h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A572663

This is an entry written by me on the causes of the English Civil War. I'm aware that there is already an edited entry on the English Civil War, but that only describes the causes briefly, in two paragraphs. This is a much fuller explanation.

If anyone cares, I've now updated the intro to remove the first-person references, and also linked to the article on the Civil Wars.

"He started taxing people illegally" ... he may of stretched the interpretations of his prerogative but illegally ? bit strong don't you think ?


while the marriage to 'Henrietta Maria' was arranged it was also a successful & happy one, might be worth mentioning.

"  Parliament first put Laud on trial, and found him guilty, and then decided to execute Strafford," you might want to revise this to make the message clearer.

"This confirmed most peoples fears that Charles was a secret Catholic" 'some' not 'most', if it had been 'most' it would have been a very short civil war.



not bad but I think you have made to much of people believing Charles was a Catholic, this was a view held only by extremist, the main worry was that he was soft on Catholics & that would let move into positions where they could undermine the true (in there opinion) religion of England.

you also come accros as being anti-royalist, try & maintain a balance (I had a problem the other way when writing the ECW article).

You might also want to point out that Charles was not groomed for kingship as it was expected his older brother would take the job.


My overall opinion of this article - shows Promise.

(one posibility if you work on this is to merge the two articles)

"He started taxing people illegally" ... he may of stretched the interpretations of his prerogative but illegally ? bit strong don't you think ?


while the marriage to 'Henrietta Maria' was arranged it was also a successful & happy one, might be worth mentioning.

"  Parliament first put Laud on trial, and found him guilty, and then decided to execute Strafford," you might want to revise this to make the message clearer.

"This confirmed most peoples fears that Charles was a secret Catholic" 'some' not 'most', if it had been 'most' it would have been a very short civil war.



not bad but I think you have made to much of people believing Charles was a Catholic, this was a view held only by extremist, the main worry was that he was soft on Catholics & that would let move into positions where they could undermine the true (in there opinion) religion of England.

you also come accros as being anti-royalist, try & maintain a balance (I had a problem the other way when writing the ECW article).

You might also want to point out that Charles was not groomed for kingship as it was expected his older brother would take the job.


My overall opinion of this article - shows Promise.

(one posibility if you work on this is to merge the two articles)

"He started taxing people illegally" ... he may of stretched the interpretations of his prerogative but illegally ? bit strong don't you think ?


while the marriage to 'Henrietta Maria' was arranged it was also a successful & happy one, might be worth mentioning.

"  Parliament first put Laud on trial, and found him guilty, and then decided to execute Strafford," you might want to revise this to make the message clearer.

"This confirmed most peoples fears that Charles was a secret Catholic" 'some' not 'most', if it had been 'most' it would have been a very short civil war.



not bad but I think you have made to much of people believing Charles was a Catholic, this was a view held only by extremist, the main worry was that he was soft on Catholics & that would let move into positions where they could undermine the true (in there opinion) religion of England.

you also come accros as being anti-royalist, try & maintain a balance (I had a problem the other way when writing the ECW article).

You might also want to point out that Charles was not groomed for kingship as it was expected his older brother would take the job.


My overall opinion of this article - shows Promise.

(one posibility if you work on this is to merge the two articles)

sorry about the multi-post

Taxation, HM, Laud and Strafford: I'll change these bits.

"Most people's views": I meant it confirmed the views of those who already believed he was Catholic, but I'll clarify this.

Making too much of "catholicism": Looking at it again, that does seem to be stressed a bit. I'll try to edit this out.

Anti-rolaylism: I'm not particularly anti-rolaylist; in fact, I tend to be quite sympathetic to Charles, but if you could point out some parts which seem like that, I'll take a look at them.

"Not groomed for kingship": I'll have to read up on this.

Merger: I'm not sure, as the causes article is pretty long, and often people who want information on the civil war don't want to know about the causes in such detail, but certainly a re-editing of the ECW article to include a link would be nice.


The changes I've mentioned will be carried out ASAP, but I'm having to spread my time quite thinly, so this may take a while.

-Alex.

Hi Alex Watson,

This article is very interesting. I personally like history and would love to see more historical entries in the guide.
Good work

A few quibbles...

I don't really like the first paragraph. Something more concise such as:
The events of the English Civil War have been documented elsewhere and are well know, but what were the underlying causes of this war? This article will deal with this question.
Or something like that anyway

The indented paragraph style you use is probably not appropriate for the guide. Put tags around individual paragraphs and they will space out more making the article easier on the eye and encourage more readers.

