"A Trumpet of Sedition"

Interview With Christopher Hill

2012-02-11T05:58:00.000-08:00

Conversations with Historians - Christopher Hill BBC Radio 4 Broadcast 14 October 1991
Presenter: John Miller

Correspondence On Speeches Of Oliver Cromwell, 1644-1658 (1901) [Paperback] , Charles L. Stainer (Editor)

2012-01-30T07:58:00.000-08:00

Chris Thompson Wrote Oliver Cromwell's early years before 1640 have recently been illuminated by the work of Andrew Barclay in his "Electing Cromwell. The Making of a Politician", published by Pickering and Chatto in February, 2011. John Morrill review it enthusiastically in the May, 2011 edition of History Today.

Christopher Thompson´s blog can be found at http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.com/

Speeches Of Oliver Cromwell, 1644-1658 (1901) [Paperback] , Charles L. Stainer (Editor)

2012-01-27T21:16:00.000-08:00

It is an open fact that very little of Cromwell´s early life is known about and hardly anything is down on paper. Cromwell´s political activity spans the years 1629 to 1658, From 1629-1644 historical material is very scarce, which is why Stainer begins his collected works at the year 1644,

Stainer correctly warns his readers and our readers it must be said "of how much must be missing", Despite the knowledge that Cromwell did take part in constitutional debates that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War next to nothing survives. Given this problem Stainer felt it was legitimate to add what he calls " substance " to a large number of speeches. which means to fill in the blanks of Cromwell´s life with the words of other people.My feelings on this matter is that the words of others should be at the back of a book with an explanation as to who said them and how accurate they are.

Stainer justified adding them because in his words they "give greater continuity to the book, they enable us to form a more general estimate of Cromwell's speech-making, and to realise the poverty of our historical records". Whether we have the actual texts of these so called speeches is for the new collection of historians working with John Morrill to find out. After all a collection of speeches should be a accurate historical account and not a just a literary exercise.

Take for instance Stainer´s use of Bulstrode Whitlockes writings The Lord General's discourse with Lord Whitelocke, urging him to accept the Swedish Embassy, Sept. 13,1653.

Whitdocke. I was to attend your Excellency, but missed of you.

Cromwell. I knew not of it ; you are always welcome to me. I hope you have considered the proposal I made to you, and are willing to serve the Commonwealth.

Whitlocke. I have fully considered it ; and with humble thanks acknowledge the honour intended me, and am most willing to serve your Excellency and the Commonwealth ; but in this particular I humbly beg your excuse. I have endeavoured to satisfy my own judgement and my nearest relations, but can do neither,nor gain a consent ; and I should be very unworthy and ungrateful to go against it.

It would appear that this conversation was recorded by Whitlocke. Stainer should have taken more care in using this record. Whitlocke was hardly an objective figure and was very partisan when it comes to Cromwell. Stainer should have warned his audience as to the reliability of such a subjective piece of writing.

Other than the above mentioned criticism Strainer's collected speeches he seems to have held a fairly disciplined and principle editorial approach to the text of Cromwell´s speeches and writings. He has only altered the text when no proper sense can possibly be made, or "where the sentences are so confused as to make restoration impossible". The punctuation is mostly Stainer´s. I am unaware if Stainer had help on this volume perhaps Professor Morrill´s team will tell us. Stainer has corrected the grammar but not being a expert on 17th century or that matter 21st century grammar someone with a knowledge of both will need to comment on Stainer´s accuracy.

One major problem confronting the OUP [Oxford University Press] Team and John Morrill in particular is how they approach the the Putney Debates. Stainer whom it would seem had substantial access to the Clarke Papers only choose to relay only a small part of the debates and therefore manged to reduce the dramatic scenes at Putney and Saffron Walden to little more than a Cromwell led debating society. My feelings as regards the OUP¨will be that the most important elements of the Putney debates must be produced in full regardless of whether Cromwell was speaking or not. After all the debates at Putney involved the question of profound importance not only to people of the 17th century but resonate even today.Discussions over private property, social inequality and the right to democracy are still contemporary issues.

Morrill´s OUP team will have to to make important decisions on whether the texts used by previous editions of collected works are accurate and were they written at the time or much afterwards. Stainer explains the problem he had and no doubt the Oxford team will have the same problems "it is quite astonishing to find so much diversity when one of the texts appears to be fairly complete and grammatical. The 'only explanation that can be suggested is, that these versions were not taken down at the time of the speech, but are founded on original reports sufficiently difficult to decipher to permit of such variations". Morrill has already warned that while they aim to achieve the highest academic standard in their work grey areas as regards the voracity of certain of Cromwell´s speech will always exist.

Stainer makes the point well on Cromwell´speech on May 6th, 1647.' he says that this is "beyond doubt, a translation, the true original of which is now lost to us ; consequently we have no means of judging whether the translation is accurate or the text complete. We can only form the same opinion of Speeches 4-8, for the Worcester College MS. N. 12 (formerly MS. Ixvii), from which they are copied, is carefully written, and is in fact a collection, very similar to Clarke MS. 41, from which Speech 3 is taken. Frequent ' blanks ' in the sentences, and in some cases on whole pages, show that the translator's task was no easy one, and yet it is important to observe that the result is a text very similar to that in several of our other MSSAyscough, 6125, 'blanks for 2 lynes,' means that the writer was unable to translate the original before him. That he did copy is evident, as the MS. is a collection, though at present we have no other authority for the full text of this speech".

Stainer also asks whether we can prove that these speeches were originally taken in shorthand or not. Given the fact that well over 100 years have past since Stainer made his collected speeches we can safely say that the Oxford team has a far better knowledge of not only type of shorthand used but our knowledge of the type of printers used at the time will greatly increase our understanding and accuracy of these speeches

Stainer encountered other problems which were of a more general character.It is no doubt that the Oxford team will have to tidy up numerous speeches of Cromwell. Stainer believes that the significant repetition of sentences throughout these speeches seems "to show that a system of relays of writers may have been resorted to". What should be taken into consideration was that Cromwell was not a slow speaker and spoke for long periods so it should be borne in mind that this gives his recorders ample time for inaccurate shorthand. also given the length of some speeches if these were written down some time after the speech then the possibilities for inaccuracies and outright distortions are extremely possible. Stainer believes that "some such system may have been used whereby writers picked each other up by agreement. The task of assembling the ' notes ' would then be comparatively easy, if everything went well ; but it must be noted that if the writers were not in full agreement or got confused, the task of assembling their notes would be a very difficult one". If the second writer began before his time long sentences would overlap, and if these were slightly different both might be introduced into the text. If he did not begin in time, sentences would be lost; and in addition, the repetition-sentence being absent, it would become easy to displace whole paragraphs. Much would then depend on memory, and further delay would be caused by the necessity of translating the notes, if taken in shorthand, and writing out a correct version. As to the shorthand system employed, it may have been either Mr. Shelton's or Mr. Biche's ; both are good, though somewhat clumsy, and both require extreme accuracy. Finally, we must not forget the possibility that the rooms in which his Highness spoke were inconveniently crowded, and very hot, so that it was not altogether easy to write.Thus in Speech 17 p. 87) we read: 'and therefore seeing you sit here somewhat uneasy by reason of the scantiness of the room and the heat of the weather, I shall contract myself with respect to that;' and again in Speech 34 (p. 211), Cromwell refers to the audience ' as certainly not being able long to bear that condition and heat that you are in.' Whilst in the case of some speeches it would seem as though no arrangements at all had been made to report his Highness, and that the versions are made up from hearsay".

One strange characteristic of Stainer was to refer Cromwell as his "Highness". I am not sure whether he is being sarcastic or that he believed that Cromwell was all but king in name seems out of place in scholarly edition.

Stainer is probably correct when he says "on the whole, the general conclusion must be that the original reports of these speeches are missing, that many circumstances doubtless conspired to make them difficult to decipher, and that there is no very great reason to suppose that our translations or copies of them are necessarily accurate". Hopefully the OUP team can develop Stainer´s work and take it to a much higher level and do justice to Cromwell.

Notes

1 One word of warning as to the download version of The Collected Works of Oliver Cromwell ed C L Stainer is that it is covered in grammatical errors and therefore the reader would be better off with a hardback book version.

2 C L Stainer used the transcripts of Clarke Paper especially on Putney Debates

3 From Wikipedia Memorials of the English affairs from the beginning of the reign of Charles I …, published 1682 and reprinted. According to the author of Whitelocke's biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition "[it is] a work which has obtained greater authority than it deserves, being largely a compilation from various sources, composed after the events and abounding in errors".

17th Century Beauty

2012-01-22T07:24:00.000-08:00

This very good article can be found at http://hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.com/2012/01/17th-century-beauty.

Why We Need A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell

2012-01-19T15:43:00.000-08:00

Despite being such a major historical figure the collected writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell are certainly the most inaccurate and some contain outright falsifications. To rectify this John Morrill and his team of historians and researchers have been given a Leverhulme Trust funded research grant of £204,337. On the surface this may seem a large amount of money but given the fact that Leverhulme also gave a quarter of a million pounds grant to study homing pigeons it tends to put Morrill´s grant in some sort of perspective.

Morrill will have a team of eight editors chosen by Oxford University Press to assemble a five volume edition of Oliver Cromwell’s collected writings and speeches. It is clear that this edition will give us a more concrete and precise appreciation of OIiver Cromwell. It remains to be seen if this is a fundamental reappraisal of “Our Chief of Men”, but it is clear that this is a long overdue project.

Among the scholars working alongside Morrill are Tim Wales who will be a Senior Research Associate. He will assist John Morrill and Andrew Barclay with volume 1 (1599-1649). Elaine Murphy will be a Research Associate. She will work with Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jason Peacey with volume 2 (1649-1653). Finally Joel Halcomb another Research Associate will be assisting David Smith and Patrick Little with volume 3 (1654-1658) All three will be assisting with the oversight of volumes 4 and 5, co-edited by John Morrill, Peter Gaunt, and Laura Lunger Knoppers.

It is clear that the team assembled is of a high academic calibre. Eight editors have been appointed and have signed contracts with OUP: Andrew Barclay, Peter Gaunt, Laura Knoppers, Patrick Little, John Morrill, Micheál Ó Siochrú, Jason Peacey, and Davis Smith. According to the University of Cambridge "all of them have worked on Cromwell’s life or thought and all have a detailed understanding of the sources for the project. An advisory board of further specialists in Cromwell and/or the editing of early modern texts has been created, including Martyn Bennett, Jan Broadway, Ann Hughes, Pádraig Lenihan, and Blair Worden".

The University of Cambridge website explains "The mission statement of the Editorial Board has been to record all surviving evidence of ‘Cromwell’s voice’. This means including all the speeches in Stainer’s edition; all the letters in Abbott’s edition for which there is any evidence of Cromwell’s authorial hand and many discovered since 1948; and contextualized editions of William Clarke’s contemporary notes of Cromwell’s contributions to the Army Debates of 1647 (their provenance recently re-examined), and (after much discussion and experimentation) versions of Cromwell’s contributions to parliamentary debates in the diaries of the early 1640s (often in very different summary form). With respect to most post-1643 letters and speeches which survive not as originals but in multiple early copies, using recent advances in book and print culture history, it is often possible to establish which of several printers of a letter was being used by Parliament or Protectorate to publish. This, as well as internal evidence, normally allows the ‘best’ text to be established). We have conducted trials to establish the feasibility of tracking down ‘lost’ documents. Where there are major discrepancies between versions and no way of seeing which is the more ‘reliable’, we have permission from OUP to publish both (e.g. the speech to the Nominated Assembly on 4 July 1653). Otherwise, we will establish the best text using advanced source criticism, and will note significant alternatives in footnotes".

Having spent a not insignificant amount of time studying Oliver Cromwell and more importantly his role in the English revolution I do not believe it is necessary to justify the amount attention given over to him. He is certainly " is one of the most studied of Englishmen ". If Morrill´s project increases interest in Cromwell more the better but the project has a deeper and more important role to play.

When I first started to study the English Civil War it was noticeable even to my limited knowledge of the writings of Cromwell that something was awry. The more I read the clearer it became that every single collection of his speeches and writings were defective or worse still wholly inaccurate. Mine is a small frustration compared to the legions of historians who have worked on Cromwell.

What are the problems with the older editions of Cromwell's words. It is clear that it will be a huge task to find out . How best to"represent Cromwell's voice" is a big responsibility. Another problem is how to deal with several copies of the same Cromwell speech or what do when earlier editors sneakily and irresponsibly corrected Cromwell's words.

A major problem is that recent and past historians have relied on these editions and have most of the time uncritically quotied them without questioning the accuracy of Cromwell´s words or deeds. One such example of this is the biography of Oliver Cromwell by Graham Goodlad. This book which seems primarily aimed at students again quotes Cromwell without any warning of to the accuracy of the quote. Over the last 25 years Cromwell´s name has been seen in more than one hundred titles in the British History Online Database. All of these titles have relied on out of date and inaccurate editions.

Lets take the most well known and probably the most important collection of Cromwell´s speeches and writings done by Thomas Carlyle’s in 1845. Carlyle´s was certainly a major accomplishment and remained in print for over a hundred years. But as John Morrill recently said at the Barry Coward memorial Lecture even a writer of Carlyle´s calibre spent next to no time in editing the speeches or writings. But perhaps the most important mistake was that he never compared different versions of the same letter or speech. He never enquired as to whether the recording of the speech or writing was the best. He took the easiest way out and just "tidied up the spelling and punctuation and printed it"

At the start of the 20th century the noted scholar Mrs S.C.Lomas, decided to tidy up Carlyle’s edition. According to Morrill this improved the quality of the text Carlyle had chosen, "but comparison of variant texts was a low priority, and the use of source criticism to determine ‘best’ readings was, to put it politely, rudimentary".

It would be fair to assume that Morrill understands that his research does not take place in either a historical or political vacuum. Cromwell was and still is a controversial figure. Every century historians have interpreted a Cromwell that fits in with the politics of their age.Morrill dew attention to one such historian in the 20th century, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, a Harvard historian who spent most of his career compiling and editing a collection of Cromwell's letters and speeches.

These volumes were published between 1937 and 1947. According to Morrill Cromwell was described by Abbott as “a proto-fascist”. Suffice to say Morrill had no time for his extreme right wing political assessment or for Abbott’s editorial approach. In a recent lecture he described Abbott´s defects. It is clear that Abbott spent a considerable time researching his prey. In 1929 he published a ‘Bibliography of Oliver Cromwell’ Between period 1937 and 1947 he published an edition of Cromwell’s recorded words in four large volumes. But as Morrill says "it is almost impossible to use this edition because there is neither a list of contents nor running heads to guide the reader to what s/he wants; its running commentary is distorted by Abbott’s increasing obsession to show that Cromwell prefigured the great dictators of the 1940s"

What are the other Challenges Facing a New Edition

Even a cursory look at the problems faced by the editors it is clear that the tasks facing the historians working on each volume will be very different. John Morrill and Andrew Barclay who are working on the period up to 1649 face mainly two major problems. According to Cambridge University "Many of Cromwell’s early letters often only exist in later copies and their transmission histories are, where known, sometimes not encouraging. We have to try to find the originals of documents whose existence is attested down to the 19th or 20th century and then lost. And we have the problem of what to do with the brief summaries of Cromwell’s speeches which he delivered as a back-bencher to the Long Parliament, especially in the years 1640-1642, and what to do about the better-recorded Army Debates of 1647 (including the Putney Debates) without reproducing the whole of the Debates. For the period 1649-1653 the main problem is the non-survival of Cromwell’s official campaign-letters from Ireland and Scotland except in multiple printed form with often as many as seven or eight versions appearing in a series of pamphlets and newspapers. From the moment Cromwell became Lord Protector in December 1653, a new problem arises: what to do about letters that he signed but did not write – the hundreds of letters which do not speak in his ‘voice’. Abbott in his edition tried to be comprehensive but then, suddenly, in 1657, just stopped. Registers of letters which Abbott had slavishly copied out up to a certain date are then abandoned. We intend to make more informed and defensible decisions about the limits of what to include".

As Morrill has already said one of the major criticism of Carlyle is that his method of correcting text tuned out in some cases to rewrite what Cromwell had actual written or said. Also Lomas and Abbott both corrected text and therefore changed some things out of recognition and in extreme cases affected the meaning of a passage. This meant instead of an accurate depiction of what Cromwell actually said we get a bastardised version which becomes unusable.

Perhaps the most famous saying of Cromwell is open to two wildly different interpretations. Written to the county committee of Suffolk in September 1643 demanding that "they abandon their preconceptions of what type of person is needed for the New Model Army". In other words their deeds mattered more than their social standing: ‘I had rather a plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a Gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a Gentleman who is so indeed’.

Deeds first, social standing afterwards. But if you take another version of Cromwell´s letter at face value then a much more radical Cromwell appears if what Cromwell did in fact write: "I honour a Gentleman who is so in deed’ In this quote Cromwell is only after Gentlemen that can not only talk the talk but walk the walk. According to Nick Poyntz "all existing versions print the first of these versions. But there is another version where ‘in deed’ are two words not one" .

Cromwell In Ireland

Perhaps the most difficult work of the team will probably be in regards to Cromwell´s action in Ireland.Certainly the most controversial part of Cromwell’s life. Not so much what he wrote or said but what he did and did not do.

Morrill explained that even today Cromwell’s involvement and the extent of civilian casualties is still open to debate. This of course is like all of Cromwell’s actions open to different interpretations again depending on your political and to some extent historical persuasion. The sack of Drogheda in September 1649 by parliamentary forces is one such action.

In his article on Cromwell Nick Poyntz makes the point that this oft-quoted phrase justified his actions : “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret”. He questions whether these are Cromwell’s words as no original letter survives. He also makes the point as does Morrill that parliament had a habit of tidying up speeches and letters of Cromwell. Again to what extent his words are accurate is one of the tasks of the project. It must be said that this is not an envious one.

Morrill recently made the distinction between civilians killed in the heat of battle as opposed to in cold blood.29 September 1649 two letters from Cromwell sack of Drogheda were read in the Parliament. “Our men getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the Sword; and indeed being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in Arms in the Town, and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men, divers of the Officers and Soldiers being fled over the Bridge into the other part of the Town, where about One hundred of them possessed St. Peters Church Steeple, some the West Gate, and others, a round strong Tower next the Gate, called St. Sundays: These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused; whereupon I ordered the Steeple of St. Peters Church to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames, God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn; the next day the other two Towers were summoned, in one of which was about six or seven score, but they refused to yield themselves; and we knowing that hunger must compel them, set onely good Guards to secure them from running away, until their stomacks were come down: from one of the said Towers, notwithstanding their condition, they killed and wounded some of our men; when they submitted, their Officers were knockt on the head, and every tenth man of the Soldiers killed, and the rest Shipped for the Barbadoes; the Soldiers in the other Town were all spared, as to their lives onely, and Shipped likewise for the Barbadoes. I am persuaded that this is a righteous Judgement of God upon these Barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to preventthe effusion of blood for the future”.As Morrill pointed out Cromwell made a list officers and soldiers killed “Two thousand Five hundred-Foot Soldiers, besides Staff-Officers, Chyrurgeons, &c. and many Inhabitants”. So it is clear that inhabitants were killed.

The team will have to negotiate what is both a political & historical minefield of differing opinions on Cromwell´s campaign in Ireland. One example being Philip Mckeiver in his book A New History of Oliver Cromwell´s Irish Campaign is an aggressive defence of Cromwell´s actions at one point denying any massacres happened at Drogheda or Wexford.Having said that his book is worth reading as it does expose a number of myths and outright lies as regards Cromwell´s actions. Peter Reese in his book the Life of General George Monck: For King and Cromwell tends to go well overboard when he describes the Irish rebels fighting Cromwell as "terrorists".

On the other side of the debate is Micheál Ó Siochrú whose book I must admit have not read yet but the title Gods Executioner tends to give you a bit of a flavour as to his historical persuasion. Lets hope his work on the new editions shows a little more objectivity and follows the advice of the historian E H Carr who argued that it was very dangerous to judge people in different times according to the moral values of his or her time. Carr's also warned that historians "should not act as judges".

Perhaps his most important advice was that you should "Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude's, goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed, if, standing Sir George Clark on his head, I were to call history "a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts", my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to think, than the original dictum".

What other problems as regards Ireland will the team face. One is finding different Versions of the Same Speech. In Many previous versions of Cromwell´s speeches the historian or writer have failed to inform his readership why they chose to publish version they did. Another cardinal sin was to produce "hybrid versions" which historians have found entirely useless for historical research.

Cambridge University website gives us one example of this " on 4 December the Irish Catholic Bishops and other leading clergy met at one of Ireland’s holiest sites, the ruined abbey at Clonmacnoise, on a hillside overlooking the Shannon, and they called for a levee en masse of the Catholic people of Ireland to drive out the invader who had come to ‘extirpate’ the Irish people and the Catholic religion. Cromwell published a scornful and haughty rejection of their claims. It was published in Cork and then in Dublin, his words in those Irish printings of the pamphlet following the words of the Irish clergy. ‘Yours’, he told them, ‘is a covenant with death and hell’. A version of this pamphlet, detached from the clerical decrees, was then published in London under the title A declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland for the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people. Only one copy of the each Irish edition is known to have survived, the Cork printing in a private library in Ireland and the Dublin printing in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Neither Irish printing appear in Early English Books Online and they appear in the Short Title Catalogue wrongly ascribed to Henry Ireton and with a very different title. No existing edition of Cromwell’s writings and speeches has noted the existence of these Irish versions, and each of them reproduces the London edition, blissfully unaware of the very significant changes that that London edition introduces, which begin on the title page itself. The title of the Irish printings lacks the hauteur of the London title page".

Hopefully the editorial team will not only correct previous editions but should elaborate more on the mistakes of past historians. My other wish is that the editions should be made available to the widest audience possible and not be priced out of the range of ordinary people or that they are not just done for a academic audience..

One hopes the team remain objective and that the new editions of Cromwell´s writing do not exhibit any of the moral judgements and outrageous political bias held by a number of historians who have written books on the Lord Protector. Let’s hope Professor Morrill and his team does succeed in their endeavours and we get a much truer picture of Oliver Cromwell “Warts and All”. As Morrill said “Cromwell will come alive in much the same way as a Great Master painting takes on a new and different life when it is cleaned and restored”.

Notes and references

1 More information about the project can be found through this link http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/research/research-projects/early-modern/new-edition-of-Cromwell

2 A New History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign [Illustrated Philip Graham McKeiver

3 God's Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú

4 Oliver Cromwell (History Insights) [Kindle Edition]Graham Goodlad

5 Nick Poyntz blog can be found here http://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/

6 A bloody Irish almanack, or, Rebellious and bloody Ireland ... London, 1646; Hib.7.646.1

7 A bloudy fight at Dublin ... London, 1649. Hib.7.649.57 London, 1650. Hib.7.650.8

8 E H Carr What Is History

WAR AND ATROCITY − 1641 DEPOSITIONS ● Prof. John Morrill

2012-01-07T11:25:00.003-08:00

WAR AND ATROCITY − 1641 DEPOSITIONS ● Panel Discussion

2012-01-07T11:24:00.001-08:00

The 1641 Rising in Cavan William Gibbs

2012-01-07T10:26:00.001-08:00

WAR AND ATROCITY − 1641 DEPOSITIONS ● Prof. Poul Holm ● TCD Long Room Hub

2012-01-07T10:25:00.001-08:00

WAR AND ATROCITY − 1641 DEPOSITIONS ● Prof. Ben Kiernan ● TCD Long Room Hub (4)

2012-01-07T10:23:00.001-08:00

WAR AND ATROCITY − 1641 DEPOSITIONS ● Prof. Jane Ohlmeyer ● TCD Long Room Hub (2)

2012-01-07T10:21:00.001-08:00

Cathal Brennan of Near90fm interviews Dr. Micheal O'Siochru of Trinity College Dublin.

2012-01-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Dr. O'Siochru is a lecturer in Early Modern Irish history.In the interview, Dr. O'Siochru talks about the causes of the 1641 rebellion in Ireland.

First broadcast on Near90fm www.near.ie

Monarchy & Republicanism –The English Revolution and its Republican Legacy

2012-01-05T11:16:00.001-08:00

Dr Ted Vallance will give the above mentioned talk at the Bishopsgate Institute on 16 February 2012 Time 7:30 PM Price £8 Concs. £6

Examining the English Civil War and its legacy, this talk highlights the flourishing of republican ideas and the brief experience of a republican government in England in the mid-17th century. Also explored is the subsequent powerful influence of the English revolution, not only on English politics but also internationally.

Dr Ted Vallance is a historian of early modern Britain and Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Roehampton. His publications include A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries and The Glorious Revolution: 1688 - Britain's Fight for Liberty.

Economic Expansion, 1560-1640 - Keith Wrightson

2012-01-03T11:32:00.000-08:00

Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts (HIST 251)

Professor Wrightson traces the major economic expansion of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Despite occasional crises of mortality, population levels rose steadily, particularly in urban areas. Increased population levels resulted in enhanced agricultural and industrial output. Professor Wrightson reviews the extension of the cultivated area, forms of agricultural improvement and trends in enclosure. He then examines urban growth, the expansion of traditional industries such as cloth-making, and the development of new ones such as coal production. He ends by discussing the intensification of internal commerce and the expansion in foreign trade which took place during the Despite economic expansion and a greatly increased national income, however, prices continued to rise, real wages remained depressed, and the problem of poverty appears to have grown.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Economic History
04:05 - Chapter 2. Agriculture
15:14 - Chapter 3. Urbanization
26:47 - Chapter 4. Changing Industrial Trends
38:53 - Chapter 5. Looking Outward

York Church Court Records Are Now Online

2012-01-03T05:49:00.000-08:00

For anybody interested in Early Modern England the BBC News website have said that the York Church Court Papers, which according to the blurb “record the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts of York from 1300 to 1858,” have now been digitized and are available on line. “The papers give detailed accounts of arguments ranging from church taxes on liquorice, roses and pigeon dung to rows over marriage, wills and inheritance.”

Books Read in 2011

2012-01-02T02:40:00.001-08:00

As you can see from the list below my books read has been a very eclectic mix.

1. The Digger Movement 1906 R -Berens (Kindle)

2. History of the English People- John Richard Green (kindle)

3. Essays in Historical Materialism editor John Rees

4. Glorious Liberty A L Morton

5. The world Turned Upside Down C Hill

6. Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England Braddick

7. The Whig Interpretation of History- Herbert Butterfield

8. Cromwell and his Place in History- S R Gardiner

9. The English Civil War Peter Gaunt

10. Gerard Winstanley A Common Treasury

11. Oliver Cromwell C H Firth

12. A Freeborn People D Underdown

13. Causes of the English Revolution 1529 1642 L Stone

14. In a Free Republic Alison Plowden

15. The Story of England-Michael Wood

16. The Thirty Year War S H Stronberg

17. Charles 1^st C Durston

18. The County Committee of Kent A M Everitt

19. The Revolt of the Provinces John Morrill

20. Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England B Manning

21. The Far Left in the English Revolution B Manning

22. The Civil Wars 1637-1653 M Bennet

23. Englishmen With Swords Montagu Slater

24. The English Civil War John Miller

25. A Revolutionary Rogue S Barber

26. Richard Baxter and the Puritan Politics Schalatter

27. Regicide and Republic Graham Steel

28. Noble Revolt John Adamson

29. Nick Poyntz-MA Dissertation

30. Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism R Hutton

31. Intellectual consequences of the English Revolution C Hill

Alison Stuart commented on What do we really know about Oliver Cromwell by Professor John Morrill? The First Barry Coward Memorial

2011-12-20T14:05:00.000-08:00

Thank you for posting this fascinating review of Morrill's work. I look forward to his conclusion. It is hard to separate fact from fiction after so many centuries and there are elements of Cromwell that strike at a contradictory personality. The account above recalls the wholesale slaughter of the "Irish" women after the battle of Naseby. Keep us posted

What do we really know about Oliver Cromwell by Professor John Morrill? The First Barry Coward Memorial Lecture.

