Conrad Russell and the "Mirage" of the English Revolution

The coalition government recently published its changes to the National Curriculum. Aside from the fact that the new changes are way too narrow, parochial and would return the educational system to the Victorian era, they have provoked an ideological battle amongst writers, historians and other academics.

Amongst historians, the battle lines are being drawn between left and right-leaning historians. It is perhaps with great irony that Tory government supporters have labelled their opponents Marxists. A recent headline in the Daily Mail was entitled "I refuse to surrender to the Marxist teachers hell-bent on destroying our schools: Education Secretary berates 'the new enemies of promise' for opposing his plan". [1] 

The reason I say ironic is that for the last twenty years or so there has been a concerted attempt to downplay and in some cases deny that Marxists or Marxism has any role to play in the understanding of history. Certainly, in the area of English civil war historiography, the attack on Marxism has been over the years heated, persistent and in some cases aggressive. The purpose of this essay is not to trawl through the entire history of these attacks except one of them caught my attention, Conrad Russell's essay The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage".[2]

The essay which was published in history today in 1990 was more populist in style than academic. Russell's article was perhaps the most open polemical attack on historical materialism and was published in what has become a house organ for revisionist historians. His article was also one of many types of articles in the field of history and politics that sought to cast doubt on historical materialism and Marxism in general as a method of historical analysis.

One such article was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. In that article Fukuyama wrote: "All countries un­dergoing economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a central­ized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organiza­tion like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens. Such societies have become increas­ingly linked with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolu­tion in the direction of capitalism."

As David Walsh noted "It is painful to read the gloating stupidities that were churned out by Western academics in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union. Seemingly every journal devoted to politics, current affairs or culture felt obliged to publish a special issue devoted to the supposed rout of socialism. The word "End" or "Death" or "Fall" or a synonym had to be included somewhere in the title."[3]

Fukuyama's attack coincided with a systematic attack from revisionist historians on Marxist historiography in the field of history. This gained added momentum in the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. His article echoed a school of thought both inside and outside academia which saw the end of the U.S.S.R as signifying the end of Marxism. Several academics wrongly saw the collapse of Stalinism as the collapse of Marxism.

According to Conrad Russell, the English bourgeois revolution was a mirage something illusory and unattainable or an incorrect conception. Russell's conclusion was there was no revolution in the 1640s, and for that matter, he does not fancy there being one in 1688 either. It should be borne in mind that before Russell wrote his article, it was broadly accepted that some kind of revolution had happened. Whether it was a puritan revolution or a bourgeois revolution.

Russell's framework for answering the question was there a revolution? Is a little ropey to say the least? Relying on Professor Alfred Cobban "Four laws!" was hardly the most objective or for that matter, scientific yardstick. Cobban like Russell was opposed to Marxism and held similar views to Russell, albeit in a different area of study, Cobban wrote extensively on the French revolution. Cobban did not believe it was a social revolution.

According to Wikipedia "Cobban's views and works in the macrocosm were to be the inspiration and birthplace of the historical school now known as Revisionism. Along with George V. Taylor, Cobban vehemently attacked the traditional Marxist conception of the past within Marx's dialectic, particularly in his work The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. His resultant argument was that the revolution could not be seen as a social revolution exacerbated by economic changes (specifically the development of capitalism and by corollary, class conflict between the bourgeoisie and the nobility). Rather, argued Cobban, the French Revolution should be seen as a political revolution with social consequences".[4]

Whether Cobban's work, the birthplace of a new form of Revisionism is open to question. In some sense all historians are revisionists, but this particular group of historians was united by their hostility to both Whig and Marxist historiography. It is also strange that Russell, who was a very distinguished historian, failed in his essay to produce any real detailed examination of Marx's actual writings on the English bourgeois revolution. Although not prodigious however he did write extensively on the rise of the bourgeoisie.

In his book, the Communist Manifesto. He notes "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind". Marx was familiar with people who denied revolutions had taken place.

Russell had an annoying habit in this essay of lumping Whig history together with Marxist. So much so that Russell believed that the Whig version of the origins of the English Civil War was a dialectical one. It is not in the realm of this essay to go into any detail suffice to say that Russell did not know what he was talking about. I am not sure how much Marxist literature he read, but it is not enough for such an eminent historian to make such a flippant remark without really backing his argument up.

Russell who would have been fully conversant with the Whig interpretation of history and he would have also been aware that Sir Herbert Butterfield's slim volume of that name was, in fact, a polemic, directed at economic determinism. In examining Russell's theories, it should be noted that he was not the first to revise Marxist historiography. When this revision started in Britain is open to much debate. I guess that it started with G.R Elton's High Road to Civil War essay.

Elton's essay is a strange one. Having read it a few times, one is struck by the paucity of his argument, which is odd because of the tremendous influence it had on large numbers of revisionist historians. Elton's essay was an expression of his conception of how to practice history. In the essay, he opposes the conception that every historical event can be rationally explained.

In 'The Practice of History', which was written in response to E H Carr's 1961 book What is History? Elton commented "All assessment of evidence must be the work of the intellect, of the reasoning faculty. The historian cannot but work on the assumption that whatever happened is capable of rational explanation and that evidence is the product of an act discoverable by reason. And yet we all know that this is not quite true; that we act, react and reflect on motives which have little to do with reason and under influences--such as ill-health, a quarrel with people not involved in the transaction, whim and lack of thought--that can but rarely appear in the evidence".[5]

Elton's "empirical or thesis-free" method was attractive to Russell, and he adopted some if not all, Elton's love of empirical methodology. For me, Russell is a pivotal link between earlier revisionists such as Elton and their more modern-day counterparts. Russell main argument is that Marxist historiography stood or fell on the theory that the English Civil War was provoked by the rise of the gentry/middle class. Which predicted the rise of the bourgeoisie.[6]

Russell believed "the notion of the rising middle classes is a fallacy" and "together with increasing doubt about the rising middle classes, 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 dialectical view, and it has come in for heavy criticism in the past fifteen years" [7].

Some things need to be said about the above quote. Firstly, to be honest, you would be hard-pressed to find in Russell's writing when the bourgeoisie did rise.  Russell, in his essay never really comes close to answering why before he wrote his essay that it was generally accepted that a revolution of some kind did take place in the 1640s. This was accepted by serious historians for the better part of three centuries

Even during the 17th century some of the more perceptive writers saw that a revolution of some kind had taken place. Vernon F Snow wrote an important essay outlining the use of the word revolution during the 17th century.   Snow says  "One of the first writers-if, not the first to apply the concept specifically to the English political upheaval was Matthew Wren, the son of Dr Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely. Sometime after the trial and execution of Charles I, this royalist wrote a treatise entitled Of the Origin and Progress of the Revolution in England. 'The world is full', he wrote, 'of both books and pamphlets, who have nothing to do but to teach their readers these events; and the design of writing this was only summarily to treat of the most general causes of those strange revolutions we have seen." [8]

Russell is strangely silent on this varied historical usage of the word revolution. His essay almost takes the form of a religious exorcism. According to Russell "historians are showing increasing doubt about the dialectical model. Who are these historians? What are they saying and more importantly, what is their political?. When Russell ties the theory of a rising Middle Class or bourgeoisie to the fate of the Marxist historians he is doing a disservice to his profession. Strangely, Russell does not elaborate on the "Storm over the Gentry" debate. Because if he did, he would have had to tackle what leading Marxist historians such as Hill did say on the matter?

