"The Debate over the English Revolution" has been
transformed out of all recognition during the past thirty years or so,"
David Underdown.
'a miserable, distracted time' in which 'when thou wentest
to bed at night, thou knewest not whether thou shouldest be murdered afore day.
Sir John Oglander
Peter Gaunt's The English Civil War: The Essential Readings
(2000) is a collection choice of essays chosen by Gaunt. It is an excellent
introduction to the study of the English revolution allowing us to study the previous
historiography.
Gaunt was given the unenviable task of putting together sixteen
essays that were divided into four parts that sum up the historiography of an
extraordinarily complex subject. Gaunt's choice of essays was made harder by copyright
difficulties and problems of format.
Gaunt starts with three politically disparate historians
John Morrill, Brian Manning, and David Underdown, who attempt to answer 'What
Was The English Revolution?' the article first being published in history Today
in 1984.
John Morrill[1]
first essay starts with an explicit rejection that the civil war was the result
of any long-term developments. He describes England after 1600 as a peaceful
and prosperous place with little or no civil disturbances and certainly no
reason to have a civil war
.
The main thrust of Morrill's argument is if it was not for
Charles blundering and political inexperience England would have carried on its
merry way. As he states "In 1640, however, Charles blundered away his
initiative. He tried to impose his will upon his Scottish subjects twice, both
times without adequate means. He could have made painful concessions, resumed
his personal rule in England and looked to divide-and-rule tactics to regain
his power in Scotland. But by attempting to impose his own brand of
Protestantism on the Scots through an unco-ordinated force of Irish Catholics,
Highland Catholics and an English army containing many Catholics, all to be
paid for with cash to be provided from Rome and Madrid, he turned the
anti-Catholic fears which his policies and his cultural values had already
stimulated into a deep paranoia. The Scots' occupation of northeast England,
and their demand for war reparations guaranteed by Parliament, created a wholly
unanticipated and wholly unique situation: a meeting of Lords and Commons over
whose determination he had no control. The MPs who gathered for the Long
Parliament knew they had a once-for-all chance to put things right. They did
not set out to organise for war but to restore the good old days."[2]
Morrill then expands on his theory that religion was the
leading cause of the English revolution. According to him "Out of England's
wars of religion came the modern secular state".[3]
Although not covered in this essay Morrill was
extraordinarily vocal in his opposition any historian who even remotely argued
that there was a revolution. This hostility was aimed mainly at the left-wing
historians Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Quite why Lawrence stone
provoked Morrill's ire is beyond me as Stone was not even remotely interested
in Marxism,
However, even Stone's limited defence of there being an
English revolution bothered Morrill who said "I have no doubt at all that
Lawrence Stone's Causes of the English Revolution (1972) were the thing people
reacted against, with its rather triumphalism claim that you could now produce
a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the
English Revolution. It was that I think which some people quite independently
reacted against".
Morrill was not the only historian to attack Marxist
historiography forming a popular front with other revisionist historians. In an
interview for Making History Morrill describes the origins of the "revisionist
Revolt", Well, I think the exciting
thing about revisionism was how a whole series of people came to the same
conclusions simultaneously without really knowing one another. I had not met
Mark Kishlansky or Conrad Russell or Kevin Sharpe when we all published our
1976 works which were the original canon of revisionism, and that is one of the
most exciting things. "It is also worth saying that almost all the
revisionists were people who had studied in Oxford and then been made to leave,
for whom jobs could not be found in Oxford. We reacted to some extent against a
previous generation of Oxford-trained historians like Stone and Hugh
Trevor-Roper and Hill."[4]
Brian Manning, in the same essay, attempts a
definition of the word "revolution". The standard definition of
revolution "involves the replacement by force or threat of force of one
political or social system by another". For Manning, the English revolution “was a
revolution in that it involved a change of the political system by force and it
was not just the substitution of one set of rulers for another. However, the
constitution devised by the Levellers was not implemented nor was the political
revolution followed by a social revolution".
Manning did not begin writing on the English revolution with
a clear-cut class analysis or even a Marxist one. In his book The English
People and the English Revolution he says "I do not see the 'middle sort
of people' as a capitalist class, but as small independent producers, and I do
not see the struggle as being between a declining feudal class and a rising
capitalist class, but as a conflict between the aristocracy or governing elites
and small independent producers".
Like Christopher Hill Manning was attracted to the "history
from below "genre. This coincided with his joining of the International
Socialists forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party(SWP). The SWP was
attractive to Manning as they also supported the history from below genre. The
Communist Party historians Group heavily influenced historians inside the SWP
apart from Norah Carlin. This was not a good influence as Ann Talbot explains "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 former rebels, revolutionaries and famous leaders was obscured by
regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition".
