"Study
the historian before you begin to study the facts".
E
H Carr
"Cromwell
built not merely an army but also a party -- his army was to some extent an
armed party and herein precisely lay its strength. In 1644 Cromwell's
"holy" squadrons won a brilliant victory over the King's horsemen and
won the nickname of "Ironsides." It is always useful for a revolution
to have iron sides. On this score, British workers can learn much from
Cromwell."
Leon
Trotsky
"I
do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself."
Michel
de Montaigne
Insolent
proceedings is a collection of interdisciplinary essays by scholars examining
the last fifty years of the historiography of the English revolution. The
essays honour the work of Ann Hughes, who is, in the opinion of the editors of
this book, a post-revisionist historian. The main bulk of the essays deals with
revisionist and post-revisionist scholarship. It remains to be seen if the
claims made by the scholars to be developing a new historiography away from the
revisionist and post-revisionist historiography can be substantiated.
The
opening chapter offers a substantial overview of the previous historiography of
the English revolution. Although it reflects on the debates of the last fifty
years, it steers clear of an evaluation of both Whig and Marxist
historiography.
The
great historian Edward Hallett Carr was fond of saying, "Study the historian before you
begin to study the facts."[1]
In this case, it is important to understand the politics of the historian whose
honour these essays are written.
It
was recently announced that Hughes would be a Labour Party candidate in the
next election. The Uk Labour Party's latest purge has almost cleared out any
nominally left-wing members and is now an openly right-wing bourgeois party. Hughes
feels at home with this party. It is a complex process, the relationship
between politics and history, and it is dialectical. While Hughes's politics
may have to a certain extent, coloured her historical writing, she is
nonetheless a serious historian, and serious historians play an objectively
significant role in social life as the embodiment of historical memory.
While
it is not in the realm of possibility to examine every chapter in this book, some
chapters are more important than others. Anatomy of the General
Rising-Militancy and mobilisation in London, 1643 discusses the significant move
to the left in both the New Model Army and the general London population to deal
with the King once and for all and defeat the Presbyterians in Parliament, who
were seeking to bring back the King to power and destroy the Independents.
David Como examines the 'General Rising' using unknown manuscript accounts. His
article examines what happened along with the class nature of the participants.
David
Lowenstein's chapter William Walwyn's Montaigne and the struggle for toleration
in the English Revolution is intriguing detective work. It examines why
Montaigne, the great French Catholic writer and sceptic, appealed to the
radical writer and Leveller leader William Walwyn.
As
Lowenstein shows, Montaigne was an attractive figure for Walwyn, one of the
left-wing leaders of the English bourgeois revolution. Montaigne writes, "I
propose a life ordinary and without lustre: 'tis all one; all moral philosophy
may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one of richer
composition: every man carries the entire form of the human condition. Authors
communicate themselves to the people by some especial and extrinsic mark; I,
the first of any, by my universal being, as Michel de
Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer. If the world find
fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as
think of themselves."[2]
Walwyn
wanted to assimilate all that was good about Michel de Montaigne. Many of the revolution's
ideologists, such as Walwyn, used the bible and read other writers, such as
Michel de Montaigne, to half understand the historical precedent and for some
theories to explain what they were doing.
Sean
Kelsey's essay Indemnity, sovereignty and justice in the army debates of 1647 is
disappointing. Given the extraordinary amount of new material uncovered about
the huge radicalisation of the New Model Army, it would appear that the revisionist
and post-revisionist downplaying of the radical nature of the New Model Army
has raised its ugly head. The important work by John Rees on the radicalisation
of the New Model Army is ignored completely. The NMA was not just an army but
was a political party in all but name as the Marxist writer Leon Trotsky once wrote,
"In this way, Cromwell built not merely an army but also a party -- his
army was to some extent an armed party and herein precisely lay its strength.
In 1644 Cromwell's "holy" squadrons won a brilliant victory over the
King's horsemen and won the nickname of "Ironsides." It is always
useful for a revolution to have iron sides. On this score, British workers can
learn much from Cromwell." [3]
Thomas
N Corns groundbreaking essay Milton and Winstanley A conversation reviews the
possible but unproven interconnections between the giants of 17th-century
literature and politics Milton and Winstanley.
'Threshing
among the people Ranters, Quakers and the revolutionary public sphere re-examines
relations between Quakers and Ranters in the 1650s. J. C. Davis' right-wing
attack on the Ranters in the 1990s was largely discredited by the work of
Christopher Hill and A L Morton, whose work is largely ignored in this book.
J C Davis's book Fear, Myth and History: The
Ranters and the Historians was the right-wing Kenneth Baker (education
secretary under Margaret Thatcher's government) favourite book. According to
Davis, the Ranters were impossible to define. What they believed in, he writes,
"There was no recognised leader or theoretician and little, if any,
organisation. The views of the principal figures were inconsistent with each
other".
Ann
Hughes's work has been important in re-establishing the importance of a
systematic study of radical groups. But perhaps more importantly, she has
fought to highlight the role of women in the English revolution, which has been
largely ignored by most of her male counterparts.
After
all, the world was turned upside down for women as much as men. As Alison Jones
points out, "The Civil War of 1642-1646 and its aftermath constituted a
time of great turmoil, turning people's everyday lives upside down. It not only
affected the men in the armies, but it also touched the lives of countless
ordinary individuals. It is well known that women played a significant role in
the Civil War, for example, defending their communities from attack and nursing
wounded soldiers. What is often forgotten, however, is that some women took
advantage of the havoc wrought by the conflict to dissent from conventional
positions in society. The slightest deviation by women from their traditional
roles as wives and mothers was condemned by this patriarchal society. Therefore
dissent could take many forms that today do not appear particularly extreme –
for example, choosing to participate in emerging radical religious sects,
having greater sexual freedom, fighting as soldiers and practising
witchcraft".[4]
[1] What Is History.
[2] Michel de Montaigne, Selected Essays,
ed. W. C. Hazlitt (New York: Dover, 2011), 172.
[3] Two traditions: the
seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
[4] Dissent and
Debauchery: Women and the English Civil War- Alison Jones