Russell mentions nothing in his article about Hill being very wary of the debate over the rise or decline of the gentry. The debates over the gentry which took place in the early 1950s were for Marxists far more complex than just placing their entire historical faith on the rise of the middle class.  As Norah Carlin notes in her excellent essay "The gentry were, in origin, simply the mass of the feudal landowning class in England, where only the upper crust of this class had distinctive 'noble' titles. Both Marx and Engels suggested that the development of commodity production in agriculture in sixteenth-century England and the two-way social mobility between the gentry and the bourgeoisie made the gentry natural allies of the bourgeoisie in the revolution. Tawney's thesis went much further than this. According to Tawney, the gentry were a revolutionary social class in themselves: a distinct social class, fundamentally opposed to the old 'aristocratic' ruling class; the revolution was made by and for them.

But it is in fact very hard to separate 'gentry' from 'aristocracy' as distinct social classes. Their sources of wealth were the same – land, with an admixture of trade and office-holding. 'Traditional' and 'commercial' attitudes to wealth (which Tawney proposes as an essential difference between the two) are found equally on both sides of the barrier of noble title. In terms of power, noble and gentle landowners shared the ruling positions in provincial society, both had access to positions at court, and they even (as Lords and Commons, both in opposition to Charles I in 1640) shared Parliament. Mobility between the two groups was very common, for a gentleman could easily be made a lord (under James I, he could even directly buy the title), while a lord's younger sons were automatically mere gentlemen. The gentry were, it seems, born and bred members of the existing ruling class under the Stuart monarchy.

The 'rise of the gentry' thus becomes a gaping trap for Marxists into which perhaps only Perry Anderson of New Left Review has jumped with both feet. For Anderson, the English Civil War was 'a "bourgeois revolution" only by proxy', because it was made by a section of the ruling class. [6] But if a bourgeois revolution can be made by proxy from above, can a proletarian revolution? If a section of the ruling class could break the last bonds of feudalism on behalf of the bourgeoisie, could not a section of the bourgeoisie set up socialism on behalf of the working class?. The way out of this situation lies in a re-examination of the actual role of the gentry in the English Civil War – the very task at which the New Historians have been beavering away in the belief that they were destroying Marxism.[9]

Russell's original point was that Marxism stood or fell based on a rising gentry. The "Storm over the gentry debate is probably one of the most important in civil war historiography. The original debate was centred on R H Tawney's thesis of a rising gentry later supported by Lawrence Stone who in 1948, who was close to the historical positions of R.H. Tawney published in the Economic History Review entitled "The Anatomy of the Elizabethan Aristocracy". Tawney and Stone's arguments were countered by historians Hugh Trevor Roper and later by J H Hexter.

It would be a mistake to describe both Tawney or Stone as Marxists, and their positions regarding the gentry were not Marxist positions. This is not to say that their work is not without great merit and should be studied at great length. Although Stone himself did describe himself in the early part of his career as being a young Marxist, his mistakes were the product of incomplete assimilation of the Marxist method of Historical Materialism. Stone had a major problem in that he never really understood the difference between genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic determinism. Stone himself soon moved away from any link with Marxist historiography, and in his own words he became in 1987, "an old fashioned Whig".

Hill's positions on the debate are instructive. He was critical of both sides and that the debate was more to do with the developing Cold War anti-communism than merely a debate over civil war historiography. Hill also called for further research into the economic positions of people on both sides who took part in the war/revolution. Hill was also a good enough Marxist historian to understand that the real target of the debate was not just Tawney or Stone or himself for that matter but of Marxism itself. 

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. 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?

To buttress his claim that the middle class did not rise at this time or that there was a revolution, Russell leans on the ultra-conservative historian J H Hexter. Hexter's article the Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England published in 1961. Russell's use of Hexter is natural to bolster his argument but to use a rebuttal piece by K.G. Davies called The Mess of the Middle Class in the same paragraph is a little weird.

I am all for historical balance, but this seems a little strange. I could be wrong but Russell's choice of historians to defend his charge gives the appearance that Russell did not give much thought to them. They almost seem to be thrown in as an afterthought. He does not detail much about their work, and most annoyingly no footnotes are used, making research difficult.

Hexter's most important essay entitled "The Storm over the Gentry"  which Russell strangely ignores was published in a mainstream magazine after it was turned down by several leading American historical journals. Hexter's main criticism was that left-wing historians relied too heavily on a social determinist argument.

Hexter who has been described as a Neo Whig and was as William H Dray said "unabashedly, and often polemically Whiggish. For Hexter, the English Civil War was to be seen as the defence of traditional English liberties against an aggressive Crown. This position contrasted in the 1970s with the revisionist views of Conrad Russell and others who disputed both the uniqueness of the English Civil War and its connection with ideas of liberty. However, since the revisionists were also explicitly anti-Marxist, their stance owed a great deal to Hexter's critiques. Russell, in particular, echoed Hexter's emphasis on continuity in English political values, Hexter's distinction between the Civil War and the subsequent revolution, and Hexter's belief that contingencies better explained the coming of the war, while rejecting Hexter's view that Parliament was acting out of a clear-cut sense of constitutional obligation and embracing instead the view that religious conflicts and practical problems in the composite monarchy were more decisive".[10]

In Dray's essay, he attempts to try to define what is to be a Whig historian. For instance, Hexter's fascination with constitutional matters certainly would put him in the Whig camp. Russell went on "Another flaw in the model is that, in its pure and original form, it does not recognize the power of ideas as an independent variable. Ideas do not simply reflect the economic circumstances of their thinkers. Where they do correlate with the economic circumstances of their thinkers, they do so in a way so various that a much more flexible instrument than that of class is needed to explain it. It might be possible to construct an explanation of why Victorian poll books show weavers voting Liberal, and butchers voting Conservative, but if so, it is an explanation which would have more to do with industrial psychology than with class conflict. In the English Civil War, people's allegiance normally correlates with their religion, but their religion does not correlate with their social background. Even in areas which were strongly of one persuasion, such as Northampton, we find people like the man who was recommended for a job on the ground that he was 'of Northampton, but I thank God not of that persuasion'. There is no way the material can be explained unless by admitting the autonomy of the mind". [11]

Russell's divorce of ideas from their economic or material base is common to most of the later revisionist historians. Hill disagreed with Russell's downplaying of the link between ideas and their material basis. In his book The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, he sought to use the method of Marxism to understand the complex and dialectical relationship between ideas and their origins.

In the introduction, he states "Marx himself did not fall into the error of thinking that men's idea was 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 that anybody of thought which plays a major in History – Luther's, Rousseau's, Marx's own-takes on because it meets the needs of a significant group in the society in which it comes into prominence".[12]

Another reason Russell believed that the revolution was a mirage is his point that the gentry or bourgeois fought on both sides so, therefore, how could you talk of a bourgeois revolution. He made the correct point that the social origins of the civil war bourgeoisie were not clear cut and that capitalists were on both sides. For him, the Civil War was nothing out of the ordinary and was largely a series of breakdowns or mistakes from leading players such as Charles Ist.

