'Popular petitions were at
the very heart of the revolutionary crisis of 1648-1649, and this book is
unique in recovering their meaning, the context in which they were issued, and
the people who wrote and supported them. Essential reading.'
John Rees-The
Leveller Revolution
'The petitions Norah Carlin
has transcribed and carefully contextualized in Regicide or Revolution?
represent an incredibly important cache of materials for understanding the
crisis of the English Revolution, the trial and execution of Charles I. Carlin
convincingly demonstrate that these petitions were not straightforward demands
for bloody retribution. Rather, their content varied considerably,
incorporating radical demands for legal, social and constitutional reform,
giving historians a highly important window into the ideals and aspirations of
the 'well affected' both within and outside the army. The collection should be
required reading for scholars and students of the English Revolution, and the
general reader alike.'
Ted Vallance, University of
Roehampton, London
There are two types of
historians. The first type is the historian that spends a tremendous number of
hours deep mining archives to produce a book. The second type is the historian
that writes about the former.
Norah Carlin has produced a
book that firmly places her in the first type of historian. It takes a skilful
historian like Carlin to produce a book out of such a large and significant
number of texts. The English revolution is one of the most worked-over topics
in English history, and rivals only the American, French and Russian revolution
in books produced. It is to Carlin’s credit that she has created something new
and highly interesting.
It is widely accepted
amongst historians of the English revolution that the many petitions addressed
to Parliament and the army in the five months before Charles I’s execution
influenced the events that led to his trial and death.
However, more Conservative
historians have argued that the petitions had little effect and represented
little more than a propaganda campaign by a small number of political and military
leaders.
It is to her eternal credit
that Carlin has undertaken the task to carry out a wide-ranging examination of
over sixty texts. As Carlin has said, the book has been nearly twenty years in
the making. The sheer number and diversity of the texts in the book indicate a
tremendous politicisation of a significant layer of the population. It would
not be an overstatement to say this is a groundbreaking book. Every text begins
with a context and ends with a background analysis. It is clear that a lot of
work and time went into this book.
In a recent interview,
Carlin described this process, “this involved trawling the contemporary printed
material in the British Library's Thomason Tracts (now available online), which
is a sheer pleasure to me, and printed record sources like the Commons Journal.
From there, I moved on to whatever manuscripts related to the petitions
survive. I also researched each regiment, county and town involved as far as I
could without greater specialisation, mainly in secondary sources (some of the
Victoria County Histories are a good starting point) but sometimes going back
to the national or local archives when I felt existing literature didn't deal
satisfactorily with a particular issue”[1].
Dual
Power
Carlin clearly believes that
the majority of the texts came from plebeian elements in other words, from the rank and file
activists. These texts then gained a wider audience. They also testify to the
dual nature of power during this short period as Leon Trotsky describes so well: “the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a
great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example
of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil
war.
At first, the royal power,
resting upon the privileged classes or the upper circles of these classes – the
aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the
squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the
Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The protracted
conflict between these two regimes is finally settled in open civil war. The
two governmental centres – London and Oxford – create their own armies. Here
the dual power takes a territorial form, although, as always in a civil war,
the boundaries are very shifting. Parliament conquers. The king is captured and
awaits his fate.
It would seem that the
conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie.
But before the royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted
itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks
the Independents the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and
farmers. This army powerfully interferes in social life, not merely as an armed
force, but as a Praetorian Guard, and as the political representative of a new
class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army
creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of
soldiers’ and officers’ deputies (“agitators”). A new period of double
sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the
Independents’ army. This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves
powerless to oppose with its own army the “model army” of Cromwell – that is,
the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian
Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a
parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the
army, under the leadership of the Levellers – the extreme left wing of the
revolution – try to oppose to the rule of the upper military levels, the
patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian regime. But this new
two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest
depths of the petty bourgeoisie have not yet, nor can have their own historic
path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political
equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of
years[2].
Carlin tackles a number of
important issues in the book. One of the most important issues is to what
extent were the authors of the various texts merely responding to political
events or were the cause by their actions of subsequent events.
She writes “The petitions were
responding to events as they occurred, and we must avoid the temptation to see
them as causing the events that followed – especially the king’s execution,
which has been a focus for hindsight almost since it happened. None of them
calls openly for the king’s death, and even among those that call for vengeance
for the blood spilt in the civil wars, only a few name him directly. Much
express concern for the common people’s rights and liberties, and a substantial
minority call for a radical redefinition of the English constitution, with the
House of Commons at its centre as representative of the people. Some list
reforms in the law and society that reveal a wider vision of revolution for
England, and very many expand on their own interpretation of the civil wars and
more recent events”.[3]
The texts in Carlin’s book
clearly show that England was going through a profound transformation. The
debate about whether to kill the king was unprecedented and had its roots in
objective processes. Carlin is enough of a Marxist to believe that such events
are not merely spontaneous occurrences but are decades if not centuries in the
making. Whether the participants are conscious of what they are doing is not
the most important point. To be more precise during the English bourgeois
revolution some of its actors were to a certain extent semi-conscious of what
they were doing it is a different matter during a socialist revolution such as
the Russian revolution where the actors were entirely conscious of what was needed
to be done.
