By Ann Talbot
Christopher Hill, the
renowned expert on seventeenth-century English history, who died on February 24
at the age of 91, lived through the great upheavals of the twentieth century.
Its wars and revolutions moulded the mind of a historian who looked back from
one revolutionary century to another, giving him a unique insight into his
subject and his books a lasting value that few historians can claim.
Hill influenced the way in
which an entire generation of students and general readers saw the English
Civil War, and even when in more recent years with the fall of the Soviet Union
his view that the events of the 1640s constituted a revolution has been widely
rejected, academics still define their position on the period in opposition to
his analysis. Within a week of his death, however, it was not just the value of
his academic work that was being discussed in the press but his own political
activity as a member of the Communist Party, when it was alleged that Hill had
been a Soviet agent.
Hill seems to be a mass of
contradictions. There is Hill the Master of Balliol College, Oxford and
prestigious academic; Hill the popular historian who would give lectures at the
Socialist Workers Party summer schools where masses of young people would crowd
in to hear him speak about the seventeenth century revolution—and now we are
told there is Hill the Soviet mole. If we are to draw a coherent picture out of
all this, we have to see Hill in the context of his time. As his fellow
Yorkshireman Andrew Marvell said of Oliver Cromwell, “If these the times, then
this must be the man.”
Hill was himself part of a
historical phenomenon. Born in 1912 the son of a well-to-do solicitor, he was
educated at St. Peter’s School York. It was a privileged existence, but its
apparent security was overshadowed by the great political and economic turmoil
of the period. A child of five when the Russian Revolution broke out, Hill grew
to maturity at the time of the abortive revolution in China, of the British
General Strike of 1926 and the Great Crash of 1929. The 1920s saw mass
unemployment and hunger marches. By the time Hill went up to Oxford in 1931,
unemployment had risen to nearly 3 million. As one historian has said of the
1926 General Strike, “The class divisions of the country were starkly revealed,
even if they did not spill over into violence.”
He was already expressing
left-wing views as a schoolboy, although it has never been clear when precisely
he joined the Communist Party. This was one of the areas of his life about
which Hill was always reticent. At Oxford, he came under the influence of
Humphrey Sumner, an expert on Russian history who arranged for him to go to
Russia for an extended stay in 1935. He came back fluent in Russian but never
spoke about what he had done while he was there, pleading that he had been ill
most of the time. In 1936, he became a lecturer at University College Cardiff,
but in 1938 returned to Balliol where he remained until he retired as master of
the college in 1978. His 40 years at Balliol were only briefly interrupted by
his wartime service, during which he was seconded as an intelligence officer to
the Foreign Office.
His period at the Foreign
Office was another aspect of his life that he was reluctant to discuss. The
historian Dr Anthony Glees, a specialist in modern German history at Brunel
University, now claims that he has discovered documents which show that Hill
kept his membership of the Communist Party secret while he was working at the
Foreign Office. Dr Glees, who has not published the evidence to back up his
allegations, claims that Hill acted as an agent of influence on behalf of the
Soviet Union while he worked first as a liaison officer for military
intelligence and then as head of the Russian desk at the Foreign Office. Glees
considers it inconceivable that the Foreign Office would have employed Hill if
the security services had known about his party membership. He told the London
Times, “His failure to own up to his party membership was outrageous, sinister
and highly suspicious.”
There is something more than
a little artificial about this indignation. It would have been rather more
surprising to find that Hill was not a member of the Communist Party by 1940
since so many young intellectuals of his generation were either members or
sympathisers. Nor can it be assumed that such an orientation inevitably implied
support for revolution. It was entirely possible in this period to be both a
patriotic subject of his Britannic Majesty and a “friend” of the Soviet Union,
as for example the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb were. As Trotsky pointed
out in his Revolution Betrayed, in the case of people like the Webbs,
“Friendship for the Soviet bureaucracy is not friendship for proletarian
revolution but on the contrary insurance against it” ( The Revolution Betrayed,
Labor Publications, Detroit, 1991, p. 258).
There was a significant
section of the British ruling class who saw in the Soviet Union their best hope
of preserving Britain’s position in the world and preventing revolution at
home. Hill’s selection for an extended stay in the Soviet Union and his
secondment to the Foreign Office suggests that at an early stage in his career
he was being groomed by a section of the ruling class who looked on the Soviet
Union under bureaucratic control as just such an insurance against revolution.
Ever since the end of World
War I, Britain had faced a thoroughgoing political, social, economic and
intellectual crisis as the position it had held since the mid-eighteenth
century as the leading world power was eclipsed by the rise of the United
States. For a time, it even seemed possible that the next major world conflict
would be between Britain and the US, until the older power learned to accept
its newly subordinate position. At the same time class relations that had been
based on Britain’s position of world dominance, which had allowed the creation
of a large labour aristocracy and trade union bureaucracy who worked with the
Liberals to maintain social peace, were seriously destabilised by Britain’s
relative decline.
