The republication of C. L. Stainer’s 1901 edition of The
Speeches of Oliver Cromwell serves more as a reminder of the ideological
tendencies informing Cromwell research than as a fresh scholarly contribution.
Its significance lies less in the material it preserves than in what it
unintentionally uncovers: that the idea of an “authentic” Cromwell is largely a
retrospective construct, pieced together from incomplete, conflicting, and
politically motivated sources, then cemented through editorial choices that
reflect bourgeois historiographical perspectives.
Stainer openly admits the difficulties in reconstructing
Cromwell's political years. For over half of Cromwell’s 29-year political
career—from 1629 to 1644—the records are mostly absent. He recognises that much
is missing. Despite this transparency, he still falls into common pitfalls that
have long affected the history of the English Revolution: he fills in gaps,
smooths over breaks, and lets the biography's storyline override the complex,
often contested, nature of the archival material.
The bourgeois cult of the “great man” and the poverty of
the record
The key issue is ideological, not philological. Bourgeois
historiography traditionally interprets the English Revolution through
personality traits—viewing Cromwell as hero, tyrant, or constitutional
statesman—while treating textual transmission as a mere technicality. Stainer’s
edition reveals the flaws in this approach. Lacking material on the
constitutional conflicts of the 1630s and early 1640s, he fabricates continuity
by inserting passages from other authors to enrich Cromwell’s speeches.
This is not just editing; it involves literary
reconstruction. It assumes that Cromwell’s voice can be meaningfully filled in,
treating the gaps in the record as aesthetic choices rather than factual gaps.
The result is a Cromwell who speaks in a voice partly his own and partly shaped
by figures like Bulstrode Whitelocke, Henry Ireton, or anonymous shorthand
writers working under difficult conditions. Stainer acknowledges that “there is
no very great reason to suppose” the existing texts are fully accurate.
Nonetheless, he treats them as though they can be refined into accuracy through
editorial skill.
The bourgeois historian struggles with discontinuity. For
the revolution to be understandable, the story must be coherent, and the
protagonist must be consistent. Stainer’s edition tries to impose this
coherence on a record that inherently resists it.
Whitelocke, self‑justification, and the politics of the
archive
The most revealing example is Stainer’s treatment of
Whitelocke’s account of the 1653 conversation at the Swedish embassy.
Whitelocke was not a neutral observer but a political actor with every
incentive to portray his own role as decisive and Cromwell’s approval as
natural and inevitable. Stainer signals this only faintly, presenting
Whitelocke’s retrospective justification as though it were a reliable
transcript of Cromwell’s thought.
Myth creation is shaped by the context of conflict, not
neutrality. The English Revolution archive, including Whitelocke’s memoirs,
Clarendon’s histories, the Clarke Papers, and Army debate notes, was created
amid factional struggles, censorship, and self-justification. Treating them as
interchangeable sources overlooks the ideological roles they were meant to
serve.
The suppression of class antagonism: Stainer at Putney
The most significant political failure is the Putney
Debates, where the Revolution's class conflicts are vividly clear. The
Levellers represent the interests of small property-owners, artisans, and
ordinary soldiers; Ireton upholds the political rights of property owners; and
Cromwell tries to control a democratic surge that could undermine the bourgeois
order.
Stainer transforms this confrontation into a biographical
event, portraying the Levellers as supporting figures in a drama led by
Cromwell. The debates are simplified to a “debating society,' diminishing their
ideological importance and obscuring their class significance.
This is intentional. Bourgeois historiography has
historically dismissed the Levellers, Diggers, and similar plebeian movements
as mere noise—vivid and intriguing, yet ultimately on the fringe. It insists
that the revolution must focus on Cromwell because he embodies the victorious
class. To fully depict Putney would mean recognising that the English
Revolution included a democratic aspect that went beyond bourgeois property
constraints. Stainer cannot allow this; his version of Cromwell must stay at
the centre, with all other forces orbiting him.
The stenographic problem and the composite Cromwell
Even on strictly textual grounds, Stainer’s edition reminds
us how unstable the record is. The surviving versions of Cromwell’s speeches
diverge wildly. Shorthand writers worked in cramped, overheated rooms, often in
relay, losing sentences, misplacing paragraphs, and producing transcripts that
were themselves copied, corrected, and corrupted. The Cromwell who speaks in
Stainer’s volume is not a historical individual but a composite produced by
stenographers, editors, printers, and political actors.
Stainer acknowledges this but does not follow the logic of
his own admission. If the record is this unstable, then the very project of
reconstructing Cromwell’s “voice” is compromised. The speeches cannot be
treated as transparent windows into Cromwell’s mind; they are artefacts of
transmission, shaped by the conditions of their production.
5. Toward a genuinely critical edition
A century after Stainer,
modern palaeography, digital collation, and a Marxist approach to history
enable a new edition to do what Stainer's version could not: showcase the
contested nature of the record, highlight the instability of texts, and amplify
the voices he sidelined—Levellers, Diggers, agitators, common soldiers—and
avoid focusing solely on biography. The English Revolution cannot be understood
by examining Cromwell alone; it requires placing Cromwell within the class
dynamics that shaped him and rejecting the bourgeois tendency to reduce
revolutions to the story of a single individual.
