Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian Hardcover – 25 Feb. 2025 by Michael Braddick
I am very grateful to Christopher Thompson for drawing my attention to the significant upcoming publication of Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian. Given the statue and importance of Hill, it is staggering that this is the first biography of the great man.
Hill was a groundbreaking historian who advocated and popularised the theory that there was a bourgeois revolution in 1640s England. Hill was a mass of political and social contradictions, and Braddick had his work cut out in examining them and placing them in the context of the time. With his 15 books and dozens of articles, Hill fundamentally changed how we understood the English Revolution.
Hill influenced how a generation of students and general readers saw the English Revolution. Although his viewpoint that the events of the 1640s constituted a revolution has been widely rejected, Braddick will no doubt establish that many general readers and academics will still have to define their position on the period in opposition to his analysis.
As I have not seen a copy of Brtaddick’s biography of Hill I cannot comment too much on it. Hopefully, he has tackled several pressing issues from Hill’s work and career. One would hope he examines the onslaught he suffered at the hands of several Conservative and revisionist historians during the 1980s who rejected the premise that England witnessed a bourgeois revolution. Perhaps the most important question, and I am a little concerned that Braddick, who is no radical historian, can answer it, is what was Hill politically.
As Ann Talbot asks in her excellent obituary of Christopher Hill, “ What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books, are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has to be said that this is a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the Webbs. The most gifted and outstanding representatives of the British intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or historians, associated themselves with the Communist Party because the old institutions of church and state had lost their hold over the imaginations of the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and progressive.”[1]
I hope Braddick's “judicious “ biography does rescue Hill for a new generation of readers. I also hope that Braddick’s choice of Verso as his publisher does not limit the political scope of this book. Verso is the main Pabloite publishing house. Pabloism has a record of betrayals as long as your arm. Verso’s role in covering up these betrayals is well documented.
[1] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
Marxism and the English Revolution - John Rees- Whalebone Press -2024 £15.00
‘It’s your Taxes, Customs, and Excise that compels the Countrey to raise the price of food and to buy nothing from us but meer absolute necessities; and then you of the City that buy our Work must have your Tables furnished, and your Cups overflow; and therefore will give us little or nothing for our Work, even what you please, because you know we must sell for moneys to set our Families on work, or else we famish: Thus our Flesh is that whereupon you Rich men live, and wherewith you deck and adorn yourselves’.1 To raise the price of food and to buy nothing from us but meer2Work, must have your Tables furnished, and your Cups overflow; and therefore will give us little or nothing for our work, even what you please, because you know we must sell for moneys to set our Families on Work, or else we famish: Thus our Flesh is that whereupon you Rich men live, and wherewith you deck and adorn yourselves.[1]
“A battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.”
Lawrence Stone
"Every sociological definition is at the bottom a historical prognosis".
Leon Trotsky
A social order that was essentially feudal was destroyed by violence, and a new and capitalist social order was created in its place."
Christopher Hill
“The sensible way to proceed — I think this is how Marx and Engels proceeded — is to develop a methodological view: historical materialism or dialectical materialism, whatever you want to call it. Then, you approach any material with that framework in mind, but you have to be able to go where the material leads you. Engels warned you can’t start forcing the historical material into a readymade format. I took that approach with my book. Of course, I had read a lot of secondary material, but I wanted to go where the historical archive and contemporary material would take me. I didn’t wish to my work, never mind debates with other Marxists or currents, to determine where the history would go. After you’ve done that, you can demarcate it and illuminate it by — in a relatively minor way — dealing with other currents and approaches. As far as I am concerned, what makes something Marxist is that it is the application of that method. “
John Rees
In his new book, the Pseudo Left writer and historian John Rees seeks to re-introduce a Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution. Rees spends most of the introduction being comfortable with the assertion of several historians that we have now entered into a ‘post-revisionist’ era in the study of the 17th-century English Revolution. However, Rees concedes there is little agreement on what this means. The book discusses the possibility of re-establishing a Marxist critique of the English Revolution and the options for countering the new Revisionist revolt. It places the study of the English Revolution within the context of the general crisis of 17th-century Europe. The English Revolution was, without a doubt, a seminal period in English history. The violent Revolution saw more dead than the First and Second World Wars.
Chapter One: The Edward Sexby Question concentrates on the Republican Leveller Edward Sexby. Sexby spoke at the Putney debates in 1647. He was perhaps the most radical voice at Putney who called for a much wider franchise than any other Leveller, saying :
"We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen - and by the arguments urged, there is none. There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little property in this kingdom as to our estates, yet we had a birthright. But it seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived. If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers. There are many in my condition that have as good a condition; it may be little estate they have at present, and yet they have as much a right as those two (Cromwell and Ireton) who are their lawgivers, as any in this place. I shall tell you in a word my resolution. I am resolved to give my birthright to none. Whatsoever may come in the way and be thought, I will give it to none. I think the poor and meaner of this kingdom (I speak as in that relation in which we are) have been the means of the preservation of this kingdom. It may be little estate they have at present, and yet they have as much a right as those two (Cromwell and Ireton) who are their lawgivers, as any in this place. I shall tell you in a word my resolution. I am resolved to give my birthright to none. Whatsoever may come in the way and be thought, I will give it to none. I think the poor and meaner of this kingdom (I speak as in that relation in which we are) have been the means of the preservation of this kingdom.[2]
Rees correctly spends a significant amount of time in the book to re-establish Sexby as a leading figure in the English Revolution. No biography of Sexby exists, and his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) entry was only published in print in 2004 and on the internet in 2010.
Sexby went further than most to try and turn the English revolution into an international revolution against the ruling elites of Europe. Sexby’s first step was translating the Leveller’s Agreement of the People[3] into French. The uprising in France was the first to use the red flag as its symbol, and the Leveller sympathiser Henry Marten received reports of the progress of the Bordeaux Republic. Alan Marshal’s well-written Oxford Dictionary biography of Sexby elaborates further:
“ A few months after the loss of his commission, Sexby was chosen by the council of state as an unofficial envoy to the Frondeurs to fan the flames of revolt in south-west France. Based at Bordeaux, his activities were regarded with grave suspicion by many among the supporters of the prince of Condé. However, Sexby could commend to the republican Ormée faction some of those radical ideas which he had effectively abandoned when he entered the service of the English Commonwealth. In the spring of 1653, he even had a hand in drawing up a manifesto entitled L'Accord du peuple, a hastily edited version of the English Levellers' Agreement of the People, rather inappropriately applied to French conditions, as well as another text designed to appeal more specifically to the sensibilities of the Huguenots of rural Guyenne. This Manifesto called for land reform, religious toleration, and the establishment of a godly government modelled on the Puritan regime in England. This enthused some French rebels sufficiently to send a deputation to Westminster on an ill-fated quest for formal English assistance in their struggle with Cardinal Mazarin and the young Louis XIV. But the revolt was finally crushed in August 1653, and Sexby himself fled back to England, where he continued to sponsor Anglo–Suguenot amity. It was rumoured in the following spring that he would command a combined force of English troops and Irish levies in an invasion of Guyenne.”7uguenot amity. It was rumoured in the following spring that he would command a combined force of English troops and Irish levies in an invasion of Guyenne.”