There have been varying degrees of success of 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 outlined the pitfalls encountered by Marxists historians. Ashton is correct in his analysis of the tensions between the king and growing section of the bourgeoisie over several issues that went back over a few decades at least.

Ashton does not subscribe to the revisionist argument 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 it harder for a clear cut analysis but does not rule out the possibility of doing one.

For Ashton, the makeup of the 17th century was complex and varied. In his article On Charles and the City of London contained in Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England; he believes 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 generalizations, it does not as Russell believes make a Marxist analysis null and void.

Having read enough of Hill, I am clear that he accepted that there were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War and small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side, i.e. different sections of the bourgeoisie and Aristocracy. From his knowledge of early Soviet historians and his study of the writings of Marx and Engels, he never assumed that this was a chemically pure revolution. In fact, in his major writings, he makes the point that large numbers of people fought and took sides outside of purely economic reasons.

According to Ann Talbot Hill was "sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into the 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".[13]

Russell rejected this analysis and reiterated that "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 dialectical view, and it has come in for heavy criticism in the past fifteen years".

Marx did indeed owe a debt to Hegel. Marxism was a development on from Hegel's philosophy. Russell is correct that one of the basic components of Marxism is the conception of the unity of opposites. Marx took what was the best or materialist from Hegel and discarded his idealist component.

Ilya Stavinsky explains this well "any development, in a wide sense of this word, consists of the birth of the event, its development, in the narrow sense of this word, and its death. So with time, the birth of the event transforms into its opposition, the death of the event. Consequently, birth and death are opposite meanings, and for this reason, they constitute a dialectical contradiction.

The essence of the dialectical logic consists in the fact that it describes the development of this contradiction, i.e. it shows the transition of the event from one stage, the birth, to its opposite stage, death. For this purpose, dialectical logic possesses by its system of category and by its abstract laws. By using them, dialectical logic can grasp in detail the process of any development independent of its character, whether it is a social or natural event. Such categories are form, content, and essence, quality, quantity, elementary form, particular form, universal form, and opposites, real and formal contradiction and so on. Examples of laws: the transformation of content into forms, the transformation of quantity into quality, unity of opposites and so on".[14]

Marx tied the study of history with the study of society itself.  If Russell had probed a little further in his research, he would have found that the main writers and philosophers during the 17th century attempted albeit gingerly to understand their revolution along those similar lines. On this matter, Russell could have done no worse than consulted several articles written by a number of the Soviet historians who wrote on this matter. It would have perhaps given his arguments more objectivity.

One such writer Evgeny Pashukanis said "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. "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 [15]letter to Weydemeyer, indicates that the theory of the class struggle was known before him".[15]

The war was a qualitative turning point. One cannot underestimate the importance of an investigation into the growing capitalistic nature of agriculture which is key to understand who fought and why they did. If it is correct to say that we are dealing with a class of landowners who held sway before and after 1642 what was the material or economic basis of this power and how did it reflect in the political superstructure.

Another aspect of Marxist analysis that was attacked by Russell and a whole host of subsequent revisionist historians has been the development of the Base and superstructure argument. As Marx pointed out  "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. 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.

"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".[16]

But no all historians rejected the base and superstructure argument. 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."

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.

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 smallholders and the labouring poor'. Russell would often make the point that he not conversant with the term's feudalism and capitalism.

Russell's essay is heavy on what was negative about Marxist historiography but is extremely poor when it comes to an alternative thesis. This negativity was picked up upon Mary Fullbrook who said "The negative emphasis of much of revisionist work so far has quite understandably provoked the sort of reaction quoted by John Morrill in the preface to the new edition of his book, The Revolt of the Provinces: 'One colleague and friend wryly accused me of "explaining why no civil war broke out in England in 1642"... '. But revisionists feel no great compulsion to develop a comprehensive explanation since they consider that the object of explanation has itself been misinterpreted: the English Revolution was not a world-historically important event requiring a commensurate scale of explanation, but rather represents, at least in origins, a somewhat bloody tiff between a specific monarch and certain factions among his subjects."[17]

To conclude, where does this debate over an essay written over twenty years ago leave us? Whether Russell knew how much damage his and other attacks on the Marxist historiography of the civil war would do is a moot point. I believe he was acting very consciously when writing his essay and was genuinely hostile to Marxism. While better writers than me have been able to refute the main thrust of his arguments, this debate does not take place in a vacuum and some consequences flow from his ideas.

There has been a definite shift away from studies that have been commonly associated with Marxism or "history from below" to a more right-wing "History from above" over the last 20 years.

As confirmed by this article in the New York Times "In History Departments, It is Up With Capitalism. It goes on A spectre is haunting university history departments: the spectre of capitalism. After decades of "history from below," focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy".[18]

What damage this shift away from Marxist historiography has done would need a PhD thesis. One thing is clear that the paucity of research into the economic changes taking place in the 17th century will badly limit our knowledge of the English revolution. I am not saying that Russell is solely responsible for the shift in academic circles both here and America. But his essay did play a small part in creating this hostility to Marxism.

---

[1] I refuse to surrender to the Marxist teachers hell-bent on destroying our schools: Education Secretary berates 'the new enemies of promise' for opposing his plan-By Michael Gove  23 March

[2] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/bourgeois-revolution-mirage

[3] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/17/dwle-s17.html

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Cobban

[5] Defender of the Faith: Geoffrey Elton and the Philosophy of History- Geoffrey Roberts http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/elton.htm

[6] For more detail on this debate see Causes of the English Revolution. Lawrence Stone

[7] The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage? Conrad Russell, History Today Volume: 40 Issue: 9 1990. http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage

[8] The Concept of Revolution in 17th Century England The Historical Journal V2 1962

[9] Norah Carlin-Marxism and the English Civil War-(Autumn 1980) https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/carlin/1980/xx/civilwar.html

[10] ] J H Hexter Neo Whiggism and Early Stuart Historiography History and Theory Vol26 No 2 May 1987 pp133-149 by William H Dray

[11] The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage? Conrad Russell, History Today Volume: 40 Issue: 9 1990. http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage

[12] Intellectual origins of the English Revolution Panther-C Hill

[13] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-By Ann Talbot  25 March 2003 https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[14] Formal and Dialectical Logic as Unity of Opposites or Development of Classical Philosophy. By Ilya Stavinsky

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

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

[17] The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt Mary Fulbrook Social History

[18] In History Departments, It's Up With Capitalism- http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?_r=0

Comment on ‘Conrad Russell and “The Mirage of the English Revolution” ’

By C Thompson

Keith Livesey is a keen commentator on the events of the 1640s and 1650s and a  vigorous defender of Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution. He has recently placed on-line his assessment of an article by Conrad Russell entitled “The Mirage of the English Revolution” published by the popular historical magazine, History Today, in 1990. Russell, who was then Professor of British History at King’s College in the University of London, had been concerned to look back at the assumption prevalent amongst (some) historians in the 1950s that the English Civil War was a “bourgeois revolution”.

He maintained that this view had not stood the test of time, partly because there was no correlation between the class or status of partisans on the two sides and partly because there was little or no sign of the Long Parliament having any bourgeois base of substance. Social changes were not responsible for the collapse of the political process at the centre in 1640 or 1642 or later.