Endnotes
Primary source
Editions and documentary collections of Cromwell's
writings and speeches
On the Putney Debates and Leveller thought
Marxist and socialist historiography of the English
Revolution
Contextual/biographical
Carlyle’s Edition and the Revolutionary Tradition
Thomas Carlyle’s 1845 edition of Cromwell’s writings was a
landmark in nineteenth‑century historiography. Despite his limitations—his
“great man” theory and his later reactionary turn—Carlyle possessed the
intellectual courage to recognise Cromwell as a revolutionary figure. Marx
praised Carlyle for having “taken the literary field against the bourgeoisie at
a time when its views, tastes and ideas held the whole of official English
literature totally in thrall,” citing “his apology for Cromwell” as one of his
most significant interventions.²
Carlyle understood, however imperfectly, that the English
Civil War was not a constitutional misunderstanding but, in the words of the
uploaded document, “a world-historical convulsion in which a class seized power
through the execution of a king.”³ This insight—partial, distorted, but
nonetheless real—explains why Marx and Engels valued Carlyle’s work. They
recognised in the English Revolution the first great bourgeois revolution, the
event that cleared the ground for capitalist development and inaugurated the
modern epoch.
Carlyle’s edition was flawed, as the document acknowledges:
“his transcriptions were not always reliable, his selection was idiosyncratic,
his commentary was infused with his own increasingly authoritarian worldview.”⁴
But these were the flaws of a bourgeois radical struggling to articulate the
class dynamics of a revolution whose full meaning only Marxism could later
reveal.
The Rise of Revisionism and Morrill’s Role
John Morrill is not a neutral editor. He is a leading figure
of the revisionist school that has dominated English Civil War historiography
since the 1970s. This tendency—associated with Conrad Russell and others—denies
that the 1640s constituted a bourgeois revolution. It rejects the notion of a
rising bourgeoisie, dismisses the class character of the conflict, and
reinterprets the revolution as a contingent political or religious crisis.
The revisionists insist that “there was no bourgeois revolution because
there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social classes can be
found on either side of the struggle.”⁵ Even Cromwell, they argue, was not a
revolutionary but “a representative of the declining gentry.”⁶
This is the intellectual framework within which Morrill has
worked for decades. His edition is therefore, as the document states, “not a
politically innocent replacement of a ‘flawed’ Victorian text with a
‘scientific’ modern one. It is an intervention in a long-running class struggle
within historiography.”⁷
What Revisionism Seeks to Erase
The revisionist school does not correct Carlyle’s
limitations from a more advanced standpoint. It retreats from them. It denies
that the English Revolution was a revolution at all.
Against this retreat, Christopher Hill’s Marxist
historiography stands as a towering achievement. Hill demonstrated in God’s
Englishman that Cromwell was a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie: a
man who purged Parliament until it reflected the needs of his class, built the
New Model Army as an instrument of revolutionary power, and suppressed the
Levellers when they threatened to push the revolution beyond the limits of
capitalist development. Hill’s position was that Cromwell “must be understood as a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie… who
suppressed the Levellers when the plebeian elements threatened to push the
revolution beyond the limits required for capitalist society.”⁸
Hill’s work followed Trotsky’s analysis in Where Is
Britain Going?, which identified two revolutionary traditions in British
history—Cromwell and Chartism—both of which were systematically denied by the Whig myth of
gradualism. Revisionism, for all its claims to sophistication, represents a
return to this Whig outlook: the comforting fiction that Britain has been
uniquely blessed with peaceful, incremental change. As the document notes,
Simon Schama proudly declares himself “a born-again Whig.”⁹
The Political Meaning of Today’s Acclaim
The universal praise for Morrill’s edition is not a matter
of scholarly merit alone. It reflects the political trajectory of the
bourgeoisie itself. The class that once celebrated Cromwell as its
revolutionary ancestor now finds that ancestry embarrassing. Having long since
abandoned all progressive historical tasks, the bourgeoisie prefers to pretend
that revolution never happened.
The bourgeoisie now insists that “the execution of Charles I was a regrettable incident, that the Levellers were irrelevant extremists, and that the whole unpleasant episode could have been avoided if only people had been more reasonable.”¹⁰This ideological sanitisation is not accidental. It serves contemporary political needs. A ruling class that fears revolution must deny that revolutions have ever been necessary, progressive, or successful.
Hence, the “unanimity of the acclaim” for Morrill’s edition. It “conforms to what the contemporary historical profession wants to believe about the seventeenth century and about revolution in general.”¹¹ A genuinely critical edition—one that illuminated rather than obscured the class forces at work—would not receive such praise.
The Working Class and the Revolutionary Heritage
The working class has every interest in understanding the
English Revolution for what it was: the first in the series of bourgeois
revolutions that created the conditions for modern capitalism and, in doing so,
brought into being the proletariat itself.
The revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie—however
historically limited—belong not to today’s anaemic liberalism but to the
international working class. As the document concludes, these traditions
“belong to the heritage of the international working class – not to the
anaemic, phlegmatic liberalism that now disowns them.”¹²
To defend the revolutionary content of the English Civil War
is therefore not an antiquarian exercise. It is part of the broader struggle to
arm the working class with an understanding of the historical processes that
shaped the modern world—and to expose the ideological falsifications through
which the bourgeoisie seeks to obscure its own past and the revolutionary
future that confronts it.
Notes