With its rapid
industrialisation, the Soviet Union seemed to offer a model of how Britain’s
declining industries might be revived and its increasing weight internationally
offered a potential counterbalance to the growing power of the US in world
affairs. But most of all the example of the Stalinist bureaucracy impressed
reformists like the Webbs as the means by which the working class could be
brought under control.
If Hill had remained a civil
servant or died in the war before he wrote his books, it is doubtful whether
anyone would have been very interested in his political activities. He would
have been one among many and would certainly not have rated any media interest.
Guy Fawkes would still be the most famous old boy of St. Peter’s school. What
makes his wartime political activities significant is the question of how it
affects his reputation as a historian of seventeenth-century England and that
question was there to be asked long before the recent revelations.
What any serious reader
interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books
are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of
someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of
English history? It has to be said that this is a complex question. Not
everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party
could be classified with the Webbs.
The most gifted and outstanding
representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists,
scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves with the Communist
Party because the old institutions of church and state had lost their hold over
the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that
was new, modern and progressive.
The Communist Party
attracted minds of the very highest intellectual calibre, as can be seen from
the fact that many of the developments that were made in biochemistry during
the post-war period were prepared by the group around J.D. Bernal, J.B.S.
Haldane and other biologists who were prominent supporters of the Communist
Party at Cambridge. For minds of this order of brilliance, the Communist Party
became a pole of attraction since despite its degeneration under Stalin it
still retained vestiges of the immensely powerful intellectual heritage of Marx
and Engels.
They could not pursue their
intellectual work in isolation from the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy,
however. Despite the fact that the Cambridge
biologists were all leading geneticists they accepted the fraudulent work of
Lysenko because Lysenko had Stalin’s support. The influence of Stalinism
on the historians was if anything even greater.
The Cambridge biologists never adopted Lysenko’s theories in their own work,
but historians associated with the Communist Party developed an approach to
history that was directly influenced by the politics of the bureaucracy.
The Communist Party
sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s
People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was
obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary
tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the
bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an
unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the
fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical
foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working
class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a
democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill
was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who
were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of
Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.
There is something
Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism. They seem to
have been capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist
approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the
line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their investigations as far
as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It was an approach that
was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life that
enabled them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never brought
them into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political questions.
It is notable that of the
Marxist Historians Group Hill wrote on
the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth century, Hobsbawm mostly on
the nineteenth century and Hilton on the Middle Ages. But none of them
specialised in the twentieth century. In more recent areas of history, as in
politics, the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy was too great to allow the free development of Marxist
thought and whether deliberately or not they all avoided venturing into the
modern arena. It is notable that E.H. Carr, who was never a member of the
Communist Party but wrote on the history of the Russian Revolution and
expressed a high regard for Trotsky, was for long periods unemployed and
unemployable because his views clashed with those on both the left and right of
British academic life.
Hill’s sole attempt at
modern history, his study of Lenin, is undoubtedly his weakest book. It is
marred by repeated attacks on Trotsky, who is dismissed as one of the
“Westernising theoreticians” of the revolutionary movement. Discussing whether
Trotsky could ever have become the leader of the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s
death, Hill concludes, “Such a view exaggerates, I think, the importance of
Trotsky in the party.”
As Hill should have known,
the British government were well aware of Trotsky’s importance since they would
not allow him into the country when he requested asylum. But still Hill’s
historical faculties would not let him deny that Trotsky was a great orator,
that he organised the insurrection which brought the Bolsheviks to power, and
nor does he avoid giving Trotsky more references in the index than Stalin. At
no point does Hill repeat the false charges that the Stalinists made against
Trotsky and his followers at the Moscow trials. Even in this book, which is certainly hack work, Hill did not make
himself fully a Stalinist hack. His criticisms of Trotsky are ill-judged and
betray an ignorance of his subject, rather than being malicious and dishonest.
He retained a core of intellectual honesty in a work that was written in 1947
as the lines were being drawn for the Cold War, which was designed to defend
the Russian Revolution and not to win him friends in high places at home or in
the Kremlin.
If his book on Lenin
represented the low point of Hill’s work, the best was yet to come as he began
to publish his remarkable series of books on the English revolution that were to change the way in which the period was understood.
