AQA A-Level History — Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy 1603–1702: exam questions, mark schemes & model answers

Question 130 marksAssess how convincing· AQA A-Level History Paper 1 Section A (style)

Extract A — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that the Civil War was caused above all by Charles I's own conduct.

The road to civil war was paved by the personality and choices of one man. Charles I governed for eleven years without Parliament after 1629, financing his rule through expedients such as the extension of Ship Money to inland counties, a levy that men of property regarded as taxation without consent. His insistence on the divine right of kings left no room for compromise, and his attempt to arrest the Five Members in January 1642 destroyed what little trust remained. Had Charles possessed his father's pragmatism, the constitutional tensions of the 1630s need never have hardened into armed conflict. It was not the institutions of England that failed but the judgement of the king who sat at their head, a ruler temperamentally incapable of the give and take on which the unwritten constitution depended.

Extract B — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that religious division was the decisive cause.

To explain the descent into war chiefly through one king's failings is to mistake the symptom for the disease. The deepest fault line in early Stuart England was religious. The Laudian reforms of the 1630s, with their altar rails, ceremony and apparent drift towards Rome, convinced a Puritan-minded political nation that a popish conspiracy threatened the Protestant settlement. When the attempt to impose a new Prayer Book provoked rebellion in Scotland in 1637, it was confessional loyalty, not constitutional principle, that armed the Covenanters. Fear of Catholicism, inflamed by the queen's faith and by the Irish rising of 1641, supplied the emotional charge that turned grievance into mobilisation. Englishmen took up arms less to defend a theory of government than to defend, or to purify, their Church.

Extract C — written for this exercise in the style of a historian arguing that long-term structural problems made conflict likely whoever reigned.

The breakdown of 1642 had roots far deeper than the reign of Charles I or the quarrels of the Church. The early Stuart monarchy inherited a structural weakness: a crown whose ordinary revenues had not kept pace with inflation, leaving every king dependent on parliamentary supply yet jealous of parliamentary encroachment. The very act of governing three kingdoms with divergent religious and political cultures created strains that no individual could master. Add to this the rising confidence of a propertied gentry conscious of their rights at common law, and the result was a system primed for crisis. Personalities and religion lit the fuse, but the explosive had been accumulating for decades. Conflict of some kind was the probable outcome of tensions that any Stuart ruler would have struggled to contain.

Question: Using your understanding of the historical context, assess how convincing the arguments in these three extracts are in relation to the causes of the English Civil War. [30 marks]

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