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

Thank you for posting this fascinating review of Morrill's work. I look forward to his conclusion. It is hard to separate fact from fiction after so many centuries and there are elements of Cromwell that strike at a contradictory personality.

The account above recalls the wholesale slaughter of the "Irish" women after the battle of Naseby. Keep us posted        

  

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

Professor John Morrill gave the First Barry Coward Memorial Lecture. Organised by the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, it was fitting that a historian of Morrill's statue gave this lecture. This is the first time I have heard John Morrill speak. I do not agree with his type of historiography, but he is a historian worth listening too.

In his introductory remarks, he made a fitting tribute to the memory of Barry Coward. Morrill regretted his untimely death and was saddened by it.

Morrill used the lecture to outline the project that he and a team of eight editors chosen by Oxford University Press to assemble a five-volume edition of Oliver Cromwell's collected writings and speeches. This edition will give us a more concrete and precise appreciation of Oliver Cromwell. The result will probably result in a significant reappraisal of "Our Chief of Men". This is a long-overdue project. The fact that the team won significant funding of £250,000 from Leverhulme Trust is testimony to its importance. 

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

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

In his hand-out given at the lecture Morrill gives us an example of the obstacles his team has encountered during their research. Probably one the more well-known misinterpretations of Cromwell's speeches, took place at the opening of the Barebones Parliament. One version, made in 1654, says:" I confess I never looked to see such a day as this – it may not be nor you neither – when Jesus Christ should be so owned as He is, at this day, and in this work. Jesus Christ is owned this day by your call, and you own Him by your willingness to appear for Him; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures can, to the day of the power of Christ. God manifests it to be the day of the power of Christ, having, through so much blood, and so much trial as hath been upon this, made this one of the great one of the great issues thereof……I confess I did never look back to see such a day

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

According to Morrill, the second statement makes Cromwell a far more radical figure than had previously thought. Nick Poyntz agrees with this assessment as well "The differences are small but important. "Cromwell is far more radical. Members of the Parliament have called forth the spirit of Christ through their presence, and the day itself is "the day of the power of Christ", an apocalyptic climax to the struggles of the past eleven years. In the second version, Cromwell calls it "a day of the power of Christ", which softens its millenarianism. Representatives have been summoned by Christ, not the other way around".[1]

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

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

Nick Poyntz makes a further point  that this oft-quoted phrase: "I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret".

He questions whether these are Cromwell's words as no original letter survives. He also makes the point as does Morrill that parliament had a habit of tidying up speeches and letters of Cromwell. Again to what extent his words are accurate is one of the tasks of the project. It must be said that this is not an envious one.

Morrill made the distinction between civilians killed in the heat of battle as opposed to in cold blood.29 September 1649 two letters from Cromwell sack of  Drogheda were read in the Parliament:"Our men getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the Sword; and indeed being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in Arms in the Town, and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men, divers of the Officers and Soldiers being fled over the Bridge into the other part of the Town, where about One hundred of them possessed St. Peters Church Steeple, some the West Gate, and others, a round strong Tower next the Gate, called St. Sundays:.

These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused; whereupon I ordered the Steeple of St. Peters Church to be fired, where one of them was heard to say in the midst of the flames, God damn me, God confound me, I burn, I burn; the next day the other two Towers were summoned, in one of which was about six or seven score, but they refused to yield themselves; and we knowing that hunger must compel them, set onely good Guards to secure them from running away, until their stomacks were come down: from one of the said Towers, notwithstanding their condition, they killed and wounded some of our men; when they submitted, their Officers were knockt on the head, and every tenth man of the Soldiers killed, and the rest Shipped for the Barbadoes; the Soldiers in the other Town were all spared, as to their lives onely, and Shipped likewise for the Barbadoes. I am perswaded that this is a righteous Judgement of God upon these Barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood, and that it will tend to preventthe effusion of blood for the future".

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

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

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[1] In his own words-https://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/in-his-own-words/

The New Social History and the 17th Century English Revolution

The New Social History Historiography appeared in the late 1960s into the early 1970s. According to some, it was perhaps the last significant historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical phenomenon known as the English revolution. Before the 1970s, most social histories had been limited to a study of everyday life. 

