English ‘Nationalism’, Celtic Particularism, and the English Civil War

Abstract

. This review suggests that recent historiography on nationalism can help us to see that the English Civil War was, in part, a conflict about national identity and ethnic difference. It argues that, even before the war began, the supporters of the parliament were associated with a narrowly intolerant strain of Englishness, and that this helps to explain why the Celtic peoples of Wales and Cornwall rallied to the king. During -, parliament's close links with the Scots -together with the presence of many foreign mercenaries in the roundhead armies -prevented the identification of parliament's cause with that of England itself from becoming absolute. Following the creation of the New Model Army, however -an army from which ' strangers ' of all sorts were deliberately excluded -relations between the Scots and parliament rapidly deteriorated, and it became possible for the parliamentarians to make an unequivocal appeal to English patriotic sentiment. The defeat of the king -and of the Welsh and Cornish troops who had done much to sustain his cause -was the result.As the entrenched assumption that ' nationalism ' was a product of the modern age begins to break down, so whole new vistas of historical inquiry are opening up before us." The prospect is especially dazzling, perhaps, for historians of England, who are beginning to accustom themselves to the notion that England may have been not only the archetypal nation-state, but the very cradle of ' nationalism ' since as early as the tenth century. This view, brilliantly advanced in a number of recent studies,# has the potential to transform our understanding both of narrowly English and of wider British * I am most grateful to

Bringing the study of warfare into theories of nationalism

“…This included the Welsh who looked to the crown as a guarantor of their constitutional privileges in the ‘British’ state, and eventually the Presbyterian Scots with whom the parliamentarians were initially allied. Cromwell harnessed an English nationalism in his New Model army to establish a Protestant Commonwealth (Stoyle , ).…”