Professor John Morrill’s inaugural Barry Coward Memorial
Lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, was
by any measure an impressive scholarly performance. Morrill is one of the most
accomplished historians of the English Revolution working today, and his five‑volume
edition of Cromwell’s writings — supported by a substantial Leverhulme grant —
will undoubtedly become the definitive textual resource for future scholarship.
His tribute to Barry Coward was warm, sincere, and entirely fitting.
But Morrill’s lecture, and the monumental editorial project
it announced, also exposes the deeper limits of contemporary Cromwell studies.
It reveals a historiographical method that is technically rigorous yet
politically anaemic; a scholarship capable of restoring Cromwell’s words with
unprecedented precision while leaving the social and class content of the
English Revolution fundamentally untouched.
From a Marxist perspective, Morrill’s method exemplifies the
wider trend in bourgeois historiography: focusing on textual precision and
individual agency, which masks the revolutionary forces of the 1640s and the
social classes that shaped Cromwell. This essay presents a summary of Morrill’s
lecture alongside a Marxist critique of its underlying historiographical
approach.
Morrill’s Project: Restoring Cromwell’s Voice
Morrill announced a much-needed scholarly project: a
detailed, critically edited collection of Cromwell’s speeches and writings.
Current editions—Carlyle’s romanticised 1845 compilation and Lomas’s 1904
revision—are full of errors, missing details, and editorial changes. Morrill’s
team of eight editors plans to produce the most accurate text yet by examining
all manuscripts and printed editions, aiming to eliminate two centuries of
inaccuracies.
The example he offered — two versions of Cromwell’s speech
opening the Barebones Parliament highlights the issue. A 1654 version refers to
“the day of the power of Christ,”. In contrast, a later edition softens this to
“a day of the power of Christ,” subtly transforming Cromwell from an
apocalyptic prophet to a devout statesman. Morrill contended that these
modifications add up to a significantly changed perception of Cromwell. The
project is undoubtedly valuable, as it aims to provide scholars with the most
precise texts of Cromwell ever compiled. However, ensuring textual accuracy
does not necessarily mean that the historical understanding will be equally
precise.
The Fetish of Accuracy: A Technical Solution to a
Political Problem
Morrill’s lecture consistently focused on the importance of
“accuracy.” He pointed out Carlyle's carelessness, Lomas's slight improvement,
and Abbott's strong ideological stance. Morrill’s edition aims to address these
issues. However, this focus on textual precision reveals a broader
methodological belief: that understanding Cromwell depends on finding his
“true” words. This approach reflects scholarly obsession — the idea that the
authentic sentence will reveal the genuine Cromwell.
A Marxist perspective emphasises the importance of class
struggle in understanding Cromwell’s words. Whether he referred to “the day of
the power of Christ” or “a day” is less important than analysing the social
forces behind his speech. The key questions are: what social interests
motivated Cromwell’s language, and how did it serve revolutionary goals?
Morrill’s method falls short because it views Cromwell’s speeches as isolated
entities, ignoring their role as ideological expressions shaped by class interests.
Cromwell as a Figure Re‑Made to Suit Ruling‑Class Needs
Morrill recognised that each
century has its own version of Cromwell—whether Carlyle’s Victorian hero,
Abbott’s proto-fascist leader, or the moderate constitutional figure of the
mid-century—each reflecting the ideological needs of its time. However, Morrill
did not explore the deeper implication: Cromwell’s image is not merely
misinterpreted but is intentionally constructed as a political tool. Bourgeois
historiography repeatedly reimagines Cromwell to reinforce the ideological
foundations of the modern British state. From a Marxist perspective, Cromwell
cannot be viewed as a timeless “great man.” Instead, he must be seen as the
political representative of an emerging bourgeois class whose interests called
for the dismantling of feudal absolutism, the creation of a national market,
the consolidation of capitalist property, and the suppression of plebeian
democratic movements. This is the version of Cromwell that bourgeois
historiography refuses to acknowledge—and thus remains invisible.
Against Revisionism: The
Bourgeois Evasion of the English Revolution
For over forty years,
"revisionist” Civil War scholarship has held sway in the British academic
world. It claims to be objective, fact-based, and opposed to Whig history.
However, it is actually the most politically cautious interpretation ever used
to analyse the English Revolution. Its main accomplishment has been to
undermine the idea of revolution itself—instead portraying a major historical
turning point as merely a collection of local conflicts, religious feelings,
and personal miscommunications.
Revisionism’s approach is
straightforward: break down, remove politics, and dissolve distinctions. While
earlier thinkers viewed history as a revolutionary clash between social orders,
revisionists see only “multiple kingdoms,” “local contexts,” and "parish
politics." Where Marxists highlight the rise of the bourgeoisie and the
fall of feudal absolutism, revisionists claim class is “anachronistic,”
“over-systematised,” or simply “not evident in the sources.” Similarly,
movements like the Levellers and Diggers, originally seen as democratic and
proto-communist, are reinterpreted by revisionists as “pressure groups,”
“agitators,” or “political minorities.”
The outcome is a
historiography where events lack intentional causes, especially social ones.
The English Revolution appears as a chain of accidents. Cromwell is seen as a
man responding to crises. The New Model Army is viewed as a disciplinary issue.
Ireland is considered a tragic misunderstanding. Radicalism is dismissed as
mere noise. This is not genuine scholarship; it is ideological suppression.
Revisionism appeared in the
late 20th century, coinciding with the British academy's move away from social
history, class analysis, and materialist views. It presents a reassuring story:
the Civil War was not a revolution but just a “war of three kingdoms.” Its
participants are seen not as representatives of social forces, but as
individuals driven by religious differences. Its conclusion is not the end of
feudalism but just a constitutional adjustment. Essentially, revisionism
rejects the revolution to dismiss its repercussions.
It cannot acknowledge that the
English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It cannot acknowledge that
Cromwell was the political instrument of a rising class. It cannot acknowledge
that plebeian movements represented the unfulfilled democratic content of the
struggle. It cannot acknowledge that revolutionary violence was structurally
necessary.
