First of all, let me make it clear that I am not now and
never have been a "revisionist". I am actually a critic of the work
of Conrad Russell, work which I believe to be fundamentally wrong although not
for the reasons Mr Sturza holds. Secondly, he will find in Valerie Pearl's 1961
book on the City of London from 1625 to 1643 careful research that shows that
the violence in the streets of London reported in Royalist news books was more
carefully controlled and organised than figures like Brian Manning or Christopher
Hill believed.
(The fall of the Bastille in Paris is irrelevant in this
context.) I have indeed read Mr Sturza's book which offers a commentary based
on secondary works rather than original research into the sources for the
early-1640s. The protagonists on both
sides in the events of the 1640s were drawn from all sections of English (and
Welsh) society but this was not a "class-based" society in the
Marxist sense at all.
The English Civil Wars were 'un grand soulevement' - 'a
great uprising' in English - more analogous to the revolt of the Low Countries
post-1566/7, to the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598 and the Frondes
of 1648-1653 and the Revolt of the Catalans in 1640 rather than to any Marxist
paradigm based on the Russian Revolution of 1917. Mr Sturza is perfectly
entitled to elaborate his hypothesis but it has almost no credibility amongst
contemporary academic historians. He may be surprised too to learn that I am
not a reactionary in any sense.
