The Levellers and the Historians: A Reassessment of Rachel Foxley’s Contribution to Revolutionary Studies

The publication of Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers marks a significant moment in English Revolution historiography. It is the first monograph devoted exclusively to the Leveller movement since H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961), and this half-century gap is itself historiographically revealing. The absence of sustained scholarly engagement with the Levellers cannot be attributed to a lack of archival material or interpretive difficulty. Rather, it reflects the political and intellectual realignments that have reshaped academic history since the late twentieth century. The Levellers’ marginalisation has accompanied the rise of revisionist approaches that seek to separate political thought from social conflict, limit the scope of revolutionary agency, and displace class analysis from the centre of historical explanation. In this sense, the historiographical silence surrounding the Levellers reflects a broader ideological shift within the discipline.

Foxley’s opening chapter, aptly titled “The Levellers and the Historians,” acknowledges this context with admirable clarity. She observes that revisionist scholars “have questioned almost every aspect of the historical reputation of the Levellers” (p. 3), from the coherence of their political programme to the extent of their influence within the New Model Army. Her study is thus situated within a long-running historiographical dispute- one that has, in effect, constituted a British Historikerstreit over the nature of radicalism, republicanism, and political agency in the 1640s. Although Foxley does not explicitly present her work as a polemical intervention in this debate, her analysis inevitably engages with it, and her conclusions challenge several entrenched assumptions of the revisionist orthodoxy.

Foxley’s intervention becomes clearer when set against the intellectual climate in which revisionism emerged. Beginning with G. R. Elton and consolidated by scholars such as Conrad Russell, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky, revisionism rejected the structural and class-based interpretations advanced by Marxist historians including Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Rather than emphasising social conflict, revisionists focused on constitutional crisis, administrative breakdown, religious sensibilities, and the contingent decisions of political elites. The Levellers, whose programme articulated demands for popular sovereignty, legal reform, and political accountability, sat uneasily within this framework. Their radicalism was minimised, reinterpreted as derivative, or dismissed as marginal. As a result, historiography often presents the Levellers as episodic actors rather than a coherent political movement.

Foxley’s study challenges this reduction. By emphasising the intellectual originality of Leveller political thought, she shows that their arguments cannot be dismissed as mere extensions of Independent or sectarian discourse. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, the petitioning campaigns of 1646–49, and the ideological exchanges surrounding the Putney Debates reveals a movement capable of sustained organisation and theoretical innovation. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the relationship between political ideas and social forces, the extent of popular mobilisation, and the ideological diversity within the parliamentarian coalition.

At the same time, Foxley’s work reflects the constraints of the historiographical environment in which it was produced. Her emphasis on political theory, rather than the class dynamics shaping Leveller activity, partly aligns her with post-revisionist tendencies. She places the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu and, while cautioning against dissolving them into an undifferentiated political world, does not fully articulate the structural tensions that defined their position within the revolutionary process. This unresolved tension between recognising Leveller distinctiveness and situating them within a wider coalition marks the limits of her intervention.

Nevertheless, The Levellers makes a major contribution to the field. It restores the movement to the centre of debates on political thought during the English Revolution and challenges the revisionist minimisation of radical agency. In doing so, Foxley’s study helps correct a long-standing imbalance in the historiography and reasserts the Levellers’ importance in shaping the political imagination of the 1640s.

Revisionism and Its Discontents

Foxley’s relationship with revisionist scholarship is complex and, in many respects, emblematic of the broader tensions that have shaped English Civil War historiography over the past half-century. On the one hand, she challenges the more reductive claims advanced by scholars such as Gary De Krey, whose critique focuses on the chronology and coherence of Leveller organisation. De Krey argues that the term “Leveller” emerged only in late 1647 and, therefore, that no identifiable movement existed before then.

This insistence on terminological precision leads him to reduce the political developments of 1645–47 to a series of contingent alliances, obscuring the ideological continuity and strategic coherence that Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn were already shaping. As the review notes, “Movements do not wait for their opponents to name them before they exist.” Foxley’s readiness to identify a Leveller movement before it was formally named therefore challenges revisionist scepticism and signals her refusal to regard political identity as purely retrospective.

Yet Foxley’s resistance to revisionism is not absolute. Her methodological focus on political theory, rather than on the social forces that produced and sustained it, places her partly alongside post-revisionist approaches that seek to combine ideological analysis with a more pluralistic understanding of political culture. She locates the Levellers within a broad parliamentarian milieu, emphasising the fluidity of alliances and the permeability of ideological boundaries. This approach enables her to highlight the Levellers’ intellectual originality without artificially separating them from the wider political world in which they operated. At the same time, she warns against “dissolving them into an undifferentiated part of that complex political world” (p. 6), demonstrating her awareness of the dangers of excessive integration. The Levellers were neither mere Independents nor simply one faction among many; they articulated a distinctive political programme that cannot be reduced to the sum of their alliances.

The tension between these positions, however, remains unresolved. Foxley’s analysis does not fully articulate the class character of Leveller politics or the structural limits that shaped its trajectory. Her focus on political argumentation, petitions, pamphlets, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves the social base that enabled it underexplored.

The Levellers drew their support mainly from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and sections of London’s lower middle strata, as well as those of other urban centres. These groups held distinctive economic interests and political expectations that shaped Leveller demands for legal reform, popular sovereignty, and magistrate accountability. Without placing Leveller ideology in this social context, the movement can appear as a free-floating constellation of ideas rather than a political expression of specific class forces.

This omission becomes more apparent when Foxley examines the structural limits of Leveller influence. She acknowledges the hostility of the army grandees and political elite. Still, she does not fully consider why Leveller demands became intolerable to the propertied classes that ultimately shaped the post-revolutionary settlement. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 resulted not simply from ideological disagreement or personal animosity, but from a class struggle within the revolutionary camp, as the interests of small producers collided with those of landowners, merchants, and military commanders. By failing to foreground these dynamics, Foxley’s account risks underestimating the material constraints that defined both the possibilities and the limits of Leveller radicalism.

In this sense, Foxley’s work occupies an intermediate position within the historiographical landscape. She challenges revisionist minimisation of Leveller coherence and influence, but does not fully adopt the class-centred analyses advanced by Marxist historians such as Hill, Manning, or Slaughter. Her study thus serves both as a corrective to revisionist reductionism and as an expression of the post-revisionist reluctance to engage directly with the structural determinants of political action. This duality is not a flaw, but a marker of the historiographical moment in which her work was produced, a moment characterised by methodological pluralism, theoretical caution, and an ongoing effort to reconcile political ideas with social forces. 

The Intellectual Originality of Leveller Thought

One of the major strengths of Foxley’s study is its demonstration of the originality and intellectual coherence of Leveller political thought. Against the long-standing revisionist tendency to depict the Levellers as derivative or merely reactive, Foxley convincingly argues that their political language was neither a simple extension of Independent polemic nor an improvised response to the accelerating crises of the late 1640s. Instead, she shows how Lilburne, Overton, Walwyn, and their associates forged a distinctive idiom that combined scriptural references, historical analogies, and emergent secular reasoning in unprecedented ways within English political discourse. Their pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals reveal a sustained effort to theorise political authority, liberty, and representation at a moment when inherited frameworks were collapsing. As contemporaries recognised, the Levellers were the revolution’s ideologues, seeking to make sense of unprecedented political developments with the intellectual resources available to them.

Foxley’s analysis is especially effective in showing that Leveller thought cannot be reduced to the religious idioms through which it was often expressed. While recognising scripture’s pervasive influence on seventeenth-century political argument, she demonstrates that the Levellers used biblical language strategically rather than dogmatically. Their appeals to “freeborn rights,” “the laws of nature,” and “the people’s consent” were not simply theological extensions, but elements of a broader shift toward secularised political reasoning. In this respect, Foxley challenges interpretations that trace Leveller radicalism exclusively to congregational practice or covenant theology. Instead, she places their political creativity within a wider intellectual transformation that was beginning to separate political and social questions from scriptural authority.

It is important to place this intellectual creativity within a broader European context. The erosion of scriptural authority after the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (1543), followed by the work of Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, destabilised the cosmological foundations on which medieval political thought had rested. As scientific inquiry undermined the Ptolemaic universe and challenged the epistemological supremacy of biblical revelation, new forms of political reasoning became possible. The Levellers were neither scientists nor consciously involved in the scientific revolution, but they operated in an intellectual environment increasingly receptive to secular explanations. Their arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality reflect this shift. They belonged to a generation beginning, however tentatively, to seek answers to political and social problems beyond the confines of theological orthodoxy.

In this sense, Leveller thought anticipates aspects of the Enlightenment. Their insistence that political authority derives from the people rather than divine sanction, emphasis on rational law over arbitrary power, and belief in the universality of certain rights all foreshadow developments in eighteenth-century political philosophy. At the same time, their critique of oligarchic power and defence of small producers and artisans echo themes later adopted by socialist thinkers. It would be anachronistic to describe the Levellers as proto-Marxists, and Foxley avoids such simplifications. Nevertheless, their political language contains early elements of later democratic and egalitarian traditions, showing that the intellectual genealogy of modern radicalism cannot be confined to the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Foxley’s contribution, therefore, is not merely to rehabilitate the Levellers as significant actors in the English Revolution but to restore the intellectual depth of their political project. By situating their ideas within both the immediate revolutionary context and the longer trajectory of European thought, she shows that Leveller radicalism was neither accidental nor derivative. It was a creative and historically consequential attempt to rethink the foundations of political authority at a moment when the old world was collapsing and a new one struggling to be born.