During the last thirty-odd years, the subject has come to prominence despite the genre being a bête noir of some revisionist historians. The most positive side of the new history is that it brought into the public domain the lives of working people or the poor who had been mainly ignored by historians. On the downside this, new history was divorced from any form of economic or materialist explanation of the revolution.

The new social history is not fundamentally different from its predecessor“old social history, which was described as a "hodgepodge" of disciplines, unlike any other historiography. The English historian G. M. Trevelyan saw it as the link between economic and political history, stating, "Without social history, economic history is barren and political history unintelligible."[1]

It was G.M. Trevelyan who gave us the most famous definition when he said that social history was 'the history of the people with the politics left out.' Historians have interpreted this statement in many different ways.

E. H Carr position was “ to analyse the past in the light of the present and the future which is growing out of it, and to cast the beam of the past over the issues which dominate current and future.' It is, he said, the function of the historian not only to analyse what he or she finds significant in the past but also 'to isolate and illuminate the fundamental changes at work in the society in which we live', which will entail a view 'of the processes by which the problems set to the present generation by these changes can be resolved'. People are a product of history, their judgements and actions conditioned by the past, and the historian should work to make them aware of this, but also to make them aware of the issues and problems of their own time; to break the chain that binds them to the past and present, and so enable them to influence the future.”[2]

While English historians were in the forefront of promoting the new social history it would be wrong to classify this movement as an English movement , it had international adherents. Paul E. Johnson described how the movement took place in America in the late 1960s: “The New Social History reached UCLA at about that time, and I was trained as a quantitative social science historian. I learned that "literary" evidence and the kinds of history that could be written from it were inherently elitist and untrustworthy. Our cousins, the Annalistes, talked of ignoring heroes and events and reconstructing the more constitutive and enduring "background" of history. Such history could be made only with quantifiable sources. The result would be a "History from the Bottom Up" that ultimately engulfed traditional history and, somehow, helped to make a Better World. Much of this was acted out with mad-scientist bravado. One well-known quantifier said that anyone who did not know statistics at least through multiple regression should not hold a job in a history department. My own advisor told us that he wanted history to become "a predictive social science." I never went that far. I was drawn to the new social history by its democratic inclusiveness as much as by its system and precision. I wanted to write the history of ordinary people—to historicize them, put them into the social structures and long-term trends that shaped their lives, and at the same time resurrect what they said and did. In the late 1960s, quantitative social history looked like the best way to do that”.[3]

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

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

The new social history's brand of historiography was challenged by a growing number of historians. Ann Hughes highlighted this changing historical fashion by citing the different titles of books produced during this time.

In 1965 Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas the late Barry Coward produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the recent work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation in early modern England.

G E Aylmer posed the question of Rebellion or Revolution. Did he wonder how much difference did the events of 1640-60 make to people's lives? The casualties, damage and other losses arising directly from the fighting, together with the generally disruptive of war on agriculture, industry, trade, transport all seem apparent on the debit side, he, on the other hand, he says the war gave people more social and political mobility, and they were able to achieve more than in any other time.

He makes the point that he believes that a few tens of thousands lost their lives and certainly no more than the worst epidemic of the time. In his chapter on the Quality of Life, he states there was no shift in the economy or radical alteration of the social structure. While he concedes that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive for business development, he says that this would have been the case if Charles 1st Personal rule had continued indefinitely, or if the royalists had won the civil war.[4]

Aylmer steered a middle course between rebellion and revolution the same could be said of a heterogeneous group of historians that included Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Mark Kishlansky, Anthony Fisher who called into question both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the Civil War. They rejected the idea that the war was the product of deep-rooted social changes instead of emphasised short-term factors and political infighting. Mark Kishlansky believed there was a "fallacy of social determinism".

Many historians who have contributed books and articles which have been in favour of the new social history have been mistakenly labelled Marxists. The majority of these historians would not in the slightest call themselves Marxist or be in favour of Marxist historiography.

They certainly would not be in favour of Marx's theory of the individuals' place in history as written in his Critique of Political Economy (1859): he explains"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, who are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.

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

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

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

Lucy Hutchinson describes this attitude so well "almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some oppressed by a certain sort of people in the House whom, to distinguish from the most honourable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men”. [5]

Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness, particularly amongst the lower sections that to have a say in these changes they must organise through some kind of political organisation.

