Ronald Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell is the first part of a trilogy that explores a field already crowded with studies of the man who led England’s seventeenth-century bourgeois revolution. Hutton acknowledges this saturation. Since 1990, five detailed academic biographies and many popular accounts have been published. Notably, an experienced historian feels compelled, in the opening pages, to defend the need for yet another biography of Cromwell. This is not because of Cromwell’s endless complexity, but because traditional historiography has already explored the revolutionary aspects of the English Revolution extensively and offers limited new insights.
Hutton has produced a book that is technically accomplished, exhaustively researched in the secondary literature, and almost entirely without insight into why Cromwell mattered. This is the core of the issue. Hutton’s Cromwell is a figure stripped of historical necessity, severed from the class forces that produced him, and rendered intelligible only as a psychological curiosity or a military technician. The result is a biography that is not merely incomplete but fundamentally evasive a retreat from historical truth.
The Wrong Historian for the Right Subject
Hutton is a prolific historian of early modern England, but not one whose work has ever seriously engaged the political, social, or class dynamics of the 1640s. His reputation rests on studies of the Royalist war effort, the ritual year, paganism, and witchcraft subjects interesting in themselves, but far removed from the structural forces that produced Cromwell. This distance is not incidental. It shapes the book’s entire method.
Hutton views Cromwell primarily through his personal traits, psychology, and military skills. He sidesteps aspects like class, ideology, or social change, and is not familiar with revolutionary historiography. Consequently, he creates a biography of Cromwell that effectively depicts someone else- someone who never led a revolution, faced dual power struggles, or managed the tensions between a bourgeois leadership and a plebeian army. This isn't just about emphasising different details; it's a fundamentally different approach. Hutton’s portrayal of Cromwell doesn’t reflect who he truly was.
A Military Biography Disguised as a Study of Formation
The title suggests a focus on developing a revolutionary leader. However, as your document highlights, Hutton's account is mainly a military narrative that traces Cromwell’s progression from an obscure Huntingdonshire gentleman to England’s most formidable cavalry commander. The issue isn't the legitimacy of military history itself, but Hutton’s portrayal of Cromwell’s rise; he presents it more as a psychological phenomenon than a political development.
He consistently downplays Cromwell’s accomplishments, attributing them to luck, while claiming he takes credit for success. Describing Cromwell as “about 50 per cent saint and about 50 per cent serpent' sounds insightful but offers no real explanation. These characterisations simplify Cromwell’s complex nature, treating his contradictions as personal flaws rather than recognising their roots in his role as a bourgeois revolutionary leader reliant on a plebeian army he did not entirely trust.
The key question of how a man with no military background became the greatest general of his time is raised but not answered. Hutton admits that war radicalised Cromwell, but he fails to clarify how or why. The explanation is absent because the categories required to understand it class, ideology, dual power have been deliberately omitted beforehand.
The exclusion of Christopher Hill’s 'God’s Englishman' is surprising. Hill’s insights into Cromwell’s political and religious evolution are unparalleled, yet Hutton omits reference to it. This isn't just a scholarly oversight but a deliberate methodological choice. Hill’s work defies integration into a framework that dismisses the revolution's social dimensions.
The Levellers: The Omission That Condemns the Book
Hutton’s book notably omits the Levellers, leaving it incomplete and evasive. By ignoring this key element, it sidesteps the core conflict of the revolution’s final phase: the internal clash within Parliament between the Independent aristocrats and the common soldiers of the New Model Army. As one might say, "A book on Cromwell’s creation that leaves out the Levellers effectively chooses not to address the revolution’s central drama."
The Levellers were more than a fringe group; they expressed the political perspective of a faction within the army. Their demands, such as expanded voting rights, legal equality, and religious toleration, signified the most radical revolutionary stance. Overlooking them equates to dismissing the revolution itself. The Diggers are also often misunderstood. Hutton characterises them as a “junto,” relying on John Adamson’s elite-faction viewpoint. This is not genuine analysis; it displaces social conflict with elite strategies. Additionally, it ignores the interests of yeomen, small producers, and urban artisans, whom the New Model Army aimed to represent. This is a significant flaw, not a minor oversight.
Dual Power: The Category Revisionism Cannot Admit
To understand Cromwell is to understand dual power, the concept English revisionists have spent forty years trying to write out of the story. Trotsky’s analysis, drawn from the Russian Revolution but explicitly applied to the English case, remains the most penetrating account of the revolution’s structure.
The first duality involves the Crown versus a bourgeois Parliament supported by the City of London. The second, more distinct duality, is between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents-led New Model Army, organised through its own council of agitators. This second duality underpins Pride’s Purge, the King's trial, and the subsequent dictatorship. Cromwell’s skill was in navigating this complex power structure: he suppressed the Levellers when their demands threatened his settlement, yet relied on their popular energy to defeat the King and Presbyterians. Without recognising this duality, a biography cannot fully explain Cromwell; it can only describe him.
Revisionism as Ideology
Hutton’s omissions are deliberate, rooted in a revisionist historiography that gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. This perspective sought to challenge both the Whig and Marxist traditions by replacing social explanations with concepts of contingency, replacing class conflict with factional politics, and viewing revolutions as accidents. This focus on contingency, faction, and high politics largely strips away class content. As a product of this school, Hutton’s book confidently omits references to Hill, Manning, or Trotsky, not as a scholarly oversight but as a deliberate choice. Revisionism isn't neutral; it's ideological. It aims to depict the English Revolution as a mere civil war lacking social roots, a conflict without class struggle, and a crisis with no revolutionary potential. This perspective shapes how students and readers view history as a series of accidents rather than an arena of conflict.