Rees’s chapter on Sexby hopefully opens up the possibility of further study on the international aspect of the Levellers. Much more study could be done on how Leveller's ideas penetrated the thoughts of American Republicans such as Thomas Jefferson, whose family was distantly related to Leveller leader John Lillburne. When Jefferson and John Adams visited England, Adams wrote in his diary, “Edgehill and Worcester were curious and interesting to us, as Scaenes where Freemen had fought for their Rights. The People in the Neighbourhood appeared so ignorant and careless at Worcester that I was provoked and asked, “And do Englishmen so soon forget the Ground where Liberty was fought for? Tell your Neighbours and your Children that this is holy ground, much holier than that on which your Churches stand. All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill once a Year.” This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their Awkwardness before might arise from their Uncertainty of our Sentiments concerning the Civil Wars. All England should come in Pilgrimage to this Hill, once a Year.” This animated them, and they seemed much pleased with it. Perhaps their Awkwardness before might arise from their Uncertainty of our Sentiments concerning the Civil Wars”. [4]
Chapter Two: Politics and Class in the English Revolution Class and politics are perhaps two of the most contentious issues when writing about the English Revolution. The American historian Lawrence Stone once described the study of the English Bourgeois Revolution as “A battleground which has been heavily fought over...beset with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.” Rees begins this chapter with the strange assertion that we should put the revisionist arguments behind us and concentrate on the “post-revisionist “ period. Perhaps it would be ok if the revisionist's political, social and economic base had disappeared, but they have not.
The historical revisionism that struck the study of the English Revolution began in earnest in the 1960s. Its central aim was to refute both the Whig and Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution and, in doing so, conceal the true political and class nature of the Revolution. John Rees is a former member of the Socialist Workers. Party(now a member of Counterfire) and, like all Pseudo Left organisations, the SWP was extremely reluctant to take to the battlefield against a coterie of revisionist historians. The SWP would sooner wait till it established a connection with several left-leaning historians, such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning and let them do the fighting. To say the results of this policy were mixed was an understatement.
In an article by John Rees in Spring 1991, “ We have waited some considerable time for Christopher Hill to enter the lists against the revisionist historians of the English Revolution. Of course, Hill has taken the occasional potshot at the revisionists in articles and lectures, some of which form the basis for this book. But generally, he seems to have stayed a little aloof, cultivating a disdain which still lingers in this book’s introduction, where he claims, ‘We should not take these fashions too seriously: they go in cycles, and it is no doubt my age that makes me a little sceptical of latter-day “revisionist” historians who try to convince us that there was no revolution in 17th century England, or that if there was it had no long-term causes or consequences.”[5]
Rees is forced to admit that Hill was not at his best when dealing with ideology and consciousness and writes “ His touch has always been less sure when dealing with the role played by ideology and consciousness in making the Revolution. This may seem an odd claim to make against a historian who is famous for rescuing the ideas of the radical revolutionaries of the 1640s from the dismissive sneers of establishment historians. Yet, although Hill remains wedded to ‘history from below’ and is clear on how the ideas of the revolutionaries sprang from the world around them, he is less clear on how they, in turn, shaped that world. He says: ‘The Revolution was not planned, not willed. Some historians think there could have been no revolution if it was not planned, just as all strikes are made by wicked agitators. But Parliament did not make the Revolution; no one advocated it ... For that matter, neither the French nor the Russian Revolutions were willed in advance by anyone. By 1917, the Bolsheviks, building on English and French experience, could take advantage of a revolutionary situation; but they did not make the Revolution. A revolutionary situation developed when the Tsarist state collapsed, just as the English state collapsed in 1640, and the Bolsheviks were prepared to take advantage of it. [6]
He continues, “Hill is less sharp than he should be on these questions precisely because the popular frontism of his Communist Party days seems to have left him methodologically confused, unable to distinguish the defining characteristics of bourgeois and proletarian revolutions properly. This weakness is embarrassingly obvious in his Lenin and the Russian Revolution.” Rees and the SWP did not deepen this analysis regarding Hill's attachment to the Stalinist theory of “history from below”.
As the Marxist writer Ann Talbot, in her excellent obituary of Christopher Hill, elaborates, “The Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form. Itincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.14e approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.[7]
Rees spends a substantial amount of time in this chapter to establish to what extent Marxists are determinists. Given that Rees is not a classical Marxist, his answer is predictably somewhat vague. Rees does not believe that Marxists writing on history are reductionist, but in the last paragraph of the chapter, he writes that Marxists have a profound objection to determinism. Which Marxists is he talking about? If he had said Vulgar determinism, I would have no problem with this, but he did not.
Rees makes scant use of Leon Trotsky’s vast writings on determinism, so it is worth quoting his essay, The ABC of Materialist Dialectics, at length. Trotsky writes, “Our scientific thinking is only a part of our general practice including techniques. For concepts, there also exists “tolerance” which is established not by formal Logic issuing from the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’, but by the dialectical Logic issuing from the axiom that everything is always changing. “Common sense” is characterised by the fact that it systematically exceeds dialectical “tolerance”.
Vulgar thought operates with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers’ state, etc, as fixed abstractions, presuming that capitalism is equal to capitalism. Morals are equal to morals, etc. Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change while determining the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state. The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives to concepts by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretisation, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say “a succulence,” which, to a certain extent, brings them closer to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a given workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc.
Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not deny syllogism but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. Hegel, in his Logic, established a series of laws: change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks. Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation, although, by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.16 Hegel wrote before Darwin and before Marx. Thanks to the powerful impulse given to thought by the French Revolution, Hegel anticipated the general movement of science. But because it was only an anticipation, although, by a genius, it received from Hegel an idealistic character. Hegel operated with ideological shadows as the ultimate reality. Marx demonstrated that the movement of these ideological shadows reflected nothing but the movement of material bodies.[8]
Chapter Three-The Levellers, the Labouring classes and the Poor. It is safe to say that Rees has probably been the foremost expert on the Levellers for at least the last decade. In that decade, we have seen a significant rise in the interest in John Lilburne and his Leveller Party. In the last few years alone, four significant studies have begun with Elliot Vernon and P. Baker's The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution, followed by Rachel Foxley's The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. John Rees's The Leveller Revolution. Gary S. De Krey released a two-volume set on the Levellers in 2018.
Rees’s work is at the high point of Leveller's study. His PhD thesis[9] is worth several reads, and his book The Leveller Revolution breaks new ground and re-establishes the Leveller's rightful place at the centre of the English Bourgeois Revolution.
As Rees explains in this short book current historiography has certainly carried over much of the worst traits of Whig attitudes towards the Levellers. Some historians, such as John Adamson, have ignored them completely. Others have portrayed them as having little or no influence on the outcome of the Revolution. John Morrill mentioned them twice in his book The Revolt of the Provinces. There have been oppositional voices. Edward Vallance has uncovered a persistent influence of John Lilburne's politics on radicals in the 1700s. He concludes, 'historians have undervalued the degree of intellectual sympathy and continuity there have been oppositional voices. Edward Vallance has uncovered a persistent influence of John Lilburne's politics on radicals in the 1700s.
Their revisionism was a by-product of their assault on Marxist historiography. In his PhD thesis, Rees writes “that revisionists depended on a wider conservative turn in social theory. The Althusserian school of the 1970s, which became the post-structuralist school, which became the post-modernist school which fed the 'linguistic turn', provided a theoretical toolbox for the revisionists and those that came after the revisionist challenge to liberal and left interpretations of the English Revolution synchronised with almost suspicious exactitude with the end of the post-war boom and the abandonment of the welfare state consensus. This change, beginning in the mid-1970s, achieved its electoral representation when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan president of the US in 1980. "In a way, revisionism was never only about the English Revolution. Very similar arguments were deployed at much the same time about the French and the Russian Revolutions.”[10]
Although Rees does consult an unprecedented range of sources for his work on the Levellers, like Hill and Brian Manning before him, he steers well clear on any of the historians or writers who were persecuted and later murdered by Josef Stalin. I can only assume that in the past, to do so would cut across the SWP’s adaptation to Stalinism. This certainly applies to Hill, a former member of the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG).
As Ann Talbot writes (this quote technically applies to the historians and writers inside the SWP}, “There is something Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism. They seem capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their investigations as far as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It was an approach further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life that enabled them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never brought them into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political questions.”[11]
One of those writers not consulted is Evgeny Pashukanis. While it is true that Pashukanis did not write extensively on the Levellers or the English Revolution, he did write one essay that historians have consistently ignored. Pashukanis has been rescued from the condescension of history by Mike Head. Head's book, Evgeny Pashukanis, A Critical Reappraisal, shines the light of day on one of the most important legal theories to emerge from "the boldest and most sweeping experiment of the 20th century"—the October 1917 Russian Revolution. Head is a law professor at the University of Western Sydney in Australia and a regular contributor to the World Socialist Web Site.
In his review for the World Socialist Web Site, Kevin Kearney writes, “Like the revolution itself, the Soviet legal experiment which produced Pashukanis was cut short by the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy and its attack on Marxism in the form of the nationalist theory of "socialism in one country." The legal complement to "socialism in one country" was the concept of "socialist legality"—a complete abandonment of the classical Marxist perspective of the "withering away" of the state and law. Ultimately, the bureaucratic caste isolated itself from and dominated the masses, necessitating not only the permanency of the state and "the rule of law" but an unprecedented strengthening of their invasive and repressive powers. With the publication of his General Theory—the same year Stalin unveiled his theory of "socialism in one country"—Pashukanis became the preeminent Soviet jurist, and his book was required reading at universities around the country.
Within 12 years, however, Pashukanis found himself under increasing pressure to adapt his ideas more openly to the needs of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Pashukanis was eventually labelled a "Trotskyite saboteur" and executed by Stalin in 1937. His writings were subsequently expunged from the universities. Pashukanis was by no means a recanting anti-Stalinist, nor was he a Trotskyist. Head successfully tackles this myth by clarifying the political record, which demonstrates that Pashukanis lined up against the Left Opposition, which was led by Trotsky, from at least 1925. However, by putting Pashukanis' theoretical work in the correct economic and political context, Head shows how it was used as Marxist window-dressing for the bureaucracy's counter-revolutionary policies.”ever, by putting Pashukanis' theoretical work in the correct economic and political context, Head shows how it was used as Marxist window-dressing for the bureaucracy's counter-revolutionary policies.[12]
Despite this, Evgeny Pashukanis’s Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law (1927) contains an important analysis of the English Revolution and the role of the levellers in that Revolution. Pashukanis writes, “The Levellers and those movements which sought social Revolution and attacked the existing property relations was, so to speak, confirmed. But this was only the case if we were to be satisfied by the consideration of ideological formulae and not the objective meaning of the given revolutionary movement. The ideology of the Levellers was typical bourgeois ideology; the overwhelming majority of the Levellers acted as defenders of the principle of private property, and this by no means contradicts the fact that the victory of the Levellers’ movement should have objectively led to the most decisive infringement on the right of feudal property. Moreover, this success and this victory could not have found its expression other than eliminating feudal ownership. Therefore, when the opponents of the Levellers accused them of attacking property and of favouring communism, this was not merely slander. It was a statement of uncontested fact that for the privileged feudal owners, the radical democratic transformation for which the Levellers strove would have presented a real threat. The affirmations of the leaders of the Levellers, concerning their adherence to the principle of private property, were a very weak consolation. On the contrary, the preaching of the commonality of ownership and the clouded communist ideology of the extreme left leaders of the German peasant war was, in fact, less of a threat to embryonic capitalist social relationships but was instead the banner of the implacable, most consistent opponents of feudal ownership and all serf and semi-serf relationships. It is here that it seems possible for us to find a series of elements which bring the two movements closer together even though they are so different in their ideological bases.
