University Of Cambridge Faculty

"One of the things I thought was very important during the 1980s was the idea that culture is meaningfully constituted. I still think that is right. But now, I put the emphasis on the "meaningful constitution"rather than the "cultural"bit. I have had arguments with my colleagues in Stanford about this. I take the view that culture is not a helpful term. It tends to be reifying and dangerous. I prefer to break it down and talk about the various processes that constitute it."

"One afternoon, Mrs Gandhi had some free time and decided to go for a drive, along with me. A few miles outside Kabul she saw a dilapidated building surrounded by a few trees, and asked the Afghan security officer what it was. Bagh-e-Babur, he told us, and Mrs Gandhi decided to drive up to it. The protocol department went into a tizzy as no security arrangements had been made. Regardless, we headed towards Babur’s grave. She stood at the grave with her head slightly lowered and I behind her. She said to me, ‘I have had my brush with history.’ I told her I had had two. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. I said that paying homage to Babur in the company of the Empress of India was a great honour."

"A serpent threaded through the shell of a turtle."

"The Religion that is most nearly akin to a philosophical reconstruction would seem to be that of Brahmanism."

"I claim for students of history that their study – if properly conducted – can strip the mind of illusions, leading them from heady abstraction back to men and women in their infinite diversity – warning them, by reference to actuality, against this or that ideology which oversimplifies the past under a single formula or promises the millenium the day after tomorrow."

"Perhaps I may also be permitted to add how much the lawyer can teach the historian about the use of evidence, and certainly I learnt most of the little I know about the criticism of medieval charters from a practising lawyer at work from ten to five in the office of the Treasury Solicitor."

"No one knows more than Douglas about the early history of Normandy and here we have a magisterial survey of the duchy, both before and after the Conquest. No one leads more confidently through the genealogical maze and uses family connections to better effect."

"G. H. Hardy in his apology for pure mathematics placed high among his arguments that the subject was "harmless". I can – alas – make no such plea for history. The correct use of historical study may be debatable, but the consequences of its abuse have been made plain for all the world to see. The propagandist use of history in the Germany of yesterday, in the Russia of today, is a fact of incalculable importance to the future fate of the world. An ignorance of history inviting its fabrications by the unscrupulous cannot be regarded simply as an innocuous academic failure. It has affected all our lives. It has led directly to Belsen and Buchenwald and Katyn Wood. It has contributed its full share to two major European disasters."

"The search for wisdom in precedent flourished as if naturally among a people whom foreign observers at a later date have praised especially for its reliance upon tradition rather than upon those wide general theories which claim universal validity."

"The philosophy of history is a fascinating and important subject, but with the rarest exceptions its chief English exponents have not been historians. Life is short, and the fervent historian has much to do. He has to discover; he has to create. The nature of his subject he must leave for others to discuss. "I do not believe in the philosophy of history," wrote the great William Stubbs, "and therefore I do not believe in Buckle.""

"Being earnest to press on his Errand he came for, the Ambassador sent to Narun Gi Pundit to know what was transacted in the Articles; but was returned for Answer. The Rajah stopt his Ears to all Affairs, declaring he had granted all the Demands, except those two Articles, expressing, Our Money shall go current in his Dominions, and his on Bombaim; and that he shall restore whatever Wrecks may happen on his Coasts belonging to the English, and Inhabitants of Bombaim. The first he accounted unnecessary to be inserted, because he forbids not the passing of any manner of Coins; nor on the other side, can he force his Subjects to take those Monies, whereby they shall be Losers; but if our Coin be as fine an Allay, and as weighty as the Moguls, and other Princes, he will not prohibit it. To the other he says, that it is against the Laws of Conchon to restore any Ships, Vessels, or Goods, that are driven ashore by Tempest, or otherwise; and that should he grant us that Privilege, the French, Dutch, and other Merchants, would claim the same Right; which he could not grant without breaking a Custom has lasted many Ages: The rest of our Desires he willingly conceded embracing with much satisfaction our Friendship, promising to himself and Country much Happiness by our Settlement and Trade: Notwithstanding Narun Gi Pundit did not altogether despair of obtaining our Wrecks, because we enjoyed the same Privilege in the Mogul, and Duccan Country."

