Revisionism by Another Name: The English Revolution c.1590–1720

The Return of a Revolution Without Its Content

Nicholas Tyacke’s edited collection, The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, promises to restore the English Revolution to its rightful place in historical debate. For decades, the dominant academic tendency, revisionism, has denied the very existence of a revolution, reducing the mid‑seventeenth century to a crisis of governance, administrative strain, and political miscalculation. Tyacke’s volume appears to challenge that orthodoxy. It revives the vocabulary of revolution, adopts the long chronological frame associated with Marxist historiography, and gestures toward the structural transformations that shaped the period. Yet the gesture is largely rhetorical. The book resurrects the language of revolution while quietly discarding the analytical framework that once gave that language explanatory force.

The English Revolution was not a constitutional accident. It was the political expression of profound social change: the erosion of feudal relations, the rise of capitalist agriculture, the expansion of overseas commerce, and the emergence of new social groups whose interests collided with the Stuart monarchy's absolutist ambitions. Any serious attempt to explain the revolution must confront these processes. Tyacke’s contributors do not. The result is a collection that borrows the temporal architecture of Marxist historiography while rejecting the materialist analysis that made that architecture meaningful.

Tyacke’s introduction is the volume's most substantial attempt to reclaim the term “revolution.” He summarises the Whig and Marxist traditions with clarity and fairness, and he acknowledges the limitations of revisionism. But he does not confront the intellectual consequences of revisionism’s dominance. The likely reason is simple: most contributors remain too close to the revisionist worldview to mount a serious challenge. The book thus occupies an ambiguous position: post‑revisionist in rhetoric, revisionist in substance.

The Long Seventeenth Century Without Its Engine

The chronological sweep from 1590 to 1720  places the volume within the tradition of the “long seventeenth century,” a concept forged by Marxist historians. Eric Hobsbawm’s general crisis thesis argued that the seventeenth century marked a decisive stage in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Hugh Trevor‑Roper’s counter‑argument, though hostile to Marxism, accepted the need for structural explanation. Christopher Hill’s Century of Revolution treated the English Revolution as the pivot of the entire period.

Tyacke’s contributors adopt the temporal frame but abandon the structural analysis. The result is a long seventeenth century drained of its meaning: a chronology without causality. The revolution becomes a prolonged episode of ideological quarrelling and constitutional improvisation, rather than the political expression of deep social transformation.

This is not merely an intellectual shortcoming. It reflects a broader trend in early modern historiography: a retreat from economic history, a suspicion of class analysis, and an elevation of micro‑politics and localism. The discipline has become increasingly capable of describing the revolution in exquisite detail while increasingly unable to explain it.

Revisionism and Its Post‑Revisionist Shadow

Revisionism, associated with Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe and John Morrill, insisted that the civil war was an accident: the product of short‑term misjudgements, provincial grievances, and the administrative difficulties of ruling three kingdoms. It denied any connection to long‑term economic or social change. Tyacke acknowledges this, but he does not confront the consequences. The contributors’ focus on high politics, religion, print culture, and elite manoeuvres remains comfortably within the revisionist comfort zone. The book’s post‑revisionist stance is therefore limited. It restores ideology to the centre of the period, but ideology without class becomes abstraction. It recognises conflict, but conflict without material roots becomes theatre. It speaks of revolution, but revolution without social forces becomes metaphor.

High Politics Without Social Foundations

The strongest chapters address the revolutionary decades. Even here, however, the focus remains overwhelmingly on elite politics, religious conflict, and print culture. Sean Kelsey’s chapter on Eikon Basilike is meticulously researched and revealing. It shows that royalism was not a monolithic bloc but a coalition divided by social tensions. This is precisely the kind of research that could challenge revisionist assumptions, yet the book never draws out its implications. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes helped restore ideology to the centre of early Stuart studies.

Michael Braddick’s effort to connect 1640 with 1688 is genuinely valuable. But ideology without class becomes abstraction. The “long revolution” Braddick describes lacks the social interests that made 1688 a settlement favouring property, Parliament, and the rising bourgeoisie. John Walter’s chapter stands out. His work on popular politics, riots, and crowd action continues the “history from below” tradition of Hill, Thompson and Manning. But even Walter stops short of treating the lower orders as decisive actors. Manning demonstrated that they were not merely a backdrop but a driving force shaping events in London, the counties, and within the New Model Army itself.⁹ Walter’s reluctance to follow Manning’s lead reflects the volume’s broader limitations.

What the Book Cannot Explain

The most glaring omission is economics. Across 212 pages, the book offers no sustained discussion of enclosure, the rise of capitalist agriculture, the expansion of the cloth trade, colonial commerce, the emergence of a powerful merchant bourgeoisie, or the transformation of London into a capitalist metropolis.

These were not peripheral developments. They were the material processes that produced the social groups whose interests collided with the Stuart monarchy's absolutist ambitions. Without them, the English Revolution becomes inexplicable: a constitutional quarrel that somehow ended in regicide, a republic, and military dictatorship.

The avoidance of economic history is not accidental. It reflects a broader trend in revisionist and post‑revisionist scholarship: a retreat from structural analysis toward micro‑politics, localism, and ideological nuance. The result is a discipline that can describe the revolution in exquisite detail while increasingly unable to explain it.

Conclusion: A Useful Collection, But Not a Sufficient One

Tyacke’s volume is well written, well researched, and often illuminating. It will be useful to students and general readers. But it is not a serious attempt to restore the English Revolution as a category of historical explanation. It revives the vocabulary of revolution while quietly discarding the Marxist analysis that made the term meaningful.

Anyone who wants to understand why England had a revolution in the seventeenth century rather than simply how it unfolded will still need to return to Hill, Manning, and Hobsbawm. Tyacke’s collection supplements that tradition, not replaces it.

Bibliography

Braddick, Michael, ‘The English Revolution and its Legacies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 189–212.

Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England (London: Longman, 1989).

Hill, Christopher, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London: Nelson, 1961).

Hobsbawm, Eric, ‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century’, Past and Present, 5 (1954), pp. 33–53; 6 (1954), pp. 44–65.

Kelsey, Sean, ‘The King’s Book: Eikon Basilike and the English Revolution of 1649’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 63–84.

Manning, Brian, The English People and the English Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1976).

Morrill, John, ‘The Causes and Course of the English Civil War’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 279–307.

Russell, Conrad, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

Sharpe, Kevin, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

Trevor‑Roper, Hugh, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, Past and Present, 16 (1959), pp. 31–64.

Tyacke, Nicholas (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Walter, John, ‘Politicising the Popular? The “Tradition of Riot” and Popular Political Culture in the English Revolution’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 113–140.

 

A Field in England: Revolution Without the Revolutionaries

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) has been widely praised for its visual invention, its genre‑bending strangeness, and its audacity in staging a Civil War hallucination on a shoestring budget. But beneath the surface of its black‑and‑white psychedelia lies a telling expression of the ideological exhaustion that has gripped British cultural life for decades. The film’s aesthetic ingenuity cannot conceal its profound historical emptiness. It is a work about the English Revolution in which the revolution—and the revolutionaries—have been almost entirely erased.