A Movement with a Mass Audience

Foxley’s analysis of Leveller mobilisation is one of the most empirically substantial and historiographically consequential elements of her study. Against the revisionist tendency to minimise the movement’s organisational capacity and popular resonance, she reconstructs a pattern of sustained political activity that demonstrates the Levellers’ ability to reach, mobilise, and coordinate large numbers of supporters across London and beyond. Her discussion of the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (July 1646) is particularly illuminating. She identifies it as “the first Leveller text to claim a mass following” (p. 36), and treats it not as rhetorical exaggeration but as evidence of a developing political constituency. By foregrounding this document, Foxley challenges the assumption common among conservative historians that Leveller radicalism was confined to a narrow circle of pamphleteers and sectaries. Instead, she shows that by mid‑1646 the Levellers were already articulating demands that resonated widely among artisans, apprentices, small producers, and politically conscious segments of the urban population.

Her use of recent scholarship on petitioning and print culture further strengthens this argument. The figures she cites- 30,000 copies of a petition printed in January 1648, 98,000 signatures on a later Remonstrance, 20,000 copies of the Agreement of the People distributed free, and 10,000 signatures on the women’s petition of March 1649- are striking not only for their scale but for what they reveal about the infrastructure of Leveller mobilisation. These numbers indicate a movement capable of coordinating printers, distributors, ward organisers, and networks of sympathisers across multiple parishes and guild structures. They also suggest that Leveller texts circulated far beyond the immediate circles of their authors, reaching readers who may not have identified formally with the movement but who were receptive to its arguments. In this respect, Foxley’s work undermines the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal or ephemeral. Instead, she presents them as a dynamic political force whose organisational practices anticipated later forms of mass politics.

Equally important is Foxley’s challenge to the claim that Leveller political ideas were fundamentally religious in origin. While acknowledging the period's pervasive religious idiom, she argues that “there is simply no need to go hunting in covenant theology or congregational practice for Leveller political ideas of equality or ‘democracy,’ or for a prototype of the Agreement of the People” (p. 9). This intervention matters in a long‑standing historiographical debate. For decades, revisionist scholars have attempted to locate the roots of Leveller radicalism in sectarian ecclesiology, thereby reducing their political programme to an extension of congregationalist church governance. Foxley rejects this reduction. She shows that Leveller arguments for popular sovereignty, legal accountability, and political equality cannot be explained solely, or even primarily, through religious categories. Their political language drew on a wider repertoire: classical republicanism, common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the emergent secular reasoning that was beginning to reshape European intellectual life.

By disentangling Leveller political thought from narrowly theological explanations, Foxley restores the movement’s intellectual autonomy. She shows that while the Levellers operated within a religious culture, their political arguments were not derivative of it. This distinction matters because it repositions the Levellers within the broader history of political ideas. Rather than treating them as a sectarian offshoot, Foxley presents them as participants in a wider transformation in political reasoning- one that was beginning to detach questions of authority, liberty, and representation from the interpretive monopoly of scripture.

Taken together, Foxley’s analysis of mobilisation and her critique of religious reductionism significantly revise the historiographical landscape. They reveal a movement that was both organisationally sophisticated and intellectually innovative, capable of articulating political demands that resonated across a broad social base. In doing so, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of Leveller significance and restores the movement to its rightful place within the political imagination of the English Revolution.

Levellers and the New Model Army

The chapter on the Levellers’ relationship with the New Model Army constitutes Foxley’s most substantial and consequential historiographical intervention. For more than four decades, revisionist scholars such as Austin Woolrych, John Morrill, and Mark Kishlansky have argued that Leveller influence within the army was limited, episodic, or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. In this view, the army’s political actions in 1647–49 can be explained through institutional grievances, professional honour, and war experience, rather than through the penetration of radical political ideas. Foxley challenges this orthodoxy directly. She highlights the petitioning campaigns of spring 1647, the cooperation between civilian and military radicals, and the striking consistency of demands articulated by Leveller leaders and army agitators. Her analysis demonstrates that Leveller influence was neither accidental nor superficial but formed part of a sustained dialogue between civilian activists and politically conscious soldiers.

Central to Foxley’s argument is her treatment of the Putney Debates. Although constrained by the publisher’s space limitations, her discussion is judicious and incisive. She rejects the revisionist tendency to treat Putney as an isolated episode, a momentary eruption of radicalism unconnected to the army’s broader political development. Instead, she situates the debates within ongoing exchanges among agitators, grandees, and civilian Levellers, showing how the issues raised at Putney had already circulated in petitions, pamphlets, and informal discussions throughout the army. This contextualisation is crucial. It shows that the debates were not an aberration but the culmination of a political process in which soldiers actively engaged with questions of sovereignty, representation, and constitutional settlement.

The review reinforces Foxley’s argument by listing the numerous Levellers who served in the army or maintained close ties with it. Figures such as Edward Sexby, William Allen, Thomas Prince, John Harris, and the Rainsborough brothers demonstrate that Leveller sympathies were not confined to civilian circles. Lilburne’s own military record was widely known, and army chaplains such as Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison openly supported Leveller positions. These connections undermine the revisionist assertion that the Levellers were “exterior to the army.” They instead reveal a porous boundary between civilian radicalism and military activism, where ideas, personnel, and organisational practices circulated freely.

Foxley’s conclusion that Putney marked “not the end but the beginning of a potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals” (p. 158) directly challenges the standard revisionist narrative. Rather than viewing the debates as a moment of radical overreach swiftly contained by Cromwell and Ireton, she interprets them as the opening of a political space in which Leveller ideas could shape the army’s constitutional imagination. This interpretation restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary dynamic. It emphasises the agency of rank‑and‑file soldiers, the army's ideological diversity, and the possibility, however constrained, of a democratic transformation emerging from within the military structure itself.

Foxley’s intervention has broader historiographical implications. By demonstrating the depth of Leveller–army interaction, she challenges the revisionist minimisation of radicalism and reasserts the importance of ideological conflict within the parliamentarian coalition. Her analysis suggests that the army was not merely a professional fighting force but a political institution in which debates about authority, liberty, and representation were actively contested. In doing so, she reopens questions that revisionism had prematurely closed: the extent of popular political consciousness, the relationship between military organisation and political radicalism, and the structural tensions within the revolutionary movement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on the army is a major contribution to the field. It dismantles the revisionist portrayal of the Levellers as marginal and restores the New Model Army's political complexity. By reintegrating Putney into the broader revolutionary process, she offers a more dynamic and historically grounded account of radicalism in the 1640s- one that recognises the army not as a passive institution but as a site of ideological struggle and political possibility.

Class Limits and the Cromwellian Settlement

Where Foxley’s analysis is less satisfactory is in her treatment of the class limits of Leveller politics. Although she acknowledges the hostility of the grandees and the structural pressures facing the movement, she does not fully explore the deeper social dynamics that shaped both the possibilities and the constraints of Leveller radicalism. The Levellers drew their support primarily from artisans, apprentices, small producers, and segments of the lower middle strata groups whose economic interests and political expectations diverged sharply from those of the propertied classes who ultimately determined the trajectory of the post‑revolutionary settlement. This divergence was not incidental. It was rooted in the material conditions of seventeenth‑century England, where the emerging capitalist order was reshaping relations of production, property, and political authority.

The Levellers’ programme- universal male suffrage, equality before the law, accountability of magistrates, and the subordination of rulers to the people- reflected the aspirations of those who were being drawn into the early capitalist labour market yet still retained elements of economic independence. Their demands expressed both a desire to preserve older forms of small‑scale production and a need to articulate new forms of political agency in a rapidly changing society. In this sense, Leveller radicalism was simultaneously forward‑looking and rooted in the social position of its supporters. It advanced democratic ideas but was limited by the class base from which it emerged.

Foxley recognises aspects of this dynamic but does not fully develop its implications. Her emphasis on political theory pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals illuminates the intellectual creativity of Leveller thought but leaves underexplored the structural forces that shaped the movement’s trajectory. The suppression of the Levellers at Burford in May 1649 was not, as the review notes, “an accident of personalities but the outcome of a class struggle within the revolutionary camp.” The grandees, representing the interests of landowners, merchants, and the higher strata of the bourgeoisie, could not tolerate demands that threatened property qualifications, social hierarchy, and the stability of the emerging capitalist order. Cromwell’s actions- arresting Leveller leaders, suppressing mutinies, and consolidating state power- were not simply tactical decisions but class imperatives.

Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility but does not fully explore why Leveller ideas became intolerable to the propertied classes. The Levellers’ insistence on political equality clashed with the economic inequalities that underpinned the revolutionary elite's power. Their critique of arbitrary authority threatened not only monarchical absolutism but also the authority of those who had assumed leadership of the parliamentarian cause. Their demands for legal reform challenged the very structures that maintained property relations. In short, the Levellers’ political programme was incompatible with the class interests of those who emerged victorious from the revolution.

