HISTORY

Jugement à Moscou, a considerable classic based on Politburo documents that Bukovsky found in surreal circumstances, is not in Mitrokhin’s index), a sort of Asiatic Finland: faithfully helping Moscow, only needing to be left alone. Her affairs passed into semi-anarchy, and then the Russians blundered in, meaning to restore order, and destroyed millions of lives. Another book which should have been in Mitrokhin’s list of sources is Christopher Kremmer’s The Carpet Wars. Its author, an Australian journalist who saw the disintegration of Afghanistan, understood the consequences of the Russians’ actions. The West, as in Iraq, has had to pick up the pieces, and deserves some credit. All in all, the Mitrokhin volume is an odd book, which prompts some reflection. In the Thirties and Forties, Moscow’s foreign intelligence was very good: it recruited the Cambridge Five, captured the secrets of the atomic bomb, and had, so far as one can judge, an important part of the French machine working for it.

B LAIR W ORDEN

FEAR OF FOREIGNERS

S OLDIERS AND S TRANGERS : A N E THNIC H ISTORYOFTHE E NGLISH C IVIL W AR

★By Mark Stoyle (Yale University Press 297pp £25)

O VERTHEPAST fifty or sixty years, interpretations of the English Civil War, which have always been controversial, have become so in a new sense. Previously the disputes were about the rights and wrongs of the war. Now they are about the causes of its outbreak and course. Historians are expected to have, not a preference for one side, but an analytical line. The lines, which have had their debts to intellectual fashion, have often changed. Half a century ago the war was perceived as a class war, in which an ailing feudal order succumbed to an emerging bourgeois one, or else in which prosperous landowners did battle with declining ones. Next came the war as a conflict between centre and locality, caused by the determination of Charles I in the 1630s, and of the Long Parliament in the 1640s, to impose a national will on the regions. In the third phase, the struggle became the last of Europe’s wars of religion, in which material and constitutional interests counted for less than the confrontation of Anglican and Puritan. Then came the war as a British conflict, where events in England were inseparable from the simultaneous quarrels in Scotland and Ireland. Mark Stoyle’s excellent book is a variant on the last of those themes. To him the war was about ethnicity and

Parts of that world survive. For instance, the Russians are much better than anyone else about Turkey (strangely, not a subject that comes up here, though Istanbul is the windpipe of their trade), and Prime Minister Primakov should have been listened to on the subject of Iraq. But on the whole, there was a dreadful decline in the quality of Moscow’s understanding of the Third World, or perhaps just a certain cynicism about the whole business of ‘national liberation fronts’, in which clever young men spouted the correct platitudes in return for the right to go to some Mozambique or Grenada and buy ballpoints. In this, there is a non-dit of some significance. Jews, on the whole, were very important indeed in the early decades of the USSR. They understood something about foreign countries. In the later Forties, antiSemitism started officially, and foreign intelligence understood less and less. So what? The unspoken question in Mitrokhin’s book. To order this book at £24, see order form on page 78

racial prejudice. He traces the impact on the military campaigns of English hostility not only to the Irish and Scots but to the Celtic populations of Wales and Cornwall, an emotion largely reciprocated – and sometimes also mirrored in the treatment of those groups by each other. Since Elizabeth’s reign, Englishness and Protestantism had grown together, and the hatred and fear of foreigners,

