There is no full-length, properly researched biography of Charles I in print. Important shorter studies of the king in recent years have been provided by Brian Quintrell, Charles I 1625–1640 (Longman, 1993); Michael B. Young, Charles 1 (Macmillan, 1997); Christopher Durston, Charles I (Routledge, 1998); and (especially) Richard Cust, Charles I (Pearson Longman, 2005). All these are more or less hostile. Kevin Sharpe’s works, listed above and below, are kinder, and for many years Mark Kishlansky has been working towards a full biography which is likely to be the most favourable of modern times. Milestones on the way to that are his articles ‘Tyranny Denied’, in the Historical Journal (1999), and ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, in Past and Present (2005).
Kevin Sharpe’s great book on the 1630s is The Personal Rule of Charles I (Yale University Press, 1992). Replies and additions to it are common in more general works cited above. Also relevant are J. F. Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alexandra Walsham, ‘The Parochial Roots of Laudianism Revisited’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (1998); David Cressy, ‘Conflict, Consensus and the Willingness to Wink’, Huntington Library Quarterly (2000); and Kenrik Langeluddecke, ‘“I Find All Men and my Officers soe unwilling” : The Collection of Ship Money 1635–1640’, Journal of British Studies (2007). Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven, mentioned above, is an important intervention in this debate.
Three huge books cover between them major aspects of the crowded years 1637 to 1642: Conrad Russell, The Fall of the Stuart Monarchies (Macmillan, 1991); David Cressy, England on Edge (Oxford University Press, 2006); and John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld, 2007). The military aspects of Charles’s contest with the Scots were considered in Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars (Cambridge University Press, 1994). John Adamson’s essay in Niall Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History (Picador, 1997), is a valuable exploration of what might have happened had Charles decided to attack the Covenanter army in 1639.
Some of the works above also cover Scotland, Ireland, or all three kingdoms, but the literature that deals with these is mostly separate. The collections of essays listed above as dealing with the ‘British Problem’ under the Tudors are all equally relevant to it under the Stuarts. Newcomers seeking an introduction should read Jenny Wormald (ed.), The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2008). The best overall textbook for Scotland in the latter period is still Keith Brown, Kingdom or Province? (Macmillan, 1992). The Covenanter rebellion and its background is dealt with in David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution (David and Charles, 1973); Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King (Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context (Edinburgh University Press, 1990); Allan I. Macinnes, Charles 1 and the Making of the Covenanting Movement (Donald, 1991); Keith Brown, ‘The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicisation and the Court, 1603–1638’, Historical Journal (1993); Julian Goodare, ‘The Scottish Parliament of 1621”, Historical Journal (1995); State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford University Press, 1999); and ‘The Admission of Lairds to the Scottish Parliament’, English Historical Review (2001); and Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (Tuckwell, 2000). All these are hard on Charles I and get tougher on James. Ireland in the same period is best covered by Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2001), together with the last section of Connolly, Contested Island, recommended above. These can be supplemented with the essays in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Victor Treadwell, Buckingham and Ireland 1616–1628 (Four Courts, 1998). The anniversary of the great Catholic rebellion generated Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Queen’s University of Belfast, 1993) and M. Perceval-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1994). Scotland and Ireland are linked by John R. Young (ed.), Celtic Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (John Donald, 1997).
Chapters 9 and 10 – Civil War and Revolution; The Commonwealth and Protectorate
The most detailed overall narrative for the period 1642 to 1660 is Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution. The military side is currently best handled by Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms 1638–1652 (Pearson, 2007), alongside which should still be read the essays by different experts in John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Civil Wars (Oxford University Press, 1998). Clive Holmes answers a series of major questions concerning it, with a style ideal for students and general readers, in Why Was Charles I Executed? (Hambledon Continuum, 2006). Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, 2008) is a dense history of England in the 1640s, especially good on intellectual, political and cultural affairs. For the 1650s, those who want a quick account and analysis of the period are welcome to my own The British Republic, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 2000). Those who would like a more detailed treatment of the Protectorate should use Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester University Press, 2002). The most accessible overall account of the neglected last two years of the republic is in the first part of my book The Restoration (Oxford University Press, latest reprint 1993).