This erasure is not accidental. It reflects a broader intellectual retreat from the understanding of the 1640s as a decisive moment in world history, a revolution in which masses of ordinary people intervened consciously in political life, debated the foundations of power, and articulated demands for equality and democratic control that resonate to this day. Wheatley’s film, for all its technical flair, embodies the opposite outlook: a Hobbesian nightmare of isolated individuals, driven by fear, appetite, and superstition, stumbling blindly through a landscape stripped of meaning.

Hobbes Without History

The film opens with an epigraph from Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s famous description of life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes wrote those words in 1651, as the English Revolution was reaching its climax. They expressed his fear of what humanity might become without a strong sovereign power. Wheatley, however, treats Hobbes not as a theorist of political order but as a chronicler of the age itself. The film’s world is one in which social bonds have collapsed, ideas have evaporated, and human beings exist as little more than instinctual creatures. This is not the 1640s. It projects contemporary pessimism onto the past.

The plot is deliberately slight. A handful of men flee a battle—of which we see almost nothing—and wander into a field where the rest of the film unfolds. Among them is Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), a timid alchemist’s assistant sent to apprehend O’Neil (Michael Smiley), a rogue who has stolen from his master. O’Neil soon dominates the group, forcing them to dig for treasure he claims lies beneath the soil. A meal of hallucinogenic mushrooms plunges the film into a series of disorienting sequences, culminating in a struggle between Whitehead and the diabolical O’Neil.

The film’s technical qualities are genuine. Shot in stark monochrome, it has moments of striking visual beauty. Wheatley borrows freely from Eisenstein’s montage, Weimar expressionism, and the folk horror tradition of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Flashes of dark humour and bursts of violence are genuinely unsettling. But these elements serve a narrative that is almost aggressively empty of historical content.

The Revolution That Isn’t There

Serious films about the English Civil War are rare, and Wheatley’s project attracted attention from historians and critics alike. The period remains one of the most consequential in British history: a king was tried and executed; a standing army debated the foundations of political authority; radical movements such as the Levellers and Diggers articulated demands for democracy and common ownership that would not be heard again for centuries. None of this appears in A Field in England.

Historian Annette Bullen, writing for the Institute of Historical Research, noted that religion—central to every aspect of 17th‑century life—barely registers in the film. Only one character expresses religious feeling, and others mock or ignore his prayers. Cromwell and the King are mentioned only in passing. The men have no political consciousness, no sense of the world-transforming events around them. They would rather be in an alehouse than at the Putney Debates. They fight, when they fight at all, for causes they neither understand nor care about. This is not a neutral artistic choice. It reflects a long ideological shift.

From Winstanley to Wheatley: A Cultural Retreat

The contrast with Winstanley (1975), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s masterpiece about Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger commune, is instructive. Brownlow and Mollo approached the period with seriousness and respect, reconstructing the Diggers' world with painstaking accuracy. Their film is about ideas—ideas fought for by ordinary men and women who believed the earth should be a “common treasury” for all. Its soldiers belong to an army that debated ordinary people's rights at Putney. Wheatley’s characters, by contrast, have no ideas.

Bullen argues that each film reflects its time's intellectual climate. Winstanley emerged from the late 1960s, when Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill interpreted the Civil War as a genuine revolution—a clash of social classes that cleared the way for capitalist development. By the mid‑1970s, revisionist historians were gaining ground, recasting the conflict as an accident, a muddle of local grievances and aristocratic factionalism with no deeper social logic.

A Field in England is the cultural expression of where that retreat has led. Its world is not merely post‑Marxist; it is post‑historical. The revolution has vanished entirely. In its place are isolated individuals, drugged and brutalised, in a field that could be anywhere. Whatever Wheatley’s intentions, the film echoes the outlook that has dominated academic life and the arts for decades: history has no meaning, grand narratives are suspect, and human beings are driven by appetite and fear.

The Political Meaning of Erasure

The 1640s were a moment when masses of ordinary people—soldiers, artisans, small farmers—intervened directly in politics. They debated questions of power, property, and equality with a seriousness that puts today’s political establishment to shame. To reduce that period to a Hobbesian nightmare is to erase precisely what made it significant.

At a time of deepening social inequality, growing hostility to the political elite, and widespread disillusionment with parliamentary politics, the revolutionary tradition of the 1640s has renewed relevance. It shows that ordinary people can think for themselves, organise collectively, and challenge entrenched power. Wheatley’s film, however, offers only despair. It mistakes hallucination for history and substitutes nihilism for political imagination.

Conclusion

A Field in England is beautifully photographed, occasionally funny, and crude and violent in equal measure. As a work of folk horror, it is striking. But as a work about the English Revolution, it is a wasted opportunity. It reflects and reinforces an ideological climate in which collective agency has been forgotten, radical ideas dismissed, and history itself reduced to a series of disconnected, meaningless episodes.

 

E.P. Thompson, the New Left, and the Politics of Historical Evasion: A Marxist Reassessment

The fiftieth anniversary of The Making of the English Working Class has triggered many commemorations, most earnest and uncritical, that avoid direct confrontation with the political implications of E.P. Thompson’s historical approach. Scott Hamilton’s The Crisis of Theory fits into this pattern. It is a thorough, often sympathetic, sometimes insightful book, but ultimately avoids addressing key issues. Its main argument that Thompson’s separation from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 marked a “crisis of theory” from which he never fully recovered functions more as a storytelling device than a rigorous historical analysis, dramatising a rupture that Hamilton does not deeply explore.

The issue isn't that Hamilton misreads Thompson, but that he declines to engage with the political tradition that shaped him. Thompson didn't come from a Marxist movement nor break away from one. He was formed in the Stalinist environment of the CPGB in the 1940s, a Stalinism that had already lost its revolutionary essence, become nationalist, and aligned with the Popular Front’s strategy of subordinating the working class to “progressive" bourgeois sectors. Mentioning a “crisis of theory” in 1956 suggests Thompson had a revolutionary theory beforehand, which isn't true. Hamilton’s book, by neglecting this crucial context, unintentionally reveals the limitations of its preferred historiographical tradition.

The Politics Hamilton Cannot Confront

Hamilton’s early chapters stand out as some of his best, yet even they show signs of evasion. He details Thompson’s political apprenticeship in the CPGB thoughtfully, but he downplays its significance, showing leniency towards the brothers’ patriotic enthusiasm. Frank Thompson’s wartime complaint that it was “humiliating” to sit by while other nationalities fought for Britain conflicts with any notion of genuine internationalism.

This detail matters: it reflects the CPGB's political climate in the 1940s, where nationalism disguised as Marxism, Popular Frontism appeared as internationalism, and Stalinism claimed to represent revolutionary continuity. Thompson emerged from the war as a staunch Stalinist, and his subsequent record shows no indication that he confronted the Moscow Trials or the purge of the Bolshevik Old Guard.