John Morrill was clearly influenced by the New Social History historiography in an interview he describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the for the front of the group "So there came along the new social history which opened up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things to happen for my period was the work which is most obviously associated with Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the Wrightson revolution indeed, in the way in which social history is made, had an enormous impact on those of us who were more interested in high politics. I mean popular politics, constructed high politics. Wrightson’s importance for my work is again something that people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally, in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.[6]

While the debate over the impact is important, it is an expression of a much more fundamental debate over whether the war was linked to social and economic changes in England and Europe at the time.

G M. Trevelyan states that the Cromwellian revolution was not caused by social and economic forces but its causes and motives were a result of the development of political and religious thought and aspiration among men who had no desire to recast society or distribute wealth.

The examination of localised politics as opposed to national politics by the new social history historians fitted in nicely with Morrill's work The Revolt of the Provinces. As Mario Caricchio states “the new social history has demonstrated the parish in England was a political forum. A continuing negotiation of authority and subordination featured within it: gossip, rough music, libel, legal disputes, rioting, petitioning, voting and rebellion represented the diverse forms of conducting and solving the conflict. They constituted elements of “popular political culture”. These were also the means by which the “ordinary people” shaped modern Europe on the continent.”[7]

A historian that has played an important part in the deleopment of the new social history project is Joan Thirsk's who along with Alan Everitt, so much so that they became to known as the Leicester School of Local History. Beginning first with a county study, then through a series of regional and national studies, Thirsk concentrated on producing a regional framework for understanding the early modern agrarian economy and economic change in that period. How much this approach deepened, our understanding of the compound nature of the English Revolution is open to debate. Perhaps the narrowness of their remits has led to accusations that this type of historiography has not had the significant impact its historians had hoped for.

The real Marxist historians had a lot of time for the new social history. Christopher Hill asserted that profound economic and social changes took place during the English revolution so much that “historians are coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in the economic history of England. To back this assertion up saying  "After the civil wars,, successive governments from the Rump onwards, whatever their political complexion, gave much more attention to the interests of trade and colonial development in their foreign policies”. Restrictions which had hampered the growth of capitalist economic activity were removed, never to the restored. “The first condition of healthy industrial growth,” wrote Professor Hughes apropos the salt industry, “was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court”.[8]

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

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

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history

[2] E H Carr, The New Society, op cit, chapter 1.

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history

[4] Rebellion or Revolution-G E Aylmer

[5]Order and Disorder-Lucy Hutchinson

[6] https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html

[7] Radicalism and the English Revolution Mario Caricchio Università di Firenze

[8] In the Century of Revolution

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

William Harvey

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

At the outbreak of war, members of the RCP were like many in the country split in their allegiance. The College of Physicians was led by an elite group of men who wielded significant power. The RCP was not a homogenous body; its members had differing religious and political opinions.

One of the most famous members of the college was the Royalist physician William Harvey who was described as "a man of lowest stature, round-faced; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit; his hair as black as a raven and curling."[1]

Harvey was not only responsible for looking after the King's medical requirements but made a significant contribution to the development of medicine by showing how blood circulated the body. He said of his discovery "I found the task so truly arduous... that I was almost tempted to think... that the movement of the heart was only to be comprehended by God. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when the diastole took place because of the rapidity of the movement." [2]

During the civil war, Harvey took no time in declaring his allegiance to the crown. Many members switched sides during the war which enabled them to navigate "their way through the conflict, pragmatically switching sides".

The exhibition has a selection of audio readings concentrating on different parts of the civil war. One such reading is "a true copy of the high court of justice for the tryal of Charles published London `1684

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

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

In one memorable exchange, the Clerk of the Court read "Charles Stuart, King of England, you have been accused on behalf of the people of England, of high treason, and other crimes, the court have determined that you ought to answer the same. To this, the King replied "I will answer the same as soon as I know by what authority you do this". Stubborn to the end the Kings last words  on the scaffold were "I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbances can be."[3]

One of the significant weaknesses of the exhibition is its failure to go into any detail as regards the significant dissension of many members towards the monarchy.  We get a small glimpse of this dissension in a quote used in the exhibition '...when dissolution and idleness had put an end to good manners), some seditious 'tribunes' of the people and ill-conditioned scoundrels ... had defiled all things ... the Phoenix ... rose at last ...' but fails to explain its meaning.

