Tristram Hunt's account of the Civil War is strong on political discourse but weak on religion. He presents a 'revisionist' interpretation of the Protestant Reformation, choosing to date it to 1533, when Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn. He then attributes the emergence of Puritanism to the Elizabethan period, enabling him to avoid mention of the underground conventicles which fomented religious dissent during Bloody Mary's reign of terror. He views the Church of England as a 'political compromise', and describes an homogenous "Protestant Religion" fighting for its survival in the Thirty Years War. Meanwhile he divides England into Anglicans, Catholics and 'zealots', seemingly unaware that the C of E was for most of James I's reign in the hands of moderate Calvinists; the Catholic Church in England being little more than an overseas mission.
He presents priestly intercession and episcopal order as civilizing norms, and bible-centred Christianity as perverse. He is critical of the Puritan belief in predestination, but seems unaware of its origins in the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas. He uses the language of nineteenth-century Marxist class analysis to examine seventeenth-century support for the cavaliers and roundheads. He highlights the Parliamentary atrocities at Colchester, Drogheda, Wexford and Basing House, but ignores the rape and pillage of Birmingham by Prince Rupert in 1643; the first real outrage of the war, and one which marked a point of no return. He acknowledges the Royalist sack of Marlborough only for its '"propaganda" value, and describes the onslaught at Leicester (in which women were murdered) as being "successful". He also ignores the Royalist atrocity at Hopton Castle, in which the members of a roundhead garrison were stripped to the waist, tied back-to-back and led out to have their throats cut, before having their bodies dumped unceremoniously in the moat. The royalists also slit the throat of a maid and forced another to watch her die.
If the book has a flaw, it is that the author's appetite for radical politics is severely compromised by his own conservative religious values, making him tut disapprovingly at Puritan iconoclasm whilst failing to recognise popular dissent at the payment of tithes. This bias leads him into the ridiculous position of having to attack Cromwell as a tyrant both for opposing the imposition of Presbyterianism upon an unwilling English populace, and for defending the religious freedoms which accompanied the decline in episcopal order and censorship. He presents attempts by the Long and Protectorate Parliaments to move away from Catholic feast days in terms of Cromwell personally "banning Christmas", oblivious to the fact that Christmas went unacknowledged by Cromwell's fellow Calvinists in Scotland for 400 years. Moreover, he pins the blame for Ireland's sectarian divide solely upon Cromwell, which is a common method used by British politicians to avoid accepting responsibility for the hundreds of years of exploitation following the Marian and Jacobite plantations and the Williamite settlement. If you want a more considered assessment of Cromwell's Irish campaign, you would do better to read: Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy, by Tom Reilly, which is available from Amazon.
Robert White
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WanabeeScientist
Just what I needed.
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Decent, yet highly elitist, selection of sources with good, concise explanation
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2014Darren Jaye
perfect reference for reenactors
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