Hamilton’s silence regarding the Trotsky–Stalin conflict is intentional, not accidental. It reflects a fundamental structural choice. Addressing this conflict would mean challenging the core ideas of Stalinism: the rejection of perpetual revolution, the promotion of “socialism in one country,” and the shift of Marxism from a scientific theory of global revolution to a nationalist, gradualist ideology. Thompson embraced this framework completely, influencing his political views, his approach to history, and his opposition to theory. Hamilton cannot openly recognise this without undermining his entire argument.

The Communist Party Historians’ Group: The Missing Foundation

The most noticeable omission in Hamilton’s book is the absence of the Communist Party Historians’ Group and, most importantly, Dona Torr. It is difficult to credit an account of Thompson’s formation that omits the person most responsible for it. Torr was not merely a mentor. She was the architect of the CPHG’s national‑radical historiography, the intellectual bridge between Popular Front politics and “history from below.” Her biography of Tom Mann, situating him as “a late representative in a story of England’s long-running struggle,” is the template for The Making of the English Working Class. The working class appears not as a class defined by its objective position in capitalist production, but as the bearer of an instinctively radical national tradition. This is not Marxism. It is Popular Frontism translated into historiography.

Thompson’s later rejection of the CPHG’s approach as “quaintly empirical" was more of a stylistic critique than a fundamental disagreement. The core assumptions, such as nationalism, empiricism, scepticism of theory, and opposition to internationalism, remained consistent in his work. Hamilton’s lack of comment on Torr is therefore deliberate. Addressing her would mean challenging the entire Popular Front.

1956 and the New Left: A Break Without a Rupture

Hamilton’s most compelling chapters explore Thompson’s exit from the CPGB and the establishment of The New Reasoner. However, even here, the key question remains unasked: was Thompson’s departure a move toward revolutionary Marxism, or just a change within a non-revolutionary political context? At the Wortley Hall Conference in April 1957, John Saville stated that the goal was to develop a body of Marxist ideas relevant to the British working class, which involved examining “our own working-class movement and its history.” David North’s response is particularly impactful: The real problem was not insufficient knowledge of Manchester or Liverpool in the 1820s, “but what had happened inside the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s.”

Thompson and Saville shifted their focus from the international class struggle to the national radical tradition. However, this was not a departure from Stalinism but a continuation of it. Thompson’s antagonism toward Trotskyism further supports this, as he told The Newsletter that Trotskyist views “tend toward the petrification and perpetuation of sectarian division.” Slaughter remembered Thompson describing Trotskyism as “sectarian, ultra-left and anti-revolutionary," indicating that he was still embedded within Stalinist ideas rather than emerging from them.

Hamilton’s interpretation of the Thompson–Anderson dispute is proficient yet lacks depth. Your review observes that neither party framed their arguments within an internationalist Marxist perspective. The entire debate centred on nationalist ideas. Anderson’s claim of an ‘epochal bourgeois revolution’ spanning from the twelfth to the nineteenth century was a Ptolemaic construct, a theoretical framework designed to uphold English exceptionalism. While Thompson’s counterargument, backed by stronger archival research, also remained confined to national boundaries, neither addressed the crucial question: how the English Revolution integrates into the global development of capitalism and international class struggles. The conflict did not reflect lively theory; rather, it reflected fatigue within theoretical approaches.

The Making of the English Working Class: Achievement and Limit

The Making remains a significant work, yet its focus on subjective experience comes at the expense of downplaying the objective, international, and scientific aspects of Marxism. This tension is at the core of Thompson’s approach. While his effort to preserve the stories of “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver” from “the enormous condescension of posterity” is compelling, it results in portraying the working class as a moral subject rather than a revolutionary force. Their radicalism appears instinctive rather than rooted in theory, their history remains national instead of international, and their struggle is cultural rather than political. This is not Marxism. It is radical liberalism with a working‑class accent.

Hamilton’s The Crisis of Theory is an important yet ultimately vague book, often enlightening but evasive in key areas. By excluding the Historians’ Group, Dona Torr, and the Socialist Labour League’s critique, it omits the crucial material needed to evaluate what Thompson’s 1956 “crisis” actually addressed or left unresolved. The reality, which is simpler and more uncomfortable, is that Thompson did not face a theoretical crisis because he never truly had a revolutionary theory to start with. His split from the CPGB was organisational rather than ideological. His politics stayed nationalist, empiricist, and opposed to the internationalist Marxism he knew only through Stalinist distortions. This essay aims to contribute to the view of Thompson not as a tragic figure who lost a theory, but as a symbol of a political tradition that never actually held one.

 

 

A Short Interview with Historian John Morrill on the New Critical Edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Writings and Speeches

For over two years, John Morrill and a team of eight researchers have been engaged in one of the most ambitious editorial projects in modern Cromwell studies: A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Their work promises to reshape the textual foundations on which Cromwell scholarship has rested for more than a century. In this short Q&A, Morrill outlines the scope, challenges, and implications of the project.

Is this a definitive version of Cromwell’s writings, or is there more to be done?

Morrill: Nine of us have spent two years tracking down Cromwell material. We have found little significant new material (although we do have new versions of some of the speeches), but we have tracked down many items not seen since they were poorly transcribed in the 18th and 19th centuries. We think it very unlikely, but not impossible, that there is unknown material ‘out there’.

How different an Oliver Cromwell emerges from your research?

Morrill: There is nothing transformative. But by excluding a few items we think are apocryphal, improving the texts of some important letters, and understanding the context better, we think there will be many small things that will cumulatively make quite a difference. How much will only be realised when I complete my new biography based on the new edition in 2015 or 2016.

What was the most difficult problem encountered by your researchers?

Morrill: A high proportion of Cromwell’s letters and speeches exist not in autographs but in multiple early copies — especially for the late 1640s and early 1650s, when we have multiple print versions of each letter but no manuscript. Most of the speeches he made to Parliament also appear in multiple copies from different scribes. Stabilising those texts has been rewarding but difficult.

Do the commentaries and headnotes represent a move away from previous historiography on Cromwell?

Morrill: We will publish three volumes of ‘texts’, each writing or speech with a contextual headnote and normal footnotes saying who people are, noting major differences between the various versions, etc. And there will be two companion volumes — one a set of essays on the edition (Cromwell’s handwriting, why some things survive and others don’t, and exploring the reliability of texts which are not autographs), and one a set of interpretative essays by a range of scholars as they work with the new edition (Cromwell’s faith, his politics, his relations with his family, with the Army, with Parliament, etc.). We think this will make the edition much more reliable than earlier ones, much more usable and much more useful.

Are the volumes aimed primarily at an academic audience, or will they be accessible to a wider readership?

Morrill: The texts are presented in their original spelling and punctuation, so they are a bit harder to follow than modernised ones would be, but the contextual headnotes and footnotes should allow anyone interested in the period to use the volumes. It will be available online with Oxford Scholarly Editions Online — the first port of call for scholars — but it will also appear in handsome volumes of 800, 800, 800, 400 and 400 pages.

What is the expected publication date?