According to William Birken[4] there was significant dissension amongst men of medicine. According to him "In England, medicine has always been something of a refuge for individuals whose lives have been dislocated by religious and political strife. This was particularly true in the seventeenth century when changes in Church and State were occurring at a blinding speed".

Christopher Hill has described the "erratic careers of some radical clergy and intellectuals who studied and practised medicine in times of dislocation. A list pulled together from Hill's book would include: John Pordage, Samuel Pordage, Henry Stubbe, John Webster, John Rogers, Abiezer Coppe, William Walwyn and Marchamont Nedham. Medicine, as a practical option for a lost career, or to supplement and subsidize uncertain jobs, can also be found among Royalists and Anglicans when their lives were similarly disrupted during the Interregnum".

He continues "among these were the brilliant Vaughan twins, Thomas, the Hermetic philosopher, and Henry, the metaphysical poet and clergyman; the poet, Abraham Cowley; and the mercurial Nedham, who was dislocated both as a Republican and as a royalist. The Anglicans Ralph Bathurst and Mathew Robinson were forced to abandon their clerical careers temporarily for medicine, only to return to the Church when times were more propitious".[5]

The exhibition is a rare glimpse into the treasure trove of material held by the RCP. A lot of this material has rarely been seen in public.

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[1]https://upscgk.com/Online-gk/5843/harvey-stayed-at-the-kings-school-for-five-years-after-which-he-matriculated-at-gonville-and-caius-college-in-cambridge

[2] William Harvey, On The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In Animals

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

[4] The Dissenting Tradition in English Medicine of the 17th and 18th Century William Birken Medical History 1995

[5] The Experience of Defeat-Christopher Hill

A Letter to Richard Cavendish

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

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

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

The life and death struggle was deeply political and to no small extent decided the course of the 20th century and not for the better. In fact, mankind paid a very heavy price for Trotsky’s “fall” from power and subsequent murder. 

Your article does not mention a single political difference between Trotsky and Stalin. I admit you have a lack of space, but your article would have been strengthened by at least a cursory examination over the controversy over Stalin’s theory of building socialism in a single country versus Trotsky’s insistence on global revolution. 

This aside, there are other things in the article that I would like to address. One of your turn of phrase left me a little cold and to say the least was a little sinister. To describe Trotsky’s murderer as a “charming Spanish Communist painter “is a little ridiculous. 

He was a murderer who pursued Trotsky and under Stalin’s personal order caved his skull with an ice pick, perhaps you could explain what was charming about this.

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

  

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

Notes

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

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

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

I am grateful for this comment although, alas, I do not think it is right. After his discussion of the dissolution of the Short Parliament, John Adamson did not proceed directly to a discussion of the Petition of the 12 peers but analysed the attitudes of the 2nd Earl of Warwick and his allies towards the Caroline regime in the 1630s and the evidence for collusion in the summer of 1640 between the members of the aristocratic Junto and the Scottish Covenanters.

He identified Maurice Thompson, John Venn and Richard Shute (Noble revolt, page 79) as the bearers of the petition from London supporting the peers' petition: Thompson and Venn had had links with Warwick through their interests in colonization since the late-1620s and in the 1630s, so his point is valid.

There is, in fact, a mass of material in The Noble Revolt on the importance of popular pressures on the proceedings of the two Houses in 1640-1642: if you do not believe me, please read Pages 285-288 on the end of Strafford's life or Pages 468-477 on tumults in the capital. He was and is interested in the impact of demonstrations and the threat of violence in London in this and succeeding periods.

Fortunately, a lot is known about how these demonstrations, etc., were organised from the works of Valerie Pearl, Robert Ashton, Keith Lindley and others. (See Clarendon Ms.20, fol.129 for Venn's role in coordinating such demonstrations.)It is, in any event, for John Adamson to develop his arguments as he wishes rather than meeting old-fashioned Marxist prescriptions.

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

Anonymous

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

For me, the main value of Adamson's work is to reopen the problem of the politics of the early 1640s. Which is a legitimate accomplishment. But I understand Livesey's uneasiness.

CT Reply

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

I am afraid, Keith, that this is not a convincing argument. It is factually incorrect to claim that all historiography before the 1970s offered some kind of explanation founded on a relationship between the 'base' of English society and its 'superstructure' as a reading of Hume, Mackintosh, Hallam, Macaulay and Trevelyan will show.