This does not undermine the
English Revolution’s lasting historical significance. As Karl Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living.”
SWP
It is a pity that Carlin has
not written more on the English revolution. Her first book Causes of the
English Civil War (Historical Association Studies) was written in 1998 and gave
a very good introduction to the English revolution. It introduces the reader to
the various strands of historiography. During her time in the Socialist Workers
Party(SWP), she produced two groundbreaking essays that should have prompted
the State Capitalist organisation to produce more work on the subject and
challenge the growing threat of a number of revisionist historians that were
seeking to denigrate any Marxist understanding of the revolution.
Carlin in both compositions
makes some critical points worthy of much further study, three of which stand
out. She believed that England witnessed a bourgeois revolution, that so-called
Marxist historians have not done enough to stem the tide of revisionism that
undermined both Whig and Marxist historiography and the need for a more precise
understanding of the class nature of the radical groups like the Levellers and
how they fit into the concept of a Bourgeois revolution. Carlin’s work did not
sit very well with the SWP’s orientation to Historians like Christopher Hill
and Brian Manning. The SWP rejected Carlin’s historiography and adopted of the
genre of “Peoples History” which was
developed by the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG).
Of the CP Carlin makes this
point “Hill left the Communist Party in 1957 after playing a not very memorable
role on the Commission for Inner-Party Democracy and ended up as Master of
Balliol College, Oxford. Given the nasty and personalised tone of the right-wing
attack, it is hardly surprising that defending Hill should come to be almost a
significant activity in itself, yet the striking fact is that when a collection
of essays by former pupils of his was got together to mark his retirement at
the end of the 1970s, not one article made any explicit reference to Marxism,
only one contributor (Brian Manning) could be regarded as in any sense a
Marxist, and several (including the advocate of muddle quoted above) were
openly anti-Marxist. There is something slightly odd about ‘Britain’s greatest
Marxist historian’ (as he is described continuously in journals such as New
Left Review and History Workshop) raising no successors”.[4]
She recently elaborated more
on her time inside the SWP when she challenged the almost religiously orthodox
position of the SWP towards Hill. She states “Most left political tendencies
have recognised the importance of the subject to some extent in recent times,
though some have got bogged down by making a shibboleth of some over-simplified
interpretation. Ironically, the left organisation I belonged to for many years
regarded me as a heretic because I didn't agree with every last word written by
Christopher Hill, including his claims that the gentry were 'the natural rulers
of the English countryside and that 'the Bible caused the death of Charles I'.
As I said in the 2019 memorial lecture, I value Hill's contribution to the
historiography of the English Revolution very highly indeed, but his writings
are not the last word on everything! It's only when there is no more debate
that history ceases to be interesting”[5].
Conclusion
Carlin should be
congratulated for producing a marvellous book that deserves to be in every
university library. The ideals and principles emanating from the texts were the
mainstays of the revolution. But in the final analysis, the English revolution
was a bourgeois revolution, and there existed, inevitably, a gap between the
ideals its participants proclaimed and their real social-economic and political
purpose. However, the revolution did pave the way for the vast expansion of
capitalism and produced the first capitalist nation-state.
About the author
Before retirement, Norah
Carlin was a Principal Lecturer in History at Middlesex University (London).
She is also the author of The Causes of the English Revolution (Oxford,
Blackwell for the Historical Association, 1999) and a number of articles on
aspects of the seventeenth-century English revolution. Having moved back to her
native Edinburgh some years ago, she is currently pursuing research on the kirk
and rural society in Scotland in the century after the Reformation.
The book can be purchased
directly from Breviary Stuff-https://www.breviarystuff.org.uk/norah-carlin-regicide-or-revolution/
or from Amazon-https://www.amazon.co.uk/Regicide-Revolution-Petitioners-September-February/dp/1916158609/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Norah+Carlin+%E2%80%93+Regicide+or+Revolution%3F&qid=1577832099&sr=8-1
[1]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/12/interview-with-historian-norah-carlin.html
[2] The
Seventeenth-Century revolution- Leon Trotsky’s Writings on Britain- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/v1/ch01a.htm
[3] Review : Regicide or
Revolution? What Petitioners Wanted, September 1648 - February 1649-Norah
Carlin £18.50 358pp / 156x234mm / paperback ISBN 978-1-9161586-0-3
[4]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2018/04/norah-carlin-socialist-workers-party.html
[5]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/12/interview-with-historian-norah-carlin.html