Morrill: We have completed the searches, completed the transcriptions, and decided in almost every case which version to use as our ‘proof text’. Nine of us will now write the headnotes and footnotes and hope to complete that by September 2014, with publication by the end of 2015.

 

No Newes is Good Newes

Books

The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History) Tim Harris, Stephen Taylor. Boydell Press have kindly given me a review copy.  The book is beautifully presented.  From Amazon “This collection sheds new light on the final crisis of the Stuart monarchy by re-examining the causes and implications of the dynastic shift of 1688-9 from a broad chronological, intellectual and geographical perspective. Comprising eleven essays by specialists in the field, it ranges from the 1660s to the mid-eighteenth century, deals with the history of ideas as well as political and religious history, and covers not just England, Scotland and Ireland but also explores the Atlantic and European contexts.

The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution, 1381-1926 Paperback Frank McLynn. Having not read the book I cannot comment too much but it seems Mclynn appears to follow in the footsteps of recent revisionist historians that do not classify the English revolution as a revolution.

Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Haney Foundation Series) Wolfram Schmidgen. Pat Rogers reviews this book in the TLS http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1285590.ece

Books recently purchased

The crisis of Theory- Scott Hamilton- EP Thompson, the new left and post war politics. I am working on a review of this in light of the anniversary of Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.

In contempt of all authority- B Sharp. Breviarry Stuff Publication have sent me a review copy which will be reviewed on my blog soonish.

Hobsbawm on History- Eric Hobsbawm.

Internet Newes

Daniel Reed has published his Dissertation submitted for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts 2007-2008 on http://www.academia.edu/ it charts the life of Sir John Hotham during the English revolution

Marriage in the English Revolution- The History of Parliament-http://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2013/07/17/marriage-in-the-english-revolution/

A Field In England [DVD] “A Field In England is set in the midst of the English Civil War, following a quartet of deserters. Said group soon fall under the influence of a thief, played by Michael Smiley, and the search begins for buried treasure. Wheatley, however, has more ingredients here, not least the introduction of some particularly potent mushrooms, that soon begin to affect the adventures of his characters, and the direction of the film. It ends up an utterly unpredictable, bold piece of cinema, that's frequently funny, very British and, at its best, downright brilliant. And, as always, Wheatley makes sure that the DVD doesn't skimp on interesting extra features too”. Amazon

British Library hush is broken by a row over reading room rules-http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/19/british-library-hush-row-reading-room

Professor Robert Ashton: Historian of early modern England- This obituary appeared in the Independent. Although the historian died earlier this year very little in the way of obituaries were written. Hopefully in the near future I would like to do one. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-robert-ashton-historian-of-early-modern-england-8533191.html

Jayne E. E. Boys, London’s News Press and the Thirty Years' War: A Study of Early News Culture and the Crisis of the Stuart State

Jayne Boys, London’s News Press and the Thirty Years' War is a useful and at times illuminating study of early seventeenth-century news culture. But it is also a symptomatic product of a contemporary historiography that has lost sight of the deeper social and economic forces driving the early modern state's crisis. Boys reconstructs the mechanics of coranto production with admirable diligence. Yet, her refusal to confront the fundamental historiographical debates surrounding the Thirty Years’ War leaves her analysis floating above the very historical ground on which her subject rests.

The book’s central claim—that the Thirty Years’ War generated an unprecedented demand for printed news in England, thereby helping to create a recognisable reading public—is sound enough. Boys’ use of the Trumbull papers, Joseph Mead’s correspondence, and the corantos themselves vividly evokes a society in which ordinary readers, for the first time, could form independent judgments about European politics. This development was indeed destabilising for a Stuart regime accustomed to monopolising political interpretation through pulpit and court.

But Boys treats this destabilisation as nearly an accidental side effect of a remote religious conflict, rather than a reflection of a broader structural crisis across Europe that was also weakening the Stuart state. In this approach, she reproduces the limited and domesticated perspectives seen in much recent scholarship.

Boys observes the government’s escalating attempts to suppress the press, including Weckherlin’s appointment in 1627, Laud’s control via the High Commission, and the harsh prosecutions of Burton, Bastwick, Prynne, and Williams by the Star Chamber. She compares James I’s strategic understanding of public opinion with Charles I’s reckless apathy. While these are significant observations, Boys presents them more as administrative errors than as signs of a deeper political illness.

The Stuart monarchy was not just slow to adapt to a shifting media environment; it was fundamentally unable to. A regime built on the weakening basis of feudal power could not forever suppress the rise of a public sphere created by the uneven growth of capitalist relations. Boys hints at this contradiction but never states it explicitly.

The Historiographical Failure: Evading the General Crisis

The book’s main weakness is its near-total neglect of the historiographical debate over the true nature of the Thirty Years’ War. Although Boys frames her analysis within revisionist and post-revisionist discussions on newsprints, she ignores the deeper, long-standing debate over the war’s fundamental essence. The common view today—that the war was Europe's last major religious conflict—is both incomplete and intellectually evasive. This perspective lets historians categorise the war as a cultural or confessional issue, avoiding exploration of the wider economic and social transformations taking place in Europe.

The Marxist tradition, however, viewed the Thirty Years’ War as part of a broader seventeenth-century crisis. Hobsbawm saw it as a breakdown of feudal systems across the continent. At the same time, Polišenský argued that its roots lay in the uneven growth of early capitalist economies, which led to clash regions where different systems met violently.

This interpretation is essential to grasping why English news culture surged when it did. The craving for uncensored news wasn't just curiosity about a foreign conflict; it mirrored broader structural pressures—economic upheaval, political deadlock, ideological division—that pushed Europe toward war and England toward revolution. By neglecting this literature, Boys strips her findings of their historical significance, recording symptoms without addressing the underlying issues.

There are also more concrete problems. Boys’ reliance on printed calendars of state papers rather than the manuscript State Papers Domestic has already been criticised, and rightly so. Her repetition of the long-corrected misidentification of the press licenser “Cottington” is not a trivial slip. It reveals a methodological complacency at odds with the book’s claims to archival rigour. This is not fatal to her argument, but it reflects a broader tendency: a willingness to treat the surface of events as sufficient, without probing the deeper structures that give them significance.

The Thirty Years’ War and Current Historiography

The Thirty Years’ War is still one of the most misunderstood events in early modern history. Modern historians generally see it as the final and most intense expression of Europe’s religious conflicts: a destructive outbreak of confessional hostility ultimately settled by the pragmatic diplomacy of Westphalia. This popular view, common in mainstream scholarship, is neat, morally comforting, and politically static. However, it fails to capture the event’s full complexity.

The “war of religion” thesis simplifies a continentwide social and political collapse into a mere theological dispute. It frames the conflict as a cultural drama instead of acknowledging it as a fundamental structural crisis. This perspective masks the underlying forces that made the war both possible and unavoidable.

The Marxist tradition offered a far more ambitious explanation. Eric Hobsbawm located the war within the general crisis of the seventeenth century: a Europe-wide breakdown of feudal structures marked by agrarian collapse, fiscal exhaustion, demographic contraction, and political fragmentation. J. V. Polišenský went further, identifying the war’s origins in the uneven development of emerging capitalist economies. This unevenness produced “buffer” regions—zones caught between incompatible economic and political systems—where conflict was most likely to ignite.

