Arguments about school curriculum are never innocent. They
are not disputes over which dates children should memorise or which
personalities they should recognise. They are battles over historical
consciousness, over what forms of explanation will be available to the next
generation, and which will be foreclosed before they have even begun to think
historically. The question of whether the English Revolution should occupy a
central place in the curriculum is therefore not a matter of pedagogical taste.
It is an ideological struggle, fought through the medium of history.
One should always “study the historian before you begin to
study the facts,” as E.H. Carr insisted. This is not a methodological nicety.
It is the whole method. Every curriculum decision is a decision about which
historians and therefore which
frameworks will be smuggled into the
minds of students under the guise of “content.” To ask whether the English
Revolution should be taught is to ask which conception of history will be
taught: one grounded in class conflict and social transformation, or one that
dissolves the seventeenth century into contingency, religion, witchcraft and
the proto‑institutions beloved of conservative commentators.
Paul Lay is not an exception; he reflects a wider
ideological trend. When he mentions historians like Conrad Russell, Kevin
Sharpe, John Adamson, and Mark Kishlansky, he's aligning with the revisionist
school that shaped scholarly debates on the English Revolution from the 1970s
to the 1990s. These revisionists didn't just propose new ideas; they aimed to
systematically depoliticise the mid-17th-century crisis.
Their shared method was simple: dissolve the revolution into
a series of accidents. Replace class antagonism with elite mismanagement.
Replace structural conflict with breakdown of consensus. Replace social
transformation with muddle. Conrad Russell’s insistence that England in 1640
possessed no coherent “opposition,” only a shifting cast of individuals with
local grievances, is the purest expression of this method. If there was no
bourgeoisie with distinct interests, no differentiation within the gentry between
commercial and feudal property forms, no ideological current that can be called
radical in a sociological sense, then there was by definition no revolution.
There were only “British Civil Wars,” a phrase whose chief virtue is that it
forecloses the question of social transformation before it can be asked.
This is why Lay’s emphasis on “religion and witchcraft” as
the prime motive of people’s actions is not merely eccentric but diagnostic. It
reveals the underlying historiographical commitment. Religion becomes, in this
framework, not the idiom through which social antagonisms were expressed, as
Christopher Hill, Brian Manning, Ann Hughes and Ann Talbot all argued, but a
free‑floating cause, sufficient unto itself. Hill’s entire oeuvre was devoted
to showing that Puritanism, millenarianism, and the proliferation of sects were
the language in which deeper conflicts over property, authority, and emerging
capitalist relations found expression. Strip class content from the analysis
and religion ceases to be an idiom and becomes an eccentricity. Witchcraft
becomes a “prime motive.” The revolution becomes a costume drama.
Niall Ferguson calling David Cameron “a new Winston
Churchill” is not a digression but a revelation. It exposes the ideological
continuity between revisionist historiography and contemporary conservative
myth‑making. A historiography that empties the 1640s of social conflict is
perfectly compatible with one that rehabilitates imperial figures for modern
consumption. Both operate by detaching political events from the class
relations that produced them. What remains is a pageant of great men,
contingency and national destiny precisely the Whig interpretation Lay claims
to have buried, even as his own account quietly resurrects it.
But to grasp the full stakes of the curriculum debate, one
must restore the concrete social texture that revisionism worked so hard to
erase. The English Revolution is not reducible to the execution of Charles I or
the emergence of the Bank of England. It is the first modern confrontation
between property and democracy, between popular mobilisation and elite
containment, between the possibility of radical transformation and the reality
of bourgeois settlement.
To truly understand the
English Revolution, one must study The Putney Debates (1647), where soldiers
and agitators challenged the grandees on issues like franchise, property, and
political rights. This was the first open debate on whether political rights
should be linked to property ownership. The Leveller stance advocating universal
political rights was not merely idealistic; it reflected the views of a
specific class within the New Model Army. The Levellers expressed their radical
democratic ideas through pamphlets, petitions, and organised networks. They
were not just fringe pamphleteers but represented the political consciousness
of a social group shaped by war and aggravated by class conflict.
The Diggers at St George’s
Hill ran a short experiment in agrarian communism that revealed the crisis's
revolutionary potential. Gerrard Winstanley’s assertion that the earth was “a
common treasury for all” was more than just mystical rhetoric; it directly
challenged existing property laws. The New Model Army's political development
was a complex ideological process shaped by its social composition, wartime
experiences, and the tension between rank-and-file mobilisation and gentry
leadership. The Army was not only a military force but also a significant
political actor. The parliamentary gentry feared popular mobilisation, anxiety
evident from 1647 onward, which led to the suppression of radicalism and the
reestablishment of a bourgeois order that limited the forces needed to defeat
the king. The tragedy of the revolution lies in this dialectic: the mobilisation
that enabled victory also made radical change possible and thus unacceptable to
the gentry.
These are not colourful footnotes. They are the revolution.
Without them, the period becomes exactly what Lay’s curriculum encourages: an
atmospheric spectacle with witchcraft at the beginning and the Bank of England
at the end. The political stakes are clear. A curriculum built on revisionist
foundations teaches students that elites, accidents, and institutions make
history. A curriculum that restores the revolution teaches that history is made
by class conflict, collective mobilisation and struggles over property and
power. The choice between these frameworks is not pedagogical but ideological.
There is a false choice between antiquarian indifference and
conservative appropriation. It correctly identifies that the argument over
Lay’s curriculum is really an argument over whether British schoolchildren will
encounter the English Revolution as a social upheaval with causes that can be
analysed, or as a depoliticised spectacle whose radical content has been
carefully excised. Restoring the revolution to the curriculum restores the
possibility that students might understand how a revolutionary crisis can
simultaneously overthrow a monarchy and produce a bourgeois settlement, and why
that paradox remains central to understanding the modern world.
The fight over the curriculum is therefore a fight over
historical consciousness itself. It is a fight over whether students will learn
that revolutions are possible, that class antagonisms shape history, and that
radical demands for democracy and equality have deep roots in the English past.
It is a fight over whether the seventeenth century will be taught as a living
history of struggle or as a sanitised prelude to the institutions of modern
capitalism. In short, it is a fight over whether the English Revolution will
be remembered as a revolution at all.
