Alison Plowden’s In a Free Republic: Life in Cromwell’s England (2006)

Alison Plowden’s In a Free Republic offers a social history of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, depicting daily life from the execution of Charles I in 1649 to the monarchy's restoration in 1660. As a prolific popular historian of Tudor and Stuart courts, Plowden approaches the era with the same narrative style that characterised her earlier works on Elizabeth I and the domestic intrigues of the sixteenth century. The book is engaging, well-crafted, and filled with anecdotal details. However, it ultimately does not fully capture the English Revolution as a true revolution.

The English Revolution was the first major bourgeois revolution and a pivotal turning point in world history. It overthrew the feudal state, dismantled absolutism, and paved the way for capitalist growth. The conflict involved the emerging bourgeoisie and parts of the gentry fighting against the monarchy, the old aristocracy, and remaining feudal social structures. Additionally, it was a moment when propertyless groups—the soldiers of the New Model Army, the Levellers, and the Diggers—tried to extend the revolution beyond what the propertied classes found acceptable.

While Plowden’s book is charming, it cannot fundamentally explore these questions. It functions more as popular antiquarianism than for historical analysis, providing descriptions of Puritan dress, household customs, religious fears, and the theatre closures. However, it fails to address the core fact of the era: a king was tried and executed by representatives of a new social class. The revolution remains hidden behind its decorative elements.

The Ideological Work of the Title

Plowden’s title, 'In a Free Republic,' is quite telling. Cromwell’s England was considered 'free” only within a narrow, class-based context, where the bourgeoisie had freed itself from absolutist restrictions. It was not a true democracy. The voting rights remained limited to property owners. Parliament was often purged when it did not align with Cromwell’s class interests.

The Levellers, advocating for universal male suffrage, legal equality, and the end of oligarchic control, faced imprisonment, silencing, and even execution. Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland was a colonial terror that left a permanent scar on history. Describing this society as a “free republic” without addressing the contradiction echoes the ideological mystifications of both the seventeenth-century ruling class and the present day.

The Limits of Popular History

Plowden's approach aligns with British popular history, characterised by storytelling, anecdotes, and a focus on personalities. While this style offers clarity, accessibility, and rich human detail, it inherently lacks the capacity for deeper analysis of class forces, modes of production, ideological struggles, or the political economy of revolution.

Trotsky’s critique of Whig historiography is directly relevant. Popular history tends to oversimplify social struggles by shifting focus from class conflicts to individual stories. The English Revolution is often portrayed merely as a setting for narratives about Puritan families, fashions, food, and customs.

A social history of “life in Cromwell’s England” risks becoming a mere idyllic scene unless it engages with the period's revolutionary essence. Plowden’s approach falls short in examining: The New Model Army as a political entity, not just a military force; The Putney Debates, where ordinary soldiers debated sovereignty and equality; The Levellers, advocating for universal male suffrage and legal equality; The Diggers, challenging private property; Cromwell’s class-based purges; and the Irish campaign, seen not as an anomaly but as a key act of bourgeois consolidation. These events are central to the English Revolution. Without acknowledging them, the era risks being reduced to a costume drama.

Plowden and the Revisionist Turn

Modern academic historiography has moved away from Christopher Hill’s Marxist approach, now claiming: there was no rising bourgeoisie; the revolution was not truly revolutionary; class was not the key factor; and Cromwell was a conservative defending traditional liberties. This reinterpretation is not apolitical; it aligns with the ideological interests of current capitalism, which promotes the view that revolutions are impossible, class struggle is illusory, and ordinary people cannot intentionally change society. Plowden is not a revisionist scholar, but her method aligns with this trend by default. A narrative of daily life without class analysis becomes a soft form of revisionism: the revolution is present only as décor.

Plowden, Hill, Russell, and Morrill on Cromwell’s England

Alison Plowden’s In a Free Republic: Life in Cromwell’s England (2006) occupies an ambiguous position within the historiography of the English Revolution. It is not a work of academic scholarship, nor does it pretend to be. It belongs to the genre of British popular history—narrative, anecdotal, personality‑driven, focused on domestic life and social texture. However, because it treats the decade of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, it inevitably enters a field shaped by profound historiographical conflict.

To grasp Plowden’s book, it is essential to place it within the context of the three main interpretive schools of the past fifty years: Christopher Hill’s Marxist perspective, Conrad Russell’s revisionist rebuttal, and John Morrill’s post-revisionist synthesis. While Plowden does not directly address these scholars, her omissions, focus areas, and storytelling decisions subtly reflect her implicit alignment and the ideological implications of her approach.