It is a matter of debate when the heyday of British capitalism occurred but no one has yet shown how this shaped Whig historiography or made it more convincing. In any case, the origins of 'revisionism' lie not in the 1970s, whether early or late, but in the late-1960s when it was increasingly obvious that the kind of deterministic explanations offered by Tawney, Hill, Stone and others were unsustainable because they were at variance with the surviving evidence.

By 1973, the work of 'revision' as Ted Rabb would describe it and the reaction against the kind of history being written by Stone and Hill wa s well under way. This was long before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reached the front rank of politics on either side of the Atlantic and long before John Adamson began his work on the 1640s.

 No so -called revisionist poured scorn on Marxist theory nor has Adamson downplayed the role of Oliver Cromwell. You should read the latter's essay on 'Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament' in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Longman. 1990) as penance. However one defines the political preferences of those you regard as 'revisionists', they were not predominantly or even obliquely right-wing.

Tristram Hunt and Simon Schama are, moreover, hardly specialists in seventeenth-century English history. I ought to add that Kishlansky's attacks on Adamson in and after 1990 had a great deal more to do with academic politics than your account allows. 

There was no requirement on Adamson to preface his study of the political role of the peerage in the 1640s with an analysis of the class composition of the gentry or of its relationship with the Stuart Crown: that would have meant giving up his priorities in research and writing to address a long obsolete Marxist agenda. It was for him to write as he chose and to investigate the issues he wanted to examine. That is the right and duty of every historian. But do not suppose that he is or has been unaware of the connections between the members of the Junto in 1640-1642 and of the grandees later in the decade with the worlds of London mercantile and artisan politics.

The novelty of his work lies in the revelations he has already made about such links and that he will make in subsequent publications. He has reshaped the historiography of the period already and will continue to do so because his work rests on secure evidential foundations, not on a political approach to the past.      

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

The primary purpose of this article is to answer Nick Poyntz claim that john Adamson's work "breaks new ground". It will do so within the context of Adamson's revisionist historiography.

For the uninitiated Adamson's primary work has been the book the Noble Revolt.  Its basic premise is that a small Junto made up of nobles led a revolt which caused the overthrow of Charles 1st.

Adamson's book is well written and researched as you would expect from a Cambridge University-based historian while the book contains new material that is not enough to say that the book breaks new ground.

In order to break new ground or create new historiography, he would have to at least absorb the two most crucial historiography that of Whig and Marxist in order to create a new synthesis. Not doing this means he has not created new historiography but continues with post revisionist historiography. 

As Mary Fulbrook perceptively writes"The empirical inductivism of revisionists, and their somewhat strident anti- orthodoxy, have failed to provide adequate positive theses to fill the vacuum left by their negative critiques. The over-emphasis on the politics of patronage, apart from being inadequately established historically, suffers from theoretical and metatheoretical shortcomings.40 Theoretically, it can really only tell us something about the medium of politics; it is an empirically open question whether or not there is any ideological content to the formation and struggles of different political factions. Metatheoretically, such exaggerated stress on patron-client relationships is at least as philosophically degrading as any other form of downplaying the autonomy of human action - such as seeing men merely as agents of historical forces - and should, therefore, be rejected by revisionists on their arguments.”

In my opinion, for a piece of work to break new ground has to be more than a well-reasoned argument or a rather large amount of text or have high colour pictures. It must be able to define itself. Revisionism and post revisionism is nothing more than a mishmash of theories that lead the study of the English revolution into a dead end.

Noble Revolt

Whether or not as John Morrill said that the revisionism that developed in the early part of the 1970s was a movement, it had one defining characteristic; it was hostile to Marxism.

This hostility to Marxism was not so much from a historical standpoint but more to do with politics. It is no accident that the growth of a revisionist movement coincided with the rise of a right-wing political movement spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This movement gained ground with the final collapse of the USSR, which led to numerous theories that the fall of Communism meant that the socialist project had failed. The most pessimistic expression of these principles came with the End of History by Francis Fukuyama. The English Civil War was not the only subject that had a noticeable revisionist trend during this time. From the 1970s Studies of the into the Russian Revolution and French revolution provoked a similar revisionist backlash.

