What was the English Revolution?
David Underdown looks back to the Tudor age in discussing the upheavals of the mid-17th century.
What was the English Revolution? Was it, as participants in the debate over the gentry a generation ago variously argued, a revolution generated by social tensions, confirming a changed balance of power within the elite, with a rising (or declining) gentry temporarily replacing an aristocracy in crises at the centre of power? Was it part of a European 'general crisis', one of many seventeenth-century 'revolts of the provinces' against the extravagance and assertive centralism of the new state-building monarchies? Was that general crisis the outcome of structural economic changes, the final stage in the replacement of 'feudal' productive relations by capitalism, the 1640s thus being in some sense England's 'bourgeois revolution'? Or was it perhaps not really a revolution at all, but merely a conflation of local struggles, or even, as Conrad Russell and other revisionists have recently suggested, simply a bit of bad luck, the result of, at most, short-term governmental breakdown?
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