This omission matters because it limits Foxley’s ability to explain the movement’s defeat. Without situating Leveller radicalism within the broader class structure of seventeenth‑century England, the suppression at Burford risks appearing as a contingent event rather than as the predictable outcome of a deeper social conflict. The Levellers were not defeated because their ideas were impractical or because they misjudged the political moment. They were defeated because their demands threatened the foundations of the new order the propertied classes were constructing.

Law, Liberty, and the Freeborn Englishman

The chapter on law and liberty is among the most stimulating in Foxley’s book, offering a nuanced account of Leveller legal thought and its place within the political culture of the 1640s. Yet it contains a notable omission: Foxley does not engage with Soviet legal scholarship, particularly the work of Evgeny Pashukanis, whose analysis of early modern legal forms provides one of the most sophisticated frameworks for understanding the Levellers’ juridical innovations. This absence is striking because Pashukanis’s Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927) remains one of the few attempts to situate Leveller legal arguments within a broader theory of the emergence of bourgeois law. His insights illuminate precisely the terrain Foxley explores, and their omission leaves a gap in an otherwise rich chapter.

Pashukanis argued that John Lilburne’s legal thought anticipated key principles of bourgeois criminal law, including the requirement that punishment correspond to the crime and the prohibition of ex post facto legislation. These principles, which would later become foundational to modern liberal jurisprudence, appear in Lilburne’s writings not as abstract theoretical propositions but as practical demands arising from his own experiences of arbitrary imprisonment, judicial manipulation, and executive overreach. Pashukanis’s observation that Lilburne was “the first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment” underscores the novelty of Leveller legal arguments. It highlights how Lilburne’s struggles forced the state to articulate and formalise procedures that had previously been applied inconsistently or not at all. In Pashukanis’s reading, Lilburne’s confrontations with authority reveal the embryonic formation of legal norms that would later underpin the bourgeois state.

Foxley’s silence on this tradition is regrettable, given its relevance to her subject. Her analysis rightly emphasises the Levellers’ insistence on due process, legal accountability, and the rights of the accused. She shows how their arguments drew on common law traditions, natural rights discourse, and the political language of freeborn English liberties. Yet without engaging with Pashukanis, she misses an opportunity to connect Leveller legal thought to a broader theoretical account of law's historical development. Pashukanis’s framework would have let her situate Leveller demands within the transition from feudal to bourgeois legal forms, illuminating the structural forces that shaped their arguments and why those arguments resonated so powerfully in the 1640s.

Moreover, Pashukanis’s analysis provides a counterpoint to interpretations that treat Leveller legal thought as merely an extension of religious or constitutional traditions. By emphasising the material and class dimensions of legal development, he offers a way of understanding why the Levellers’ juridical innovations emerged when they did and why they took the form they did. His reading suggests that Leveller legal arguments were not simply moral appeals or constitutional clarifications but expressions of deeper social transformations associated with the rise of market relations, the consolidation of property rights, and the emergence of a new political subject: the legally autonomous individual. Foxley gestures toward these themes but does not fully develop them, and her omission of Pashukanis leaves this dimension of Leveller thought underexplored.

This gap is particularly evident in her discussion of the relationship between law and class. Foxley acknowledges the grandees’ hostility to Leveller legal reforms but does not analyse the structural reasons why those reforms were unacceptable to the propertied classes. Pashukanis’s framework would have clarified this point: the Levellers’ insistence on legal equality and procedural fairness challenged elites' discretionary power. It threatened the hierarchical legal order that underpinned emerging capitalist relations. Their defeat, therefore, was not simply political but juridical: a suppression of legal forms that were incompatible with the interests of those shaping the post‑revolutionary settlement.

In sum, Foxley’s chapter on law and liberty is rich and insightful, but her omission of Pashukanis represents a missed opportunity. Engaging with Soviet legal scholarship would have deepened her analysis, connected Leveller legal thought to broader theoretical traditions, and clarified the structural forces that shaped both the movement’s achievements and its limits.

Conclusion

Foxley’s The Levellers is, without question, a major scholarly achievement. It synthesises a wide range of recent research, challenges entrenched revisionist assumptions, and restores the Levellers to a central place in the political thought of the English Revolution. In doing so, it intervenes decisively in a historiographical landscape long shaped by scepticism toward radical agency and by a tendency to minimise the intellectual coherence of seventeenth‑century popular movements. Foxley’s work demonstrates that the Levellers were not marginal pamphleteers or episodic agitators but serious political thinkers whose ideas resonated across a broad social base and contributed meaningfully to the revolutionary dynamic of the 1640s.

One of the book’s most impressive accomplishments is its ability to integrate intellectual history, political theory, and close textual analysis without losing sight of the broader revolutionary context. Foxley’s readings of Leveller pamphlets, petitions, and constitutional proposals are consistently sharp and historically grounded. She shows how the Levellers developed a distinctive political language that combined scriptural references, common-law traditions, and emerging secular reasoning. Her analysis of the Agreement of the People, in particular, highlights the movement’s constitutional imagination and its attempt to articulate a vision of political authority rooted in popular sovereignty rather than inherited privilege. In this respect, Foxley’s work significantly revises the revisionist portrayal of Leveller thought as derivative or improvisational.

Equally important is her challenge to the long‑standing assumption that Leveller influence within the New Model Army was minimal or ideologically incompatible with military discipline. By reconstructing the petitioning campaigns of 1647, the exchanges between agitators and grandees, and the connections between civilian and military radicals, Foxley demonstrates that Leveller ideas circulated widely within the army and shaped debates about representation, authority, and settlement. Her treatment of the Putney Debates is particularly effective, situating them within a broader pattern of political engagement rather than treating them as an isolated eruption of radicalism. In doing so, she restores the debates to their proper place within the revolutionary process and challenges the revisionist minimisation of rank‑and‑file political consciousness.

Despite these strengths, the book has limitations. Foxley’s reluctance to foreground class dynamics leaves an important dimension of Leveller politics underdeveloped. The movement’s social base- artisans, apprentices, small producers- shaped both the radicalism of its demands and the structural limits of its influence. The suppression of the Levellers in 1649 was not merely a political defeat but the outcome of a deeper class conflict within the revolutionary camp. While Foxley acknowledges the grandees' hostility, she does not fully explore the material interests that made Leveller demands intolerable to the propertied classes who ultimately shaped the post‑revolutionary settlement. A more explicit engagement with class analysis would have strengthened her account of both the movement’s achievements and its defeat.

Similarly, Foxley’s silence on Soviet legal scholarship, particularly Evgeny Pashukanis, represents a missed opportunity. Pashukanis’s analysis of Lilburne’s legal thought provides a powerful theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of modern legal norms and the relationship between law and class power. Engaging with this tradition would have deepened Foxley’s discussion of Leveller jurisprudence and connected it to broader debates about the historical development of legal forms.

These limitations, however, do not diminish the book’s overall significance. The Levellers represents a major step toward a more balanced and historically grounded understanding of radical politics in the 1640s. It challenges the revisionist orthodoxy, reopens questions that had been prematurely closed, and restores the Levellers to the centre of debates about political thought in the English Revolution. It deserves a wide readership, and one hopes that a more affordable paperback edition will make it accessible to students and scholars alike.

Primary and Secondary Works

Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961.

De Krey, Gary. Review of The Levellers, by Rachel Foxley. History (online). Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12111_4 (onlinelibrary.wiley.com in Bing)

Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Preface.

Kishlansky, Mark. Various works on the New Model Army and revisionist interpretations (not directly cited with title in the essay but referenced as part of the revisionist school).

Morrill, John. Works on the English Civil War and the New Model Army (referenced in discussion of revisionist historiography).

North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism. Published online, 24 October 1996. Available at: https://www.wsws.org

Pashukanis, Evgeny B. “Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law” (1927). Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm (marxists.org in Bing)

Rees, John. – Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519. Available at: https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519 (reviews.history.ac.uk in Bing) – Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution. PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/ (research.gold.ac.uk in Bing)

Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt.” Labour Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (May–June 1958), pp. 77–82.

Talbot, Ann. “‘These the times … this the man’: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill.” World Socialist Web Site, 25 March 2003. Available at: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html (wsws.org in Bing)

Contextual and Historiographical References

Elton, G. R. Foundational works on Tudor government and the origins of revisionist historiography (referenced indirectly).

Historikerstreit. General background on the German historiographical dispute. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit (en.wikipedia.org in Bing)

Woolrych, Austin. Works on the New Model Army and the English Civil War (referenced in discussion of revisionist interpretations).

Notes Corresponding to the Original Essay

1. Rees, John. Review of The Levellers, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
2. “Historikerstreit,” Wikipedia.
3. De Krey, Gary. Review in History.
4. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface.
5. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
6. Talbot, Ann. WSWS, 25 March 2003.
7. North, David. Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism.
8. Rees, Leveller Organisation and the Dynamic of the English Revolution, PhD thesis.
9. Foxley, The Levellers.
10. Rees, Reviews in History, no. 1519.
11. Slaughter, Cliff. “Religion and Social Revolt,” Labour Review, 1958.
12. Pashukanis, Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927).

 

Royalist Clergy and the English Revolution: A Review of Fiona McCall’s Baal’s Priests

Fiona McCall’s Baal’s Priests is a remarkable example of archival research. It is the first comprehensive study to systematically utilise the extensive John Walker manuscripts housed in the Bodleian Library—an extraordinary collection that scholars have largely overlooked for hundreds of years. McCall’s thorough reconstruction of the lives of clergy sequestered, imprisoned, or displaced during the 1640s and 1650s is commendable. The book exemplifies careful, detailed scholarship and brings to light a wealth of historically neglected evidence, correcting misconceptions about the social effects of the civil wars.

