ABSTRACT
Continuing the theme of local interest and principled involvement in central policy are recent family studies like Jacqueline Eales’s of the Harleys of Herefordshire, and local studies like Ann Hughes’s of the county of Warwickshire. Both reject the revisionist picture of localism and neutralism determining county response to troubles at the centre. In the article below, Hughes grants that many English people preferred to avoid armed conflict in 1642; however, she argues that this need not imply neutral opinions. The political and judicial experience of local gentlemen, and the information available to them and their constituents, produced polarities in county opinion and commitment long before the outbreak of war. She finds ‘sharp ideological divisions’ in nearly all counties, as well as alignments that reflected fears arising from the social restructuring of the previous century, now aggravated by political and religious division. She rejects both the notion of a monolithic county response and class-based allegiance. Her own study of Warwickshire and Lord Brooke’s parliamentarian leadership there, together with her summary of other local studies, draws a much more complex picture. Informed political ideology and religious commitment emerge as central, and the Civil War as far from ‘accidental’.