Christopher Hill: Revolution as Class Struggle

Christopher Hill (1912–2003), the leading Marxist historian of the English Revolution, stands in stark contrast to Plowden’s approach. Hill’s work—The Century of Revolution, God’s Englishman, The World Turned Upside Down—insists that the mid-seventeenth-century crisis was a bourgeois revolution, driven by conflicts between the rising bourgeoisie and sections of the gentry; the monarchy and the feudal aristocracy; and the propertyless masses who sought to push the revolution further.

Hill’s method is structural, dialectical, and materialist. He treats the New Model Army as a political force, the Levellers and Diggers as expressions of class consciousness, and Cromwell as the representative of a class whose interests determined the limits of the revolution.

Hill’s key insight—that Charles I's execution was a deliberate revolutionary act—falls outside Plowden’s perspective. In a Free Republic, the trial and execution seem like background events rather than the pivotal moment that established the republic she discusses daily. Hill would argue that discussing “life in Cromwell’s England” requires explaining why Cromwell’s England existed.

Plowden’s book is thus not merely incomplete; it is methodologically incompatible with Hill’s project. Where Hill sees class struggle, Plowden sees atmosphere. Where Hill sees revolution, Plowden sees period colour. Where Hill foregrounds the masses, Plowden foregrounds domestic detail. Hill’s absence from her narrative is itself a historiographical statement.

Conrad Russell: The Revisionist Counter‑Revolution

Conrad Russell (1937–2004), a prominent revisionist historian, embodies the intellectual resistance to Hill’s ideas. In works such as The Causes of the English Civil War and Parliamentary History, he contends that there was no rising bourgeoisie, that class was not the decisive factor, that the Civil War resulted from short-term political mismanagement, and that the revolution was not truly revolutionary. Russell’s approach is intentionally anti-Marxist; he dismisses structural explanations, rejects the notion of coherent class interests, and views the conflict as a political crisis of the state rather than a societal one. His work relies heavily on empirical research, but that empiricism is used to undermine the era's revolutionary significance.

Plowden’s book aligns implicitly with Russell’s revisionism—not because she adopts his arguments, but because her method produces the same effect. By focusing on daily life, customs, and personalities, she reproduces the revisionist tendency to treat the Commonwealth as an aberration, a curious interlude rather than a decisive transformation. The revolution becomes a backdrop, not a subject.

Russell would likely have approved of Plowden’s approach to the Levellers, Diggers, and New Model Army as not being political groups with clear social agendas. He would have supported her avoidance of class analysis. Additionally, he would have appreciated her portrayal of Cromwell as a multifaceted figure rather than solely as a class representative. While Plowden’s book is not revisionist in its scholarship, its tone and approach have a revisionist effect, making the revolution seem more familiar and domesticated.

John Morrill: Post‑Revisionism and the “War of Religion”

John Morrill (b. 1946), a leading post-revisionist historian, seeks to integrate Hill and Russell by shifting the interpretive focus. He contends that the English Revolution was not primarily a class struggle or a constitutional crisis, but a war of religion. Morrill views the revolution as a conflict over differing visions of godly reformation, portraying the New Model Army as a Puritan institution, Cromwell as a providentialist warrior, and the Levellers as political radicals driven by religious beliefs. While acknowledging the period's revolutionary nature, Morrill shifts the primary driving force from class to religion. Plowden’s book also emphasises religion, but with less analytical depth—her Puritans are moralistic and socially restrictive but not political, her Cromwell is devout but not ideologically shaped by religion, and her republic is godly but not revolutionary.

Where Morrill sees religion as a structuring force, Plowden sees it as cultural texture. She adopts the surface of Morrill’s argument while omitting its substance.

Plowden’s Position: Pastoralisation of Revolution

Placed alongside Hill, Russell, and Morrill, Plowden’s historiographical stance becomes evident: she avoids class analysis, as Russell does, emphasises religion only as an atmosphere, as Morrill does, and lacks Hill’s revolutionary framework. Her book does not challenge historiographical debates; instead, it retreats from them, presenting a vision of a republic without revolution, a society without class struggle, and a decade devoid of dialectic. This approach is politically charged, as it idealises revolution within domestic life, thereby supporting the ideological needs of contemporary capitalism. It dismisses the idea that ordinary people can consciously change society, denies that revolutions have causes, agents, and outcomes, and suggests that history is not driven by class struggle. Overall, Plowden’s work reflects a broader cultural move toward depoliticising the past.

The Continuing Relevance of the English Revolution

The English Revolution remains one of the most consequential events in world history. It was the first of the great bourgeois revolutions that cleared the ground for capitalist development. Its contradictions—above all, the conflict between the property‑owning classes who made the revolution and the propertyless masses who wanted to carry it further—prefigure the struggles of every subsequent revolution, including the socialist revolution that the working class must still make.