The subtitle suggests a broader scope than the book actually covers. Although it references the “English Revolution,” McCall discusses it only briefly. Her primary focus is the loyalist clergy, their hardships, and how they remembered these experiences. It largely neglects the underlying political and social upheavals that led to these hardships. Whether McCall deliberately chose this framing or the publisher influenced it, it makes the book feel somewhat awkward, especially as it avoids the key debates dominating current historiography. Overall, the book offers detailed insights into its specific subject but leaves the broader revolutionary context underexplored.

This absence matters because the Walker manuscripts do more than document clerical hardship; they also reveal 1640s social relations and how civil war changed them. The clergy were not just neutral spiritual figures caught in conflict. They were allies of the monarchy and the old order—collecting tithes, enforcing obedience, and representing a hierarchical church closely linked to the crown. Hostility toward them didn't emerge randomly; it reflected deeper societal conflicts during a revolutionary crisis. Viewing their suffering solely as a religious issue, disconnected from the political struggle behind it, overlooks the significance of the evidence McCall has carefully gathered.

The book’s lack of engagement with politics is notable, especially considering its detailed material. McCall demonstrates that numerous clergy opposed Parliamentarian authority, at times violently. She provides evidence of armed clashes, sabotage, and collaboration with royalist groups. These incidents are significant, showing the clergy as active players in a conflict that reshaped the English state. However, McCall stops short of exploring the full implications. The Walker manuscripts do more than record persecution; they document the clash between two social orders—one ascending and the other in decline.

This review aims to clarify the historiographical debate. McCall’s approach aligns more with the revisionist perspective associated with John Morrill than with Christopher Hill's Marxist tradition. Revisionists aim to downplay the revolutionary aspects of the civil wars, framing them as a “war of religion” or local disputes. In contrast, Hill and others see the king's overthrow, the abolition of the Lords and bishops, and the rise of radical groups like the Levellers and Diggers as signs of a deep social revolution. By avoiding this debate, McCall's study seems detached from the political context that gives the Walker manuscripts their significance.

Marx’s insight in The Eighteenth Brumaire is highly relevant: during revolutionary crises, people summon past ideas and debate using borrowed language. English revolutionaries used scripture, while their adversaries relied on the language of divine-right monarchy. Taking this language literally, as revisionists often do, confuses the superficial appearance with the deeper significance. The persecution of loyalist clergy was not just a religious issue but a crucial element in the fight over the organisation of state and society. McCall’s book is therefore best understood as an excellent introduction to its subject rather than a full account of the English Revolution. It opens the door to a richer, more politically grounded reading of the Walker manuscripts—one that remains to be written.

The Walker Archive

The Walker collection began life as a polemical counterblast. Edmund Calamy’s 1702 account of the nonconformist ministers ejected after the Restoration provoked John Walker, an Exeter clergyman, to compile a rival catalogue of Anglican clergy persecuted by Parliament and the Cromwellian regime. Walker spent roughly a decade assembling his Sufferings of the Clergy (1714), drawing on printed sources, legal documents, parish papers, and—crucially—more than a thousand replies to a circular he distributed through archdeacons. The sheer scale of the response speaks to how intensely the clergy and their families remembered the upheavals of the 1640s. It also reveals how the Restoration Church sought to construct a counter-narrative to the Puritan martyr tradition Calamy revived.

The resulting archive is not oral history in the strict sense, but much of it was written decades after the events, often by descendants or successors. It is steeped in family memory, parish tradition, and partisan purpose. The letters Walker received were shaped by the early eighteenth-century political climate, when the Church of England fought to assert its authority against dissenters and defend its role in the state. Those who wrote to Walker had every incentive to dramatise their accounts, to emphasise suffering, and to present the clergy as victims of illegitimate persecution. The archive is therefore a hybrid creation: part memory, part polemic, part historical record. Walker himself was cautious enough to include contradictory material, but the collection cannot be treated as a verbatim transcript of the 1640s.

McCall is fully aware of these problems. She faces the same methodological challenge Walker did: separating subjective recollection from objective fact. Her judgment that the manuscripts constitute a broadly reliable body of evidence is defensible, but the book could have done more to equip general readers to navigate the archive’s complexities. The Walker manuscripts demand a high level of critical engagement. They require the historian to read not only for what is said but for why it is said, and for the silences, exaggerations, and distortions that inevitably accompany retrospective testimony. McCall acknowledges these issues but tends to treat the manuscripts as transparent windows onto clerical experience rather than as contested artefacts shaped by memory and ideology.

This is a missed opportunity, because the Walker archive is itself a product of political struggle. It was assembled to defend the Church of England’s reputation and to counter the narrative of Puritan suffering that had become central to dissenting identity. In this sense, the archive is part of the English Revolution's long afterlife. It reflects how the civil wars continued to be fought in memory, in print, and through competing claims by religious communities. A more politically attuned reading would have explored how the clergy and their families framed their experiences, interpreted the actions of Parliamentarian committees, and sought to position themselves within the moral economy of Restoration England.

The temporal distance between the events and their recording also raises important questions about the nature of historical memory. Children or grandchildren wrote many of the accounts Walker collected of the clergy involved. Their narratives blend inherited stories, local tradition, and early eighteenth-century political assumptions. They are shaped by a desire to honour ancestors, defend the Church, and present the civil wars as a period of illegitimate disorder. McCall notes these tendencies but does not fully explore their implications. The Walker manuscripts are not simply sources; they are interpretations of the past, shaped by present needs.

This is where the book’s reluctance to engage with the politics of the English Revolution becomes most apparent. The clergy who suffered sequestration, imprisonment, or displacement did so because they belonged to an institution deeply embedded in the old social order. They were not neutral spiritual figures but agents of royal authority, tithe collectors, and defenders of hierarchical structures. Their persecution was not merely the product of religious zeal or local vendettas. It was part of a broader struggle over the nature of the state, the distribution of power, and the legitimacy of monarchy. To treat their suffering as a purely confessional phenomenon is to detach it from the revolutionary context that gave it meaning.

McCall’s methodological caution is admirable, but it leads her to underplay the political significance of the Walker archive. The manuscripts do not simply record clerical hardship; they record the collision between two social orders. They reveal how the clergy experienced the breakdown of royal authority, responded to the rise of Parliamentarian power, and interpreted the actions of soldiers, committees, and local activists. They also reveal the class tensions that shaped parish life, as tithe‑payers, tenants, and labourers confronted clergy who represented the old regime.

A more politically grounded reading would have shown how the Walker manuscripts illuminate the social dynamics of the English Revolution. They are evidence not only of suffering but of resistance, conflict, and the reconfiguration of authority. They show how the clergy understood their place in a remade world, and how they sought to preserve that understanding despite defeat.McCall’s book remains a valuable contribution. But the Walker archive demands a historian willing to confront the political and social forces that shaped both the events of the 1640s and their remembrance. That task remains open.

Suffering—and Resistance

The book’s strongest sections vividly reconstruct the treatment of loyalist clergy under Parliament and the Protectorate: ejection, imprisonment, confiscation of goods, and the impoverishment of families. McCall convincingly demonstrates that the campaign was sanctioned at the highest levels. Parliament often merely ratified actions taken by committees and local agents.

Crucially, McCall resists portraying the clergy as passive victims. As James Mawdesley noted in his Reviews in History critique, many fought back. Jonathan Swift later boasted that his grandfather Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, had laid a trap in a river that killed some 200 enemy soldiers (p. 107). McCall calculates that at least 150 Walker accounts record acts of aggression by the “sufferer” (p. 201).

These glimpses of clerical resistance point toward something the book touches on but never develops: the class relations embedded in the conflict. The clergy were not neutral spiritual figures. They were pillars of the monarchy and the old social order—collectors of tithes, enforcers of obedience, and agents of royal policy. Hostility toward them did not arise spontaneously. It reflected the deeper antagonisms of a society in revolutionary crisis.

McCall’s reluctance to engage with politics means these dynamics remain underexplored. Her chronology even omits Charles I's execution in January 1649, and the book never clearly marks the beginning of government without a monarchy. For a study titled the English Revolution, this is a striking omission.

Memory and Its Limits

McCall’s central interest is memory: how suffering was recorded, shaped, and transmitted. She documents real trauma. But suffering was not confined to loyalists. Parliamentarian soldiers, sectaries, and ordinary civilians endured devastation on a comparable scale. A more balanced treatment would have situated clerical experiences within the broader landscape of suffering in the civil war.

There is also a historical irony McCall herself highlights. The Restoration did not bring the vindication many loyalist clergy expected. Under Charles II, survivors often fared little better than they had under Cromwell. The restored monarchy prioritised stabilising its rule, not compensating those who had suffered in its name. The loyalist clergy discovered that political loyalty did not guarantee political reward.

A Question of Historiography

McCall’s historiographical stance is difficult to pin down. She respects Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill. Still, her approach aligns more closely with John Morrill’s revisionist interpretation of the conflict as a “war of religion” rather than a revolution. She examines religious and confessional loyalty in great detail while largely avoiding the question of which social forces were contending for power.

