Barry Coward, who passed away in 2011, was a leading scholar
in 17th-century English history for many years. As a dedicated lecturer at
Birkbeck, University of London, and a past president of the Historical
Association, Coward mentored countless students and authored influential works
that serve as key references in the discipline. His books, The Stuart Age:
England 1603–1714 and his biography of Oliver Cromwell, continue to be
extensively used in university courses.
Coward’s career unfolded amidst substantial political and
intellectual upheaval. His work should be interpreted within the broader
historiographical shift starting in the 1970s, when the Marxist perspective on
the English Revolution—especially advocated by Christopher Hill—encountered
ongoing critiques. Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group demonstrated
that rigorous scholarship could coexist with a revolutionary perspective,
portraying the English Civil War as a crucial phase in the shift from feudalism
to capitalism and the emergence of bourgeois dominance.
Coward supported the revisionist school, which called for
dismantling this framework. The revisionists argued that "there was no
long-term crisis of the Stuart state, no rising bourgeoisie, and no class
conflict driving events.” They saw the English Civil War not as a revolution
but as a political crisis fuelled by misjudgements, religious tensions, and
Charles I's personal flaws. This perspective shifted the emphasis from
structural causes to elite strategies and decision-making.
Coward held a moderate stance within this perspective. His
work on the Stuart Age recognized aspects of social and economic unrest and
acknowledged the importance of popular mobilization, but his interpretive
approach was mainly revisionist. He questioned the idea of a bourgeois
revolution and was hesitant about class analysis, viewing the conflict as a
collapse of elite consensus rather than a revolutionary change caused by mass
forces.
His biography of Cromwell highlights both the strengths and
limitations of this approach. It offers a detailed, scholarly portrayal of
Cromwell as a political figure. However, as noted in the document, it misses “a
sense of the revolutionary dynamic, of the mass forces that drove events beyond
the control of any individual.” In Coward’s portrayal, Cromwell appears as a
figure influenced by circumstances; in Hill’s view, he embodies deep social
change.
The emergence of revisionism was closely linked to the
rightward shift in British society—marked by the defeat of the labour movement,
the rise of Thatcherism, and an intensified ideological battle against Marxism
after the USSR's collapse. Revisionists aimed to disconnect historical research
from revolutionary politics, arguing that revolution was merely an illusion
created by outdated Marxist ideas. Their efforts both mirrored and bolstered
the dominant intellectual mood of the time.
Recently, 'post-revisionist' scholarship has challenged the
dominance of revisionism by reintroducing structural analysis. Still, the main
question persists: Is it possible to understand the English Revolution without
Marxism? Their answer was no. “The revisionists could focus on empirical
details, but they failed to offer a unified alternative explanation for why
English society fragmented in the 1640s... Only Marxism... can explain these
events.”
Barry Coward was a committed and meticulous historian whose
work remains influential. However, his contribution should be viewed within a
historiographical framework that, in the end, tended to mask the revolutionary
nature of the 17th-century crisis. Grasping the English Revolution as a true
revolution—and extracting its political lessons—is still closely linked to the
Marxist tradition that Coward, despite his scholarly achievements, opposed
throughout his career.
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