"Near a Month after they had been here, Narun Gi Pundit sent word, That to Morrow about Seven or Eight in the Morning, the Rajah Seva Gi intended to ascend his Throne; and he would take it kindly if they came to congratulate him thereon; that it was necessary to present him with some small thing, it not being the Custom of the Eastern Parts to appear before a Prince empty-handed. The Ambassador sent him word, according to his Advice; he would wait on the Rajah at the prescribed time. Accordingly next Morning he and his Retinue went to Court, and found the Rajah seated on a Magnificent Throne, and all his Nobles waiting on him in Rich Attire; his Son Samba Gi Rajah, Peshuah Mora Pundit, and a Brachmine of Great Eminence, seated on an Ascent under the Throne; the rest, as well Officers of the Army as others, standing with great Respect. The English made their Obeisance at a distance; and Narun Sinai held up the Diamond Ring that was to be presented him: He presently took notice of it, and ordered their coming nearer, even to the Foot of the Throne, where being Vested, they were desired to retire; which they did not so soon, but they took notice on each side of the Throne there hung (according to the Moors manner) on heads of Gilded Launces many Emblems of Dominion and Government; as on the Right-hand were two great Fishes Heads of Gold, with very large Teeth; on the Left, several Horses Tails, a Pair of Gold Scales on a very high Launce’s head, equally poized, an Emblem of Justice and as they returned, at the Palace Gate stood two small Elephants on each side, and two fair Horses with Gold Trappings, Bridles, and Rich Furniture, which made them admire how they brought them up the Hill, the Passage being both difficult and hazardous. Two days after this, the Rajah was married to a Fourth Wife, without State; and doth every day bestow Alms on the Brachmines…"

"I will only add one Passage during the Stay of our Ambassador at Rairee: The Diet of this sort of People admits not of great Variety or Cost, their delightfullest Food being only Cutchery, a sort of Pulse and Rice mixed together, and boiled in Butter, with which they grow Fat: but such Victuals could not be long pleasing to our Merchants, who had been used to Feed on good Flesh: It was therefore signified to the Rajah, That Meat should be provided for them; and to that end a Butcher that served those few Moors that were there, that were able to go to the Charge of Meat, was ordered to supply them with what Goat they should expend (nothing else here being to be gotten for them), which he did accordingly, to the consumption of half a Goat a Day, which he found very profitable for him…The honest Butcher had made an Adventure up the Hill, though very old, to have the sight of his good Masters, who had taken off of his hands more Flesh in that time they had been there than he had sold in some Years before; so rare a thing is it to eat Flesh among them…"

"They [the English team]…were glad when they beard the Rajah [Shivaji] was returned from Purtaabgur, when the Ambassador solicited Narun Gi Pundit [a Saraswat Brahmin in Shivaji’s service who also functioned as interpreter] to procure his leave to pass up the Hill into Rairee [the famous Raigarh fort] Castle. The next day they receive’d order to ascend the Hill into the Castle, the Rajah having appointed an House for them; which they did; leaving Punckarra about Three in the Afternoon, they arrived at the top of that strong Mountain, forsaking the humble Clouds about Sun-set."

"It is fortified by Nature more than Art, being of very difficult access, there being but one Avenue to it, which is guarded by two narrow Gates, and fortified by a strong Wall exceeding high, and Bastions thereto: All the other part of the Mountain is a direct Precipice so that it’s impregnable, except the Treachery of some in it betray it. On the Mountain are many strong Buildings, as the Raja’s Court, and Houses of other Ministers, to the number of about 300. It is in length about two Miles and an half, but no pleasant Trees, or any sort of Grain grows thereon. Their House was about a Mile from the Rajah’s Palace, into which they retired with no little content."