The force of ideas as an independent variable was not recognised in Marxist or quasi-Marxist historiography nor was the fact that religious allegiances were not coterminous with social backgrounds. English government, in any case, depended on consent in the localities. There was certainly no sign of a bourgeois revolution in 1688-1689 either. Marx and his works, he concluded, constituted a colossal wrong-turning.

Russell’s essay was, in many ways, a reflection on the arguments current when he had been an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s. The quarrels over the fortunes of the gentry had subsided by the end of that decade and had been succeeded by a ferment of research into the significance of county and local history and into the importance of ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ conflicts as potential explanatory mechanisms for the English Civil War.

The researches of Valerie Pearl into the City of London’s politics up to 1643 and those of J.T.Cliffe and Gordon Blackwood on the allegiance and fortunes of the Yorkshire and Lancashire gentry, let alone those of Gerald Aylmer on Charles I’s bureaucracy, had demonstrated how difficult it was to sustain the claims of Tawney, Hill and Stone about the nature of the English Revolution. Long before Russell proclaimed his dissent in the mid-1970s from the economic and social determinism informing Marxist and sub-Marxist explanations, those explanations had been recognised as more than inadequate.

This is why it is so strange to read Keith Livesey’s claim in April, 2013 that the attack on Marxism in English Civil War historiography has been heated and aggressive. This is not the case. This has not been the case since the early-1970s. No academic historian I can think of had had to acknowledge the importance of Marxist historiography and to take on board some of its analysis up to 1990.

Whatever Christopher Hill may have thought, the work of Soviet historians on the English Revolution – which Hill tried to promote – was too far divorced from the sources and too heavily shaped by Leninist preconceptions to be worth attention. Lawrence Stone, moreover, was never a Marxist. Keith Livesey’s comments are thus anachronistic. Russell had been writing about the state of historiography in the 1950s: by the time his article appeared in 1990, Marxism had receded dramatically as an intellectual influence. By then, Russell’s own ‘revisionism’ had reached its peak in his Ford lectures and his work on the fall of the British monarchies. He, too, was about to go out of historiographical fashion.

Jared van Duinen on ‘An Engine Which the World Sees Nothing of’: Revealing Dissent under Charles I’s ‘Personal Rule’

By Christopher Thompson

Jared van Duinen’s essay, which first appeared in the Australian journal, Parergon, in 2011, addresses two main themes. The first of these is an historiographical one covering the analysis of the ‘Personal Rule’ of King Charles I between 1629 and 1640 by historianslargely since the appearance of ‘revisionisim’ in the 1970s. The second involves a call to current and future historians to focus their research on the personal networks of Puritan association that linked together the King’s opponents in the period before the summoning of the Short and Long Parliaments. It is thus a review of relatively recent work and a programme for new work. It is always helpful for a field of historical research to be reassessed, especially by a young scholar reflecting on his own recent experiences.

This exercise begins with some observations on the concentration of much historical work in the twentieth century on the politics of the centre in England with its focus on Parliament in particular. Whigs and Marxists as well as the ‘revisionists’ of the 1970s and 1980s inevitably sought to explain the dissent faced by James VI and I and by Charles I in their Parliaments from 1604 until 1629 but were less interested in the hidden facets of dissent in the 1630s when no Parliaments were held. Van Duinen was critical of Kevin Sharpe’s book, The Personal Rule of Charles I, published in 1992 for this reason. It emphasized the intrinsically deferential, hierarchical and unrevolutionary nature of politics and society in the 1630s when England experience a period of relative calm and stability.

Sharpe’s view was reinforced by the studies of royal patronage of the arts, of masques, etc., in the same decade, which threw welcome new light on Court politics and the role of Henrietta Maria as Queen. Similarly, the debates over the nature of the Caroline Church and the role of Laudianism served to reinforce the central perspective on the period of ‘Personal Rule’. He was not critical of this work in itself but he  thought that it needed to be balanced by a new concentration on local and regional spheres of activity to discover how dissident activity was decentralized and diffused when there was no forum in Parliament to give it focus.

A decentralized research strategy would, in his view, help to show how national and local concerns about Caroline rule intersected: the cultural, familial and intellectual milieus of contemporaries as well as the impact on their political, religious and social links could thus be explored. Some of this work had already been done. Kenneth Fincham had shown how sophisticated a grasp the Kentish gentry had on national issues while figures like Ann Hughes, Jason Peacey and Tom Webster had been able to investigate important networks of clerical and lay association. Case studies of the careers and lives of Samuel Rogers and Robert Woodford were equally rewarding.

 The Feoffees of Impropriations and the two colonizing ventures, the Masachusetts Bay Company and the Providence Island Company,  demonstrated how such networks of association drew opponents of the King together. Indeed, the Providence Island Company offered future leaders of the Long Parliament valuable grounding in business administration and experience of committee work. Laudianism, moreover, with its pursuit, sometimes persecution, of religious opponents helped to construct a “more pronounced or significant puritan opposition than had hitherto existed”, hence the need for a new research strategy.

This is, I hope, a fair account of Jared van Duinen’s argument. It is not, however, one that can be enthusiastically endorsed partly because the strategy for which he calls has been one I have pursued ever since I was a postgraduate decades ago. The survival of much of the estate archives of the Rich family, Earls of Warwick, from 1617, of comparable material from the estate of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Say and Sele, of the 4th Earl of Bedford’s commonplace books and of his letters, and of the colonial manuscripts covering the Massachusetts Bay, Providence Island and Saybrook companies have permitted the extensive reconstruction of the attitudes and ideas of those Jared van Duinen’s own thesis described as the ‘Junto’ from the mid-1620s into the 1640s.

The colonial material is especially helpful in  revealing the views of these men on forms of government in Church and State alike. How these connections were constituted and exercised their covert influence in the 1630s is much better understood than he appreciated. Similarly, the patronage of the Earls of Bedford and Essex and Warwick, of Viscount Say and Sele and Lord Brooke and of their allies, men like Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Sir Thomas Barrington and Richard Knightley has been comprehensively explored in local government and in the Church. The new strategy for which Dr van Duinen has called was already out of date when it was issued.

S.R.Gardiner on the ‘Peace Party’ in 1642-1643

A New blog article by Christopher Thompson

S.R.Gardiner’s History of the Great Civil War is one of the great achievements of late-nineteenth century historiography. It provided more than just a narrative account of the events of the 1640s in the British Isles but also a graphic illustration of what the late Christopher Hill called the “assumptions … of a liberal-minded middle-class Victorian Englishman.”

Much of the framework provided by these assumptions lasted well beyond the rise of Marxist influence in the period after 1930 and into the latter part of the twentieth century. Gardiner was certainly responsible for the concept that, on the Long Parliament’s side in the early stages of the English Civil War, it was possible to identify ‘peace’ and ‘war’ parties amongst partisans in the two Houses of Parliament and in the City of London. This idea was subsequently developed by J.H.Hexter in his work, The Reign of King Pym, published in 1941 although he elaborated on Gardiner’s scheme by postulating the existence of a ‘middle group’ led by Pym in the House of Commons operating between the ‘peace’ and ‘war’ parties.

