"I think one of the vital qualifications for a
historian is to be readable, is to write history which people will read, and is
not dry as dust".
Robert Blake
"In a sense, our recordings were almost like a tutorial
in reverse, where I interrogated them on why they had come to particular
conclusions, and whether they had changed their minds at a later date. "
John Miller
This interview with Christopher Hill (1912-2003) a former
Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and leading authority on the English bourgeois
revolution was first broadcast on February 1991 on BBC Radio Four for 'Conversations
with Historians'. The interviewer is John Miller.
The programme was a product of a "dictum of Jacob
Burckhardt". As Miller relates "When producer John Knight and I were
planning it we were keen to include a broad cross-section of approaches as well
as periods of study. So we were delighted when everyone on our first list
accepted the invitation to take part – Lord Blake, Christopher Hill, Eric
Hobsbawm, Sir Michael Howard, Lady Longford and David Starkey. As Elizabeth
Longford put it, on hearing who else made up the group: 'High Tories to
Marxists, with me somewhere in the middle."
One of the things that strike the listener is Hill's
tremendous erudition and almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the English
revolution.
It must be said Miller was not a hostile interviewer. His
questions ranged from the interesting to the mundane.
One of Miller's first question and probably one of his most
important was why did Hill study the English revolution? Hill's answer I must
admit was a little reticent and defensive. Like most of the historians in the
Communist, Party Hill came to study the English revolution through a love of
literature.
This was, of course, coupled with an interest in the significant
events of his early years. The late 1930s saw the Great Depression. The Moscow
Purges in the Soviet Union that saw the mass murder of millions of Communists
including the state murder of the entire central committee that had led the
Bolshevik revolution. The rise and fall of Italian and German Fascism. While it
would have been hard for even the most politically astute person to orientate
themselves at this time (Hill was, after all, no great shakes as a political
theorist), it is to Hill's credit that he managed to produce such quality and
quantity of historical writings on his chosen subject.
Hill's answers to the questions are informative and
incisive. They also indicate that Hill had not to any substantial extent
revised his previous convictions on the English revolution. He still believed
that it was a bourgeois revolution. The older Hill got, the more accurate and
precise became his analysis.
The interview begins with Miller attempting some
counterfactual questions. Hill quite correctly avoids getting involved in the
trap of "what if" school of history.
It is true that Hill in response to Miller's question as to
whether a different outcome could have happened if Charles Ist did things differently he did
offer the possibility that a settlement between Parliament and the King which
would have given England a constituent monarchy, would have seen Parliament
have more say over legalisation, a degree of freedom of the press and
toleration of religious groups.
Hill was enough of a Marxist not to rule out the role an
individual plays in the historical process. It is clear that the actions of
Charles Ist played an integral part in the "long march" towards revolution.
His vanity, stubbornness and sheer stupidity played their part, but he was part
of a much significant movement of social, forces.
As Hill said "Marx himself did not fall into the error
of thinking that men's idea was merely a pale reflection of their economic
needs, with no history of their own: but some of his successors, including many
who would not call themselves Marxist, have been far more economic-determinist
than Marx. It seems to me that anybody of thought which plays a major in
history – Luther's, Rousseau's, Marx's own takes on because it meets the needs
of the significant group in the society in which it comes into prominence".[1]
It is true that the historical process that brought about
the English revolution was not predetermined. Hill believed, and his answer to
Miller's question expressed his opinion that the revolution and its development
could have proceeded in any number of a given number of directions.
However, in
the end, run the material political and economic changes expressed in the
revolution would have come out sooner or later, albeit in different forms.
Also, the actions of any given character such as Charles 1 or for that matter
an Oliver Cromwell represented in distorted constitute the struggle of classes,
both characters pursued mutually different but in the end incompatible terms.
Hill expressed in his writings the fact that individuals,
classes, even whole parties have socioeconomic interests, and these are
sometimes expressed through significant historical figures. But in the end "The
breadth and nature of their activity are substantially defined by the laws of
the capitalist mode of production".
Some historians have criticised Hill for an overestimation
of the political influence of radical groups such as the Levellers or Diggers.
It is true that Hill paid substantial attention to the radicals of the English
revolution represented by groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and was
correct when he said that while these were the most conscious revolutionaries,
they were second in importance to Oliver Cromwell as a revolutionary force. At
the time of the 1991 interview, Penguin had just re-published Hill's The World
Turned Upside Down. Hill's work on the Levellers stands the test of time. He
does not overestimates their importance, and he correctly states that in the
historical scheme of things the most important revolutionary was not John
Lilburne but was in fact, Oliver Cromwell.
Hill justified this by saying that "Some will think
that I overemphasise the importance of the defeated radicals at the expense of
the mainstream achievements of the English revolution. Yet without the pressure
of the Radicals, the civil war might not have transformed into a revolution:
some compromise could have been botched up between the gentry on the two sides-
a "Prussian path". Regicide and republic were no part of the
intentions of the original leaders of the Long Parliament: they were forced on
the men of 1649 by the logic of the revolution which they were trying to
control."
Hill was accused that he had renounced his Marxist
interpretation towards the end of his life, one writer recounted that "Hill
gave a talk on radio marking the centenary of the publication of Marx's "Das
Kapital". He ended it by recounting how Marx had accidentally come across
some former comrades from the 1848 revolutions, many years later. They had
become prosperous and one, reflecting on old times, indicated how he felt that
he was becoming less radical as he aged. "Do you?" said Marx, "Well
I do not."
