The politics of the parish and the politics of the nation during the English civil wars

Few recent studies of popular politics in early modern England have tried to trace partisan ideological issues at the level both of the nation and the parish. The civil war has in the past been the locus classicus of such attempts. Recent studies have correlated evidence of allegiance with socio-economic factors but, despite their subtlety, remain open to the charge of determinism and relatively weak in dealing with the complexity and fluidity of civil war allegiances. A central theme of my own recent work is the effect on politics of the need to mobilise political and material support among wider publics. This led to overlapping, conflicting and intersecting campaigns aimed at connecting the politics of the parish and of the nation: petitions, demonstrations, recruitment to the armies, taxation, and pamphleteering for example. This connects to recent work emphasising the importance of the 1640s for the transformation of the 'public sphere'.

The analysis of mobilisation, as opposed to allegiance, allows for partial, instrumental engagements by wider publics in national campaigns, the appropriation of those campaigns to local priorities, and for successful mobilisation by different 'sides' among the same populations. It connects the sociology of mobilisation--the analysis of the networks that underpinned it--with the issues of representation highlighted by cultural history, but also with agency and calculation--the potential of a particular mobilisation to prove useful or effective. Analysis of these multiple mobilisations is crucial to an understanding of the fluidity and creativity of political argument and of the progress of the war. At the same time a small body of work on interpersonal encounters illustrates the freight of political meaning which they might carry--gesture, or speech acts of apparent triviality, could express differences over very big issues. Raising a hat in Mears Ashby might be a comment on national or even cosmic issues.

These developments demonstrate the usefulness of approaches that go beyond binary divides (parish and nation, high and low, elite and popular) to look for shared meanings, appropriations and deployments; and at means of communication and mobilisation. Specificity is crucial to this approach: analysis of the time-sensitive use of common tropes and discourses by identifiable actors in order to mobilise or express support for particular, partisan purposes. This complexity is best approached in limited contexts, through case-studies either of particular campaigns, or the activities of individuals.

It will be explored through four case-studies using a range of sources (print and manuscript) and approaches (social, cultural and political): of two particular moments; and of two significant individuals. Studies of political mobilisations will throw light onto the interaction of local and national, elite and popular politics, exploring in detail how potentially divisive issues could be submerged in common causes mobilised among wider publics. Such campaigns, however, while negotiating some of the difficulties also created new fault lines and contributed to the instability of civil war alliances. Studies of two activists will throw light on the use made of these opportunities, on the interaction between their projects, available resources (discursive and communicative) and political circumstance. These complex interactions provide important context for discursive, communicative and intellectual creativity. A fifth essay will explore how gestural codes helped to foster and express exclusive identities on the basis of ideological affiliation. A final essay will explore relationships between the social depth and plurality of political mobilisation, polemical escalation, and discursive, communicative and intellectual creativity; also connecting historiographies of the public sphere, popular politics and the civil war, and studies of early Stuart and restoration politics.