Instead, it presents a
Cromwell who is psychologically nuanced but socially insubstantial, a
Parliament that is complex in structure yet devoid of class distinctions, and a
revolution that paradoxically isn't truly a revolution. This is why revisionism
has become so appealing to the modern academy: it sanitises history. It strips
away the explosive elements of the 1640s—the overthrow of monarchy, the mobilisation
of people with low incomes, the rise of democratic calls, and the development
of capitalist social relations—and substitutes a politically neutral mosaic of
“contexts." A Marxist critique pierces through this illusion. The English
Revolution was not a mistake, nor a local crisis, nor a religious conflict. It
was the first major bourgeois revolution, and its contradictions—its
radicalism, violence, and repression of democratic forces—mirror the
conflicting interests of the class driving it. Revisionism fails to recognise
this because it cannot accept it. Its goal isn't to explain the revolution but
to diminish its significance.
Ireland and the Politics of Sanitisation
The most insightful part of Morrill’s lecture focused on
Ireland. He highlighted uncertainties in casualty numbers, questioned the
reliability of Cromwell’s letters, and noted Parliament’s tendency to
"tidy up” his words. He carefully differentiated between civilians killed
in combat and those killed after surrender. While this stance of meticulous
neutrality seems objective, it serves a political purpose by diverting
attention from the underlying reality: the Irish campaign was an element of the
brutal consolidation of a new bourgeois state.
The Drogheda massacre—regardless of how its details are
reconstructed—was not merely a tragic mistake. It was a calculated act of
terror executed by a revolutionary force whose triumph depended on dismantling
the ancient Irish order. Morrill’s approach, by emphasising textual
uncertainty, downplays the revolutionary violence central to the English
bourgeois revolution.
Morrill’s approach exemplifies
the broader shift towards revisionism in Civil War historiography. This
perspective critiques the traditional Whig narrative of constitutional
progress, replacing it with an equally ideological focus on local grievances,
religious sensitivities, and individual agency. It breaks down the revolution
into a series of contingencies, interprets class struggle through cultural
anthropology, and views Cromwell as a psychologically intricate individual
managing crises. Instead of seeing the revolution as driven by material forces,
it portrays it as a patchwork of personal decisions. Conversely, a Marxist
perspective argues that Cromwell was not merely contingent but a necessary
outcome—shaped structurally by the decline of feudalism and the rise of the
bourgeoisie.
The Erasure of Radical Movements
A key aspect of Morrill’s historiography is how it downplays
radical movements. Levellers, Diggers, and Army agitators—the democratic and
proto-communist groups of the 1640s—are only seen as “pressures” on Cromwell,
not as independent class movements driven by their own historical logic.
Cromwell’s suppression of these groups is viewed as political prudence, not as
a reflection of his role in defending property and supporting the “gentlemen
Independents." This approach is not objective scholarship; it reduces
plebeian politics to mere background noise, ideologically diminishing their
significance.
The Cleaned Portrait Without the Canvas
Morrill concluded his lecture with a metaphor: Cromwell is
like a Great Master painting that takes on a new life when cleaned and
restored. The metaphor is insightful—Morrill restores the portrait but leaves
the canvas untouched. The Cromwell he depicts is precise in text but stripped
of political context, portraying him as a man of conscience rather than a
revolutionary. A Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell’s significance lies
not in his personality but in his role as the military and political representative
of a rising bourgeoisie, both triggering and holding back revolution. Morrill’s
approach cannot uncover this deeper, class-based understanding of Cromwell
because it doesn't address the class dynamics of the English Revolution.
What We Really Know About Cromwell
Morrill’s edition will be
invaluable, providing the most precise collection of Cromwell texts to date.
However, it won’t answer the fundamental question Morrill asked: What do we
truly know about Oliver Cromwell? To truly understand Cromwell, we must grasp
the class forces that drove him to power, the economic changes that enabled the
revolution, the social tensions that influenced his religious rhetoric, and the
historical necessity that positioned him as the figurehead of a rising
bourgeois class. Achieving this understanding requires a Marxist analysis—an
approach that the bourgeois academy has largely avoided for decades. Morrill’s
project cleaned the portrait. It will not reveal the painter.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Sources on Revisionism
Responses to Revisionism
Marxist and Social-Historical Works
Historiographical Context
The New Social History emerged as a historiographical
movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and is arguably the last
significant school of the twentieth century to attempt a full explanation of
the English Revolution. Before the 1970s, most social history had been confined
to the study of everyday life. Over the following three decades the field grew
steadily in prominence, despite becoming something of a bête noire for
revisionist historians. Its most valuable contribution was to bring the lives of
working people and the poor — long neglected by mainstream historians — into
the historical record. Its most significant weakness, from a materialist
standpoint, was its divorce from economic explanation.
In its methods, the New Social History was not radically
different from the older "social history" that preceded it, a field
the English historian G. M. Trevelyan once described as a hodgepodge of
disciplines unlike any other historiographical tradition. Trevelyan himself saw
social history as the connective tissue between economic and political history,
writing that "without social history, economic history is barren and
political history unintelligible."[1] It was also Trevelyan who supplied
the movement's most famous, and most contested, definition: social history as
"the history of the people with the politics left out." Historians
have argued over what exactly he meant by this ever since.
E. H. Carr took a different view of the historian's task
altogether, insisting that the past should be analysed in the light of the
present and the future growing out of it. For Carr, the historian's job was not
simply to identify what was significant in the past, but to "isolate and
illuminate the fundamental changes at work in the society in which we
live," and in doing so to help people understand the processes by which
the problems of their own generation might be resolved. People are shaped by
history — their judgements and actions conditioned by what came before — and
Carr believed the historian's task was to make that conditioning visible,
thereby loosening its grip and opening the possibility of shaping the future
rather than simply repeating the past.[2]
An international movement
Although English historians were at the forefront of the New
Social History, it was never a purely English phenomenon. The American
historian Paul E. Johnson recalled its arrival at UCLA in the late 1960s, where
he was trained as a quantitative social science historian. He was taught that
"literary" evidence, and the kinds of history that could be built
from it, were inherently elitist and unreliable. The French Annalistes,
meanwhile, spoke of setting aside heroes and events altogether in favour of
reconstructing the more enduring social "background" of history — a
project that, in Johnson's recollection, could only be carried out with
quantifiable sources, and was pursued at times with what he called
"mad-scientist bravado." One prominent quantifier reportedly argued
that no one ignorant of statistics through multiple regression should hold a
job in a history department; Johnson's own doctoral adviser wanted history to
become "a predictive social science." Johnson never went that far
himself. What drew him to the New Social History was its democratic
inclusiveness as much as its statistical precision — the ambition to write the
history of ordinary people, situating them within the social structures and
long-term trends that shaped their lives while still recovering what they
actually said and did.[3]
The French Annales School profoundly shaped British social
history. Keith Wrightson, in English Society, argued that the social
changes of the period were evolutionary rather than revolutionary, while posing
a genuinely difficult question at the outset of his book: to what extent was
English society polarised enough to produce civil war, revolution, and the
execution of a king? And to what extent did growing social inequality shape the
social, economic, and political events that followed?