The Levellers undoubtedly were a purely bourgeois party. To the extent that commodity-money and bourgeois-capitalist relationships at that time (i.e. in the 1640s) extended rather deeply into the English countryside, to such an extent that demands could not enter into their programme for a general division of land, “an agrarian law” etc. But this did not mean that in the case of victory for Levellers, the relationships of land ownership would have remained the same. The makers of the great French Revolution were no less attached to the principle of private property. Noblemen. In England the secularisation of monastic holdings happened long before the Revolution, in the reign of Henry VIII. These lands were sold cheaply by the Crown and plundered by influential people and land ownership was accompanied, as a rule, by a worsening in the position of the peasants living off the land. All this confiscation of monastic holdings was, in general, and as a whole, a step on the road to victory of bourgeois relationships over feudal ones. However, in this case, it was at the expense of the destruction of one of the pillars of feudal society while the position of another part of it was strengthened. The landlords, rounding out their holdings by robbing the monasteries, simultaneously retained their feudal privileges concerning the peasants. As was shown above, they used their feudal privileges to direct the further progress of the development of capitalist relations in the country for the maximum profit for themselves and the maximum loss for the basic mass of the peasantry.”30the destruction of one of the pillars of feudal society while the position of another part of it was strengthened. The landlords, rounding out their holdings by robbing the monasteries, simultaneously retained their feudal privileges concerning the peasants. As was shown above, they used their feudal privileges to direct the further progress of the development of capitalist relations in the country for the maximum profit for themselves and the maximum loss for the basic mass of the peasantry.”[13]
Chapter Four: The Middling Sort. The question of the Middling Sort has vexed historians for well over a century. Since the “Storm over the Gentry” debate, historians have been lobbing grenades at each other over this issue. While it is difficult to argue against the idea that England had no “ pre-formed revolutionary ideology before 1640”, it would be a fool or a charlatan to deny that there was no resistance to the King by a growing Middle Class. Thomas Hobbes, not noted for his radicalism, was forced to recognise that London’s middle class had looked at the successful revolt of the Dutch, saying that ‘the like change of government would to them produce the like prosperity’. Rees is to be commended for the quality and accuracy of his research, which is second to none on this subject.
Rees correctly points out and backs this up with substantial research that the Revolution's main leaders and its left-wing were predominantly from the middle class. He writes, “The leaders of the Levellers were overwhelmingly from the middling sort. They were or had been, apprentices and became craftsmen, free of their respective City companies. John Lilburne was famously apprenticed to the clothier Thomas Hewson. Thomas Prince, eventually co-treasurer of the Leveller movement, was also a clothier. Samuel Chidley, Prince’s co-treasurer, was, like his father Daniel, free of the Company of Haberdashers. William Walwyn, older and more prosperous than most Leveller leaders, was from the Merchant Adventurers. Originally a Gloucestershire yeoman, William Larner was first apprenticed to the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Edward Sexby was originally apprenticed as a grocer.
He continues,” Some figures, like Lilburne and Sexby, were from gentry families. But significantly, they were both second sons. As Earle observes, the spread of primogeniture meant that, as a study of Northamptonshire showed, ‘by 1700, most younger sons of the county’s gentry families had either gone into the church or trade in London, while the daughters had married London merchants…’. So, the term ‘second son’ was a So, the conclusion that we might draw from all this is that the Levellers were part of an increasingly self-conscious and socially decisive group. Their ideas appealed to social groups below them. Still, these layers were less numerous than in modern society and were more socially marginalised than the middling sort to which the Levellers belonged.”[14]
Chapter Five: The Levellers and the Historians. This is by far the most interesting chapter, and Rees acknowledges this by setting aside nearly forty pages for the topic.
Leon Trotsky once wrote, "In reality, leadership is not a mere "reflection" of a class or the product of its free creativeness. Leadership is shaped by clashes between the different classes or the friction between the various layers within a given class.. this sentiment animates Rees’s investigation into how historians have seen the Levellers. It is impossible to do justice in this review to such an all-encompassing review of current and past historiography. I will return to this chapter at a later date.
To conclude this is a very short book which tackles a huge subject. To my mind, it seems to have been put together in too much haste. It would be remiss of me at this juncture to leave out Rees’s political persuasion. Rees was a member of the SWP before leaving to found the Counterfire group in 2010 as a major split from the SWP.
Counterfire specialises in offering a platform for the flotsam and jetsam of pseudo-left politics. The group is thoroughly convinced of the power and longevity of capitalism and is hostile to the working class and genuine socialism. Counterfire and Rees’s occasional use of Marxist phrases, and even rarer references to the Russian revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, is for the sole purpose of opposing the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a revolutionary and internationalist programme. Counterfire's self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” are bitterly opposed to the orthodox Marxism represented by the World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Parties and the International Committee of the Fourth International.
[1] The mournfull Cryes of many thousand poor tradesman, who are ready to famish through decay of Trade in D Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (Frank Cass 1967), pp. 275–276.
[3] The Agreement of the People (1647-49) was the principal constitutional manifesto associated with the Levellers.
[4] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/01-03-02-0005-0002
[5] Revisionism refuted-Spring 1991) https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/rees-j/1991/xx/engrevrev.html
[6] Revisionism refuted-Spring 1991) https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/rees-j/1991/xx/engrevrev.html
[7]"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[8] The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (December 1939) https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm
[9] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf
[10] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf
[11] These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[12] A Marxist perspective on jurisprudence-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/11/pash-n26.html
[13] Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law
(1927) https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm
[14] The Levellers, the labouring classes, and the poor-https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-levellers-the-labouring-classes-and-the-poor/
Following in the Footsteps of Oliver Cromwell-A Historical Guide to the Civil War-By James Hobson: Pen & Sword History: 3rd July 2019
Following in the Footsteps of Oliver Cromwell by James Hobson is a well written and good introduction to the life of Oliver Cromwell. It is not an orthodox biography and was written to fill a gap. Hobson explains, “Following in the Footsteps of Oliver Cromwell is a history of the man mediated through the places where he lived, worked, fought and ruled. It is a biography, but different to others. It's also an introduction to the famous places associated with Cromwell”.
Unfortunately, The book entered a crowded market and was published before John Morrill’s major work on Cromwell[1]. Like most books on Cromwell Hobson’s resonates today because we still live with the social and political consequences of the English bourgeois revolution.
Hobson’s books are usually aimed at the general reader but retain a good academic standard. To his credit, he does not pander to the latest revisionist historiography. Still, he believes a revolution occurred and that Cromwell was part of a ruling elite that carried it out.