2011-12-19T06:40:00.000-08:00

Professor John Morrill gave the First Barry Coward Memorial Lecture last Friday. It was fitting that a historian of Morrill’s calibre gave this lecture. This is the first time I have heard John Morrill speak. While not necessarily agreeing with many of his historical conclusions he is a historian worth listening to and this memorial lecture was a joy and extremely informative. The event itself was well organised by the Birkbeck Early Modern Society

I may not have changed my thinking on many aspects of Cromwell but Morrill’s intellectual rigour raises a very high bar. His introductory remarks and the lecture as a whole paid fitting tribute to Barry Coward both as a person and as a historian of note. Morrill’s only note of regret and sadness and this goes for the audience as well was that Barry Coward’s untimely death rob us of his input into such an important project.

Morrill used the lecture to outline the project that he and a team of eight editors chosen by Oxford University Press to assemble a five volume edition of Oliver Cromwell’s collected writings and speeches. It is clear that this edition will give us a more concrete and precise appreciation of OIiver Cromwell. It remains to be seen if this is a fundamental reappraisal of “Our Chief of Men”.

It was clear from Morrill’s lecture that this is a long overdue project. The fact that the team won significant funding of £250,000 from Leverhulme Trust is testimony to its importance.

John Morrill’s main emphasis throughout the entire lecture was the importance of accuracy in historical research. While it is fairly standard knowledge that the various previous collections of Cromwell’s collected speeches and writings are found wanting this project undertaken by Morrill and his team give us the first real attempt to put the historical record straight and give us a more precise understanding of one of the most important historical figures in both English and world history.

Morrill began his lecture by going over previous editions of Cromwell’s collected speeches and writings. The first and probably most well-known of the collected edition of Cromwell’s words was by Thomas Carlyle in 1845 and updated by S. C. Lomas in 1904. Morrill’s main criticism of Carlyle was that he made little effort at accuracy. Carlyle never looked at previous examples of speeches quoted in his collection. Morrill believes the Lomas version is better but not by much.

In his hand-out at the lecture Morrill gives us an example of the obstacles the team has encountered during their research. Probably one the more well-known misinterpretations of Cromwell’s speeches, by the way Austin Woolrych in his book on the Barebones Parliament, makes a similar point in that Cromwell’s speech at the opening of that parliament. One version, made in 1654, says:

I confess I never looked to see such a day as this – it may not be nor you neither – when Jesus Christ should be so owned as He is, at this day, and in this work. Jesus Christ is owned this day by your call, and you own Him by your willingness to appear for Him; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures can, to the day of the power of Christ. God manifests it to be the day of the power of Christ, having, through so much blood, and so much trial as hath been upon this, made this one of the great one of the great issues thereof……I confess I did never look back to see such a day

The same speech recorded 100 years later says this: "I confess I never looked to see such a day as this – it may not be nor you neither – when Jesus Christ shall be so owned as He is, at this day, and in this world. Jesus Christ is owned this day by you all, and you own Him by your willingness in appearing here; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures can, to a day of the power of Christ by your willingness…god manifests it to be to be the day of the power of Christ, having, through so much blood, and so much trials as hath been upon these nations made this one of the great one of the great issues thereof… I confess I did never look to see such a sight

According to Morrill the second statement makes Cromwell a far more radical figure than had previously thought. Nick Poyntz agrees with this assessment as well “The differences are small but important. In the one version, "Cromwell is far more radical. Members of the Parliament have called forth the spirit of Christ through their presence, and the day itself is “the day of the power of Christ”, an apocalyptic climax to the struggles of the past eleven years. In the second version, Cromwell calls it “a day of the power of Christ”, which softens its millenarianism. Representatives have been summoned by Christ, not the other way around”.

It would be fair to assume that Morrill understands that his research does not take place in either a historical or political vacuum. Cromwell was and still is a controversial figure. Every century historians have interpreted a Cromwell that fits in with the politics of their age.Morrill dew attention to one such historian in the 20^th century, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, a Harvard historian who spent most of his career to compiling and editing a collection of Cromwell's letters and speeches.

These volumes were published between 1937 and 1947. According to Morrill Cromwell was described by Abbott as “a proto-fascist”. Suffice to say Morrill had no time for this extreme right wing political assessment or for Abbott’s editorial approach. Certainly the most controversial part of Cromwell’s life was his time spent in Ireland. Morrill explained that even today Cromwell’s involvement and the extent of civilian casualties is still open to debate. This of course like all of Cromwell’s actions is open to different interpretations again depending on your political and to some extent historical persuasion. The sack of Drogheda in September 1649 by parliamentary forces is one such action.

In his article on Cromwell Nick Poyntz makes the point that this oft-quoted phrase: “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret”. He questions whether these are Cromwell’s words as no original letter survives. He also makes the point as does Morrill that parliament had a habit of tidying up speeches and letters of Cromwell. Again to what extent his words are accurate is one of the tasks of the project. It must be said that this is not an envious one.

Morrill made the distinction between civilians killed in the heat of battle as opposed to in cold blood.29 September 1649 two letters from Cromwell sack of Drogheda were read in the Parliament

“Our men getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the Sword; and indeed being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in Arms in the Town, and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men, divers of the Officers and Soldiers being fled over the Bridge into the other part of the Town, where about One hundred of them possessed St. Peters Church Steeple, some the West Gate, and others, a round strong Tower next the Gate, called St. Sundays: These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused; whereupon I ordered the Steeple of St. Peters Church to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames, God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn; the next day the other two Towers were summoned, in one of which was about six or seven score, but they refused to yield themselves; and we knowing that hunger must compel them, set onely good Guards to secure them from running away, until their stomacks were come down: from one of the said Towers, notwithstanding their condition, they killed and wounded some of our men; when they submitted, their Officers were knockt on the head, and every tenth man of the Soldiers killed, and the rest Shipped for the Barbadoes; the Soldiers in the other Town were all spared, as to their lives onely, and Shipped likewise for the Barbadoes. I am perswaded that this is a righteous Judgement of God upon these Barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to preventthe effusion of blood for the future”.

As Morrill pointed out Cromwell made a list officers and soldiers killed “Two thousand Five hundred-Foot Soldiers, besides Staff-Officers, Chyrurgeons, &c. and many Inhabitants”. So it is clear that inhabitants were killed.

Let’s hope Professor Morrill and his team does succeed in their endeavours and we get a much truer picture of Oliver Cromwell “warts and all”. As Morrill said “Cromwell will come alive in much the same way as a Great Master painting takes on a new and different life when it is cleaned and restored”.

The World Turned Upside Down- 40 Years On Sheffield University Conference on 14th April, 2012

2011-12-19T03:28:00.000-08:00

(Reprinted from the University of Sheffield website)

Christopher Hill’s classic work, The World Turned Upside
Down, was published in 1972. The book, though much criticised, remains one of the most popular books on the history of the English Revolution, offering an enduringly attractive and accessible introduction to the period. In order to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication this conference will bring together experts on popular politics, radical religion, political ideas and the literature of the 1640s, to offer critical appreciations of the book and its influence.

REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS NOW OPEN.

FEE: £10

To register, please book your place here: World Turned Upside Down

This event is sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democratic Culture, University of Sheffield, with financial support form the Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘The Comparative History of the Political Engagement in Western and African Societies’ research network.

The ‘New Social History School’ and the 17th Century English Revolution

2011-12-14T11:10:00.000-08:00

The purpose of this article is to examine critically the new Social History school from a Marxist viewpoint. This article is a re-edited version of a previous blog called The English Civil War and its Impact on the British Economy and Society

The New Social History of historiography appeared in the early 1970s. According some historians it was perhaps the last major historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical phenomenon known as the English Civil War. Prior to the 1970s Social History had largely been limited to a study of everyday life. During the last thirty odd years the subject has come to prominence because some aspects of it have become the bête noir of a number of revisionist historians. The most positive side of the new history is that it brought into the public domain the lives of working people or the poor who had largely been ignored by historians. On the negative side this new history became divorced from any form of economic or materialist explanation of the civil war

The new social history is not that different from its predecessor “old social history”. Described as a “hodge podge” of disciplines and unlike any other historiography. The English historian G. M. Trevelyan saw it as the link between economic and political history, he stated, "Without social history, economic history is barren and political history unintelligible."

In fact it was G.M. Trevelyan who gave us the most famous or infamous definition depending on your viewpoint of social history at the beginning of his English Social History when he said that social history was 'the history of the people with the politics left out.' Historians have interpreted this statement in many different ways.

I tend to prefer what E H Carr said on the matter, 'The historian undertakes a twofold operation: to analyse the past in the light of the present and the future which is growing out of it, and to cast the beam of the past over the issues which dominate present and future.' It is, he said, the function of the historian not only to analyse what he or she finds significant in the past, but also 'to isolate and illuminate the fundamental changes at work in the society in which we live', which will entail a view 'of the processes by which the problems set to the present generation by these changes can be resolved'. People are a product of history, their judgements and actions conditioned by the past, and the historian should work to make them aware of this, but also to make them aware of the issues and problems of their own time; to break the chain that binds them to the past and present, and so enable them to influence the future. E H Carr, The New Society, op cit, chapter 1.

While English historians were in the forefront of the new social history it would be wrong to classify this movement as solely English, it had international adherents. Paul E. Johnson described how the movement took place in America in the late 1960s: “The New Social History reached UCLA at about that time, and I was trained as a quantitative social science historian. I learned that "literary" evidence and the kinds of history that could be written from it were inherently elitist and untrustworthy. Our cousins, the Annalistes, talked of ignoring heroes and events and reconstructing the more constitutive and enduring "background" of history. Such history could be made only with quantifiable sources. The result would be a "History from the Bottom Up" that ultimately engulfed traditional history and, somehow, helped to make a Better World. Much of this was acted out with mad-scientist bravado. One well-known quantifier said that anyone who did not know statistics at least through multiple regression should not hold a job in a history department. My own advisor told us that he wanted history to become "a predictive social science." I never went that far. I was drawn to the new social history by its democratic inclusiveness as much as by its system and precision. I wanted to write the history of ordinary people—to historicize them, put them into the social structures and long-term trends that shaped their lives, and at the same time resurrect what they said and did. In the late 1960s, quantitative social history looked like the best way to do that”.

The Social History School in Britain was hugely influenced by the French Annales School of historical study. Keith Wrightson who himself was influenced by the French school outlines in his book English Society that the social changes that took place were not revolutionary but were rather evolutionary. Wrightson does pose some interesting questions. In the beginning of his book he asks to what extent was English society polarised enough to cause a civil war, revolution and finally to cut a Kings head off. He also asks to what extent was the growing social inequality a factor in how social, economic and political events shaped up.

It is clear that if you took a straw poll of peoples view at the beginning of the 17th that within 40 years there would be a massive civil war, revolution and regicide then they would have said you were mad. In many ways there was no precedent for what took place in 1640. The leaders of the English revolution had no previous revolution to study to guide them. The 1640s revolution was unlike any other. Subsequent leaders of the revolutions such as the French and Russian had the luxury of learning from previous revolutions.

This stems from their disdain to tie social change to that of political and economic factors. A view championed by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill. The purpose of this essay is not to deny that change both social and political took place or to over exaggerate the scale but to find the extent of the social and economic impact from a historical materialist viewpoint.

Lately the whole historiography of the new social history group has been challenged .Over the last quarter of a century it has been highly fashionable to question the social context of the civil war. In her book Ann Hughes highlights this changing historical fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of sources covering early modern social history. In 1965 Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas the late Barry Coward produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation in early modern England.

This latter more qualified approach has been taken by G E Aylmer who posed the question Rebellion or Revolution. He questioned how much difference did the events of 1640-60 make to people’s lives? The casualties, damage and other losses arising directly from the fighting, together with the generally disruptive of war on agriculture, industry, trade, transport all seem obvious on the debit side, he on the other hand he says the war gave people more social and political mobility and they were able to achieve more than in any other time.

He makes the point that he believes that a few tens of thousands lost their lives and certainly no more than the worst epidemic of the time. In conclusion to his chapter on the Quality of Life he states there was no shift in the economy or a radical alteration of the social structure. While he concedes that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive for business development he says that this would have been the case if Charles 1”s Personal rule had continued indefinitely, or if the royalists had won the civil war.

Whether you could describe Aylmer as a revisionist is open to debate but he was certainly loosely linked to a heterogeneous group, which included Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Mark Kishlansky, Anthony Fisher which called into question both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the Civil war. They have rejected that the war was the product of deep-rooted social changes but have emphasised short-term factors and political infighting.

Mark Kishlansky's presents a one sided view that the Civil war was over ideology when he says much has been written about the ideology of the army, but most of it misconceived. According to him the “principle reason for this has been historians have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers created a commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and logical grounds. There were men of low birth among the New Model’s officers, and much has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still might be made of obscure officers like Sponger and Creamer whose surnames suggest backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. Yet careful study of the armies social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more traditional in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still does not meet the real objection to existing interpretation- the fallacy of social determinism”.

D. Penington poses an alternative scenario to Kishalnsky while not really not analysing the great issues of social revolution or of land and capital he has made important studies of how the Civil War impacted on the social fabric of society, he states by 1646 “most of the country seemed on the verge of collapse” its economy and government was exhausted tired out and ready to give up the ghost.” He then began to examine to what extent this was an accurate picture of events, one aspect he began to look at was the army and its impact on society and the economy. He outlined the great plunder that took place and in many respects you can see why soldiers sought exemption from prosecution.
Pennington agrees with point that in proportion to the size of the population more Englishmen died as a result of the Civil war in the seventeenth century than either of the world wars in the 20th century’ “it was bloodiest conflict in relative terms in English history” crops and land were seized; cattle and horses were taken . Pennington makes the point that the Royalists were more brutal than the Parliamentarists.

Another useful source on the impact of the civil war can be found in Steven Porter’s book while careful not to exaggerate the destruction he has some important statistical data on the scale of the impact of the civil war. 150 towns and 50 villages suffered destruction of property. According to the House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers,23 Sept. 1648 “…miserable it is to see the multitudes of inhabitants and their children flocking in the streets of the bordering towns and villages and have not a house to putt their heads therein, whereby to exercise their calling”.Towns became garrisons to feed and clothed the armies, he uses the example of Newcastle that by 1645 economic life was severely shattered yet complete disaster had been averted. Each side saw to it not to alienate the population. While there was general suffering historians have found it difficult to be precise in one such example the town of Taunton was according to Clarendon a third of the town was destroyed by fire, but according to Sprigge a flourishing town was all but destroyed.

A number of books have come out recently, which contain important sources of eyewitness accounts of the civil war. One such is J Adair By The Sword Divided highlighted one particular aspect which was the development of social advancement inside the army and service in the armies of parliament certainly provided opportunities for social advancement. At first the rival armies were officered by men of much the same social status, but gradually new men from the middle, lower middle and artisan classed moved into positions of responsibility, both on committees that ran the war and in the wider army. John Hampden’s Shepherd, Thomas Shelbourne, rose to be colonel of Cromwell regiment of Ironsides and there were similar stories. The more conservative Puritan gentry objected to their newcomers as much as on social grounds as on account of their often unorthodox or radical religious views.

Forced requisitioning took place but a lot of goods were paid for at market prices. Adair says while there was “decay of life” there was also an opposite of this huge growth of profits for many people. Also things such as the legal system remained relatively normal and survived unscathed. In the London the impact of the civil war was difficult to assess in many respects everyday life carried on as normal. London also avoided sack or siege however emergency wartime powers were resented by large sections of the population. Its economy was vital for the New Model Army and this state of affairs led one Royalist to lament “if posterity shall ask who pulled the crown from the kings head said it was proud unthankful schismatically, rebellious, blood city of London”.

The new social history group of historians make the assertion that social and economic changes did bring about changes in peoples thinking. They have been mistakenly labelled Marxist’s but in reality never ascribed to Marx’s viewpoint on history. Marx insisted the men and women made history but not separate from objective developments one of most perceptive statements on the subject came from his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): in it he states “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, who are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.

"The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.

Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production”.

While it is generally accepted that there was not a massive amount of unrest and protest during the civil war. John Morrill has made the point that changes in social and economic policy were largely controlled by the middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented by this class. However there was a tangible fear amongst sections of the middle class who feared the little people.

As Lucy Hutchinson writes with disdain, “almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturb’d with like factious little people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some oppressed by a certain sort of people in the House whom, to distinguish from the most honourable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men”. Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness particularly amongst the lower sections that in order to have a say in these changes they must organise thorough some kind of political organisation.

John Morrill was clearly influenced by the New Social history historiography in an interview he describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the for front of the group “So there came along the new social history which opened up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things to happen for my period was the work which is most obviously associated with Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews, returned to Cambridge and then moved onto Yale). And the Wrightson revolution really, in the way in which social history is done, had a huge impact on those of us who were more interested in high politics. I mean popular politics, constructed high politics. Wrightson’s importance for my work is again something that people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally, in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamenta"l.

While the debate over the impact is important it is an expression of a much more fundamental debate over the whether the war was linked to social and economic changes in England and Europe at the time. G M. Trevelyan states that the Cromwellian revolution was not caused by social and economic forces but its causes and motives were a result of the development of political and religious thought and aspiration among men who had no desire to recast society or distribute wealth.

Having said that he does make some points that the Marxist historians would agree with “to speak in general terms, Royalism was strongest where the economic and social changes of the previous hundred years had been least felt. The King and the Church were best loved in rural regions and market towns furthest from the capital, and least connected with overseas commerce. Parliamentary and Puritan sympathy was strongest where recent economic change had gone furthest, as in London under the influence of the great Elizabethan trading companies’ in the seaports (including the King’s own ships and dockyards)’ and in the newer type of manufacturing town or district like Taunton, Birmingham and the clothing Dales on both sides of the Pennines. The squires, who had most business connection with London, or with trade and industry anywhere, tended most to the Roundhead side in politics and religion. The London area, including Kent, Surrey and Essex, was at once seized for Parliament, and the Royalist minority there was never able to raise its head”.

The examination of localised politics as opposed to national politics by the new social history historians fitted in nicely with other historians such as john Morrill’s work The revolt of the Provinces. As Mario Caricchio points out “ the "new social history" has demonstrated the parish in England was a political forum. A continuing negotiation of authority and subordination featured within it: gossip, rough music, libel, legal disputes, rioting, petitioning, voting and rebellion represented the diverse forms of conducting and solving conflict. They constituted elements of a “popular political culture”. These were also the means by which the “ordinary people” shaped modern Europe on the continent”

Other historians such as Joan Thirsk's played a major contribution, her work with Alan Everitt, came to known as the Leicester School of Local History. Beginning first with a county study, then through a series of regional and national studies,Thirsk concentrated on producing a regional framework for understanding the early modern agrarian economy and economic change in that period. How much this approach deepened our understanding of the complex nature of the English revolution is open to debate. Perhaps the narrowness of their remits has led to accusations that this type of historiography has not had the major impact its historians had hoped for.

The Marxist historian had a lot of time for the new social history group of historians. Hill asserted that profound economic and social changes took place and states that “historians are coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in the economic history of England. To back this assertion up he quotes writes Dr. Corfield “After the civil wars,”, “successive governments from the Rump onwards, whatever their political complexion, gave much more attention to the interests of trade and colonial development in their foreign policies”. Restrictions which had hampered the growth of capitalist economic activity were removed, never to the restored. “The first condition of healthy industrial growth” wrote Professor Hughes apropos the salt industry, “was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court”.

Right up until his death Christopher Hill had been the main proponent of the opinion that the social, economic, and political changes that took place in the civil war were the product of a bourgeois revolution. Hill argued that the seventieth century saw a turning point in English and world history. This view of trying to understand the social processes at work in the English revolution has been fiercely attacked by numerous historians yet none so that by P Lassett who said The English Revolution ought to be entombed. It is a term made out of our own social and political discourse…. It gets in the way of enquiry and understanding, if only because it requires that change of all these different types go forward at the same pace, the political pace… There never was such a set of events as the English Revolution”.

Hill never put forward that the events that characterised the English Civil War proceeded at the same pace. His point is that it helps to understand very complex developments if they are firstly set within the social and economic frame work. What conclusions can be drawn? Through the sheer weight of empirical evidence it is clear that the war had a major impact on the social and political fabric of England.

Notes & References

1. Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War p117

2. G E Aylmer Rebellion or Revolution

3. Mark Kishlanksy Ideology and politics in the parliamentary Armies1645

4. Carlton p199 Ch9

5. S Porter The Destruction in the Civil War

6. G M Trevelyan Social History of Britain

7. C Hill In the Century of Revolution

8. Keith Wrightson English Society 1580-1680

9. Interview Professor John Morrill

10. Radicalism and the English Revolution Mario Caricchio Università di Firenze

11. Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions 1500-1760 007,416pp.;

12. What is Social History?By Raphael Samuel | Published in History Today Vol 35

13. Raphael Samuel is a tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford,

14. David Cannadine is Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, editor of Politicians, Power and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Towns 1982).

15. The Two Faces of E.H. Carr by Professor Richard J. Evans,

Guardian Obituary of Kevin Sharpe

2011-12-12T11:02:00.001-08:00

It has taken the Guardian a month but they finally produce an obituary of Kevin Sharpe. It can be accessed @http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/12/kevin-sharpe-obituary

Some Supplementary Comments made by Peter Basham Historical collections assistant at the Royal College of Physicians on 'An end to good manners': The Royal College of Physicians and the English Civil War

2011-12-02T09:53:00.001-08:00

The exhibitions are an opportunity to give the RCP’s collection a wider audience. In this instance, we were pleased to have put on show items that have rarely, if ever, seen the light of day here, and also material that people wouldn’t necessarily expect the RCP to have.

The first couple of items that sparked this exhibition off were the manuscript copy of Thomas Hobbes’s Behemouth – sadly we couldn’t uncover how we came to have this in the collection – and the kings’ evil broadsheets. The king’s evil material came from, firstly, Charles I’s reign, and a second document from his son’s. They showed that despite the nation rebelling and overthrowing the monarchy for seeing itself as essentially untouchable, when the dust settled, a king, with his divine right and powers ‘intact’, was back on the throne.

The narrative of the exhibition had to be restricted and shaped by what we had in the collections, bar a couple of images from the British Library, and we were specifically linking it to the RCP where possible. It was not intended as a full account of the whole period of the Civil War, nor indeed medicine of the time. Instead we looked at how the RCP and its fellows reacted to the turmoil.

We have had a good amount of feedback – primarily: from people interested that we have non-medical material (such as Hobbes’s work, and the famous Leviathan title page on display here);interest in the king’s evil touch pieces; the stories of George Bate and Baldwin Hamey Jnr.

Regarding the RCP’s position on the Civil War – as the exhibition points out, it did not take an official position. The RCP functioned as well as it could, although with its fellows dispersed, some apothecaries and others took advantage of their absence to expand their remit and make diagnoses, for example. When the king was overthrown, the RCP sought to confirm its authority under Cromwell, and took the same steps under Charles II. The RCP did not take sides, but many of its fellows did, even if some happily switched to suit circumstances.

Histories written after the restoration tended to paint their subjects as loyal royalists – from Hamey’s 1733 biography by Ralph Palmer up to Munk’s Roll (Lives of the fellows of the Royal College of Physicians) in the late nineteenth century. There was a tendency to ignore involvement with the parliamentary side once the monarchy was restored – in this way the RCP’s attitude to the war could be said to have changed.

'An end to good manners': The Royal College of Physicians and the English Civil War

2011-11-29T09:32:00.000-08:00

The exhibition held at the Royal College of Physicians is small and limited but to its credit does offer a great insight into the attitude of the country’s leading medical profession to the English Civil War.

At the outbreak of war members of the RCP were like many in the country heavily split in their allegiance. It is true that “In the 17th century the College of Physicians was led by a small group of powerful men who held widely differing religious and political opinions”.

Certainly one of the most famous members of the college was the Royalist physician William Harvey who was described as "a man of lowest stature, round faced; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit; his hair as black as a raven and curling"

Harvey was not only responsible for looking after the Kings medical requirements but made a significant contribution to the development of medicine by showing how blood circulated around the body. He said of his discovery “I found the task so truly arduous... that I was almost tempted to think... that the movement of the heart was only to be comprehended by God. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when the diastole took place by reason of the rapidity of the movement..."

While Harvey took no time in declaring his allegiance to the crown it could be said that other RCP members took a longer term attitude in order to navigate “their way through the conflict, pragmatically switching sides” some it would seem at the drop of a scalpel.

The exhibition has a well put together selection of audio readings concentrating on different parts of the civil war. One such reading comes from “a true copy of the high court of justice for the tryal of Charles published London `1684

According to the exhibition notes this was “Published after the restoration to the throne of Charles II, this pro-Royalist work includes a transcription of Charles I’s trial and execution. There is also an appendix which provides 'An alphabetical catalogue of the members of the execrable pretended high court of justice…'

The exhibition notes describe the picture left as an “allegorical frontispiece is unambiguous in overall tone. Devil-like figures have commandeered a carriage, taking the crown and 'three nations' hostage, leaving liberty in the balance. Sheep and doves are attacked behind it, and the beheaded King Charles is crushed beneath its wheels. An accompanying explanatory verse was still deemed necessary, making reference to 'wounded justice' and a 'murder'd monarch'.

In one memorable exchange the Clerk of the Court read “Charles Stuart, King of England, you have been accused on behalf of the people of England, of high treason, and other crimes, the court have determined that you ought to answer the same.To this the King replied “I will answer the same as soon as I know by what authority you do this”. Stubborn to the end the Kings last words on the scaffold were “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbances can be.”

Perhaps one of the major weaknesses of the exhibition is its failure to go into any detail as regards the significant dissension towards the monarchy after all it puts this quote as a sub heading of the exhibition ‘...when dissolution and idleness had put an end to good manners), some seditious ‘tribunes’ of the people and ill-conditioned scoundrels ... had defiled all things ... the Phoenix ... rose at last ...’ but fails to explain its meaning.

According to William Birken there was quite a tradition of dissension amongst men of medicine. According to Birken “In England, medicine has always been something of a refuge for individuals whose lives have been dislocated by religious and political strife. This was particularly true in the seventeenth century when changes in Church and State were occurring at a blinding speed. In his book The experience of defeat, Christopher Hill has described the erratic careers of a number of radical clergy and intellectuals who studied and practised medicine in times of dislocation. A list pulled together from Hill's book would include: John Pordage, Samuel Pordage, Henry Stubbe, John Webster, John Rogers, Abiezer Coppe, William Walwyn and Marchamont Nedham.1 Medicine as a practical option for a lost career, or to supplement and subsidize uncertain careers, can also be found among Royalists and Anglicans when their lives were similarly disrupted during the Interregnum.

He goes on “among these were the brilliant Vaughan twins, Thomas, the Hermetic philosopher, and Henry, the metaphysical poet and clergyman; the poet, Abraham Cowley; and the mercurial Nedham, who was dislocated both as a republican and as a royalist. The Anglicans Ralph Bathurst and Mathew Robinson were forced to abandon temporarily their clerical careers for medicine, only to return to the Church when times were more propitious”.

