Stainer’s Cromwell, a Century On: What the Speeches Still Conceal

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

• Stainer, Charles L. (ed.), Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 1644–1658 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901).

Editions and documentary collections of Cromwell's writings and speeches

• Carlyle, Thomas (ed.), Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845; rev. edns to 1904).
• Abbott, Wilbur Cortez (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–1947).
• Morrill, John (gen. ed.), The Complete Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Oxford University Press, in progress — the modern critical edition referenced in the review as the successor project to Stainer and Abbott.
• Firth, C. H. (ed.), The Clarke Papers: Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, 4 vols. (Camden Society, 1891–1901) — the manuscript source underlying both the Putney Debates material and much of Stainer's text.

On the Putney Debates and Leveller thought

• Woodhouse, A. S. P. (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts (London: J. M. Dent, 1938; repr. University of Chicago Press).
• Aylmer, G. E. (ed.), The Levellers in the English Revolution (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975).
• Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) — the key theoretical treatment of the property/franchise question raised at Putney.
• Brailsford, H. N., The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (London: Cresset Press, 1961).

Marxist and socialist historiography of the English Revolution

• Hill, Christopher, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972).
• Hill, Christopher, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970).
• Trotsky, Leon, "Where Is Britain Going?" (1925), in Leon Trotsky on Britain (New York: Monad Press, 1973) — discusses Cromwell and the English Revolution as a model of bourgeois revolution.
• North, David, and the WSWS Editorial Board, various essays on the historiography, World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org).

Contextual/biographical

• Whitelocke, Bulstrode, Memorials of the English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First to the Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second (London, 1682) — the primary source Stainer draws on for the Whitelocke–Cromwell dialogue discussed in the review; on its reliability, see the assessment in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn., s.v. "Whitelocke, Bulstrode."
• Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1893).
• Gaunt, Peter, Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).