Andrew Barclay’s Electing Cromwell: The Making of a
Politician (Pickering & Chatto, 2011) is a work of considerable
archival diligence. It reconstructs, with painstaking attention to detail, the
local political world of the eastern counties in the decades preceding the
English Revolution. Its central question is narrow but not insignificant: how
did an obscure, financially troubled gentleman from Huntingdonshire become, by
1640, the Member of Parliament for Cambridge and, within a few years, one of
the most consequential figures in the revolutionary overthrow of the English
monarchy?
Barclay’s answer is rooted in the methodological tradition
of the History of Parliament Trust — an antiquarian empiricism that privileges
documentary accumulation over social analysis. Parish registers, drainage
petitions, corporation minute books, kinship networks, and municipal quarrels
are assembled with impressive care. The book’s most valuable sections
illuminate the political economy of the Fenlands: the conflicts over drainage
schemes that set commoners and smallholders against improving landlords and
court‑connected “adventurers,” the factional struggles within Cambridge’s godly
elite, and the coordinated campaign that secured Cromwell’s election in both
Parliaments of 1640.
Yet the very strength of Barclay’s method reveals its
fundamental limitation. The narrative remains confined within the boundaries of
localism. Cromwell’s emergence is presented as the product of personal
grievances, inheritance disputes, and the tactical manoeuvring of borough
elites. What disappears almost entirely is the broader social and political
crisis engulfing the English state — a crisis that made Cromwell’s rise
possible and gave his actions national significance. The reader is left with a
meticulously described landscape of local rivalries but without an explanation
of why these rivalries were becoming explosive, or why they were about to be
overtaken by a revolutionary confrontation between the monarchy and the rising
forces of bourgeois society.
This absence is not merely a matter of emphasis. It reflects
the ideological retreat of contemporary academic historiography from any
engagement with class dynamics. Earlier generations of historians — above all
Christopher Hill — understood that the Fen drainage disputes were not parochial
quarrels but part of a systematic assault on customary rights by an emergent
agrarian capitalism. The “adventurers” were not simply ambitious landlords;
they were agents of a new social order, backed by monopolists and courtiers
tied to the crown. Cromwell’s defence of commoners’ rights in the 1630s cannot
be understood apart from this transformation. It was an early expression of the
political alignment that would, in the revolutionary crisis of the 1640s,
propel him into national leadership.
The contrast between Christopher Hill and Andrew Barclay is
not merely one of style or emphasis; it reflects two fundamentally different
conceptions of what history is and what it is for.
Method: Social Interpretation vs Empirical Reconstruction
Hill approaches Cromwell as a product of the long‑term
transformation of English society — the rise of agrarian capitalism, the crisis
of absolutism, and the ideological ferment of Puritanism. His method is
synthetic and explanatory. Local conflicts, such as the Fen drainage disputes,
are read as expressions of national class antagonisms. Cromwell’s defence of
commoners’ rights becomes an early political alignment with forces that would
soon challenge the monarchy.
Barclay, by contrast, works within the antiquarian
empiricism of the History of Parliament Trust. His Cromwell emerges from parish
records, corporation minutes, kinship networks, and electoral manoeuvring. The
material is rich, but the explanatory horizon is narrow. Social conflict
dissolves into personal grievance; class dynamics into local factionalism.
The English Revolution: Structural Crisis vs Local
Politics
For Hill, the English Revolution is a bourgeois revolution —
the overthrow of a decaying absolutist order by forces shaped by capitalist
development. Cromwell’s rise is inseparable from this structural crisis. His
political trajectory is meaningful because it expresses the interests of a
class whose ascendancy was reshaping the English state.
For Barclay, the Revolution remains largely offstage. His
narrative ends in 1640, just before the crisis becomes national. The reader
receives a detailed account of how Cromwell entered Parliament, but little
sense of why the political world he entered was about to collapse into civil
war.
Ideology: Puritanism as Class Expression vs Puritanism as
Local Faction
Hill treats Puritanism as the ideological form of a rising
bourgeoisie — a worldview shaped by market relations, individual
responsibility, and hostility to feudal privilege. Cromwell’s godliness is
therefore not a psychological curiosity but a political language through which
class interests were articulated.
Barclay treats Puritanism primarily as a network of local
alliances and religious affinities. Its social content is acknowledged but not
analysed. The “godly” faction in Cambridge becomes a municipal pressure group
rather than a political expression of broader social forces.
Historical Purpose: Explanation vs Description
Hill writes history to explain the movement of society. His
Cromwell is a figure whose significance lies in his relationship to the
revolutionary transformation of England.
Barclay writes history to describe political processes. His
Cromwell is a figure whose significance lies in the mechanics of his election.
Hill provides the why of Cromwell’s rise; Barclay provides
the how. Hill shows the forces that made Cromwell possible; Barclay shows the circumstances
that made him electable. Hill’s Cromwell is a revolutionary agent; Barclay’s is
a local politician.
Both approaches have value. But without Hill’s structural
analysis, Barclay’s empirical reconstruction floats free of the social crisis
that gave Cromwell historical weight. Without Barclay’s archival precision,
Hill’s broad synthesis risks abstraction.
Barclay acknowledges this literature in his footnotes but
declines to integrate it into his analysis. The result is a portrait of
Cromwell that is empirically rich but theoretically impoverished. The man who
would preside over the trial and execution of Charles I, suppress the
Levellers, and wage a brutal campaign in Ireland appears here as a figure
shaped primarily by local patronage networks and municipal disputes. The
revolutionary content of his politics — the class forces that made him both the
instrument and the beneficiary of a bourgeois revolution — is left unexplored.
None of this negates the genuine contributions of Electing
Cromwell. Barclay’s reconstruction of the Cambridge elections of 1640 is a
valuable corrective to providential or psychological accounts of Cromwell’s
“calling.” He demonstrates convincingly that Cromwell’s emergence was neither
accidental nor mystical but the product of deliberate political organisation by
a coherent godly faction. This is an important insight, and it enriches our
understanding of the pre‑revolutionary conjuncture.
But the larger task — situating Cromwell’s early career
within the crisis of the Stuart state, the pressures of the Thirty Years’ War,
the fiscal‑military breakdown of absolutism, and the rise of capitalist social
relations — lies beyond the scope of Barclay’s empiricism. The English
Revolution was not the sum of local grievances; it was the overthrow of a
decaying social order by forces whose development Barclay’s method cannot
grasp.
In an era when contemporary bourgeois democracies confront
their own insoluble contradictions — widening social inequality, the erosion of
parliamentary norms, and the turn toward authoritarian forms of rule — the
study of the English Revolution demands more than antiquarian reconstruction.
It requires an understanding of how individuals like Cromwell become the
political expression of deeper class forces. On this decisive question, Electing
Cromwell remains silent.