This view sees the Thirty Years’ War not as a mere religious conflict but as a fundamental upheaval. Religion served as the ideological language, not the primary cause. The prevalent focus on confessional explanations today mirrors a wider trend among historians to Favor social narratives. By depicting the war as a battle of beliefs rather than a struggle over material interests, historians sidestep the crisis of the feudal system and the rise of capitalist dynamics that shaped the century. Consequently, the war is viewed as a moral tragedy rather than a significant political event.

This is important because the Thirty Years’ War was not an isolated event. It was part of a broader crisis across Europe that also destabilised the Stuart monarchy, transformed state institutions, and created new forms of political communication, such as the rise of English news culture. Viewing the war only as a religious conflict overlooks its true significance.

A historiography that refuses to confront the conflict's structural roots cannot explain why the war lasted thirty years, why it engulfed half of Europe, or why its consequences were so transformative. The confessional thesis offers description without explanation. The Marxist tradition, by contrast, insists that the war must be understood as a decisive episode in the long, uneven transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Boys has written a clear, competent, and often engaging study. She restores England to its proper place within a Europewide news culture and shows how the early press became entangled with the crisis of monarchical authority. But her refusal to confront the broader crisis of the seventeenth century—its economic roots, political contradictions, and social upheavals—means her book ultimately explains less than it describes.

📚 Core Modern Scholarship (Confessional / Post‑Revisionist Paradigm)

These works represent the dominant “war of religion” interpretation in current historiography.

• Olaf Asbach & Peter Schröder (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Thirty Years’ War (Routledge, 2014). A comprehensive survey of current scholarship, emphasising religious and political motives across multiple theatres of conflict.
• Ronald G. Asch, The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–48 (Palgrave, 1997). A widely used introduction reflecting the mainstream confessional and political framing.
• Stephen J. Lee, The Thirty Years War (Routledge, 1991). A concise overview in the “Lancaster Pamphlets” series, typical of the post‑revisionist synthesis.
• Herbert Langer, Thirty Years’ War (Hippocrene Books, 1980). A narrative account that strongly emphasises religious conflict and state politics.

📚 Marxist & Structural Interpretations (General Crisis Framework)

These works challenge the confessional paradigm and locate the war within the seventeenth-century general crisis and the uneven transition from feudalism to capitalism.

• Eric Hobsbawm, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (essays in Past & Present and later collected). Places the Thirty Years’ War within a Europe‑wide structural breakdown of feudal society.
• J. V. Polišenský, The Thirty Years War and War and Society in Europe, 1618–1648. Argues that uneven capitalist development produced “buffer zones” where incompatible systems collided, generating conflict.

(These Marxist works are not in the search results but are essential to the historiographical debate you are engaging with. Their absence from current mainstream bibliographies is itself symptomatic of the field’s ideological drift.)

📚 Classic Works & Older Historiography

These texts shaped earlier interpretations and remain useful for understanding the field's evolution.

• The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. IV: The Thirty Years’ War (Macmillan/Cambridge University Press, 1934). A monumental early‑20th‑century synthesis.
• Carl J. Friedrich, The Age of the Baroque, 1610–1660 (Harper & Brothers, 1952). Connects the war to the liquidation of the medieval imperial order.
• Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (Knopf, 1959). Detailed chapters on the war’s phases and the Peace of Westphalia.
• Georges Pagès, The Thirty Years War 1618–1648 (Harper & Row, 1970). A classic narrative account.

📚 Useful Thematic and Contextual Works

These works are not exclusively about the war but provide essential context.

• David Maland, Europe in the Seventeenth Century (St. Martin’s Press, 1966). Includes a substantial section on the war within broader European crisis dynamics.
• Earle E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries

 

" To Have no Newes is good Newes"

Book Reviews

The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences-David Cannadine London, Allen Lane, 2013, ISBN: 9781846141324; 352pp.; Price: £20.00 Reviewer:Dr Beverley Southgate University of Hertfordshire http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1435

Turncoats and Renegadoes: Changing Sides during the English Civil Wars Andrew Hopper Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN: 9780199575855; 272pp.; Price: £65.00 Reviewer:Dr Elliot Vernon URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1434

Women and the Bible in Early Modern England by Femke Molekamp Times Higher Education by Lucy Wooding http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/women-and-the-bible-in-early-modern-england-by-femke-molekamp/2005022.article

Pamela O. Long. Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400-1600. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2011. xii + 196 pp. $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-87071-609-6; ISBN 978-0-87071-647-8.Reviewed by Lesley Cormack (University of Alberta)Published on H-Albion (May, 2013)Commissioned by Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth

New Books

The English Revolution C. 1590 1720: Politics, Religion and Communities [Paperback] Nicholas Tyacke Publisher: Manchester University Press (1 Sep 2013)ISBN-10: 0719090083

Conferences

Conference on Hugh Trevor-Roper in Oxford in January, 2014 Hugh Trevor-Roper 1914-2014 A series of papers and discussions to mark the centenary of his birth (on 15 January) and to appraise aspects of his thought and writing. The occasion is arranged by the Dacre Trust and will be held on   Saturday 11 January 2014 in Corpus Christi College Oxford.

" To Have no Newes is good Newes"

A new feature of this blog will be a bi- monthly collection of articles, reviews, new books from the world of Early Modern history.

Aaron Graham from Jesus College, Oxford has reviewed a number of books under the title of Mercantile Networks in the Early Modern World. The Historical Journal Vol. 56 Issue 01. A difficult task but the review is highly informative and useful for anyone studying this subject.

Bernard Capp reviews Ann Hughes book Gender and the English Revolution in English Historical Review. April 2013

Sam Jordison reviews Robert Newman new book The Trade Secret published by Cargo. Cargo have kindly agreed to send me a review copy.  The book promises to be a ripping yarn about the early origins of capitalism. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/07/the-trade-secret-newman-review

History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about the future by Tristram Hunt. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/12/niall-ferguson-british-history-parochial

Memory and the Construction and Experience of Elite Masculinity in the 17^th Century Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. By Christine Jackson Vcol25 Issue 1 April 2013 Gender & History

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century Geoffrey Parker 672 pages: Yale University Press (22 Feb 2013) ISBN-10: 0300153236. Will be reviewed for this blog at a later date. Christopher Hill wrote that Parker was “Perhaps the most perceptive modern historian of the subject”. 

History Today June edition reviewer Paul Dykes. BBC History Magazine has another review of the above book in its June edition author Penny Roberts

In the Journal of Modern History March 2013 Tom Webster reviews Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580-1720 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History) Andrew Chambers author.

The Public Face of Early Modern England Artfully Revealed is reviewed by Helen Pierce at Reviews in History website http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/

History through the Eyes of the Working Man is an appreciation of the work of E P Thompson especially his major work The Making of the English working Class which saw its 50^th birthday this year. Review is by David Priestland BBC History Magazine. June edition.