It is worth remembering just how improbable the events of
the 1640s would have seemed in advance. A straw poll taken at the start of the
seventeenth century asking whether England would, within forty years,
experience civil war, revolution, and regicide would almost certainly have been
met with disbelief. There was no real precedent for what took place in 1640.
The leaders of the English Revolution had no earlier revolution to study or
learn from — unlike the leaders of the French and Russian revolutions centuries
later, who could draw on 1640 itself as a model.
A shifting historiographical fashion
The New Social History's dominance did not go unchallenged.
Ann Hughes illustrated the shifting fashion by comparing book titles across the
decades: where Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in
England, 1540–1640 in 1965, the late Barry Coward later produced Social
Change and Continuity in Early Modern England, 1550–1750. The substitution
of "continuity" for "revolution" in the more recent title
captures a more qualified, cautious assessment of just how much genuinely
changed in early modern England.
G. E. Aylmer posed the question directly: rebellion, or
revolution? How much difference, he asked, did the events of 1640–60 actually
make to people's lives? On the debit side stood the casualties, material
destruction, and general disruption war brought to agriculture, industry,
trade, and transport. On the other side, Aylmer argued, the period brought
greater social and political mobility, allowing people to achieve more than
they might have in more settled times. He estimated that a few tens of thousands
died as a direct result of the conflict — no more, he suggested, than the worst
epidemic of the era might have claimed. In his chapter on the quality of life,
Aylmer maintained that there was no fundamental shift in the economy or radical
alteration of the social structure. While conceding that England after the
1640s and 1650s was more conducive to business development, he argued this
would likely have happened regardless — whether Charles I's personal rule had continued
indefinitely, or the royalists had won the war outright.[4]
Aylmer steered a middle course between rebellion and
revolution, and he was joined in this by a heterogeneous group of historians —
Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Mark Kishlansky, and Anthony Fletcher among them
— who questioned both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the civil war. They
rejected the idea that the conflict grew out of deep-rooted social change,
emphasising short-term political contingency and factional infighting instead.
Kishlansky in particular argued against what he called the "fallacy of
social determinism."
It is also worth correcting a common misreading: many
historians associated with, or sympathetic to, the New Social History have been
mistakenly labelled Marxists, when the great majority would reject that label
outright — and would certainly reject Marx's own account of the individual's
place in history, as set out in his 1859 Critique of Political Economy:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably
enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely
relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of
their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation
on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond
definite forms of 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... Then begins an era of social
revolution.
Popular politics at the local level
While it is generally accepted that outright unrest and mass
protest during the civil war years were limited, John Morrill has argued that
changes in social and economic policy remained largely under the control of the
"middling sort," whose presence helped prevent large-scale disorder.
There was, nonetheless, real anxiety among sections of the middle class about
the possibility of rioting by people experiencing poverty. Lucy Hutchinson
captured this unease vividly, describing how "almost all the Parliament
garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little people,"
to the point that "many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command"
by a certain sort of person that some in the House distinguished,
disparagingly, as "worsted stocking men."[5] Hutchinson was almost
certainly describing people increasingly influenced by the Levellers, who
articulated an emerging awareness — particularly among the lower orders — that
having a genuine say in these changes required political organisation.
Morrill has spoken candidly about his own debt to the New
Social History, crediting the work of Keith Wrightson in particular as
transformative for historians like himself who were more naturally drawn to
high politics. As Morrill put it, the "Wrightson revolution" in how
social history was written had an enormous impact even on those working on
national and constitutional politics rather than social structure — an
influence he considered, in his own mid-career reflection, absolutely fundamental.[6]
Underlying this debate over impact lies a more fundamental
one: whether the war was genuinely linked to social and economic change in
England and Europe at the time, or whether it can be explained without
reference to those forces at all. G. M. Trevelyan himself took the latter view,
arguing that the Cromwellian revolution was not the product of social and
economic forces, but of developments in political and religious thought among
men who had no desire to recast society or redistribute wealth.
The New Social History's turn toward localised, parish-level
politics — rather than national politics narrowly defined — dovetailed with
Morrill's own work in The Revolt of the Provinces. As Mario Caricchio
has observed, this body of scholarship demonstrated that the English parish
functioned as a genuine political forum: a continuous negotiation of authority
and subordination played out through gossip, "rough music," libel, legal
disputes, rioting, petitioning, voting, and rebellion — the diverse forms
through which conflict was conducted and resolved, and the constitutive
elements of a broader "popular political culture" through which
ordinary people helped shape early modern Europe.[7]
Joan Thirsk, working alongside Alan Everitt, played a
central role in developing this project — the pair became known collectively as
the Leicester School of Local History. Beginning with county-level studies and
expanding into regional and national work, Thirsk built a regional framework
for understanding the early modern agrarian economy and the economic change of
the period. How far this approach deepened our understanding of the composite
nature of the English Revolution remains genuinely open to debate; the
narrowness of its regional remit has led some to argue that this strand of
historiography never achieved the broader impact its practitioners had hoped
for.