The book could have done with a better attempt to place Cromwell in a more objective context. As the great revolutionary Karl Marx once said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under existing circumstances, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue. Still, he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue".
To conclude, I would recommend this book. It deserves to be on every reading list at major universities and deserves a wide read. Hobson is to be congratulated for his work on this important revolutionary. His books should be a basic textbook to aid future study.
About the Author
Author James Hobson has written such works as ''Dark Days of Georgian Britain', 'The English Civil War Fact and Fiction'. Hobson has a website @ https://about1816.wordpress.com/
[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-letters-writings-and-speeches-of-oliver-cromwell-9780199587889?cc=gb&lang=en&
Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives Hardcover – 30 November 2020 by Professor Martyn Bennett (Author, Editor), Raymond Gillespie (Editor), Scott Spurlock (Editor)
Although planning a major conference from the cosy confines of a pub is not usually a good idea, writing to Tom Reilly, I said I look forward to reviewing the book. It is hoped that he will produce a more objective account of Cromwell and the English bourgeoise’s adventure in Ireland. It is the least the Irish people deserve. It is also hoped that the new historiography produced by the book will not add to the already crowded book market lending justification to the centuries-long plunder of Ireland.”[1] As I did not hold out too much hope for this conference and not wanting to be associated with the defence of Genocide, I turned down Reilly’s request to participate.
One of the major problems of this collection of essays is its failure to place Cromwell and the English bourgeoise’s military and economic intervention in Ireland in an objective context. As was said in the introduction, whether conscious or not, the essayists defend Genocide. The lead protagonist of this group of historians is Tom Reilly.[2] Reilly’s unconditional defence of Cromwell is well known. Reilly states in the preface to this volume that ‘it is virtually impossible to reconcile the image of the genocidal maniac of the Irish imagination with this virtuous pillar of local society who became king in all but name’ (p. xii). Micheál Ó Siochrú replies, “In fact, it is not difficult. Ireland was a place apart, and the historical narrative from the medieval to the modern is awash with Englishmen (almost entirely men) who behaved in a civilised manner at home before seemingly losing the plot on crossing the Irish Sea”.[3]
Although Micheál Ó Siochrú welcomes the book, he offers a somewhat stinging rebuke, writing, “Overall, the results are decidedly mixed. The pressure on academics to publish, especially in Britain, has resulted in a tsunami of edited collections in the last twenty years, often consisting of little more than a random selection of essays loosely grouped around a general theme. Unfortunately, the current volume falls within this category and the primary responsibility must lie with the editors. All three are accomplished scholars and experts in early modern Irish, Scottish, and English history, but they appear to have taken their collective eye off the ball in this instance. The introduction is unsatisfactorily slight and curiously slapdash in places. They write that the idea for the book ‘came, as many good ideas do, in a pub’ and that, ‘unlike so many such ideas, this one lasted beyond the morning after’ (p. 2). The idea may have survived, but their commitment to the project after that seems half-hearted at best.”[4]
Reilly is well within his right to defend Cromwell, and nothing wrong with his specialisation in Cromwell studies. However, Reilly’s love affair with Cromwell goes too far. He writes, “There is no one more Irish than I am. But a miscarriage of justice is a miscarriage of justice. Cromwell is a convenient bogeyman. He was an honourable enemy.” Leading academics have accused Reilly of being blinkered and deliberately overlooking evidence. Reilly replied, “They closed ranks when they saw this pugnacious amateur taking them on. If I’m ever proven wrong, I’ll shut up and get off the stage.”
The subject of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland is a contentious one, to say the least, so much so that significant numbers of historians have steered well clear of the topic. The debate over Cromwell in Ireland has tended to reveal more about 20th-century politics than early modern historiography. The historiography is divided into two camps. On the one side, we have Tom Reilly and his supporters who believe that “Cromwell was Framed.” Reilly’s books have been aimed at demolishing some myths about Cromwell’s and Parliament's behaviour in Ireland. Tom Reilly’s first book claimed that no civilians were killed in Drogheda by Cromwell’s forces and that Cromwell did not intentionally target civilians during his anti-Catholic campaign. “There were no eyewitnesses who give us ideas of civilian deaths,” he said of the two sieges, claiming that it was two propagandists who spread the word about Cromwell. Reilly maintains that Cromwell had “no deliberate policy to kill the innocent.” He sees his book as “the start of Cromwell’s rehabilitation.”
The opposition to his thesis on Cromwell in Ireland is equally reckless and dangerous. Reilly’s historiography has many opponents. Among them are the historians Simon Schama, John Morrill and Micheál Ó Siochrú[9]. Simon Schama, in 2001, threw a live hand grenade into the debate when he referred to Oliver Cromwell's alleged massacre of 3,000 unarmed enemy soldiers at the Irish town of Drogheda in 1649 as a 'war crime' and 'an atrocity.” Schama claimed in his History of Britain series on BBC2. Whether Schama believes Cromwell was a “war criminal” is not essential; his use of inflammatory language is not conducive to a healthy debate of the subject.
As Bernard Capp, professor of history at Warwick, pointedly wrote, “War crimes are a twentieth-century term, not a seventeenth-century one, and its use is problematic,' said 'It is true he treated the enemy in Ireland much harder than elsewhere, but there was a strong military rationale.''A bloodthirsty episode would have served the purpose of driving the war to a speedy conclusion.
It is hard not to disagree with Micheál Ó Siochrú when he writes that “Reilly’s chapter in the book is a huge disappointment, simply restating arguments made in the 1990s, with no more than a cursory effort to engage with the extensive criticisms of his work since then. He concludes bizarrely that those who refuse to accept his interpretation ‘will be left behind to become part of some insular, embittered partisan clique whose roots are planted firmly in obduracy’ (p. 74).
Reilly’s insult goes too far and has no place in academic debate. The fact that Relly was allowed to have it in print says much about the editorial process and standard. As Ó Siochrú points out, not all of Reilly’s comrades go along with his madness. He writes, “Ironically, Reilly’s obstinacy in the face of the evidence is exposed by Nick Poyntz’s forensic analysis of the news from Ireland at the outset of Cromwell’s campaign. Through a painstaking engagement with a range of material, he reaches the conclusion that Reilly’s determination to discredit the inclusion in Cromwell’s published correspondence of the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’, relating to those killed at the siege of Drogheda, is hard to sustain.”
