England Under the Stuarts

Folio Society History of England #6

by George Macaulay Trevelyan, John Morrill (Introduction)

An undisputed classic, England Under the Stuarts is an account of England in the years between 1603 and 1714, charting England's progress from a 'great nation' to a 'great empire'.

G. M. Trevelyan's masterful narrative explores the major events of this period, which witnessed the upheavals of Civil War, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. While never neglecting to examine the conditions of English life, this celebrated historian highlights the liberty and toleration that emerged during these years.

Almost a century after its first publication, and now with a new introduction by John Morrill, Trevelyan's thorough survey of the Stuart age remains certain to inform and delight anybody with an interest in this period of English history.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Reference, European History

568 pages, Paperback

Published March 22, 2002

About the author

George Macaulay Trevelyan, OM, CBE, FRS, FBA, was an English historian. Trevelyan was the third son of Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and great-nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose staunch liberal Whig principles he espoused in accessible works of literate narrative avoiding a consciously dispassionate analysis, that became old-fashioned during his long and productive career. Contemporary E. H. Carr considered Trevelyan to be one of the last historians of the Whig tradition.

Many of his writings promoted the Whig Party, an important aspect of British politics from the 1600s to the mid-1800s, and of its successor, the Liberal Party. Whigs and Liberals believed the common people had a more positive effect on history than did royalty and that democratic government would bring about steady social progress.

Trevelyan's history is engaged and partisan. Of his Garibaldi trilogy, "reeking with bias", he remarked in his essay "Bias in History", "Without bias, I should never have written them at all. For I was moved to write them by a poetical sympathy with the passions of the Italian patriots of the period, which I retrospectively shared."

Reviews

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a splendid account of the turbulent 17th century. Trevelyan argues that England differed from other European socieites at in that its great lords were much closer, in social and economic terms, to the rural gentry they had emerged from a generation or so before. This weakened the appeal of royalist absolutism amongst the national elites, and also maintained continuity of values across the gradations of the social hierarchy.

The efforts of the Stuart monarchy to construct a social bloc out of the land-owning classes and the Anglican church supporting an all-powerful king floundered on the fact that they most dynamic sector of the propertied classes tended towards puritanism, favouring the reform of the church on the basis of local government. Charles I's impatience withh the reform of his kingdom and his attempt to push through a Laudian settlement on the church provoked the reaction which led to the Civil War.

Trevelyan does well to bring out an account of the social forces which produced the political character of England, with its division into Puritan/Whig and Cavalier/Tory camps that has remained to the present day. Cromwell is dealt with sympathetically, as a man attempted to straddle the divisions of the Puritan camp and to resist its pronounced tendencies to slide towards totalitarianism. The wars with the Netherlands and in Ireland are presented as the great errors of the Commonwealth, and the reason why the Restoration appealed to so many Roundheads as the only means to contain otherwise unlimited power.

I'd never understood the period of the Restoration to have been so fraught with revolutionism though, with the Whigs under Shaftesbury and the 'Green Ribbon Club' being regularly involved in insurrectionary plots.

So, onto the Hanoverians!

[Chris Fellows · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was written in a splendidly engaging style, and made clear to me much that had hitherto been obscure - though this clarity is already fading in my mind behind a tangle of names which, being unexaminable, inevitably become confused in my memory.

Primarily it is the story of how the prototype of modern representative democracy developed its distinctive and laudable features through a process driven by selfish interest, tragic miscalculation, and the occasional joke:

"The Act of Habeas Corpus itself ... had only passed the Upper Chamber because the tellers in jest had counted a fat Lord as ten, and had failed to rectify their figures."

The title of the book is slightly misleading, as Trevelyan covers the entire period from the death of Elizabeth I to the accession of George I to the same degree of detail, giving in fact a more detailed account of the War of the Spanish Succession than of any other military action.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a history of England, from the accession of James 1 through the death of Anne. It is a whig history par excellence: the theme is "how England became a strong, prosperous and free country, despite danger and adversity."

Trevelyan is skeptical of the Stuart kings; he believes all three of them after James I had a deliberate desire to impose Catholic despotism on the country. This is probably wrong for both the Charleses. Charles II was crypto-Catholic; his father wasn't. And Charles II was actually pretty comfortable with parliaments.

The book opens with a long discussion of English politics and society at the start of the 17th century. One paragraph I thought was especially notable:

The administration of each district was conducted by certain of the local gentry, selected by the Crown as unpaid Justices of Peace. The rural districts were therefore governed, neither by the feudal rule of the landowner in his own estate and in his own right, nor by royal bureaucrats sent down from the capital. The magistrate’s authority derived from the Crown, and yet it was in effect local government and squirearchal power. This mutual dependence of the central and provincial administrations is the key to the history of the Stuart epoch. The institution of unpaid local magistrates ensured both the ill-success of the republican propaganda and the failure of the Stuart Kings to establish a despotism without possessing a bureaucracy. For while the majority of the squires always rallied to preserve the sovereignty of the Crown, whose service had been from father to son the chief pride of many ancient families, on the other hand the same class was able in 1640 and in 1688 to maintain views of policy and religion against the will of kings from whom they derived neither income, lands, nor social esteem. The policy of the Crown depended for its execution on the active consent of magistrates, who again depended tor their own social position on the good-will of the neighbouring squires, and were on such friendly terms with the middle class in town and country, that magisterial resistance to the Crown might at moments become one with the resistance of the whole nation : and it was these moments which decided the fate of England.

The prose is excellent; there is a reason Trevelyan was at one point one of the most popular writers in English.

Available online: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet....

[Matthew Welker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great general history of England under the Stuarts. They don’t really write history books like this anymore. Trevelyan you can tell was passionate about the subject and very passionate to be English though his views at times were certainly dated & I’ll just say he was a man of his time. I like his very “artistic” writing style though it did become detrimental at times where perhaps a more straightforward approach could’ve been better. Regardless, this was worth the read. This is an incredibly important period in English history that is also impactful regarding Western European history & US history imo. I wasn’t quite familiar with the European conflict of the late 17th centuries & the following war of the Spanish succession in the early 18th which would have major repercussions down the road. Good book.

[Stephen Burridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very old fashioned history., but still an interesting read. Great prose, a window into a late Victorian mindset, and useful information on the politics of the period. Now I probably need to read something more recent as a supplement and corrective.