by Chris Thompson.
I will return to his comments shortly as I have some
other projects which are taking my limited time. As for the original target of
my piece called should the English Civil War Be at the Heart of the National
Curriculum? Paul Lay I will not hold my breath for a reply. I am not sure that
blog writers appear on his intellectual radar too much to warrant a reply. I
hope to be surprised. Chris Thompson’s blog can be found at here
http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.co.uk/. Any one studying the subject of
early modern Britain will find a valuable research tool.
Over the last three years, I have become more sympathetic
to Keith Livesey’s blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I have grown to like him too.
This is partly because he is an unrepentant Marxist of a kind much more common
when I was an undergraduate and postgraduate in the 1960s. He believes that the
events of the period between 1640 and 1660 were a genuine revolution, that they
had as their principal causes antecedent economic and social changes and that
they paved the way for the emergence and triumph of capitalism in England with
all the momentous consequences that had for the world as a whole in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Christopher Hill, it is no surprise to find, is one of
his heroes in the ranks of professional historians and he is no less interested
in the Communist Party’s group of historians that flourished in the late-1940s
and until the mid-1950s. This is a perfectly respectable and defensible
position although not one that I accepted either in the 1960s or
subsequently.(One of my favourite conversational gambits when confronted by a
Marxist four or five decades ago was to deny that there had been a ‘Revolution’
in a recognisably Marxist sense at all.)
Keith Livesey recently (13th March) commented on the
views of the Editor of History Today, Paul Lay, on the contents of a revised
National Curriculum for history. He agreed with Paul Lay that it should cover
the English Civil War and offered his agreement if the former meant “that the
English Revolution paved the way for capitalism to flourish in England”. But he
was apprehensive that Paul Lay seemed to belong to a group of historians who
“have sought to revise previous Marxist historiography of the English Civil
War.” He went further when he expressed the view that Paul Lay and other
revisionist historians had downplayed the role of economics in people’s actions
at that time. “Lay’s real beef is with Marxist historiography .... Lay blames
Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill for using base and superstructure
to best understand the civil war. Lay believes that the demise of Marxism has
once again brought the role of religion as the main driving force behind civil
war. Lay has the right to his ideology but the constant attack by revisionists
and their apologists is doing untold disservice to those students who wish to
have a multi rather than one dimensional understanding of the civil war.”
I am sure that Paul Lay, if he so wishes, is perfectly
capable of responding to these criticisms. Nonetheless, there are some
important points that need clarifying for the record. There was never a time
when Marxist interpretations of the English Civil War or the English Revolution
constituted an established historiographical orthodoxy in this country (the
United Kingdom).Nor did they do so in the United States. Hugh Trevor-Roper,
John Cooper and Jack Hexter’s criticisms decisively punctured the sub-Marxist
explanations of Tawney, Stone, Hill, and others: this was why there was such an
explosion of advanced research into the gentry’s fortunes and the experience of
counties from the late-1950s onwards. Christopher Hill himself came to the view
by the 1970s that the events of the 1640s were not the result of the rise of
the bourgeoisie but the precondition for such a rise later in the seventeenth
century. He was severely criticised by figures like Norah Carlin for such
apostasy.
The second major point that I should make is that ‘Revisionism’
as it came to be termed had a very short life-span. It was born in the
mid-1970s with Conrad Russell’s work on the Parliaments of the 1620s and was
defunct after 1990-1991 when his works on The Causes of the English Civil War
and The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 appeared in print. There has
been no campaign of continuing criticism of Marxist historiography in this area
or of Christopher Hill’s body of work because both have, in general terms,
ceased to be regarded as relevant by academic historians. The debates amongst
historians of the Civil War period have moved on a very long way over the last
twenty years or more.
No historian that I know maintains that economic and
social changes before 1640 were unimportant or unrelated to the events of the
years thereafter. But very few would maintain that economic and social changes
in themselves were decisive in determining the outcomes of the military
struggles between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England or the conflicts in
Ireland and Scotland. Much more sophisticated connections between intellectual
and popular culture, between literacy levels and political and religious
changes, between the rise of aristocratic constitutionalism and the demands of
landed and mercantile elites have been developed since Christopher Hill’s
prime.
The terms of the debates will no doubt continue to change. That is right
and proper in academic history. Whigs, Marxists and Revisionists have had their
day and now belong to the students of intellectual historiography.