His years of greatest productivity came
after 1957 when he left the Communist Party following the Soviet invasion of
Hungary that suppressed a workers’ uprising. The fact that Hill was not among
the most politically advanced elements of the party—those who then joined the
Fourth International—is perhaps a greater tribute to them than it is a
criticism of him. His subsequent work showed him to be a better historian than
he was a political thinker.
Hill’s great achievement as
a historian was to challenge the accepted consensus of Whig history—that
Britain had been peculiarly blessed with a
tranquil history based on gradual change and had achieved peaceful
progress through class compromise without the excesses of revolution.
The most
outstanding representative of the Whig tradition is Macaulay and it was continued in the twentieth century by his
nephew Trevelyan. It had the advantage that it was at once suited to Liberalism
and Labourism. It was a tradition that was physically embodied in the Trevelyan’s
country house at Wallington, Northumberland, where Macaulay’s desk is preserved
and which was the scene of annual Labour picnics. The roofed central court of
this house is decorated with historical scenes and not a revolution among
them—as the national epic unfolds from prehistoric times to the triumph of
industry and empire in Victorian Britain. They were images that adorned
children’s history books well into the twentieth century and underlay much of
the popular consciousness of British history.
The term the “Whig
interpretation of history” dates back to Sir Herbert Butterfield’s slim volume
of that name. As a polemic, it was not particularly well aimed and has often
since been directed at economic determinism rather than the Victorian view of
British history that was its target. But the name has stuck. The Whiggish view
of history gained ground as Britain achieved a degree of social stability as
its economic supremacy emerged that must have been surprising to many
contemporaries given its turbulent past history. Writing in the midst of the
1848 revolutions and as the Chartists marched in London, the historian J.M.
Kemble expressed the sense of Britain’s special destiny:
“On every side of us thrones totter and the deep foundations of
society are convulsed. Shot and shell sweep the streets of capitals which have
long been pointed out as the chosen abodes of order: cavalry and bayonets
cannot control populations whose loyalty has become a proverb here, whose peace
has been made a reproach to our own miscalled disquiet. Yet the exalted Lady
who wields the sceptre of these realms sits safe
upon her throne and fearless in the holy circle of her domestic happiness,
secure in the affections of people whose institutions have given to them all the blessings of an equal law.”
The sense that in Britain
things were done differently and without continental excess was 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.
The myth of the “Glorious
Revolution” was the target of Hill’s first published article, which appeared in
the Communist International under the pseudonym E.C. Gore in 1937. It was
followed in 1940 by a short essay, The English Revolution 1640, which contained
a concise statement of the arguments that Hill was to spend the rest of his
life elucidating.
Hill never acknowledged
having read Trotsky, but there are distinct parallels between his attacks on
the Whig interpretation of history and Trotsky’s brief but trenchant analysis in Where is Britain Going? in which he
identified two revolutionary traditions in British history—that of the Cromwell
in the seventeenth century and later of Chartism—both of which were denied by
the prevailing conception of gradualism that characterised the Whig view of
history. “The ‘great’ national historian
Macaulay,” Trotsky wrote, “vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth
century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are
sometimes interesting but always superficial.”
Trotsky recognised Cromwell
as a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie, whose New Model Army was not
merely an army but a party with which he repeatedly purged Parliament until it
reflected the needs of his class and suppressed the Levellers who represented
the plebeian elements who wanted to take the revolution further than was
necessary for capitalist society to thrive. Whether he got it from Trotsky, or arrived at his assessment of
Cromwell independently by reading Marx and Engels, Hill reflected this analysis
of Cromwell in God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution
(1970) in which he explored Cromwell’s revolutionary role. It was a measured
portrait of the man that recognised his ruthless pursuit of the interests of
the class he represented—as when he had the leaders of the Levellers executed
and in Ireland where he sacked the towns of Drogheda and Wexford, executing the
captured garrison and civilian population. If in concluding that Cromwell’s
historical importance could be compared to that of Stalin as much as Lenin,
Hill revealed that his affiliations still lay with the party he had left in
1957, he perhaps also revealed something of his own inner feelings when he said
of the English revolution, “The dreams of a Milton, a Winstanley, a George Fox,
a Bunyan, were not realised; nor indeed were those of Oliver himself: ‘would
that we were all saints’.”
Employing the Old Testament
phraseology of the seventeenth century he concluded, “The sons of Zeruiah
proved too strong for the ideals which had animated the New Model Army.” For
the seventeenth century revolutionaries
the Sons of Zeruiah represented the forces of reaction that had prevented them
achieving their vision of utopia. Perhaps Hill also thought of the Soviet Union
as a country in which the Sons of Zeruiah had proved too strong.
Hill’s achievements were
twofold. Firstly he identified 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. Hill conveys a sense of the
organic character of revolution and views
the many ordinary people who made the seventeenth
century revolution with admirable
humanity.