"Four days after their ascent, by the sollicitation of Narun Gi Pundit, the Rajah gave them Audience, though in busily employed by many other great Affairs, relating to his Coronation and Marriage. Our Ambassador presented him, and his Son Samba Gi Rajah, with the Particulars appointed for them; which they took well satisfied with them; and the Rajah assured them we might trade securely in all his Countries without the least apprehension of ill from him, for that the Peace was concluded. Our Ambassador replied, that was our Intent; and to that intent the President had sent him to this Court to procure the same Articles and Privileges we enjoyed in Indostan and Persia, where we traded. He answered, it is well, and referred our Business to Moro Pundit, his Peshua, or Chancellour, to examine our Articles, and give an account what they were."

"He and his Son withdrew into their private Apartments, to consult with the Brachmines about the Ceremonies preparatory to his Enstalment; which chiefly consisted in Abstinence and Purifying; till which be over, he will hear no farther of Business. They likewise departed to their Lodgings."

"A day or two after our Ambassador went to Narun Gi Pundit, and took his Advice concerning the presenting of the rest; who told him he might go in Person to Moro Pundit, but to the rest he should send by Naran Sinaij what was intended for them: Declaring likewise if he would have his Work speedily effected, and without any impediment, that it was necessary to be at some more charge to present Officers with Pamerins, who were not in their List of Presents; to which he assented, considering the time of the Year was so far spent, and that if he should be forced to stay the whole Rains out at Rairee, the Honourable Company’s Charges would be greater than the Additional Presents: He answered that two Pamerins were not enough for Moro Pundit, that we must present him with four; and Peta Gi Pundit Vocanovice, or Publick Intelligencer, with the Diamond Ring, valued at 125 Rupees…"

"About this time the Rajah, according to the Hindus Custom, was weighed in Gold, and poised about 16000 Pagods, which Money, together with an 100000 more is to be distributed among the Brachmines after the day he is enthroned, who in great numbers flock hither from all parts of his Territories."

"... Dickinson published a wide range of books, plays and dialogues throughout his career, including Revolution and Reaction in Modern France (1892), Letters from a Chinese Official (1901), Goethe and Faust (1928), and Plato and His Dialogues (1932). As the breadth of these texts suggests, Dickinson's career stands as testament to an intellectual life led before the concretion of academic specialization. He has been variously described as a classicist, a historian, and a political scientist, and his work on international relations was deeply influenced by an overall critical humanist perspective on intellectual inquiry that embraced a variety of historical, philosophical, literary and political perspectives."

"The real antithesis is not between East and West, but between India and the rest of the world." Only India is different; only India un spools some other possibility fantastically. India is the odd man out of the global citizenry... Thus India stands for something, which distinguishes it from all other peoples...Standing on the Ghats at Benares or by any village well we are transported into the beautiful antique world."

"In ages of Faith religion is not only sublime; it is intimate, humorous, domestic; it sits at the hearth and plays in the nursery."

"... I doubt whether there is one book of his by which, in the field of his teaching, he is likely to be permanently significant. But if ever I have met wisdom incarnate, Lowes Dickinson was its embodiment. There is not one book of his that does not suggest vistas; nor one that does not make the claim of reason seem more worthy of reverence. He wrote nothing that did not possess beauty of form, delicacy of insight, the call of a supremely generous nature to the life upon the heights."

"History may be used to support any conclusion, according to the emphasis of our conscious or unconscious principle of selection."

"Some of my readers may have heard of a club known as the Seekers. It is now extinct; but in its day it was famous, and included a number of men prominent in politics or in the professions. We used to meet once a fortnight, on the Saturday night, in London during the winter, but in the summer usually at the country house of one or other of the members, where we would spend the week end together."

"The scientific denial of immortality is based upon the admitted fact of the connection between mind and brain; whence it is assumed that the death of the brain must involve the death of that, whatever it be, which has been called the soul. This may indeed be true; but it is not necessarily or obviously true; it does not follow logically from the fact of the connection."

"What we commonly have in our mind when we speak of religion is a definite set of doctrines, of a more or less metaphysical character, formulated in a creed and supported by an organization distinct from the state. And the first thing we have to learn about the is that it included nothing of the kind. There was no church, there was no creed, there were no articles. Priests there were, but they were merely public officials, appointed to perform certain religious rites. The distinction between cleric and layman, as we know it, did not exist; and whatever the religion of the Greeks may have been, one thing at any rate is clear, that it was something very different from all that we are in the habit of associating with the world."

