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The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642

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In 1640 few supported the dissolution of the monarchy or the House of Lords...The heart of this book is its long chapter on the causes of the English revolution. That revolution, Stone maintains, was in a real sense caused by the dissolution of government (rather than causing its dissolution); that "class" warfare along Marxist explanatory lines is not applicable to the revolution and; that the revolution was more than a reaction to unpopular monarch. He then sets out to identify the long-term, underlying causes of the war and its more proximate catalysts. His discussion of the weak reach of the Tudor bureaucracy and its corresponding lack of credibility as a legal enforcer, and his discussion of the impact of Puritan thought are especially compelling.
The first section of the book surveys the methodological issues involved in explaining revolution. This survey, though somewhat dated by now, still provides useful insights. And, he has a caustic eye for those of his colleagues who prefer an arid, artifically technical jargon over clarity and concise prose.

This is analytical history, not the narrative sort. A reader would do well to have a fair sense of Tudor England before taking on this volume. Stone examines a list of causes for the civil war that encompasses political, economic, social, and religious frictions. Although he quibbles with his own summation of "multiple dysfunction" as the explanation for the Civil War, it makes a viable argument, however it is phrased. Henry VIII opened a Pandora's Box that affected far more than religion when he established the Church of England. Elizabeth artfully dodged many of the conflicts set off by her father for forty years, but left a seething mess for her successors. The Stuarts proved inept stewards of their legacy at a time when the aristocracy, gentry, and a rising merchant class were asserting their own priorities and an expansively literate laboring class was inventing a plethora of new religious and political notions. Stone divides these causes into preconditions, precipitants, and triggers of armed conflict, while acknowledging that war was not inevitable from structural conditions. That this book should be reprinted thirty years after its original publication speaks to its insight and relevance.

P.S. Valuable as it is, this book is no page-turner. It is written in academic prose, though hardly the worst of the sort. Be prepared for bouts of internecine sparring as Stone crosses swords with detractors and critics in defense his methodologies and analyses -- but soldier on.

This book reminds me of Doyle's `Origins of the French Revolution', constructed as it is in much the same way. Stone begins, interestingly, with a consideration of general theories about types of revolution and what leads to them. He moves on to a narrative about the different views historians have taken about the causes of this particular revolution.

These chapters are not great fun but Stone has an incisive style and makes his points well.

Finally he advances to his own account of the causes, which occupies two thirds of the book.

The picture he paints, as a reviewer on Amazon.com has pointed out, is that Henry VIII opened a Pandora's box by getting into bed with Parliament in a systematic way in order to iron out the details of his divorce and break with Rome. As a consequence, Parliament became accustomed to an integral role in the shaping of the centralized state that Henry and his father before him were developing.

Furthermore, the break with Rome begged the question: `What religion?' This was a question to which Henry's answer, and Elizabeth's after him, was to play a pretty straight bat. Stone suggests that Elizabeth in particular effectively almost marginalised the importance of religion, opting for a compromise which was only accepted because of the charm and balance with which she played off all parties against each other.

Stone says the net result was that after she died the Puritan and Catholic gentry, who had benefited from the great improvement in educational standards in the latter part of her reign, and grown from the massive increase in numbers and wealth of the gentry, were in strong and entrenched positions when James's government began to break down. Stone criticises Elizabeth for not tackling the religious issue head on, which he thinks might have pre-empted the conflicts of the Stuart period.

He points to the intransigence of James and Charles especially as regards their refusal to truck with Parliament and their anti-Puritan bias. He points out that however wilful and ill-advised they might now seem, they were only doing what any self-respecting monarch of the Ancien Regime in Europe would have done.

In England however, in the context of what Henry VIII had started and Elizabeth consolidated, it didn't wash. Stone suggests that the attempt by Charles I to force Ireland and Scotland with blinding insensitivity to fall in with his plans was what sealed his fate, in that it alerted the English aristos and gentry to what was in store for them if they didn't resist. He also highlights how the nascent London banking and trading scene, fiercely radical in terms of religion, effectively lit the blue touch paper when they had been alienated by the king.

This is an essay, written in trenchant style, perhaps rather in the tradition of Elton's history of the Tudors, but you need to have a good basic grasp of Tudor and Stuart history to really benefit from it.