The exhibition is a rare glimpse into the treasure trove of material held by the RCP which in many cases have rarely been seen in public. So anyone finding themselves in London for a bit of Christmas shopping could do worse than going along along to see it.

The Exhibition is held at the RCP Mon-Fri 9am-5pm until 15th March 2012

Notes & References

1.         William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Harvey

2.         A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court / taken by J. Nalson Jan. 4, 1683 : Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service

3.         The Dissenting Tradition in English Medicine of the 17th and 18th Century William Birken Medical History 1995

4.         The RCP of London and its Support of the Parliamentary Cause in the English civil War William Birken Journal of British Studies Vol 23 No 1 1983

A Letter to Richard Cavendish

2011-11-19T13:01:00.000-08:00

While I cannot say I follow your articles for History Today on a regular basis but when an article catches my eye I tend to read it. One such article was called Trotsky Offered Asylum. As the title of your column suggests you write about events from the near or distance past.

If this particular article was nothing more than a straight factual account of Leon Trotsky’s exile from the former Soviet Union I would have had nothing to complain about but it was not. I am sorry to say your article was a little dark and had a strong hint of a very conservative bias to it to say the least.

My first complaint is that while you mention the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin for students and people coming to this subject for the first time you would not garner from your article that this was little more than just a personality clash that Trotsky lost.

The life and death struggle was deeply political and to no small extent decided the course of the 20th century and not for the better. In fact mankind paid a very heavy price for Trotsky’s “fall” from power and subsequent murder. What I am trying to say that your article does not mention a single political difference between Trotsky and Stalin. I admit you have a lack of space but your article would have been strengthened by at least a cursory examination over the controversy over Stalin’s theory of building socialism in a single country versus Trotsky’s insistence on global revolution.

This aside there are other things in the article that I would like to address. One of your turn of phrase left me a little cold and to say the least was a little sinister. To describe Trotsky’s murderer as a “charming Spanish Communist painter “is a little ridiculous. He was a murderer who pursued Trotsky and under Stalin’s personal order caved his skull with an ice pick, perhaps you could explain what was charming about this.

While we are on the subject of Trotsky’s murder to describe the act of murder as a “stab” of an ice pick is just plain bizarre. Trotsky’s skull was caved in why you downplay this horrendous assassination.

My last point is that while it is difficult for a historian to come out of their comfort zone and write on a subject they know little about I must take exception to your description of Robert Service as “Trotsky’s biographer” ,given Service’s very right wing biography which is strewn with major errors it is simply not true. If readers new to the subject of Trotsky's life would like to view a more balance view then they should look no further that Isaac Deutcher’s three volume trilogy. The compliment you pay Service is not deserved.

Notes

1. Trotsky offered asylum in Mexico By Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume: 61 Issue: 12 2011 http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/trotsky-offered-asylum-mexico

2. Trotsky: A Biography by Robert Service; In Defence of Leon Trotsky by David North Review by: By Bertrand M. Patenaude The American Historical Review Vol. 116, No. 3, June 2011 URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.900

Kevin Sharpe 1949-2011

2011-11-09T10:03:00.000-08:00

I cannot claim any direct connection with Professor Sharpe but this does not stop me feeling somewhat sad that a historian of his calibre has passed from the historical scene at such a young age. Having already lost another significant historian of the 17th centruy Barry Coward this year, Early Modern historical study has been diminished by the loss of two historians of stature.

Sharpe never really subscribed to the great historical genres of Whig" and "Marxist" history studies. He was in fact from an early period in his career very much part of the revisionist group of historians who not only rejected both Whig and Marxist historiography but sought by counter arguement to provide something different.

It must be said that Sharpe was not the first to concentrate on the “superstructure “of events of the English revolution. His concentration on politics to the detriment of “base” i.e. economics was developed to a fine art by Professor Conrad Russell. Russell has been attributed with being one of the few historians to link causes that were connected to actual effects. Whether this is true this is not really the place to argue.

Perhaps Sharpe’s most important book was The Personal Rule of Charles I. It is certainly a tour de force of about 980 pages. Sharpe in this book strikes me as being sympathetic to his subject of Charles 1st. He shares this admiration of Charles with another historian John Adamson. Sharpe presents the period of Charles 1st rule as one of stability and that his rule did really accomplish a lot. Suffice to say he does not subscribe to the Marxist theory that this was a time of great crisis and the Civil war represented an important stage in the transformation of England from a feudal society into a capitalist one.

I must admit have not read all of Sharpe’s work so therefore I cannot comment yet on their merits. Of the work I have read Sharpe comes across as a historian who was passionate about his subject. He was methodical and according to one writer had a fierce work ethic. He paid great attention to accuracy. Whether you agreed with his conclusions he wrote in a manner which was able to explain in simplified terms complex problems. This appears to be a dying art these days.

It appears his attitude to life bore a remarkable resemblance to another historian who died recently Barry Coward. According to Joad Raymond “those fortunate enough to have been his friend will know him as a truly and remarkably caring and funny man, whose humour was deep, broad and frequently inappropriate. Many of the anecdotes will be unpublishable and have to be saved for the pubs across the world where he will be being remembered. He was an insightful and empathic commentator and adviser on affairs of the head and heart; he was the first person I would have called to express my grief at his absence”.

It will be to future historians to judge whether Sharpe’s contribution and other subscribers to revisionist history has transformed our understanding of early modern England. Unlike some writers I believe this debate to be on going and far from “sterile”. One of the most important aspect of Sharpe’s history writing was his attempt to cross the divide between history and politics. Again it is not within the remit of this appreciation of Sharpe’s life to judge whether this ‘cultural turn’ will “refigure our understanding of the history and politics of early modern England and the materials and methods of our study”.

His method can be found in my favourite book of his called Reading Revolutions-The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England Yale University Press 2000. It is a fascinating book.

It offers one of the very few comprehensive studies of reading and politics in early modern England. The book is based on the huge notes Sir William Drake. According to Michael Mendle Sharpe adopts “a meticulous treatment of the readership of Sir William Drake (1606-1669), a Buckinghamshire gentleman whose vociferous literary appetite is chronicled in his own notebooks, marginalia, and diaries. At the core are fifty-four volumes, mostly commonplace books, in the Ogden Mss. at University College, London. Sharpe also tracked down important Drake manuscripts at the Huntington and the Folger Shakespeare Libraries, and still others at the House of Lords Record Office and the Buckinghamshire Record Office. He identified printed books likely to have been owned by Drake amidst the books in University College, London, and another one, extensively annotated, in the Folger. It is a large body of material, written in Drake's hand or in that of an amanuensis, in English, Latin and Italian, the three tongues sometimes sharing the same page. As with the textual corpus, nothing in the presentation is done on a small scale; Sharpe, who is not known to favor compression, provisions his fourth chapter with 627 footnotes”.

To concentrate a whole book on the notes of one person is a very hazardous thing to do. However the book deservedly won the 2001 SHARP Award from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing for the best new book in Book History.

The study of Drake who was an important figure during the English revolution shows how many people not just what was then the middle class but ordinary people managed to read or were relayed information which allowed them to formulate opinions and act on them. This process enabled many to adopt radical social value. This can be seen by the explosion of multifarious radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers etc.

Not all shared this enthusiasm for knowledge the poet and playwright George Chapman said

“Away ungodly Vulgars, far away,

Fly ye profane, that dare not view the day,

Nor speak to men but shadows, nor would hear

Of any news, but what seditious were,

Hateful and harmful and ever to the best,

Whispering their scandals ... "

Sharpe highlights that very act of reading was in itself a political act. It is only really now that we are getting a clearer picture not only of peoples reading habits during the Civil War but how they managed to get hold of reading matter. The world of the secret printing presses is an area of research that has been woefully under researched.

Many diverse political figures took advantage of the relatively mobile printing presses. The beginning of the 17th Century saw a significant increase in the number of books printed each year, literacy rates also increased. With the onset of civil war England became the ideological battleground of competing social classes represented by Crown and Parliament.

How great a historian was Kevin Sharpe should be answered by his peers. But in my mind he was a good one. I do not agree with much of what he wrote but he wrote well and sought to reach and educate a wide audience.

Kevin Sharpe (1949-2011)

2011-11-07T07:02:00.000-08:00

The historian Kevin Sharpe died on 5th November 2011. A short obituary will follow soon.

A Bourgeois Revolution by Christopher Hill

2011-11-05T16:24:00.000-07:00

This essay was first published in Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 Ed J A Pocock (Princeton U.P 1980) and contains within it a change in Hill’s 1940s position on the English bourgeois revolution. Some historians both hostile and friendly to Hill have seen this essay as Hill repudiating his previous estimation of the bourgeois revolution. I do not agree with this supposition. In fact the older Hill got the more he understood the complex problem associated with an explanation of the transformation of Britain from a feudal society into a capitalist one.

Hill begins this essay with a defence of his method and integrity. Throughout his career Hill was accused of being dogmatic, a “rolodex” historian and only using sources that fitted in with his Marxist assumptions. My own understanding of Hill is that while he was a Marxist he was none of the above. He was a very good historian and like all historians he was constantly revising his understanding of the English revolution. This attitude is best summed up by this quote from Hill

“The historian should not stay on the surface of events; his or her interest should not be limited to State Papers, Acts and Ordinances, decisions of judges and local magistrates... He or she should listen--carefully and critically--to ballads, plays, pamphlets, newspapers, tracts...to every source that can help him or her to get the feel of how people lived and in what ways their sensitivity differed from ours... The historian must listen to alchemists and astrologers no less than to bishops, to demands of London crowds; and he or she must try to understand the motivation of rioters, whether they are labelled anti-Catholic or anti-enclosure rioters or simply food rioters”. The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution (London, 1993), pp436-437.

The main theme of this essay as the title suggests is was there was there a bourgeois revolution?. Hill in this essay observed that that it was extremely difficult to offer a precise definition of bourgeois revolution. 'The Marxist conception of a bourgeois revolution, which I find the most helpful model for understanding the English Revolution,' he wrote, 'does not mean a revolution made by the bourgeoisie'. There was no self-conscious bourgeoisie which planned and willed the revolution. But the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution because its outcome, though glimpsed by few of its participants, 'was the establishment of conditions far more favourable to the development of capitalism than those which prevailed before 1640'. 'A Bourgeois Revolution?’ op cit, pp110, 111, 115, 134.

Hill’s original essay tackling the bourgeois revolution was written in 1940. The essay stands on its own merit but you feel that Hill was not entirely satisfied with what he wrote and his intention was to revise it and take the subject matter further after all he did write it while he still serving in the army and as he said it was the work of “a very angry young man, believing he was going to be killed in a world war.”

The 1980 essay is a confirmation that in later life Hill never repudiated his previous position he attempted to reformulate certain thoughts. In 1967 he wrote Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1967), while still retaining the idea that it was a bourgeois revolution he sought to give the term a clearer approximation. He intimated that the revolution was not as clear cut as he had thought and neither was a chemically pure as had been written on. After the entire bourgeoisie in its various forms did fight on both sides. But he is clear on the fact that the revolution made a path for further and rapid capitalist expansion.

With a few reservations I think Hill is correct when he says that the 1640 “bourgeois revolution” was not “consciously willed by the bourgeoisie”. This is not to say that the revolution did not have its thinkers or that philosophy played no part in the revolution. At the heart of Hill’s position is that he believed that the actions of the leading figures of the revolution were to some large degree empirical.

Having said that” he was sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing”. "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill by Ann Talbot 25 March 2003

Hill’s work was clearly ground breaking he defined the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution. His definition of the revolution that the rule of one class was replaced by the rule of another still stands the test of time despite a ferocious attack by the revisionists.

As Ann Talbot said “Most of all he was sufficiently astute to realize that when the people execute their king after a solemn trial and much deliberation, it is not the result of a misunderstanding but has a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie were soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no monarch sat easily on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria’s reign”.

While Hill maintained that the bourgeoisie was barely conscious of its actions his writing imbues a recognition that revolutions are not solely made by a tiny elite. In the case of the 1640 revolution the mass of the population were involved and that a change in the consciousness of that mass of people did change. This change was in distorted form reflected in the writings of the Levellers

A considerable part of Hill’s essay concerned itself with the Land question. His emphasis examining economic changes which contributed to the English revolution are an anathema to most modern day historians. According to Hill in his 1940 essay

“The northern and western parts of England remained relatively untouched by the new commercial spirit radiating from London and the ports; but in the south and east many landowners were beginning to exploit their estates in a new way. Both in the Middle Ages and in the seventeenth century the first importance of an estate was that it supplied a land owner (through his control over the labour of others) with the means of livelihood. But over and above this, the large estates had in the Middle Ages maintained with their surplus agricultural produce a body of retainers who would on occasion act as soldiers, and so were the basis of the political power of the feudal lords. Now, with the development of the capitalist mode of production within the structure of feudalism, many landowners began either to market that portion of the produce of their estates which was not consumed by their families, or to lease their lands to a farmer who would produce for the market. So landowners came to regard their estates in a new light: as a source of money profit, of profits that were elastic and could be increased. Rents used to be fixed at levels maintained so long that they came to be regarded as “customary,” as having existed “from time immemorial”; so did the many extortionate legal charges which feudal landowners extracted from the peasantry; but now they were being “racked up” to fantastically high levels. This was in itself a moral as well as an economic revolution, a break with all that men had held right and proper, and had the most disturbing effects on ways of thought and belief.”

Hill paid important attention to the radicals of the English revolution of groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and he was correct when he said that while these were the most conscious revolutionaries they were second in importance to Oliver Cromwell as a revolutionary force. Again in this essay Hill would have appeared to have revised his previous position on the Levellers.

Hill justified this revision by saying that “Some will think that I overemphasize the importance of the defeated radicals at the expense of the mainstream achievements of the English revolution. Yet without the pressure of the Radicals the civil war might not have transformed into a revolution: some compromise could have been botched up between the gentry on the two sides- a “Prussian path”. Regicide and republic were no part of the intensions of the original leaders of the Long Parliament: they were forced on the men of 1649 by the logic of the revolution which they were trying to control”

A Series on English Civil War historiography

2011-11-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

From time to time I will review journal essays,books and individual articles examinging the differing strands of English Civil War historiography. The first in this series will be A Bourgeois Revolution by Christopher Hill 1980 Princeton U P. First published in Three British Revolutions 1641,1668,1776.

Further comment on Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground

2011-10-27T09:01:00.000-07:00

(This post was forwarded to me by Chris Thompson. It was left Anonymously on his blog. I am publishing because while not agreeing with every point it does have something to add to the debate.Chris thompson's remarks are also included)

Anonymous

It seems to me that most of the valid intellectual work Adamson's narrative accomplishes was better done by your own work on the "middle group."Then there are the problems. The valid nugget in Livesey's discontent, I think, is that Adamson has little patience for or interest in what might be called popular mobilization, even though this was what gave aristocratic politics its bite. And his treatment of the events of 1640--the only moment concerning which I have sufficient expertise to comment--is riddled with significant omissions and errors (example omission: he skips directly from the dissolution of the Short Parliament to the Lords' Petition, without offering to explain the summer's agitation; example error: he claims the London Petition was carried by clients of Warwick). While errors are an unavoidable part of the scholarly process, these seem more like errors of opportunity to me, opportunities to affirm the centrality of the figures in his study to the politics of that year.
For me, the main value of Adamson's work is to reopen the problem of the politics of the early 1640s. Which is a legitimate accomplishment. But I understand Livesey's uneasiness.

CT Reply

I am grateful for this comment although, alas, I do not think it is right. After his discussion of the dissolution of the Short Parliament, John Adamson did not proceed directly to a discussion of the Petition of the 12 peers but analysed the attitudes of the 2nd Earl of Warwick and his allies towards the Caroline regime in the 1630s and the evidence for collusion in the summer of 1640 between the members of the aristocratic Junto and the Scottish Covenanters. He identified Maurice Thompson, John Venn and Richard Shute (Noble revolt, page 79) as the bearers of the petition from London supporting the peers' petition: Thompson and Venn had had links with Warwick through their interests in colonisation since the late-1620s and in the 1630s, so his point is valid. There is, in fact, a mass of material in The Noble Revolt on the importance of popular pressures on the proceedings of the two Houses in 1640-1642: if you do not believe me, please read Pages 285-288 on the end of Strafford's life or Pages 468-477 on tumults in the capital. He was and is interested in the impact of demonstrations and the threat of violence in London in this and succeeding periods. Fortunately, a lot is known about how these demonstrations, etc., were organised from the works of Valerie Pearl, Robert Ashton, Keith Lindley and others. (See Clarendon Ms.20, fol.129 for Venn's role in co-ordinating such demonstrations.)It is, in any event, for John Adamson to develop his arguments as he wishes rather than meeting old-fashioned Marxist prescriptions.

Christopher Thompson commented Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground

2011-10-26T13:45:00.000-07:00

I am afraid, Keith, that this is not a convincing argument. It is factually incorrect to claim that all historiography before the 1970s offered some kind of explanation founded on a relationship between the 'base' of English society and its 'superstructure' as a reading of Hume, Mackintosh, Hallam, Macaulay and Trevelyan will show. It is a matter of debate when the heyday of British capitalism occurred but no one has yet shown how this shaped Whig historiography or made it more convincing. In any case, the origins of 'revisionism' lie not in the 1970s, whether early or late, but in the late-1960s when it was increasingly obvious that the kind of deterministic explanations offered by Tawney, Hill, Stone and others were unsustainable because they were at variance with the surviving evidence. By 1973, the work of 'revision' as Ted Rabb would describe it and the reaction against the kind of history being written by Stone and Hill wa s well under way. This was long before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reached the front rank of politics on either side of the Atlantic and long before John Adamson began his work on the 1640s. No so -called revisionist poured scorn on Marxist theory nor has Adamson downplayed the role of Oliver Cromwell. You should read the latter's essay on 'Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament' in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Longman. 1990) as penance. However one defines the political preferences of those you regard as 'revisionists', they were not predominantly or even obliquely right-wing. Tristram Hunt and Simon Schama are, moreover, hardly specialists in seventeenth-century English history. I ought to add that Kishlansky's attacks on Adamson in and after 1990 had a great deal more to do with academic politics than your account allows. There was no requirement on Adamson to preface his study of the political role of the peerage in the 1640s with an analysis of the class composition of the gentry or of its relationship with the Stuart Crown: that would have meant giving up his priorities in research and writing to address a long obsolete Marxist agenda. It was for him to write as he chose and to investigate the issues he wanted to examine. That is the right and duty of every historian. But do not suppose that he is or has been unaware of the connections between the members of the Junto in 1640-1642 and of the grandees later in the decade with the worlds of London mercantile and artisan politics. The novelty of his work lies in the revelations he has already made about such links and that he will make in subsequent publications. He has reshaped the historiography of the period already and will continue to do so because his work rests on secure evidential foundations, not on a political approach to the past.

Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground”

2011-10-26T12:37:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this article is to answer Nick Poyntz assertion that despite significant attacks in the past from historians such as Mark Kishlansky he believes that Adamson’s work does “break new ground”. To recap John Adamson’s main argument in his previous essays and in his huge book the Noble Revolt is that a small group or in his words a Junto made up of nobles led a revolt which caused the overthrow of Charles 1^st. Having finally read the book I find it difficult to agree with Nick’s point. The book is well written and extremely well researched. While I agree with Nick that Adamson has uncovered new material and sources I do not believe that he has developed it into a new historiography and therefore break new ground.

A new historiography would in my estimation have to at least take on board previous historiography and would have to be a synthesis of the most important parts of both Whig and Marxist historiography in order to develop a new and improved historiography. Without this Nick’s claim becomes devoid of substance.

Furthermore I am a firm believer that most previous historiography (certainly 20th century) had some kind of material base or at least paid lip service to the relationship between base and superstructure. In other words previous historiography whether it was Whig, Marxist or Post-Modernist were in some form refractions of what was taking place in society either politically or economically. For example the rise of the revisionists in the early 1970s coincided with a right wing political movement spearheaded by Thatcher and Reagan. This movement gained ground with the final collapse of the USSR which led to numerous theories that the collapse of Communism meant that the socialist project had failed. The most pessimistic expression of these theories came with the End of History by Francis Fukuyama. The English Civil war was not the only subject that had a noticeable revisionist trend during this time. From the 1970s Studies into the Russian Revolution provoked a similar revisionist backlash.

A point of clarification I am not in favour of a crude economic determinism. One of the main attacks on Marxism is that it argues that ideology is just a cover for real economic motivations of social actors. It is said that Marxism does not account for the subjective actions of individuals based on political motivations. I do not deny that people can be motivated by ideological motives and I do not claim some kind of umbilical between the two but I believe that there is a connection which is dialectical in nature between political and economic actions. Adamson while correctly portrays his figures were motivated by ideological concerns he fails to uncover the social interests that were served by those ideologies.

It is true that historians and their historiography do go out of fashion but historiographies that were fashionable two hundred years ago still can contribute to our understanding of the war. Despite Christopher Thompson’s protestation Whig and Marxist historians while thin on the ground still exist today. Tristram Hunt and Simon Sharma are for all intense and purposes Whig historians. In fact large swathes of television historians offer a certain Whig outlook. In fact the BBC is full of them.

To answer another point from Chris Thompson historians such as Christopher Hill when developing his historiography did not reject entirely the work of Whig historians. He took the attitude that they had something to contribute to an understanding of the complex nature of the English Civil War.

Hill did not just offer a critique of Whig history he understood that their historiography belonged to a time in English history that coincided with the heyday of British capitalism. Whig history reflected the position of significant section of the English bourgeoisie. He also recognised that Whig history had some similarities with Marxist history.

In my opinion for a piece of work to break new ground has to be more than a well-reasoned argument or a rather large amount of text or have expensive colour pictures, Adamson refers to the English Gentry but does not really go into any extensive detail as to the class composition of the gentry. What was its economic position towards the king? Adamson maybe a skilled historian but a more detailed description of the class struggle involving his Cabal would have made the book far more precise and concrete.

Adamson’s books on the English Civil war are part of what has become the ‘post revisionist ‘school of history writing. The main characteristic of this school of thought is a rejection of both the Marxist and Whig views English Civil War historiography. From the beginning of his career Adamson sought to distance himself from any form of socio-economic explanations which have largely been championed by ‘Marxist’ historians such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.

Before the Post Revisionist era there consisted a group of historians who were for want of a better term simply “revisionists.” From the late seventies onwards a group of mainly but not all right wing historians sought to pour scorn on Marxist theory based largely on socio-economic explanation of historical events. The result of this has been a chaotic mix of differing theories with Adamson’s being one of them. Adamson elaborated his thesis.

As I said at the beginning Adamson’s work has previously come under ferocious attack from the historian Mark Kishlansky. Kishlansky’s first essay Saye What which challenged Adamson’s theory extends to nothing more than a catalogue of Adamson’s errors. Some of his criticisms I agree with. I am not sure Adamson’s cabal of politicians was that influential and I do not agree with his downplaying of Cromwell’s role. Also in some respects does seem to turn events upside down, but having said that I think Kishlansky’s critique of Adamson does border on academic bullying.

Take for instance this quote from Conrad Russell “What makes a historian master of his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from this discipline, risks acquiring a dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable”.

Kishlansky accuses Adamson of “tendentious interpretation”. Well you could accuse every single historian that has written on the English Civil War of this. Historians have the right to interpret the facts or sources the way they feel fit without fear of some form of academic bullying.

Adamson’s new work seems to have taken too much notice of Kishlansky’s remarks. It does contain a large amount of footnotes in fact it is slightly an overkill to publish so many and one reason that has been suggested is that it was a defensive reaction to Kishlansky’s critique..Kishlansky alleged that Adamson was “deliberately abusing and misreading sources”.

What began as a disagreement between two historians soon became a major historical debate. Both sides of the debate took their gripes to the pages of academic journals. Big named historians such as Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper took one side or the other without really resolving the issue.

Outside of the academic community these debates which occur frequently might seem like storms in tea cups but in reality particularly when concerning the discussion over the civil war they are expressions of very deep seated divisions over cause and effect. As Lawrence Stone described the history of the 17th century as 'a battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.”

You are correct when you stipulate that Adamson concentrates more on superstructure than on base. Having said this I do not believe Adamson’s aversion to base his analysis of the Junto on economic motives does not constitute a new historiography. You also point out that if Adamson had carried out “a sustained analysis of the vertical links between politicians and "people" would be a very different work of history”. In this matter you are correct he choose to concentrate on this class of people because in a distorted way it reflects his politics. In my experience very few historians have been able to abstract themselves away from their political slant. Whether this is a good or bad thing is still open to debate.

The Royal Stuarts by Allan Massie: Jonathan Cape :A Review

2011-10-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

The Royal Stuarts by Allan Massie is a very good portrait of one of the most important families in British history but whether they were a family that “shaped Britain” is very much open to challenge. Quite logically Massie starts at the beginning of the Stewarts reign. The spelling of the family name was changed to 'Stuart’ by Mary, Queen of Scots, to “stop the French mispronouncing it”.

The Stuarts began life as very rich landowners from Brittany, France before moving to Scotland were they acquired the hereditary office of 'steward ’to the Scottish kings. Massie is correct when he gives such a wide sweep to a family that did span a considerable range of British history, to be exact from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic period.

The book is far from an academic account of the Stuarts although having said that this is no Mills & Boon approach to historical writing according to one reviewer “he has the novelist’s ability to conjure up context and background in a brief sketch, the journalist’s knack of summarizing arguments and issues, and the storyteller’s gift for picking out those key actions or remarks that bring a person’s character to life”.

It is true the book has the feel of a novel but Massie is a good enough writer to document his text with a generous use of footnotes. His use of sources comes from older historians and writers rather than modern day ones. He cites, John Buchan, Lord Macaulay and Sir Walter Scott.Massie is not a professional historian and this has led to some historians bemoaning the fact that it seems to have no original use of primary sources or that any manuscripts were consulted.

But there is nothing wrong citing other creative writer’s opinion on his chosen subject. In saying that students studying this book should also do some independent research.The book does have its share of mistakes it has been pointed out that Charles I ‘find refuge’ in Carisbrooke Castle, this is not strictly true as he was in reality held under armed parliamentary guard. Massie asserts Charles 'almost certainly’ did not read Hobbes’s Leviathan. But this is contradicted by the fact that was given a manuscript copy by Hobbes himself.

Perhaps more importantly the book does have several weaknesses. Massie seems to follow in the footsteps of recent historiography in the fact very little mention of the vast economic changes that covered the reign of the Stuart family. Nothing is learnt of the close connection of the Stuarts to section of the growing mercantile class that grew up in the 15th and 16th centuries and played no small role in the English revolution.

From my standpoint the most important chapter in the book is Charles 1 The Martyr King. In this part of the book Massie clearly indicates sympathy for his subject. For Massie Charles is not a “man of blood”. The chapter also lacks certain objectivity and Massie’s conservative proclivities shine through. He takes on board a number of revisionist arguments. Charles was not responsible for the civil war it was nasty parliaments fault. Massie uncritically presents the counterfactual argument If Charles had not been so stubborn then things might have not developed into a civil war. There is a downplaying of social and economic factors.

