1. Over the last fifteen years Keith Lindley has published a series of impressive articles on early Stuart and Civil War London. 1 Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London is the first book-length installment of his on-going study of the capital during the 1640s and 1650s. It covers the period from the riots against Archbishop Laud in May 1640 to the emergence of the Levellers in 1646, and contains the fruits of long and painstaking archival research. Lindley has unearthed a great deal of information about the social networks which sustained Parliament's cause within the capital, and about the comparatively obscure people who demonstrated against Strafford and who pushed for godly reform within their parishes. With equal care he has traced the identity of those who defended Laudian clergy in the early 1640s, who petitioned for peace and who were the nucleus of Royalist activism within the city. He establishes how often the same individuals acted as grassroots activists through the war. Unfortunately, however, the structure of the book does not do justice to the author's exemplary prosopographical scholarship. Its conclusions are never spelled out, and its arguments are often very hard to follow unless the reader has a really intimate knowledge of Valerie Pearl's London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) and Robert Brenner's Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

2. The book starts somewhat abruptly with an account of the rioting in London in May 1640. Its first chapter traces what is termed the 'rise of mass politics' in the capital, examining the first London petitions for Root and Branch reform of the Church of England and the riotous agitation against the Earl of Strafford which culminated in his execution in May 1641. Lindley shows how the petitioners were drawn from a cross-section of London society, and how, though there was clearly a degree of organization in their campaigns, Londoners were capable of independent action in pursuit of their political objectives. He then turns to religion, surveying the anti-popish panics of the early 1640s, detailing the campaigns which removed the scandalous ministers and describing the parish conflicts which opened up the vestries in many areas of the city. He shows how the parish and civic elite of 1640 contained many religious conservatives, but also demonstrates that the godly, those whom he repeatedly calls the parish zealots, were not the lowly rabble which Royalist propaganda made them out to be.

3. He then returns to the interaction between Londoners and parliament. Between May 1641 and the departure of the King in January 1642 crowds of Londoners, swelled by the economic crisis, pressured Parliament and there were open battles between cavaliers and roundheads in December 1641. Having examined the social background of the radical supporters of parliament, he continues this prosopography by examining the shift in the balance of political power within the City of London in the early 1640s. In the livery companies there were numerous attempts by lesser artisans to increase their representation within the guild. In the City there was a marked shift towards the more democratic Common Hall, while the 1641 common council elections marked 'a watershed' in London politics in which radicals gained control of the corporation. Succeeding chapters show how groups of godly militants sustained Parliament's war efforts, helping to raise troops and to levy the heavy taxes which were required to fight the king. He describes the iconoclastic campaigns to rid London churches of 'superstitious images', and the rise both of Presbyterian forms of ecclesiastical organization and of gathered churches.

4. As well as charting these manifestations of parliamentary and Puritan enthusiasm, Lindley pays careful attention to the London campaigns for peace, and to the many manifestations of hostility to 'King Pym' and more or less active support for Charles. Such royalism, he shows in his final chapter, gathered new support in 1645 and 1646 as Independent churches with mechanic and even women preachers became more prominent, provoking a Presbyterian campaign for stern ecclesiastical discipline and a wider backlash in favour of the traditional order.

5. It is an exciting and important story with wide historiographical implications. As Lindley concludes, without London 'there would have been no civil war and no eventual parliamentarian victory.' (p. 404) When one reads of London women who in 1644 and 1645 vowed to kill the king, and of how a Middlesex Baptist family were assaulted and harrassed through the courts by their religiouly orthodox neighbours, then it is clear that many members of the capital's middling sort and even the lower orders held strong opinions about the central issues of the revolution.

