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.