Gardiner traced the origins of the ‘peace party’ to the period after the first, indecisive battle of the Civil War at Edgehill in October, 1642 and the subsequent advance of the King’s forces towards London. He thought that in the City of London and in Parliament, especially in the House of Lords, such a party was quickly formed.

 Its most respectable member in the upper chamber was “the kindly Earl of Northumberland, always anxious for a quiet life and always distrustful of enthusiasts.” He was supported by the former courtier, Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, and by the 4th Earl of Pembroke, who steered a course between appeasing the King when he seemed strongest and opposing him when Parliament seemed most likely to be victorious.

When the House of Lords proposed opening negotiations for peace with King Charles at the end of October, a peace party formed in the House of Commons and in the City of London numbering in its ranks lawyers like Maynard and Whitelocke and figures like D’Ewes and Edmund Waller. Gardiner considered that they “all shared in the common weakness of desiring compromise, without rising to the height from which an honourable compromise alone was possible.

They longed for peace, but there was no intellectual basis of peace in their minds.” As subsequent discussions in the House of Commons in November on whether to negotiate over proposals for peace showed, the peace party could by then count on the support of Denzil Holles, one of the five Members Charles had attempted to arrest in January, 1642. Gardiner thought that, between Holles and Pym, the difference was one of perception rather than principle. “Both [the peace and war] parties preferred peace to war, but neither party was ready to make those concessions which alone could make peace possible. … Now members who were agreed on ecclesiastical subjects differed politically.

 Pym would have no peace which did not bring with it Charles’s complete submission to the directing power of Parliament and to a Puritan church. Holles and his friends would have made concessions to Charles’s claim to rule the State, but they expected him to abandon his own ideal of church government.

As there was not the slightest chance that he would ever do anything of the kind, they did but beat the air.” Holles, in particular, “was ready to ask the King to accept, in church matters, the conclusions to which Parliament should come, upon the advice of the assembly of divines, and to allow the punishment of such persons as had been impeached before the outbreak of the troubles.” Gardiner concluded that, if “these were the demands of the Peace-party, they had no more reasonable hope of winning Charles’s assent than the proposals of their opponents.”

It was in the House of Lords where the peace party was predominant that detailed proposals were drawn up and sent down to the House of Commons on 20th December, 1642.

Gardiner noted that the King was, under this scheme, to commit himself to passing such bills – presumably on church matters – as Parliament should approve after consultation with the assembly of divines; to allow Lord Digby and all others impeached before 1st January, 1642 to stand their trials in Parliament; to exclude the Earls of Bristol and Hertford and four others from office and the royal Court; to secure and vindicate the privileges of Parliament; to assent to Bills for the payment of the Parliament’s debts; to agree that all acts of the Privy Council should be signed by those who advised them and to a new Militia Bill as well as reinstating the Earl of Northumberland as Lord High Admiral. “They asked for ministerial responsibility and for a Puritan settlement of the Church – for all those concessions, in short, to which both Charles and his partisans were most bitterly hostile.”

The peace party “had the good wishes of the vast majority of the nation, yet, for all that, it was from the first predestined to failure. There was not the smallest reason to suppose either that the terms which the Houses now offered would ever be accepted by the King, or that they would themselves be ready to accept any terms which the King was likely to propose.” Pym and the war party knew that: they appreciated that Charles could not be trusted and that a Puritan England could only be created by the sword. As the negotiations at Oxford in the early months of 1643 proved, they were right.

There are a number of points that arise from Gardiner’s claims. First of all, there is the matter of the relationship between supporters of the ‘peace party’ in the House of Lords and those who shared their views in the House of Commons (as well as in the City of London).  How they may have co-operated is left entirely unexplored. Some co-ordination is implied by Gardiner himself.  Secondly, there is the issue of the extent to which Holles and his allies were prepared to make concessions to the King on the degree to which he might rule in the State if not in the church. The propositions presented to Charles in Oxford on 1st February, 1643 envisaged that there should be an Act of Parliament to settle the militia on land and sea as well as command of the country’s forts and ports “in such a manner as shall be agreed on by both Houses.”

Senior judicial positions were to be held by men nominated in the propositions as long as they behaved well. Future foreign policy was to be predicated upon an alliance with the United Provinces and other Protestant princes. Popish recusants were to be repressed by law while those who had had a hand in promoting the Irish rebellion of October, 1641 were to be excepted from any general pardon. Those amongst supporters of the Long Parliament who had lost their offices were to be compensated and restored to their posts. Certain named individuals who had counselled or supported the King in this burgeoning conflict were to be either barred from office or the Court or punished. All this was in addition to the abolition of Episcopal government in the Church of England and its remodelling as Parliament after advice from an assembly of divines should determine.

There was precious little sign of Holles or the peace party allowing latitude to the King in the government of the State as Gardiner had claimed: on the contrary, his supporters in the State and in the Church were to be proscribed and punished while the levers of power and ministerial responsibility were to be exercised by men responsible to Parliament. Gardiner was certainly right in thinking that such proposals were unacceptable at that time to Charles and his supporters but how could Gardiner be sure that the peace party had the support of the vast majority of the nation or, indeed, that it was predestined to failure. He could not have done so unless he was reading the events of 1642-1643 backwards and looking to the emergence of a constitutional monarchy as preordained.

There is another, perhaps more fundamental issue to be addressed in future analyses. Is the ‘peace party’/’war party’ framework for Parliamentary politics or its later derivative, the ‘peace party’/’middle group’/’war party’ structure plausible any longer? If not, what can justifiably be put in its place? These are questions John Adamson and David Scott may in all likelihood answer in the near future.

Review of The King's Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest Manhunt in British History Michael Walsh, Don Jordan -ISBN-13: 978-0349123769

 "We are not traitors or murderers or fanatics, but true Christians and good commonwealths men, fixed and constant in that noble principle of preferring the universality before particularity.

 John Cooke. Regicide.

"We shall therein… by all means possible endeavour to pursue and bring to their due punishment those bloody traitors who were either actors or contrivers of that unparalleled and inhuman murder." 

Charles ll

This is a very well written and soundly researched book. Jordan and Walsh's book has been described as "a work of popular history". It would also suit the more academically minded reader.

The fact that both authors are not historians in the formal sense is all the more remarkable because this is a very serious attempt at a complex subject and should be read by any student, academic or member of the public interested in the story of the regicides.

The book works on many levels. On a lower level, this is a personal story of a son's revenge for the killing of his father. One minor criticism of the book is that the authors dwell a little too long on this. On a much higher level, the vengeance expressed in the manhunt and ultimate murder of over twenty regicides was the product of a deep-seated counter-revolution against the very people who took part in the English revolution especially its most far-sighted and courageous republican representatives.

The first few chapters of the book give an adequate introduction to the events that led up to one of the greatest show trials in English and for that matter World history. The book could have done with a bit more research into the historiography of the events of the civil war and the trial itself. 