"J. C. D. Clark has argued that "the radical critique" of the late Hanoverian constitution "had its origins in theology, not economics". In his view, establishment thought was seeped in the doctrines of Filmer and Leslie, that all political and social authority derived from the first two persons of the Trinity, being enshrined in the fatherhood which God bestowed on Adam, and in the Apostolic Church to which Christ gave power of the keys. Consequently, those who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity – heterodox Dissenters such as Deists, Arians, Socinians, and Unitarians – struck right at the political heart of the regime, unlike middle-class Lockean radicals who dealt it merely glancing blows. After about 1800 the old regime began to be undermined, but in Clark's view this was not so much by "the progressive advance of a liberal mood shared by all", as by demographic and social changes. It was eventually destroyed by the legislation of 1828–9, which Clark describes as marking a "final and sudden betrayal"... Clark can claim that the legislation of those years destroyed the unitary state and opened a door to religious pluralism, through which not only orthodox Dissenters but also heterodox Dissenters, and eventually Jews, atheists, and free thinkers, could pass."

"Jonathan Clark is the most controversial historian of his generation. In his English Society, 1688–1832, he reopened debate about Hanoverian England, by asserting the centrality of religious belief and ideology. Clark's Revolution and Rebellion sought to link political developments and historical controversies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and, in doing so, took issue with most British scholars of the period."

"In an epoch-making study entitled English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime, published in 1985, he forcefully argued that eighteenth-century England, its policy based on a close alliance between the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church, was an "ancien regime", indistinguishable from contemporary France, for instance, or even Spain. What it was not was some sort of forward-looking experiment in constitutional monarchy and representative government. Thus the final collapse of this ancien regime was heralded not by the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 but by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1830 [sic], when England ceased to be a confessional state. In the same way he argued for the close identification of political radicalism with religious nonconformity, in contradiction to E. P. Thompson's Tawneyesque The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 and well established as a classic. Clark's theories have provoked a great deal of opposition, not eased by his confrontational technique and acerbity of manner, but he has to be taken seriously, and it must be rare indeed for a scholar of his age (born in 1951) to have two major historical conferences and two issues of different professional journals entirely devoted to a discussion of his theories. We must never forget that his work runs in parallel with the excellent but more conventional work of John Cannon, Ian Christie, Paul Langford and others, but there is no doubt that he has put a new spin on British eighteenth-century studies, and it is safe to say that they will never be the same again."

"The monarchy is not the only target: from right to left, across a spectrum from the police via the church to the BBC, such bodies seem to be valued chiefly as targets. Yet institutions such as these are peculiarly important in the social fabric of unrevolutionised Britain just as they are peculiarly unimportant in societies such as America that have had the slate wiped clean by a great social upheaval... [N]o nation can exist without some modest pride in its institutions and its achievements, and Everyman as well as the Prince has an interest in being free to feel at one with what he coolly and neutrally observes. Political correctness does to our national culture what the architecture of brutalism did to our urban landscape. The Prince was right again."

"PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions."

"The love affair of the British with their national institutions is no limp romanticism but an appreciation of the way that institutions embody and perpetuate, as well as symbolise, a certain way of doing things. That is why a predilection for hereditary peers and against high inheritance taxes is an affirmation of family integrity. That is why an established Church is widely endorsed, even by other Christian denominations, as an official acknowledgement that law is more than technical convention. That is why the national history curriculum has become a potent symbol of society's right corporately to affirm a vision of itself."

"Far from seizing the initiative for the Commons, early-eighteenth-century Whigs (who comprised the majority of MPs) were more concerned that the chief agent of all initiatives in government, the Crown, should not be seized by the Stuart dynasty. The reinstatement of Jacobitism as a profoundly important issue was a major achievement of recent scholarship in the early-Hanoverian field."