Hobbes's Leviathan: A tale of two bodies Stephen B. Hequembourga The Seventeenth Century Volume 28, Issue 1, 2013.

Marxist Review March/April edition Reviews John Gurney’s wonderful book Gerrard Winstanley.

Paul Lay writing in April’s edition of Literary Review casts a critical eye over Leviathan; The Rise of Britain as a World Power by David Scott Harper Press

Last and by no means least Thomas L Leng from the University of Sheffield thought provoking appreciation of the life of William Sykes. ‘His neighbours land mark’: William Sykes and the campaign for ‘free trade’ in civil war England Historical Research Volume 86, Issue 232, pages 230–252, May 2013

Horses, People and Parliament: The English Civil War and the Retreat from Social Explanation

Gavin Robinson’s Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War (Ashgate, 2012) is, at first glance, a tightly focused monograph on a seemingly narrow subject: the requisitioning of horses by Parliament’s armies during the 1640s. Yet the book’s significance lies not in its topic but in what it reveals about the state of English Civil War historiography nearly forty years after the collapse of the Marxist and Whig frameworks that once dominated the field. Robinson’s study is a microcosm of the post‑revisionist settlement: empirically diligent, theoretically self‑conscious, and almost entirely evacuated of social explanation. It demonstrates, with almost painful clarity, how far the discipline has retreated from the attempt to understand the English Revolution as a revolution.

Examining Robinson’s work is therefore examining the intellectual trajectory of Civil War studies itself. The book’s strengths and weaknesses are not merely personal but symptomatic of a broader historiographical transformation—one that has replaced structural analysis with administrative micro‑history, class conflict with identity construction, and revolutionary causation with discursive contingency. In this sense, Horses, People and Parliament is not simply a study of wartime resource extraction. It is an artefact of a discipline that has lost sight of the social forces that made the English Revolution historically necessary.

The Empirical Achievement: Reconstructing Wartime Extraction

Robinson’s archival labour is substantial and, on its own terms, valuable. Drawing on Parliamentary ordinances, county committee papers, constables’ returns, and the records of the Committee for Compounding, he reconstructs in granular detail how Parliament attempted to convert a nominal claim on the nation’s resources into actual horseflesh for Essex’s army and later the Eastern Association. The book’s structure — propositions, seizure, quotas, purchase — traces the evolution of Parliament’s efforts from voluntary subscription to coercive requisition as the war dragged on and the gap between what Parliament claimed to control and what it could actually extract became impossible to ignore.

This material is genuinely useful. It confirms, with documentary precision, what an older generation of historians argued from a different theoretical standpoint: that Parliament’s authority in the localities was not a given but something that had to be manufactured, contested, and enforced against a population that was, in the main, reluctant, self‑interested, or simply indifferent to the constitutional questions at stake in London. The picture that emerges — of committees improvising bureaucratic machinery, of constables dragging their feet, of horse‑owners hiding animals or claiming exemption — is a powerful corrective to any account of the war that treats “Parliamentarian” or “Royalist” England as blocs of the committed.

Robinson’s evidence shows that the English state in the 1640s was not a coherent national apparatus but a fragile project struggling to impose itself on a population divided by locality, class, and economic interest. The requisitioning of horses becomes a window into the broader problem of wartime state‑building: how to mobilise resources in a society where authority was dispersed, contested, and often resisted.

Yet this empirical achievement raises questions that Robinson’s theoretical framework cannot answer. Why did some counties comply more readily than others? Why did certain social layers gravitate toward Parliament while others clung to the monarchy? Why did the extraction of horses — a seemingly technical matter — map so clearly onto deeper conflicts over property, privilege, and the organisation of the economy? These questions are latent in Robinson’s archive, but his interpretive apparatus prevents him from addressing them.

Robinson’s central argument is that allegiance was not a “fixed underlying condition” but something “constructed” through action, performance, and administrative categorisation. He insists identities were imposed on people regardless of their actual sympathies. This is presented as a significant theoretical advance. In reality, it is the familiar post‑1980s linguistic‑turn orthodoxy: dissolve political identity into discourse, treat allegiance as performative, emphasise contingency and local negotiation, and reject essentialist or interest‑based explanations.

This framework is not without insight. Robinson is right that county committees often imputed allegiance based on behaviour rather than belief, and that this had real, often punitive, consequences. But the difficulty is what such a framework systematically excludes. By treating allegiance as a discursive artefact rather than a social relation, Robinson cannot explain why certain behaviours emerged in the first place. The result is a picture of allegiance as a floating administrative category, detached from the material conditions that shaped people’s willingness or refusal to comply.

The problem is not simply theoretical. It is methodological. Robinson’s approach forbids him from asking the most basic questions about the English Revolution: why this conflict, at this time, with these social consequences? Why did the struggle over horses, money, and workforce map so clearly onto deeper conflicts over land, market relations, and political authority? Why did Parliament’s demands resonate with some sections of society and provoke resistance in others?

These are not optional questions. They are the conditions of possibility for understanding the English Revolution. Without them, the war becomes a drama of administrative improvisation rather than a struggle between antagonistic social forces.

The Historiographical Retreat: From Revolution to Micro‑Administration

Robinson’s book reflects a broader historiographical shift that has reshaped Civil War studies since the late 1970s. The first wave of this retreat was the revisionist school — Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Mark Kishlansky — whose project was to dismantle the Marxist and Whig narratives that treated the Civil War as the product of long‑term structural tensions. Revisionism insisted on localism over national conflict, contingency over causation, elite consensus over social antagonism, and the denial of any meaningful “revolutionary” content. Revisionism reimagined the English Revolution as an accidental conflict triggered by short‑term political mismanagement.

By the 1990s, revisionism’s narrow political focus had become untenable. The field responded not by returning to social explanation but by embracing the cultural turn. Post‑revisionism added discourse, identity, performativity, and micro‑history. This produced a historiography that was richer in texture but still evacuated of social content. Allegiance became a matter of “identity construction,” political conflict a matter of “discursive negotiation,” and the revolution itself a matter of “contested meanings.”

Robinson’s book is a perfect example of this phase. It takes a genuinely important question — how Parliament extracted resources from a divided society — and reframes it as a problem of administrative categorisation and performative allegiance. It treats the social forces that made extraction difficult or possible as background noise.

The cumulative effect of revisionism and post‑revisionism has been the production of a Civil War historiography in which the revolution has no structural causes, no social agents, no economic content, and no necessity. It becomes a conflict of committees, ordinances, identities, and discourses — a revolution without revolutionaries.

Restoring the Revolution: A Materialist Counter‑Argument

To understand the English Revolution, one must restore what the older Marxist tradition understood: that the conflict between king and Parliament was inseparable from the transformation of English society between 1500 and 1640. The growth of a market in land, the differentiation of the peasantry, and the rise of a commercial gentry and merchant class increasingly at odds with a monarchy organised around courtly privilege and feudal prerogative were not background conditions but the revolution's substance.