This omission is not neutral. For decades, revisionists have sought to strip the 1640s of their revolutionary content, recasting the upheaval as a series of accidents, provincial quarrels, or confessional disputes—a “war without an enemy,” in Sir William Waller’s phrase. Against this, Hill and others insisted that the overthrow and execution of a king, the abolition of the Lords and bishops, and the emergence of radical movements such as the Levellers and Diggers constituted a profound social revolution.

Marx’s observation in The Eighteenth Brumaire is directly relevant: in revolutionary crises, men “conjure up the spirits of the past” and fight in borrowed language. The English revolutionaries spoke in scripture; their opponents in the idiom of divine-right monarchy. Taking this language at face value, as revisionism does, mistakes costume for drama. The persecution of the loyalist clergy was not a confessional sideshow. It was part of the struggle over the structure of state and society. Read critically, the Walker manuscripts show that struggle.

Conclusion

Readers seeking a challenge to the revisionist minimisation of the English Civil War’s social character will not find it in Baal’s Priests. McCall has produced an important, carefully researched study, but one that stops short of drawing the political conclusions her material points toward. The book is best read as an excellent introduction to the Walker archive, not as a definitive account of royalism or the English Revolution.

If McCall returns to this material, one hopes she will be prepared to confront the political and social dynamics that shaped the experiences she so ably documents.

 

Radicalism Without Revolution: Revisionism and the Assault on the English Revolution

More than half a century after Christopher Hill's pioneering studies restored the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters to the historical stage, the struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution remains unresolved. Indeed, it has intensified. Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context, a collection of essays arising from a 2006 conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London, reflects the continuing efforts of a generation of historians to redefine, fragment and ultimately neutralise the revolutionary content of the most profound social upheaval in seventeenth-century England.

The volume edited by Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan contains valuable archival research and several worthwhile contributions. Yet taken as a whole, it exemplifies a broader tendency in contemporary historiography: replacing social conflict, class interests, and revolutionary transformation with a language of discourse, contingency, and context. The editors ask whether the term "radical" can legitimately apply to movements and ideas associated with the English Revolution. Behind this seemingly semantic dispute lies a more fundamental question: whether the English Revolution can still be understood as a revolution.

The editors begin by surveying three major historiographical approaches to radicalism. The first, identified with Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark, is the nominalist position. Since neither "radical" nor "radicalism" possessed their modern political meanings in the seventeenth century, these historians object to their retrospective application. The implication is that historians should employ only categories available to contemporaries themselves.

This position is untenable. Historical analysis necessarily employs concepts unavailable to historical actors. If historians were prohibited from using categories developed after the events they describe, concepts such as feudalism, capitalism, absolutism and even the Renaissance would disappear from historical scholarship. The nominalist approach reduces history to antiquarianism, replacing explanation with the mere cataloguing of language.

The second approach, traditionally dominant before revisionism's rise, treated radicalism as a substantive phenomenon. Although divided between liberal and Marxist interpretations, both schools regarded the English Revolution as a decisive turning point in social and political development. Whether understood as the foundation of constitutional liberty or as a bourgeois revolution driven by class conflict, radical movements mattered historically because they emerged from broader processes of social transformation.

The third approach, now dominant and broadly endorsed by the editors, is the functional definition associated with J.C. Davis, Jonathan Scott and Glenn Burgess. Here radicalism is defined not by specific social content but by its relationship to contemporary norms. Any idea or movement challenging established assumptions may be considered radical. Radicalism thus becomes entirely relative to context.

At first glance, this position appears more flexible and sophisticated than either traditional liberal or Marxist interpretations. In practice, however, it evacuates radicalism of all historical substance. The Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters and republicans become isolated phenomena linked only by their deviation from prevailing conventions. The social forces that produced them disappear from view.

This framework shapes much of the volume. Several essays offer important empirical insights. Mario Caricchio's study of the publisher Giles Calvert reconstructs the network of radical religious writers clustered around his Black Spread Eagle bookshop in London. Nicholas McDowell explores the literary and theological influences that shape religious radicalism, while Noam Flinker examines the Ranter Abiezer Coppe's use of Midrashic methods. Jason Peacey's contribution investigates royalist pamphleteering during the civil wars and shows that defenders of established authority could appropriate apparently radical language.

Yet throughout the collection the relationship between ideas and social interests remains curiously absent. Peacey's observation that royalist propagandists employed radical rhetoric does not demonstrate that the revolution lacked social foundations. It demonstrates only that counterrevolutionary forces sometimes sought to exploit popular grievances for their own purposes. The distinction is significant.

Some of the strongest chapters point toward conclusions more profound than those permitted by the editors' theoretical framework. Stefano Villani shows that contemporary Italian observers often interpreted English events as a conflict between social orders rather than merely a constitutional dispute. Jim Smyth's study of republican imperialism traces the ideological assumptions underpinning Cromwell's conquest of Ireland, revealing the relationship between republican government and colonial expansion. These chapters suggest that contemporaries themselves often perceived dimensions of social conflict that many modern historians are reluctant to acknowledge.

The collection becomes more problematic when viewed within the wider historiographical campaign against Christopher Hill and the Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution. Hessayon's own essay on Gerrard Winstanley is not objectionable in itself. His emphasis on Winstanley's religious development usefully reminds readers that the Digger leader emerged from a world saturated with theological assumptions. Serious historians have never denied this fact. Certainly Christopher Hill did not.

But Hessayon has repeatedly advanced a broader critique of Hill, accusing him of selective use of evidence and of projecting modern concerns backwards into the seventeenth century. Such criticisms form part of a wider revisionist assault associated with J.C. Davis's Fear, Myth and History and Alastair MacLachlan's The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England. These works challenge not merely particular interpretations of radical movements but the legitimacy of conceiving the English Revolution as a revolutionary process at all.

The tendency reaches beyond purely scholarly concerns. Hessayon's review of Edward Vallance's A Radical History of Britain was notable less for its assessment of the book than for its warnings about providing "ammunition" to contemporary extremists. Vallance correctly responded that the review seemed more preoccupied with present-day politics than with his work's contents. Such episodes are revealing. The issue is not simply whether Hill occasionally overstated connections between historical movements. The deeper objection concerns whether past popular struggles might retain political relevance today.

Nevertheless, Marxists cannot respond by uncritically defending every aspect of Hill's legacy. The Communist Party Historians' Group's achievements were immense. Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A.L. Morton, E.P. Thompson and others transformed British historical scholarship by recovering the experiences of ordinary people and insisting upon the centrality of social conflict. Their work represented a major advance over conservative political history.

Yet the political conditions under which it emerged shaped this historiography. The Communist Party of Great Britain's embrace of the Popular Front following the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935 encouraged the search for a specifically national democratic tradition. As historians such as Philip Bounds have noted, British Communists increasingly emphasised an indigenous line of radical development stretching from the Peasants' Revolt through the Levellers and Chartists to modern labour movements.

This framework produced important historical discoveries. At the same time it encouraged a nationalist conception of historical development in which class conflict was often subsumed within a broader narrative of "the English people" advancing democratic traditions across the centuries.

This approach's weaknesses became apparent as political conditions changed. Because the radical tradition was often presented as a transhistorical national inheritance rather than a product of specific social relations, the political spectrum could appropriate it. Appeals to the Levellers and Chartists have since appeared not only among socialists but among populists and nationalists of various political persuasions.

A genuinely Marxist approach proceeds differently. Marx and Engels regarded the English Revolution as the first great bourgeois revolution in European history. It represented neither the awakening of an eternal democratic tradition nor merely a collection of competing religious discourses. It was a struggle rooted in profound transformations of property relations and state power.

The Levellers and Diggers were not embryonic socialists. Nor were they dissenting voices within a discursive field. They represented the aspirations of social layers whose demands exceeded what the emerging bourgeois order could accommodate. Their defeat stemmed not from defective rhetoric or from a failure to construct convincing ideological narratives. It resulted from the revolution's objective limitations and the balance of class forces that emerged in its aftermath.

Leon Trotsky grasped this essential point in Where Is Britain Going? Writing in 1925, he insisted that Cromwell's revolution belonged to the working class's political inheritance because it demonstrated the necessity of revolutionary methods to break the resistance of an obsolete ruling order. For Trotsky, the English Revolution's historical significance lay not in a continuous radical tradition but in the dynamics of revolutionary struggle.

From this standpoint, the deficiencies of Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context become clear. The collection allows radicals to exist only after detaching them from the social forces and historical processes that produced them. They become localised expressions of difference, stripped of broader historical significance.

There is much valuable scholarship in these essays. Readers will learn a great deal from the contributions of Smyth, Villani, Caricchio, and several others. Yet the volume ultimately remains confined within the assumptions that have dominated English Revolution studies since the rise of revisionism in the 1970s and 1980s.

The English Revolution was not merely a clash of languages or competing discourses. It was a social revolution whose consequences shaped the development of capitalism, empire and the modern state. Any serious assessment of seventeenth-century radicalism must begin from that fundamental reality.

Revisionism has enriched our knowledge of detail. It has not provided a viable alternative understanding of the revolution itself. A renewal of historical materialist scholarship, freed from both revisionist scepticism and the nationalist distortions inherited from Popular Front historiography, remains an urgent intellectual task.

