Malcolm Wanklyn, Frank Jones. A Military History of the English Civil War. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005. 308 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-582-77281-6.
Reviewed by John Shedd (Department of History, State University of New York at Cortland)
Published on H-Albion (September, 2006)
Contingency versus Determinism
James McPherson, in his Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (1996), uses the terms "elements of contingency," "points of contingency," and "moments of contingency" (pp. 134-136) in his analysis of the Union victory. Military history lends itself to "what would have happened if?" questions. A. J. P. Taylor, in his classic work, A History of the First World War (1963), invoked an element of contingency when he asserted that the war happened when it did because the Austrian archduke loved his wife: "None foresaw that Franz Ferdinand, on his wedding day, had fixed the date of his death, still less that this would lead to the deaths of many million others" (p. 9).
Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones seek to replace a standard, what they term "determinist," explanation for why Parliament won the Civil War--one that prefers broad, long-term factors, especially Parliament's superior resources--with a version that employs contingency analysis. The authors downplay the role of the bulk of supplies and soldiers available to each side and emphasize instead how closely matched were the two armies during most of the war. They point out that only well into the war did the side of Parliament muster significantly superior resources, both human and material, guiding the reader to suppose that had the commanders on both sides made different decisions, the war would have turned out as a royalist victory.
Contingency analysis can be seen as the opposite of determinism--what might have happened instead of what must happen. The authors employ contingency analysis at many points in the book. For instance, in the summary of part 5, the section on the 1644 campaign season, they use "if" propositions several times to reflect their belief that it was high command decisions, and not resources, that tell the real tale of the war: "If Manchester had remained in the Ouse valley, the three Parliamentary armies could have challenged the king to a battle in the environs of Oxford ... leaving the Scots and the Fairfaxes to deal with what was left of the Marquis of Newcastle's command." "If, after Charles's escape from Oxford, the two armies had remained in the Thames valley area, the city could not have held out for long, resulting in the loss of another 3,000 or so veteran Royalist infantry." "If either Waller or Manchester had been in a position to move into the Oxford area in strength in mid- to late July, the king's field army would have been forced to return to defend its headquarters, thus allowing the Earl of Essex to reconquer the southwest of England unmolested." "Waller and his cavalry regiments ... gave the king the chance of defeating the Parliamentary forces in detail if he had been sufficiently fleet of foot" (pp. 211-214). Many historians will not go into print with these sorts of contingency statements, seeing them as amounting to guesswork.
Thus, the authors' use of the word "determinist" as an accusation against other scholars is problematic. Preferring long-range causes is no more deterministic than preferring short-range ones. Historians of the English Civil War who point out that Parliament's enjoyment of London's resources (both material and governmental), of other population centers in the south and east, of the loyalty of the navy, and of a generally better paid and better equipped fighting force, especially after the advent of the New Model Army, made its side more likely to win the war are not engaging in economic, political, or social determinism. Teleology has long been recognized as the spirit historians find most difficult to exorcise. Indeed, historians by definition perform after-the-fact analysis of causation and thus open themselves up to charges of determinism. Towards the end of their book, for example, Wanklyn and Jones make a causal connection that could be labeled as deterministic when they claim that it was Cromwell's switching cavalry tactics that shortened the war. What is really at issue here is a traditional style of military history at odds with scholarship that prefers broad and long-term causal analysis. By taking on writers who place discrete battlefield events within their wider settings, Wanklyn and Jones seek to help us understand the extent to which the actual combatants determined the course of the war and not broader or tangential factors.
Given how difficult it is sometimes to distinguish between causation and determinism, it seems apparent that the real value of this book is in its careful, methodical, and detailed use of an array of sources to suggest corrections in the interpretations of military events found in previous accounts, from S. R. Gardiner to John Kenyon to Ian Gentles to John Barratt. Two examples, among many, stand out. First, the authors present the Earl of Essex in a more favorable light than has often been the case. Gone is the Essex whose arrogance masked his failures, both as a husband and as a general; one whose reluctance to engage the enemy and achieve total victory over his king amounted to a major stumbling block, a hindrance corrected only by the coming of the New Model. Instead the authors present a leader who made field command decisions based on immediate, practical considerations. Essex comes off looking especially competent when compared to the often feckless Sir William Waller. Although Wanklyn and Jones are not overly praiseful of Essex, his failures to engage the enemy more vigorously are often seen by them as resulting from the lord general's very realistic assessment of what his army was capable of doing at a given moment, as, for example, the poor shape of his cavalry during the Thames valley campaign of 1643. A second example is their taking on the old conclusion that it was Goring disobeying his orders to abandon the West and join his forces with the king's that lost both the battle at Naseby and the war. Wanklyn and Jones show that, given the movement of George Goring's troops in the weeks prior to Naseby, combined with evidence taken from the royalist war council and from the king's personal correspondence, Goring was too far away to have made it to the battlefield in time to be of help. This second example perhaps suggests that contingency analysis is most useful when it is employed in efforts to make right the wayward conclusions presented by other historians.
The authors present so many of these kinds of corrections to previous accounts that, taken as a whole, this book should be considered a major reassessment of the Civil War. The reassessment that Wanklyn and Jones seek to present also includes placing English field tactics within the context of methods of warfare used on the Continent. By showing the reader how officers in both armies copied or modified tactics they had learned of from the Dutch, Swedes, and others, the authors strengthen their thesis that credit and blame for winning and losing the war should be placed on the armed forces of England and not on more impersonal forces.
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Citation:
John Shedd. Review of Wanklyn, Malcolm; Jones, Frank, A Military History of the English Civil War.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12231
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