Plowden’s book, for all its merits as a work of popular history, cannot illuminate these questions. It offers the reader a republic without revolution, a society without class struggle, a decade without its dialectic. It is a portrait of Cromwell’s England in which Cromwell’s revolution has been politely removed.

For readers seeking to understand the English Revolution as a world‑historical event, Plowden’s book must be read critically—and supplemented by works that grasp the period in its full social and political depth.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

• The Putney Debates, ed. Michael Mendle (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom (1652).
• John Lilburne, England’s New Chains Discovered (1649).
• The Trial of Charles I, ed. J. G. Muddiman (Everyman, 1928).
• Oliver Cromwell, Letters and Speeches, ed. Thomas Carlyle (1845).

Marxist and Socialist Historiography

• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Penguin, 1972).
• Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution (Routledge, 1961).
• Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Penguin, 1970).
• Ann Talbot, “Christopher Hill and the Socialist Tradition,” World Socialist Web Site (2003).
• Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? (1925).
• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
• Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (1850).

Revisionist and Post‑Revisionist Historiography

• Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1990).
• John Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces (Longman, 1976).
• Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed (Penguin, 1996).
• Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2002). 

Popular History

• Alison Plowden, In a Free Republic: Life in Cromwell’s England (Sutton Publishing, 2006).
• Alison Plowden, The Young Elizabeth (1971).
• Alison Plowden, Marriage With My Kingdom (1977).

 

Christopher Thompson on: Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (Routledge Keegan Paul. 1972)

(This is a reply to my original post on Lawrence Stone’s The Cause of the English Revolution. I am not sure whether I am going to reply to it. Needless to say I do not agree with some his remarks although some clarification might be in order. I would welcome any other comments from my readers. Please do not be shy. All posts within reason will be published)

The publication of this work in 1972 offered sixth-form pupils and first-year undergraduates a useful overview of the origins and causes of the English Revolution from the other side of the Atlantic. Since his move to Princeton in 1963, Stone had become increasingly interested in the work of anthropologists and political scientists just as he had been in the 1940s in that of economic historians and in the light, that such work might throw on long-standing historical problems.

Whatever subscription he had once paid to the influence of Marx and Tawney had long since gone by the time in the late-1950s and early-1960s that he composed The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Stone was certainly never a Marxist in the sense that Christopher Hill was. His early teaching at Princeton was, in any case, devoted, as the festschrift in his honour shows, to a survey course on the evolution of English society between c.1500 and c.1700. Stone certainly liked being at the centre of academic attention and of controversy, hence his production of works like this although it was also true to say that he had, by the early-1970s, become cut off from the main currents of academic research in England.

The origins of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dislike of Stone did not lie in the latter storming out of a revision class at Christ Church College in Oxford. In fact, the quarrel over the gentry arose from Hugh Trevor-Roper lending his transcripts on aristocratic indebtedness from the Recognizances for Debt then held in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Stone used this material without Trevor-Roper’s permission and with the most misleading of indications as to how he had acquired it in his 1948 article in The Economic History Review.

Furthermore, because he had not understood the technicalities of this source, Stone had assigned to the late-Tudor peers levels of debt twice their real size. Trevor-Roper was perfectly entitled to criticise Stone’s work and, indeed, that of Tawney whose stature as an historian was considerably higher in 1950 than that of Stone but whose analytical errors were, as J.P.Cooper shortly thereafter pointed out, even more serious

The controversy probably stimulated more interesting research into English history in the seventeenth-century than any before or possibly since. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a friend of Jack Hexter until the publication of Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, in Encounter in May, 1958. For several years thereafter, their friendship was in abeyance. Politically, they were very different indeed, as anyone who knew them both would understand. There is no significance in the funding of that magazine for their historiographical positions.

The problem with Stone’s 1972 work was not just its use of sociological jargon like ‘multiple dysfunction’, ‘preconditions’, ‘precipitants’ and ‘triggers’ but also its antiquated analytical framework, its assumption that very long-term factors were at work, that the loss of landed possessions by the Crown and Church and, as he erroneously believed, the peerage made Revolution inevitable as the apparatus of Stuart rule failed to cope with the rise of the gentry, the spread of Puritanism, and the decline in the prestige of the Crown and Court and the Laudian church. Stone held that the political and religious history of the pre-Civil War period had already been written by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth and fundamentally needed no emendation. He was profoundly wrong as Nicholas Tyacke and others were already demonstrating.

Stone’s work on the origins and causes of the English Revolution was dated by the time it appeared in 1972. It belonged essentially to the 1950s and early-1960s. No amount of sociological dressing could make it fashionable again.

By then, Trevor-Roper had written and published his ground-breaking essay on the Union of the Crowns. It was to the hypotheses about the significance of ‘multiple kingdoms’ that the future in 1972 belonged.