Yorkshire’s Treaty of Neutrality

The shires of seventeenth-century England looked to their own affairs with a pride and independence of which the modern world—even the world of sport— carries only distant echoes. None of them was more alive to its rights and interests than Yorkshire, and it may come as no surprise to Yorkshiremen that their ancestors signed a treaty of neutrality to keep their county out of the Great Civil War. This story, however, is more than a fragment of local history. Yorkshire’s bid for peace was not unique, for several other counties attempted their own local “pacifications.” All of them illustrate the deep reluctance with which the majority of Englishmen faced the facts of war in 1642; they are part of the evidence that civil conflict sprang far more from a failure of statesmanship at the centre than from any boiling over of political and religious passions in the country at large. The scene of this essay is set in Yorkshire because Yorkshire gave a lead to other local peace parties, and because the treaty signed near Leeds, attracting as it did such keen attention at the time, has left us the materials for following its progress most closely.