I am all for swimming against the historical tide and have
done so on many occasions, but then I am not a professional historian, and I do
not have an editor to tell me when I make a stupid mistake or to leave some
things well alone.
So why did no one tell David Horspool that arguing Oliver
Cromwell was a monarch is not the cleverest thing to do.
It is not as though we have hundreds of historians who
favour this type of bad historiography. What was the nature of the discussion
at Penguin? I would have paid money to hear it. Maybe If he had done it in
the form of a counterfactual argument, then this is a different matter. It is
also a little strange that the book does not present an argument for Cromwell
inclusion as a monarch.
It is no secret that Cromwell took on some of the trappings
of a king including being called 'His Highness'. He also took on some of the
rituals of court and lived in palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court. But
Oliver Cromwell was not a king, and therefore it is no accident that some of
the greatest historians of the subject refused to label him that.
So why does a giant publishing firm ask a historian to argue
the opposite? One answer would be the type of series that Penguin wants to
have. The last ten years or so have seen an increase in studies that concentrate
on Royalism. While there is nothing wrong with that, unfortunately, most of
these studies have attempted to rehabilitate the monarchy (see my review of
Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky.[1]
David Horspool book is a well-written introduction to the
life of Oliver Cromwell. However, I did expect at least a defence of why
Cromwell was listed in a series on the monarchy, but this does not happen.
I am also a little disturbed that no historian so far has
attacked this mild falsification of history. I may be old fashioned, but if
this book appeared twenty years ago, there would have been a historian's fight.
So far, the only review of this book has been in the
Guardian.[2]
Which unsurprisingly decides to take a somewhat cynical view. The reviewer
tells us "the controversial inclusion of Oliver Cromwell in the Penguin
Monarchs series will doubtless elicit a few tuts of disapproval from royalists.
Well, it should elicit a few from left minded historians.
You get the feeling that David Horspool was not entirely
happy with the prospect of defending the impossible conceding that the
inclusion of Cromwell in the list of monarchs should be "in square
brackets". However, Horspool as the Guardian review says, "reminds
pedants, monarchy means a sole ruler, not necessarily the holder of a royal
title."
This is stretching things a bit, and it is not something a
serious historian should or would stoop to. This brings me to my main
critique of the book. In some ways, the book expresses a growing problem modern
historiography of the English revolution in that the issue of class is not
discussed.
As Horspool brings out, Cromwell was a member of the
gentry. If the reader is concentrating on whether Cromwell was a king,
then Cromwell's connection with the revolution is completely submerged.
As the Historian, Brian Manning brings out in his review of Oliver
Cromwell by Roy Sherwood "Charles was a hereditary monarch. Sherwood shows
that Cromwell became a 'king in all but name', but he does not consider that
before the civil war, despite his aristocratic connections and his status as a 'gentleman',
his economic position, as John Morrill shows the English Revolution[4], 'was essentially that of a yeoman, a working farmer': 'Cromwell's
economic status was much closer to that of the "middling sort" and
urban merchants than to that of the county gentry and governors. He always
lived in towns, not in a country manor house; and he worked for his living. He
held no important local offices and had no tenants or others dependent upon him
beyond a few household servants.'
He continues, "Karl Kautsky pointed out that the role
of 'great men' in history should be related to the group or class which they
represented or symbolized. In the English Civil War Charles, I defended
aristocracy and episcopacy, and his strength came from his party. Sherwood
should have asked who made Cromwell' king in all but name'. He should have
considered the power-hungry politicians, the seedy financiers, and the
sycophantic journalists who pushed him forward and, more broadly, the lords of
manors who rightly trusted him to defend their rank and property, the clergy
who successfully pressed him not to abolish their tithes (the tax which
supported them), and the lawyers who managed to keep him from reforms of the
legal system that would have reduced their profits".[3]
The other aspect of Cromwell is that in the last resort his
power rested on the New Model Army. He clearly took into consideration that it
would not sit well with the army if he became king. I mean they had just fought
two bloody civil wars and killed a king. Cromwell knew full well that to take
the crown would be political as well as military suicide.
To conclude the book is well written, it does not offer a
new perspective on the life of Cromwell. If Horspool is looking for debate
then hopefully a few historians will come out of their comfort zone and give
him one.
[1] http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=charles
[2]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/oliver-cromwell-by-david-horspool-review
[3] Brian Manning-The monarchy
and the military-(September 1999) Socialist Review 233.