I share Geoffrey Robertson belief that "historians rarely have a good word to say about the trial: 'Oh dear, oh dear – shocking, shocking' was all that Richard Holmes, Cromwell's advocate in the BBC's 2002 Great Britons series, could manage (so it was little wonder that Oliver came last in the voting). J.G. Muddiman, the editor of the notoriously slanted version of the trial published in 1928 in the influential Famous British Trials series, was a ranting royalist".[1]

This downplaying of the importance of the trial of Charles l is also expressed by numerous revisionist historians. Perhaps the most eloquent of these is Blair Worden who in his book The English Civil Wars, believes that the war achieved nothing and that the parliamentarians: "whose exploits were ... emphatically reversed" with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, would have supported John Dryden, view in 1700: that  "Thy wars brought nothing about."

The most open hostility towards the trial is expressed by Blair Worden in his book The English Civil Wars, believes that the war achieved nothing and that the parliamentarians "whose exploits were ... emphatically reversed" with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, would have supported John Dryden, view in 1700: that  "Thy wars brought nothing about." According to Worden, nobody wanted a revolution; no one wanted to kill the king and that the king died because of "the law of unintended consequences".

Hopefully in their next book, Walsh and Jordan will pay more attention to this historiography and less to drama. To their credit, the authors have consulted Geoffrey Robertson book The Tyrannicide Brief. Robertson dubbed the trial of the regicides as the "the first war crimes trial in history" he also made a valid point in comparing it to  Stalin's show trial of old Bolsheviks. While not on the same scale both were counter-revolutions against previous revolutions and both carried out a series of judicial state murders.

This book is not a radical history of the English revolution. The authors are if anything sympathetic to the Whig interpretation of history and seem to be republicans. They believed that the civil war was a progressive development  and support Robertson contention that  "The proceeding against Charles I in 1649 secured the constitutional gains of the Civil War – the supremacy of Parliament, the independence of judges, individual freedom guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law".

It must be said that large numbers of these regicides have been woefully under-researched and their ideas and motivation have been largely left to small footnotes in old history books. One such figure is the leading regicide and republican lawyer John Cooke who has been finally recognised in a recent biography by Geoffrey Robertson. Cooke it seems is more known for his refusal to pick up the Kings silver top than for providing the theoretical, constitutional and practical justification for killing the king. 

As Cooke said, "We fought for the public good and would have enfranchised the people and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation if the nation had not delighted more in servitude than freedom."One thing is clear that many who took part, including Cooke, did not believe that the trial and execution of the king was a foregone conclusion. The majority of the leading figures of the revolution "did not at first want to kill the King". 

John Cooke, at the beginning, thought that "the proceedings would end with some form of reconciliation". It was only the threat of an intervention from the New Model Army that moved most of the leading regicides to kill the king. It was after all the army that wanted "to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for that blood he had shed, and mischief he had done".

The regicides were leading intellectual figures of the English revolution. The majority were republicans and were "men of principle". John Cooke was  concerned with the plight of the poor. He wrote in several publications calling for action to be taken to secure a better standard of living for the poor. In the book The Poor Man's Case.  He called for social equality and even called for a national health service, In another far-sighted way he believed that poverty was a significant cause of crime, he would later call for limits to the death sentence and abolition of imprisonment for debt. He even urged fellow barristers to give away small parts of their salary in order to carry out legal work for the poor.

Cooke for his trouble was hunted down like a common criminal and was a given the traitor's death: hanged, drawn and quartered. Agents and spies were sent all over the world to hunt down and murder if necessary, every regicide. In 1664 Sir John Lisle, a barrister who helped organise the trial but did not sign the warrant, was shot on his way to church in Lausanne, Switzerland, shortly after Edmund Ludlow and five others fled there from nearby Vevey.

The writer's Don Jordan and Michael Walsh at times turn their book into a spy novel. They show how Charles spymaster Sir George Downing of Downing Street fame, and described by Samuel Pepys as "that perfidious rogue", plotted and planned to go himself to the Continent, kidnap and if necessary murder then and there his former friends or bundle them back to England to stand trial and certain execution.

It would appear from the book that the reign of Charles was dominated by this manhunt. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognised the growing danger of a rebellion. As Jordan and Walsh point out when the mistake was made to give a public funeral to one of the regicides, over twenty thousand people attended testifying the still considerable support held for republican ideas.

Another striking aspect of the book is how people who were once leading members in the Cromwellian era shifted their allegiances like some people change a shirt.

Charles Monck, who has always struck me as a person of extreme opportunism, was "a turncoat of heroic proportions". He had been commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower of Cromwell. But after being promised the unheard-of sum of £100,000 a year for the rest of his life changed sides and decided to do the kings dirty work.

One severe weakness of the book is that it fails to convey how the regicides lost power and a monarchy established albeit with the help of substantial sections of the bourgeoisie. The book is absent as to the political and economic makeup of the Charles ll regime. The trial far from just being about revenge was a counter-revolution by sections of the bourgeoisie who were still closely connected to the Monarchy.

Given the skill of the two writers, the failure to explain the demise of the republicans of the Cromwellian era is a major weakness. Even if the authors of the book are not sympathetic to Marxist historiography the least, they could have done examined for instance James Holstun's assertion that "What turned the tide was the failure of bourgeois republican revolutionaries to unify themselves militarily, and create an interest and stake in the republic among the copyholders, soldiers, sailors and apprentices; and the superior power of General Monck and the forces of Restoration in shaping and controlling the army".

To conclude, despite the books many weaknesses I would still recommend this serious attempt at explaining the "Kings Revenge". It is a cracking read and deserves a wide readership and should be put on university reading lists on the subject.

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[1] Geoffrey Robertson, QC is author of The Tyrannicide Brief: The Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold (Vintage, 2005)

Comments on Alex Callinicos’s review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?

These are some observations made by Chris Thompson on Alex Callinicos’s review of Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? For some reason the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) did not post these comments on their website.  

Calinicos's review can be viewed at http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=869. In the near future I shall review Davidson’s book for my own blog.

 This review offers a clear expression of the ever-widening gulf between modern academic research and writing on the events of the 1640s in the British Isles and an approach based on a Marxist, indeed Trotskyite, analysis.

 The prolific use of terms like ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘feudal’ and ‘modern’ aristocracy, ‘proletariat’ and ‘non-bourgeois strata of the middle class’ invites comparison with the debates of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s historians’ group in the late-1940s and early-1950s recently edited by David Parker. Antique concepts like the claim that a class of urban capitalists were developing in the sixteenth century with feudalism or that these people were held to be socially inferior and were excluded from power by Absolute States are given vigorous exercise.

‘Bourgeois’ revolutions inevitably occurred and, in their outcomes, promoted capitalism. There is also an undertow of historiographical controversy: Callinicos’s protest against the revisionist historians of the 1970s is linked to an attack on ‘Political Marxists’ like Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood for their assistance in undermining a more authentically Socialist interpretation.

It is easy to see where the origins of this interpretation can be found. Neil Davidson and Alex Callinicos have recognised that, between 1500 and 1800, the basis for a new form of society was laid down. As a matter of Marxist theology, they believe that the transition to capitalism could not have been achieved peacefully but required a violent break-through, in other words, a ‘bourgeois revolution’. It was logical, therefore, to assume that such ‘bourgeois revolutions’ could be identified in the revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule in the latter part of the sixteenth-century and in the violent Puritan Revolution of the 1640s in England.