Historians and their historiography do indeed go out of fashion. However, historiographies that were fashionable two hundred years ago still can contribute to our understanding of the war, despite the protestations of Christopher Thompson.

Adamson refers to the English gentry but does not go into any extensive detail as to the class composition of the gentry. What was its economic position towards the king? Adamson is a skilled historian, but a more detailed description of the class struggle involving his Cabal would have made the Noble Revolt far more precise and concrete.

Adamson's work has previously come under ferocious attack from the historian Mark Kishlansky.

I am not saying that Adamson is a left-wing historian by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been modus operandi of right-wing historians to attack other historians in order to push them and their study of history to the right. You only have to look at the"Storm Over The Gentry" Debate to see this.

Kishlansky is first essay Saye What challenged Adamson’s historiography. In reality, this essay was nothing more than a catalogue of Adamson’s errors. Kishlansky’s critique of Adamson does seem to border on academic bullying. In all probability, Adamson made some errors but who has not.

What lies behind Kishlansky's attack is his opposition to Adamson, concluding the facts. In this quote from Conrad Russell, he appears to back Kishlansky's attack on Adamson saying“What makes a historian master of his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from this discipline, risks acquiring dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable".

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

This dispute with Kishlansky clearly bothered Adamson so much so that his book does contain a large number of footnotes 191 to be precise maybe this was a defensive reaction to Kishlansky's critique. Kishlansky alleged that Adamson was “deliberately abusing and misreading sources

As  Nick points out "the unfortunate thing about the debate was that it tended to damn the rest of Adamson's much wider thesis; unfairly, in my view”.

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

The Royal Stuarts is a portrait of one of the most famous families in British history. It is open to debate whether they were the family that "shaped Britain" and can be challenged quite easily.

Logically Massie starts at the beginning of the Stewart's reign. The spelling of the family name was changed to 'Stuart' by Mary, Queen of Scots, to "stop the French mispronouncing it".

The Stuarts began life as wealthy landowners from Brittany, France before moving to Scotland where they acquired the hereditary office of 'steward' to the Scottish kings. Massie book highlights the fact that the family span a considerable range of British history, from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic period.

Massie's book is not an academic account of the Stuarts and if truth be told it reads more like a novel as Noel Malcolm poetically writes "he has the novelist's ability to conjure up context and background in a brief sketch, the journalist's knack of summarising arguments and issues, and the storyteller's gift for picking out those key actions or remarks that bring a person's character to life".[1]

Massie's generous and in some cases, sloppy use of footnotes is annoying but not a game-changer. However, his use of historians is mainly from an older generation is annoying. His book would be much better with the use of more modern historians.

One of the biggest gripes against Massie according to several leading historians is the fact that he is not a professional historian, and this has led to these historians to bemoan the fact that he has used no original primary sources or consulted any manuscripts.

Tim Harris is equally scathing in his review of the book "The footnoting is sloppy. Many quotes are not footnoted at all, and when they are, often, no page numbers are given. Moreover, Massie appears to be completely ignorant of much of the relevant historiography. The work of distinguished scholars at the world's leading universities is ignored: John Morrill (Cambridge), Clive Holmes (Oxford), Mark Kishlansky (Harvard), Daniel Szechi (Manchester), Ronald Hutton (Bristol), and John Miller (London), to name but a few. Massie seems to think the last word on Charles II is the work of Arthur Bryant and Hester Chapman. Normally when those outside the profession turn their hand to writing history, it is because they have a deep love of the field. Massie seems to hold the world of professional historical scholarship in contempt."[2]

Other mistakes include Massie citing that Charles Ist did 'find refuge' in Carisbrooke Castle, this is not strictly true as he was in reality held under armed parliamentary guard. Massie asserts Charles 'almost certainly' did not read Hobbes's Leviathan. However, this is contradicted by the fact Hobbes himself gave that a manuscript copy.

Historiography

From a historiography standpoint, Massie's book is part of a cottage industry of Royalist studies. The book is one dimensional in that it pays minimal attention if all to the profound economic changes that covered the reign of the Stuart family. Nothing is learnt of the close connection of the Stuarts to a section of the growing mercantile class that grew up in the 15th and 16th centuries and came of age in the 17^th century and played no small role in the English revolution.