I am not critical of Massie’s choice of the Stuarts as a study but readers should bear in mind Massie’s “is well known for advocating a Tory viewpoint” as one writer pointed out correctly that the “Stuarts are meat and drink to conservative revisionist historians because their complex personalities and the shifting, pre‑modern nature of their kingdoms (plural after 1603) made them unusually susceptible to interpretative spin. Stuart reputations go up and down like the stock market”

Perhaps one of the weaknesses of the Marxist historians was so little work was done counter the revisionists view of the Stuarts with a historical materialist viewpoint.

To conclude Massie is a very good writer and his approach throughout the book is intelligent and does not talk down to the reader. The pace of the book is fast and deals with a large amount of material. Massie who is a writer with a wealth of experience which makes this a book well worth reading and good introduction to the subject.

Adamson review: a response

2011-09-30T12:12:00.000-07:00

John Adamson, The Noble Revolt. The Overthrow of Charles I. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London. 2007. Xxii + 742 pages.)

I have just received two responses to my blog review of John Adamson 's book the Noble Revolt and have now published both. Suffice to say I will in time reply to some their points. While putting Adamson's work in a wider context of new research on the Civil War. One question I will attempt to answer is does it break new ground?.

From Chris Thompson

I have now had the opportunity to read Keith Livesey’s comments on his blog (“A Trumpet of Sedition”, 26 September, 2011) regarding John Adamson’s book in detail. Keith Livesey has an intense interest in the events of the 1640s and favours a Marxist interpretation as readers of his blog will know. I enjoy reading what he has to say although I am often sceptical about his claims. On this occasion, however, I fear that he is seriously mistaken.

Let me begin with the historiographical issues he raises. Nineteenth and early-twentieth century Whig historians argued that the English Civil Wars of the 1640s were the result of constitutional and religious struggles that paved the way for the establishment of a limited monarchy alongside Parliamentary supremacy, the rule of law, freedom of the press and religious toleration after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. These were the Whigs’ themes from the time of Hallam and Macaulay to that of G.M.Trevelyan. This argument was rejected by Marxist historians and those historians influenced by Marx in the period before the Second World War and after it. One thinks of figures like R.H.Tawney, Christopher Hill and others who believed that antecedent economic and social changes explained the origins and course of the ‘English Revolution’. Of course, there were historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was definitely not a Marxist, but who had his own socio-economic explanation to advance in the late-1940s and early-1950s.

The ‘storm over the gentry’ and contrasting claims about the fortunes of the peerage led to the great outpouring of theses and published works on the landed elites and on counties in the 1950s and 1960s. It is fair to say that this body of research left earlier arguments about the economic and social causes of the English Civil Wars or Revolution still undetermined. The controversy had run into the sand.

It was in this context that Conrad Russell observed in 1973 that social change explanations of this kind had failed. He left open the possibility that new explanations of this sort might be advanced. Russell himself and those historians advocating a new approach to the religious and political history of the early Stuart period were concerned with the causes of the breakdown in Stuart England before 1640: Theodore Rabb denominated them – misleadingly in my view – as ‘revisionists’. It was against the claims of Russell that historians like Richard Cust, Ann Hughes, Peter Lake and Tom Cosgwell, i.e. the post-revisionists, reacted in the 1980s. But there was a second group of historians, including John Morrill and Mark Kishlansky, engaged more or less simultaneously in re-evaluating the conflicts of the 1640s. These historians, whether or not they constituted one or two groups of ‘revisionists’, were certainly not mainly right-wing in their political persuasions. Russell himself, Ann Hughes, Richard Cust and John Morrill would have rejected such a description out of hand. In any case, by 1991 when Russell’s two books on the origins of the English Civil War and the fall of the British monarchies were published, revisionism and the reaction against it were over. New concerns over images, propaganda and the public sphere were coming to preoccupy seventeenth-century historians.

There was no attempt in the 1970s by the so-called revisionists to put forward explanations entailing “a rejection of both the Marxist and Whig views of English Civil War historiography” or “to pour scorn on Marxist theory”. Whig views were regarded as methodologically flawed and Marxist ones as anachronistic and irrelevant. They had ceased to matter. It is certainly wrong to claim that John Adamson’s “politics and historical attitudes were formulated during the Thatcher era.” John Adamson was a graduate of the University of Melbourne and arrived in Cambridge long after Mrs Thatcher had become Prime Minister. There is nothing in his book to suggest that he viewed the main actors in the period before the end of January, 1642 as reacting blindly to events or that he fails to explain or does not want to explain what provoked this revolt of the nobles and their allies. Equally clearly, he has nothing in its text or in the introduction to the volume of essays he edited in 2009, The English Civil War, to suggest any denigration of Oliver Cromwell or that he particularly admired King Charles I. When Keith Livesey says that the book “contains significant omissions which include the significant role played by the Earl of Essex as Parliamentary commander after the outbreak of the civil war, the creation of the Royalist party, the significance of the New Model Army, the military defeat and elimination of the King, and the abolition of the House of Lords”, the chronological and logical fallacies involved in such claims are all too clear. None of these things had happened by the end of January, 1642 and thus fell outside the scope of John Adamson’s book. They will, no doubt, be dealt with in his later volumes.

Take, for example, the proposition advanced in his review that “Adamson does not touch upon any of the controversies over the war” and the contention four paragraphs later that he “accused some historians of relying too much on large abstract forces and opposed a downplaying of the role of the individual. He said”, so Keith Livesey argues, “he did not agree that long term views got us anywhere or that it was a bourgeois revolution. He [Adamson] felt that this “economic determinist” viewpoint did not explain too much.” The two claims are contradictory. But, if one reads Adamson’s book carefully, it is possible to see that he did engage with earlier historians’ interpretations – e.g. throughout the footnotes and in his epilogue (Pages 513-516) and that the bulk of his introduction to the 2009 volume of essays considers historiographical issues as a prelude to the work of his contributors. Nowhere in the book is there any comment to link the decline of Marxist influence on Civil War historiography with the fall of the Berlin Wall or to explain the English Revolution as a result of Charles I’s inexperience and vanity. Furthermore, no one can massage the egos of dead aristocrats.

In fact, almost all of Keith Livesey’s claims are either unfounded or untenable. I understand why, as a Marxist, he regrets its passing as an influence on the study of the events of the 1640s and 1650s since the early-1970s and the great days of Christopher Hill. That was probably inevitable as one generation of historians reacts against the claims of the preceding one. I happen to think that this is a good, positive development which has led to some profoundly important new lines of enquiry. John Adamson’s work has contributed very largely to this process and will, I expect, continue to do so into the future. His views on politics, whatever they may be, are irrelevant to the importance of his research just as they are to the work of historians of the left. We are all engaged in a continuing debate about these issues, a debate to which, alas, this review has contributed very little.

mercuriuspoliticus commented on The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson 576 pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

2011-09-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

This was a thought-provoking post but I'm not sure I would agree with all of what you say about Adamson's work here. (You will probably have guessed that having read my own review of the book!). I think it's a bit unfair to say it's light on analysis: the sustained way in which Adamson unpicks the factional manoeuvrings behind the Junto, and particularly the complicated Anglo-Scottish-Irish connections, are to my mind highly analytical and considered.

And he does devote lots of space, too, to understanding why a certain section of peers and MPs were so hostile to Charles I's policies during the Personal Rule. he does not arrive at a class-based explanation of this group's actions, but on the evidence I think he's right to locate their opposition in political and religious ideologies: or to put it another way, to prioritise superstructure rather than base.

Perhaps it's fairer to say that Adamson's book does not really engage with those below the level of the political class. There are moments when he takes a rather monolithic view of politicians controlling the London crowd: it was probably more complicated than this, and while some protests in 1641 were I'm sure engineered or at least tacitly supported by the Junto grandees, many more will have owed their origins to the indepenent political agency of those participating in them. But to carry out a sustained analysis of the vertical links between politicians and "people" would be a very different work of history, and add hundreds of pages to what is already a monster of a book.

And the book does stop in January 1642, which means that its chronological scope can't really cover some of the things you mention in your review. Within these limits I think it is absolutely reasonable for Adamson to argue that the outbreak of the war - in the sense of Charles and Parliament coming to blows - is driven by the sustained efforts of the Junto to achieve a quasi-republican settlement. Yes of course when it comes to recruiting armies, to choosing sides etc this doesn't look at the motivations of working people, but in terms of Adamson's focus - what was going on in London/Edinburgh/Dublin politics that caused the rift between King and Parliament - the book, for me, breaks new ground.

I'm sure you're right that Adamson has some sympathies with Charles I (and Strafford, too) - read his chapter in Niall Ferguson's "Virtual History" for a rollicking attempt to imagine the ancien regime in England continuing into the late eighteenth century had Charles only been able to defeat the Scots. But I'm not sure you can argue that he denigrates Cromwell because of his politics. See for example his chapter in John Morrill's "Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution", in which he conducts a close and considered analysis of Cromwell's attitudes to Parliament and his behaviour in the Long Parliament.

The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson 576 pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

2011-09-26T01:29:00.000-07:00

To begin with this review of John Adamson’s Nobel Revolt is not an attack on the merits of Adamson as a historian. Adamson is a competent historian and his books are usually well written and extensively researched. The Noble Revolt has been described as "a work of great style and imagination as well as scholarship... As with a great 19th century novel, the story and the characters will become your friends for life."

Adamson’s books on the English Civil war are part of what has become the ‘post revisionist’ school of history writing. The main characteristic of this school of thought is a rejection of both the Marxist and Whig views English Civil War historiography. From the beginning of his career Adamson sought to distance himself from any form of socio-economic explanations which have largely been championed by ‘Marxist’ historians such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning

Before the Post Revisionist era there consisted a group of historians who were for want of a better term simply “revisionists.” From the late seventies onwards a group of mainly but not all right wing historians sought to pour scorn on Marxist theory based largely on socio-economic explanation of historical events. The result of this has been a chaotic mix of differing theories with Adamson’s being one of them. Adamson elaborated his thesis when he edited the recent book The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts 2009. Again no space could be found for socio or economic explanations of the war.

The Noble Revolt is a work that took Adamson nearly 15 years to research and write. The book is a formidable read with nearly two hundred pages of notes. The main theoretical premise of the book is to put forward a view of the Civil war as basically a coup d'etat by a group of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the King.

According to Diane Purkiss these nobles were “driven by their code of honour, they acted to protect themselves and the nation. Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex and Warwick move from the sidelines to occupy centre stage, as do their counterparts among Scottish peers. It was they and not the rude masses who plucked a king from his throne. Oliver Cromwell, for Adamson, was merely one of their lesser lackeys”. The work is light on analysis. It must be said that Adamson’s theory is not that original and is mainly a rehash of some previous revisionist historians.

It is also noticeable in the majority of Adamson’s work “ordinary people” rarely get a look in which is less to do with his historical proclivities and more to do with the right wing nature of his politics. Adamson’s politics and historical attitudes were formulated during the Thatcher era. He belongs to a generation of historians that include Niall Fergusson whose main task seems to be working towards removing any trace of Marxist or Whig influence from current history writing.

Robert Boynton describes the early days of this group in a article “Ferguson calls this his "punk Tory" period, a phase when he and Sullivan listened to the Sex Pistols and vied to see who could most effectively rankle the left-liberal majority. He treasures an invitation he received from friends at Balliol in the early eighties, to a cocktail party to celebrate the deployment of U.S. cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. The invitations were illustrated with champagne bottles emitting mushroom clouds. The conservative Cambridge historian John Adamson remembers dining with Ferguson the night Thatcher resigned. "We both sensed it was the end of an era," Adamson said

One aspect of the Noble Revolt you feel that despite Adamson writing about a palace coup you get a strong feeling that he has a lot of sympathy for Charles 1st. You can see this in his book title the Noble Revolt (notice this is not a revolution from below but a revolt from above) The reader can judge for themselves when Adamson writes "From the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles caught a glimpse of the gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the boat turned westwards, past the Abbey, and under the great east window of St Stephen’s Chapel – the Commons’ chamber, and the scene of his most recent political debacle. It would be seven years before Charles saw his palace again”.

Adamson also seems the revel in his idea that the main players in the revolution were largely reacting somewhat blindly to events. One reviewer of Adamson’s book said “Unlike hind sighted historians, they stumbled forward, seeking peace if possible and war if necessary. As Oliver Cromwell, in 1640 an obscure farmer on the fringes of Warwick's circle, once said, 'no one travels so high as he who knows not where he is going'.

As regards the footnotes it is some sort of an overkill to publish some many. One reason maybe because previously in his career Adamson was attacked by historians such as Mark Kishlansky who alleged that Adamson was “deliberately abusing and misreading sources”. This doubtless explains why Adamson’s book comes with so many footnotes. What began as a disagreement between two historians soon became a major historical debate

Both sides of the debate took their gripes to the pages of academic journals.. Big name historians such as Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper took one side or the other without really resolving the issue.

Outside of the academic community these debates which occur frequently might seem like storms in tea cups but in reality particularly when concerning the discussion over the civil war they are expressions of very deep seated divisions over cause and effect. As Lawrence Stone described the history of the 17th century as 'a battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.”

The book is clearly written for a very small academic community and not for a general readership. While not agreeing with Adamson premise it was true to certain extent that there was a revolt amongst the nobility but Adamson fails to or does not want to explain what provoked this revolt and whether there was the socio economic or class basis to it. Purkiss is correct to say that “ he has impressively uncovered a neglected aspect of the mentalite of the age. It does not follow that the juntos were the cause of the war or that the war was what they thought it was”.

Another criticism I have of the book is that it tends to overestimate this particular group. Adamson clearly explains the political motivation for this group but this is to the detriment of far more important social layers.Again nothing is said of the ordinary people who made up the main content of the armies. What provoked them to die for a cause in their hundreds of thousands. More importantly his denigration of leading figures such as Oliver Cromwell is perhaps more tied up with Adamson politics than his history. Certainly Cromwell is hardly flavour of the month of leading sections of the current ruling elite of whom Adamson no doubt associates himself with now and again.

The book is beautifully illustrated with full colour photos, helpful maps and plans. You get the feeling that a lot of money was spent on this book. Which is strange as it appeals to such a small audience.

The chronological dates of the book are May 1640 and January 10, 1642 when the King departed London. Not only the period covered by the book but also the layer that Adamson studies composed a very small part of the English ruling elite in the early 1640s. Not that I believe this layer does not deserve systematic coverage but if it is done so without placing them in the overall context of the war then it becomes a matter of ego massaging by the historian. Adamson does mention the intellectual climate of the time but a single paragraph of a 742 page book is hardly objective.

The historian R C Richardson has called the book title and subtitle” both highly misleading. The events documented in this book did not lead to the overthrow of Charles I. As Adamson himself now concedes, what happened in the 1640s "was no mere barons' war" and the "baronial context" was one of several that coalesced at the time. "Nor was it a revolt of the nobility, or even the major part of the nobility, acting alone".

A better book would have recognised that these two years covered by Adamson were extremely crucial not only because of the rebellion by a minority of the Nobility as Adamson suggest but they set the scene for the future course of the war. The tendency amongst post revisionist historians to concentrate on limited political aspects covering only the ruling elite and a tiny majority for that matter is detrimental to a fuller and more rounded understanding of the war.

The book also contains significant omissions which include the significant role played by the Earl of Essex as Parliamentary commander after the outbreak of civil war, the creation of the Royalist party, the significance of the New Model Army, the military defeat and eventual elimination of the King, and the abolition of the House of Lords.

Another big omission is the fact that Adamson does not touch upon any of the controversies over the war. According to one blog review by Gavin Robinson “There is no coverage of other historians from a wide range of theoretical or argumentative backgrounds.. This extends through the book’s epilogue, where Adamson is keen to debunk Whigs and revisionists alike by finding a third way on explaining the origins of the war – but can coverage of only 1640-1642 cover enough of the origins of the war to adequately explain them? I don’t believe it can”

Adamson’s theory tends to try and rule out the revolutionary nature of the civil war. His Noble Revolt essentially put forwards a consistent view used by numerous right wing historians, commentators and one prime minister that Britain does not do violent revolutions Adamson says “Unlike our Continental neighbours, British revolutions have tended to be relatively polite and orderly affairs. Not for us the tumbrels and tanks in the streets, the giddy cycles of massacre”.

According to Ann Talbot “The sense that in Britain things were done differently and without continental excess is not entirely new. Burke had expressed it in his Reflections on the French Revolution, but there were plenty of voices to gainsay him and the social disturbances in the years of economic upheaval that followed the Napoleonic wars were a testimony to the contrary. Luddism, anti-corn law agitation, the anti-poor law movement, strikes and most of all Chartism demonstrated that Britain was not an island of social peace. Nonetheless the Whig interpretation of history had deep roots in the consciousness of the British political class. The visitor to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire can still see in the great entrance hall a fireplace inscribed with the legend “1688 The year of our liberty.” It refers to the “Glorious Revolution” when James II quit his throne and his kingdom overnight and William of Orange was installed as king. This was the kind of palace revolution that the British ruling class increasingly preferred to look back on rather than the revolution in the 1640s when they had executed the king, conveniently overlooking the fact that James would not have run if he had not remembered the fate of his father—Charles I”.

He accused some historians of relying too much on large abstract forces and opposed a downplaying the role of the individual. He said he did not agree that long term views got us any where or that it was a bourgeois revolution. He felt that this “economic determinist” viewpoint did not explain too much.

Adamson echoes the prevailing academic orthodoxy that there was no bourgeois revolution largely because he felt there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social classes can be found on either side of the struggle.

According to a number of historians and I would include Adamson in them even Cromwell, it can be argued could be better understood as a representative of the declining gentry rather than the rising bourgeois. Adamson believes that Cromwell never intended a revolution and come to think of it neither did those around him but according to Ann Talbot who indirectly countered Adamson’s point by saying “wished merely to restore what they believed to be the ancient constitution of the kingdom. The whole unpleasant episode could have been avoided if only Charles II had been a little wiser”.

Adamson linked this distancing away from the Marxist viewpoint on the civil war with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He somewhat smugly said that no one had anticipated the collapse of the wall and communism, which is not true. He went on to say that there has been in the past too much emphasis on social classes in the civil war but in reality the war was much more about individual allegiances and decisions.

Essentially according to Adamson the war was caused by Charles the 1st and his inexperience and vanity. There is no doubting Adamson’s work rate or ability to carryout prodigious research his current book’s weight and I don’t mean academic but physical is testimony to that. But this is not alone enough to give a multi rather than singular dimension to understanding the complexity and magnitude of the Civil war.

Is the book as the blogger Mercurius Politicus suggests is a “major contribution to the debate on the origins of the English Civil War”. I do not think it is. Is it worth reading, yes but try and read it quickly otherwise you may lament spending some much time on it.

Notes

1. Not the main act but a prelude to drama 20 July 2007 Roger Richardson-Times Higher Educaltion

2. "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill By Ann Talbot 25 March 2003-www.wsws.org

3. How Charles I lost his head 03 May 2007 Malcolm Gaskill reviews The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson. Sources

4. John Adamson is the author of The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow Of Charles I (Orion,

5. Leon Trotsky's Writings on Britain Ch 2 Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism

6. The Nobel Revolt Review by Diane Purkiss Published: June 1 2007 Diane Purkiss is author of ”The English Civil War: A People’s History” (HarperCollins

7. The English Context of the British Civil Wars.By John Adamson Published in History Today Volume: 48 Issue: 11

8. From Thinking the Unthinkable: A profile of Niall Ferguson Robert Boynton

9. Class & Cabal Tom Hazledine New Left Review.

10. The War of the Realms: The English Civil War: Noble Revolt John Adamson (To be published in 2013)

The House of Commons 1604-1629 edited by Andrew Thrush, John P. Ferris

2011-09-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

Christopher Thompson has written an interesting and thought provoking review of the above book. It can be accessed at http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1129/response

A Short Review of Regicide and Republic-England 1603 -1660 Graham E Seel Cambridge Perspectives in History 2001.

2011-09-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

This short book is a decent account of a very complex historical event. The book is part of Cambridge Perspectives in History and is aimed at AS and A Level history students. The author Graham E Seel covers the period from 1603 to 1660.

Seel explains well the complex religious and political developments such as the remarkable execution of Charles I, civil war and the introduction of a republican form of government.

The book is well laid out and is beautifully illustrated with generous and interesting pictures.

The book was published in 2001 and this is reflected in the large number of quotes from revisionist and post revisionist historians. This comes as no surprise as the revisionists tend to dominate this particular historical field at the moment. The book does contain a chapter on economic questions which again is a rarity but is to be welcomed anyway.

The book is very light on historiography but does at least give a very basic run down of the various schools of thought on the civil war. Seel does issue a valuable piece of advice in that it is important for any new student of the subject to study the historian before you study the history.

The Life And Times of Richard Baxter 1615 – 1691

2011-09-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

Richard Baxter

In his book Richard Baxter and Puritan Politics Richard Schlatter makes the point that figures like Baxter have been significantly overlooked by historians of both left and right persuasions. Schlatter is correct when saying that the English Civil War was one of a half dozen creative periods of world history. While figures such as Baxter have faded into the background the Civil War still provokes great interest. The purpose of this short article is to go some way to redress this imbalance.

Richard Baxter was born in 1615 in the village of Rowton, Shropshire. Baxter described his father as “a mean Freeholder”. The Baxter’s early family life was hard and “entangled by debts”. Although much of this was brought on by a family trait of addiction to gambling .

Despite this wild beginning the family soon began to adopt the Puritan lifestyle and philosophical outlook. Baxter later acknowledged his fathers as the “Instrument of my first Convictions, and Approbation of a Holy Life’. Baxter was in many ways a representative of the archetypal lower middle class layer that saw Puritanism as both a moral and philosophical outlook. His father also bred into his son that hostility to Puritanism stems from “mere Malice’ and that ‘Godly People were the best’.

Baxter's own ‘vehement desires’ had been to proceed from school to university to achieve ‘Academick Glory’, and throughout his life he regretted his lack of a university education and pointed to his ‘wanting Academical Honours’ as a mark of his insufficiency as a minister

Despite his lowly academic status how does one account for the fact that Baxter “became one of the most learned of seventeenth-century divines.” Baxter himself probably puts this down to his devotion to God. But while not downplaying the fact that Baxter was undoubtedly a gifted speaker and writer Baxter was also moved by the massive social, political and religious upheavals brought about by the English revolution.

While much of Baxter’s thought was cloaked in religious trappings his political and philosophical writings should be studied today because they play an important part in our understanding of the events of the 17th century English revolution.

Baxter even early on in his life engendered dislike and hatred from many sides of the class struggle. One example came in 1642 when a churchwarden tried to impose a parliamentary order for the demolition of any outstanding images of the persons of the Trinity or of the Virgin Mary. Baxter was held by many accountable for this order and was targeted by ‘a Crew of the drunken riotous Party of the Town’. Baxter clearly feared for his life at this time. The tensions and hostilities surrounding the outbreak of civil war further heightened feelings: ‘a violent Country Gentleman’ passing Baxter in the street ‘stopt and said, There goeth a Traitor’.

Baxter politically was on the right wing of the Presbyterians. He never gave his full backing to Cromwell and never really adhered to his ideas about the war and later the Commonwealth. One thing is also certain is that he was hostile to the left wing independents such as Hugh Peters. He reserved his anger for “sectaries” such as Thomas Rainborow. As for the Levellers and Diggers he saw them as nothing more than “tools of Anabaptists’, in fact any one who sought to enfranchise a wider selection of the population were labelled Anabaptists.

Baxter was a prodigious writer turning out more than 130 books (the exact figure depends upon how works published in a variety of forms are counted), several of them folios over 1 million words in length.

The civil war produced an outpouring of writing that had never been seen previously in England and would match any contemporary event. According to Christopher Hill “People especially Puritans began to utilise the press more often than not secretly to forward their thoughts and views on the nature of religion politics and philosophy. It has been said with his volume of work Baxter “was the first author of a string of best-sellers in British literary history”. The political theorist, Hobbes, describes how the Presbyterian merchant class of the city of London was the first centre of sedition, trying to build a state governed like the republics of Holland and Venice, by merchants for their own interests. (The comparison with the bourgeois republics is constantly recurring in Parliamentarian writings.) Mrs. Hutchinson, the wife of one of Cromwell’s colonels, said all were described as Puritans who “crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or conversation, or anything good.”

Baxter claimed no credit for his letter writing. Again he put his thoughts down to a gift from God. He was however a compulsive letter writer. His 1200 letters which were sent to over 350 people. This amount of letter writing bears testimony to not only Baxter’s own love of life but give us a deeper insight into the culture and politics during the civil war.

According to one writer “The largest single group among Baxter's correspondents consists of some seventy men who became nonconformist ministers at the Restoration, but the interest of the letters is not confined to the history of nonconformity, ecclesiastical affairs, or theological controversy. Baxter was an acute enquirer into matters arcane and mundane, inveterately interested in both public affairs and individuals' experience, encyclopaedically industrious in establishing the grounds for the opinions which, for over half a century, he freely discussed in letters with persons of every walk of life, from peers, the gentry, and members of the professions, to merchants, apprentices, farmers, and seamen. The result is not merely a rich historical archive: the range of this correspondence, the vitality of its engagement with a great variety of topics, the immediacy of its expression, and the unpredictability’s of its mood and tone make this collection a record of felt experience unique among early epistolary archives”.

Would it be correct to say that Baxter’s writing represented a definite strand within Puritan philosophy?. No not really, In most doctrinal disputes he sought a middle position. Another writer suggested “that his affinities with the Cambridge Platonists have placed Baxter as a precursor for the rationalism which was to lead to John Locke and the deists”.

Title page of a 1657 edition of The Reformed Pastor.

While people took sides in the war for different reasons Baxter would have preferred to remain neutral and it was touch and go which side he would support as he felt comfortable with both.

Baxter chose the parliamentary side because he felt that “for the debauched rabble through the land emboldened by his (the kings) gentry, and seconded by the common soldiers of his army, took all that were called Puritans for their enemies”. Baxter blamed the King for the war and was disturbed by the fact that it could in his words disturb the rabble into riot.

Some of his writings as regards the poor have the whiff of fascism about it. He did not believe that men “from the Dung-cart to make us laws, and from the Ale-house and the May-pole to dispose of our religion, lives, and estates. When a pack of the rabble are got together, the multitude of the needy and the dissolute prodigals if they were ungoverned, would tear out the throats of the more wealthy and industrious…. And turn all into a constant war”. It would be easy to dismiss Baxter’s writing as an exception but in reality they expressed a real fear amongst the propertied elite that the revolution would lead to a wider enfranchisement and a rebellion against property.

If you strip away all the religious trappings Baxter’s writings are imbued with this hatred of the masses. His Holy Commonwealth which is probably his most famous book is a manifesto against wider democracy except for the chosen few namely people like him. Baxter‘s hostility to the working masses was expressed most vehemently in his opposition to the Leveller’s. In fact a study of people like Baxter shows eloquently the social and political forces that were reigned against the Levellers.

During his time in the New Model army as an army Chaplin he took on the Levellers in debate. He accused the Levellers of publishing large numbers of wild pamphlets as “changeable as the moon “and advocating “a heretical democracy”.Despite Baxter’s hostility to the Levellers Baxter’s books themselves were burnt and he was labelled a subversive.

While some writers have compared Baxter’s writings to that of Hobbes and Harrington according to Schlatter Baxter’s opposition to Hobbes and Harrington were that they believed in a secular state but Baxter did not. Baxter followed the writings of Hobbes and Harrington very closely ,Baxter declares: "I must begin at the bottom and touch these Praecognita which the politicians doth presuppose because I have to do with some that will deny as much, as shame will suffer them to deny." Harrington, Hobbes and to a lesser extent Baxter writings expressed the sentiment that at the heart of the civil war was the unresolved nature of democracy. Like Baxter perhaps the majority of puritans including the leadership of the revolution were extremely hostile to a wider enfranchisement of the population.

