12th May 2012 9:00
By Jessica King
With the wealth of options on offer for history A Level these days – the AQA syllabus alone lists 44 possible subjects – it can be difficult for tutors to prepare material for each individual pupil. From the Crusades and the Reformation, through the emergence of nationalism in Europe and then the wars of the twentieth century, the geographical and chronological scope gives students the opportunity to gain insight into a time period very different from their own.
This insight can only be gained through a combination of textual and contextual resources. Secondary literature is important for background, but the increasing emphasis on the divergence in historiographical takes on a period makes it necessary to cross-reference different accounts. This is a confusing process, and one which requires guidance from someone more acquainted with the process, and who already has a chronological overview. Even the study of the past is constantly gaining fresh new perspectives.
For example, when I raised the ‘English Civil War’ – or, as the event is more correctly known, the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms,’ with a friend who is very well read and studied International Relations at LSE, he had the conventional view that it was caused by constitutional grievances and baronial discontent. In fact, the revisionist view, of which one of my university lecturers John Morrill was a proponent, is that the major source of discontent was religious.
The reforms imposed on the Anglican Church by Archbishop Laud, like the new restrictions regarding communion, clerical attire, and what many saw as the arbitrary exercise of the church’s power over those branded guilty of sedition, were very unpopular. They were seen as a ‘popish’ plot, paving the way to reinstate Catholicism. Because contemporary political thought made it difficult to conceive of actively resisting the will of the monarch, which suffered no legal check but that of the divine authority, it was politically expedient for Charles I’s opponents in the House of Commons, and the Lords, to accuse the church of usurping his will.
The Covenanter rebellion in Scotland in 1637, the result of the imposition of numerous religious reforms on the Scottish Kirk, triggered the occupation of English territory just outside Newcastle. Charles, forced into dependence on Parliament to finance this war, found the ‘Short’ and ‘Long’ Parliament difficult to bend to his will. His many other arbitrary exercises of power, previously and subsequently, and inability to try for a diplomatic solution, eventually made civil war all but inevitable.
In today’s largely secular British society, it is difficult to conceive of the conflict between branches of Protestantism igniting a war. As L.P. Hartley put it in a much overused quote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” (The Go-Between (1953)) Let me be your tour guide.