Conclusion
I agree with Micheál Ó Siochrú that the conference and subsequent book represent a missed opportunity. This is not to say the book is without merit. David Farr’s chapter on Henry Ireton is well worth a read. But as Ó Siochrú says, “Scholarship has moved on enormously in the last twenty years and yet the focus of this volume remains disappointingly old-fashioned, obsessing over popular perceptions of Cromwell and the issue of personal accountability. Despite the best efforts of individual contributors, some ideas are perhaps best left in the pub.”
[1] Was Oliver Cromwell Really Framed- https://keith-
[2] Was Oliver Cromwell Really Framed- https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/03/was-oliver-cromwell-really-framed.html
[3] https://www.historyireland.com/cromwell-and-ireland-new-perspectives/
[4] https://www.historyireland.com/cromwell-and-ireland-new-perspectives/
Book review: Sir Thomas Browne: The Opium of Time-Gavin Francis, Oxford University Press, 2023 ISBN 9780192858177
“His whole house and garden is a paradise and Cabinet of rarities and that of the best collection, amongst Medails, books, Plants, natural things”.
John Evelyn, 'The Diary of John Evelyn' (1671)
‘Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are a very good person.
Virginia Woolf
Gavin Francis's new biography of the polymath is a refreshingly different biography. His latest account of the life and works of Sir Thomas Browne, the 17th-century English polymath. Browne had an infectious curiosity for the world around him. The author, Gavin Francis, who is GP, and author shares that curiosity and has written a biography from a personal standpoint rather than an objective one. This slim volume, which runs to only 133 pages, is part of a series of biographies whose authors, like Francis, have a personal attachment to their subject matter. They tell much about themselves as they do the person they are writing about. Francis is not the only writer to be enamoured by Browne. He influenced many writers, such as Samuel Johnson, WG Sebald, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Conrad, and EM Forster.
Education was important to Browne. In 1623, Browne went to Oxford University. He graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford. He studied medicine at some of Europe’s finest institutions Padua and Montpellier universities, completing his studies at Leiden. Second, only Shakespeare introduced over 700 new words into English, such as electricity,’ medical’, ‘anomalous’ and ‘coma’.Browne went on to be a pivotal figure in the development of modern science. Some put him on par with the great Francis Bacon. Browne’s problem was that he struggled to maintain a scientific understanding of the world around him while maintaining orthodox Christian beliefs.
Browne lived in an age when religious belief started to be undermined by the growth of scientific knowledge of the world. David North writes, “Religion began to encounter the type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. However, the invigorating scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led people to wonder whether a man couldn't change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.
He continues, “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it was well underway.”[1]
Browne was not the only genius around at the time. Amazingly, Browne never met Sir Isaac Newton(1642-1727), Who, like Browne, by no means sought to undermine the authority of God, but as North points out, Newton “ demonstrated that the Almighty could not have accomplished his aims without the aid of extraordinarily complex mathematics. Moreover, the phenomena of Nature were not inscrutable but operated according to laws accessible to the human mind. The key to an understanding of the universe was to be found not in the Book of Genesis but in the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The impact of Newton’s work on intellectual life was captured in the ironic epigram of Alexander Pope: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night, / God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
Francis’s slim book is a fascinating and partisan introduction to the life of Sir Thomas Browne. It deserves a wide readership and hopefully re-establishes Browne’s reputation as one of the major thinkers of the 17th century. His thinking and writing still resonate in today’s world. If Browne were transported from his century into ours, it would not take him long to accommodate himself. Whether he would like what he saw is another matter.
[1]Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
The Protector: The Fall and Rise Of Oliver Cromwell - A Novel- Tom Reilly-Top Hat Books (June 24 2022
“The whole agrarian history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of Irish land to be handed over to English settlers. These settlers, in a very few generations, under the charm of Celtic society, turned more Irish than the aborigines. Then a new confiscation and new colonisation took place, and so in infinitum.”
Frederick Engels
‘If I’m ever proven wrong, I’ll shut up and get off the stage.’
Tom Reilly
“Such issues are beyond good manners, sir. Catholicism is more than a religion. It is a political power. Therefore, I am led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed.”
Oliver Cromwell
“This ancestor of Lord Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But he came over in the wake of Cromwell’s army and got himself appointed ‘Physician to the Army of Ireland’. In 1662, he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish Estates and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes, the latter fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to ‘invest’ his £500 to good purpose.”
James Connolly
“What is History but a fable agreed upon?”. Napoleon I.
A new book on Oliver Cromwell is always welcome, but this one is a major disappointment. I would not go as far as to say that it wastes both the reader and author's time but it comes pretty close to that. It is not Reilly’s fault but now all new work on Cromwell will be defined by its attitude to the magnificent three volumes of Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.[1]His book does not fair very well.
Despite being an amateur historian, books by Tom Reilly are worth reading. He has come under significant attack for what is seen as an unhealthy fixation with Cromwell. However, not all the criticism from modern academia has been fair, and some have been borderline abusive. The book is not without some merit. It is well written and researched and, to a limited degree, re-establishes Cromwell’s authentic voice. How much of the real Cromwell appears remains to be seen. My criticism of his robust and somewhat rose-tinted defence of everything Cromwell did fails to place Cromwell in a more objective context.
Before the invasion of Ireland, Cromwell had to do two necessary things, both crucial to a successful invasion of Ireland. First was the execution of Charles I. Although, in the short term, far from stabilising an already unstable ruling elite, the execution led sections of the bourgeoisie to pursue negotiations with the Royalists in England and Ireland. One of the reasons for the invasion was to subdue a possible Royalist/Catholic revolt and to secure Cromwell’s and a large section of the English bourgeoisie's strategic political and economic interests in that country. Second, Parliament charged Cromwell to deal with the growing radicalisation of the New Model Army. One manifestation of this radicalism was the Leveller inspired revolt over the army being shipped to Ireland to put down the revolt.
Most criticism of Reilly has centred on his passionate defence of Cromwell’s role in Ireland.[2] In his new book, Reilly continues his theme that Cromwell was not to blame for the massacres. He writes, “We should apologise to Cromwell’s family for blackening his name, for making him a monster. We are teaching our children propaganda that perpetuates anti-English prejudice.”
Suppose we take out of the equation Reilly’s hyperbole and infatuation. In that case, we are left with the fact that Oliver Cromwell was a leading member of the English bourgeoisie and, alongside others, not only made a lot of money out of the conquest of Ireland but, if it happened today, would be guilty of war crimes.