"To attempt to write the history of liberalism before the 1820s is thus, in point of method, akin to attempting to write the history of the eighteenth-century motor car. There were, of course, forms of transport which performed many of the functions which the motor car later performed, the sedan chair among them. Yet to explain the sedan chair as if it were an early version of the motor car, and by implication to condemn it for failing so lamentably to evolve into the motor car, is to turn a modern error of scholarly method into a failure of men in a past society. To stretch explanatory categories so far that they lose their specific reference and become mere holdalls for our ahistorical assumptions about the eternal nature of human motivation is to condemn us merely to explore the inner landscape of the assumptions and to deny us any perception of a need to locate those assumptions in time."

"Strong leaders, even absolute monarchs, owe their strength to a natural social constituency rather than to an authoritarian personality. For Charles, it was the nexus of squire and parson that fuelled the uncompromising counter-revolution of populist Anglicanism. These were the men, like the Vicar of Bray, for whom Good King Charles's days were golden, at least in retrospect. At the time, they found him often reluctant to go as far as they wished in persecuting Catholics and Dissenters. Only later did Charles's reign assume the golden glow of nostalgia, as unhappy Tories under the first two Georges sought a stylish archetype which would highlight, by contrast, the Hanoverian boorishness. Then, Charles's rule came to seem a symbol of the triumph of indulgence, pleasure and tolerance over rigour, earnestness and bigotry. But at the time, it was a much more ambiguous affair."

"Francis Fukuyama, that emblematic American commentator of the 1980s, gave only the last and most optimistic version of this benign intellectual isolationism. His vision of the irresistible triumph of American liberal capitalism around the world was normally read by Americans as an assurance that their victory would be bloodless. Everyone would soon largely agree with them... The most perceptive alternative analysis was that of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His new model for international relations predicted a world divided into armed and antagonistic blocs on religious lines. Huntington's was the best argument, but it was Fukuyama who wrote the bestseller."

"The rebellions of the 1640s delayed the rise of the English monarchy, but failed to stop it."

"The rebellion of 1688 was not a bid for a weak monarchy, but for a Protestant monarchy. Consequently, the legislative expressions of that attempt which followed had much to do with religion, but little to do with placing limitations on the monarchy's prerogative in other spheres. Discounting the libertarian rhetoric which 1688–9 generated on the part of a small but vocal minority, it is possible to see that the effective powers of the Crown continued to grow."

"Far from being uplifted by their history, the Scots have over many centuries been strikingly bad at maintaining and developing a useful sense of national identity. Worse, Scotland lost much of the self-image it once possessed. Medieval Scotland was a considerable achievement of dynastic politics over poverty and localism. It boasted four universities to England's two, and into the 16th century, Scottish culture was famous across Europe. This mental world of renaissance latinity sustained a Scots identity built around dynastic history and religion rather than the folk culture of Robert Burns. It was this which went disastrously wrong... The Glorious Revolution, ardently espoused by Scots Presbyterians, began the break-up and suppression of this high culture of latinity, episcopalianism and dynastic legitimacy. With dour thoroughness, episcopalians and nonjurors were expelled from their posts as clergy, schoolmasters and academics, and were subjected to lasting and effective persecution. Presbyterians hailed William III, and later the Hanoverians, as saviours of their religious and civil liberties; but, far more than in England, Scots were divided. Presbyterianism survived at the cost of sacrificing a national identity which had grown up in another mental world."

"In the 19th and 20th centuries, continental Europe was swept by grandiose ideologies and, after their exhaustion, is hurrying towards anti-nationalist federalism. England, by contrast, was largely unmoved by these ideologies, and still retains a stubborn patriotism."

"The model of the atomised, acquisitive individual, dealing with others only through secularised market relations regulated by self-interest, is disastrously inadequate as an account of how real men behaved in real societies, as real historians ultimately discerned."

"Indignation is a powerful weapon. With it, the English empiricists saw off the continental system-builders: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Treitschke, Braudel. The best English historians, by contrast, have been superbly negative and slashingly reductionist, ripping down airy continental nonsense with sharp, scholarly hooks."

