{"id":18664,"date":"2017-03-30T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-30T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/?p=18664"},"modified":"2017-04-13T12:26:11","modified_gmt":"2017-04-13T11:26:11","slug":"rethinking-the-english-revolution-of-1649","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2017\/03\/30\/rethinking-the-english-revolution-of-1649\/","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649<\/a> by Jonathan Fitzgibbons was published in The Historical Journal<\/em><\/a><\/h5>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When the axe fell on 30 January 1649, cutting short the troubled life of King Charles I, one eyewitness claims that there followed \u2018such a groan\u2019 from the crowds of spectators \u2018as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again\u2019. That groan has reverberated through British history ever since.<\/p>\n

Few historians now believe that England witnessed a revolution in 1649. Despite the regicide, the abolition of the kingly title and the creation of a kingless republic most accounts stress that the interregnum was inherently conservative. The new republic, it\u2019s assumed, was unwanted, unintended and nothing more than a stop-gap for the majority of people who longed for the return of monarchy.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never found this very convincing. My latest article<\/a> in The Historical Journal<\/em><\/a> sets out some of the grounds for my scepticism.<\/p>\n

The Restoration of King Charles II in 1660 continues to cast its long shadow over 1649. As many tried to defend their lives in the wake of Charles II\u2019s return it\u2019s hardly surprising that few professed any affection for the kingless republic created in 1649 and fewer still associated themselves with its creation.<\/p>\n

But does this reflect what people thought at the time? If we strip back the veneer of post-Restoration testimony, and concentrate solely on contemporary evidence, I believe that a very different account emerges.<\/p>\n

We must consider the dynamics of constitutional change: if the abolition of kingship and creation of the republic were unforeseen and unintended outcomes of the king\u2019s death we\u2019d expect to find preparations for the kingless regime only after the regicide. Yet this is not the case.<\/p>\n

In the weeks before the king\u2019s death parliament was already taking decisions that anticipated, and paved the way for, kingless government. These measures included the creation of a new great seal that obliterated all royal imagery; judicial reforms that ensured that the laws no longer ran in the name of any king; the abolition of the obligation to swear oaths to the king or his successors. These actions are hard to reconcile with any supposed irresolution concerning the fate of England\u2019s monarchy.<\/p>\n

Too much weight is placed on the fact that kingship was not formally abolished immediately upon the king\u2019s death. There\u2019s a danger we expect too much. As Britain sets about the process of extricating itself from the European Union we\u2019re reminded that major political and constitutional changes require time and careful planning; rushing forwards without first making adequate preparations is generally a bad idea. Rather than being disappointed with the fact that it took over a week after the regicide for the Commons to resolve upon the abolition of the kingly title we should be impressed that it only<\/em> took eight days to take that resolution.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong \u2013 the regicide was, quite literally, an unpopular act carried out by a minority in the army and parliament. Yet, this shouldn\u2019t lead to the conclusion that most parliamentarians were dogmatically committed to monarchy. Those who remained at Westminster in the early months of 1649, many of whom played no part in the king\u2019s trial, confronted their constitutional future with an open rather than a closed mind.<\/p>\n

The politics of memory have obscured a crucial dimension of parliamentarian political thought in the late 1640s: a willingness to accept the mutability of governments, to laud the substance of government over its outward form. Only when reflecting on past events from the (dis)comfort of the Restoration era did the majority of parliamentarians conclude that the republican experiment was doomed from the start and that monarchy had always been England\u2019s destiny.<\/p>\n

Read Jon Fitzgibbon’s\u00a0full article on ‘Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649’ at The Historical Journal<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Main image credit: \u00a9 National Portrait Gallery, London<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rethinking the English Revolution of 1649 by Jonathan Fitzgibbons was published in The Historical Journal When the axe fell on 30 January 1649, cutting short the troubled life of King Charles I, one eyewitness claims that there followed \u2018such a groan\u2019 from the crowds of spectators \u2018as I never heard before and desire I may […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":18667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[1641,55,666,2364],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-18664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","tag-british-history","tag-history-2","tag-revolution","tag-the-historical-journal"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18664"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}