The last time that the name of Professor Lawrence Stone came up in this space was a review of his magisterial study of the rise and triumph of bourgeois family structure and its mores in England, The Family, Sex And Marriage In England 1500-1800(the study centered on English changes, which as the vanguard of capitalism made a study of the bourgeois family structure quite sensible) from 1500 to 1800 so the good professor is certainly familiar with the period under discussion in this book. The bourgeois family study, some 500 pages, abridged, is contrasted here by a much shorter work of less than two hundred pages. But don't be thrown off by the shortness of this work, given the expansiveness of the subject, because this is a serious concise work that lays out for the beginner and the more knowledgeable a very nice grab bag of causes for the 17th century English revolution that gives one a jumping off point for further investigation. For the more advanced devotees of the study of the English revolution there are plenty of footnotes and a bibliography at the end that will provide helpful for that further study.

Of course any speculation on the cause or, more correctly, the causes of the English revolution (like any revolution, or other world historic event) is, for the most part, a matter of hindsight, and therefore ready material for an historian's "cherry-picking" to suit his or her predilections. And also a cause, as in the English case described here by Professor Stone in the first section of the book, for all sorts of "flare-ups" back in the 1950s and 1960s in British academic circles. From such questions as whether the 1640-60 events were even a revolution ( a question pretty much now resolved in favor of revolution) to which class lead and benefited from it to more esoteric questions about whether the gentry (the big landowners, for the most part) benefited from the revolution or not there was something of a field day on this period and Professor Stone seems to have been right in the middle of it along with such English revolution luminaries as Professors Tawney and Trevor-Roper. And as long as it is kept to the academic milieu ( as is the usual situation) such infighting can, and in this case did, produce some useful insights.

After the academic "fireworks" settle down from the first section Professor Stone, in the second and third sections, gets to his laundry list of causes for the revolution, some worth further investigation, some that seem more speculative (like the question of the rise and fall of the gentry, or parts of it, in the rush to revolution). He breaks down the period from 1529 to 1642 into smaller segments in order to separate longer term causes from shorter and more direct causes. Obviously any study of long term trends toward revolution in England in this period has to include changes in agricultural production toward more capitalist methods of growing for the market, the role of demographic spreads and population growth (especially London's growth) and, probably most importantly, the fall out from the Protestant Reformation as it played out in there. Shorter term reasons include the rise of Puritanism in the wake of the religious and political policies the James I and Charles I regimes, the vast increase in literacy, education, and lay authority in church matters, changes in the legal and state church structure, particularly by Charles I promoting a more authoritarian regime in the face of more democratic church movements, and, as always, the personal factor, of Charles I's eagerness to shoot himself in the foot every time some controversy came up so that in the end he alienated, and made indifferent or hostile , the elements of society that stool closest to him, especially the merchants and nobility. This is hardly exhaustive of Professor Stone's presentation but should be enough to whet the appetite.

Of course for revolutionaries, as well as thoughtful historians, the causes of revolution and the pre-revolutionary period are important in their own right. Just as today we can see, even if we cannot right this minute do anything about it, that conditions in America and Europe are ripe for revolution, a socialist revolution, and we can point to unemployment, the gaps between the rich and poor, extensive deindustrialization, cuts in public social welfare budgets and the like as the precursors we can look at the English, French Russian and Chinese revolutions for some insights. The English revolution, as the first great Western one, is particularly important to study because of the links to America and because something in the English-American psyche (at least in the past) has acted almost as a barrier to further revolutions among English-speaking Anglo-American people.

I read this book for one of my graduate classes on historiography, and I hated almost every moment. This book starts out with a long convoluted theoretical discussion of revolutions. Stone then explains why each theory doesn't work, but then gives his own crack job theory. Stone's method is to first come up with a theory and then shove all evidence as best he possibly can into the parameters of his own theory. This method doesn't work. He has a few good points along the way, but his writing is what I would call complicated on purpose so people don't see the kinks in his arguement. If you want to read about the causes of the English civil war I would check out Adamson's the Noble Revolt and Cressy's England on Edge. Adamson focuses on the House of Lords and Cressy focuses on the people. They compliment each other very nicely. They are also much more enjoyable to read, and get down to the nitty gritty of what is really going on (unlike Stone who makes grand sweeping theories which end up mostly being bull anyways). If you are hoping for an easy answer to why the English Civil War (or revolution) happened, don't expect to get it. The English revolution (and for that matter the historiography of this event) is just a mess of religion and politics. I should also mention that since this book was written new documents have come to light that were employed in Adamson and Cressy's books, somewhat outdating this book anyways. So, overall I would say avoid this book unless you are studying the historiography of the English civil war.