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Clarendon and the Caroline Myth of Peace

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Raymond A. Anselment
Raymond A. Anselment*
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Extract

The origins of the Civil War are apparent from the outset of the History of the Rebellion: “he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of the time,” Clarendon contends, “will find all this bulk of misery to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us, from the same natural causes and means which have usually attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification, and castigation of Heaven.” The relationship between prosperity and calamity is, of course, commonplace in classical as well as seventeenth-century chronicles of civil conflict, but both the sections of the History written in 1646 and those added some twenty years later insist that “the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation” (I, 84). Although he modifies his praise of this peaceful era in The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, claiming that “England enjoyed the greatest Measure of Felicity that it [and not, as he earlier said, any nation] had ever known,” this view of Caroline prosperity remains extreme. Clarendon likens the years of Charles's personal rule to a golden age. Without specifically invoking the classical tradition of the halcyon calm or the return of Astraea, his recollection of the 1630s gives central importance and new immediacy to a well-established Caroline myth of peace.

Modern historians have generally found much amiss in the decade of Charles's personal rule, and they have naturally questioned Clarendon's characterization of unrivalled happiness. Only B. H. G. Wormald's seminal study of Clarendon accepts the notion of “unparalleled prosperity,” which, it argues, “is an indisputable fact so far at least as the gentry were concerned.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Spring 1984 , pp. 37 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1984

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References

1 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, ed. Macray, W. Dunn (Oxford, 1888), I, 2Google Scholar. Hereafter cited in the text.

2 Lucan, for example, emphasizes the relationship between peace and war in The Civil War, trans. Duff, J.D. (Cambridge, 1943), p. 15Google Scholar; MacGillivray, Royce surveys seventeenth-century adaptations of this tradition in “The Surfeit of Peace and Plenty,” an appendix to Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague, 1974), pp. 237–42Google Scholar. Firth, C.H. discusses the composition of the first books in “Clarendon‘s History of the Rebellion,” English Historical Review, XIX (1904), 29–33Google Scholar.

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