The motive force for these and later such revolutions was that of a productive bourgeoisie hampered by the protective system of absolute monarchs and a feudal aristocracy. Only in England, where the bourgeoisie was better developed and represented in Parliament, was capitalism able to triumph. A new form of economic organisation was established and industrial capitalism was subsequently able to transform the world.

The profound problems with such arguments and assumptions were obvious six or seven decades ago. It is straightforward enough to claim that economic changes occurred in England in the course of the seventeenth-century and that the country’s economy was more advanced in 1700 than in 1600. But is has never been shown that these changes precipitated the English Revolution or that the economy of 1700 would have been more backward had the English Revolution not occurred. The Revolution itself was undoubtedly immensely costly in human and animal lives, in demographic terms and in the destruction of property. That it forwarded the development of capitalism remains unproven.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the bourgeoisie headed the 1648 revolution despite Callinicos’s pleadings or that the bourgeoisie was allied to the ‘modern aristocracy’ – who were they? – against the monarchy, the feudal aristocracy and the established – in fact, disestablished – Church at that time. The idea of the existence, real or potential, of a non-bourgeois strata of the middle class or of an embryonic proletariat is completely anachronistic.

There was no victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, no evidence of the abandonment of primogeniture, of competition over the guilds, etc. 

The new economy, the new historiography, the new philosophy and the new science of the post-Restoration period was as much the work of former Royalists as of former Parliamentarians. None of this was stifled by the return of the King, the House of Lords and the Church of England. Tories and Whigs alike contributed to the defenestration of James II in 1688-89 and to the emergence of Britain as a major military and naval power.

The political and religious lessons of the Interregnum had been learnt: there was to be no return to such chaos. In 1640, political and religious fissures could be found across all ranks of English society but they were not based on class or on the rise of a bourgeoisie or on the opposition of a reactionary monarchy or aristocracy or church. After 1660, there was a deep-seated determination never to let such divisions lead to Civil Wars again: slowly, the constitutional machinery to accommodate political and religious differences was put in place.

But these changes have yet to be shown to have been due to the rise of the bourgeoisie or of capitalism. It has, indeed, yet to be shown that there was a ‘bourgeois revolution’ at all. That is why it cannot be found in the works of early modern historians and why the assumptions of Callinicos and Davidson are fallacious and unconvincing.   

Review: Oliver Cromwell: British Library Historic Lives by Peter Gaunt the British Library Publishing Division (Sep 1 2004) ISBN-13: 978-0712348577

Peter Gaunt’s biography of Oliver Cromwell is a well written, handsomely illustrated and the product of substantial research. The book was well received by the general reader though academic reviews were few and far between. Despite this fact, one writer said, “this book is as disciplined, vivid and vigorous as the man it celebrates”.

The book has only a hundred pages of text, with the rest of it taken up by illustrations. Gaunts uses several portraits of Cromwell and others well. The book also contains reproductions of letters and other documents. It is clear that Gaunt has used his access to the British Library well.

Guant is extremely careful in his use of Cromwell’s letters mindful that Cromwell’s early life is a minefield of historical inaccuracy. It is therefore hoped that John Morrill’s new editions of Cromwell’s writings and speeches will clear a lot up of the myths and inaccuracies surrounding Cromwell.

Gaunt like Barry Coward is a partisan historian when it comes to Cromwell. Also like Coward, he was also a former chairman of The Cromwell Association. As Stephen Roberts states “His Cromwell Association credentials are a useful clue as to his approach. He is sympathetic to his subject, seeing the lord general and the lord protector as one who achieved much of value and who "always retained a radical edge and never became a self-satisfied, conservative figure" (p. 9). Always inclined to give Cromwell the benefit of the doubt--his defence of Cromwell in Ireland in 1649 is the benchmark of Gaunt's liberalism as it is in similar vindications by liberals before him--Gaunt concludes by emphasising the "inherent decency of the man and his regime “[1].

Guant’s book acknowledges that Cromwell was a leading figure of the revolution but was not its main theoretician. Cromwell is correctly portrayed by Gaunt as a deeply religious man. In the main Cromwell’s courageous and farsighted political action was guided by those beliefs.

As poet Andrew Marvell famously wrote “If these the Times, then this must be the Man. Moreover, well he therefore does, and well has guest, Who in his Age always has forward prest: And knowing not where Heavens choice may light,Girds yet his Sword, and ready stands to fight”.

The great Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay added that Cromwell was “A force thus composed might, without injury to its efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other troops, would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general, soldiers who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates, and pass resolutions on high questions of state would soon break loose from all control would cease to create an army, and would become the worst and most dangerous of mobs. Nor would it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any regiment religious meetings at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a back-sliding major. However, such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-Command of the warriors whom Cromwell had trained that in their camp a political organisation and a religious organisation could exist without destroying a military organisation. The same men who, off duty, were noted as demagogues and field preachers, were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by prompt”.

One of the more controversial parts of the book is Guant’s attitude towards the events in Ireland. Gaunt believes that Cromwell was acting as any leading member of the new rising bourgeoisie would act. Cromwell being deeply religious, responded to the persecution of Protestants in Ireland with his form of justice against the Irish ruling elite and sections of the population. He was reported to call them "Barbarous and bloodthirsty.” Perhaps most importantly significant economic gains were made in the plunder of Ireland by the English bourgeoisie. Cromwell himself invested heavily in the colonisation of Ireland.

It is perhaps that given the short nature of this book that Gaunt cannot cover every part of Cromwell’s life and the stuff he does write about must have only a preliminary nature about it.

According to Roberts “Cromwell's attitude to the Scots is skated over somewhat; they took the stage in the narrative only in 1644. The Presbyterianism of the Scots is mentioned but not convincingly described, and the appearance of the "so-called Presbyterians" (p. 59) of the House of Lords and the House of Commons will doubtless convey something meaningful to those conversant with the main themes of the period. However, with no exploration of why "so-called," or of how they relate to the other lot of Presbyterians north of the border, much may well remain perplexing to the readers to whom this book is addressed. The statement that Cromwell was "tolerant of Protestant beliefs" but "hated Roman Catholicism" obscures as much as it reveals. In Gaunt's account, it was Cromwell and the army who dismissed the conservative MPs of the Rump at the time of the dissolution of that parliament in 1653, but no mention is made of the pressure Cromwell was under from the millenarians led by Thomas Harrison and the threat these radicals represented to Oliver's position.

Conclusion

This book is much a political history of the English Civil War as a political biography. Disappointingly there one page of further reading, It therefore clear that the book is aimed at the general reader rather than a guide for students. This may have limited the sales of the book but is not necessarily a bad thing. I will recommend the book as it is a good introduction to the complex world of Oliver Cromwell

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[1] Peter Gaunt. Oliver Cromwell. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 144 pp. $22.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-3164-2. Reviewed by Stephen Roberts (History of Parliament Trust, London)Published on H-Albion (November, 2006)

Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy (Revolutionary Lives) Hardcover – 9 Nov. 2012 by John Gurney

Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing '– Gerrard Winstanley.

Dr John Gurney is fast becoming a leading authority on the Diggers and their leader Gerrard Winstanley. He is the author of a previous book on the Diggers called Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution and also the author of several papers on the Diggers. Gurney's latest book is a result of a paper published from 1994.[1] He regularly lectures on Winstanley.

