Historical Accounts of the English Civil War

Historical Accounts of the English Civil War

After our study of many accounts of the English Civil War and Charles I’s trial and execution, it is clear that discovering historical truth and writing a satisfying history are two very separate, difficult tasks, and that finding among many accounts a single “best” story is complex, if not impossible. In order to compare the job each historian did in explaining what’s important about this conflict, the following criteria can be helpful for identifying a satisfying history.

First, the historian must refer to primary sources, must describe how he selected his sources and how they are useful, and must quote, refer to, or interpret sources responsibly (representing their context, content, and importance as accurately and fairly as possible) and precisely (using them to clearly support his specific arguments, not haphazardly or too generally). This satisfies the reader by relating (at least one version) of what really happened, and showing how the author justifies his analysis in light of historical fact.

Second, the historian must place himself within the existing historical debate on the topic at hand, and state (if not so formulaically as is presented here) what he intends to add to or correct about the existing discussion, how he intends to do that (through examining new sources, asking new questions, or shifting the emphasis of pre-existing explanations), and whether he’s going to leave out some parts of the story. This fulfills the qualities of good history by alerting readers to the author’s bias in comparison with the biases of other schools of scholarship on the topic, and shows that the author is confident enough in his arguments to hold them up to other interpreta...

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... complete and satisfying history is to read multiple sources and to inquire into the history of the writing of history on a topic – that is, the progression over time of ways of thinking about a conflict like the English Civil War, or the different interpretations and motivations of different schools of interpretation. History is a subtle discipline, where interpretations are never finally ruled to have been right or wrong as theorems in the physical sciences have been. An historical account tells us as much about the environment and particular philosophy of the historian as it does about the event or change it takes as its topic. The criteria presented here basically ask the historian to do some of the work of the critical reader, but the student of history must always make his own comparisons and investigations before deciding how much to trust the historian.