Counter Revolution: The Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646-8.

The English (or, according to the latest orthodoxy, British) revolution of 1640-60 is often regarded as the first of the great western revolutions, fit to rank alongside 1776, 1789, and 1917. Even more than those later eruptions, however, it was an infinitely complicated affair, whose course was determined by the relationships between all of the Stuart monarchs' three kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Robert Ashton is an accomplished and experienced historian who has already written widely on the first English civil war of 1642-46. He now turns his attention to the often baffling and confusing period between that earlier struggle and the conflicts of 1648, generally labeled, for essentially Anglocentric reasons, the "second" civil war. Although in some places he deals with things that happened in 1648, his main purpose is to unravel the complexities of the previous two years; for a more coherent account of the war and its participants, he tells us, we must await a second volume.

This will not be an easy book for the non-specialist reader. It demands a good deal of familiarity with prior events, as well as a voracious appetite (more likely to be found in British than American readers, I suspect) for the details of these tumultuous two years. Still, it repays study, for every page of it is clearly a distillation of the impressive knowledge of the period accumulated by a historian of great insight and integrity. Ashton carefully traces the course of politics at the center: the negotiations between Charles I and the other major players (the English Parliament, the New Model Army, and the Scots); the alienation of many of Parliament's formerly moderate supporters in the localities by excessive centralization, high taxation, oppressive behavior by the military, and by Parliament's own County Committees; and the stories of religious radicalism emanating from the Army. He takes us through the various petitioning campaigns, which both expressed and influenced public opinion; the turbulent events in London in the summer of 1647, when a counterrevolutionary mob held both Houses of Parliament hostage and forced the temporary withdrawal of the Army's supporters; the revival of royalist feeling (much aided in some areas by the popular preference for the old liturgy of the Church of England rather than the new Presbyterian one of the Directory); and the gradual drift to disorganized violence in 1648. The disorganization was crucial to the outcome, as it enabled the Army of Fairfax and Cromwell to deal piecemeal with the military rebels in South Wales, the southeastern localists at Maidstone and Colchester, the Scots at Preston, and with a dozen other lesser outbreaks, few of which showed any signs of coordination with the others.

There is much to admire in all this. Ashton is sensitive to the importance of popular culture - the Kent disorders began at Canterbury as a protest against the Puritans' attempt to suppress Christmas, and continued in a riot that was also a football game. He wisely resists trendy interpretations like the one which a few years ago implausibly reduced everyone, whether on the royalist or parliamentarian side, to deferential puppets of a handful of noblemen. He might with advantage, I think, have paid even more attention than he does to the "British dimension": it does not explain everything, certainly not as much as some of its adherents claim, but it probably has more explanatory force for this period than for almost any other. There is much in this book about Anglo-Scottish relations, but internal Scottish politics receive less attention and are seen primarily through English eyes. On English politics, though, Ashton always commands respect, which makes his somewhat unwieldy book a reliable guide through the historical thicket of 1646-48.

DAVID UNDERDOWN Yale University