The book is a meticulously researched, scholarly and well-presented. Gurney provides us with a good understanding of the origins of the Digger movement. It has been praised for setting an "extremely high standard for local histories of this sort and must rank alongside similar studies such as Eamon Duffy's acclaimed The Voices of Morebath."

Gurney's biography runs to just over 162 pages. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that the book is academically or intellectually 'light '. It is nothing of the sort. Nor should it be treated as an introductory to Winstanley, the reader to get the best out of this book should at least have a rudimentary knowledge of the Digger leader and the Diggers struggle.

Gurney's introduction sets the tone for the rest of the book in the respect that it attempts to place his work in the context of previous 'left-wing' or 'Marxist' historiography.

The sign of a good book is that it tells us something new.  Gurney's work can be seen as development on from the work of Christopher Hill and others.

It is well known that previous Marxist's had written on the English revolution. Gurney elaborates that the Russian revolutionaries paid particular attention to the writings of Winstanley so much so that Vladimir Lenin the then leader of the fledgling Soviet state issued a decree that a previous Tsarist monument was to be changed with names of former revolutionaries replacing old figures of earlier Russian history. Winstanley's name appeared eighth on the list.

For their revolution, the Russian revolutionaries were able to draw on the experiences of revolutionaries from England and France. Winstanley had no such experience to draw upon. This, in some respect, shows why the revolutionaries had such an empirical outlook.

On the plus side, the English revolutionaries were as Ann Talbot explains "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".[2]

The book is well researched and for such a small work shows many years of hard, painstaking research. The result is a very readable narrative. The book is extremely informative and thought-provoking.

It is perhaps only recently that the words of Winstanley have been fully appreciated. Gerrard Winstanley's 'extraordinarily rich body of writings' were little read and even less written upon between the years 1651 and the 1890s. It was only after an explosive revolutionary era encompassing the late 19th and early 20th centuries that his writings were systematically studied and written about. The first to do so were the early Marxists and later the group of historians around the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Gurney is clear that the study of Winstanley should be not solely of historical value but must have a contemporary resonance. He says: Today, knowledge of Winstanley is widespread, and he has become one of the best-known figures from the period of the English Revolution. There have been numerous plays, novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often been cited as an inspirational figure by politicians of the left. More specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained prescient, inspiring generations of activists and social movements" his name he continues "has in recent years also been invoked by freeganism, squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs, greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists and libertarians have laid claim to him as a significant precursor".[3]

Knowledge of Gerrard Winstanley's early life is a bit sketchy. He was born 1609, and as one writer put it he was "one of the most extraordinary and engaging figures to emerge during the English Revolution of 1640 – 60".

He was the son of an Edward Winstanley. In 1630 he moved to London and took up an apprenticeship, and in 1638, he was a freeman of the Merchant Tailors' Company. His adult life is unremarkable he married Susan King, who was the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639. It is clear that without the English Civil War, his life would have moved at the same pedestrian pace as before. But like many, his world was turned upside down. His business took a beating during the early part of the war, and in 1643 he was made bankrupt. He moved to Cobham, Surrey, where he found menial work as a cowherd.

It was at Cobham in Surrey that the Diggers movement was founded. Winstanley believed that the land was a "common treasury for all". He began to recruit like-minded people and began to work the ground on St George's Hill in the summer of 1649.

The Diggers 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. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from their religion, they had no program 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 Diggers or that matter did the larger group 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 a lot of the poor to be made more equitable.

Where does Gurney's book fit in today's historiography of the English Revolution? Until quite recently little has been written on the Digger movement. This has been largely down to the fact that over the last few decades historiography on the English revolution has been dominated by a large group of revisionist historians who have sought to move away from any Marxist understanding of the English revolution.

According to Michael Braddick, revisionists have "have tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to cast it in its terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical heroes".[4]

Given that Mark Kishlansky is one of those arch revisionists mentioned by Braddick, it seems a bit strange that  Kishlanskywrote of the book "This is a clear-eyed yet sympathetic account of one of the most baffling figures of the English Revolution. Gurney's painstaking research provides a wealth of new information that is assembled into a highly readable narrative. An informative and thought-provoking book."

Kishlansky despite recommending Gurney's book is keen to downplay the role of Winstanley who according to him was "a small businessman who began his career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain, and in between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The years when the world was turned upside down stand in the same relation to the course of English history as Winstanley's wild years either side of his fortieth birthday does to his subsequent life as a churchwarden".[5]

Gurney's work on the Digger's represents opposition to this revisionism. I am not saying that it accounts for a new form of historiography, but it does mean that opposition to present-day revisionism is beginning.It is also no accident that interest in Winstanley coincides with one of the biggest crisis to the capitalist system we have witnessed since the 1920s and 1930s..

Gurney's book is invaluable when it starts to trace the origins of Winstanley's radicalism. Gurney does not subscribe to the theory that it was solely down to the war radicalizing people such as Winstanley. Gurney believes that radical views were being expressed all over the country before the outbreak of civil war.

In a previous essay, Gurney elaborates on why the Digger's achieved a level of local support in Cobham "Local support for the Diggers may also have been connected with Cobham's marked traditions of social conflict. The manor of Cobham, a former possession of Chertsey Abbey, had passed into the hands of Robert Gavell in 1566 and was to remain with his family until 1708. During the later sixteenth century the Gavell family became involved in a long and protracted series of disputes with their tenants. In a case brought in the court of Requests by William Wrenn, a Cobham husbandman, Robert Gavell was accused of overturning manorial customs and of infringing his tenants' rights, by seeking to extract more rent than was customarily paid, and by spoiling the timber on Wrenn's copyhold. He was also charged with attempting to escape the payment of tax by shifting the burden on to his tenants, laying 'a hevy burden uppon the poorer tennants contrarye to the Ancient usage, equitie and Consciens'Actions against Robert Gavell and his son Francis were resumed in the court of Chancery during the 1590s by tenants seeking to halt the continued assault on manorial custom".[6]

It has been suggested that Winstanley was proto-communist and early Marxist but as Geoff Kennedy commented in his Digger Radicalism and Agrarian Capitalism Winstanley should also be placed in the context of his times. Winstanley's thought and writings were profoundly religious, and as the former Marxist writer, Cliff Slaughter said "for the understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity. What is the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the 'Utopians' wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of social relations to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. 'The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism."[7]

To conclude, I would say that this no hagiography. Gurney is not blind to Winstanley's weaknesses. He outlines that some of Winstanley's ideas were not progressive, or that his attitude towards women's emancipation was not the same towards men. Having said that Gurney's book has the look of a labour of love. The author even goes as far as to include his photos with the text. Gerrard Winstanley is an important book and should be read by academics and the general public alike and for all those in favour of a "common treasury for all".

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[1] Gurney, J, 1994 Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement in Walton and Cobham, Hist J, 37(4), 775–802

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[3] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-08-31/diggers-land-and-direct-activisim/

[4] https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/the-digger-years.html

[5] Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and Visionaries Who Foretold the ...

  By Christopher Rowland

[6] http://www.academicroom.com/article/gerrard-winstanley-and-digger-movement-walton-and-cobham

[7] Religion and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labour Review Vol 3 No 3 June 1958