Selected Bibliography

Bounds, Philip. Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009.

Davis, J.C. Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972.

Hill, Christopher (ed.). The Law of Freedom and Other Writings of Gerrard Winstanley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

Hessayon, Ariel and David Finnegan (eds.). Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

MacLachlan, Alastair. The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1843-44).

Trotsky, Leon. Where Is Britain Going? London: New Park Publications, 1975 [1925].

Vallance, Edward. A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries, the Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedom. London: Little, Brown, 2009.

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso, 1991.

Wood, Neal. The Social History of Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

 

 

The regicides and the English Revolution: Charles Spencer’s Killers of the King and the unresolved legacy of 1649

On January 30, 1649, his subjects brought a king before judgment and executed him in public. The beheading of Charles I was not simply the dramatic climax of the English Civil War. It was one of the great revolutionary acts in world history. For the first time, a reigning monarch was tried by representatives of the people, convicted as a tyrant and traitor, and put to death in the name of a higher authority than the crown. The execution proclaimed that sovereignty no longer resided in the king by divine right, but could be claimed by society itself.

More than three and a half centuries later, the events of 1649 remain politically explosive. The regicide poses questions that successive generations of historians have sought either to explain or evade. How did a movement that began by fighting for Parliament's rights against royal absolutism end by abolishing the monarchy altogether? Why did ordinary soldiers, artisans, merchants and farmers conclude that peace was impossible while the king lived? And why, after overturning the old order, did the revolution ultimately prove unable to secure its gains?

Charles Spencer's Killers of the King addresses only part of this historical problem. It is an engaging account of the men who signed Charles I's death warrant and the vengeance they later faced at the Restoration. Spencer writes with considerable narrative skill and has done a genuine service by bringing the regicides' history to a broad audience. Yet his book exemplifies the limits of contemporary popular history. It tells us much about individuals' courage and fate, but little about the social forces that turned political conflict into revolution.

The relative neglect of the regicides by modern historians is itself significant. C. V. Wedgwood's A King Condemned remains the indispensable account of the king's trial. Since its publication, only a handful of major studies have seriously addressed the subject. This neglect reflects broader developments within academic historiography.

For much of the post-war period, historians such as Christopher Hill understood the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution rooted in profound economic and social transformations. The emerging capitalist classes sought to break the political constraints imposed by feudal absolutism and establish forms of government compatible with the developing market economy. Political and religious struggles reflected deeper conflicts embedded in society's structure.

Over the last several decades, however, revisionist historians have sustainedly attacked this interpretation. Revisionist historians have replaced the concept of revolution with narratives of contingency, misunderstanding, and elite political manoeuvre. Social class has largely disappeared from view. The Civil War is presented less as a revolutionary upheaval than as a tragic misunderstanding among a political elite that stumbled into conflict.

The implications for understanding the regicide are obvious. If the Civil War was essentially accidental, then Charles I's execution appears inexplicable. If no underlying social transformation was underway, then the destruction of the monarchy becomes little more than a collective act of political madness.

Spencer's work does not explicitly embrace revisionism, but it remains influenced by its assumptions. The central question confronting any account of the regicide is straightforward. Why did men who initially fought under the slogan of "King and Parliament" come to conclude that the king himself had to die?

The answer lies not primarily in personal characteristics or individual motives. Charles I was stubborn, duplicitous and politically inept. Yet European history contains many incompetent rulers who were not brought before revolutionary tribunals. The explanation lies not in the king's personality but in the social crisis that engulfed seventeenth-century England.

As Blair Worden has observed, revolutionary wars transform those who fight them. The New Model Army, established to defeat the king militarily, increasingly developed political conclusions that extended beyond Parliament's original objectives. Prolonged struggle radicalised thousands of soldiers. They confronted not merely the king's armies but an entire structure of political authority rooted in hereditary privilege.

The decisive turning point was the Second Civil War in 1648. Charles I's secret negotiations and encouragement of renewed armed resistance convinced many who had previously favoured compromise that no stable settlement was possible while he remained alive. The king had become identified with perpetual counter-revolution.

Spencer acknowledges this development but never adequately explains it. His preferred method is biographical rather than social. He approaches history primarily through personalities and individual experiences. This produces vivid storytelling but limits historical understanding.

Karl Marx's observation in The German Ideology remains essential. Human beings make history under specific social conditions, and consciousness develops through lived experience rather than abstract reflection. The regicides lacked a modern revolutionary programme. They understood their actions through religious language, constitutional arguments and historical analogy. Yet the social content of their actions extended far beyond their own conscious intentions.

The rank and file of the New Model Army increasingly represented layers of society whose interests conflicted sharply with the old order. Smallholders, artisans, merchants and sections of the lower yeomanry had acquired both military confidence and political expectations. They had fought, sacrificed and bled for victory. Many were unwilling to accept a settlement that restored the authority they had spent years defeating.

The famous encounter between Colonel George Joyce and Charles I captures this shift with remarkable clarity. When the king demanded to see Joyce's commission authorising his actions, Joyce pointed to the soldiers behind him. Their collective force was his commission. Authority no longer flowed downward from the monarchy. It was being recreated from below through revolutionary struggle.

This was the profound significance of 1649. As Christopher Hill and other Marxist historians argued, Charles's execution represented far more than the punishment of a failed monarch. It signalled a decisive rupture with feudal conceptions of power. Whatever compromises followed, no English ruler could ever again govern exactly as Charles had attempted. The revolution permanently altered the relationship between ruler and ruled.

The greatest strength of Spencer's book lies not in its discussion of the regicide itself but in its account of what followed.

The Restoration unleashed one of the most determined political manhunts in British history. The surviving regicides became fugitives. Some escaped abroad. Others were captured and subjected to spectacularly brutal public executions intended to terrify republican sentiment into submission.

Spencer vividly recreates this campaign of revenge. What emerges most clearly is the social background of the men being hunted. Many were not members of ancient aristocratic families. They were sons of tradespeople, craftsmen, and minor property holders who had risen through talent, conviction, and military service. Their careers reflected the social mobility revolution itself unleashed.

The pursuit of the regicides also exposed the extraordinary opportunism of many Restoration figures. Sir George Downing, once a servant of the Commonwealth and later a diplomat for Charles II, personally organised the capture of former comrades. Spencer's account shows how quickly principles dissolved as the political climate changed.

Yet here the book's limitations become most evident. Spencer largely presents the Restoration as an understandable act of royal revenge. Charles II wanted to punish those responsible for his father's death. Former parliamentarians sought to divert attention from their own past actions. Such explanations are not false. They are simply inadequate.

The Restoration was not merely a personal triumph for a returning monarch. It was a political settlement accepted by broad sections of the ruling class. By 1660 the propertied elite had secured many of the changes they desired from the revolutionary period. The old absolutist project had been defeated. The power of Parliament had expanded. Property relations had been consolidated in ways favourable to emerging capitalist interests.

At the same time, these same social layers feared the democratic impulses that the revolution had unleashed. Levellers, radical republicans, and militant sections of the army raised demands that threatened not merely the monarchy but property itself. The ruling classes increasingly feared popular radicalism more than they feared kings.

The punishment of the regicides therefore served a broader political purpose. It symbolically buried the revolutionary aspirations that had extended beyond the interests of the propertied elite. The revolution retained its constitutional achievements. Its most radical possibilities were repudiated.

This contradiction explains the fate of the English Revolution more effectively than appeals to individual betrayal. George Monck's opportunism mattered. But political turncoats succeed only when broader social conditions permit it. The republic's collapse after Cromwell's death reflected deep weaknesses within the revolutionary regime, including its inability to build a durable alliance with the popular classes whose mobilisation made the revolution possible.

Historians such as James Holstun have examined these contradictions far more seriously than Spencer. Questions of class, property and political power remain largely absent from Killers of the King. Consequently, the book describes the end of the revolutionary process without fully explaining either its origins or its defeat.

Spencer's own conclusions are ironic. The ninth Earl Spencer began the project expecting to sympathise with Charles I. Instead, he ended with considerable admiration for the men who condemned him. He accepts that the king's execution was necessary and endorses the view that the trial helped secure constitutional gains that shaped Britain's future development.

This is ultimately a modernised Whig interpretation of the Revolution. Spencer recognises the progress embodied in 1649, but he understands that progress primarily in constitutional terms. Parliamentary government, the rule of law and limits on executive power emerge as the revolution's chief achievements.

What disappears from view is the deeper social transformation that made such constitutional changes possible. The English Revolution was not merely a dispute about legal arrangements. It reflected the emergence of new social forces and property relations that increasingly clashed with the old feudal order.

For that reason, Killers of the King remains an important but limited work. It is not a serious analysis of the English Revolution. It lacks a coherent social interpretation and never fully transcends the horizons of political biography. Nevertheless, it is exceptionally readable, meticulously researched and often compelling. Above all, it rescues from historical obscurity a group of men who carried out one of the most audacious acts in political history.

The regicides understood the historical forces they represented only imperfectly. Yet through their actions they demonstrated a truth that has echoed through every subsequent revolution: kings rule only for as long as society permits them to rule. Once that belief is destroyed, no throne is secure. The men who signed Charles I's death warrant discovered this truth in its most dramatic form. The ruling classes that returned to power in 1660 never forgot it. Neither should historians today.