He has been criticised by
later historians for only using the published sources and not making any use of
the manuscript material that is available. Hill had some excuse for doing so,
however, in that the amount of published material from this period when
censorship collapsed is so enormous. In the 1640s everyone had something to say
about the way the world was going and
everyone who was literate wanted to get into print. It is a dramatic contrast
with the preceding centuries, when only a
small elite with government approval found their way into print. If later
historians have made far greater use of unpublished manuscript sources, this to
some degree reflects the extent to which Hill made the published sources his
own so that they have had to look for new material.
What fundamentally separates
Hill from his detractors is not that they have turned to new sources, but that
they have rejected his conclusion that a bourgeois revolution took place in the
mid-seventeenth century. The prevailing academic orthodoxy is that there was no
bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people
from all social classes can be found on either side of the struggle. Even
Cromwell, it is argued, can better be understood as a representative of the
declining gentry rather than the rising bourgeois. He and those around him
aimed not at revolution, but 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.
Hill, of course, was well
aware that there were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the
civil war and small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side. He had read
enough Marx and Lenin to know that one could not expect a chemically pure
revolution in which the members of one social class lined up one side of the
barricades and those of the other on the opposite side. However, 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.
Most of all he was
sufficiently astute to realise 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.
More serious Marxist criticisms of Hill are that he always maintains an
essentially national approach to the English revolution, which he does not
place in an international context, and that he has a tendency to romanticise
the religious movements of the period and to be too dismissive of their
rational intellectual descendants such as Newton and Locke. In part these characteristics arise from the national orientation of his social class and
reflect even in Hill vestiges of the Whig outlook that imagined a peculiarly
English political tradition rooted in millennial seventeenth century visionaries like Bunyan that was entirely
separate from Enlightenment thought.
More significantly it reflects the
influence of the popular front politics and
national outlook of Stalinism. With Hill
this is evident more in what he does not write than in what he does write.
Within the strict confines
of the few decades that comprise the Civil War and Commonwealth period, Hill
had some reason to concentrate on the many religious sects which to modern eyes
are so strange that their connection with revolution is by no means obvious. In
The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), Hill performs a
useful task in showing that although there was no Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Karl
Marx in the English revolution the revolutionaries of the period were moved by
definite social, political and economic ideas—albeit expressed in a religious
form.
In the period after 1660,
all these groups lose their revolutionary impetus, but Hill persists in
pursuing them as though they retained their political significance. Like E.P.
Thompson he was concerned to demonstrate that there was a distinctive English
revolutionary tradition than ran intact from the Civil War to modern times. He had therefore no interest in showing the
continental origins of many of the ideas that inspired the English revolution,
such as natural rights theory that was to play such a significant role in the
development of Enlightenment thought and the political ideas of subsequent
centuries. Nor was he interested in examining how the English philosopher, John
Locke, or the political theorist, Algernon Sidney, took up the ideas that had
been expressed in the course of the English revolution and distilled them into
a more precise programmatic form that could be developed in turn by American
and French revolutionaries.
The science of the period
that did so much to inspire a rational approach to politics and society was
only of interest to him insofar as he could connect the scientists directly to
the revolutionary movement. He never explored the complex relationship between the impetus to social revolution and
the scientific revolution, because the increasingly rational and materialistic
conclusions of science were uncongenial to him. The materialism of Hobbes and
Spinoza was outside his orbit and even Newton, for all his mysticism and
millennial visions, left Hill cold.
Yet within the 20-year
period from 1640 to 1660, Hill’s historical achievements were significant in
his own lifetime and are likely to prove more so in the future because current
academic history is hardly less complacent than the Whig interpretation of history
was in Hill’s day. Simon Schama, who recently presented A History of Britain
for the BBC, declares himself to be “a born-again Whig”. His account of the
Civil War in volume two of the books that accompany the series is full of
colourful incident and fascinating detail, but there is no analysis of the
contending class forces involved and the clash of interests that led to the
bloody suppression of the Levellers, or to Cromwell’s repeated purges of
Parliament and his personal dictatorship.
The actions with which Cromwell
ensured the success of the revolution are, for Schama, excesses or deviations
which violated “precisely the parliamentary independence that the war had been
fought to preserve.” This is Whig history indeed, although to be fair to Macaulay
it is a neutered variety of the genre.
Set against this background
Hill’s analysis of the Civil War takes on a very contemporary significance. As an historian he stands head and shoulders above
his detractors and his books deserve to
be read and reread, and if with a critical eye, it should always be with the
knowledge that his limitations and faults as much as his great historical
insights and innovations are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but
never dismissed, and only bettered by those who have studied him.
