The Royal College of Physicians and the English Revolution: A Missed Opportunity

William Harvey

The current exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), ostensibly a survey of the medical profession's response to the English Civil War, is a modest and in many respects politically evasive affair. While it gestures toward the turmoil that gripped English society in the 1640s, it consistently retreats from any serious examination of the class forces and ideological cleavages that this convulsion exposed within the ranks of the medical elite itself.

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.

A Letter to Richard Cavendish

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.