From the mid-1970s, revisionist historians presenting the English Civil War as an avoidable conflict caused by short-term mishaps outpaced those who still perceived the war as a revolution. However, as David Cressy writes, “the English Revolution keeps getting up and pulling the stake from its heart” (8). Despite focusing on the years 1640 to 1642, therefore, England on Edge is not simply revisionism revised. Cressy argues that this was the period that saw true revolution—political, religious, and cultural—and that this revolution led to civil war.
The book reviews the prewar years, surveys the historiography, and discusses the connotations of the term “revolution” before sifting through the mentalities at work in England in the 1640s. The discourse of the middling and poorer sorts is, inevitably, largely presented through records mediated by the gentry; but the economic and religious frustrations of the common people are convincingly reconstructed. Such feelings erupted when, to satisfy Charles I's desire to enforce religious uniformity on Scotland, thousands of the poor and unemployed were conscripted as soldiers and herded north. Cressy repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the disastrous 1640 campaign in precipitating crisis and revolution, providing useful insights into the process of mobilization. Gathered together, the conscripts became dangerous agents of political and social instability, declaring themselves to be defenders of Protestantism and traditional community values as they allied with local factions to destroy enclosures, smash church furniture and harass (sometimes lethally) those suspected of popery. After the army's disbandment, disgruntled officers representing the other side of the debate, believing their sovereign to have been betrayed, engaged in plots and took their argument onto the London streets. There, these prototype Cavaliers encountered a hostile populace whose mounting discontent with royal policy had already sparked demonstrations and violence. Cressy provides valuable detail on the Lambeth Disturbances and various insurrections in London, concluding that “a crack had appeared in the edifice of social and political control” (124).
Turning to affairs within the Church of England, the book attempts to identify religious conservatives and innovators. The complexity of this particular minefield is amply illustrated when the Laudians emerge as conservative innovators (129). Assertions that the 1630s had been a “time of hyperconformity” are countered by observations of serious doctrinal divisions (141, 132), testifying above all to the efficiency of the governing Laudian clique. However, their repressive management of the Church provoked a backlash: the Long Parliament, called in the aftermath of the Scottish debacle, quickly became the bishops’ nemesis. Nevertheless, Cressy shows how, even at this stage, instinctive uneasiness at the accelerating pace of erosion of traditional “mechanisms of control” had already begun to draw many erstwhile reformers inexorably back toward the royal fold (219–21). If questions remain as to why other gentry discounted such fears and maintained their opposition, some illumination might lie in what Cressy describes as “the opening of discourse and the expansion of the public sphere” facilitated by the press (282). The massive expansion of printing after 1640 is persuasively presented as a cultural revolution, particularly the collapse of the licensing system (another episcopal role dismantled by Parliament). Authors and printers became increasingly willing to debate previously privileged topics, while their readers fixed pamphlets to walls, doors, and palace gates. Cressy draws an interesting contrast between this newfound freedom and increasing anxieties engendered by the interception of private correspondence (315). Lower down the social scale, the tide of often-contradictory news led to increasing cynicism and distrust even of official communiqués—supporting to an extent the claim that “the security of the regime depended on control of the written word” (289).
In trying to estimate the impact these various revolutions had upon the national psyche, Cressy attempts to “eavesdrop on the arguments in streets and taverns” (321). Well aware of the problems involved in attempting to retrieve the spoken word from written records, he avoids making any inflated claims for the conversations selected, choosing instead to indicate circumstances and contexts, and the plausible opportunities such discourse might afford. The “engaged and energized public” that emerges from this exercise is much more convincing than the passive worshippers depicted earlier in the book (234, 325). The part played by humor in attracting people to this “national conversation” and in undermining authority is particularly interesting: Cressy notes, for example, that many leading episcopalian-royalists—Matthew Wren, Sir John Finch, Dr. Arthur Duck, and Sir John Lambe—had names that afforded opponents ample opportunity to engage in wordplay and ridicule. But humor was a double-edged sword, and could humiliate “overreaching parliamentarians” as easily as “over-mighty prelates” (338). Aside from humor, the overwhelming emotion that emerges from this book is fear, particularly the widespread neurosis among the gentry regarding the fragility of the social order. However, at this point, having flirted with the spectre of social revolution throughout the book, Cressy banishes the notion. Admitting that social recalcitrance was nothing new, he notes an increased frequency and intensity of social insubordination between 1640 and 1642, together with an unprecedented “deconsecration of majesty and a demystification of power” (369), but leaves open the question of where the confidence to display such disrespect might have come from. Whatever the source, the deference previously shown even by rioters and rebels had been replaced by a “deterioration in civility,” which, as Cressy persuasively argues here, “fostered a climate of anxiety and alarm in which people made catastrophic political errors” (348).
This book makes a useful contribution to the historiography of the English Revolution. One reservation concerns the conclusion: a complex historiographical model—one that has clearly involved immense and painstaking effort to assemble—deserves more than a set of bullet points inserted into a postscript. While the chronology is a useful aid, there is, frustratingly, no bibliography. The scale and perspicacity of the research, however, lifts England on Edge above such shortcomings. Although the material includes the usual suspects, many voices from local archives are genuinely fresh, and this thought-provoking study is all the more welcome for it.