Where the real Marxist historians stood
Marxist historians, for their part, generally viewed the New
Social History with considerable sympathy. Christopher Hill maintained that the
English Revolution produced economic and social changes profound enough that,
in his words, "historians are coming more and more to recognise the
decisive significance of these decades in the economic history of
England." Hill pointed out that successive governments from the Rump
Parliament onward, whatever their political complexion, gave far greater
attention to trade and colonial development in their foreign policy than their
predecessors had. Restrictions that had previously hampered capitalist economic
activity were swept away, and never restored. As Professor Hughes observed with
respect to the salt industry, "the first condition of healthy industrial
growth was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court."[8]
Until his death, Hill remained the leading proponent of the
view that the social, economic, and political transformations of the civil war
period amounted to a bourgeois revolution — a genuine turning point not only in
English but in world history. This interpretation has been fiercely contested,
perhaps by no one more forcefully than Peter Laslett, who argued that the very
term "the English Revolution" ought to be abandoned altogether: it
is, he suggested, a construction of our own social and political discourse that
obstructs rather than aids inquiry and understanding, not least because it
forces political, social, and economic change to be read as proceeding at a
single, uniform pace. In Laslett's view, there was never any single set of
events that could properly be called "the English Revolution."
Hill, however, never argued that events proceeded at a
uniform pace across every sphere. His point was rather that grounding these
genuinely complex developments in a social and economic framework helps make
sense of them. What conclusions, then, can reasonably be drawn? On the weight
of the empirical evidence alone, it remains clear that the civil war had a
profound and lasting impact on the social and political fabric of England.
Notes
[1] G. M. Trevelyan, quoted in "Social History," Wikipedia.
[2] E. H. Carr, The New Society, ch. 1. [3] Paul E. Johnson, quoted in
"Social History," Wikipedia. [4] G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or
Revolution? [5] Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder. [6] John
Morrill, interview, Institute of Historical Research, Making History
project. [7] Mario Caricchio,
"Radicalism and the English Revolution" (Università di Firenze). [8]
Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution.
 |
| William Harvey |
The exhibition's treatment of William Harvey is emblematic of its broader method. Harvey, physician to Charles I and discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is presented largely as an isolated genius, his scientific achievement arrived at through what he himself called an "arduous" struggle to comprehend the rapid movement of the heart. What the exhibition declines to interrogate is the relationship between Harvey's unwavering royalism and his social position as a court physician—a dependency that placed him, materially and ideologically, on one side of an emerging bourgeois revolution.
More revealing, and more thoroughly buried, is the exhibition's passing acknowledgment that the College was no homogeneous body, and that many of its members navigated the conflict through opportunist maneuver rather than principle. This is precisely the terrain on which a serious historical account would dwell. The curators gesture at it—noting a single cryptic reference to "seditious tribunes of the people" and "ill-conditioned scoundrels"—but decline to unpack what this tells us about the fear the propertied and professional classes felt toward the plebeian and radical currents unleashed by the war.
Here the exhibition's silence is most damning. As the historian William Birken has observed, medicine in this period functioned as a refuge for men whose careers had been shattered by the political and religious rupture of the age—a milieu that, per Christopher Hill's account, produced figures ranging from radical sectarians like Abiezer Coppe and William Walwyn to displaced Anglican clergy who took up medicine only to abandon it once the Restoration made their old careers safe again. This is the real content of the "dissenting tradition" the exhibition invokes without explaining: not a matter of individual conscience, but a symptom of a social order in crisis, in which whole layers of the educated middle strata were thrown into disarray by the collision between an old order and a rising one.
The exhibition's centerpiece materials on the trial and execution of Charles I—the pro-Royalist tract republished after 1660, the allegorical frontispiece depicting devilish figures dragging a carriage bearing the crown and "three nations" hostage, with the executed king crushed beneath its wheels—are presented with a kind of antiquarian neutrality that flattens their function as counter-revolutionary propaganda. That the King's own reported defiance, demanding to know "by what authority" the court presumed to try him, is allowed to stand unexamined as mere color rather than as the ideological last stand of a doomed absolutism, is symptomatic of the exhibition's unwillingness to draw out the revolution's actual stakes.
None of this is to deny the exhibition's value as an archival event: it opens to public view material that has rarely been displayed. But an exhibition that presents the English Revolution's professional classes as a gallery of individual personalities and curiosities, rather than as a body riven by the same class antagonisms tearing apart the nation at large, forfeits the chance to say anything essential about why this convulsion happened, or what it changed.
I read History Today only intermittently, but individual contributions occasionally warrant closer attention. Your recent column, “Trotsky Offered Asylum,” was one such instance. Although the column’s remit is to revisit episodes from the past, the piece in question was not simply a concise historical vignette. It advanced — implicitly, but unmistakably — a particular interpretation of the political struggle that shaped the fate of the Soviet Union and the international workers’ movement in the twentieth century. It is on this point that I wish to register concern.
Your account presents the conflict between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin as a largely personal or factional contest, a “power struggle” in which Trotsky was the unsuccessful protagonist. This framing is not merely reductive; it effaces the political content of the dispute and thereby distorts its historical significance. The confrontation between Trotsky and Stalin was not an episode of intra‑elite rivalry but the decisive political question confronting the revolutionary movement after 1917: whether socialism could be constructed within the confines of a single, economically backward state, as Stalin and the emergent bureaucratic stratum maintained, or whether — as Trotsky argued — the survival and development of the revolution depended upon its extension to the advanced capitalist centres.
This was not a theoretical disagreement in isolation from social reality. Stalin’s doctrine of “socialism in one country” articulated the interests of a bureaucratic caste that had consolidated power at the expense of the working class and sought accommodation with the existing international order. Trotsky’s insistence on the primacy of world revolution defended the internationalist foundations of October and the strategic orientation of the early Communist International. The defeat of the Left Opposition was therefore not the personal defeat of one revolutionary leader by another; it represented the political triumph of a bureaucratic counter‑revolution over the programme of international socialism. The consequences were profound: the degeneration of the Communist International, the disastrous policies that facilitated Hitler’s rise, the suppression of the Spanish Revolution, and ultimately the Great Terror, in which the generation of Bolsheviks who had led the October Revolution was physically annihilated. None of this essential context appears in your narrative.
