Writing and Re-writing the English Civil War
By R. C. Richardson
Literature and History, Volume 11 Issue 2 (2002)
Introduction: Although not ‘total war’ in the modern sense in which that term has come to be understood – Royalists and Parliamentarians were militant minorities, fighting was seasonal, and some parts of the land were relatively unaffected – the English Civil Wars hit this country with devastating impact. The total death rate for England in this period, it has been estimated, exceeded that experienced in the First World War. For Scotland it was higher still, while Ireland’s death rate may well have been in the order of a staggering 40 per cent of the pre-war population. Economic life was severely disrupted, political and religious hierarchies were dismantled, family fortunes were wrecked and families were divided in their allegiances. The number of new publications, documenting and reflecting on the troubled times, shot up; new genres of writing, new kinds of author emerged. That the English language had to be expanded to include new words and terms like ‘plunder’, ‘prisoner of war’ and ‘sending to Coventry’ is a further demonstration of the ways in which the old order was being challenged or changed. Radicalism of all kinds expressed itself unchecked in the freer climate produced by a collapse of old-style censorship. A plethora of religious sects flourished until a Blasphemy ordinance was hastily enacted in 1650 to check their worst excesses. Levellers and Diggers had their day. The Quakers began their meteoric rise. Women seized, or were forced to exercise, new roles, new responsibilities, and made their voices heard in these rough, masculine times. Monarchy was dispensed with after the trial and public execution of the defeated King Charles I. Britain’s one and only republic was ushered in with Cromwell becoming in due course a president in all but name. Scotland and Ireland were conquered and made to toe the line in a way that Tudor and early Stuart monarchs had dreamed of but conspicuously failed to bring about. ‘Restoration’ might come in 1660 through default and expediency rather than Royalist victory but the Civil War legacy was indelibly etched in the life and memory of this country. As such it has continued to be rehearsed and reinvestigated ever since. These four books tune in to different aspects of the cultural historiography.
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