Sunday 18 February 2018

Comment by Chris Thompson on Leanda de Lisle's White King

 I have been reading your review of Leanda de Lisle's book on your blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I would agree that it is not a particularly good book and that its attempt to defend Charles I's rule is by no means convincing. But I do not think that it can be described as a "revisionist" work partly because "revisionism" in early modern British history has been dead since c.1990.


Its heyday lasted from c.1976 until the end of the following decade. Whig or whiggish history had effectively perished by the time of the Second World War and the Marxist history of Christopher Hill and his allies like Brian Manning was never as predominant as you, I suspect, might have wished it to have been. It was certainly more influential in the 1950s and 1960s but Conrad Russell's assault in the mid-1970s terminated its influence.