"History uncovers the inter-relatendess of problems which practical men seek to isolate: recent crises should remind us how mutually dependent monarchy, church and Parliament still are if each is to survive. And their mutual dependence is a clue to their importance. Republicans disagree, for they see the crown as an anachronistic survival, left perched on top of a society already secular and republican to the core. As so often, this half truth is rather less than half true. Whatever the traumas of the 1640s or 1830s, they hardly ranked with 1776, 1789 or 1917: much survives, in the machinery of government (the Queen's peace, the Queen's ministers, unpoliticised armed forces), in manners (deferential more than egalitarian), values (altruistic more than radical-individualist), even speech (the Queen's English rather than cultural pluralism). Tony Benn is right to see England as essentially unrevolutionised; that indeed is his problem. England's differences from societies republican in their essence are still wide."

"The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth I) over many centuries. The cult of the English common law was already ancient, and was revitalised by texts like Matthew Hale's The History of the Common Law of England (1713) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). But the biggest body of literature outlining a shared experience concerned the English church. It was here especially that an image of a free, Protestant people was worked out and sustained, whether in best-sellers like John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1559 and many later editions) or in heavyweight theological texts like Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593; first complete edition, 1662). Between them, these texts kept alive the interpretation long ago placed on English history by the Venerable Bede (d.735) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum that its unifying theme was providential destiny and survival in the face of overwhelming odds."

"Despite its dubious ancestry, the word "revolution" by now has a Pavlovian effect on some historians: applied to any event, it leads at once to eager expectations of radical structural change, profound discontinuity, a sweeping away of the old order. We may indeed wonder whether England has ever experienced a revolution in the extensive terms of the social scientists' definitions in the 1640s, 1688 or 1714, or even under the later impact of "Industry". How much was destroyed in the Civil War? Apart from the large extent to which royalist peers and gentry retained their estates, local studies suggest the widespread and deeply rooted survival of Anglican religious loyalties and practices, even reinvigorated by the experience of persecution."

"In any period, as we now see, we have been asked to believe that the rich are always getting richer, the poor always getting poorer, the middle class always rising, the aristocracy always about to disintegrate. The old scenario no longer convinces: it fails to identify and date the real transformations which did occur. Revisionist historians of the ancien regime in England, 1660–1832, being aware that "class" emerged as a terminology only in the last decade or so of their period, and then only as a minority dialect, looked back with incredulity and amazement on the Old Guard in the early-Stuart period, labouring to explain the English Revolution in terms of class conflict, of rising or declining classes, or the aspirations of a bourgeoisie."

"It has been traditional in British historiography to trace industrial growth and technological innovation to the sturdy virtues of bourgeois individualism, and especially to the individualism of Protestant-democratic England... [T]he example of Japan in our time refutes the necessity of any such connection, for Japan has demonstrated the possible industrial dynamism of a highly deferential society, indeed a society which has only recently masked the values and practices of a divine-right monarchy. It is perhaps possible in the changed climate of the 1980s to re-emphasise the extent to which England's commercial and industrial achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested not only on success in war, averting revolution and eliminating French competition, but also on the virtues of loyalty, diligence, discipline, subordination and obedience in the work-place, whether factory, mine or office (indeed the British economy was eventually overtaken by others which practised these virtues to a higher degree). But such practices had already been elevated to the status of social ideals within the Anglican-aristocratic nexus; and it was the military elite, not the nation of shopkeepers, which won the wars. The values of nineteenth-century industrial society owed far more to the values of the ancien regime than the Victorians were prepared to admit."

"This perception of a hierarchical order, which was an orthodoxy in England into the early nineteenth century, suddenly seemed far more persuasive once the idea had been abandoned that eighteenth-century England was a peculiarly modern society by European standards, and that it was so not least as a result of the bourgeois revolution of the 1640s."

"County studies have succeeded in proving that there was no self-sufficient impetus to rebellion (let alone revolution) within the English counties. The English Civil War, we can then see, was the result of a "domino effect" produced by successful rebellions in Scotland and Ireland."