Jim Holstun correctly states for Manning "English
workers at the very centre of the English Revolution as innovative political
actors and theorists in their own right. His approach contrasts strongly with
the usual somnambulist turn to the ruling class initiative and frequently
inverts its causal sequence".[5]
David Underdown was a historian caught between a rock
and a hard place. Neither Marxist or revisionist Underdown steered a middle
course very successfully. According to Mark Kishlansky, Underdown's work "displayed
two abiding qualities: a mastery of archival sources faithfully reported, and a
compelling prose style that carried both story and argument. He was a craftsman's
craftsman, a master of sources, of historiography, and of method which had few
equals even among a flashy generation of generalists whose significant theses
dominated discussion but faded over time while his firm conclusions persevered".[6]
Underdown was a gifted historian who was able relatively successfully
to navigate the choppy waters of the study of the English revolution. As he
relates in his essay "As always, each historian has his or her own
solution. My own starts from two innocuous premises: first, that the revolution
was not a mere accident (though the fortuitous and unpredictable certainly
played a part in it); secondly, that to understand it we need to look back once
more over the history of the previous century. When we do so we find, I suggest,
a profound division emerging among the English people about the moral basis of
their commonwealth, a division expressed in a cultural conflict that had both social
and regional dimensions. The revolution was an unsuccessful attempt to resolve
the conflict by imposing a particular notion of moral order, articulated in the
culture of the Puritan' middling sort', upon the rest of the kingdom".
He continues "In any discussion of a political
situation as chaotic as this one, we always need to look at the relative
strength of the countervailing forces of tradition and change". This is
what Underdown has attempted to do all his life and has been very consistent.
From any objective standpoint Mary Fulbrook's, the English
Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt', Social History, is one of the most critical
essays in the book. Not everyone was enamoured by her article leading one blogger
to write it was "more proof that
revisionists and Marxists will never understand each other because they just do
not want to understand each other". [7]
Mary Fulbrooks article is probably one of the most multi-dimensional
attacks on the revisionist's positions. In the opening paragraph, she explains that
"One of the most contentious problems of English history is the English
Revolution, or English Civil War, of the mid-seventeenth century. Even the very
name, the most appropriate characterization of the phenomenon, is contested.
Was it a major historical revolution, requiring analysis in terms of long-term
political, ideological and socio-economic causes? Or was it rather a mere
rebellion, of a familiar and recurrent type, developing by a series of mistakes
and ineptitudes which require short-term analysis of power struggles, patronage
and personalities? In recent years, a flurry of writings by scholars such as
Conrad Russell, Paul Christianson, Kevin Sharpe and others, have sought to
revise what they term the 'traditional' approaches to English seventeenth-century
history: the so-called 'Whig', 'Marxist' and 'sociological' approaches which
share a grand conception of the revolution and a grand approach to explanation.
These revisionist writings, revolting against major traditions of
interpretation, have been met with a growing wealth of rebuttals from
historians concerned to defend older approaches. It seems that the battle over
the Civil War will continue.' In the meantime, however, recent debates have
involved issues of more general historiographical interest".[8]
Fulbrook, while being heavily critical of the revisionist misrepresentation
of Marxist views, had sympathies with the lot of the revisionists. Sitting on
the theoretical fence is a skill both Underdown and Fulbrook have mastered. The
rest of us do not have that luxury.
Conrad Russell,s 'Why Did Charles I Fight the Civil War?'
History Today, 1984. Is a typical piece of Russell's work. For Russell there
was no English revolution, no clash of class forces he believes that "Civil
wars are like other quarrels: it takes two to make them. It is, then, something
of a curiosity that we possess no full analysis of why Charles I chose to fight
a Civil War in 1642. Yet the early seventeenth century was in many ways a good
period for the gentry, and a bad period for kings. If we were to search the
period for long-term reasons why the King might have wanted to fight a Civil
War, we would find the task far easier than it has ever been to find long-term
causes why the gentry might have wanted to fight a Civil War[9].
It is not for nothing that Jim Holstun described Russell's historiography as a 'manifesto
for historical revisionism',
Christopher Hill, 'A Bourgeois Revolution? (1980) is the
most important essay in the book. Hill's original 1940 essay outlining the
theory of the English bourgeois revolution is what all historians have to
define their work by. Whether they are for or against, they have to deal with
this theory in one way or another.
As Ann Talbot correctly states "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 a few people at the top
do not make revolutions 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".
She continues "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 a 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".[10]
Conclusion
It was always going to be a problematic and personal decision
of what historians to leave out. Articles
by Ann Hughes or Kevin Sharpe would have improved the book. As one reviewer
correctly stated, Gaunt has "managed his task with sensitivity and
imagination. Anyone approaching the subject for the first time could do no
better than study this collection of essays.
[1]
See Review-More Like Lions Than Men-Sir William Brereton and the Cheshire Army
of Parliament, 1642-46-Andrew Abram -Helion & Company. http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2020/03/more-like-lions-than-men-sir-william.html
[2]
What was the English-Revolution?John Morrill, Brian Manning and
David
Underdown Originally appeared in History Today 1984
[3]
What was the English-Revolution?
[4]
Professor John Morrill-Interview Transcript-Selwyn College, Cambridge, 26 March
2008-https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html
[5]
Brian Manning and the dialectics of revolt-Issue: 103-Posted on 29th November
2004-https://isj.org.uk/brian-manning-and-the-dialectics-of-revolt/
[6]
Obituary of David Underdown by Mark Kishlansky.
[8]
The English Revolution and the
revisionist revolt-Social History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Oct., 1982), pp. 249-264
[9]
Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?- Published in History Today Volume 34
Issue 6 June 1984
[10]
"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org
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