I would also draw attention to the language employed in your description of Trotsky’s assassination. Referring to Ramón Mercader as a “charming Spanish Communist painter” is not a harmless stylistic flourish; it obscures the fact that Mercader was an operative of the Soviet secret police, trained and directed by the GPU to carry out a political murder. Similarly, characterising the act of driving an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull as a “stab” is a euphemism that diminishes the brutality and political intent of the crime. Such choices of language have interpretive consequences: they aestheticise an act of state terror and detach it from the political struggle that motivated it.
Finally, your description of Robert Service as “Trotsky’s biographer” is misleading. Service’s book is not a neutral scholarly biography but a polemical work marred by factual inaccuracies and methodological deficiencies. These have been documented extensively, most notably in David North’s In Defence of Leon Trotsky, which provides a systematic critique of Service’s misrepresentations. Readers seeking a rigorous and balanced account of Trotsky’s life and political thought would be better served by Isaac Deutscher’s classic trilogy — The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast — which, despite certain interpretive limitations, remains the standard scholarly treatment.
Given the influence of History Today on a broad readership, the historiographical choices made in such columns matter. A more precise and politically informed account of Trotsky’s exile and assassination would contribute to a clearer understanding of one of the most consequential ideological and political struggles of the twentieth century.
The publication of *The Noble Revolt* marked a pivotal point
in the historiography of the English Revolution. By then, Conrad Russell’s
generation had already challenged the dominant Marxist and Whig orthodoxies of
mid-century scholarship. Adamson’s book stands out as one of the most ambitious
efforts to solidify this revisionist perspective. It is a meticulous work of
archival research, carefully reconstructing the actions of a small aristocratic
group — the Junto — whose political manoeuvrings, Adamson argues, triggered the
crisis of 1640–42.
However, the strengths of the book also highlight the
boundaries of the paradigm it belongs to. Adamson’s work is primarily archival
rather than historiographical. While his narrative is filled with detail, it
lacks theoretical depth, and its political outlook is confined by the
assumptions of a revisionist tradition that has outlived its useful explanatory
role. To grasp this fully, it is necessary to place Adamson within the wider
intellectual and political landscape that originally gave rise to revisionism.
The Revisionist Turn: Politics Disguised as Method
The revisionist movement of the 1970s positioned itself as a
correction to previous methodologies. Its key figures—Russell, Kishlansky,
Morrill—claimed their goal was to rescue early modern history from the
teleological views of Whig constitutionalism and Marxist class analysis. They
focused on factors like contingency, local contexts, patronage networks, and
the micro-politics involved in elite negotiations. Rejecting structural
explanations, they championed empirical inductivism. They argued that the English
Revolution was not truly a revolution but rather a political crisis that had
been misinterpreted by ideologues.
This methodological stance was never free from political
implications. The revisionist shift happened alongside the rise of Thatcher and
Reagan, the decline of post-war social democracy, and a loss of confidence
within the leftist intellectual community. By the late 1980s, Marxism was
viewed not just as outdated but as illegitimate — a remnant of a discredited
political agenda. The 1990s' post-Soviet triumphalism, exemplified by
Fukuyama’s “end of history,” strengthened the perception that structural analysis
was a thing of the past.
Revisionism thrived in this environment because it provided a historiography free of conflict, class struggles, or ideology—a story centered on elite politics that aligned with neoliberal distrust of social explanations. Its opposition to Marxism, notably expressed by John Morrill, was not merely a methodological stance but an ideological one. Consequently, replacing older frameworks didn't indicate their obsolescence but reflected the prevailing political climate that made them unpopular.Adamson’s work must be read against this backdrop. His book is not simply a contribution to revisionism; it is a symptom of its long dominance.
Adamson’s Junto Thesis: Archival Brilliance, Conceptual
Narrowness
The Noble Revolt stands as an impressive accomplishment.
Adamson meticulously reconstructs the political tactics of the Junto — Bedford,
Warwick, Essex, and their allies — using remarkable archival detail. He
demonstrates how they coordinated parliamentary influence, crafted
constitutional rhetoric, and capitalised on the king’s weaknesses. The story is
engaging, the research thorough, and the writing assured.
The book's conceptual scope is quite limited. Adamson offers
a detailed account of the gentry and aristocracy but does not explore their
economic roles or their connections to the crown. The Junto is depicted as a
group of political actors with individual preferences, ambitions, and concerns,
rather than as a social class motivated by material interests. Their actions
are interpreted as political choices rather than responses to social forces.
A more class-conscious approach would have enhanced the
book's clarity and specificity. It would have elucidated the economic pressures
facing the crown, the fiscal crisis of the 1630s, the interplay between
aristocratic initiatives and gentry assertiveness, and the social forces active
in London and the provinces. Such an approach would have linked political
actions to material interests. In essence, it would have provided a synthesis
with Marxist historiography instead of withdrawing from it.
The Kishlansky Affair: Policing the Boundaries of
Interpretation
The debate over Adamson’s work — especially Mark
Kishlansky’s sharp criticisms — is frequently seen as a clash over evidence.
Kishlansky charged Adamson with biased interpretation, misinterpreting sources,
and creating a narrative not backed by the documents. Conrad Russell supported
these criticisms, adding authority and reinforcing the idea that Adamson
breached the field’s methodological standards.
However, the intensity of the critique exposes a more
profound issue: the politics involved in enforcing disciplinary boundaries.
Kishlansky’s responses are part of a longstanding tradition among conservative
scholars who critique alternative views by accusing them of carelessness. The
debate known as the “Storm Over the Gentry” from the 1950s and 60s set a
precedent, where methodological disagreements concealed underlying political
concerns about class, agency, and social conflict.
Adamson was not attacked because his thesis was implausible;
he was attacked because he stretched the revisionist paradigm beyond its
comfort zone. His Junto thesis reintroduced intentionality, coordination, and
elite strategy into a field that had grown wary of any narrative that resembled
structural explanation. Kishlansky’s critique was therefore not simply a
factual audit; it was a defence of a paradigm.
