The Causes of War: A Historiographical Survey

Abstract

Clarendons History of the Rebellion and Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana are very different works. With the encouragement of Charles I, The History of the Rebellion was written deliberately — to counter the parliamentary history of Tom May — as an historical narrative ‘of the grounds, circumstances and artifices of this rebellion’ on the model of the great works of classical antiquity. Although it was, in part, a work of political philosophy, in that Clarendon sought to show that the misfortunes resulted ‘from the same natural causes and means’ as had taken place at other times and in other kingdoms, ‘swollen with long plenty, pride and excess, towards some signal mortifications and castigation of heaven’, its primary purpose was didactic — a warning about past mistakes and a guide to future actions. The Commonwealth of Oceana, on the other hand, is essentially a work of political theory. Like Clarendon’s History it was probably composed for political purposes as a post-war defence of the Good Old Cause of ‘constant successive parliaments, freely and equally chosen by the people’, and in opposition to the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, but its form is that of a republican tract rather than of an historical narrative.

It will be wondered at hereafter, that in a judging and discerning state, where men had, or seemed to have, their faculties of reason and understanding at the height; in a kingdom then unapt and generally uninclined to war …. those men who had the skill and cunning, out of froward and peevish humour and indispositions, to compound fears and jealousies and to animate and inflame those fears and jealousies into the most prodigious and the boldest rebellion that any age or country ever brought forth ….

Clarendon, Selections from the History of the Rebellion … ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford, 1978), p. 224

And by these degrees came the House of Commons to raise that head which since hath been so high and formidable unto their princes that they have looked pale upon those assemblies. Nor was there anything now wanting unto the destruction of the throne but that the people, not apt to see their own strength, should be put to feel it, when a prince, as stiff in disputes as the nerve of monarchy was grown slack, received that unhappy encouragement from his clergy which became his utter ruin; while trusting more unto their logic than the rough philosophy of his parliament, it came unto an irreparable breach; for the house of peers, which alone had stood in this gap, now sinking down between the King and the Commons, showed that Crassus was dead and Isthmus broken. But a monarchy divested of her nobility hath no refuge under heaven but an army. Wherefore the dissolution of this government caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government

Harrington, ‘The Commonwealth of Oceana’ from The Political Works of fames Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), p. 198