Baxter was heavily critical of Hobbes whose “mistake” according to one writer “was that in his doctrine of "absolute impious Monarchy' he gives priority to man by making sovereign the will of man rather than the will of God. Baxter deplored any attempt to draw criteria for right and wrong from man's As for Harrington; his great fallacy consisted in denying God's sovereignty by making "God the Proposer, and the people the Resolvers or Confirmers of all their laws." If his [Harrington's] doctrine be true, the Law of nature is no Law, till men consent to it. At least where the Major Vote can carry it, Atheism, Idolatry, Murder, Theft, Whoredome, etc., are no sins against God. Yea no man sinneth against God but he that consenteth to his Laws. The people have greater authority or Government than Gods in Baxter's view, such conceptions of politics and its practice as those of Hobbes and Harrington is suited to atheists and heathen”.

While Baxter was critical of both Hobbes and Harrington much of his philosophical writings bore similarities to them both. Politically speaking he took a moderate position constantly seeking not to alienate the political establishment of his day of which he did not succeed. According to Geoffrey Nuttall who summarized Baxter's political position by pointing to the fact that "in politics as well as ecclesiastical position as continually taking a 'moderate' position which from both sides would bring him charges of betrayal or insincerity."

In many ways Baxter work was physical proof that despite recent revisionist historian’s denial that the Civil war was very much fought along class lines. As Baxter himself put it at the time: “A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of England . . . adhered to the King . . . And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry and were for the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and civility in the land; and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the strength of iniquity”

How to understand Baxter, Schlatter offers some advice “students of Baxter must look backwards, for he stands near the end of a tradition which, although someone is always trying to revive it as a weapon in the never ending war on liberty and democracy has been long been dead. To understand Baxter’s politics we must reflect on that long political tradition which achieved its first and most magnificent expression in the City of God, which flourished in the Middle Ages and reformation, and died in the Age of Reason”.

Sources

1. Richard Baxter and Puritan Politics Richard Schlatter Rutgers University.2. N. H. Keeble Oxford National Biography 3. Politics and Theology in the Thought of Richard Baxter- Walter B Douglas.Andrews University 4. IIIM Magazine, Volume 2, Number 27, July 3 to July 9, 2000 5 The Work and Thought of Richard Baxter by Lynell Friesen 6. The English Revolution 1640 Christopher Hill

My Recent Reads on the 17th Century

2011-09-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

1. Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England by B Manning. Manning was a member of the Socialist Workers Party and this book is a reflection of their historical stance on the English Revolution. The book is well researched, well written but has a tendency to overplay the revolutionary potential of the Middle class.

2. The Far Left in the English Revolution Brian Manning

3. The Civil Wars 1637-1653. Martin Bennett Lines up with the Three Kingdoms theory of the Civil War

4. Englishmen with Swords Montagu Slater-See Review

5. The English Civil War John Miller. Very good introduction but does not go into the historiography of the revolution. Big weakness

6. A Revolutionary Rogue-Biography of Henry Marten. S Barber. Extremely important study of one of the leading republican figures during the revolution. A Regicide and military leader. Close supporter of the Levellers. Contains important information on the close links between the Levellers and left wing independents. Marten unfortunately was one of those figures who have slipped through the historical net.

7. Regicide and Republic Graham Seel. A Level resource book. A very good teaching and study aid.

Regicide and Republic, 1647-1660

2011-08-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

In this lecture Professor Wrightson considers the events leading to the execution of Charles I in 1649, and the republican regimes of 1649-60 (the Commonwealth and the Protectorate), with particular attention to the role of Oliver Cromwell. He begins with the unsuccessful attempts to negotiate a settlement with Charles I after the civil war, the intervention of the army in 1647 and the outbreak of the second civil war in 1648, which culminated in Pride's Purge and the trial and execution of Chares I. He then considers Cromwell's campaigns in 1649-51, his expulsion of the Rump Parliament in 1653, the nominated parliament of 1653 (Barebone's Parliament) and the two phases of the Cromwellian Protectorate 1654-8, ending with the instability following Cromwell's death and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Professor Wrightson notes that although the Restoration marked the failure of the revolution, the political landscape had been irrevocably changed. The restored monarchy lived in the shadow of the civil war, the politicization of a large section of society was not reversed, religious dissent was now a permanent reality, and a plethora of new political and religious ideas had been advanced.

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

The King’s General

2011-08-21T03:49:00.001-07:00

Alison Stuart has written a brief review of the Daphne du Maurier book The King’s General. It can be found @ http://hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.com/2011/08/kings-general.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HoydensAndFirebrands+%28Hoydens+and+Firebrands%29

A Brief History of the The English Civil Wars-John Miller

2011-08-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

(As part of my recommendations of new books on the English Civil war here is a brief review of John Millers book).

The English Civil War is testimony to the fact that John Miller is very well versed on the history and politics of this subject. The English Civil War is perhaps one of the most “ hotly contested areas of English History”. Having said this it is perhaps given the limited space 200 pages a wise move that Miller does not delve into historiography of the Civil War.

I believe this is a weakness of the book but you pay your money and you take your choice. The book is light on military aspects which I think is a good thing. Some new books on the Civil war tend to use descriptions of battles etc to pad things out.

The book is heavy on politics and this is a good thing. Miler clearly believes that this was a period that changed “the political, social, religious and intellectual landscape of the country for ever and was “an extraordinary turning point in British history”.

The book is not a deeply academic but is aimed at the student or general reader who does not have too deep an understanding of the complex nature of this subject. In the forward Miller says his aim was “to produce something for students and interested general readers that is both brief and clear'. As an interested general reader I think he achieves his aim entirely. I say this not to rubbish what after all is a very good book. If it is not already on university book lists then it should.

On John Miller

Professor Miller’s began doing his original area of research looking into English politics in the reigns of Charles II and James II, To his credit his books tend to concentrate heavily on the politics of this time. While certainly no Marxist historian he does take on board and Anallize the movement of class forces and how they impact on important individuals

I would not put him in the revisionist collection of historians and again to his credit he does not solely examine the history of “winners” but has a substantial interest of how politics worked at “grass roots level”,His chapter War and the People demonstrates this

Some thoughts on Montagu Slater, Gilbert Mabbott and historical fiction.

2011-08-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

Montagu Slater was a major literary figure inside and outside the British Communist Party. He was born into a working class family in 1902. At an early age he showed enough promise to win an important scholarship to Oxford.

Like many of his generation he was shaped intellectually by the social, economic and political upheavals caused by the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism. While active in local politics at an early age he joined the CP in 1927.

He joined the British CP at the height of the Stalinist witch hunt by Joseph Stalin against Leon Trotsky. Slater clearly sided with the Stalinist theory that you could build Socialism in One Country as opposed to Trotsky position of extending the Russian revolution on an international stage.

Any assessment of his literary work should bear his politics in mind. His adherence to the theory of building socialism in one country paved the way for him in 1930s to become editor of 'Left Review', which himself helped to create. Left Review became an apologist for Stalinist crimes against the working class and especially became a house organ for attacks on Leon Trotsky

Slater it must be said was a versatile writer who wrote many stage plays, reviews, and articles and edited theatre journals

Perhaps his most famous work was a libretto for Benjamin Britten’s `Peter Grimes’. Anthony Burgess, said in The Listener in 1964, “The excellence of Peter Grimes has a great deal to do with Montagu Slater’s libretto, the only libretto I know that can be read in its own right as a dramatic poem.”

Slater who died at a very early age of 54 it must be said stayed true to his Stalinist ideals. Despite being linked with the `New Reasoner’ wing inside in the Communist Party, Slater agreed with every twist and turn of the British Communist party’s attack on Trotskyism including its “British Road to Socialism”. When the Hungarian revolution took place in 1956 he called it a counter-revolution. On his deathbed in 1956 he still retained his party membership.

`Englishmen with Swords” is a piece of historical fiction which centres on the years 1647-1649. Slater wrote the piece using material from the journal of a minor but important real life participant of the English Civil War Gilbert Mabbot. Having read the book I would say that it is a reasonably faithful portrayal of the events of those years.

As much as I can tell (no doubt others with a greater knowledge will probably disagree with) the story line remains faithful to actual events. You can argue that Mabbot was not really the person who named Buff Coat who was a rank and file figure who spoke at the Putney Debates but this is nit picking. The book should not be seen as a historical document but should be used as a complimentary with formal historical research

Slater should be congratulated for bringing Mabbott to the attention of a wider audience. Too many figures such as Mabbott have been lost in the revisionist stampede to replace the “history from below” genre with history from above.

Mabbott (1622—c. 1670) was according Graham Stevenson “the official licenser of the press from 1647 to 1649 and himself a pioneering journalist and publisher of newsbooks during the English Civil War period”.

While a secretary in the Army Mabbot he was to become a substantial writer of newsletters. Significantly he was according to a number of sources a close ally to the Levellers political party. He was responsible for the Newsbook The Moderate (Left)

Describing the move Mabbott said "I have laid down my former title of 'Moderate Intelligencer' and do go by another, viz. 'The Moderate'". The Moderate espoused republican views. It eagley supported the execution of the King and held views that were similar to the Levellers.

This link to the Levellers has been questioned by Frances Henderson who said “Mabbott's reputation as a Leveller, which rests solely on his alleged editorship of the radical newsbook The Moderate, is open to question. It is possible that he contributed to early issues of this newsbook, but there is no evidence that he was responsible for editing it and nothing in his career or conduct to link him directly to the Levellers”.

Hendersons view has been challenged according to Patrick Ludolph who has a blog called funny enough Gilbert Mabbott which can be found @ http://gilbertmabbott.wordpress.com “Gilbert Mabbott was a licenser of pamphlets and newsbooks from 1645 to 1649. He was also brother-in-law to Sir William Clarke and a client of John Rushworth. From 1647 to 1649, he was in the pay of the New Model Army, acting as their “agent” in London. As well, Mabbott has been accused of being the editor of the radical newsbook The Moderate, an accusation which I have come to believe”.

He was however not overtly gushing over Slater’s book Englishmen with Swords he believes “Slater chose Mabbott because he knew absolutely nothing about him. He saw his name on a bunch of documents and decided to write from his viewpoint because Mabbott was a virtual nobody, a clean slate to write on”.

Slater’s book is the first historical novel I have read in a month of Sundays so at the moment I cannot really form much of an opinion of historical fiction genre. From what I have read the genre has its admirers and it has its detractors amongst historians who have a tendency to look down their noses at it. Some of their criticisms I can sympathise with especially if there are major historical inaccuracies. But having said that there appears to be too much academic snobbery. As I have said I cannot detect any major historical flaws of Slater’s book.

There were and are some very great writers of the genre such as Dickens, Tolstoy who wrote War and Peace. just to name two. A more modern day example is the famous The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe which is now a major film.

It is important to distinguish between a genuinely good historical novel and the large number of pulp fiction novels which contain sometimes outrageous historical inaccuracies.

According to Chris Hopkinsin his essay Historicising the Historical Novel: “Lukacs in his The Historical Novel (1937; 1963) distinguishes between various periods when literary historicism has become merely a mannerism, and periods when historical genres have made authentic engagements with history, as some of his section titles may briefly suggest: 'The Classical Form of the Historical Novel', 'The General Tendencies of Decadence and the Establishment of the Historical Novel as a Special Genre'. Lukacs, of course, as one of the most influential Marxist critics of the twentieth century sees the success of the historical novel at different period as not simply an aesthetic matter, but as one deeply determined by history itself”

Notes

1. Article on Slater’s life can be found @ http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index

2. Montagu Slater’s personal papers, now archived in the Lawrence Collection at the University of Nottingham, are full of poems and songs, prose works - many intended for broadcast or filming - film and television scripts, and reviews.

3. 'Gilbert Mabbott' in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

4. For a thought provoking article called From Progress to Catastrophe-Perry Anderson on the Historical Novel. @ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n15/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe

Further Reading

1. 'The Trial of King Charles the first' by J.G. Muddiman (Hodge, London, 1928)

2. Montagu Slater Biography - ( 1902 –56 ), great Stay Down Miner, A New Way to Win, Peter Grimes - Published, Wrote, John, Including, Poems, and Plays http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/10042/Montagu-Slater.html#ixzz1Ue8OVAE7

3. Historicising the Historical Novel: Introduction Chris Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University

John Hampden:War Leader

2011-08-19T10:02:00.000-07:00

For anyone looking into the life of a leading parliamentarian John Hampden War Leader is a third year dissertatation by Jonathan Keen. It is a useful introduction to the subject. It can be found @http://www.johnhampden.org/warleader.pdf

The witch trial that made legal history

2011-08-17T13:50:00.000-07:00

The BBC Magazine has an interesting article on the 17th century Pendle Witch Trial.It can be accessed here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14490790

Montagu Slater's Englishmen With Swords

2011-08-09T10:22:00.000-07:00

I am currently working on a review of Montagu Slater's Englishmen with Swords. The book has been sitting on my bookshelf for nearly three years so I thought it was about time it came in from the cold.

I know very little about Slater. He was in the Communist Party but was not around its historians group. The book is a work of fiction but contains historical facts and Slater has written the book in the form of a journal of a real life figure from the Civil war period Gilbert Mabbott.

I have read very few historical novels so at the moment cannot form an opinion of the genre. From what Iittle I know of the genre it has its admirers and it has its detractors amongst historians who have a tendency to look down their noses at it. Some of their criticisms I can sympathise with especially if there are major historical inaccuracies. But having said that there appears to be a little too much academic snobbery as well.

After all there were and are some very great writers of the genre such as Dickens, Tolstoy just to name two. For a thought provoking article called From Progress to Catastrophe-Perry Anderson on the Historical Novel. @ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n15/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe

Researching for the review led me to the main figure in Slater’s book Gilbert Mabbott. According to Patrick Ludolph who has a blog called funny enough Gilbert Mabbott which can be found @http://gilbertmabbott.wordpress.com/about/

“Gilbert Mabbott was a licenser of pamphlets and newsbooks from 1645 to 1649. He was also brother-in-law to Sir William Clarke and a client of John Rushworth. From 1647 to 1649, he was in the pay of the New Model Army, acting as their “agent” in London. As well, Mabbott has been accused of being the editor of the radical newsbook The Moderate, an accusation which I have come to believe”.

I contacted Patrick and asked for his opinion on the Book and this is what he said “I have read it, but I couldn’t tell you much more about its background than what’s already on the dust jacket. It’s from the point of view of Gilbert Mabbott (which you obviously know because you commented here, but I thought I would say for others out there) and makes use of a number of original documents from the Civil War. However, Slater chose Mabbott because he knew absolutely nothing about him. He saw his name on a bunch of documents and decided to write from his viewpoint because Mabbott was a virtual nobody, a clean slate to write on. The irony is not lost on me. It’s been a while since I looked at it; I seem to recall that Slater was a little confused about some things, but I don’t remember what.Come to think of it, I probably should have done a post on this, but I read it before I started blogging”.

Front cover of the Perfect Diurnall for January 16-23, 1654, with which Mabbot was associated.

Figures like Mabbott have been largely neglected by modern day historians this is mostly down to the opposition of revisionist historians to look into radical figures such as Mabbott who had links to groups such as the Levellers. Another neglected area of research is regarding the proliferation of secret printings presses before the war which would tend to contradict historians such as Conrad Russell who have put forward that radicalism did not really exist before the outbreak of civil war hostilities. Mabbott after all was involved in the publication of the Moderate newsbook.

For more on this subject see (Secret Printing, The Crisis of 1640 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism- Past And Present 2007 David R Como.

A Brief Review of The Civil Wars 1637-1653 Martyn Bennett

2011-08-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

This is the first encounter I have had with a historian who is associated with the school of historiography which portrays the English Civil War as Wars of the Three Kingdoms rather than it being an English revolution. One point Bennet is correct in that terminology used by historians should tell you a lot about how that historian sees the revolution of the mid-seventeenth century reflects and reinforces the interpretations we make or as E H Carr was fond of saying always look out for the bees buzzing in historians head.

In the title of this book Bennett uses the dates 1637-1653. I have not come across this date span before and Bennett explains why he uses

“Imposing the dates 1642-1651 on the civil wars renders them relatively meaningless outside the bounds of England and Wales: calling them the 'English' Civil War is similarly problematic. The term English Civil War became common during the last century, adding to the range of titles available - from the contentious 'English Revolution' to the 'Great Rebellion' and the 'Great Civil War'. Yet such a title does obscure the involvement of the other nations as effectively in the book market as it does in popular entertainment”.

Bennett in true revisionist style also questions the use of the term English Civil War “The enduring symbol of the crisis which gripped the British Isles during the middle of the seventeenth century is the name given to it, 'The English Civil War'. Yet this symbol is itself problematic and can even act as a barrier to a clear understanding of what happened in that turbulent century. It may be argued that calling the conflict the English Civil War limits the scope of our perceptions. By labelling it an English event, we can marginalise Scotland and Ireland and perhaps even ignore Wales altogether. Yet all four nations were involved in the rebellions, wars and revolutions that made up the period”. To Bennett credit he does not deny a revolution took place , he challenges the “revolution's Englishness.

This is a short book of 114 pages and should not be seen as an in depth or analytical study of the Civil war. At best it should be seen as a good introduction to the conflict.

While not being very familiar with this type of historiography its origins stem mainly from the rejection of large group of revisionist historians who sought to reject a Marxist and Whig interpretation of the Civil War. While Bennett uses the term revolution in a couple of titles the book does not really have any socio-economic analysis of the revolution.

Most of the book gives a reasonable explanation of what took place during the war. Chapters 1-6 deal largely with this and can be seen as a good introduction. Perhaps the most interesting and informative chapters are 7-8. Chapter 7 called Revolution in England and Wales gives a basic insight into the growing divergence of views between parliament and a growing threat posed by the Levellers. Chapter 8 gives a presentable account of the views and actions of the Levellers.

The book is quite striking in its very liberal use of historiography. I think he mentions only one other historian but this is probably compensated by very good notes at the back of the book.

Bennett backs his Three Kingdoms argument by saying “in a November 1998 article in History Today, J.S.A. Adamson argued that here England truly demonstrated its distinctiveness and any four nations context comes about when only England imposed its revolution on the other nations. But even here we could add that Welsh politicians and soldiers were involved in this revolution too. Moreover Ronald Hutton reminds us in The British Republic (1989) that the revolutionaries of 1648-9 were themselves products of the civil wars, who were changed so much by the experience of the war that they eschewed many of their long-held traditional political beliefs when they led the nation into the republican experiment. So even that most English of phenomena - the revolution - was a product of the crisis of the four nations”.

Bennett is enough of a good historian to not be too caught up with the “wars of three kingdoms” historiography and he warns against “against thinking that this current interpretation of the war is the last word: historical fashions come and go. It may be as well to paraphrase Mark Twain: reports of the death of the English Civil War may yet be greatly exaggerated”.

Notes

Dr Martyn Bennett is the Director of the Faculty of Humanities School of Graduate Studies and Research at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of several books on the civil wars, including The Civil Wars of Britain and Ireland (Blackwell, 1997) and The Civil Wars Experienced (Routledge, 2000). His biography of Oliver Cromwell for Routledge apeared in 2006.

See Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia the wars of the Three Kingdoms

Further Reading

The Personal Rule of Charles 1st K Sharpe

Civil War –The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660 Trevor Royle.

Britain in Revolution A Woolrych

The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652 (Modern Wars In Perspective) Ian Gentles

Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637-49 (British History in Perspective) David Scott

Henry Neville and English Republican culture in the seventeenth century

2011-08-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

{This advert for Gaby Mahlberg book will be the first of a series of new books I will be recommending. I have followed her blog for over a year now and she is a historian worth reading and is something of an authority on republican ideas during the English revolution and more precisely an expert on James Harrington}.

The blurb for Henry Neville and English Republican culture in the seventeenth century comes from p://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/catalogue/book.asp?id=1204366

"a book that has been very carefully crafted in order to touch upon considerations of political patriarchy, culture and the history of ideas that form the nexus of much of today’s university curriculum". History (95, 3)

"This is an important, well-researched, and lucidly written work that not only adds greatly to our knowledge of Neville but also contributes significantly to ongoing debates about republicanism, civic humanism, patriarchalism and anti-patriarchalism, and neo-Harringtonian thinking, among much else"

Journal of British Studies

"Based on thorough research and a close analysis of all Neville's writings (and others attributed to him), this book at once becomes the standard guide and essential point of reference"

Bernard Capp, English Historical Review

Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century is the first full-length study of the republican Henry Neville in his many facets as country gentleman, politician, political thinker, rebel and libeller. It traces the development of Neville’s political thought from the English Civil Wars to the Exclusion Crisis and beyond, while also challenging the way in which the history of ideas has been conceptualised in recent years by discussing Neville’s political theory alongside his lesser known libels, shams and poetry. The book also challenges an established view of Neville based on his collaboration with the better-known philosopher James Harrington and shows Neville as a political thinker in his own right.

While studies of early modern English republicanism tend to focus on the Interregnum, Neville’s Plato redivivus, which promoted a restructuring of the political order, was only published after the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy. This study therefore draws attention to long-term continuities in English republican thought and introduces the concept of anti-patriarchalism to focus on what Neville and other republicans writing before 1649 or after 1660 had in common. They shared their opposition to tyranny, not monarchy, and aimed to limit the discretionary powers of the executive – a concern which links the debates between the Long Parliament and the King of 1641 to Neville’s proposals to limit the powers of the Crown in 1681.The author’s engagement with Neville’s reputation as an atheist and crypto-Catholic also sheds new light on the role of religion in republican thought.

To read a sample chapter go to

http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/uploads/docs/Mahlberg%20chapter%203.pdf

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and conventions

1 Introduction

2The biographical framework

3 Republicanism as anti-patriarchalism

4 Harringtonianism

5 Religious reputations

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

hb 9780719079467 01 June 2009 £60.00

Gaby Mahlberg is a historian and journalist. She has taught early modern British and European history at the University of East Anglia and at Queen Mary and Goldsmiths Colleges, University of London She can be contacted at gaby.mahlberg@northumbria.ac.uk

Some Notes for An Article on Conrad Russell and The "Mirage" of the English Revolution

2011-07-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

(As the title suggests these are just notes for an essay I am working on in answer to Conrad Russell's 1990 article) His original artcicle can be accessed @ http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage

1. In 1990 the distinguished historian Conrad Russell posed in an article the question was “The Bourgeois Revolution A Mirage”?. He answered the question in the affirmative albeit none to convincingly. Russel’s article was perhaps his most open and political attack on the method of historical Materialism and was published in what has become virtually a house organ for revisionist historians, History Today.

2. Russell’s article was one of many similar articles in the field of history, politics that sought to cast doubt on Historical Materialism and Marxism in general. Russell’s pronouncement on the death Marxist historiography is typical of the outlook that prevails in current academia. It is not really an accident that Russell’s article appeared just a year before the collapse of the USSR. In many ways his article anticipated a school of thought which saw the end of the U.S.S.R. signifying the end of Marxism. For a number of academics who were largely out of their depth in this field the USSR equalled Marxism rather than it being a Stalinised distortion. This outlook says far more about the social and political outlook of the academic fraternity than it does about Marxism.

3. Russell's argument is predicated on and I quote “the notion of the rising middle classes, the political yeast of historical writing in the 1950s and 1960s. In most periods, this yeast is much harder to find than it used to he. The rise of the middle classes has been chased into later and later periods, until the rise of the working classes has been snapping at its heels, and in some cases, may even be thought to have overtaken it”.

4. Russell in a clumsy way is saying because the theory of a rising gentry or middle class as put forward by some ‘Marxist’ historians in the early part of the 20th century has been ‘disproved’ therefore he argues that this brings to an end the belief that historical materialism can be applicable to explain the complex events of the English revolution.

5. The question is should Marx and his method of investigating and explaining historical phenomena be held responsible for the implementation of his method by subsequent historians Marxist or otherwise. My answer to that lies in the negative after all if a patient dies on the operating table should that lead to the questioning and repudiation of the whole history of medical science.

6. Russell continues “historians are showing increasing doubt about the dialectical model, in which change comes about by the clash of opposites. This model, as Marx generously admitted, is one we originally owe to Hegel, and its survival has owed as much to Hegelian as to Marxist influence. The Whig version of the origins of the English Civil War, for example, was a clearly dialectical view, and it has come in for heavy criticism in the past fifteen years”.

7. It is true that Marx does owe a debt to Hegel. Marxism was a development on from Hegelism. Russell is correct that one of the basic components of Marxism is the conception of unity of opposites. Marx took what was the best or materialist from Hegel and discarded his idealist component.

8. Wikipedia describes this well “Marx and Engels started with the observation that everything in existence is a combination or unity of opposites. For example, electricity is characterized by a positive and negative charge and atoms consist of protons and electrons which are unified but are ultimately contradictory forces. Even humans through introspection find that they are a unity of opposite qualities. Masculinity and femininity, selfishness and altruism, humbleness and pride, etc. The Marxist conclusion being that everything "contains two mutually incompatible and exclusive but nevertheless equally essential and indispensable parts or aspects." The basic concept being that this unity of opposites in nature is the thing that makes each entity auto-dynamic and provides this constant motivation for movement and change. This idea was borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Hegel who said: "Contradiction in nature is the root of all motion and of all life."

9. While Marxist historians have tried to apply this theory to the study of the English revolution at no stage did they say Marxists were responsible for the class struggle. Marx was not the first to discover the existence of the class struggle. As Marx said no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical forms of struggle in the development of production”.

10. Marx clearly tied the study of history with the study of society itself. “The doctrine of state and law is part of a broader whole, namely, the complex of sciences which study human society. The development of these sciences is in turn determined by the history of society itself, i.e. by the history of class struggle. It has long since been noted that the most powerful and fruitful catalysts which foster the study of social phenomena are connected with revolutions. The English Revolution of the seventeenth century gave birth to the basic directions of bourgeois social thought, and forcibly advanced the scientific, i.e. materialist, understanding of social phenomena.

11. “It suffices to mention such a work as Oceana – by the English writer Harrington, and which appeared soon after the English Revolution of the seventeenth century – in which changes in political structure are related to the changing distribution of landed property. It suffices to mention the work of Barnave – one of the architects of the great French Revolution – who in the same way sought explanations of political struggle and the political order in property relations. In studying bourgeois revolutions, French restorationist historians – Guizot, Mineaux and Thierry – concluded that the leitmotif of these revolutions was the class struggle between the third estate (i.e. the bourgeoisie) and the privileged estates of feudalism and their monarch. This is why Marx, in his well-known letter to Weydemeyer, indicates that the theory of the class struggle was known before him".

12. To probe a little deeper than Russell has will evaluate one of the best exponents on how well Marxist historians have applied historical materialism to the study of the English revolution the historian Robert Ashton. In his essay The Civil War and the Class Struggle he outlines the pitfalls encountered by Marxists historians. Ashton is correct in his analysis on the tensions between the king and growing section of the bourgeoisie over a number of issues that went back over a few decades at least.

13. Ashton does not subscribe to the revisionist contention that just because there were bourgeois elements on both sides of the war that it discounts the Marxist theory of a bourgeois revolution. Ashton points out that this makes in harder for a clear cut analysis but does not rule out the possibly of doing one.

