Malcolm Wanklyn, Frank Jones. A Military History of the English Civil War. Harlow: Pearson
Longman, 2005. 308 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-582-77281-6.
Reviewed by John Shedd (Department of History, State University of New York at Cortland)
Published on H-Albion (September, 2006)
Contingency versus Determinism
at many points in the book. For instance, in the summary of part 5, the section on the 1644 campaign season,
they use “if” propositions several times to reflect their
belief that it was high command decisions, and not resources, that tell the real tale of the war: “If Manchester
had remained in the Ouse valley, the three Parliamentary armies could have challenged the king to a battle
in the environs of Oxford … leaving the Scots and the
Fairfaxes to deal with what was left of the Marquis of
Newcastle’s command.” “If, after Charles’s escape from
Oxford, the two armies had remained in the Thames valley area, the city could not have held out for long, resulting in the loss of another 3,000 or so veteran Royalist
infantry.” “If either Waller or Manchester had been in a
Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones seek to replace
position to move into the Oxford area in strength in mida standard, what they term “determinist,” explanation
to late July, the king’s field army would have been forced
for why Parliament won the Civil War–one that prefers to return to defend its headquarters, thus allowing the
broad, long-term factors, especially Parliament’s supe- Earl of Essex to reconquer the southwest of England unrior resources–with a version that employs contingency molested.” “Waller and his cavalry regiments … gave the
analysis. The authors downplay the role of the bulk of king the chance of defeating the Parliamentary forces in
supplies and soldiers available to each side and emphadetail if he had been sufficiently fleet of foot” (pp. 211size instead how closely matched were the two armies
214). Many historians will not go into print with these
during most of the war. They point out that only well into sorts of contingency statements, seeing them as amountthe war did the side of Parliament muster significantly ing to guesswork.
superior resources, both human and material, guiding the
Thus, the authors’ use of the word “determinist” as
reader to suppose that had the commanders on both sides
made different decisions, the war would have turned out an accusation against other scholars is problematic. Preferring long-range causes is no more deterministic than
as a royalist victory.
preferring short-range ones. Historians of the English
Contingency analysis can be seen as the opposite of
Civil War who point out that Parliament’s enjoyment of
determinism–what might have happened instead of what London’s resources (both material and governmental), of
must happen. The authors employ contingency analysis other population centers in the south and east, of the loy-
James McPherson, in his Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (1996), uses the terms
“elements of contingency,” “points of contingency,” and
“moments of contingency” (pp. 134-136) in his analysis of
the Union victory. Military history lends itself to “what
would have happened if? ” questions. A. J. P. Taylor, in
his classic work, A History of the First World War (1963),
invoked an element of contingency when he asserted that
the war happened when it did because the Austrian archduke loved his wife: “None foresaw that Franz Ferdinand,
on his wedding day, had fixed the date of his death, still
less that this would lead to the deaths of many million
others” (p. 9).
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alty of the navy, and of a generally better paid and better
equipped fighting force, especially after the advent of the
New Model Army, made its side more likely to win the
war are not engaging in economic, political, or social determinism. Teleology has long been recognized as the
spirit historians find most difficult to exorcise. Indeed,
historians by definition perform after-the-fact analysis
of causation and thus open themselves up to charges of
determinism. Towards the end of their book, for example, Wanklyn and Jones make a causal connection that
could be labeled as deterministic when they claim that
it was Cromwell’s switching cavalry tactics that shortened the war. What is really at issue here is a traditional
style of military history at odds with scholarship that
prefers broad and long-term causal analysis. By taking
on writers who place discrete battlefield events within
their wider settings, Wanklyn and Jones seek to help us
understand the extent to which the actual combatants determined the course of the war and not broader or tangential factors.
the authors present a leader who made field command
decisions based on immediate, practical considerations.
Essex comes off looking especially competent when compared to the often feckless Sir William Waller. Although
Wanklyn and Jones are not overly praiseful of Essex, his
failures to engage the enemy more vigorously are often
seen by them as resulting from the lord general’s very
realistic assessment of what his army was capable of doing at a given moment, as, for example, the poor shape of
his cavalry during the Thames valley campaign of 1643.
A second example is their taking on the old conclusion
that it was Goring disobeying his orders to abandon the
West and join his forces with the king’s that lost both the
battle at Naseby and the war. Wanklyn and Jones show
that, given the movement of George Goring’s troops in
the weeks prior to Naseby, combined with evidence taken
from the royalist war council and from the king’s personal correspondence, Goring was too far away to have
made it to the battlefield in time to be of help. This second example perhaps suggests that contingency analysis
is most useful when it is employed in efforts to make right
the wayward conclusions presented by other historians.
Given how difficult it is sometimes to distinguish between causation and determinism, it seems apparent that
the real value of this book is in its careful, methodical, and
detailed use of an array of sources to suggest corrections
in the interpretations of military events found in previous accounts, from S. R. Gardiner to John Kenyon to Ian
Gentles to John Barratt. Two examples, among many,
stand out. First, the authors present the Earl of Essex in a
more favorable light than has often been the case. Gone
is the Essex whose arrogance masked his failures, both
as a husband and as a general; one whose reluctance to
engage the enemy and achieve total victory over his king
amounted to a major stumbling block, a hindrance corrected only by the coming of the New Model. Instead
The authors present so many of these kinds of corrections to previous accounts that, taken as a whole, this
book should be considered a major reassessment of the
Civil War. The reassessment that Wanklyn and Jones
seek to present also includes placing English field tactics within the context of methods of warfare used on
the Continent. By showing the reader how officers in
both armies copied or modified tactics they had learned
of from the Dutch, Swedes, and others, the authors
strengthen their thesis that credit and blame for winning
and losing the war should be placed on the armed forces
of England and not on more impersonal forces.
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Citation: John Shedd. Review of Wanklyn, Malcolm; Jones, Frank, A Military History of the English Civil War. HAlbion, H-Net Reviews. September, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12231
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