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.