Fulbrook’s Insight: Revisionism as Negation Without
Creation
Mary Fulbrook notes that revisionism criticizes orthodox
beliefs without establishing new ones, which helps explain Adamson’s role in
history writing. While revisionism challenged the Whig and Marxist stories, it
did not provide a clear alternative. It favored empirical evidence over theory,
emphasized structure over patronage, and highlighted elite negotiation instead
of social conflict. This approach was strong in critique but weak in creating
comprehensive theories.
Adamson’s book demonstrates this pattern. It is full of
empirical detail but lacks theoretical depth. Instead of engaging with older
frameworks, it criticizes them through omissions. It provides no new
terminology for understanding the English Revolution. Its 191 detailed,
cautious, and comprehensive footnotes reveal a paradigm that equates dense
archives with better explanations. The outcome is a book that expands on an
existing framework instead of surpassing it. Adamson doesn't explore new ideas;
he simply develops the same concepts more thoroughly.
V. Conclusion: The Exhaustion of the Revisionist Paradigm
Adamson’s The Noble Revolt is a highly accomplished example
of the revisionist approach. It stands out as an important piece of archival
scholarship, yet it doesn't push historiographical boundaries. Its limited
political scope, absence of class analysis, and refusal to engage with
traditional frameworks highlight the restrictions of a paradigm that has shaped
early modern studies for fifty years.
The English Revolution remains highly debated in British
history. Its significance cannot be explained solely through patronage
networks. The key structural changes of the seventeenth century—such as fiscal
crises, religious conflicts, ideological debates, and the emergence of new
social groups—call for a historiography that combines political action with
material interests. Revisionism falls short in providing this integrated
perspective. Adamson’s work clearly illustrates why.
Contemporary historians should aim to go beyond the
revisionist paradigm by revisiting the original explanatory goals of earlier
traditions, while steering clear of their teleological views. This involves
reengaging with themes like class, ideology, and structural analysis, and
acknowledging that the English Revolution was not just a political crisis but a
significant social transformation. Adamson’s contribution is significant, but
its scope is confined by its traditional framework. The future direction of
early modern historiography must take a different path.
Allan Massie’s The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family
That Shaped Britain presents itself as a sweeping chronicle of a dynasty
whose fortunes intersected with some of the most turbulent centuries in British
history. Tracing the Stewart line from its medieval origins to Cardinal York’s
death in 1807, Massie gives readers a brisk, accessible account of monarchs,
marriages, feuds, betrayals, and the long Jacobite aftermath. Reviewers have
praised the book’s wit, pace, and readability, and one American publisher even aimed
it at audiences drawn to the early modern period through television costume
drama rather than archival scholarship. That marketing choice matters: it
reveals the kind of book Massie has written—and the kind of history it pushes
aside.
The Dynastic Frame as Ideological Device
The three centuries Massie surveys — from the Wars of
Independence and the Union of the Crowns to the civil wars, Charles I’s
execution, the Cromwellian republic, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution,
and the Jacobite risings — were more than vivid episodes in a royal family
saga. They were the battleground on which Britain’s shift from feudal-absolutist
monarchy to capitalist state took shape: a period of revolutionary rupture,
class conflict, and constitutional transformation.
Massie’s structure—one chapter per monarch—reduces this complex
historical process to a series of individual lives. Personalities, loyalties,
rivalries, and temperaments bear the explanatory weight that a materialist account
would instead place on the struggle among an entrenched landed aristocracy, an
emerging mercantile bourgeoisie, and the popular forces drawn, unevenly and
often tragically, into both camps.
This is more than a matter of style; it is the ideological work
of dynastic biography. By casting the Stuarts as the story’s driving force, the
genre shifts historical causation from social structures to individual
character. Charles I’s execution becomes a family tragedy instead of the political
expression of a revolutionary crisis involving crown, Parliament, and the
classes each imperfectly represented. Likewise, the Glorious Revolution appears
as a courteous transfer of power rather than the consolidation of a new
bourgeois order. The promotional language — “backstabbing, betrayal, and
ambition gone awry” — makes the substitution explicit. Three centuries of
social transformation are repackaged as the plot of a prestige drama.
Massie’s book is not isolated from its cultural moment. It belongs
to a culture industry that has taught audiences to consume history as
melodrama. Series such as The Tudors,
The Borgias, Versailles, and Outlander
have popularised a model in which the past becomes courtly spectacle, sexual
intrigue, dynastic rivalry, and moralised character drama. Massie writes for
that expectation. The genre shapes the book, but the market shapes it as well,
offering the emotional grammar of television rather than the analytical grammar
of historical explanation. That is why the book’s readability is inseparable
from its weakness: it reads like entertainment, and entertainment cannot
explain revolution.
The Stuart Mythos and Conservative Nostalgia
The Stuarts have long been fertile ground for conservative
romanticisation. Walter Scott’s Jacobite novels, Victorian medievalism, the
cult of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” and the modern tourist economy of Highland
nostalgia all participate in a cultural project that rehabilitates monarchy as
a site of emotional identification rather than political domination.
Massie’s Scottish background and literary formation place his
sympathies firmly within this tradition. His Jacobites are tragic, his exiled
monarchs dignified, and his villains neatly assigned. The result is a narrative
that softens Jacobite reaction into sentimental longing, allowing the emotional
fate of a family to obscure the structural forces behind the Revolution.
What the Genre Cannot Explain
The dynastic-biography form cannot explain why the monarchy
was abolished in 1649, restored in 1660, overthrown again in 1688, or why the
British state that emerged differed fundamentally from the one the Stuarts
inherited. It fails because it cannot account for class, structure, or material
forces; it can only interpret history through character, temperament, and
family drama. For all its craft, Massie’s book therefore becomes less an
explanation of the period than a way of avoiding one.
Even sympathetic reviewers have pointed to the book’s uneven
evidentiary base: a blend of archival material, literary sources, plays,
novels, and earlier histories. That mixture makes the narrative readable but
less reliable. Sharper critics have also noted Massie’s tendency to cast some
figures as heroes and others as villains without the analytical support serious
scholarship demands. These are not incidental defects, but symptoms of a genre
that values narrative satisfaction over historical explanation.