6. Unfortunately, however, the prosopographical tail has ended up wagging the historical dog. We are given a wealth of information, not an interpretation or clear narrative. The exact significance of much of the biographical information provided about the activists on both sides is never brought out, partly because the author seems more concerned with rebutting Cavalier allegations that the parliamentarians were a bunch of lowlifes than with establishing if there was a correlation between any social group and particular political and religious position. Indeed Lindley's reluctance to tabulate his data means that his argument is far less easy to follow than Gary De Krey's discussion of the goegraphy and social composition of late seventeenth-century London politics, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

7. Moreover, many readers will become bewildered, bored or alienated because Lindley refers to parish after parish without providing any visual clue as to their location. I do not expect my students to know the wherabouts of St. Andrew by the Wardrobe or St. Michael Crooked Lane. How can a publisher expect readers in Japan or Australia to know? How can a publisher charge £50 for a book containing index entries for nearly a hundred London parishes and not include a map, especially as there are readily available ones of seventeenth-century London? Tighter copy editing would also have made this a much more accessible publication. Time and time again individuals are introduced by their surname with no explanation. On p. 29, for instance, we encounter to '"the Presbyterian party" of Nalson's imagination', and on p. 79, we find that 'Baillie ... dismissed the sectaries as "no considerable party"'. How many graduate students (let alone undergraduates or general readers) would instantly know that Lindley was referring to the Exclusion Crisis historian and pamphleteer, John Nalson, and the Scottish Presbyterian divine, Robert Baillie? Key figures in Lindley's account are mentioned regularly but never introduced. In the final chapter, for instance, we read regularly that 'Juxon states' and 'Juxon claims'. If you track back two hundred pages you find a passing reference to 'Thomas Juxon's invaluable diary'. If you then use the index to go back another hundred pages you can piece together that there was a London Independent and soldier called Thomas Juxon. We are never told anything about the nature of this manuscript diary or of its author's world view.

8. In addition key analytical terms like 'parish zealots' are never explained, and the author does not seem particularly concerned to relate his work to wider historiographical debates. In part this may be that the broad outlines of Lindley's narrative are familiar from the work of Pearl, Brenner and Roger Manning's The English People and the English Revolution 1640-1649 (London: Heinemann, 1976). Indeed because Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London lacks a clear conclusion or sections setting out an overall argument, it is frequently not clear exactly how its interpretation differs from these earlier accounts. On occasions Lindley does not dissent strongly from what they have written and appears content to have produced a book mildly revising their arguments. A footnote on p. 190, for instance, notes that the City elections of 1641 are the centrepiece of Pearl's book and that the 'present account ... confirms that the changes of 1641-42 on common council were momentous but argues against over-dramatising them.' He is never as explicit in his comments about Brenner's work; Lindley qualifies but broadly supports the latter's assocation between the new companies and trade with the Americas and radical parliamentarianism. If this study is reluctant explicitly to discuss former studies of London and the civil war, it makes virtually no effort to engage with the wider historiography of the civil war, nor with the literature on popular politics and religion in early modern England and Europe. There is no reference to any discussions of early modern European urban revolt; not one study of an English provincial town during the seventeenth century is mentioned. Some will be grateful that the term revisionism does not darken the pages of the book. But it is quite remarkable that there is no reference to the work of Conrad Russell, and that despite Lindley's emphasis on parish zealotry he never mentions John Morrill's contention that the civil wars were England's Wars of Religion or Patrick Collinson's argument that acts of iconoclasm such as the demolition of Cheapside Cross were episodes in a longer cultural conflict running through post-Reformation England. 2

9. However, the greatest disappointment of the book is that the author never begins to link the social networks which are so carefully and fully identified with the languages, images and ideas of Civil War politics. Indeed the propsopographical approach both empties people's political and religious positions of meaning and downplays the extent to which people changed their minds and were affected by the ferment of ideas which were being debated and published in London during the 1640s. Tim Harris's London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) (another book never mentioned in Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London) showed that one can integrate social analysis with a nuanced reading of the forms of political culture and a subtly theorized account of the nature of popular politics. The work which combines Lindley's archival care with an account of the forms and content of political culture in civil war London will genuinely transform our understanding of the Revolution and of London history.

Notes

1. 'Riot Prevention and Control in Early Stuart London', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 33 (1983), 109-26; 'London and Popular Freedom in the 1640s' in R. C. Richardson & G. M. Ridden ed., Freedom in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986); 'London's Citizenry in the English Revolution', in R. C. Richardson ed., Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

   

2. John Morrill, 'The Religious Context of the English Civil War', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 34 (1984), 155-78; Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1988), ch. 5.

   

MARK S. R. JENNER
UNIVERSITY OF YORK