14. The make up of the 17th century was complex and varied. From this article and his article on Charles and the City of London, the monarchy had the support of a small but significant section of the bourgeoisie who stood to gain if Charles won the war. On parliaments side stood varying different sections of the bourgeoisie. While this scenario does make it difficult to make generalisations it does not as Russell makes out void a Marxist analysis.

15. He makes a valid point that if Marxist’s believe the war to be a qualitive turning point then an investigation into the growing capitalistic nature of agriculture is the key to understanding who fought for what and why. I am not downplaying the importance of investigating the role played by an increasing industrial and commercial class but they were a small minority of the bourgeoisie and did punch above their weight this was in reality a pre industrial society and therefore as Harrington wrote land and property were the key in understanding the revolutionary nature of the period

16. If it is correct to say that we are dealing with a class of land owners who held sway before and after 1642 what was the material I e economic basis of this power and how did it reflect in the political superstructure. In this respects we will have to deal with the relevance of Marx’s base and superstructure argument.

17. In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

18. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

19. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

20. “The Revisionists have directed their fire at what has been called the social interpretation of the English Revolution, but the “social interpretation” they have in mind is one that no serious Marxist historian has held for some time, including Hill himself -- the old idea of “bourgeois revolution” in its classic sense.Other Marxists, notably Robert Brenner, have developed another social interpretation. This starts from the premise that there was indeed no clear class division of the kind required by that old idea, and that the landed aristocracy itself was already well advanced down the capitalist road, but demonstrates how the revolutionary events of the 17th century were nonetheless grounded in the prevailing social property relations. (See especially the Conclusion to Brenner's Merchants and Revolution, Verso 2001.)

21. Robert Ashton writing on the English Revolution makes an interesting point on some historians while not being Marxist did use some use of Marxist ideas. Ashton said “The idea of religious, political and constitutional issues as an ideological superstructure based on foundations of material and class interests has been influential far beyond the ranks of Marxist historians. It has indeed been adopted, in part at least and with a radically different emphasis, by some of their more formidable and determined opponents. The following passage from a celebrated article by Professor Trevor-Roper may serve to remind us that anti Marxist history are not necessarily history which plays down the crucial importance of material factors and class interest".

22. While to the casual observer of historical debate these arguments could be viewed as storm in a teapot what lay behind them was Russell’s systematic attack on any materialist approach to historical understanding, smuggled in under the guise of a revaluation of the English revolution or in Russell’s case no revolution. Speaking of Russell Jim Holstun described his work as a ‘manifesto for historical revisionism’, Holstun makes the point that Russell sought another way to explain the social changes that were taken place in the English revolution that historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry, the middling sort of people who were rising according to Russell ‘not so much at the expense of the gentry, as at the expense of small holders and the labouring poor’. Russell would often make the point that he not conversant with the term’s feudalism and capitalism.

23. Secondly, it is a legitimate practice to question how well historians have used Marx’s method in one form or another to explain the English revolution . But to use their supposed weaknesses as Russell does to dismiss Marxist historiography is more to do with Russell’s liberal politics than any thing else.

24. “In the 1950s, it was widely assumed that the English Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, but now it appears to many, if not to all, historians that this assumption has not stood the test of time”. A historian of Russell’s character should really not make off the cuff remarks along the lines of many historians have rejected a Marxist explanation, who are they and what have they said. Is there rejection valid, this is just lazy history.

25. In this next paragraph Russell makes a sweeping statement “There is, first, no correlation between class or status on one hand, and loyalty on the other. In modern research, Parliamentarian peers, for example, are figures of great prominence, and Charles I's confidence in Royalist sentiment in the City of London, though in the event misplaced, does not appear unreasonable, His City supporters, though outmanoeuvred, were numerous and powerful”.

26. It is true that representatives of the bourgeoisie fought on both sides. This goes to show that the revolution was not made in a vacuum. Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill who Russell never sites in his article stated this fact on many occasions. But there was a correlation between class and loyalty. In stating this I am not saying it is an easy thing to prove but there has been sufficient research to allow some generalisation to be made. The problem with historiography over the last three decades is that it has been dominated by a growing number of revisionist historians who have decided not to apply their talents to research on economic and social aspects of the revolution.

27. Work by historians such as Robert Brenner is a noticeable exception. But on the whole the attack on Marxism has taken its toll on any counter historiography to the present Royalist fixated work.

28. After his critique of Marxism Russell then outlines his explanation of the events. “The type of crisis that happened, a collapse of the political process at the centre, slowly and painfully exported to the provinces, is not the sort which is easily explained as a consequence of social change. There was little debate and even less disagreement on economic issues, and bills on economic questions were left to moulder without reaching even a Second Reading. There was little change in the social base of those holding power, and in social terms, England in 1660 was very little different from England in 1640. Nor is there much evidence of a social change during the previous century which might help to explain a major political upheaval. The changes which used to be invoked for this purpose seem to fall into three categories. One, including the growth of an active land market, production of food for market, enclosure and mobility of labour, dates, as Alan Macfarlane has shown, from the generation after the Black Death. These changes were nearly 300 years old, and if they created the Civil War, they took an unconscionable long time about it. The second category is of things such as the rise/decline of the gentry, which never happened at all. The third, involving the rise of colonial trade, the growing prosperity of towns and the development of a class of rich merchants, dates from well after the Civil War, and is more likely to have been delayed than hastened by the war.

29. Russell then sites two rather conservative historians both politically and historically to back up his premise that the English Civil War was not a bourgeois revolution, “we have to consider whether it happened at some other time, or whether it has never happened at all. J.H. Hexter's article on 'The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England', published in 1961, has stood the test of time. Yet so too has the reply by K.G. Davies, called 'The Mess of the Middle Class', which accused Professor Hexter of trying to sweep the mess of the middle class into someone else's territory, and protested that it did not belong in his territory, If there was no bourgeois revolution in 1642, when was there one?”

30. Having denied that a revolution took place in the 1640s Russell in the rest of his article somewhat lamely tries to find other periods when England had a bourgeois revolution. He comes to the staggering conclusion that it did not.

31. Again strangely having argued for most of his article that Hegel and Marx are redundant he says that “We should perhaps look first at the part of the model we owe to Hegel: the notion that the process of change happens by the clash of opposites. There is no need to deny that it sometimes does so, but neither the course of English constitutional development nor the course of English social development appears to be a case in point. The past generation's work on the reigns of Charles II and James II suggests that the clash of opposites in the English Civil War did far less to diminish the powers of the monarchy than we used to think. The two events that did most to diminish it seem to have been the French wars under William III, and the priority William gave to financing them, and subsequently, the madness of George III. Neither of these involved a dialectical clash within English history”.

32. In conclusion according to Russell who himself was a deeply political figure political differences that occurred during the civil war were no more than squabbles and did not represent anything deep and meaningful and certainly did not usher in a revolution. Lawrence Stone makes the point in his book The Causes of the English revolution 1529-1642 that “22 ,000 sermons,speeches,pamphlets and newspapers were published between 1640-1661” would be mere froth on the surface of things to Russell.

33. “A theory which has been so persistently wrong for all periods up to and including the one in which it was written is unlikely to be more helpful now”

34. One point in answering Russell is that if Marxism is such an outdated and no longer useful tool in studying the English Revolution why do so many revisionist take up so much space writing about it.

Notes

Conrad Russell was Professor of History at King's College, London, and author of The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990).

Historians on the Rise of British Capitalism Christopher Hill Science & Society Vol. 14, No. 4 (Fall, 1950), pp. 307-321 http://www.jstor.org/stable/40400023.

Christopher Hill and the Recovery of History-Ellen Meiksins Wood ATC 104, May-June 2003

Evgeny Pashukanis The Marxist Theory of State and Law (1932)

Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Karl Marx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

K. Marx, Letter to Weydemeyer (March 5, 1852), MESW, vol.1, p.528.

The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage? Conrad Russell, History Today Volume: 40 Issue: 9 1990.

Further Reading

The English Civil War And After, 1642-1658 Edited by R H Parry 1970

Merchants and Revolution Robert Brenner 2010

Essays in the Economic and social History of Tudor and Stuart England

On John Morrill's Choice of Oliver Cromwell Biographies

2011-07-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

I must admit I am a little surprised at the choices made by John Morrill in his list of five biographies of Oliver Cromwell. While I have no disagreements over a couple of his choices I would like to offer some alternative titles.

His choice of Antonia Fraser’s Our Chief of Men is a good one. I don’t feel Fraser gets enough credit for her historical work; while financial remuneration has befalling her it must nonetheless must be difficult writing in a very male dominated world.

I will always have time for Barry Coward’s work and any of his books would make a lot of people’s lists. Morrill states “Barry Coward is a writer of a number of general works on the 17th century. He brings extreme lucidity and conciseness to the topic. It’s a short book, which is – and doesn’t claim to be more than – a very clear account of the main debates about Cromwell. It doesn’t argue a very strong line itself; it simply represents the different strands of thought there are about Cromwell”.

As for Morrill’s other choices I am not so sure. God’s Executioner By Micheál Ó Siochrú is a curious choice. Having not read the read I cannot comment on its value but I am not sure it should be in a top five biographies of Cromwell. The book is centred on events in Ireland in which Cromwell’s behavior anticipated future bourgeois attitude.

Oliver Cromwell New Perspectives edited by P Little is largely made up of the most up to date writings from revisionist historians. Do not expect a picture of Oliver Cromwell based on socio economic factors. It has been a long while since Cromwell has been placed within the context of economic and social changes of the time.

Cromwell’s Head By Jonathan Fitzgibbons is a book I know little about but itssubject matter seems a little obscure choice given the nature of John Morrill who himself is working on a major publication of Ccromwell’s speeches and writing.

To sum up I am a little disappointed with John Morrill’s choices I would have thought they would have had a little more seriousness and historical depth to them. Lastly to leave out Christopher Hill’, Gods Englishman is very strange.

Here are some alternative Choices.

1 Gods Englishman C Hill 1970

2 C H Firth 1900

3 C V Wedgewood Oliver Cromwell 1973

4 John Morley Oliver Cromwell 1899

5 S Rawson Gardiner Cromwell’s Place in History 1897

6 Theodore Roosevelt Oliver Cromwell 1900

The English Bourgeois Revolution and Some Marxist Historians

2011-07-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Stone I believe once described the history of the 17th century as 'a battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way'. Anyone studying the subject of this article will know what I mean.

Up until the 1970s it was standard practice with few a dissenting historians to describe the events that took place in England between 1640 and 1660 as the English Revolution. Also a significant section of English historians grudgingly accepted that some kind of bourgeois revolution had taken place and this was reflected in a distorted way in their own work.

The historian and member of the Communist Party Historians Group , Eric Hobsbawm went so far as to correctly place the English revolution in a broader international context by saying that it was part of a general crisis of the 17th century and was one of many revolutions that took place.

It has however over the last quarter of a century has been highly fashionable to question the revolutionary nature of the civil war. In her book Ann Hughes shows that this changing historical fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of sources covering early modern social history. In 1965 Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas Barry Coward produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England 1550-1750. The coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation in early modern England.

This latter more qualified approach has been taken by G E Aylmer who posed the question Rebellion or Revolution. Aylmer in his chapter on the Quality of Life states there was no shift in the economy or a radical alteration of the social structure. While he concedes that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive for business development he says that this would have been the case if Charles 1”s Personal rule had continued indefinitely, or if the royalists had won the civil war.

So was there a bourgeois revolution in England. My easy answer to this question is yes but the major difficulty is proving it. Like many aspects of the history of the English Civil War whether a revolution took place has caused serious disagreements among historians. The purpose of this essay is to examine the validity of the theory of a bourgeois revolution as explained by leading Marxists and how this has been applied by two leading Marxist historians of the 20th century Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.

It is useful to begin with what the orthodox Marxist movement has written on the bourgeois nature of the English Revolution. All who have written on it agree it was bourgeois in character. This cannot be said of the considerable differences over the class nature of the Levellers. I cannot say that the English revolution produced volumes of work from the major Marxist leaders but what they did write explained in one form or another the basic premise this period witnessed a transition from a mainly feudal economy into a significant capitalist economy.

For Marx” the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois property over feudal property, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the partition of estates over primogeniture, of the owner’s mastery of the land over the land’s mastery of its owner, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic laziness, of civil law over privileges of medieval origin.

He went on “however, it is certainly true that feudal relations were not delivered one concentrated blow. Feudalism [in England – eds.] was destroyed but disappeared only gradually. This process extended over many centuries during which certain aspects of the feudal order displayed surprising adaptability and vitality”.

Marx did not write extensively on the English Revolution but then he did not need to. He gave us a method i.e. Historical Materialism in which to examine complex historical problems such as the transition from one economic system to another, in our case the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. Although even a cursory study of the historiography of the English Revolution will tell you that this is far from an easy task. It must be said that Marx was well aware that when using the method of Historical Materialism in examining complex historical issues he made clear that it should be used as a guideline to historical research (Leitfaden or Auffassung) not a replacement for serious research. He also warned that he was not giving a theory of history, a grand philosophy of history or a master-key to history. He certainly did not advocate having a materialist outlook that was a substitute for not studying history.

In the next paragraph below Marx gives us an insight how revolutions come about and the role that individuals play in transformations such as the English Revolution he said “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure”.

While Marx talks about the “era of Social Revolution” his method can be applied to the 17th century English bourgeois revolution. Although it has been challenged the revolution did eventually usher in a qualitative change in England’s political and economic structure. The method of examining the change from a quantitative development (the reason for Marxists heavy emphasis on long term causes of any given event) into a qualitative development has long been a valuable weapon in the Marxist armoury in examining complex historical events. While this method cannot be mechanically applied to this period it does provide the user with unparalleled insight into the revolution in England.

The Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky explains Quality and Quantity: “Quality is an aspect of something by which it is what it is and not something else; quality reflects that which is stable amidst change. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change (become more or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else; quantity reflects that which is constantly changing in the world (“the more things change, the more they remain the same”). The quality of an object pertains to the whole, not one or another part of an object, since without that quality it would not be what it is, whereas an object can lose a “part” and still be what it is, minus the part. Quantity on the other hand is aspect of a thing by which it can (mentally or really) be broken up into its parts (or degrees) and be re-assembled again. Thus, if something changes in such a way that has become something of a different kind, this is a “qualitative change”, whereas a change in something by which it still the same thing, though more or less, bigger or smaller, is a “quantitative change”. In Hegel’s Logic, quantity and quality belong to Being”

How did Trotsky apply this method to the 17th century English Revolution and give more precise explanation of the revolutionary events and contending class forces contained in the explosive events.

“A study of the revolutionary era in Britain's development, which lasted approximately from the enforced summoning of parliament by Charles Stuart until the death of Oliver Cromwell, is necessary above all in order to understand the place of parliamentarism and of 'law' in general in a living and not an imaginary history. The 'great' national historian Macaulay vulgarised the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial. The French conservative Guizot approaches events more profoundly. But either way, whichever account is taken, the man who knows how to read and is capable of discovering under the shadows of history real living bodies, classes and factions, will be convinced from this very experience of the English revolution how subsidiary, subordinate and qualified a role is played by law in the mechanics of social struggle and especially in a revolutionary era, that is to say, when the basic interests of the basic classes in society come to the fore. In the England of the 1640s we see a parliament based upon the most whimsical franchise, which at the same time regarded itself as the representative organ of the people”.

The next part of this essay is to examine how well historical materialism has been applied in studying the 17th century from the 20th and 21st century by two Marxist’ historians Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.

The main theme of Hill’s work was the premise that the war represented a beginning of the transition from a Feudal society to a capitalist society. For the sake of clarity (as one historian did have trouble with words feudalism and capitalism) it is worth quoting Hill “I use the word feudal in the Marxist sense, and not in the more restricted sense adopted by most academic historians to describe narrowly military and legal relations. By “feudalism” I mean a form of society in which agriculture is the basis of economy and in which political power is monopolised by a class of landowners. The mass of the population consists of dependent peasants subsisting on the produce of their family holdings. The landowners are maintained by the rent paid by the peasants, which might be in the form of food or labour, as in early days, or (by the sixteenth century) in money. In such a society there is room for small handicraft production, exchange of products, internal and overseas trade; but commerce and industry are subordinated to and plundered’ by the landowners and their State. Merchant capital can develop within feudalism without changing the mode of production; a challenge to the old ruling class and its state comes only with the development of the capitalist mode of production in industry and agriculture”.

Hill was probably the most well known of the Marxist historians to come out of the Communist Party Historians Group to adhere to the theory of the bourgeois revolution although not all around the group tried to use historical Materialism to explain the events of a revolutionary nature.

Hill asserted that profound economic and social changes took place and he states that “historians are coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in the economic history of England. “After the civil wars,” writes Dr. Corfield, “successive governments from the Rump onwards, whatever their political complexion, gave much more attention to the interests of trade and colonial development in their foreign policies”. Restrictions which had hampered the growth of capitalist economic activity were removed, never to the restored. “The first condition of healthy industrial growth” wrote Professor Hughes apropos the salt industry, “was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court”.

Right up until his death Christopher Hill had been the main proponent of the opinion that the social, economic, and political changes that took place in the civil war were the by product of a bourgeois revolution. Hill argues that the seventieth century saw a turning point in English and world history. This view of trying to understand the social processes at work in the English revolution has been fiercely attacked by numerous historians. P Lassett said “the English Revolution ought to be entombed. It is a term made out of our own social and political discourse…. It gets in the way of enquiry and understanding, if only because it requires that change of all these different types go forward at the same pace, the political pace… There never was such a set of events as the English Revolution”.

This attack on Hill is inaccurate and somewhat shallow. Hill never put forward that the events that characterised the English Civil War proceeded at the same pace. His point is that it helps to understand very complex developments if they are firstly set within the social and economic frame work. What conclusions can be drawn? Firstly through the sheer weight of empirical evidence it is clear that the war had a major impact on the social and political fabric of England. About whether this was a world turned upside down will be hotly debated for another 25 years.

In Hill’s book The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution he sought to use the method of Marxism to outline the objective basis for revolution. If the reader will bear with me I shall use two quotes firstly from the introduction “Revolutions are not made without idea, but they are not made by intellectuals. Steam is essential to driving a railway engine, but neither a locomotive nor a permanent way can be built out of steam. In this book I shall be dealing with the steam” and secondly “Marx himself did not fall into the error of thinking that men’s idea were merely a pale reflection of their economic needs, with no history of their own: but some of his successors, including many who would not call themselves Marxist, have been far more economic-determinist than Marx. It seems to me that any body of thought which plays a major in history – Luther’s, Rousseau’s, Marx’s own-takes on because it meets the needs of significant group in the society in which it comes into prominence”. Whether this group was the Gentry has been called into question. But regardless of this Hill’s point and method of arriving at his conclusions is completely lost not only by Hexter but also Hill’s modern day detractors.

Hill application of Historical materialism enabled him in the words of Ann Talbot identify “the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution, which in the case of Britain overthrew the rule of one class and brought another to power. Secondly he recognised that revolutions are made by the mass of the population and that for a revolution to take place the consciousness of that mass of people must change, since revolutions are not made by a few people at the top although the character of their leadership is crucial at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of continuing relevance today, when historians increasingly reject any serious economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny group of conspirators”.

Brain Manning studied under Hill and was profoundly influenced by him. While Manning started his academic career political tied to the Labour Party later in life he was politically attached to the radical left group the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This was a handicap that was to hamper his work for whenever the SWP review any book by the members of the Communist Party Historians Group there was and is a tendency to glorify the attachment these historians had to Marxism. This aside Manning was a serious historian and did important work in upholding what he believed was a Marxist approach to the Civil War.

In addition to his own work Manning went out of his way to praise and evaluate other historians who carried important work in examining the transition of Feudalism to Capitalism. Manning attached great importance to the work of Robert Brenner and reviewed his book for the SWP.

Manning correctly centres the first debate over whether there was a transition from Feudalism to Capitalism came about when in 1946 of Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism, was published. Manning some what generously makes the claim that the second great debate came about when Robert Brenner's article on 'Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe' in Past and Present (1976). Having only just started to read Brenner I can only comment at a later date as to the validity of this claim.

Manning is also correct when he says that like all great controversies they provide not just Marxists or for that matter Marxist historians a “framework within which to interpret the English Revolution of 1640 to 1660”

Brenner’s book largely concentrates on the role of the London merchants in the English revolution. Strangely though only in the Postscript does Brenner put his chosen subject in the context of a general understanding of the revolution.

While I would recommend Brenner’s book any reader interested in his subject matter would do well to first read Valerie Pearl 1961 book . Pearl was perhaps the first major historian to attempt a detailed look at the political allegiances of the London merchants. Having said that I do not agree with all her conclusion. Brenner in the past has pointed out that out of the largest merchants who controlled the great chartered overseas trading companies and the government of the city were royalists, while the parliamentarians were 'merchants of the middle rank', '...wealthy, but not the wealthiest men in the city...', '...important traders but not directors of the chartered companies...'

While Manning is largely in favour of Brenner’s conclusions he does issue this warning “a serious problem in analysing the parties is that even among well documented groups like gentry and merchants there are substantial numbers about whom no information can be found of their allegiances in the civil war. Brenner has examined 274 of the London merchant elite, but for about half of them there is no evidence about which side they supported, and this must be borne in mind when drawing conclusions. Of 130 merchants who can be allocated to the parties, 78 were royalists, 43 were parliamentarians, and nine were side changers. Breaking these figures down, he finds that the leading merchants of the Levant and the East India companies, which controlled the city government before the revolution, were overwhelmingly royalists, while the Merchant Adventurers, who were now less dominant than they had been in the 16th century, were more evenly divided”

Brenner makes some interesting points as regards the political allegiances of some London merchants “shows that the royalist citizens were 'the men of wealth and superior standing, the city's traditional rulers...' Twice as many overseas merchants were royalists as were parliamentarians. The typical parliamentarian 'was the more modestly prosperous domestic tradesman with his own house and shop, and sometimes other city property, who was engaged in the retailing of textile and other goods'. He was a citizen of substance but 'generally less prosperous, well-connected and powerful' than the typical royalist. 'It was this kind of London citizen, working with fellow militants in his parish, ward and livery company, and ready to exert a radical influence in the city's and kingdom's affairs, who provided much of the dynamism in the English Revolution.'

Since I have only started to read Brenner’s book I will reserve judgement on this next statement from Manning who says “It is thus now well established that the merchant elite of London--the richest and most powerful citizens--were mostly royalists in the civil war. This substantiates the Marxist thesis, as advanced by Dobb that the great merchants were tied into feudal society, their wealth and power were derived from royal and aristocratic grants and favours, and they were not agents of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.7 Brenner notes that the ability of these merchants to make a profit depended on buying cheap and selling dear, and so on their power to prevent over trading in their markets and to restrict the number of traders, which could be achieved only by political assistance from the feudal monarchy and aristocracy in granting them monopolies, such as those of the Levant and the East India companies”

Manning then quotes Brenner from Merchants and Revolution “Far from transforming the old system economically or subverting it politically, the merchant class thus tended to live off the old socioeconomic order and to constitute one of its main bulwarks. As Marx concluded, 'commerce imparts to production a character directed more and more towards exchange value', nevertheless, 'its development [and that of merchant's capital]...is incapable by itself of promoting and explaining the transition from one mode of production to another.

One warning about the book although not a weakness it must said that as Manning points out that merchants were only a part of the bourgeoisie and, there is much more work to do on identifying the revolutionary forces in the industrial districts and the relations between various elements in those districts--gentry, yeomen farmers, and merchants, landholding and landless artisans, proto-capitalists and proto-proletarians”. On this I concur.

Further Studies

From A Petit-bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party, by Leon Trotsky, December 15, 1939.

The English Revolution and the transition from feudalism to capitalism. A review of R Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Cambridge University Press, 1993) £40

'Science and Society' (Spring 1950, Fall 1952, Spring 1953, Fall 1953) reprinted with additional essays in R Hilton (ed), The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 197 T H Aston and C H E Philpin (eds), The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985).

R Brenner, 'Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism', in A L Beier, D Cannadine and J M Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989) pp291-292; Merchants and Revolution, pp668-670.

C Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution, and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London, 1991), pp36-37.

The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century-Eric Hobsbawm Past and Present (1954) 33-53.

Bibliography

K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas

Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War p117

G E Aylmer Rebellion or Revolution Opus 1986

C Hill in the Century of Revolution Open University Set Book 1961

C Hill The English Revolution 1640 Lawrence and Wishart 1940

Maurice Dobb Studies in the Development of Capitalism Routledge 1946

D C Coleman The Economy of England Oxford 1971

R Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, pp375-388.

K Lindley, 'London's Citizenry in the English Revolution', in R C Richardson (ed), Town and Countryside in the English Revolution (Manchester 1992).

M Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (London 1946), pp86-89,120-122,168-169.

R Brenner, 'The Civil War Politics of London's Merchant Community', op cit, p65.

B Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (Bookmarks, London, 1991).

V Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1961)

R Brenner, 'The Civil War Politics of London's Merchant Community', Past & Present, No 58 (1973).

Hammersmith & Fulham Council Cut Valuable Archive

2011-07-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

I have been running this blog now for nearly two years. As I am not a professional historian much of my research is Internet based. I do love visiting archives and where possible do some searching of ‘real’ primary sources. One such prompting was after reading an article written by the Historian Adam Smyth who lectures at Birkbeck University in London.

He has recently written a interesting and important book called Autobiography in Early modern England (Cambridge University Press 2010). In this book he mentions Reverend John Wade of Hammersmith (1632- 1707) who kept the parish register. In this register Smyth reveals that local people had recorded their ‘personal and political’ comments in margins of the register.

Having read this I contacted Adam to find out where he got his source from. So off I went to Hammersmith & Fulham Archive housed at the Lilla Huset building. Imagine my dismay upon being told that the resource had been cut to the bone. Originally the archive was staffed by two experienced archivists who have been made redundant and opened three times a week. Although the archive has been kept open(originally it was to close altogether in order to save just £70,000) it is open only twice a month by appointment and is being kept open by volunteer historians and others.

The cuts to the archive has been met by a wave of dismay from members of the public and historians. Fears are now mounting that the extremely important resource will be lost. The archive contains “important historical documents, newspapers and photographs” which could no longer be available future researchers except at a very high financial price.

The historian Melanie Backe-Hansen and Hammersmith resident said "I am concerned about the speed of these cuts without any consultation. The records should be open to everyone and as a working historian, paying large sums to someone else to do my research is wrong. There are big concerns regarding the upkeep, security, freedom of information and the future costs that will arise."

Another resident said: "I work in archive services outside the borough and have first hand experience of people from all walks of life benefiting from access to archival materials. As these services are paid for by taxpayers, I feel it is wrong to ask those wanting access to these to pay twice. Freedom to information should not the preserve of the well-off."

Lucinda Hawksley, who is an an author and great-great-great-grandaughter of Dickens, said: "I am so shocked to hear about the proposed closure. As an author and lecturer, I spend much of my time researching and local studies libraries are a vital part of that research. "If the local studies library is closed, what will happen to all the local history and local knowledge? Where will all the files be kept and how will people access them?"A library like this should be the heart of a democratic, literate community, it should be prized. Can you really imagine a world with no libraries? What a colourless, impoverished place it would be. H&F Council seems to have no conception of this. "By destroying the libraries and their surrounding culture the council is ensuring a state of ignorance will ensue and the long-term consequences will be far more expensive than the savings these mean-spirited cuts will make."