Also, a kiss of death of any book is when the historian appears to have sympathy for his or her subject. Massie indicates sympathy for Charles.  Massie is a very conservative writer, and the book would not look out of place in the growing revisionist historiography. The main characteristic of this historiography being hostility to both Whig and Marxist historiography.

Massie also believes that Charles was not responsible for the civil war it was nasty parliaments fault. Massie uncritically presents the counterfactual argument If Charles had not been so stubborn, then things might not have developed into a civil war.

Massie, as one writer states "is well known for advocating a Tory viewpoint. Stuarts are meat and drink to conservative revisionist historians because their complex personalities and the shifting, pre-modern nature of their kingdoms (plural after 1603) made them unusually susceptible to interpretative spin. Stuart reputations go up and down like the stock market".

To conclude, Massie is an excellent writer and his approach throughout the book is intelligent and does not talk down to the reader. However, do we need another book on the Stuarts that mostly rehashes previous work and offers nothing new?

           

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[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7724980/The-Royal-Stuarts-by-Allan-Massie-review.html

[2] Review The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family that Shaped Britain by Allan Massie Review by Tim Harris -The Historian, Vol. 75, No. 2 (SUMMER 2013), pp. 392-393

Adamson review: a response

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

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

From Chris Thompson

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

Let me begin with the historiographical issues he raises. Nineteenth and early-twentieth century Whig historians argued that the English Civil Wars of the 1640s were the result of constitutional and religious struggles that paved the way for the establishment of a limited monarchy alongside Parliamentary supremacy, the rule of law, freedom of the press and religious toleration after the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. These were the Whigs’ themes from the time of Hallam and Macaulay to that of G.M.Trevelyan. This argument was rejected by Marxist historians and those historians influenced by Marx in the period before the Second World War and after it.

One thinks of figures like R.H.Tawney, Christopher Hill and others who believed that antecedent economic and social changes explained the origins and course of the ‘English Revolution’. Of course, there were historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was definitely not a Marxist, but who had his own socio-economic explanation to advance in the late-1940s and early-1950s.

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

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

There was no attempt in the 1970s by the so-called revisionists to put forward explanations entailing “a rejection of both the Marxist and Whig views of English Civil War historiography” or “to pour scorn on Marxist theory”. Whig views were regarded as methodologically flawed and Marxist ones as anachronistic and irrelevant. They had ceased to matter. It is certainly wrong to claim that John Adamson’s “politics and historical attitudes were formulated during the Thatcher era.” John Adamson was a graduate of the University of Melbourne and arrived in Cambridge long after Mrs Thatcher had become Prime Minister. There is nothing in his book to suggest that he viewed the main actors in the period before the end of January, 1642 as reacting blindly to events or that he fails to explain or does not want to explain what provoked this revolt of the nobles and their allies. Equally clearly, he has nothing in its text or in the introduction to the volume of essays he edited in 2009, The English Civil War, to suggest any denigration of Oliver Cromwell or that he particularly admired King Charles I.

When Keith Livesey says that the book “contains significant omissions which include the significant role played by the Earl of Essex as Parliamentary commander after the outbreak of the civil war, the creation of the Royalist party, the significance of the New Model Army, the military defeat and elimination of the King, and the abolition of the House of Lords”, the chronological and logical fallacies involved in such claims are all too clear. None of these things had happened by the end of January, 1642 and thus fell outside the scope of John Adamson’s book. They will, no doubt, be dealt with in his later volumes.

Take, for example, the proposition advanced in his review that “Adamson does not touch upon any of the controversies over the war” and the contention four paragraphs later that he “accused some historians of relying too much on large abstract forces and opposed a downplaying of the role of the individual. He said”, so Keith Livesey argues, “he did not agree that long term views got us anywhere or that it was a bourgeois revolution. He [Adamson] felt that this “economic determinist” viewpoint did not explain too much.” 

The two claims are contradictory. But, if one reads Adamson’s book carefully, it is possible to see that he did engage with earlier historians’ interpretations – e.g. throughout the footnotes and in his epilogue (Pages 513-516) and that the bulk of his introduction to the 2009 volume of essays considers historiographical issues as a prelude to the work of his contributors. Nowhere in the book is there any comment to link the decline of Marxist influence on Civil War historiography with the fall of the Berlin Wall or to explain the English Revolution as a result of Charles I’s inexperience and vanity. Furthermore, no one can massage the egos of dead aristocrats.

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