What was 'ship money'? You should explain terms such as this - possibly in footnotes.

For me I would like you to say why Charles' taxes were illegal.

Keep up the good work

Orcus

I can see this developing into a fine article, but I do agree with some of the previous posts. I'd like to know why the taxes were illegal, and I'm curious about 'ship money'.

I can also see that you are quite familiar with HTML, and are becoming familiar with GuideML as well. While you can feel free to decorate your homepage and articles not designed for inclusion in the Edited guide however you choose (within limits, of course), there are some editorial guidelines for coding articles for the Edited Guide. In this case, you've actually done more work than necessary. Your tags will be removed in the editing process, and your line breaks and spaces will be removed and replaced with paragraph tags. And the guideline for emphasizing words or phrases in the text favors italics tags over bold . This is all to make sure that Guide articles are easy to read, show some sort of uniformity of layout style, and look good in present and future skins.

This is all for future reference rather than current need. I tell you this to save you some extra work in the future, and save your editors the work of changing your tags.

First paragraph: I may indeed change this in future, because the first paragraph was written in a bit of a rush anyway, and probalby needs revising.

Paragraphs: I personally prefer indents, but apparently they will be removed in editing anyway, so I might as well get rid of them while it's still in Peer Review.

Ship money, illegal taxation: Yes, footnotes would be good for this. I forgot all about footnotes, because this article was originally converted from an essay I wrote on the causes. I'll add these in the near future, but as I mentioned earlier, I'm a bit busy right at the moment.

Colonel,

Thanks for your informative post about editing conventions. I hadn't read up on this properly, but I will be making these corrections ASAP. I'm not sure about the emphasis thing, though - I think it makes it much easier to see the words if they are in bold, but if this is going to be edited out anyway, I suppose I'll have to change it.

Can I just say "Francis Pym"

I've updated the article, changes outlined below:

* Updated intro a bit, but not certain what's wrong with it.
* Changed bits regarding fears that Charles was a Catholic, also added footnote about this.
* Added footnotes on ship money, illegal taxation, Convenanters.
* Changed formatting - no font tags, removed indentation and replaced with tags, changed bold to italic.

Again, feel free to make comments on the updated version, including anything you feel I've missed out in the update.

2nd paragraph “One of the main reasons why the civil war broke out in England in 1642 was because of Charles' lack of money”, says who? use the footnotes to give references.

3rd paragraph, again references. Also “Puritans in his Parliament” it traditional to refer to the two camps in parliament (at this time) as 'Court' & 'County'.

4th paragraph, again references. Also 'ship money: “Ship money' was a duty imposed on sea ports to pay for the upkeep of ships, although it had not been used for many years. Charles reinstated it, and also extended its use to other towns.” Charles did not revive 'ship money', it never fell out of use what he did do is extend it from costal towns to inland one's (it should also be mentioned that ship money fell within Royal Prerogative' although the extension of it may not of). “He started raising taxes” no he didn't , he sold customs monopolies, peerages & maximised such funds as he could raise under 'Royal Prerogative' (as in the case of ship money).

Covenanters, you may want to link to the excellent edited article on Coventers ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A356843 ).

5th Paragraph, again references.

6th paragraph, “made some of the public believe more strongly that Charles was Catholic”, is this comment needed or valid, we are talking a bout a very small minority of the population here.

6, 7, 8th paragraph again references.

9th paragraph, “This fuelled people's fears that the same might happen in England, and made some suspect that Charles, too, might secretly be a Catholic.” You making too much of this, Charles went to great ends to help the Protestants in the 30 years war including paying the ransom for his nephew Prince Rupert.





Parliament, Paragraphs 10 & 11;

Needs extending big time, with separate sections on both the long & short parliament & details about the activities of Key players such as 'Pym', what was the split between court & county factions, how did the county factions intimidate the court faction, why did some members of the county faction decide at the last moment to leave Parliament & fight for the King ..?

Paragraph 12, “159 votes to 148,” but 493 MP's were elected, what happened to the votes of the other 186 elected MP's?

Paragraphs 10,11 & 12, once again references.

References: if your stating a fact (especially one open o dispute) try & provide a reference, if your expressing an opinion then make it clear its an opinion.



.

2nd: I'm not sure that a reference to whoever said this is necessary. It's plain that many of the King's problems stemmed from the fact that he had very little money.

