The World and Politics of Viscount Falkland
One man's tragic stand against the outbreak of the English Civil War.
One of the rarer invocations of historical figures by conservatives is of Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland (c.1610-1643). Invariably, his mention concerns the only quote for which he is remembered: “where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” Divorced from its context, it appears a conservative aphorism on questions of change, perhaps more specifically on constitutional or institutional matters. Yet Falkland was no explicit political or philosophical conservative, his life preceding both the Enlightenment and the Glorious Revolution, nor does he count as a source of older wisdom from eras up to the Renaissance. As such, he makes for a rather insular figure in the timeline of the conservative tradition. Should this be the case? As Royalists and Parliamentarians radicalised against one another and England descended into civil war, Falkland’s tragic stand for a politics of moderation and reconciliation deserves revisiting, if only to imagine briefly what might have been.
Before being elected to the Short and Long Parliaments in 1640, he had spent much of the 1630s in intellectual surroundings. From his manor at Great Tew, Oxfordshire, he fostered a gathering of clerics, scholars, poets and other literary men, many from the nearby University of Oxford. There they spent their days studying and writing, their evenings enjoying Falkland’s hospitality and the sophisticated conversation of their peers. Edward Hyde, later 1st Earl of Clarendon and responsible for much of Falkland’s characterisation in historical accounts, described the Great Tew Circle as “a college in a purer air, a university bound in a lesser volume,” its conviviality opposed to the growing tensions of Oxford or London. Indeed, Great Tew was noted for its intellectual openness, interest in European humanists and use of reason in religious thinking. Their approach was one of high-minded toleration as Puritanism and High-Church Laudianism polarised against each other in the country beyond.
Once in Parliament, Falkland’s moderate streak continued. He supported the trial and execution of the authoritarian royal adviser Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, as well as curbing the secular power of the clergy and the ritual excesses of Laudianism. However, he opposed the abolition of bishops altogether amidst debates over the ‘Root and Branch’ reform petition, in which he probably made his most enduring contribution. This was because he believed the Triennial Act of 1640, designed to force King Charles I to convene Parliament once every three years in defiance of his long personal rule, would sufficiently control the bishops’ influence over secular affairs. In fact, given their powerful position in a then significantly smaller House of Lords and their other encroachments of the period, his declaration about change did possess a constitutional character. Other members of the Great Tew Circle in Parliament also worked towards conciliation, although Falkland for a time went further than others like Hyde in conceding exclusion of the bishops from the Lords as a bearable cost of preserving the Anglican hierarchy. However, as parliamentary opposition support for the Root and Branch Bill intensified and radicalised in late 1641, moderates including Falkland and Hyde were alienated from the leadership.
At the start of 1642, Falkland was offered the post of Secretary of State, which he accepted at Hyde’s urging. Thereafter, however reluctantly, he was committed to the Royalists as Charles’s attempted arrest of the Five Members dramatically catalysed England towards civil war. Even through the summer of 1642, as both sides armed themselves for war, Falkland earnestly attempted to seek peace and reconciliation. He still carried overtures of peace to Parliament, with the king’s promise of a reformation of the Church of England, after the latter had raised the royal standard at Nottingham. As subsequent events show, this was in vain; Falkland was present with the king at the Battle of Edgehill on 23rd October 1842. Hyde, writing much later as Earl of Clarendon, relays how the end of peace overwhelmed Falkland with despair and ultimately destroyed him from within. The affable personality and impeccable presentation that characterised his years in the company of intellectuals at Great Tew evaporated with the conditions in which he had thrived and the ideals which had gone unheeded by those now at war. He saw only misery in either side prevailing with such an enmity towards compromise with the other’s institutions, equally in the continuation of civil war. Additionally, his intellectuality was ill-suited to high-level politics, even less to being a wartime politician. At the First Battle of Newbury on 20th September 1643, he found a way out of his torment. Riding alone at a gap in a hedge controlled by the enemy’s fire, so ended his short life. Writers after the Restoration in 1660, including Clarendon, attempted to elevate his death into a symbolic martyrdom for political purposes, but this was not so. Despite Clarendon’s likely embellishments to understandings of his life, he was clearly a broken man at the end, without any further determination.
Although his life and politics are intriguing by themselves, does he belong within the conservative tradition? As indicated in the introduction, his life preceded the conservative label by two centuries, the first of Edmund Burke’s writings by well over a century and the first emergence of the Whig-Tory divide by generations. To write of a ‘left’ or ‘right’ in this period, although tempting at times, would be deeply anachronistic. Still, in the context of Falkland’s time and the society in which he found himself, there is a case for observing recognisably conservative characteristics in his thought and actions. He stood for moderate change, religious toleration and protecting as much as practicable core institutions. This was eminently admirable at a time when so many instead gave themselves to mindless dogmatisms, which demanded aggrieving others in acts of radical destruction and eventually violence as the only means of satisfying their own aims. Falkland was not alone in his beliefs in Parliament, but grew increasingly isolated as the impatience of both sides with each other cascaded towards war. He ultimately sided with the monarchy because he could not countenance the Parliamentarians’ demands for revolutionary changes to church and state, but at the same time did not wish to see Parliament subjugated by the monarch’s claimed divine right to rule. His insularity within the conservative tradition is insoluble, but he does not deserve to be forgotten or reduced to a single quote. A statue of him sculpted in 1845 still stands today in St Stephen’s Hall in the Palace of Westminster, a fitting legacy and perhaps yet a silent lesson, or warning, from history.
Bibliographical Notes
For a general introductory biography of Falkland, which Wikipedia unsubtly plagiarises in the name of public domain as the basis for its entry on him, see the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
For a survey of the Great Tew Circle and the interactions of its key members, see: Mendle, Michael. “The Convivium Philosophicum and the Civil War: A Country House and Its Politics.” Studies in the History of Art 25 (1989): 289-97.
For post-Restoration interpretations of Falkland and his death, see: Poulter, William. “Post-Mortem by Print: Reflections on the Death of Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland.” Faculty of History, University of Oxford. Nov 30, 2023.
For further insights on Clarendon’s characterisation of Falkland, see: Wilson, Gayle Edward. “Clarendon’s Hamlet: The “Character” of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland.” CLA Journal 14, no. 2 (1970): 171-77.