I want to make some points from a few recent posts on your blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I am sure your readers will (or should) be aware that I am not a Marxist of any kind, so obviously, I am starting from a very different position. The rise of 'revisionism' in the early to mid-1970s was not, in my view, a response to a range of 'Conservative' political impulses. Its criticisms of Whig and Marxist explanations of the origins of the events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles arose from the weaknesses of the arguments of Tawney, Stone, Hill and others over the 'rise of the gentry': 'revisionism's' advocates were from a variety of political standpoints - Russell was then a Labour Party supporter before becoming a Liberal Democrat: John Morrill was not a Conservative and, in the early-1980s, was a Social Democratic Party member: Kevin Sharpe was no Conservative either nor, of course, was an American like Mark Kishlansky. But one of the consequences of this shift in the period's historiography was the divorce between political and religious history on the one hand and economic and social history on the other.
It persists if one, for example, reads Henry Reece's recent
book on the fall of the Protectorate and the demise of the Rump in the period
from 1658 to 1660. There is not much trace of it either in the recent studies
of Oliver Cromwell's life. John Walter had some very important comments on this
subject to make in the Huntington Library Quarterly in 2015. Nonetheless, the
interaction between economic and social developments and political and
religious history in the British Isles under the Stuarts cannot, in my opinion,
be entirely neglected. These factors interact without the former determining
the latter, as some believe.
I would also like to make two further caveats. London, which
appears to be the major focus for radical activities, was not England, and
historians who focus on the capital seem largely oblivious to the strength of
the bonds between landowners and their tenants, neighbours and allies. There
were complex local arrangements for dealing with bargaining over complaints
from people below the landed elites for resolving problems in local and county
communities, which do not appear to have been appreciated very much since the
time of Peter Laslett and the CAMPOP group. Despite the late Lawrence Stone's
claims, there is a case to be made that the position of the landed
'aristocracy' strengthened markedly in the early to middle of the seventeenth century.
This is one of the factors that rendered the idea of a 'revolution' or, if one
prefers, a 'bourgeois revolution' untenable. A 'great uprising, 'un grand
soulevement', failed.
