Introduction: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660

Abstract

As long as English history is studied, historians will continue to debate the nature and significance of the Civil War and its aftermath. It is certainly not because there is any lack of good books on the subject that interpretation of the events of 1640–60 remains so controversial. Rather the opposite; in part at least this is just because there are works by such historians as Clarendon, Ludlow, Hume, Guizot, Macaulay, Ranke, Gardiner, Firth, Trevelyan, and among the living Veronica Wedgwood, Maurice Ashley, Christopher Hill and Hugh Trevor-Roper, whose approaches to the subject have differed and continue to differ so completely. Recently we have seen a new wave of interpretations, or revisions. At one extreme Professor Lawrence Stone has offered an explanation of the revolution in demographic terms — as having been in part at least the consequence of population growth coupled with the frustrated ambitions of men educated above their stations. At the other Professor Geoffrey Elton, with as robust an iconoclasm as befits an admirer of Thomas Cromwell, has asserted that the emperor is wearing no clothes. For he argues that there was no revolution in seventeenth-century England, and that it is therefore otiose to spend time arguing about how to explain it. And from a very different standpoint, if also from Cambridge, Mr Peter Laslett’s definition of a revolution would exclude the events of 1640–60, along with a good deal else.

’settlement I fear is not in some men’s minds, nor ever will be.’

Thurloe to Henry Cromwell (3 March 1657)