Charles I and Local Government: The Draining of the East and West Fens

1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark E. Kennedy

“The dissolution of this government,” suggested James Harrington, “caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government.” This dictum has recently received favorable attention not only from a historian who sought the causes of the English Revolution in the great social and economic changes of the sixteenth century, but also from one who described the Civil War as the product of the financial weakness of the Stuart monarchy. The agreement, in at least this one respect, of two such disparate interpreters is heartening. If Professors Stone and Russell are correct in their assessment of Harrington, then the task of the historian of the Civil War is that much simpler. In order to understand the outbreak of armed conflict in 1642 the historian must first understand the collapse of government in 1640.Many explanations for this collapse have already been advanced. What is interesting from a historiographical perspect is the limited number of variables considered. Whether regarding them as merely precipitants or as major casual factors, historians have concentrated almost exclusively on the great programs of Charles's government: the Book of Orders, the perfect militia, Laudianism, extraparliamentary taxation. This fixation remains largely unaffected even by the recent outpouring of local studies.

1980 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurice Lee

That complex problems like the causes of the English civil war are constantly subject to reinterpretation is an obvious truism. Twenty years ago we were all embroiled in the gentry controversy; now it is the fashion to lay more stress on the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Lawrence Stone's recent survey is a case in point. Though his title, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, promises a long running start, this quondam disciple of R. H. Tawney places a surprising amount of emphasis on what he calls precipitants and triggers, which, it turns out, are the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Among these is the mishandling of the situation in Scotland. It is well known, of course, that the attempt to impose the new service book in 1637 touched off the chain of events which led to the Long Parliament, but historians have pointed out that this was by no means the first of Charles's errors there. At the very beginning of his reign came the act of revocation, which among other things rescinded “all grants made of crown property since 1540, … all disposition of ecclesiastical property and the erections of such property into temporal lordships.” No such sweeping change came about, of course, but in the view of most scholars this act, though in some sense successful, since it achieved the purpose both of increasing clerical stipends and of providing a machinery for their continuing adjustment, made the Scottish landed classes so mistrustful and fearful for their property that Charles could never gain their confidence. The comment of Sir James Balfour is always quoted: the act “in effect was the ground stone of all the mischief that followed after.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (02) ◽  
pp. 621-632
Author(s):  
JAMES T. KLOPPENBERG

When I began work on Toward Democracy more than twenty years ago, I planned to write a short book explaining how and why ideas about self-government developed in European and American thought from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. Teaching courses and writing articles on republican, liberal, and democratic ideas, I found thinkers reflecting again and again on searing experiences of fratricidal violence, and as a result the theme of civil war became more prominent in my understanding of democracy. Had my analysis begun in the eighteenth century, I would have missed—as US historians often do—the shaping force of the devastating sixteenth-century wars of religion, the murderous mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War, and the less violent but no less crucial English revolution of 1688. Attempts to establish non-monarchical regimes, or even to modify monarchies to include elements of popular participation, foundered for multiple reasons, but among them were recollections of the carnage that ordinary people repeatedly inflicted on other ordinary people. Misgivings about democracy did not only arise from cultural conservatism or reverence for hierarchy. They also were forged in irrepressible memories of savagery.


2005 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Rorke

This paper uses customs figures to show that herring exports from the east and west coast lowlands expanded significantly in the last six decades of the sixteenth century. The paper argues that the rise was primarily due to the north-west Highland fisheries being opened up and exploited by east and west coast burghs. These ventures required greater capital supplies and more complex organisation than their local inshore fisheries and they were often interrupted by political hostilities. However, the costs were a fraction of those required to establish a deepwater buss fleet, enabling Scotland to expand production and take advantage of European demand for fish while minimising additional capital costs.


Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser

Analysing the development of the concept of non-state parties to an armed conflict from the writings of philosophers in the eighteenth century through international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty law to contemporary practice, three threads can be identified. First, as pointed out by Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago, one basic principle underlying the laws of war is that war is not a relation between men but between entities. Accordingly, the lawful objective of parties cannot be to harm opponents as individuals but only to overcome the entity for which the individual fights. This necessitates that any party to an armed conflict is a collective, organized entity and not a loosely connected group of individuals. Second, de Vattel already stressed that civil war is fought between two parties who ‘acknowledge no common judge’ and have no ‘common superior’ on earth....


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942199789
Author(s):  
David A. Messenger

The bombardment of civilians from the air was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. It is estimated some 15,000 Spaniards died as a result of air bombings during the Civil War, most civilians, and 11,000 were victims of bombing from the Francoist side that rebelled against the Republican government, supported by German and Italian aviation that joined the rebellion against the Republic. In Catalonia alone, some 1062 municipalities experienced aerial bombardments by the Francoist side of the civil war. In cities across Spain, municipal and regional authorities developed detailed plans for civilian defense in response to these air campaigns. In Barcelona, the municipality created the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva de Barcelona, to build bomb shelters, warn the public of bombings, and educate them on how to protect themselves against aerial bombardment. They mobilized civilians around the concept of ‘passive defense.’ This proactive response by civilians and local government to what they recognized as a war targeting them is an important and under-studied aspect of the Spanish Civil War.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Samuel Fullerton

Abstract This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.


Author(s):  
Michael Meere

The performance of violence on the stage has played an integral role in French tragedy since its inception. Onstage Violence in Sixteenth-Century French Tragedy is the first book to tell this story. It traces and examines the ethical and poetic stakes of violence, as playwrights were experimenting with the newly discovered genre during decades of religious and civil war (c.1550–1598). The study begins with an overview of the origins of French vernacular tragedy and the complex relationships between violence, performance, ethics, and poetics. The remainder of the book homes in on specific plays and analyzes biblical, mythological, historical, and politically topical tragedies—including the stories of Cain and Abel, David and Goliath, Medea, Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, the Roman general Regulus, and the assassination of the Duke of Guise in 1588—to show how the multifarious uses of violence on stage shed light on a range of pressing issues during that turbulent time such as religion, gender, politics, and militantism.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subira Onwudiwe

A civil war marked by the intervention of foreign military troops is known as an internationalized non-international armed conflict.' This type of armed conflict happens often and presents a number of issues of concern to international lawyers. The scope of this article is confined to the application of international humanitarian law in such circumstances, and it does not address the validity of foreign involvement in a civil war. In civil conflicts involving foreign intervention, the sides seldom agree on the facts or their interpretation. As a result, this article is dependent on certain factual assumptions, assumptions for which evidence cannot always be provided.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle O'Brien

Armed conflict is socially transformative. Although migration research has established the proximate relationship between armed conflict and increases in migration, much less attention has been paid to the long-term, or distal relationship. This research leverages the case of the 1992-1997 Tajikistani Civil War to examine the distal relationship between armed conflict and migration decisions nearly a decade after the war had ended. Using a series of logistic regression models and a selection-based endogeneity correction, I estimate the likelihood of migrating in 2006, given the intensity of conflict experience at the district level. I find that, controlling for individual, household, and district-level indicators, the legacy of conflict continues to influence migration – for men and for ‘stayers’ – nearly a decade after the peace accord was signed. Some evidence suggests that certain kinds of development projects can moderate this relationship. In conflict-affected countries, incorporating the legacy of conflict into empirical research can help scholars and policy-makers better understand migration in the aftermath of war.


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