20. Civil War

READINGS FOR THIS LESSON

A revolution without freedom
Vol. 1B, pages 1768-1798 and 1814-1823
from the Longman 3rd ed.
"The Civil War, " "Milton," and "Aeropagitica"

Cromwell's Sept. 17, 1649 report on Drogheda appears at
http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/programs/sai/syllabi/his254/drogheda.pdf
also here

A text of Eikon Basilike is also available online at
http://anglicanhistory.org/charles/eikon/

Selections from Milton's Eikonoklastes are found online at
http://www.brysons.net/miltonweb/eikonoklastes.html

Selections from Areopagitica are found online at
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/areopagitica/

The petition of London gentlewomen and tradesmen's wives can be read here

Revolution, warring words, battling books.

NOTES AND COMMENTARY
Adapted and enlarged by Dr. G from David Damrosch, et al., Teaching British Literature (New York: Longman, 2003)

The English Civil War,
or the War of Three Kingdoms

This section of our anthology provides readings in the most momentous event of 17th century Britain: the wars of religion that raged in England, Scotland and Ireland. Similar wars took place simultaneously on the continent. Across Europe, revulsion at this violent era eventually produced the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of modern secular states in which the business of government was no longer to grow any particular church or to suppress any particular forms of worship. Freedom of religion enshrined in the US Constitution was one outgrowth of this horror-filled history.

This civil war also provided a broader model for the American Revolution more than 100 years later in that subjects rose up against their monarch, successfully removed him, and replaced the government with a parliamentary republic, a The Commonwealth of England. Although the new democracy did not last, its formation was not only a rough blueprint for the rebellious American colonists but also a cause of the unpopularity of the American Revolutionary War in Britain. The printing presses ran without effective censorship during much of the civil war period, so records of the time are plentiful and highly partisan.

Our textbook makes John Milton (1608-1674) the chief literary hero of this period--and with reason. Ahead of almost all of his peers, Milton came to embrace religious tolerance and pluralism. These views resulted after his disillusion with both the King and Cromwell-led Parliament, as well as his imprisonment for his role as spokesman for the rebellion.

When the monarchy was restored in 1660, it was considerably weakened. The new king Charles II had so little political power that he freed Milton and allowed his publication of religious poems. Though we do not have time in our course to read them, Milton's epics Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as well as his drama Samson Agonistes are radical for their time as inspired retellings of the Bible. A church of one, Milton perfectly embodies the protestant ideal of religion without the trappings of clergy and doctrinal conformity. In focusing on the individual or personal vision of various subjects, Milton modeled the subjective form of poetry that would become standard in later times.

Left:
Reenactment of Cromwell's New Model Army using both muskets and pikes.

Above: Charles I with an eye on a heavenly crown as glorified in Eikon Basilike. The image bears the following legends

Immota, Triumphans — "Unmovable, Triumphant" (scroll around the rock);
Clarior é tenebris — "Brighter through the darkness" (beam from the clouds);
Crescit sub pondere virtus— "Virtue grows beneath weight" (scroll around the tree);
Beatam & Æternam — "Blessed and Eternal" (around the heavenly crown marked Gloria ("Glory").
Splendidam & Gravem — "Splendid and Heavy" (around the Crown removed from the King's head and lying on the ground), with the motto Vanitas ("vamity").
Asperam & Levem — "Bitter and Light", the martyr's crown of thorns held by Charles, with the motto Gratia ("grace").
Coeli Specto — "I look to Heaven"
In Verbo Tuo Spes Mea — "In Your Word is My Hope"
Christi Tracto — "Word of Christ"
Mundi Calco — "I tread on the world".

In the age of print, words become foremost weapons of war, and the English Civil War is a great example. Milton’s Eikonoklastes (meaning image breaker, 1649) was written as a response to the Charles I's Eikon Basilike (meaning royal image, 1649), which probably was ghost-written by the King's spiritual advisor, Bishop John Gauden. Gauden's text was apparently intended to present the king as a martyr, a loyal servant of God beset by irreligious ne'er-do-wells whose rioting and lawlessness brought on the civil war, rebellions, and overthrow. Although it appealed to loyalists and many aristocrats, Eikon Basilike confirmed for the king's opponents that he was too arrogant to appreciate that he had brought his trouble on himself by attempting to rule as an absolute monarch and head of the kingdom's only recognized church. Milton's response has distinctively modern touches, including ideas that the head of state should be a servant of the people, that the state should be based on the rule of law and not the will of any one person, that the people have rights to present grievances, that imposition a state religion causes persecution and conflict, and that religiosity in a ruler is often the mark of a tyrant.

The "Petition of Gentlewomen and Tradesmen’s Wives" (1642) gives a sense of the unrest in London in the early 1640s—including the economic hardships of the people as well as the complaints against the Bishops. This text also documents the English outrage at the reports of rebellion in Ireland and massacres of English protestant colonists there. Events in Ireland had a great impact on the pressure to get rid of the monarchy, since Charles was perceived as a closet-Catholic, and a potential ally of "papists" in Ireland. That women banded together to produce a petition can be seen as a striking example of women’s communal political activity in the early modern period, but of course it is entirely possible that their petition was written and staged by the women's church leaders, all of whom were male. The "reasons" at the end of the petition make it clear that petitioning the government was a "strange" thing for women to do, but that these women were addressing their problems as members of a church. If the Catholics take over, all of their souls will be damned, the petition argues. The women do not seek to be equal with men in authority or wisdom. Was the exclusion of women from power a contributing cause of the brutality that marked the reformation period?