Popular dynastic history sells because it offers readers what
academic history cannot—and should not—provide: the comforting illusion that
great upheavals are ultimately family stories on a grand scale. It makes the
past feel emotionally accessible, morally clear, and narratively ordered. The
strategy is effective, but deeply distorting. A reader may finish The Royal
Stuarts knowing which monarch quarrelled with which sibling, yet still not understand
why a social order was overturned, briefly abolished, and restored on fundamentally
altered terms.
The Royal Stuarts is a well‑crafted, briskly paced
example of a genre built to entertain rather than explain. It succeeds
brilliantly on those terms — hence the enthusiastic notices from readers
approaching the Stuarts as costume drama rather than as a chapter in the
history of the English Revolution.
But readers seeking to understand why the Stuart story cannot
be separated from civil war, regicide, and the revolutionary transformation of
crown, Parliament, and the emerging capitalist order will need to look
elsewhere: to the structural, class-based history this genre works to obscure. Massie
has written a family saga. Britain’s history between the fifteenth and
eighteenth centuries was not a family saga. It was a revolution.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources: Stuart History and the English
Revolution
Jacobitism and the Stuart Afterlife
Popular History, Culture Industry, and Historical
Representation
Historiography and Marxist Approaches
Works on the Stuart Dynasty and Royal Biography
Suggested Further Reading for a Materialist
Interpretation of the Stuart Period
John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles
I is, by its own standards, a formidable achievement: a densely researched
and elegantly written account of the eighteen months from May 1640 to January
1642, when England moved from Charles I’s personal rule to the edge of civil
war. It is also a significant intervention in a long-running historiographical debate.
Its political purpose has received surprisingly little attention in mainstream
reviews, but it should be stated plainly: Adamson offers one of the most
sophisticated recent efforts to displace the Marxist interpretation of the
English Revolution and replace it with an aristocratic, essentially
conservative account of political change.
Adamson places a close circle of peers — including the Earls
of Warwick and Bedford and their allies — at the heart of the crisis of
1640–42. He argues that this “Junto” drove events: first by encouraging the
Scottish Covenanter invasion that forced Charles I to recall Parliament, then by
working persistently in the House of Lords to reshape the monarchy into a
“Venetianised” commonwealth controlled by the aristocracy. In this account, the
Lords rather than the Commons held the initiative, and events were pushed to
breaking point by aristocratic interest and constitutional strategy, not by
religious conviction or popular mobilisation.
As narrative history, the book is highly effective.
Adamson’s extensive archival research — including private correspondence,
estate papers, and parliamentary diaries overlooked by earlier historians — lets
him trace the Junto’s activities in precise detail. His portrayal of Charles I
is equally unsparing: not the unfortunate monarch of schoolbook tradition, but
a stubborn and inept ruler whose repeated misjudgements intensified the crisis.
Few readers will come away without a clearer sense of how badly the king misunderstood
the political situation.
John Adamson and the Revisionist Project
Published in 2007, John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt was
more than a major archival reconstruction of the crisis of 1640–42; it
represented the culmination of a historiographical current that had been gaining
strength for over thirty years. To understand the book’s claims, omissions, and
political implications, it must be read within the revisionist and post-revisionist
tradition that has reshaped studies of the English Revolution since the 1970s.
That tradition arose in direct response to the Marxist interpretation
associated with Christopher Hill and his circle, and it increasingly sought to replace
the structural, class-based analysis that dominated mid-twentieth-century
scholarship.
The Marxist Moment: Hill and the Structural
Interpretation
From the 1940s to the 1970s, Christopher Hill’s work dominated
interpretations of the English Revolution. In The English Revolution 1640,
The Century of Revolution, and The World Turned Upside Down, Hill
argued that the civil war was a bourgeois revolution: a struggle between a
rising commercial and gentry class and a monarchy tied to a declining feudal
order. For Hill, the House of Commons, rather than the Lords, was the
institutional centre where these forces came together. Religion, ideology, and
popular mobilisation were therefore expressions of deeper social change.
Hill’s interpretation was capacious: it made room for the
ideological ferment of Puritanism, the radicalism of sectarian movements, and
the political assertiveness of London. But its foundation was structural. The
English Revolution was not an aristocratic quarrel; it was a conflict rooted in
class dynamics and the transition to capitalism.
By the late 1970s, this framework had become the orthodoxy
against which a younger generation of historians reacted. Revisionism developed
in opposition to Hill’s structuralism. Its leading figures — including John
Morrill, Conrad Russell, and Anthony Fletcher — argued that the English Civil
War was not a revolution but a political crisis shaped by contingent causes:
religious conflict, constitutional misunderstanding, and Stuart misgovernment.
They rejected long-term social explanations and instead emphasised short-term
political events.
The revisionist project had several defining features. It
rejected structural explanations, denying that class conflict or economic change
played a decisive role and instead stressing the fluidity of political
alignments. It placed religion at the centre of the crisis, especially in
Morrill’s account, where conflict arose from competing visions of Protestantism
rather than class power. It also rehabilitated the monarchy by portraying
Charles I less as the representative of a feudal order than as a ruler constrained
by circumstance, poor advice, or irresolvable religious divisions. Finally, it
minimised popular agency, treating crowds, sectarians, and London radicals as
episodic disturbances rather than structural forces.
Revisionism was not politically neutral. It emerged in a
period when Marxist interpretations were losing institutional ground, and it
offered a vision of English history that was orderly, constitutional, and
fundamentally non‑revolutionary — a comforting narrative for a nation uneasy
with the idea of having undergone a revolution at all.
Post-Revisionism and the Aristocratic Turn
By the 1990s, revisionism had begun to change. Post-revisionists
kept parts of the critique of Marxism but reintroduced political agency and intent,
focusing on elite strategy, factional organisation, and aristocratic networks. Adamson’s
work emerged from this context. His early articles, and later The Noble
Revolt, firmly belong to this post-revisionist moment. His central move is
to shift political initiative from the Commons to a small group of peers — not merely
changing the emphasis, but redrawing the political map of the early 1640s.
