by Chris Thompson
I am afraid that it is not true to claim that there was a
dearth of works on the Levellers before Christopher Hill and other members of
the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group began work to rescue them from
historical oblivion or that this was the responsibility of Whig historians.
S.R.Gardiner considered the Levellers’ influence in the period from 1647-1649
in some detail in Volume IV of his history of the English Civil War and in his
biography of Oliver Cromwell: the first Agreement of the People, now known to
be the product not of Leveller thinking but of a group of radicals around Henry
Marten, appeared in 1889 in his Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution.
It was C.H.Firth who edited and published The Clarke
Papers, which throw such light on relations between the leaders of the New
Model Army, the Agitators and Levellers, between 1891 and 1901. Eduard
Bernstein’s book, Cromwell and Communism; socialism and democracy in the great
English Civil War was published in German in 1895 and in an English translation
in 1930. G.P.Gooch’s work, The history of English democratic ideas in the 17th
century, first appeared in 1898 and T.C.Pease’s book, The Leveller Movement; A
Study in the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War, was
published in 1916. Margaret James’s book, Social Problems and Policies during
the Puritan Revolution 1640-1660, was published in 1930 as was J.W.Gough’s
article, ‘The Agreements of the People’ in History in the following year. The
truth is that there had been a significant amount of work done on the Levellers
long before they attracted the attention of Christopher Hill or of the
Communist Party’s Historians’ Group.
It is true that there were Marxist historians of
importance working in the pre- and post-Second World War periods. But, by the
early-1970s, their influence was largely spent as far as the early modern
period was concerned as was that of Lawrence Stone. Marxist influence had never
been overwhelming or absolutely predominant even if it had attracted the
support of, perhaps, a third of the specialists in this period. Hugh
Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper and J.H.Hexter had seen to that. ‘Revisionism’ in the
sense you use the term was born in the late-1960s and was itself defunct by the
early-1990s.
To be a non-Marxist is not to be a ‘revisionist’.
Personally, I prefer a situation in which a range of influences and trends
shape the historiography of the period before, during and after the struggles
of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Critical attacks on Kishlansky,
Morrill and Russell will not revive historical materialism of the kind
advocated in the 1950s and 1960s. The Levellers were an interesting phenomenon
and important for their ideas amidst the competing political and religious
debates of the late-1640s but their support was relatively small and they were
gone in the space of a very few years. Such a transient phenomenon deserves
serious historical evaluation rather than hagiography.
