Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?
Russell, Conrad
History Today, Volume: 34 Issue: 6 (1984)
Abstract
Civil wars are like other quarrels: it takes two to make them. It is, then, something of a curiosity that we possess no full analysis of why Charles I chose to fight a Civil War in 1642. Yet the early seventeenth century was in many ways a good period for gentry, and a bad period for kings. If we were to search the period for long-term reasons why the King might have wanted to fight a Civil War, we would find the task 
far easier than it has ever been to find long-term causes why the gentry might have wanted to fight a Civil War.
Why, then, has the task never been attempted? The trouble, I think, comes from our reliance on the concept of ‘revolution.’ Revolutions are thought of as things done to the head of state and not by him. The result is that Charles has been treated as if he were largely passive in the drift to Civil War, as a man who reacted to what others did, rather than doing much to set the pace himself.
Click here to read this article from History Today
Related posts:
- The English Civil War
- The Role of Charles I in the Evolution of Taste and Collecting in England
- Milton’s ‘Divorcive’ Liberties: Ecclesiastical, Domestic or Private, Civil and Cosmological
- In Defense of the Monarchy: The Restoration of Charles Stuart
- Vaubans Siege Legacy in the War of the Spanish Succession, 1702-1712