M ICHAEL M C K EON

THESECRETHISTORYOFDOMESTICITY Public, Private, andtheDivisionof Knowledge

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 HISTORY

that proved ‘fatal’ to his cause. Parliament, which in any case had a smaller component of foreigners in its own army, cleared them out during the reorganisation of its forces in the winter of 1644-5, after which the New Model triumphed as the champion of Englishness and as the deliverer of the land from alien incursion. Soldiers and Strangers is boldly and imaginatively conceived, and is written with verve and style. Sometimes the argument is over-bold, as indeed Stoyle seems half-aware. Part of the difficulty is his heavy dependence on the evidence of printed propaganda, which told its readers what to think but does not

or ‘strangers’, was a potent political weapon. Yet the English could not sustain the Civil War on their own. They needed the military leadership and expertise that in recent decades had been gained by the rest of Europe during the Thirty Years War. And they needed manpower. Parliament brought in a huge Presbyterian army from Scotland, which the Puritans piously called ‘our brethren’, a phrase soon mocked not only on the royalist but on the parliamentarian side, where the Scottish soldiers became equally detested. The king tried to import armies from Scotland and from the Continental monarchies. Mercenary soldiers arrived from France (to find themselves called the ‘beastly and buggerly French’ and ‘barbarous blood-suckers’), the Netherlands, Lorraine, and from further afield – even, it seems, from Mesopotamia and North Africa. Mercenaries were generally more prone than native troops to indiscriminate plunder and destruction. They also allegedly strove to ‘protract and spin out the war’ and so prolong their income from it. Foreign captives suffered some merciless treatment. It was the Irish who came off worst. Cromwell’s slaughters at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 merely continued the earlier policy of Parliament, which in legislation of 1644 – that ‘golden ordinance’, as a delighted Puritan divine called it – declared that every Irishman captured in England must be put to death without quarter. MPs were incredulous when Prince Rupert, the king’s foreign nephew and commander, responded to the execution of thirteen of the king’s Irish soldiers by hanging the same number of English prisoners, as if Irishmen could somehow be regarded as ‘equal’ to Englishmen. After the Roundhead victory at Naseby a huge number of female camp-followers on the king’s side, supposedly from Ireland, were unhesitatingly put to death, as ‘whores’, by the Roundheads. Actually it seems that they may have been from Wales. For the Welsh attracted brutal treatment too, as did the Cornish. Wales and Cornwall supply the most original parts of Stoyle’s book. Though both communities had parliamentarian enclaves, Wales in the south, Cornwall in the east, both were overwhelmingly royalist. The king, maintains Stoyle, was ‘irrevocably committed’ to ‘ethnic diversity’ in his armies, a policy

Birmingham gets the sack

necessarily tell us, as one might infer from Stoyle, what ‘many English men and women’, or ‘thousands’ of them, did think. ‘Ethnicity’, which is not defined, is too loosely related to the sentiments of class, religion and locality with which it interacted. In any case the royalism of Wales and Cornwall may make at least as much sense when taken together with its non-ethnic counterpart in the northern counties of England, that other ‘backward part of the land’. Stoyle skilfully traces the tendency of Welsh and Cornish soldiers to lose their royalist enthusiasm when their local regiments, having at first been given local tasks, were broken up and their members absorbed into nationwide English armies. But how much did ethnic feeling contribute to that change, which was paralleled in most of the counties of England? For if the English could hate foreigners, most of the time they were busy enough hating each other. I suspect, too, that the purging of foreign soldiers by the Cromwellian leadership owed more to its will to win the war than to any xenophobic impulse. Stoyle likes to cite the assertions by Cromwellians of ‘English’ values and birthrights, but those statements were more often than not innocent of anti-alien sentiment. They had a long pedigree and a long future. When England expected every man to do his duty, Nelson was not inciting his English sailors to turn on the other Britons at their side. Yet the boldness that has over-propelled Stoyle has also been a stimulus to discovery and thought. Soldiers and Strangers is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable studies of the Civil War to have appeared in recent years. To order this book at £20, see order form on page 78

MADegree in Biography Starting January 2006 Appreciate the art of biography while learning the skill in this one or two-year taught MA. The Buckingham MAin Biography was the first postgraduate programme in this field to be offered in the UK. Course director: Jane Ridley Contact: jane.ridley@buckingham.ac.uk or write to her at The University of Buckingham, Buckingham MK18 1EG Tel: 01280 814080

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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