3rd, court and county: I had not seen anything about this prior to reading your post, and after looking, I have found no information about it on the Net. Could you provide a link to somewhere with info on this?

4th: The bit about the Tyranny *does* sound a little confused, I've given it a tweak, incorporating the things you've noted.

6th, 9th: I noticed this originally and tried to remove most of the references to these extremists. Clearly, I didn't review enough.

10th, 11th: I'm not sure the Short parliament requires a separate section, and I think the activities of the Long are already covered quite well. I agree that something about Pym is required, I'll get to work on this.

12th: All the sources I've seen which refer to the number of votes say that it was voted 159 to 148, and others state that it was voted in by 11 votes. Perhaps you could state where you read that there were 493 MPs at this time?

References: You seem to make a lot of these. While it clearly is improtant to state where material was acquired, I don't think it's necessary to state references for every paragraph. I will be adding a bibliography of sorts in an update soon, at any rate.

“2nd: I'm not sure that a reference to whoever said this is necessary. It's plain that many of the King's problems stemmed from the fact that he had very little money.”

(sorry that should of read third para).


“3rd, court and county: I had not seen anything about this prior to reading your post, and after looking, I have found no information about it on the Net. Could you provide a link to somewhere with info on this?”

Robert Aston: Emeritus Professor of English History in the University of East Anglia in his book 'The English Civil War, Conservatism and Revolution 1603-1649' (ISBN: 1 85799 184 2) would be a good place to start but I can list other books if you want.

“10th, 11th: I'm not sure the Short parliament requires a separate section, and I think the activities of the Long are already covered quite well. I agree that something about Pym is required, I'll get to work on this.
12th: All the sources I've seen which refer to the number of votes say that it was voted 159 to 148, and others state that it was voted in by 11 votes. Perhaps you could state where you read that there were 493 MPs at this time?”

If you went into more detail about the parliament's you would know that 493 MP's were elected but by the time the vote to whic you refer took place Pym & co had managed to disbar or scare away a good number of legally elected MP's, so only 307 MP's were left to vote. You have barely touched this area of what happened at the parliaments – when the parliaments met war was not inevitable, it was what happened here that directly led the King raising his Standard (& thus starting the war).







“Lack of money”
Your coming at this from the wrong angle (in my opinion).
James came from running Scotland without a parliament, when h came to England he considered it meddlesome and that it interfered with his divine right to rule (see quote at the top of ECW article), these beliefs were passed on to Charles which meant that Charles like his farther was reluctant to call a Parliament and so Parliament when called only voted through small taxes to ensure that it would be recalled. Inflation had bugger all to do with it.



I noticed there is still no mention of the fact that Charles was not raised to be a king, a role he was thrust into when his older brother died, I personally feel that this lack of schooling in the arts of Kingship greatly effected his ability to govern well.

Long parl, 403 MPs &c: I'm in the process of reading up on the Long Parliament, the article will be updated when I've finished this.

Charles not being raised for kingship: I plan a separate section on Charles himself. This will come under that heading.

Lack of money: Fiddled with, I have included the example from Charles' early reign of Tunnage and Poundage being granted for a year only.

Also, could you suggest a short explanation for the meanings of Court and County, to go in a footnote? I understand them, but I'm at a loss to think up a suitably short definiton.

-Alex.

Simply

Court = those MP's that were in the King pocket (held positions appointed by the king or benefited from monopolies bestowed by the king etc) & represented the views of the royal court.
County = those MP's who tried to represent the views of those from the county's (or at least the landowners).

you will need to pretty the prose up but that's it in a nutshell.

Gosh!

It always amazes me when this happens. Somebody creates an entry about something hugely obscure, posts it, and seemingly *everyone* is an expert! You're getting a lot of feedback there, Alex - if it ever gets to be a touch too much, just ask people to give you a bit of breathing space, and I'm sure they'll be happy to oblige

I, on the other hand, am certainly not an expert. But it is certainly an enthralling entry, and reads very well - like some kind of gripping novel with lots of twists in the plot, leading up to the grand climax - I loved it! Just promise me you won't lose the feel of the entry with all the updates, ok?

-Lucinda (ignorant, but somehow a scout)

I think that Lucindas way of telling me I may of been a little overbearing, what can I say the point I have made are very valid but the tone I have made some of them in was ... well I 'm recently stopped smokeing so er sorry.

I ike the concept & it will complement the existing articles but it is importent to get it right.