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