The requisitioning of horses is not simply an administrative process. It is a window into the uneven development of agrarian capitalism, the differentiation of the peasantry, the rise of a commercial gentry, and the conflict between market forces and feudal prerogatives. The struggle over horses reflects deeper struggles over who controlled the means of mobility, production, and war.

Robinson’s archive contains this story, but his framework prevents him from telling it. His committees operate in a social vacuum. His horse‑owners resist or comply for reasons he never explores. His counties differ in their responses, but he treats the reasons for those differences as unknowable or irrelevant. The war becomes a drama of administrative improvisation rather than a struggle between antagonistic classes.

A materialist explanation would begin by recognising that allegiance was shaped not by discourse but by social interest. The willingness to give up horses, money, or workforce was not a matter of identity but of class position. The conflict over resource extraction was inseparable from the conflict over the social order itself.

Finally, the book’s pricing — over $120 at release — is not incidental. It reflects the transformation of Civil War historiography into a professionalised, inward‑facing academic discourse. The English Revolution, once a subject of mass political interest, has been sequestered in a university library market increasingly detached from broader public engagement with the revolution's meaning. This is not merely unfortunate. It is part of the same depoliticising process that has stripped the revolution of its social meaning.

Robinson’s book is therefore best mined for its archival detail, not followed for its interpretive framework. It is a product of a historiography that has abandoned the attempt to explain the English Revolution as a revolution — and replaced it with a focus on discourse, identity, and administrative practice that leaves the deeper social conflict untouched.

Conclusion

Horses, People and Parliament is a useful empirical study of wartime state‑building, and Robinson’s insistence that Parliament’s authority in the counties was fragile, contested, and had to be actively constructed is a genuine corrective to accounts that treat the parliamentary war effort as smoothly effective. But the book’s larger theoretical ambitions—to displace explanations grounded in social interest with an account centred on discourse and the performative construction of identity—exemplify the limitations of much academic historiography of the period.

The English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, however unevenly and confusedly its participants understood it. To treat allegiance as a free‑floating administrative artefact is to miss the deeper conflict over the country's social and economic order. Robinson’s book, and the historiographical tradition it belongs to, cannot explain why the revolution occurred, why it took the form it did, or why it had the consequences it did. It documents the revolution while obscuring its meaning.

Restoring that meaning requires a return to materialist explanation—to the recognition that the English Revolution was not a drama of identity but a struggle over property, privilege, and the organisation of society itself. Robinson’s archive points toward this story. A different historiography must tell it.

 

Conrad Russell and the “Mirage” of the English Revolution: Revisionism, Anti Marxism, and the Politics of Historiography

Introduction

Recent efforts by the coalition government to modify the National Curriculum have reignited a familiar ideological debate. Conservative ministers and their media allies frequently label critics of their reforms as “Marxists,” a term that often serves more political purpose than accurate description. For more than twenty years, a concerted effort has been ongoing within academia to discredit and marginalise Marxism as a method for historical analysis. This campaign has been especially active in the historiography of the English Civil War, where a revisionist school aims to challenge both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the seventeenth-century conflict.

A key influence on this revisionist shift was Conrad Russell’s 1990 History Today essay, “The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage.” With a populist tone and a polemical aim, Russell strongly challenged the idea that the events of the 1640s represented a revolutionary break. Nonetheless, his argument was based on weak intellectual grounds and aimed to undermine materialist and class-based theories of historical change.

This article revisits Russell’s intervention, situating it within the wider revisionist project inaugurated by G. R. Elton and Alfred Cobban, and assessing its methodological, theoretical, and political implications. It argues that Russell’s essay was less a work of historical scholarship than a manifesto for a historiographical reorientation that sought to sever ideas from their material basis and dissolve the English Revolution into a sequence of contingencies devoid of social meaning.

Russell’s Argument in Context

Russell’s essay emerged at a time when the Soviet Union's collapse encouraged commentators to dismiss Marxism as intellectually dead. Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man offered a philosophical backing for what was essentially a political celebration of liberal capitalism. Russell’s contribution aligned with this trend in seventeenth-century historiography, arguing that no revolutions took place in the 1640s or in 1688.

This was a radical claim. Before Russell's work, many believed a revolutionary rupture had occurred. His argument relied significantly on Alfred Cobban’s book, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, which argued that political upheaval could be separated from class struggles. Cobban’s cautious approach to social explanations became the foundation of a revisionist school, defined more by its opposition to Whig and Marxist views than by a clear alternative explanation.

Russell adopted this scepticism wholesale. His central wager that Marxist historiography depends on the thesis of a “rising middle class” was a caricature. Marxist historians never relied on such a crude model, and contemporaries themselves, including royalists, described the events of the 1640s as a “revolution. Russell ignored this evidence.

A key flaw in Russell’s essay is its failure to engage with Marx’s own works. Russell does not mention Marx’s depiction in the Communist Manifesto of the bourgeoisie as a class that “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production”, and that dissolves “all fixed, fast-frozen relations." Instead, he merges Whig and Marxist historiographies into a single category of “dialectical thinking,” a simplification that suggests either unfamiliarity with or disregard for Marxist theory.

Russell dismisses dialectics based on a misinterpretation of Marx’s approach. In the 1859 preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy," Marx explains the dynamic between base and superstructure: social being influences consciousness, but ideological forms serve as the means by which actors realise underlying conflicts and confront them. Therefore, Russell’s focus on the “autonomy of the mind” criticizes a distorted version of Marxism rather than Marxism directly.

The Roots of Revisionism: Elton and Empiricism

Russell’s intervention should be seen as part of a broader revisionist movement initiated by G. R. Elton. In his book The Practice of History, Elton strongly challenged E. H. Carr’s view that historical interpretation is fundamentally theoretical. Elton advocated for an “empirical, thesis-free" approach to history, implying that choosing and organising evidence are not theoretical actions. Russell embraced this empiricism to justify a history that excludes social explanations.

Elton’s earlier essay, “The High Road to Civil War,” already set the stage for a revisionist view of the seventeenth century, emphasising political contingency over structural tensions. Russell’s essay built on this, dismissing efforts to frame the Civil War as a result of class conflict or material contradictions.

Distorting the ‘Storm Over the Gentry’ Debate

Russell’s analysis of the mid-20th-century debate involving R. H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and J. H. Hexter is somewhat selective. As Norah Carlin has highlighted, the gentry and aristocracy were not clearly separate classes; both derived wealth from land and trade, held influence at court and in Parliament, and social mobility between them was common. Tawney’s assertion that the gentry was a rising revolutionary class went beyond the arguments of Marx or Engels.

Perry Anderson’s idea that the English Civil War was a bourgeois revolution “by proxy,” executed by a part of the ruling class for the bourgeoisie, raised important theoretical questions. Russell ignored these issues completely, instead viewing the debate as proof of Marxism’s shortcomings rather than engaging with it as a nuanced historiographical conflict.

His application of Hexter is especially telling. Russell adopts Hexter’s scepticism of social determinism but ignores Hexter’s claim that the Civil War was a true constitutional conflict. This selective use indicates a writer who cherry-picks authoritative voices to support a preformed conclusion rather than genuinely engaging with their arguments.