 

One response To Killers of the King by Charles Spencer

There’s always plenty of scope for revisiting historical events – even ones we think we understand. And as always there are messages for our own times: “They had their own reasons for vengeance. 

For a lot of Parliamentarians, choosing the king’s killers as scapegoats took the attention away from their own years of rebellion against the Crown”. Yes indeed!

A Scott' s blog can be found http://turkeyfile.wordpress.com/

The Making—and Unmaking—of a Marxist Historian: Revisiting E. P. Thompson

Published to mark the fiftieth anniversary of *The Making of the English Working Class*, *E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism* serves both as a tribute and an intervention. Edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor and published by Manchester University Press in 2013, this volume fits within a thriving field of Thompson scholarship. This field has expanded steadily since his death and shows no signs of slowing down. Events at Harvard, Birkbeck symposia, new publications from Monthly Review Press, and ongoing biographical and historiographical analyses all highlight Thompson’s lasting significance. His work remains widely translated, debated, and included in curricula worldwide. Few British historians post-WWII have attracted such sustained international attention. However, this widespread recognition has created a peculiar distortion: Thompson is celebrated, contextualised, and memorialised, yet rarely subjected to a rigorous Marxist critique. This noticeable gap is what the current review aims to address.

The editors present their collection as a multifaceted assessment of Thompson—covering his roles as a historian, educator, poet, peace advocate, and political figure. Many contributors, personally acquainted with Thompson or engaged within his intellectual circle, approach him with a blend of respect and critique. The eye-catching cover, clearly inspired by Soviet interwar propaganda posters, aims to place Thompson within a history of radical politics. However, this choice is ironically complex, given Thompson’s complicated and often hostile relationship with Marxism, especially its revolutionary Soviet form. His political evolution—from early Communist Party membership to Cold War dissent and New Left activism—was characterised more by breaks than consistency. Consequently, the cover’s stylistic homage unintentionally underscores the gap between Thompson’s idealised radicalism and the Marxist tradition he aimed to support.

Mainstream academic audiences have received the volume well. Sheila Rowbotham commends its sympathetic yet critical tone, highlighting the editors’ success in showcasing Thompson’s broad intellectual scope. Mary Kaldor considers it a reminder of the “loss of English radicalism” and a prompt to revive it. These endorsements show how the book aligns with a broader academic trend that views Thompson as a symbol of humane socialism, participatory democracy, and cultural dissent. He is celebrated not only for The Making but also for his critiques of nuclear weapons, his defence of civil liberties, and his focus on the moral aspects of politics. In this way, Thompson has become a symbol of a certain kind of left-liberal nostalgia—an icon invoked to mourn the decline of grassroots activism and the weakening of public intellectual engagement.

Despite the growing body of literature, one perspective is notably missing: a Marxist critique of Thompson’s politics and approach to history. This gap is deliberate. The widespread hostility to authentic Marxism—especially the classical Marxism of Trotsky, Lenin, and the revolutionary tradition—has led to Thompson’s anti-Marxist critiques being seldom questioned. Instead, people often praise them as bold acts of intellectual independence. His criticism of Althusser, his dismissiveness of “theory,” and his focus on moral experience over class analysis are viewed as refreshing counterpoints to dogmatism. However, for Marxists dedicated to historical materialism, these positions are not a progression but a step back from Marxism.

This review does not aim to cover every chapter of the volume or every facet of Thompson’s extensive work. Instead, it highlights aspects most relevant to his political ideas—his views on class, his opposition to Marxist theory, his moral critique of Stalinism, and his influence on the British New Left. These themes are crucial to understanding Thompson’s legacy and his ongoing role in modern historiography. Often seen as the symbol of “history from below,” emphasising agency, culture, and lived experience, this positive view can hide the political consequences of his approach: replacing class struggle with moral storytelling, favouring cultural radicalism over revolutionary action, and turning Marxism into an ethical outlook rather than a scientific analysis.

By emphasising Thompson’s activism—his advocacy for peace, opposition to nuclear armament, and critique of Cold War militarism—the editors strengthen a moralised perspective. Although Thompson’s activism was genuine and often brave, it also reflected a strong rejection of Marxist ideology. His 1956 split from the Communist Party, triggered by Khrushchev’s disclosures and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, shifted his focus from revolutionary Marxism to humanist moralism, increasingly excluding class analysis. The New Left he co-founded embodied this moral stance: anti-authoritarian, culturally broad, and politically varied. It criticised capitalism without proposing a revolutionary agenda and praised working-class culture without advocating for proletarian power.

This review treats E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism not just as an academic work, but as part of a larger ideological effort to domesticate Marxism in academia and to position Thompson as its acceptable figurehead. Focusing on chapters most relevant to his political views, the review seeks to reintroduce a perspective often overlooked in modern scholarship—a Marxist critique rooted in historical materialism rather than moral judgment.

A gifted teacher, an undisciplined historian

Thompson’s reputation as an educator has always been a key part of his legacy, and those who contributed to _E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism_ rightly highlight this aspect. He was, by all accounts, a natural teacher: lively, demanding, and driven by a belief that history matters because ordinary people matter. While his politics are subject to debate—and this review will suggest they had significant flaws—his dedication to adult education and the intellectual emancipation of working-class individuals was sincere. His years teaching extramural classes in Yorkshire for the Workers’ Educational Association not only influenced his teaching approach but also deeply impacted his historical writing. _The Making of the English Working Class_ cannot be understood without those years in church halls and community centers, listening to working-class students’ experiences and encouraging them to see themselves as active participants in history.

John Rule’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reflects this duality effectively. Thompson’s postgraduate students at Warwick recalled him as meticulous, inspiring, and deeply devoted to their intellectual growth. He was the type of supervisor who examined drafts meticulously, encouraged students to approach history, not just theory, and regarded scholarship as a moral calling. Nonetheless, Rule also highlights the tensions between Thompson and the university. Heavy teaching responsibilities, constant meetings, and bureaucratic pressures within a rapidly growing institution left little time for research. Thompson was uncomfortable with the managerial university that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, as his temperament and politics were influenced by the older tradition of adult education, where teaching served as a social mission rather than a professional duty.

Rule’s observations on The Making are equally perceptive. The book reflects an author who challenges conventional academic norms with a lively, combative, and sometimes unrestrained language. For example, Thompson’s harsh critique of Methodism as “ritual psychic masturbation” illustrates his tendency to use strong language when moral clarity calls for it. His aversion to quantification, evident in his mocking critique of economic historians claiming that industrialisation’s benefits amounted to “a few potatoes, some cotton clothing, tea and sugar, and many articles in the Economic History Review,” was not merely stylistic but also indicated a deeper rejection of the analytical rigor associated with Marxism.

Thompson's resistance to formal analysis is central to any Marxist critique of his work. His avoidance of quantification was driven not by personal preference but by a deeper disdain for abstract, theoretical, and structural methods. Instead, he emphasized narrative, moral storytelling, and lived experience. This perspective shaped his historical techniques and political views. After leaving the Communist Party in 1956, his shift was towards a moral humanism that prioritized ethical sentiments over class analysis, rather than embracing a more rigid Marxist stance. The New Left he helped create embodied these ideas: it was anti-authoritarian, culturally open, and politically inclusive, yet lacked a coherent theory of capitalist development or proletarian action.

Thompson’s impatience with rigour permeated his work at all levels. In history, it led to a romanticised view of working-class agency that often overlooked the structural limits capitalism imposed. Politically, it produced a moral critique of Stalinism that never matured into a comprehensive critique of bureaucratic decay or serious engagement with revolutionary Marxism. For example, his debates with Althusser were not about defending Marxist methodology but about rejecting theory altogether. Thompson’s claim that “theory” was an external imposition on historical practice did not deepen Marxist analysis but signalled a retreat from it.

The contributors to E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism celebrate his teaching, his prose, and his moral passion. These qualities were real, and they help explain his enduring appeal. But they also point to the limits of his politics. Thompson’s strengths as a teacher—his immediacy, his impatience with abstraction, his belief in the primacy of lived experience—were inseparable from the weaknesses of his historical method and his political thought. A Marxist critique must therefore begin not by denying his gifts but by recognising how those gifts were bound up with a rejection of the very rigour that Marxism demands.

1956: the crisis of Stalinism

Michael Newman's chapter addresses the decisive episode in Thompson's political life. Khrushchev's "secret speech" of February 1956, followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary that November, threw the Communist Party of Great Britain into crisis. Thompson, together with John Saville, produced the dissident Reasoner inside the party and, after leaving it, launched The New Reasoner in 1957.

Newman correctly notes that 1956 caused a leftist realignment, but his explanation overlooks the key political decision presented by the crisis. Thompson deliberately rejected Trotskyism, the only current that challenged Stalinism from Marxist and international worker perspectives. Additionally, describing the New Left Review, created in 1960 from The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, as a leading Marxist scholarly publication is inaccurate.

The British branch of the International Committee of the Fourth International, led by Gerry Healy, viewed the crisis as a chance to expose Stalinism as counter-revolutionary and attract the most promising individuals breaking away from the CPGB. They did so with a notable group, including Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker journalist whose Budapest reports the party suppressed, historian Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, and Tom Kemp. These individuals helped found the Socialist Labour League in 1959.

