule over others because of an accident of birth.

[ckaihatsu]

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The men who ordered the execution were far from being extreme republicans. Only 20 months before, their leader Oliver Cromwell had defended the principle of monarchy, saying that ‘no man could enjoy their lives and estates quietly without the king had his rights’.104 Now he famously declared, ‘We will cut off his head with his crown on it.’ He was, despite himself, opening the door to a new era, which would question the assumption that some human beings were divinely ordained to superiority over others.

[ckaihatsu]

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There are fashionable accounts of the English Revolution which see it as a result of mere jockeying for position between rivals within a homogenous ‘gentry’ elite. Such accounts chart the patronage and family connections which tie one upper class figure to another and explain the battles and beheadings as flowing from a process of plotting and counter-plotting which got out of hand.

[ckaihatsu]

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Such interpretations fail to see that 1649 was not some historical quirk. It was a product of the clash between the same social forces which had been tearing much of Europe apart for a century and a half—forces unleashed as market relations arose out of and transformed the old feudal order. It involved not just rival upper class courtiers and politicians, but merchant interests similar to those prominent in the Dutch revolt; it involved artisans and small traders like those who had carried the Reformation through south Germany or been burned at the stake in France; and it involved peasant protests, much smaller in scale but not different in kind to the German Peasant War of 1525. Binding together the parties in the English Civil War were the rival religious notions thrown up by the European Reformation.

[BAM]

Although I haven't read his book, it sounds like Harman based his analysis of the civil wars on the work of Brian Manning!

[bailey_187]

Although I haven't read his book, it sounds like Harman based his analysis of the civil wars on the work of Brian Manning!

quickly looking at the sources he used, i cant see Manning cited but Chris Hill is. Manning is recommended in the "further reading" section though

[BAM]

quickly looking at the sources he used, i cant see Manning cited but Chris Hill is. Manning is recommended in the "further reading" section though

Manning's thesis about the civil wars is very interesting. He sees the revolution driven by the actions of the "middle sort" of society - a disparate class of people, some of whom would become the bourgeoisie, the rest who would fall to the status of wage-labourers. Rather than the stale old arguments in civil war historiography about the rise of the gentry, Manning's analysis of the forces at work shows them to be highly dynamic. The London crowds almost come across like the Parisian mobs during the French Revolution!

Manning's PhD thesis was a pioneering piece of work on the "Clubmen" risings - radical neutrals who rose up against both sides in the civil war to protests against a bloody conflict that had a greater proportional impact on society (in terms of deaths and woundings) than the first world war.

And, though I love Christopher Hill's work (I have about 15 of his books on my bookshelves) in terms of the analysis of the events of the civil war itself, he didn't write that much, surprisingly.