Clive Holmes’s disagreement with Malcolm Wanklyn over the outcome of the Great Civil War was voiced in his Why Was Charles I Executed?, and directed against Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War 1642–1646 (Pearson Longman, 2005), which is the best current work on its subject. The overall causes were considered in three successive and differing books of the 1990s: Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990); Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edn (Macmillan, 1998); and Norah Carlin, The Causes of the English Civil War (Blackwell, 1999), of which the first has been by far the most influential or provocative. John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Longman, 1993) brings together a series of important studies of the war and its context by this key historian. Its ethnic dimension is well treated in Mark Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers (Yale University Press, 2005). The local aspect, so prominent in the period between 1965 and 1985, is still represented in recent years by Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (University of Exeter, 1996); A. R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Gloucestershire 1649–1672 (Boydell Press, 1997); Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions (Manchester University Press, 1998) (On Leicestershire); John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces (Longman, 1999) (a famous general survey); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1999) (on Colchester); and Lloyd Bowen, The Politics of the Principality: Wales c. 1603–1642 (University of Wales Press, 2007). Most publications on the wars pay more attention to the Parliamentarians, but the Royalists get some from my own monograph The Royalist War Effort, 2nd edn (Routledge, 1999) and Jason McElligott and David. L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Parliamentarian politics are surveyed in the more general works listed above, and in Ian Gentles, The New Model Army (Blackwell, 1991); D. E. Kennedy, The English Revolution (Macmillan, 2000); and Michael Mendle (ed.), The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
The question of how far the wars in the three kingdoms should be treated as a whole was debated by Jane Ohlmeyer and John Adamson in History Today (November, 1998). Important works that take the holistic approach include David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms 1637–1649 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution 1629–1660 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and John Morrill’s contribution to Wormald (ed.), The Short Oxford History of the British Isles: The Seventeenth Century.
Blair Worden’s groundbreaking essay on the meaning of toleration in the period was published in W. J. Sheils (ed.
), Persecution and Toleration (Oxford University Press, 1984). Religious politics in it have been recast by a series of articles by J. C. Davis: ‘Puritanism and Revolution’, Historical Journal (1990); ‘Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal (1992); ‘Against Formality’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1993). Most recently there is Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby (eds), Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester University Press, 2006). The role of pamphlet propaganda during the 1640s and 1650s has been well considered by Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers (Ashgate, 2004)
The establishment of the republic has been revisited in a set of short studies: Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic (Manchester University Press, 1997); Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); and Sean Kelsey, ‘The Death of Charles I’, Historical Journal (2002) and ‘The Trial of Charles I’, English Historical Review (2003). Republican and quasi-republican writing in early modern England has been the focus of three books from Cambridge University Press: Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (1995); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (1999); and Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles (2004). An overview of the subject is provided by John McDiarmid, The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2007).
The Protectorate has been re-examined in detail in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Boydell, 2007); the period of the Major-Generals in Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major-Generals (Manchester University Press, 2001); and the ecclesiastical settlement in Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History (2002). Foreign policy gets a rare treatment from Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1996). The five best recent biographies of Cromwell are Peter Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell (Blackwell, 1996); Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell, 2nd edn (Longman, 2000); J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (Arnold, 2001); Martyn Bennett, Oliver Cromwell (Routledge, 2006); and John Morrill’s entry for him in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), which has since been issued as a short book by Oxford University Press. To these should be joined the still significant collection of essays in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Longman, 1990). The final stages of the republic remain neglected: there is a useful but unfortunately polemical monograph by Ruth Mayers, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth (Boydell Press, 2004).
There is no new panoramic study of Ireland in the period, but instead a remarkable recent explosion of essays and monographs by different authors: Micheál Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649 (Four Courts, 1999); Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Micheál Ó Siochrú (ed.), Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland in the 1640s (Four Courts, 2001); Padraig Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1641–49 (Cork University Press, 2001); Padraig Lenihan (ed.), Conquest and Resistance: War in Seventeenth-century Ireland (Brill, 2001). Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2002); and Robert Armstrong, Protestant War (Manchester University Press, 2005). In this group is Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, Age of Atrocity, mentioned earlier. After 1653, however, everything suddenly goes quiet, and nobody has succeeded T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford University Press, 1975). There is nothing comparable for Scotland in the whole period, no work having yet really replaced David Stevenson’s classic books, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651 (Royal Historical Society, 1977) and Alasdair MacColla and the Highland Problem in the Seventeenth Century (John Donald, 1980), and F. D. Dow, Cromwellian Scotland (John Donald, 1979). John Grainger, Cromwell against the Scots (Tuckwell, 1997) is at least a new history of the English conquest, and Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Boydell Press, 2004) brings a three-nation perspective to the 1650s.