Thompson was not among them, whatever Newman's attempt to place him at the centre of a "Marxist revival." The Trotskyists were sharply critical of The New Reasoner but sought political discussion. In "The New Left Must Look to the Working Class," published in Labour Review in 1959, Healy pointed out that Thompson's article entirely omitted the working class.

Healy explained that the New Left was not simply a group of people with new ideas. It reflected a phase in the crisis of capitalism, and like earlier movements among intellectuals and students, it warned of a resurgence of the working class. He wrote that the crisis first found its reflection in the battle of ideas.

Thompson had no interest in such a discussion. He responded to the SLL by accusing it of factionalism, a charge levelled at the Trotskyist movement throughout its history. Healy remarked that Thompson had discarded all the baggage he carried out of the Communist Party except "one soiled old suitcase labelled anti-Trotskyism."

The Trotskyists' fight was made harder by the revisionist tendency led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel, which split the Fourth International in 1953. The Pabloites presented Khrushchev's speech as evidence that the bureaucracy could reform itself under mass pressure and move leftward. This perspective lent credibility to those leaving the Communist Party who wanted to break with Stalin's crimes without breaking with the political outlook that had produced them.

Thompson found a warmer reception among the state-capitalist tendency of Tony Cliff, forerunner of today's Socialist Workers Party, which abandoned the defence of the Soviet Union and broke with the Fourth International around 1950. For decades that tendency has provided left cover for emigrants from Stalinism. David McNally, writing in International Socialism in 1993, called Thompson the greatest Marxist historian of the English-speaking world and credited him with a commitment to freeing Marxism from Stalinist distortion.

Socialist humanism and the New Left

The New Reasoner drew together former and current CPGB members, individuals who had passed through the Trotskyist movement, and Labour Party members. They were united by opposition to Trotskyism. Thompson was openly hostile to an international revolutionary perspective and sought instead to root his journal in a supposedly native "English" radical tradition.

Kate Soper's chapter shows that Thompson offered, in place of Marxism, what he called "socialist humanism." It is a moral and essentially utopian outlook. Its critique of Stalinism was vague by design. For Thompson, Trotskyism was merely another variant of Stalinism, a position that spared him the need to explain how the Soviet bureaucracy arose.

Even McNally conceded the point. He noted Thompson's lackadaisical attitude to scientific rigour. He acknowledged that while Thompson denounced the camps, the show trials and the police state, he never offered a clear analysis of the nature of the Stalinist regimes. That is precisely the analysis Trotsky had provided in The Revolution Betrayed two decades earlier.

Thompson never advocated building a revolutionary party. Like the New Left as a whole, he blamed Lenin's conception of the party for Stalinism. In 1959, The New Reasoner published Eric Heffer, a former Communist who later became a Labour MP, arguing that the vanguard had met a past historical need but had become a hindrance.

Thompson's dispute with Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, who took control of New Left Review in the early 1960s, and his later polemic against Louis Althusser in The Poverty of Theory (1978), have been presented as a defence of Marxism. They were nothing of the kind. They were arguments between different tendencies of the petty-bourgeois left, none of which based itself on the working class.

The subsequent evolution of New Left Review is instructive. As Julie Hyland has written on the WSWS, the journal became a meeting place for Stalinist-influenced academics and Pabloite tendencies, promoting the Frankfurt School, structuralism, Maoism, anarchism, postmodernism and a succession of other theories of student radicalism.

Theodore Koditschek's chapter discusses Thompson's lifelong engagement with socialism and Marxism while acknowledging his distance from the "dogmas" of orthodoxy. The formulation is revealing. What Koditschek calls dogma is historical materialism itself, and it is precisely this that Thompson abandoned.

The Making and the problem of consciousness

Thompson's break with historical materialism underpins The Making of the English Working Class. Despite its rich detail and undoubted literary power, the book lacks a materialist account of how the working class developed. Class appears above all as a cultural experience and a moral self-definition, rather than as a social relation rooted in the development of the productive forces.

The "history from below" genre that Thompson helped found is enjoying a revival, promoted by a section of academic historians and by groups such as the SWP. Amid the crisis of world capitalism, its popularity is understandable, and well-written works in this tradition can add to our knowledge of complex events. But its practitioners rarely examine the political origins of the method, or the politics it serves.

Its most damaging feature is how it treats consciousness. It is one thing to rescue the working class from what Thompson famously called "the enormous condescension of posterity." It is another to explain where the working class came from, and how and from where it derives its ideas.

Stuart Hall, Thompson's collaborator in the first New Left, set out their shared view in New Left Review in 2010. Against what he called the "economism" of the Stalinist, Trotskyist and Labourist left alike, Hall insisted that socialists were "made, not born." On this view, consciousness is detached from the objective processes of the mode of production.

The materialist conception of history begins from the opposite standpoint. As Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.... We do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, to arrive at men in the flesh. We start with real, active men, and based on their real life-process, we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.... Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

This does not equate consciousness with mere passive reflexes. Marxism argues that a revolutionary party must actively cultivate socialist awareness among the working class through deliberate struggle, grounded in a scientific grasp of the objective conditions. Thompson, Hall, and the New Left, however, rejected this approach.

Nina Power's discussion of Thompson's view of class highlights a related issue. Thompson idealized the working class and its spontaneity, while recognizing his own empirical approach. Without the praise often associated with it, his view of class tended to distinguish socialism from the working class as a revolutionary, global force. Paul Bond noted on WSWS that this form of "Marxism" was aligned with a petty-bourgeois fraction that remains closely connected to the current order.

No single review can finally settle E. P. Thompson’s place in history, nor should it try. Thompson remains a historian whose work will continue to be read, debated, and reinterpreted for decades to come. The Making of the English Working Class will endure as one of the most influential works of post‑war British historiography, not only for its narrative power but also because it opened space for history writing that took the experiences, aspirations, and cultural worlds of ordinary people seriously. Thompson’s achievement in this respect is undeniable. He restored agency to historical subjects who had long been treated as passive objects of economic forces, and he did so with a literary verve that few academic historians have matched. Future generations will continue to turn to his books for answers to the political and historical problems of their own time.

But they should read him critically. Thompson’s strengths as a historian were inseparable from his weaknesses as a Marxist. His hostility to abstraction, his suspicion of theory, and his impatience with analytical rigour were not incidental features of his work; they were constitutive of his intellectual identity. These qualities made him a compelling teacher and a vivid writer. Still, they also limited his ability to grasp the structural dynamics of capitalist development or the political logic of revolutionary movements. Thompson’s insistence on moral experience over theoretical analysis led him to elevate culture over class, agency over structure, and narrative over explanation. The result was a body of work that is rich in detail and human sympathy but often thin in its conceptual foundations.

This tension stemmed from Thompson’s political formation. Although he left the Communist Party in 1956, he never fully discarded the outlook he acquired within it—above all its hostility to Trotskyism. His break with Stalinism was moral rather than theoretical. He rejected the bureaucratic brutality of the Soviet regime, but he did not engage seriously with the Marxist critique of Stalinism developed by Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Instead, he carried into the New Left assumptions shaped by the Communist Party's ideological battles: suspicion of Trotskyist analysis, dismissal of revolutionary strategy, and a tendency to equate Marxist rigour with dogmatism. His polemics against Althusser were not a defence of Marxist method but a rejection of theory itself. His critique of Stalinism remained ethical rather than historical, grounded in moral outrage rather than a systematic account of bureaucratic degeneration.

This legacy has shaped how Thompson’s work is received. The academic celebration of Thompson as a humane socialist, a defender of civil liberties, and a champion of “history from below” has often served to domesticate Marxism within the university. Thompson becomes the acceptable face of radical history: passionate but not doctrinaire, moral but not revolutionary, cultural but not structural. The contributors to E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism largely reproduce this image. They admire his teaching, prose, and activism, but they do not confront the political limits of his method or the ideological function his work continues to serve.

A genuinely Marxist biography of Thompson remains to be written—one that situates him not as a heroic outsider but as a product of the political contradictions of the British left in the mid‑twentieth century. Such a biography would examine his formation within the Communist Party, his moralised break with Stalinism, his role in shaping the New Left, and the theoretical consequences of his hostility to Marxist rigour. It would treat Thompson not as a saint of radical history but as a complex figure whose achievements and limitations illuminate the broader crisis of socialist politics in the post‑war period.

Thompson will continue to be read, and he should be. But readers should read him with an awareness of the political choices that shaped his work and the theoretical horizons he refused to cross. Only then can we understand his legacy in its full historical and political significance.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

1. Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor (eds.), E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism, Manchester University Press, 2013.
2. The Many-Headed Monster blog, papers from the Birkbeck symposium on "history from below."
3. Cal Winslow (ed.), E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, Monthly Review Press, 2014.
4. John Rule, "Thompson, Edward Palmer (1924–1993)," Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
5. G. Healy, "The New Left Must Look to the Working Class," Labour Review, 1959.
6. David McNally, "E. P. Thompson: Class Struggle and Historical Materialism," International Socialism 61, Winter 1993.
7. Eric Heffer, article in The New Reasoner, 1959.
8. Julie Hyland, "Embittered row between UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband and Daily Mail over his father, Ralph," WSWS, 8 October 2013.
9. Stuart Hall, "Life and Times of the First New Left," New Left Review 61, January–February 2010.
10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845–46.
11. Paul Bond, "Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism," WSWS, 5 March 2014.