In opposition to Hutton’s psychological reductionism, Plekhanov’s classic analysis of individuals in history provides the essential correction. Great figures are not mere accidents but arise from social conditions that demand someone to fulfil a specific historical role. Had Cromwell not existed, another individual from the same social strata- people from the godly, property-owning gentry with sectarian ties- would have stepped into a similar role. The revolution would still have needed to address the fundamental issue. Hutton misses this because he excludes the categories that would make this understanding clear.
Hutton’s narrative is well-crafted, demonstrating a strong command of detail and a competent reconstruction of battles and campaigns. It provides a clear, chronological military account for those interested. However, as an explanation of how an obscure man became the central figure in the first significant bourgeois revolution in European history, the book falls short. It does so by dismissing essential categories such as class, dual power, and ideological radicalisation needed to answer that question. There are two volumes left. Based on this one, there is little reason to expect a departure from the conservative historiographical stance that has spent decades separating Cromwell from the revolution that shaped him.
The issue extends beyond academia; it is inherently political. Depoliticising Cromwell equates to depoliticising the revolution, which in turn leads to a dehistorized view of history. This stance leaves a population unable to identify the driving forces behind their world. Hutton’s book is more than a flawed biography; it reflects a wider ideological retreat that shuns historical truth, class analysis, and the revolutionary tradition essential to understanding the modern world.
The English Revolution was the first great bourgeois revolution. It produced the modern state. It produced the conditions for capitalist development. It produced the political vocabulary of rights, representation, and sovereignty. And it produced, in the Levellers and Diggers, the first modern expressions of radical democracy and agrarian communism. To write Cromwell without this context is to write Cromwell out of history.
A Biography Without a Revolution
Hutton’s The Making of Oliver Cromwell offers a well-crafted military and political account. However, it does not serve as a biography of Cromwell as a revolutionary leader. Instead, it portrays Cromwell as a figure shaped by accidents, contingencies, and personal contradictions, seemingly detached from the social forces that influenced him. Hutton’s work “fails, because it has ruled out in advance the categories of analysis: class, dual power, the social content of religious radicalism, without which that question cannot be answered." This statement is true and definitive. Ultimately, Hutton’s biography omits the revolution, and without a revolution, it cannot fully explain the man who led one.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary and Contemporary Sources
- The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. (Essential for Cromwell’s own political and religious vocabulary; widely used across Cromwell scholarship.)
- The Discovery of D’Ewes’s Long Parliament Diary. (Key contemporary parliamentary source.)
Classic Biographies and Foundational Works
- Gardiner, S.R. Cromwell’s Place in History (1897).
- Gardiner, S.R. Oliver Cromwell (1901).
- Firth, C.H. Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans (1900). (Still indispensable for narrative structure and early scholarly framing.)
Mid‑20th‑Century Studies
- Buchan, J. Oliver Cromwell (1934).
- Wedgwood, C.V. Oliver Cromwell (1939).
- Paul, R.S. The Lord Protector (1955).
- Young, P. Oliver Cromwell (1962).
- Gillingham, J. Cromwell: Portrait of a Soldier (1976). (These works shaped the pre‑revisionist consensus and remain valuable for narrative and military analysis.)
Marxist and Social-Historical Scholarship
- Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970). (The most important Marxist study of Cromwell’s political and religious development; conspicuously absent from Hutton’s book.)
- Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down (1972). (Definitive account of radical sects, Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian politics.)
- Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution (1976).
- Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution (1971).
- Morton, A.L. The English Revolution (1949).
- Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), esp. Vol. 1, ch. on dual power. (Trotsky’s analysis is explicitly applicable to the English case and central to your review’s argument.)
- Plekhanov, Georgi. The Role of the Individual in History (1898). (Essential theoretical counterpoint to Hutton’s psychological reductionism.)
Revisionist Historiography (1970s–1990s)
- Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War (1990).
- Russell, Conrad. Parliamentary History and the English Civil War (1983).
- Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I (1992).
- Adamson, John. The Noble Revolt (2007). (Adamson’s “junto” framework is directly relevant to Hutton’s interpretive choices.)
- Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed (1996). (Revisionist synthesis influential in curriculum debates.)
Post‑Revisionist and Recent Scholarship
- Morrill, John (ed.). Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1990). (Includes major essays by Adamson, Woolrych, Stevenson, Davis, Sommerville, and Morrill himself.)
- Gaunt, Peter. Oliver Cromwell (1996).
- Coward, Barry. Oliver Cromwell (1991).
- Smith, D.L. Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution (1991). (Useful for students; reproduces extracts from other historians.)
- Gaunt, Peter (ed.). Cromwell 400 (1999). (Quartercentenary collection of papers.)
Works on Radical Movements
- Wolfe, Don. Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (1944).
- Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution (2016).
- Sabine, John. The Diggers and the English Revolution (1975).
- Hill, Christopher. The Diggers (1975).
- Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (2013).
General Histories of the English Revolution
- Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (2002).
- Hutton, Ronald. The British Republic 1649–1660 (2000).
- Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army (1992).
- Elliott, J.H. Revolution and Continuity in Early Modern Europe (1978).
Biographical and Encyclopaedic Sources
- Morrill, John S. “Oliver Cromwell.” Encyclopaedia Britannica (2026). (Provides a mainstream biographical overview.)
- Collins, Jacquelin. “Oliver Cromwell.” EBSCO Research Starters (2024). (Useful for contemporary summaries of Cromwell’s political and military significance.)
Curriculum, Ideology, and Historiography
- Carr, E.H. What Is History? (1961). (Foundational for the argument that one must “study the historian before the facts.”)
- Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory (1994). (On the politics of historical memory and curriculum.)
- Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003). (Relevant to the review’s discussion of conservative rehabilitation of imperial figures.)