Russell often stresses the “autonomy of the mind,” implying that religious and political loyalties are not solely determined by class. However, Marxism acknowledges the nuanced development of ideas. Christopher Hill’s The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution emphasises that Marx did not view ideas merely as "pale reflections" of economic interests.

Hill’s work shows that ideological forms become influential because they meet the needs of important social groups, reflecting a dialectical rather than mechanical relationship. Even historians who are not sympathetic to Marxism, like Robert Ashton, have recognised the usefulness of understanding religious and constitutional ideologies as rooted in material and class interests.

Russell’s argument that class analysis is impossible because bourgeois and gentry elements supported both sides does not hold up. Ashton’s research on royalist support in London reveals a nuanced pattern: various parts of the bourgeoisie supported different factions for reasons that class analysis can clarify. Hill acknowledged this complexity, offering detailed qualifications about who fought for which side and why, including that religious beliefs, not just economic motives, influenced many participants. Russell’s oversimplified critique of Marxist determinism falls apart with even basic scrutiny.

The Political Function of Revisionism

Jim Holstun has characterised Russell’s work as a manifesto advocating for historical revisionism. Mary Fullbrook pointed out the resulting void: by dismantling the notion that the Civil War was a significant event in world history, revisionists felt no need to explain it beyond a dismissive reference by one historian, describing it as a “bloody tiff” between king and subjects. This shift in historiography coincided with a broader trend in university departments, moving away from “history from below” toward renewed interest in capitalists, bankers, and markets. This change’s political purpose was evident: to detach the study of the seventeenth century from any framework that might interpret revolutionary change as driven by social contradictions, rather than by accident, contingency, or the independent flow of ideas.

Russell’s “Mirage” was not just a critique of the English Civil War. It was part of a wider ideological effort to discredit Marxism, undermine social explanations, and portray history as a series of isolated events. Even after twenty years, the core debate persists: can history be understood through class and material interests, or should it be seen as a collection of unrelated episodes devoid of social significance?

Notes

Primary Works by Conrad Russell

• Russell, Conrad. Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642. London: Hambledon Press, 1990.
• Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
• Russell, Conrad. The Origins of the English Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1973.
• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Russell, Conrad. The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
• Russell, Conrad. “Parliamentary History in Perspective, 1604–1629.” History 61 (1976): 1–27.

Revisionist Scholarship (Elton, Sharpe, Christianson, Morrill, Fulbrook, Kenyon)

• Elton, G. R. “A High Road to Civil War?” In From the Renaissance to the Counter‑Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingley, edited by Charles Carter, 1966.
• Elton, G. R. The Practice of History. London: Collins, 1967.
• Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces. London: Longman, 1980 (orig. 1976).
• Sharpe, Kevin, ed. Faction and Parliament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• Christianson, Paul. “The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Journal of British Studies 15, no. 2 (1976): 40–75.
• Christianson, Paul. “The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament.” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978).
• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Past & Present (JSTOR).
• Kenyon, John. “Revisionism and Post‑Revisionism in Early Stuart History.” Journal of Modern History 64 (1992): 686–699.

Marxist and Materialist Scholarship (Hill, Anderson, Ashton, Hexter)

• Hill, Christopher. “Parliament and People in Seventeenth‑Century England.” Past and Present 92 (1981): 100–124.
• Hill, Christopher. The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965.
• Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London: Verso, 1974.
• Ashton, Robert. The English Civil War. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978.
• Ashton, Robert. The City and the Court, 1603–1643. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Hexter, J. H. “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England.” Journal of Modern History 50 (1978): 1–50.
• Hexter, J. H. “The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England.” History Today (1961).
• Hexter, J. H. “Storm Over the Gentry.” In Reappraisals in History, 1961.

General Historiography and Context

• Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642. London: Longman, 1989.
• Hughes, Ann. The Causes of the English Civil War. London: Macmillan, 1991.

·       Cogswell, Thomas. “Coping with Revisionism in Early Stuart History.” Journal of Modern History 62 (1990): 538–551.

 

 

Comment on ‘Conrad Russell and “The Mirage of the English Revolution” ’

By C Thompson

Keith Livesey is a keen commentator on the events of the 1640s and 1650s and a  vigorous defender of Marxist interpretations of the English Revolution. He has recently placed on-line his assessment of an article by Conrad Russell entitled “The Mirage of the English Revolution” published by the popular historical magazine, History Today, in 1990. Russell, who was then Professor of British History at King’s College in the University of London, had been concerned to look back at the assumption prevalent amongst (some) historians in the 1950s that the English Civil War was a “bourgeois revolution”.

He maintained that this view had not stood the test of time, partly because there was no correlation between the class or status of partisans on the two sides and partly because there was little or no sign of the Long Parliament having any bourgeois base of substance. Social changes were not responsible for the collapse of the political process at the centre in 1640 or 1642 or later.

The force of ideas as an independent variable was not recognised in Marxist or quasi-Marxist historiography nor was the fact that religious allegiances were not coterminous with social backgrounds. English government, in any case, depended on consent in the localities. There was certainly no sign of a bourgeois revolution in 1688-1689 either. Marx and his works, he concluded, constituted a colossal wrong-turning.

Russell’s essay was, in many ways, a reflection on the arguments current when he had been an Oxford undergraduate in the 1950s. The quarrels over the fortunes of the gentry had subsided by the end of that decade and had been succeeded by a ferment of research into the significance of county and local history and into the importance of ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ conflicts as potential explanatory mechanisms for the English Civil War.

The researches of Valerie Pearl into the City of London’s politics up to 1643 and those of J.T.Cliffe and Gordon Blackwood on the allegiance and fortunes of the Yorkshire and Lancashire gentry, let alone those of Gerald Aylmer on Charles I’s bureaucracy, had demonstrated how difficult it was to sustain the claims of Tawney, Hill and Stone about the nature of the English Revolution. Long before Russell proclaimed his dissent in the mid-1970s from the economic and social determinism informing Marxist and sub-Marxist explanations, those explanations had been recognised as more than inadequate.

This is why it is so strange to read Keith Livesey’s claim in April, 2013 that the attack on Marxism in English Civil War historiography has been heated and aggressive. This is not the case. This has not been the case since the early-1970s. No academic historian I can think of had had to acknowledge the importance of Marxist historiography and to take on board some of its analysis up to 1990.

Whatever Christopher Hill may have thought, the work of Soviet historians on the English Revolution – which Hill tried to promote – was too far divorced from the sources and too heavily shaped by Leninist preconceptions to be worth attention. Lawrence Stone, moreover, was never a Marxist. Keith Livesey’s comments are thus anachronistic. Russell had been writing about the state of historiography in the 1950s: by the time his article appeared in 1990, Marxism had receded dramatically as an intellectual influence. By then, Russell’s own ‘revisionism’ had reached its peak in his Ford lectures and his work on the fall of the British monarchies. He, too, was about to go out of historiographical fashion.