INDEX
Abbott, George (Archbishop of Canterbury) 1, 2
Acts of Parliament 1
making Henry VIII head of Church of England 1
restricting clergy privileges 1
on wages (1598 and 1603) 1
alcoholism 1 see also poverty
American colonies (English) 1, 2, 3, 4
American Revolution 1
Americas, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Andrewes, Lancelot 1
Anjou, Duke of 1
Anne of Cleves 1
Archbishops of Canterbury 1, 2 see also individual entries
Abbott, George 1, 2
Bancroft, Richard 1
Cranmer, Thomas 1, 2
Grindal, Edmund 1, 2
Laud, William 1, 2
Warham, William 1
Whitgift, John 1
Arminians/Anglo-Catholics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
army see New Model Army
Arthur, King 1
and Round Table 1
Arundel, Earl of 1
Bacon, Sir Francis 1
Bancroft, Richard (Archbishop of Canterbury) 1, 2
Bastwick, John 1
battles (of)
Agincourt (1415) 1, 2
Blenheim (1704) 1
Bosworth Field 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Dunbar 1
East Stoke 1, 2
Edgehill (1642) 1
Flodden 1, 2, 3
Kinsale (1601) 1
Marston Moor (1644) 1
Naseby (1645) 1, 2
Pinkie (Scotland) 1, 2
St Quentin 1
against Western rebels (1497) 1
Beaufort, Cardinal 1
Beaufort family 1
Bible 1, 2
English Authorized Version of the 1
translated into English 1
birth rate, decline in 1
bishops 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Edmund Grindal (London) 1
Irish 1
John Fisher (Rochester) 1
and Mary Tudor 1, 2
reject abolition of mass 1
restoration of 1
in Scotland 1, 2, 3, 4
in Wales 1
William Juxon (London) 1
blasphemy 1, 2, 3
Bohemia 1 see also Frederick, Prince (Elector Palatine)
and 1618-20 revolt 1
Boleyn, Anne 1, 2, 3, 4
Book of Martyrs 1
Booth’s Rebellion (1659) 1
Bothwell, Earl of 1
Boulogne 1, 2, 3
Bourbon family of France 1
British Isles and Elizabeth I 1
British Problem, the (New British History) 1
Brittany 1, 2
Bromyard, John 1
Brudenell, Lord 1
Buckingham, Duke of 1
execution of (1521) 1
Buckingham, Duke of see Villiers, George
Buckinghamshire, Verneys of 1
Bunyan, John 1
Burghley, Lord see Cecil, William
Burghley House 1
Burgundy 1, 2
Charles the Reckless of 1
Duke Philip the Good of 1
Margaret, Dowager Duchess of 1, 2
Burton, Henry 1
Cabot, John 1
Calais 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Camden, William 1, 2, 3
Carlyle, Thomas 1, 2
Catherine of Aragon 1, 2
Catholicism (and) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 see also Mary Tudor
American colonies 1
assassins 1
conspiracies against Elizabethan government 1
Counter-Reformation 1, 2
downfall of 1
Elizabeth I 1
English 1
French 1
persecution/fining of 1, 2, 3
plot for Irish self-government 1
priests’ training college at Douai 1
seminary priests/missionaries 1
suspension of English persecution of 1, 2
Cecil, Robert (Earl
of Salisbury) 1, 2, 3
and Great Contract financial scheme 1
as Lord Treasurer to James VI 1
Cecil, William (Lord Burghley) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
as chief minister of Elizabeth I 1
as Lord Treasurer 1
Celts/Celtic kingdoms 1, 2
Charles I 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 see also Civil War and Henrietta Maria, Queen
constitutional changes by 1
escapes and signs deal with Scots Covenanters 1
escapes to Wales 1
and fear of English Parliaments 1
financial straits of 1
and help of Ireland in Civil War 1
military failure of 1
and his Parliaments 1, 2 see also Long Parliament
Personal Rule of 1, 2, 3, 4
and punishments 1
refuses Heads of Proposals 1
and Ship Money 1
and Spain 1
trial and death of 1, 2, 3
at war with Scotland 1
Charles II (and) 1, 2
battle of Worcester 1
invited back as king 1
religious persecution 1
Scots invasion of England 1
Charles V, Emperor of Spain 1, 2, 3, 4
Charles V, King of France 1, 2, 3
Charles VI, King of France 1
A Brief History of Britain 1485-1660 Page 34