Christopher Thompson
Every now and then,
Google’s alert system turns up unexpected results. Yesterday was a case in
point when I was made aware of Ed Simon’s review of Jonathan Healey’s
relatively new work, The Blazing World: Radical Ideas During the English
Revolution (1972). Echoes of that seventeenth-century world in songs and poetry
can still be heard according to Simon even though its theological disputes,
puzzling political arrangements and problematic scientific theories remain
difficult to explain to modern readers. Nonetheless, as Healey explained and
Simon agreed, this world had been transformed by 1700 by the growth of trade
and consumption, the development of political parties and the press, the
appearance of coffee houses, concert halls and theatres. But it had its obverse
side too in the spread of liberal scientific positivism and religious
pluralism, in the growth of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade and
the beginnings of a market view of the world that may yet prove apocalyptic as
the record of the start of the industrial revolution powered by coal buried in
the ice cores of the Antarctic shows. The period and the book thus have
important implications for the world in which we now live.
For support for these contentions, Simon appealed to Christopher Hill’s book, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution, published in 1972. Hill’s study encompassed a range of groups like the Levellers and Diggers, the Ranters, the Seekers and Familists, who were participants in an alternative, abortive Revolution that never happened but with which Hill found sympathy. Even so, Hill was inclined to regard these groups as crypto-liberals disguised as religious sectaries whereas the truth was the other way round. But right now, the liberal underpinnings of the state, of the sovereignty of the individual and the need for the market are being seriously challenged from the left and the right in our time. The seventeenth century is over but it is not yet done with us if Ed Simon is correct.
There is no doubt that Stuart England in 1700 was profoundly different from Tudor England in 1600. Its economy like its trading and colonial links had been transformed: it had reached constitutional and legal arrangements, political and religious settlements that transcended the quarrels of the mid-seventeenth century. Its public finances had been transformed and it had become a military and naval power comparable to any in Europe. It was recognisably a modern society on its way to becoming the most advanced country in the world for just over a century and a half. That the legacy of these developments are still apparent in the modern world is quite another matter altogether.
Behind these disputable propositions, there is another, more serious issue at stake. There is no doubt either that the events of the 1640s, i.e. of the English Civil Wars or Revolution or, as more recent historiography has it, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, appeal particularly to people with radical political convictions.
The idea of an older order being overthrown, of traditional forms of government and rule collapsing, of novel ideas about how states should be run or economies and societies organised , and the appearance of groups dedicated to these ends has had an enduring attraction. Sitting in great archive depositories and libraries - in the Huntington Library in San Marino or the Bodleian Library in Oxford or the British Library in London - it is all too easy to forget the immense suffering that followed from these ‘grands soulevements’: many lives, human and animal, were lost; many thousands of people were maimed; the destruction of property was on a huge scale; in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, old institutions were torn down; military power supported successive regimes from 1646 until the Restoration in 1660.
A terrible price was paid for the political
and religious speculations, the constitutional and legal quarrels of the 1640s
and 1650s which ended not as Christopher Hill would have liked in rule by tiny
groups of sectaries and radicals but in what turned out to be the victory of
the Royalists. Blair Worden’s verdict on these conflicts was fundamentally
right. Imputing responsibility to the issues that preoccupy modern societies
and current thinkers to the outcome of struggles in seventeenth-century England
is a fallacious argument. No such lessons can legitimately be drawn.