Two Posts from Christopher Thompson

2011-07-08T12:02:00.000-07:00

(I am reprinting two articles from Chris Thompson Blog. His blog can be accessed at http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.com/

The Kishlansky Case

Earlier this week, I noted the publication of Ian Gentles's new book, Oliver Cromwell. God's Warrior and the English Revolution, and of the festschrift for John Morrill edited by Michael J.Braddick and David L.Smith, The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland. The former arrived on Tuesday and the latter today. I have been leafing through both. Ian Gentles's work is, as one would expect, clearly written and a persuasive work of scholarship. I have not had the time to read the Morrill festschrift in detail but I have looked at Mark Kishlansky's tribute in detail. It is a warm piece testifying to a friendship that has lasted for almost forty years. I was, however, particularly struck by Kishlansky's account (ibid., Pp.xxx-xxxi) of the controversy into which he entered in the pages of The Historical Journal in 1990-1991 and subsequently in The Journal of British Studies. The target of his criticism is not named at all but is simply described first of all as someone "who happened to hold a junior position at Cambridge" and then as a person who "held only a position as a College fellow" when everyone interested in the period knows exactly who he means. He also claims that, following comments from the Historical Journal's two readers of his original draft article and from John Morrill himself, "the amended essay would then be submitted [to his target]... for response".

I do know a little about this episode. Kishlansky's prospective attack was revealed by a very senior American historian from a university on that country's eastern seaboard on a visit to London in the summer of 1990. He described how he had learnt from Kishlansky himself, then holding a post at the University of Chicago, of the planned publication of this article in the Historical Journal. News of this inevitably spread and came to the ears of Kishlansky's intended victim who knew nothing of this manoeuvre and who had not been supplied with a copy. He naturally learnt of its contents and details about those to whom it had already been circulated. No less naturally, he began preparing his response. Soon the whole matter became widely known and entangled in intellectual politics in Cambridge and elsewhere.

I do not know who the "senior member of the field" was who sent John Morrill "a menacing missive" demanding that Kishlansky's essay should not appear and asserting that Morrill's own career would be damaged if it did. G.R.Elton is a possibility but Conrad Russell seems a much more likely candidate. Either way, Kishlansky's essay did appear in the Historical Journal late in 1990 to be followed in the next edition by a far-reaching rebuttal. In my view, Kishlansky had much the worse of this exchange but others will, no doubt, have their own opinions.

Nostalgia Marxist style

When James Holstun, the literary scholar and Marxist polemicist, wrote his appreciation of the career and works of the late Brian Manning in 2004, he observed with a degree of regret that Marxism was hardly to be found amongst academic historians studying the English Revolution but could only be discovered in the ranks of tutors for the Workers' Educational Association and amongst political scientists and sociologists. I was reminded of this observation when reading the essay by Geoff Kennedy, a political scientist at Durham University, on Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution (in Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys, ed., History and Revolution. Refuting Revisionism, Verso Press 2007). His picture of the historiography of the pre-1970s was predicated on belief in a traditional social interpretation of the events of the 1640s and 1650s deriving from the works of Christopher Hill, R.H.Tawney and Lawrence Stone later rejected at the behest of G.R.Elton and under the stimulation of the works of Conrad Russell. Revisionists apparently denied the importance of historical materialism and adopted a form of static traditionalism that was itself a form of reductionism. Long-term causes, especially the importance of the development of capitalism, had been abandoned to Dr Kennedy's regret. Political history had been denied its social context and isolated from it by this regrettable process.

I am afraid that the pillars underpinning this argument will not bear such weight. The arguments advanced by Hill in 1940 and by Tawney in 1941 had become fiercely contested in little over a decade: the criticisms of Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper inspired a vast range of Ph.D.theses and books on the fortunes of the gentry and peerage that would not have been composed had there been such a "social interpretation" in place. 'Revisionism', to use Ted Rabb's phrase, was itself a protest against the kind of reductionism advocated by Hill, Tawney and Stone and was, in any case, principally, an Oxford rather than a Cambridge phenomenon. Kennedy's appeal to Bob Brenner's case developed in the festschrift for Lawrence Stone that the 1590s saw a shift to economic rents on large estates is very fragile: Stone had not, in truth, examined leasing practices in any detail on any aristocratic estate: where this has been done, e.g. on the estate of the Rich family in Essex, the length of leases (at 21 years) and the high proportion going to former tenants suggests that there was little, if any, such competition and certainly no development of agricultural capitalism in this period.

Geoff Kennedy's view that the Levellers in the 1640s represented a petit-bourgeois group carries little conviction. Of course, there are those who would still like to adhere to the views of Hill or Tawney in 1940-1941 but those views have long ceased to have any purchase in serious historical study. 'Revisionism' has been dead for twenty years. Neither Marxism or Revisionism is relevant to serious historical research in this period any longer. The clock cannot be turned back whatever Geoff Kennedy might hope for.

A Review of Radicalism in the English Revolution 1640- 1660 F D Dow.

2011-07-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

That an inequitable thing it is for one man to have thousands, and another want bread, and that the pleasure of God is, that all men should have enough, and not that one man should abound in this worlds good, spending it upon his lusts, and another man of far better deserts, not be worth two pence, and that it is no such difficulty as men make it to be, to alter the course of the world in this thing, and that a few diligent and valiant spirits may turn the world upside down, if they observe their seasons, and shall with life and courage ingage accordingly.

--- attributed to William Walwyn

As F D Dow says in the preface, his little book is not a narrative of the events of the English civil war. However he does in such a small book give a good introduction to the level of radicalism in the English Revolution. It is clear that outside of the Russian and French revolutions respectively no other revolution has generated such heat historically speaking.

He begins his book with an assessment of current historiography on the subject of the radical groups in the Civil war. The reader should keep in mind that the book was written and published in 1985 when Dow wrote this book the revisionists had already had been going for well over ten years.

The first chapter is well written and informative. He outlines the attack on Marxist historiography especially any understanding of the importance of any long term causes of the English civil war. As Dow suggests even the use of the term radical to describe groups such as the Levellers has come under attack, according to Glenn Burgess “Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark to name two have said that the term 'radicalism' should not be applied to phenomena that exist before the term itself was coined. Clark has pointed out that it applies "to a doctrine newly coined in England in the 1820s to describe a fusion of universal suffrage, Ricardian economics and programmatic atheism. To speak of an eighteenth - or a seventeenth-century radicalism is therefore as much of a solecism as to speak of an eighteenth- or a seventeenth-century fascism or Marxism".

One by product of this turn away from Marxist historiography (that was perhaps best expressed in the writings of Christopher Hill, Brian Manning and the early work of Lawrence Stone) was the increase in number of local studies. Studies such as The County Committee of Kent in the Civil War by A M Everitt and more famously John Morrill’s work on the Revolt of the Provinces emphasised short term explanations. The rise of local studies does not necessary mean that these historians had a right wing agenda. David Underdown Riot, Rebel and Rebellion is well worth a look at. On the whole local studies are a worthwhile thing but note should be taken as E H Carr suggests to study the historian before you study the history.

Other revisionists such as John Adamson limited the civil war to a struggle amongst the nobility not a class struggle in his Noble Revolt and his forth coming Noble Realm. This has led to the muddying or an outright denial of class struggles in the English civil war.

Dow shows that a number of historians have tended portray the period before the civil war as calm and that the English ruling elite would have never believed that civil war was on the agenda. But relying on Brain Manning’s work Dow paints an alternative picture of life before the war stating that Manning had "forcefully argued that economic discontent and popular unrest were important elements in producing an atmosphere of crisis before and after 1640 ... that this eruption of the lower and middling orders into the political arena crucially affected the alignment of political groupings within the elite ... parliament’s appeal to the ‘middling sort of people’ was ... to release one of the most dynamic forces of the decade and substantially promote the cause of popular radicalism”.

On the section called Parliamentarians and Republicans Dow examines the philosophical basis for the Civil War. He explains that before the Civil war the English ruling elite was largely content with the divine rule of kings. Society was in order and that everything was ordained by God.

But as the Marxist political writer D North explains a closer examination brings a different picture “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it, was well under way. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual environment”.

It would be wrong of course to mechanically apply this type of reason to the thinking of parliamentary opposition to the King. It was after all mostly confused and not coherently thought out. According to Dow (p15) “Four major issues were touched upon by these new writers, the nature and location of sovereignty, the origins of government in the consent of the people, the welfare of the people as the end or purpose of government and the role of common people in resisting the king”. Dow attempts in this chapter to establish a link between the new philosophy and the actions of players of the revolution.

Dow correctly spends some time on the philosophy James Harrington. The importance of Harrington is that his writings are a confirmation of the relationship between political thought and political action. Dow however downplays Harrington grasp of the relationship between property and power saying he was not a “proto Marxist”. While this is true he was a writer who anticipated a materialist understanding of social and political events.

For Dow the chief ideologues of the revolution were the radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers etc. He states on page 8 that “Ideological and organizational advances were made by radicals who were not matched until the 1760s. Although the Levellers did not achieve power, and succeeded more in frightening those who did hold power than in convincing them of the merits of the radical case., their beliefs and their programme opened up new vistas of political participation, religious toleration and social equality. If not for all men then at least for very significant sections of the middling classes”.

The Levellers according to Dow were “founding fathers of the working class movement”. Dow claimed the Levellers broke new ground.” They grounded their programme of anew ideological basis by developing arguments based on doctrines of natural rights and popular sovereignty. And they mobilized support for their movement by employing sophisticated modern techniques of propaganda and organization”.

I do not agree with Dow on this assessment of the Levellers. As A L Morton says of the Levellers “it was a radical but not a working class party: indeed, how could it be at a time when the working class as we know it was only beginning to exist? Still less was it a ‘socialist’ party in the sense of advocating the type of egalitarian and agrarian communism which was widespread at this time” and to add was not articulately expressed (until) Winstanley and his Diggers or ‘true Levellers’.

Dow admits it is difficult however to paint an exact picture of what constituted the Leveller party and it was as the Baptist Henry Dunne said a “very heterogeneous body”. It is to Dow’s credit he places the rise of the Levellers in a socio-economic context “The socio economic preconditions for the rise of the movement like the Levellers had been created by long term changes in landholding and in the manufacturing. Those changes which had adversely affected the status and prosperity of the urban and rural ‘middling sort’ of people were especially important in providing potential supporters for the Levellers, who were to become principally the spokesmen for the ‘industrious sort’. Pressure on the smaller peasant farmer who lacked the resources of his larger neighbour to benefit from the expanding market and rising prices: the discontent of the insecure copyholder subject to rack-renting and the fear of the small cottager or husbandman at the prospect of enclosure, produce dissatisfaction which the Levellers could tap and issues on which they could take a stand.

Of even greater significance were the problems of the small craftsmen and tradesmen, particularly in the towns, whose independence seemed threatened by large scale merchants and entrepreneurs. The existence of such problems in London was crucially important, for the capital was to provide the core of the Leveller movement. Here, a large pool of discontent existed among journeymen unable, because of changes in the structure of manufacturing to find the resources to set up as masters in their own right. Anger smoulder among small tradesmen and merchants chafing at the alleged oppression of the guilds”.

Dow makes the point that the Levellers tapped into a growing hostility from people especially in London towards a deal with the monarchy. An outward display of this came about through the army at Putney. Dow makes a very perceptive point that “The radicalisation of sections of the rank and file did not happen solely, or even directly, because of Leveller influence, it happened because soldiers’ perception of their own ill treatment at the hands of the Presbyterian majority produced a political consciousness on which the Levellers could capitalize”.

Dow crucially examines the nature of the society, or specifically sections of the society, from which the Leveller movement sprang. Several attempts have been made to explain a class background to the Leveller movement and the people whose support it attracted. While it is prudent to acknowledge David Underdown’s warning that "Class is a concept that can be applied to seventeenth-century English society only with the greatest possible caution".

Dow relies heavily on the work of Professor Brian Manning’s recently revised study, The English People and the English Revolution. Manning who was a member of the Radical group the SWP tries like Dow to examine the Levellers “from a socialist perspective”. But seems to contradict himself using Manning’s own words "that some of the ‘middling sort’ played a crucial role in the revolution".

The book is a very good introduction to the subject of radicalism in the English Revolution. Dow’s work on the Levellers is equally important. To end with I concur with A L Morton who said “A Party that held the centre of the stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation’s history, voiced the aspirations of the unprivileged masses, and was able to express with such force ideas that have been behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten”.

Sources

Glenn Burgess, "A Matter of Context: 'Radicalism' and the English Revolution", in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries), 2006-2007: 1-4

Lecture 7 The English Civil War http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/lecture7c.html

Bibliography

Brian Manning, "The Levellers and Religion" in J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay (editors), Radical Religion in the English Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1986, page 241.

David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-60, Oxford University Press, 1987, page 168.

Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, Bookmarks, London, 1991, page 7.

F. D. Dow, Radicalism in the English Revolution 1640-60, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1985, chapter 1.

A. L. Morton (editor) Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1975, page 101.

Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas, Princeton NJ, 1985, ch. 5, especially pp. 138-41.

Barry Coward: A Partisan Historian of the English Civil War.

2011-06-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

These remarks come one day after attending a memorial service for the historian and teacher Barry Coward. Well over 130 of Barry’s family, close friends, co-workers and former students attended the service. Perhaps it is a bit strange to say this but it was a hugely enjoyable and uplifting occasion. The death of any person is a sad thing but the fact of the matter is that Barry Coward was a special historian and I certainly left the memorial with the feeling that knowing him made you a better person.

I first met him in 1999 at Birkbeck University. I was attending an open evening because I was thinking of doing a part time degree and Birkbeck had been recommended to me by a friend. At the open meeting was Barry Coward. Part of the attraction of the degree was the study of the English revolution. I had a vague likening for the subject but when I asked Barry about the course, he immediately fired my enthusiasm and signed up a week later. This was probably one of my better decisions

The first thing that struck me about Barry Coward was his incredible and infectious enthusiasm for his chosen topic. He was also something rare amongst most historians in that he was always warm and friendly towards his students.

In his own words “I never ceased to be amazed by their ability to combine full-time employment with part-time study and gain degrees as good as, and often better than, those who studied full time. It was enormously rewarding to watch Birkbeck students – especially those who had not done formal study for some time – develop academically, and then use Birkbeck as a launch pad for life-changing experiences. I’d like to thank them for their enthusiasm and the freshness of their ideas that I drew on in my writings.’

Barry Coward was rare bread. He was both a serious historian but he was also a first class teacher. John Croxon who was one of Barry’s students who spoke at the memorial testified to Barry’s special talent as a teacher. John’s experience echoed my own and many other students in the fact that Barry always had time and patience for students no matter how small their questions.

While listening to the speakers you got a great sense of Barry’s modesty. This may of stemmed from the fact that he had a formidable knowledge of his subject so much so that a number of his books such as the The Stuart Age, England 1603–1714 (latest edition 2003)The Cromwellian Protectorate (2002) are standard texts on the subject of the English Civil war. Fellow historian Ian Roy spoke of Barry’s work. I tend to agree with him as regards probably Barry’s most important work certainly because of its value for research purposes was his English Historical Documents, 1603-1660: which edited alongside Peter Gaunt.

His book on Oliver Cromwell (1991) has also become a standard textbook on the period. This was not an orthodox biography. He kept an open mind on major issues surrounding Cromwell. He made an important point of saying that it is good to strip away the myths surrounding Cromwell. Many of these myths and falsehoods were spread by hostile biographers.

As the title says, Barry was a partisan Historian. He was a former president of the Cromwell Association. While he wore his history on his sleeve, he did so to further our understanding of not only Cromwell but also his place in the English revolution.

Coward was not a materialist historian. While not a revisionist historian, he accepted the way history of this period is now written without any attention to underlying socio-economic causes of events portrayed in the book. However Coward did conceed that the differences which arose amongst parliamentarians were political rather than religious. The main cause of disagreement was over what to do with the king. What was the class basis of the differences between the Independents and Presbyterians?

He makes an outstanding claim that the New Model Army was not political from the outset and that it was not politicised by the Levellers, which I don to agree with. Coward says the army spontaneously gravitated to radical solutions over pay grievances etc. This downplaying of the ideological debates that took place in the army is a major weak point in the book. That is not to say that Coward had no grand narrative, which was his fascination with Cromwell’s attempt at a “Godly Reformation” . Again the weakness in this book is the absence of any class analysis. What social forces were moving not just Cromwell but other players?

Barry was a good public speaker although not the best he was not the worse. He also had one of the best traits of a historian in that during his lectures you could almost sense that when he was speaking on subject he was already rethinking his remarks.

It would be remiss of me to say that I did not always see eye to eye on his political and historical conclusions on the Civil War. We came from different political family trees. He was old school labour and I was certainly to the left of him but must say that during his seminars which was probably the best part of my degree we had a frank exchange and that was it. Having said this he was always, the gentlemen and these debates never became bitter or rancorous.

In conclusion while Barry never subscribed to the Marxist method of studying historical events I am sure he would not mind me quoting Karl Marx to highlight Barry’s attitude to study. In the 1872 Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital Vol. 1, Marx emphasised that "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits". Reaching a scientific understanding was hard work. Conscientious, painstaking research was required, instead of philosophical speculation and unwarranted, sweeping generalisations. Suffice to say Barry made it to that luminous summit. I will miss Barry and so will past and future students of 17th century England.

Historians on the Levellers and the English Revolution 1642-1652

2011-06-23T09:15:00.000-07:00

(I just received this email from Christopher Thompson regarding my latest posting on the Levellers. I would like to throw this subject open to debate. I will in due course reply myself but it would make far more interesting discussion if readers of this blog got involved, it would make a far more rounded discussion.)

I am afraid that it is not true to claim that there was a dearth of works on the Levellers before Christopher Hill and other members of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group began work to rescue them from historical oblivion or that this was the responsibility of Whig historians. S.R.Gardiner considered the Levellers’ influence in the period from 1647-1649 in some detail in Volume IV of his history of the English Civil War and in his biography of Oliver Cromwell: the first Agreement of the People, now known to be the product not of Leveller thinking but of a group of radicals around Henry Marten, appeared in 1889 in his Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution.

It was C.H.Firth who edited and published The Clarke Papers, which throw such light on relations between the leaders of the New Model Army, the Agitators and Levellers, between 1891 and 1901. Eduard Bernstein’s book, Cromwell and Communism; socialism and democracy in the great English Civil War was published in German in 1895 and in an English translation in 1930. G.P.Gooch’s work, The history of English democratic ideas in the 17th century, first appeared in 1898 and T.C.Pease’s book, The Leveller Movement; A Study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War, was published in 1916. Margaret James’s book, Social Problems and Policies during the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660, was published in 1930 as was J.W.Gough’s article, ‘The Agreements of the People’ in History in the following year. The truth is that there had been a significant amount of work done on the Levellers long before they attracted the attention of Christopher Hill or of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group.

It is true that there were Marxist historians of importance working in the pre- and post-Second World War periods. But, by the early-1970s, their influence was largely spent as far as the early modern period was concerned as was that of Lawrence Stone. Marxist influence had never been overwhelming or absolutely predominant even if it had attracted the support of, perhaps, a third of the specialists in this period. Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper and J.H.Hexter had seen to that. ‘Revisionism’ in the sense you use the term was born in the late-1960s and was itself defunct by the early-1990s.

To be a non-Marxist is not to be a ‘revisionist’. Personally, I prefer a situation in which a range of influences and trends shape the historiography of the period before, during and after the struggles of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Critical attacks on Kishlansky, Morrill and Russell will not revive historical materialism of the kind advocated in the 1950s and 1960s. The Levellers were an interesting phenomenon and important for their ideas amidst the competing political and religious debates of the late-1640s but their support was relatively small and they were gone in the space of a very few years. Such a transient phenomenon deserves serious historical evaluation rather than hagiography.

The Levellers and the English Revolution-1642-52

2011-06-20T11:05:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this essay is two fold. Firstly to examine through the writings of four of the main revisionist historians and their current historiography on the Levellers. Secondly to present some observations on the Levellers place in the English revolution.

It is fair to say that up until some members of the Communist Party Historians Group namely Christopher Hill and a few others started to rescue them from historical oblivion the Levellers have had a pretty raw deal from historians.

A collective responsibility for the dearth major works of note up until the early part of the 20th century is largely the fault of Whig Historians. Large numbers of these historians in the words of Hill had a tendency to ‘bury their head in the sand’ as regards the Levellers.

Current historiography has certainly carried over much of the worst traits of Whig attitudes towards the Levellers. Some have ignored them completely such as John Adamson others have portrayed them as having little or no influence on the outcome of the war. John Morrill mentioned them twice in his book The Revolt of the Provinces.

While it is difficult to generalise as regards current historians views on the Levellers and not all current writing on the Levellers are by conservative historians some points can be made.

The Conservative orientated revisionist’s downplaying of the significance of the Levellers was really a by product of their assault on Marxist historiography. Before I go any further one point I must make is that I am not against historians revising previous work on the English revolution. As one writer recently put it all historians especially good ones are revisionists, he states “I continue to believe that revisionism is absolutely essential to the study of history. In fact, there would be no history without it. In his book Who Owns History?, Columbia University history professor Eric Foner recalls a conversation with a Newsweek reporter who asked him, "When did historians stop relating facts and start all this revising of interpretations of the past?" Foner responded: "Around the time of Thucydides." (1)

Modern revisionist historians who wrote on the Civil war period first appeared in the early 70s. John Morrill in an interview describes how a new revisionist outlook on the civil war came into being

“Well I think the interesting thing about revisionism was how a whole series of people came to the same conclusions simultaneously without really knowing one another. I hadn’t met Mark Kishlansky or Conrad Russell or Kevin Sharpe when we all published our 1976 works which were the initial canon of revisionism, and that’s one of the most interesting things. It’s also worth saying that almost all the revisionists were people who’d studied in Oxford and then been made to leave, for whom jobs couldn’t be found in Oxford. We reacted to some extent against a previous generation of Oxford-trained historians like Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper and Hill. So it was a curiously Oxford-dominated thing both in what was being reacted against and in the reaction itself. I think it was in 1973 in Oxford when I was a young research fellow that I gave a series of lectures called ‘Some Unfashionable Thoughts on English 17th-century History’, and these were extraordinarily crude and unsophisticated revisionism avant la lettre. But I’m not claiming I’m the progenitor – I’m saying there were a lot of people trying to work out a new position who were dissatisfied with the existing position. I’ve no doubt at all that Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) was the thing people reacted against, with its rather triumphalist claim that you could now produce a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the English revolution. It was that I think which a number of people quite independently reacted against”. (2)

Social or economic determinist views on history are of course associated with a Marxist view of historical development. Morrill alongside others sought to revise previous historiography’s that were based on Marxist methodology. One such tenant of Marxism was the use of historical materialism in order to explain historical processes and events.

The revisionist attack on historical materialism took many forms. Holstun makes the point that when revisionists talk or address the question of class, “working people” or the historians who examine class issues through the school of historical thoughts called “history from below” their questions and their answers are usually only half answered and they try their best to stop any deeper understanding of class relations during the war.

Another point is that it would be wrong to define the group as a card carrying set of historians who met every Monday to work out new revisions or new attacks on Marxism. Each historian should be measured on their merits and what they wrote and said. It would also be fruitful to examine certain parts of their work from the standpoint of whether they brought a new insight into as regards the Levellers or whether they sought to impose a more conservative historiography on studies of the Levellers.

It would be good to start with perhaps the most outspoken representative of the revisionist hostility to the Levellers Mark Kishlansky. His philosophy towards the Levellers could be summed up best with his famous quote “The war created radicalism; radicalism did not create the war”. On the surface this can seem an accurate assessment of the Levellers. It is true that the immeadite causes of any revolution are “a change in the state of mind of conflicting classes and changes in the collective conscoiousness by groups such as the Levellers which had a semi concealed thing about them. These changes in thinking mostly reveal themselves sharpley when events such as a revolution occur. In these times they break through to the surface with a intensity not seen in peaceful times.

Undoubtedley these groups were radicalised by the war and gained support from soldiers and civillians who became disillusioned with the way things turned out. What Kishlansky leaves out are that these ideas were a reflection in the minds of men and women of powerful economic and social changes that were developing at least in the proceading decades or according to some Lawrence Stone a centruy before.

Kishlansky concedes that the Levellers were a radical outfit but argues they had limited or no influence inside the New Model Army and certainly made no major difference to the radicalisation of the army. What radicalisms did occurred was for Kishlansky because of arrears over pay and conditions. He also states that the army was not radicalised before 1647. This view is common amongst other revisionist historians and writers take for instance this quote from Jason Eldred who is largely an apologist for Kishlansky views in his essay An Army So Provoked. (3)

“The New Model Army’s intrusion into politics was not as unavoidable as its historiography has made it seem. Mark Kishlansky’s enormously influential Rise of the New Model Army was the first major work on the New Model in nearly a century and stood generations of accepted belief about the New Model on their heads, arguing that the Army was not an intrinsically radical organization bent on radical ends from its inception. Few historians would now challenge Kishlansky’s thesis, although, as always in the historiography of England in the 1640s, there is room for plenty of debate. The Army could have been politicized or radicalized before the spring of 1647, but if it was, then neither the soldiers nor their officers left any indication of that nascent radicalism in print. Quite simply, the New Model’s politicization was provoked in the spring and summer and kept red hot by the actions of the House of Commons. Several factors triggered the Army’s entry into politics: their material, legal, and civil concerns, and the House of Commons’ concomitant total disregard for those concerns”.

Kishlansky questioned the level of Leveller involvement citing the fact that the dispute in army was largely over pay. This statement can be easily disproved if one examines the debates that took place at Saffron Walden. The debates showed that it was not just a matter of pay but there was the first indication of political demands and more significantly soldiers were showing a level of political independence through the setting up of spokesman for their cause in the form of agitators. The growing Leveller influence in the army can be detected in the statement that the soldiers saw that their "liberties as Englishmen are 10,000 times more important than our arrears of pay". Kishlansky counters by saying that Leveller rhetoric was fundamentally opposed to a standing army and that Lillburne’s own experience made him suspicious and out of touch with its rank and file, while Kishlansky suggested that the dynamics of army relations with parliament could be explained adequately in terms of the army’s own sense of its honour, its legitimate demands as an army, and its own experience in war and peace’.

Of course the statement by Kishlansky is true in so much that an army did have its own characteristics and demands but what is lacking in his argument is any understanding that the army was made up of people of different social and political backgrounds and they represented definite social and politics classes. These people fought out their ideas inside the army. The army itself was not above politics. The Levellers understood this and in a limited way so did Cromwell who knew that who controlled the army controlled power

While Kishlansky admits that the army was full of politics, it was driven not by the movement of people fighting for their politics. His somewhat crass view that the army was moved not by ‘Lillburne's rhetoric’ but by the ‘shedding of blood’

Kishlansky rejects this attitude and presents a somewhat one-sided view of the political struggles inside the army.

He dismisses the struggle was over ideology when he says ‘Much has been written about the ideology of the army, but most of it misconceived. A principle reason for this has been historians have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers created a commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and logical grounds. There were men of low birth among the new Model’s officers, and much has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still might be made of obscure officers like Spongers and Creamer whose surnames suggest backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. Yet careful study of the armies social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more traditional in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still does not meet the real objections to existing interpretation- the fallacy of social determinism”.

Kishlansky is therefore hostile to any historical sources that seek to detect the social undercurrents that moved people of different social backgrounds into fight against the king and against parliament as the Levellers did.

From the 1640s onwards the Levellers advocated new and revolutionary ideas but as any person who studies this period they took the form of a “curious and archaic guise”. The Levellers who were the true ideologists of the revolution used the bible to find historical precedent to explain and justify what they were doing.