The English Bourgeoisie, from the beginning saw Ireland as a money-making adventure. As an incentive to make the conquest easier, it got Parliament to pass an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 to invite the “Middling Sort” to invest in the army. The greater the investment, the greater the return of land. Cromwell had loaned over 2,000 pounds and had been promised land in Leinster. Christopher Hill correctly states Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland was “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy”.While many of the bourgeoisie stumped up money for their adventure in Ireland, Parliament felt a little more cooperation was a need and this came in the form of a series of ordinances which was a demand for money with menaces. In February 1648: it issued An Ordinance For raising of Twenty thousand pounds a Month for the Relief of Ireland.
Frederick Engels states, “ In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland, except the newly Scotchified North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so that when the British (Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised upon the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. And the “adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers so that 1,000 acres should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300, in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this beneficent plan, they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament and combat a possible Vendée with these means.[3]
In another part of the same letter, Engels makes this point: “The 80,000 Protestants’ massacre of 1641. The Irish Catholics are here in the same position as the Commune de Paris. The Versailles massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors of the Commune. The English Protestants under Cromwell massacred at least 30,000 Irish and, to cover their brutality invented the tale that this was to avenge 30,000 Protestants murdered by the Irish Catholics.”
The Irish socialist James Connolly, while not blaming the English bourgeoise for everything that occurred to the Irish people after the conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the seventeenth century, but wrote “ Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. If we would understand the national literature of a people, we must study their social and political status, keeping in mind the fact that their writers were a product thereof and that the children of their brains were conceived and brought forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland, at the same time as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from a prolonged arrested development. During the closing years of the seventeenth century, all the eighteenth, and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish people were the lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish peasant, reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his tribeland and controlling its administration in common with his fellows, was a mere tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the hands of an irresponsible private proprietor. Politically, he was non-existent. Legally, he held no rights; intellectually, he sank under the weight of his social abasement and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had been conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands of a ruling class and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of `Woe to the vanquished'.[4]
I do not hold out much hope that Reilly’s next Cromwell adventure will produce a more objective study. I will examine Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives, which emerged in 2020. Reilly can write more books and hold more conferences, but the reality is that his hero is not as innocent as he makes out. Perhaps his next book should contain a few warts.
[1] The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1: October 1626 to January 1649 (Speeches & Writings of Oliver Cromwell) Hardcover – 7 Sept. 2022by Andrew Barclay (Editor), Tim Wales (Editor), John Morrill (Editor)
[2] See Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives Hardcover – 30 Nov. 2020
by Professor Martyn Bennett (Author, Editor), Raymond Gillespie (Editor), Scott Spurlock (Editor)
[3] Engels To Jenny Longuet-Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 326-329-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_24.htm
[4] Labour in Irish History by James Connolly
Insolent proceedings-Rethinking public politics in the English Revolution-Editors: Peter Lake and Jason Peacey-Manchester University Press-2022
"The third part of Gangræna. Or, A new and higher discovery of the errors, heresies, blasphemies, and insolent proceedings of the sectaries of these times; with some animadversions by way of confutation upon many of the errors and heresies named. ... Briefe animadversions on many of the sectaries late pamphlets, as Lilburnes and Overtons books against the House of Peeres".
"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
Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution-Gender, Genre, and History Writing-by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille-Hardback-Published:10 October 2022-368 Pages
Yet after all this he is gone hence, and I remain, an airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest — Lucy Hutchinson, Final Meditation'
"I write not for the presse to boast my own weakness to the world" — Lucy Hutchinson.
Lucy Hutchinson and the English Revolution by Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille is an extremely important and long overdue evaluation of Lucy Hutchinson's historical writings and her Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. The memoirs, although written between 1664 and 1667, were not published until 1806, and the Memoirs were largely forgotten in the twentieth century. It could be said that Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille rescues Lucy Hutchinson from the condescension of history.
Gheeraert-Graffeuille has had a little help in this rescue mission. The early 1980s saw more historians and literary scholars interested in Hutchinson and other female writers. Hutchinson's book challenges the assumption that early modern women could not write the history of the English Revolution. Gheeraert-Graffeuille shows that Lucy Hutchinson was a reader of ancient history and a gifted historian of the English Revolution. She should be ranked alongside Richard Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.
The 17th-century philosopher and historian Lucy Hutchinson was the wife of Colonel Hutchinson, a regicide who sent Charles I to his execution in 1649. Without his wife's memoirs, this significant figure of the English Revolution would have been lost to history.
Lucy Hutchinson was born in 1620 to a class of landowning merchants. She had a comfortable childhood, and her father was a lieutenant of the Tower of London. Hutchinson was part of a growing gentry, later among the most dominant class forces during the English Revolution. From a political standpoint, she dominated the marriage. She was able to pursue a significant political involvement that was not available to most women. However, she could not publish under her name using her husbands or remaining anonymous.
At the beginning of the English Revolution, the Hutchinson family rejected the Royalist cause and became firm Republicans. Her book Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson is an extremely important documentation of the English Revolution. While an intimate account of her husband's actions during the revolution, it is a highly lucid political and sociological analysis of British history's only successful social revolution.
Gheeraert-Graffeuille seeks to restore Hutchinson to the pantheon of writers of the 17th-century English Revolution. Figures like Thomas Hobbes, one of the most important early materialist thinkers, tend to dominate mainstream accounts of the English Revolution.
Hobbes wrote at a time of war And revolution in Europe. Particularly endemic was the Thirty Years War. This war shaped Hobbes's world view leading him to write his world-famous view of the state of nature expressed in chapter 13 of Leviathan, in which he describes the life of man in a state of nature as "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short." The state of nature was how human society fell when civil society broke down. Ann Talbot said, "For Hobbes, the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct. It was something that existed in large parts of Europe. Hobbes's response to these very real causes of fear was to attempt to construct a scientific and materialist theory of politics that was revolutionary in its implications and was to reverberate through the Enlightenment.