Where Hill treated the Commons as the institutional
expression of a rising class, Adamson identifies the Lords as the decisive
arena of political action. Where Marxists emphasised structural forces, he
foregrounds aristocratic calculation; where earlier revisionists stressed
contingency, he stresses elite strategy. This marks Adamson’s distinctive
contribution: the “baronial context.” Unlike earlier revisionists, who often framed
their work as a corrective to Marxist excess, Adamson presents his account as a
replacement. The Warwick-Bedford circle is not one factor among many, but the
central engine of political change.
This confidence rests on three methodological pillars.
First, Adamson’s archival immersion — especially his use of private
correspondence and estate papers — enables him to reconstruct aristocratic
networks in exceptional detail, giving the Junto the appearance of a hidden
hand directing events. Second, his tight focus on eighteen months allows aristocratic
manoeuvring to appear as the decisive causal chain, while broader social forces
recede into the background. Third, his limited engagement with Marxist
historiography lets him displace that tradition indirectly, presenting his interpretation
as if it emerged naturally from the sources. The strategy is rhetorically
powerful, but it obscures the interpretive choices behind the narrative.
Adamson’s work is more than a scholarly intervention; it forms
part of a broader ideological project. Revisionist and post-revisionist historians
have repeatedly sought to domesticate the English Revolution, recasting it as a
constitutional crisis rather than a revolutionary rupture. Adamson’s emphasis
on aristocratic initiative strengthens this vision of English history as
polite, orderly, and essentially non-revolutionary. His “Venetianised”
commonwealth is an oligarchic ideal of stability, not an acknowledgement of the
social upheaval that defined the 1640s. In this sense, The Noble Revolt marks
the culmination of a long historiographical counter-revolution: an effort to
strip the English Revolution of its revolutionary content.
Adamson as the Revisionist Apex
John Adamson stands at the apex of the revisionist
tradition. He has produced its most sophisticated narrative, its most detailed
archival reconstruction, and its most confident challenge to Marxist
historiography. But his work also reveals the limits of the revisionist
project. By focusing so narrowly on aristocratic manoeuvring, Adamson cannot
explain the broader social forces that made the English Revolution possible.
What Adamson leaves largely unstated, but what deserves
emphasis, is that The Noble Revolt directly challenges the Marxist
tradition associated above all with Christopher Hill. Hill and his contemporaries
saw the English Revolution as a genuine bourgeois revolution: a clash between a
rising commercial and gentry class and a declining feudal-absolutist monarchy,
with the House of Commons serving as the institutional expression of this
emerging social force. In that view, the civil war was not an aristocratic dispute
but a structural conflict rooted in class transformation.
Adamson’s book seeks to overturn that interpretation. It
shifts political initiative away from the Commons and the broader social forces
Hill emphasised, locating it instead in a narrow aristocratic clique driven by dynastic
and constitutional aims. As a result, the larger class dynamics of early modern
England — commercial expansion, gentry assertiveness, and Puritan ideological
ferment — are displaced by the manoeuvres of a handful of grandees.
This is revisionism in its fullest form. Adamson belongs to
the revisionist and post-revisionist tradition that has shaped English Civil
War scholarship for decades, a tradition that has repeatedly sought to drain
the period of its revolutionary significance. His depiction of British
political change as characteristically “polite and orderly,” especially when
contrasted with continental upheaval, makes the ideological stakes clearer than
most reviewers have recognised. Whether consciously or not, this is history
written to reassure a national self-image uneasy with the idea of an English
revolution.
The book’s central weakness follows directly from its
polemical ambition. By confining its account so tightly to the intrigues of a
small group of peers, Adamson produces a compelling story about aristocratic
manoeuvring — but only by systematically bracketing off the wider social forces
that made that manoeuvring effective.
The London crowds that besieged Parliament and Whitehall in
the winter of 1641–42 appear only as background noise, rather than as political
actors whose mobilisation influenced parliamentary strategy. The City’s
merchant and financial elites, whose interest in limiting royal fiscal power was
central to the crisis, are largely absent. Deep anti-Catholic feeling across
English society — a crucial force behind political mobilisation — is treated as
atmosphere rather than structure. The provincial gentry, indispensable to any
constitutional settlement, scarcely register.
In later writing, Adamson has acknowledged that the events
of 1640–42 were “no mere barons’ war” and that the aristocratic context was
only one factor among many. Yet this concession comes too late to alter a book
whose narrative structure is designed to foreground the aristocracy while
pushing other forces to the margins.
The problem is deepened by the book’s near silence on
historiographical controversy. A work that aims to overturn an established
tradition should engage that tradition directly, but Adamson does not. The
Marxist account he implicitly challenges is never addressed as an intellectual
position; instead, it is displaced by archival detail. This is rhetorically
effective, allowing his thesis to seem to arise naturally from the sources, but
it is ultimately evasive. Archival depth does not eliminate interpretation.
What the Book Achieves — and What It Cannot Explain
This does not diminish the book’s real achievements. Adamson
demonstrates more clearly than any earlier historian the existence, significance,
and political role of the Warwick-Bedford circle. His reconstruction of
aristocratic strategy is meticulous and often compelling, and any serious
student of the period must now confront the evidence he has brought together.
Yet the larger claim — that the crisis of 1640–42 was essentially
a baronial revolt — is unconvincing. The English Revolution was not the work of
peers alone. It emerged from the interaction between aristocratic initiative and
wider class forces: the assertiveness of the Commons, London’s mobilisation,
Puritan ideology, the City’s fiscal interests, and the structural tensions of a
changing society. Adamson explains a faction; he does not explain a revolution.
The Noble Revolt is a major achievement in archival research
and narrative history. It reveals the importance of an aristocratic faction
whose role in the crisis has often been underestimated. Yet its effort to
recast the English Revolution as a polite, oligarchic episode — emptied of
class conflict and popular agency — should be seen clearly: it is the most
sophisticated recent expression of a revisionist project that seeks to
domesticate England’s revolutionary century. The book succeeds brilliantly as a
study of faction, but fails as an explanation of revolution.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Works by John Adamson
Marxist and Structural Interpretations
Revisionist Scholarship
Post‑Revisionist and Aristocratic‑Focused Works
Works on Popular Mobilisation, London, and Social Forces
General Histories and Contextual Works
Archival and Documentary Collections
Optional: Works on Historiography and Method