The left wing American historian Jim Holstun described Conrad Russell’s work as a ‘manifesto for historical revisionism’, he makes the point that Russell sought another way to explain the social changes that were taken place in the English revolution that historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry, the middling sort of people who were rising according to Russell ‘not so much at the expense of the gentry, as at the expense of small holders and the labouring poor’.

Russell would often make the point that he not conversant with the term’s feudalism and capitalism. In many senses these revisionist views are not new in 1926 R H Tawney was highly scathing of historians and writers who rejected social change explanations for revolutionary events, he said ‘After more than half a century of work on (capitalism)… by scholars of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists’ or to suggest that if it does exist, it is unique among human institutions in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eternity, or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids that history to be disinterred, is to run wilfully in blinkers … (An author) … is unlikely, however, to make much of the history of Europe during the last three centuries if, in addition to eschewing the word, he ignores the fact.’

Christopher Hill argues that Russell had a tendency like Kishlansky to say that the civil war occurred due to a series of accidents, which were the consequences of the personal peculiarities of powerful individuals. He still takes too short-sighted a view of the social and economic causes and consequences of the greatest revolution in our history. (4)

Austin Woolrych has a similar position on the Putney debates as Russell he correctly states that, the Putney Debates of 1647 were regarded as a chapter in the history of the Levellers he rejects that Putney was an essentially a battle between contending social forces. With Cromwell representing the Grandees and the Levellers representing the petty trades and artisans.

Woolwich somewhat contentiously states that the army had “refrained from political activity despite the tendency of the Presbyterians both religious and political to portray it as a hotbed of sectaries and radicals”. If this is true then did Putney really drop from the skies? Is there no connection between the activity of the army before Putney and during? Is history just a series of unconnected episodes?

Woolrych’s books are worth reading not so much for his analysis but for the tremendous use of empirical material. In fact it would be correct to say that a number of revisionist historians who have at least attempted to address the Levellers have done so with a disdain for the theoretical nature of a lot of Leveller writings.

In one passage, Woolrych again tries to separate the debate at Putney from the general discussion within the army and outside it. ‘Anyone who strains to hear the voice of the soldiery in the Putney debates should be aware that, apart from one brief interjection by an unnamed agent, the only troopers who spoke that day were Sex by and Everard, and on the other two days recorded by Clarke the only others who opened their mouths were Lockyer and Allen. No agitator of a foot regiment is known to have spoken. Out of just fifty officer-agitators listed in October, twelve spoke in the course of the three-recorded days five of them only once, and very briefly. We should be very cautious about treating the Putney debates, wonderful as they are as the typical voice of the army’.

While it is true that the ordinary soldiers were thin on the ground, even a cursory look at who was at Putney would give a much clearer picture as to the significance of these individuals. Wooldrych mentions Edward Sexby, who at the time was a colonel in the New Model Army. Sexby who came up through the ranks and began life from a lowly position. Sexby spoke not for himself but for the rank and file soldiers who he said were as poor as him and had risked their lives for their ‘birthright and privileges as Englishmen’ only to be told by Ireton that unless they had a fixed estate they had no birth right, he then vented his frustration ‘we sought to satisfy all men, and its was well’ but in going (about) to doe it we have dissatisfied all men. Wee have laboured to please a Kinge, and I think and I think, except we goe about to cutt all out throats, we shall nott please him, and we have gone to support and housewh. Will prove roten studs, I meane the parliament which consists of a company of rotten members’.

Even Woolrych is forced to describe incidents where ‘open incitements to mutiny were already bearing poisoned fruit. Fairfax had ordered Colonel Robert Lillburne's foot regiment to Newcastle, for sound military reasons, but a party of new agent bearing copies of The Case of the Armies overtook it and urged it not to let the army be divided. Thereupon its soldiers turned back, held an unauthorised rendezvous and refused to obey their officers. Other regiments were in a state of incipient mutiny before the debates at Putney were wound up’.

The first thing I would like to say about John Morrill is that he is a generous historian who is willing to pass comment and give his time to other historians. He as can be seen above was perhaps the first historian to notice that the new revisionist historiography sought not only to attack Marxist writings but also Whig interpretations of the civil war. Morrill’s attempt to replace Marxist historiography as the dominant force in civil war studies was to reject social, economic explanations and to resort to ‘local studies’. As Kevin Sharpe explained “the key to English political thought was not theory but circumstance, practical politics rather than philosophy. Morrill downplayed the use of “larger economic explanations” as “less important as family and upbringing

What was the place of the Levellers in the English revolution? The Levellers appeared to take on many of the characteristics of a political party in the years 1645-46. This is a contentious issue and has been disputed. They were the radical wing of the Independent coalition and were responsible for many of modern day political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and the lobby of MPs. As an aside William Clarke who provided us with the report of the Putney Debates was an avid collector of books, pamphlets and leaflets found in his collection was over eighty Leveller pamphlets. The Levellers strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had significant support in the army.

The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and extension of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property, artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers, which made up the composition of the Levellers themselves.

Some historians such as Alan G. Smith have a mistakenly put forward suggestions that the Levellers were proponents of’ social revolution’. Certainly, in recent studies communist ideas have been attributable to them by the very same people who have tended to exaggerate the revolutionary potential of the Levellers. As we will see later, this was not just attributable to later day historians but by the some participants of the civil war themselves.

The Levellers themselves were part of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract thought. Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City of London, a decentralisation of justice and the election of local governors and stability of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from their religion they had no programme to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Levellers constitute a mass movement.

The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained “I am no advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them, without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient”.

Knowing that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate the Levellers attempted to find constitutional ways of getting round it. A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be refounded on the basis of certain fundamental “native rights” safeguarded even from a sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in the first place. The Agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.

The one chance the Levellers had to put their ideas into practice was to gain control of the army. The development of the new model army was central to the outcome of the English civil war, who controlled the army controlled state power. The Levellers had agitated for the arrears of wages to be paid and that indemnity for actions committed during the civil war is granted. This agitation had won them considerable support in the army.

At the Army Council debate at Putney held in the October/November of1647 came the Levellers opportunity. The limitations of the Leveller program was cruelly exposed in a very famous exchange between Colonel Rainsborough, leader of the Levellers in Parliament and Henry Ireton, Rainsborough stated that “The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he and therefore every man that is to live under a government ought, first, by his own consent. To put himself under the government”.

This seemed all very democratic but ‘free born Englishmen’ excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute ‘the people’. Christopher Hill says, “The Leveller conception of free Englishmen was thus restricted, even if much wider, than the embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. However, manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were”.

To put it more simply the generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of a majority of the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their own supporters against them. Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise was widened it would threaten his position in parliament. Again, Hill explains, “Defending the existing franchise Cromwell son in law, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine ‘that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here’. The vote was rightly restricted to those who ‘had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom’. Namely, ‘the person in whom all lands lies and that incorporation’s in whom all trading lies”

Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free Englishmen. If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free. Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no reason why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument completely confused Rainsborough and undermined his argument.

Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the Levellers and the smaller groups within them such as the Diggers were becoming a dangerous business. Cromwell said of what he called the ‘lunaticks’ “You must break these men or they will break you” Cromwell declared. By May 1649, the Levellers had been defeated in battle and their influence in the army and in civilian life disappeared.

In many respects, the true revolutionary of the civil war were Cromwell and his New Model Army. While not agreeing with the revisionists that the Levellers were an insignificant movement, they should not also be hyped into something they were not. They were essentially a movement of the lower middle class that sought to extend the franchise on a limited basis. The reason this failed was that the social and economic basis for their ideas had not yet developed in this sense their egalitarian ideas were a foretaste of future social movements, not communistic but more in the tradition of social democracy.

Sources

(1) All Historians are Revisionists by John Fea wardworldhistory.blogspot.com/2011/05/all-historians-are-revisionists.html

(2) Professor John Morrill interview transcript at Selwyn College, 26 March 2008 www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html

(3) An Army So Provoked Popular Print and the Language of Radicalisation in the New Model Army Jason Eldred University of Virginia

(4) The bashed-up revolution: Christopher Hill responds to last week's article by Conrad Russell marking the 350th anniversary of the start of the English Civil War Thursday, 27 August 1992 .

(5) Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution Geoff Kennedy 2007 Verso

Bibliography

Holstun Jim Ehud’s Dagger Class struggle in the English revolution Verso 2000

Morrill John The Revolt of the Provinces

Russell Conrad The Crisis of Parliaments 1603-1660 (1971)

Russell Conrad The Causes of the English Civil War (1990)

Russell Conrad The fall of the British Monarchies.

A Short Biographical Sketch of Sir Michael Livesey

2011-06-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Sir Michael Livesey was born 1614. In historical terms his early family history is often presented as being rebellious but this is far from an accurate picture as the origins of the family were in reality as established members of the 17th century English gentry. Michael Livesey’s grandfather was employed as the sheriff of Surrey. Michael’s father was the first Livesey to inhabit Kent. The family soon became settled so much so that they became very important community members with Michael’s father also becoming sheriff in 1618.

The Livesey’s growing status was expressed in the fact that Michael was granted a baronetcy in 1627. Given the exalted status of the family it is on the surface perplexing to find that Michael Livesey played such a prominent part on the side of parliament and was a radical independent to boot.

Why people choose sides in the English Civil War has occupied historians of different views for centuries. In this short article I would like to offer some thoughts. Linking this question to Sir Michael Livesey is conditional on the fact that little is known about his personal views as regard why he fought against the King and in the end gleefully signed his death warrant. After all he left no diary or as far as my research has taken me no substantial statements of his intent have been found so only some general points can be made on why a layer of the gentry represented by Livesey was driven to fight on parliament’s side.

From1637 up until 1640 he was a justice of the peace. At the start of the war he became one of the most fanatical puritans in the county who gave information according to J T Pearcy’s biography “against recusants to the Long Parliament in November 1640, and was one of the ringleaders of the Kentish petition of grievances in February 1642.

This petition provoked Parliaments ire and it answered.” Mr. Peard reports the Conference concerning the Kentish Petition: The Lord Keeper delivered the Subject of the Conference in Writing; viz."This Conference is desired concerning the Kentish Petition, upon the Informations my Lords have received, That it is yet, by the malignant and ill-affected Party, with great, though secret Industry, carried on; and not only in that County, but in some others of this Kingdom: And as it may have an ill Consequence, and a dangerous Effect, in the Disturbance of what the Parliament hath settled for the present Safety of the Kingdom, the Desire of the Lords is, That the Delinquents, and such as have been Actors in this Petition, may speedily be brought to their Trial: And that forthwith there may be a Declaration unto the Kingdom, that whosoever shall be found to further or to countenance this Petition, or any other of the like Nature, shall be held to be Disturbers of the Peace and Quiet of this Kingdom, and justly liable to the Censure of Parliament: And those that shall discover and give Information of such Practices, shall be reputed to do an acceptable Service to the King and Parliament."Ordered, That a Message be sent to the Lords, to acquaint their Lordships, That this House doth assent to the Declaration mentioned at the last Conference; and do desire that a Committee of both Houses may be appointed to draw up one to that Purpose. (From: 'House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 21 April 1642', Journal of the House of Commons: volume 2: 1640-1643 (1802), pp. 535-537. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=9061

In November 1642 he was one of only two Kentish parliamentarians excluded from pardon by Charles I”.Livesey’s record in the civil war is one of contradictions. He commanded a Kentish regiment during the first civil war. He was fervent member of the county committee, and sheriff in 1643. He had a reputation for ruthlessness amongst Royalist forces but also elicited grave suspicions amongstparliamentarians

While little is known about Livesey’s thoughts his actions speak volumes. We do know he was politically an Independent MP and was on its Left wing as he was aligned closely with its radical wing. According to one writer “this was particularly clear during the counter-revolution of 1647, when he was one of the members who fled to the safety of the army in the face of Presbyterian inspired riots in Westminster in July”

Under his leadership his troops became radicalised with him so much so they were accused of disorder and plunder, and he had to be warned to keep them under control, “for fear of disaffecting the community further”. This radicalising led to his troops sanctioning Pride’s Purge in December 1648. He was so trusted by Cromwell that when it came to kill the king he served on the high court of justice to try Charles I. His signature is fifth on the death warrant. Livesey attended every day of the trial. One writer has joked that he was so eager that he was almost waiting with quill in his hand dripping with ink. The men who signed the death warrant have had a far from easy time from historians depending on their point of view historians of this subject have either taken the view of the 17th century Italian philosopher Vico and described them as Heroes or they have been described as in CV Wedgwood book, The Trial of Charles I, as“rogues and knaves”.

From what we know of Livesey it is clear he made choices and acted on those choices with a passion that is undeniable. What drove him? Unfortunately for a number of established and distinguished historians this has become an unimportant question. As far as the historian Conrad Russell is concerned there were no great causes of the civil war which drove men such as Livesey to do what they did in fact according to Russell “it is certainly easier to understand why sheer frustration might have driven Charles to fight than it has ever been to understand why the English gentry might have wanted to make a revolution against him”.

For Russell it was easier to trace long term reasons why the King would do what he did but he mysteriously denies that these same long term reasons could also explain the actions of the gentry. Russell is of that brand of revisionist who believes that the English do not really do revolutions especially nasty ones When they do he prefers the 1688 version not 1640s. I must add that I do not brand Russell a revisionist as some kind of epithet but it some respects all historians are revisionist. The use of the term in this respect is done to highlight that Russell brand of historiography was a reaction and refutation of the Marxist Historians such as Hill and ManningThis can be seen clearly in this next quote in which Russell was seeking to dispel the Marxists insistence of long term causes of the Revolution.

“If we were to search the period for long-term reasons why the King might have wanted to fight a Civil War, we would find the task far easier than it has ever been to find long-term causes why the gentry might have wanted to fight a Civil War.” Why, then, has the task never been attempted? The trouble, I think, comes from our reliance on the concept of 'revolution.' Revolutions are thought of as things done to the head of state and not by him. The result is that Charles has been treated as if he were largely passive in the drift to Civil War, as a man who reacted to what others did, rather than doing much to set the pace himself. This picture is definitely incorrect. Whether the notion of an 'English Revolution' is also incorrect is a question I will not discuss here. Anyone who is determined to find an 'English Revolution' should not be looking here, but later on, in the years 1647-1653, and those years are outside the scope of this article. This article is concerned with the outbreak of Civil War, an event in which the King was a very active participant”.

At this point I should point out that although members of the gentry like Livesey did take part in a revolution despite Russell’s protestations it would be wrong to say that they did so as a tightly discipline unit similar to Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution. The 17th century revolution was a not a chemically pure revolution. And one caricature of Marxism has been to present Marxists as presenting so. It is clear that the gentry were split into all sorts of camps and fought for all kinds of political, social, and economic. religious and localized reasons.

But the beauty of this period is that identifiable class relations were becoming more definable and parties and political allegiances became somewhat clearly into view. According to a 20th century Russian revolutionary speaking on 17th century revolutionary politics “The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic Church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place a social self-determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called “root and branch men” or, in the language of our day, radicals, stood for a republic. The half-way position of the Presbyterians fully, corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie – between the nobility and the plebeians. The Independents” party which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to their conclusion naturally displaced the Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and the countryside that formed the main force of the revolution”.

One last point a number of historian perhaps the most famous of which are A Everitt and John Morrill have sought to explain the behaviour of members of the Gentry such as Sir Michael Livesey from the standpoint of local politics or religion. Morrill’s most famous work The Revolt of the Provinces to a certain extent sums this school of History up.

In an interview with Morrill he describes how he developed his provincial view of the Civil War “I think it was in 1973 in Oxford when I was a young research fellow that I gave a series of lectures called ‘Some Unfashionable Thoughts on English 17th-century History’, and these were extraordinarily crude and unsophisticated revisionism avant la lettre. But I’m not claiming I’m the progenitor – I’m saying there were a lot of people trying to work out a new position who were dissatisfied with the existing position. I’ve no doubt at all that Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) was the thing people reacted against, with its rather triumphalist claim that you could now produce a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the English revolution. It was that I think, which a number of people quite independently reacted against”.

Having only picked up Morrill book recently I cannot comment on his particular type of historiography. I am not against local studies of the revolution. In many ways it is useful in explaining the actions of people like Livesey but I believe this type of study can only take you so far. There were local issues that impacted heavily of why people fought and who they fought for. But I believe that this type of study must be done in conjuncture with an understanding of the long term causes of the war and have a deep understanding of the way socio economic changes move men and women or as Marx said it "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”.

Sources

J.T. Peacey, Sir Michael Livesay , Oxford DNB, 2004
A. Everitt, The community of Kent and the great rebellion, 1640–60 (1966)
House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 21 April 1642', Journal of the House of Commons: volume 2: 1640-1643 (1802), pp. 535-537. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=9061 Date accessed: 01 June 2011).
Why did Charles I fight the Civil War? Conrad Russell .History Today 1999
The Independents in the English Civil War Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Professor John Morrill interview Transcript interview took place in Selwyn College, Cambridge, and 26 March 2008.
Alison Stuart Regicide and Family Legend http://hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.com/2009/01/regicide-and-family-legend.html

Bibliography

On the origin of the Kentish rising see Matthew Carter’s A true relation of the Honourable though unfortunate expedition of Kent, Essex, and Colchester.
Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution (1931) Leon Trotsky

Appendix A

Sir Michael Livesey to Sir Anthony Weldon. ] - Sir William Clarke, The Clarke Papers. Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, vol. 2 [1894

Sir,

Wee are glad your parts are soe quiett. Itt is otherwise with other parts of the County; Rochester, Sittingburne, Feversham, and Sandwich all garrison’d for the Kinge. The County Magazines in those places, and as wee just now heard . . . . likewise seized, Mr. Box their prisoner att Sittingburne, and one John Swan though of their owne partie, and by themselves . . . What our indeavours are and present engagements wee shall att large acquaint you with att your coming, which we daily expect. In the meane time resting,

Your humble servant

Michael Livesey. Aylesford, 22 May. 1648,

Appendix B

A contemporary list of radical members at the time of Pride's Purge The following list is from a little-known but important pamphlet published a few days after Pride's Purge, giving a list of those regarded by its author(s) as the real radicals of Parliament. It appears to be reasonably accurate, as it omits the more conservative independents, such as Armine and those known to have been absent at the time, such as St John, Whitelocke, Vane, etc.

A Remonstrance and Declaration of several Counties, Cities and Boroughs
against the Unfaithfulness and late unwarrantable Proceedings of Some of their
Knights, Citizens and Burgesses in Parliament. We the knights etc. neither gave nor intended to give to

Henry Marten Thomas Harrison Wm. Lenthall ( Speaker)

Hairy Smith Francis Rous Lord William Monson

John Hutchinson Gregory Clement Philip Lord Lisle

Humphrey Edwards Augustine Skinner Robert Blake

Humphrey Salway Sir Gilbert Pickering William Cowley

Thomas Purey Sir James Harrington Henry Ireton

Isaac Pennington Edmund Ludlow Sir Edward Bainton

John Lisle William Edwards Philip Smith

Michael Oldsworth Nicholas Love Peregrine Pelham

Thomas Scott Thomas Atkins Thomas Challoner

Edmund Dunch Luke Hodges Brian Stapleton

Nicholas Gold Sir William Allanson William Hay

Valentine Walton Cornelius Holland Oliver Cromwell

Henry Herbert John Carew Denis Bond

Thomas Waite Benjamin Valentine John Fry

Anthony Stapley Francis Allen Sir Michael Livesey

John Jones Lawrence Whitacre Peter Temple

John Lenthall Roger Hill Miles Corbet

John Venn Sir Henry Mildmay George Thomson

Richard Aldworth Thomas Lord Grey Sir Peter Wentworth

John Dure

John Moore John Gurdon

____________________

Books Read on the 17th century

2011-06-04T09:33:00.000-07:00

This is a list of books and Pamphlets read over the last year or so.

The Protestant Revolution W G Naphy
Radicalism and the English Revolution F D Dow
Oliver Cromwell Peter Gaunt
Cromwell Profiles in Power Barry Coward
Life in a 17th Century Coffee Shop David Brandon
Oliver Cromwell David Smith
The Civil Wars in England John Kenyon
The Trumpet of Sedition Ellen Meiksins Wood & Neal Wood
Irreligion in the Puritan Revolution Christopher Hill
The English Civil War and after 1642 -1658 Editor R H Parry
The English Civil War Essential Reading
The Light Shining in Buckingham (Play)
Oliver Cromwell D E Muir
The Problem of Poor in Tudor and Stuart England A L Beirer
The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber
The Digger Movement R Berens(kindle Version)
History of the English People 1642 1660 John Richard Green(Kindle)
The World Turned Upside Down Christopher Hill
Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England- Braddock
The Wig Interpretation of History H Butterfield(Kindle)
Cromwell and His Place in History S R Gardiner(Kindle)
The English Civil War Peter Gaunt
Causes of the English Revolution Lawrence Stone
A Freeborn People David Underdown
Oliver Cromwell C H Firth
Gerrard Winstanley A Common Treasury
In Free Republic Alison Plowden
The Thirty Year War S H Steinberg
Charles 1st C Durston

Pamphlets

Harrington Interpretation of his Age R H Tawny (pamphlet)
County Committee of Kent in the Civil War A M Everitt
A Glorious Liberty A L Morton
The Levellers and the democratic Tradition Tony Benn

In A Free Republic by Alison Plowden

2011-05-29T03:33:00.000-07:00

I recently purchased a copy of Alison Plowden Women All on Fire because I intended to write on female involvement in the English revolution. Like a lot of things related to writing on the subject of the revolution I got distracted by other things. This appears to be an occupational hazard or would be if I made money out this blog but you get my meaning.

While researching in my local library I came across Plowden's book In a free Republic and have now just finished it so I will write some brief thoughts on it. Firstly while looking on the internet to find something on her I found to my dismay that she died in 2007. This fact took me by surprise but I freely admit apart from the year of my degree I have only properly studied this subject for two years, but does it strike me that there seems to be a written rule that more you learn about the civil the less you actually know.

To get onto the subject of her book I enjoyed reading it and Plowden does write in an interesting and thoughtful way. She once described herself as being "in the fortunate position of having been able to turn my hobby into a profession". "There must be thousands of women doing unsatisfying jobs who have a private interest or talent which could be turned to full-time and financial advantage… I do wish more of them would have a go."

The book is well researched and she makes good use of primary sources such as diaries of some leading figures of the revolution. Her books are extremely popular, leading one writer to say on one of her books on the Elizabethan period “Where Alison Plowden excels, is in shrewdly stressing how Elizabeth appreciated the dangers of sexual desire; the general reader will find it wholly informative and very entertaining.” However she does appear to rely heavily on conservatives figures of the revolution and especially there appears to be an over reliance on the diary of John Evelyn.

Ploweden’s background as a writer is interesting she came to write academic history from a background as a writer in television and a very successful one at that. She mainly concentrated on the Tudor and Stuart periods. In her career she wrote 25 books, including The Elizabethan Quartet, a four-volume study of Elizabeth I. Her life appears as fascinating as the subjects she chose to write about. In her obituary in the Times of London it said of her “through her father, Miles Plowden, she was a descendant of the Elizabethan jurist Edmund Plowden, of whom it was said there was “no man more worthy to be remembered as singularly well learned in the Common Laws of England”.

She seems to have been well liked amongst her profession with historian and journalist Paul Johnson saying of her Quartet of books on Elizabethan England “writes with verve, brevity and often wit; a most entertaining book which at the same time is accurate and judicious”.

Plowden wrote a number of books on the civil war, The Stuart Princesses, which looked at the lives of the six princesses of the House of Stuart. She followed up with the book I intend to review at a later date Women All on Fire. This is a brave book in many ways. It cannot have been easy writing such a study in what is a very male dominated subject in fact what period of history isn’t. It is a valuable study of the women who played an important political and social on both sides of the Civil War.

While she had every right to write a book which largely stems from a conservative and bordering of royalist historiography In a Free Republic – Life in Cromwell’s England, does tend to be heavily critical of Cromwell's Republic. While it has been portrayed as looking at the reality of life in Cromwell’s England it tends to be a little one sided. In fact it’s not so much what she writes it is what she chooses to leave out. But having said that she is worth reading.

Christopher Thompson on: Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (Routledge Keegan Paul. 1972)

2011-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

(This is a reply to my original post on Lawrence Stone’s The Cause of the English Revolution. I am not sure whether I am going to reply to it. Needless to say I do not agree with some his remarks although some clarification might be in order. I would welcome any other comments from my readers. Please do not be shy. All posts within reason will be published)

The publication of this work in 1972 offered sixth-form pupils and first-year undergraduates a useful overview of the origins and causes of the English Revolution from the other side of the Atlantic. Since his move to Princeton in 1963, Stone had become increasingly interested in the work of anthropologists and political scientists just as he had been in the 1940s in that of economic historians and in the light, that such work might throw on long-standing historical problems. Whatever subscription he had once paid to the influence of Marx and Tawney had long since gone by the time in the late-1950s and early-1960s that he composed The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Stone was certainly never a Marxist in the sense that Christopher Hill was. His early teaching at Princeton was, in any case, devoted, as the festschrift in his honour shows, to a survey course on the evolution of English society between c.1500 and c.1700. Stone certainly liked being at the centre of academic attention and of controversy, hence his production of works like this although it was also true to say that he had, by the early-1970s, become cut off from the main currents of academic research in England.

The origins of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dislike of Stone did not lie in the latter storming out of a revision class at Christ Church College in Oxford. In fact, the quarrel over the gentry arose from Hugh Trevor-Roper lending his transcripts on aristocratic indebtedness from the Recognizances for Debt then held in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Stone used this material without Trevor-Roper’s permission and with the most misleading of indications as to how he had acquired it in his 1948 article in The Economic History Review. Furthermore, because he had not understood the technicalities of this source, Stone had assigned to the late-Tudor peers levels of debt twice their real size. Trevor-Roper was perfectly entitled to criticise Stone’s work and, indeed, that of Tawney whose stature as an historian was considerably higher in 1950 than that of Stone but whose analytical errors were, as J.P.Cooper shortly thereafter pointed out, even more serious

The controversy probably stimulated more interesting research into English history in the seventeenth-century than any before or possibly since. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a friend of Jack Hexter until the publication of Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, in Encounter in May, 1958. For several years thereafter, their friendship was in abeyance. Politically, they were very different indeed, as anyone who knew them both would understand. There is no significance in the funding of that magazine for their historiographical positions.

The problem with Stone’s 1972 work was not just its use of sociological jargon like ‘multiple dysfunction’, ‘preconditions’, ‘precipitants’ and ‘triggers’ but also its antiquated analytical framework, its assumption that very long-term factors were at work, that the loss of landed possessions by the Crown and Church and, as he erroneously believed, the peerage made Revolution inevitable as the apparatus of Stuart rule failed to cope with the rise of the gentry, the spread of Puritanism, and the decline in the prestige of the Crown and Court and the Laudian church. Stone held that the political and religious history of the pre-Civil War period had already been written by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth and fundamentally needed no emendation. He was profoundly wrong as Nicholas Tyacke and others were already demonstrating.

Stone’s work on the origins and causes of the English Revolution was dated by the time it appeared in 1972. It belonged essentially to the 1950s and early-1960s. No amount of sociological dressing could make it fashionable again. By then, Trevor-Roper had written and published his ground-breaking essay on the Union of the Crowns. It was to the hypotheses about the significance of ‘multiple kingdoms’ that the future in 1972 belonged.

Jacques Callot, "The Miseries and Misfortunes of War" (1633)

2011-05-28T08:52:00.000-07:00