The conflict in Ireland is briefly indicated in our readings by Oliver Cromwell’s Letter of Sept. 17, 1649. Cromwell was Parliament's hero at the Battle of Naseby, which was the decisive battle in the revolution against the king. Thereafter he was seen by supporters as the best military leader and "God's hand" in the successful Puritan cause against the Royalists.

In this letter Cromwell justifies the massacre of Irish Catholics at Drogheda, near Dublin, where several thousands of "these barbarous wretches" were killed or shipped into slavery, as revenge for Irish shedding of "innocent blood" of the English overlords and as a measure taken to "prevent the effusion of blood for the the future." Why English revenge would stop the cycle of violence when Irish revenge had only provoked more atrocities, Cromwell does not say. His language suggests the war is a religious crusade as well as a political matter.

His letter can be read in connection with Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser’s "A View" (also in our anthology) which, like many other English tracts on Ireland, proposed the military conquest of Ireland that Cromwell carried out. At the time of the confiscations, Spenser’s grandson received a letter from Cromwell granting him his land and mentioning that Cromwell had actually read his grandfather’s writing on Ireland. An Irish account of the confiscations is given by Seán O Duibhir an Ghleanna (John O’Dwyer of the Glenn) (c. 1651).

For a sense of the dissent that arose within the Republican movement over discontent with Cromwell’s failure to live up to the ideals of the English revolution, see John Lilburne, England’s New Chains Discovered (1648). For his fierce resistance to censorship and dictatorship, "Freeborn John" is one of sources of the US Constitution's Bill of Rights and, more broadly, a founder of the human rights movement which would become prominent in the 1800s.

In Presbyterian Scotland, the initial religious-ideological conflict broke out over the imposition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The turmoil is illustrated in "The Story of Alexander Agnew, or Jock of Broad Scotland" from the newspaper Mercurius Politicus. Agnew was the first Scot to be publicly tried for atheism.

Finally, Edward Hyde’s”The Death of Montrose” from The True Historical Narrative of the Rebellion (1704) shows the participation of some Scots in the royalist cause, with Montrose figuring as the hero of the highland Scots’ support of the Stuarts. Hyde appeals to modern sensibilities as one of the few historians of the period to take a dim view of religious conflict.

Areopagitica (1644)
Milton's reputation is higher in the United States than in the United Kingdom, not only because of the attack on the king in Eikonoklastes but also the argument against state censorship in Areopagitica. We take for granted today the ideas underlying freedom of the press, but they were new during the Reformation, and there is no better statement of them than Milton's. The poet had seen first hand Galileo's terrible predicament as the pope's prisoner, and he also had been asked to play a role as censor in Cromwell's cabinet where he served as a propagandist. From these experiences he understood that a free society in which citizens can read and judge for themselves is better than a state-controlled system of censorship, and he was not afraid to say so. In Miltonism, the individual must know both virtue and vice, so that virtue can be desired and chosen as the known better path. The state in Milton's view should not be a promoter of religion but a facilitator of the free exchange of ideas, not simply to multiply opinion but to pursue the truth.

Left: Oliver Cromwell by Pieter van der Faes.

Left: John Lilburne (1614?-1657).

Left: Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609-74).

OTHER RESOURCES & AMUSEMENTS

From Wikipedia: English Dissenters

For a full historical account of the English Civil War period, see Martin Bennet’s The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland 1638–1651 (1997).

English Civil War Society:
http://www.english-civil-war-society.org.uk/www/cms/index.php

Society of King Charles the Martyr http://www.skcm.org/SKCM/skcm_main.html

John Milton, Areopagitica from Bartleby. Also Areopagitica from Oxford University. Complete Poems in English from Bartleby. Tractate on Education (1673) from Bartleby. The largest selection of Milton texts appears at the Dartmouth Milton Reading Room. A good selections is also found at Luminarium on John Milton: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/milton/

John Milton chapter by George Saintsbury with bibliography from the Cambridge History of English Literature at Bartleby.

For discussion, the Milton-L Home page: http://www.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton/

BBC Rise and Fall of Oliver Cromwell:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/sceptred_isle/page/63.shtml

Pragmatic royalist Thomas Hobbes from Bartleby.

Students are not examined on these "other resources and amusements." However, if you know of an excellent website that would wonderfully complement this lesson, please send it to Dr. G. If he adopts it in his list, extra course credit will be awarded.

ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON

The lesson includes both a quiz and a journal writing assignment to be submitted on the interactive course site at SUNY Learning Network. See General instructions on Journaling for this course. For a sample journal, see Dr. G's 2007 Brit Lit 1 Journal.

Journal

Write for an hour (or more if you have time). Summarize the readings or make notes you will find useful on the final essay. Some other journaling ideas for today include:

The textbook says we are in the "early modern" period of British literature. What seems modern about the English Civil War period? What is not modern?

Was King Charles God's representative, or was Cromwell? Are conflicts among Islamic sects today a repeat of the Christian sectarian violence at the reformation?

Are Milton and Sidney making the same points against censorship? Or are their arguments different?