Hutchinson was a different type of thinker than Hobbes. As Chris Dite writes, "Hutchinson diverges from Hobbes. "Disorder" is not some wild state of nature but the corrupt existence of man-made hierarchies. "Order" is their destruction and replacement with something natural, good and just. Think of her order-and-disorder schema as a kind of "socialism or barbarism" for the first revolutionary movement of early capitalism."[1]
Hutchinson, according to Dite, sought to steer a middle course. He writes, "Two disastrous poles emerge in Hutchinson's account. The first is Oliver Cromwell and his Grandees, who successfully vie for a republican oligarchy. Hutchinson is too proudly independent to support their brutal centralisation, and she condemns them as corrupt slaves to their ambition. The second is the Diggers — proto-communists who "endeavoured the levelling of all estates and qualities." This is no less disturbing to Hutchinson, who viewed private estates — overseen by good-hearted landlords committed to justice for the poor and the mighty — as the model community. So this victorious Hutchinson — so attuned to the power dynamics of revolutionary change — finds herself too "virtuous" to further usher in any new world. As Cromwell's dictatorship fell apart upon his death, the monarchy returned to power in 1660. John was arrested on suspicion of plotting against King Charles II and died in prison."
Despite the woeful lack of media coverage, this is an important book. It rightfully restores Lucy Hutchinson's place amongst the great figures of the 17th century, such as Hobbes, Harrington, Baxter, Edmund Ludlow, and Edward Hyde.
Some Thoughts on Christopher Hill and the English Revolution: 50 years after TWTUD Conference
To what extent you could describe the conference as a success is hard to say. What is undoubtedly true is that it was a significant historical event drawing many historians of the Early Modern period and general members of the public. The conference was a counterblast at all the revisionist historians who not only attack Hill but believe his writings have no bearing on today's historiography.
It is a regret that more young people did not turn up because Hill certainly had something to say to this generation. His insight into deep insight historical questions would help them navigate some very choppy seas.
It is not within the realm of this short article to review the contents of the conference. While I understand organising it was a logistical nightmare, perhaps given the importance of the subject, it should have been spread over two days. You would not have the embarrassing spectacle of the main speaker being told to cut it short because the hall was only booked till 5 pm. I am sure that the papers presented will end up in a book.
If Penguin, who have the rights to the book TWTUD had any sense, they would re-issue it with a new updated forward. Mike Braddick would be a good choice for an introduction. Braddick, as was mentioned in the meeting, is working on a biography of Christopher Hill. It is quite staggering that this will be the first biography of this great historian.
A personal highlight was finally meeting the superb historian Rachel Hammersley. It is the first time I have been able to offer my condolences over the loss of her husband, the equally magnificent historian John Gurney. As she mentioned to me, John would have been in his element. Before he passed on, Rachel made sure his fantastic paper on Gerrard Winstanley was published. A nice touch would have been for Rachel to read and present the paper at the conference.[1]His death robbed the world of a very good historian who, in my mind, would have gone on to even great things.
It would have been interesting to know John's thoughts on Michael Braddick's assertion that Hill was a dialectical materialist. Perhaps a more pertinent question is the one posed by Ann Talbot her obituary of Christopher Hill[2] Talbot who asks, "What any serious reader interested in history or politics wants to know is, when we read Hill's books are we reading the work of an apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has to be said that this is a complex question".
It is a deep regret that the subject was not mentioned at a conference of this importance. This is hardly surprising given that no orthodox Marxist historian or politician was invited to the conference, let alone asked to give a paper. A Marxist historian may be requested when the sixtieth anniversary of the TWTUD Conference is organised.
[1] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left -John Gurney-Past & Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206,
[2]"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England-Michael Sturza-The Mad Duck Coalition, New York, 2022. 230 pp., $25
"The 'great' national historian Macaulay vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial."
Leon Trotsky
"The dreams of a Milton, a Winstanley, a George Fox, a Bunyan, were not realised; nor indeed were those of Oliver himself: 'Would that we were all saints'."[1]
Christopher Hill
"English academics always hated revolutions so that there is an in-built pleasure in being able to get back, as some of them tried to do, to saying nothing important had happened. French, Russian and American historians have accepted revolutions as part of their tradition, whereas we've always hushed ours up and transferred it to the Glorious Revolution of 1688."[2]
Christopher Hill
The London Revolution 1640-1643 does not contain any new research from previously used new primary archival sources. It, however, stands on the shoulders of previous work and provides the uninitiated with a useful summary of the main points of the English revolution.
Sturza's defence of the concept of an English revolution is to be welcomed, as is his attempt to explain the English Revolution from the standpoint of a historical materialist outlook. As Frederick Engels so eloquently put it, "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but changes in the modes of production and exchange."[3]
The book offers a basic understanding of the main historical events for the reader new to the English revolution. But its main task is to highlight the revolution's fundamental political and class character. Many of the main revolutionary figures of the English Revolution were moved, as Sturza outlines in the book, by definite social, political and economic ideas. Still, their ideas were often cloaked in religious form. Many varied social currents brought people of diverse social backgrounds into a struggle against the king. They sought to understand the new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. They turned to the only source available to understand these ideas, the Bible.
Sturza's book pays considerable attention to the works of previous Marxists while also examining current historiography, which has been dominated over the past few decades by revisionist and post-revisionist ideologues. Sturza correctly explains that revisionism was an academic articulation of capitalism's attack on the working class. Reagan-Thatcher's right-wing agenda was enforced by a violent assault on the working class. The high point of this assault in the UK was the year-long civil war conducted by the British police against the coal miners' strike of 1984-85.
The English revolution was not the only revolution under attack from the revisionists. The French, Russian and, very recently, the American Revolution have all come under sustained attack from revisionist historians.
What makes Sturza's book different from the previous historiography, according to Alan Wallis, professor of history at New Jersey City University, is that "unlike most other writings on the English Revolution, the English Revolution was driven by petty-bourgeois artisans under militant Puritan leadership rather than the moderate gentry in the House of Commons, as is usually claimed by historians who deny or ignore the importance of leadership in carrying out any successful revolution. Sturza illustrates how the protests and street battles in the early 1640s foreshadowed the Civil War, which many historians have presented as an inexplicable bolt from out of the blue."[4]
One of those historians who thought the revolution was a bolt from the blue was the dean of revisionism, John Morrill. Morrill's essay 'Revisionism's Wounded Legacies' neatly encapsulated his opposition to any theory that remotely smacked of revolution or Marxism, prompting one colleague to ask him if there was ever a civil war in the first place. Morrill explained that his Revisionism "was a revolt against materialist or determinist histories and historiographies."[5].
However, Morrill made one insightful remark in that essay in that he correctly states that every historian writing on the English revolution had to define their attitude to the work of Christopher Hill. The same must be said of Sturza. Christopher Hill, whose astonishing early book, The English Revolution 1640, had defined the English revolution as a bourgeois revolution, has achieved widespread acclaim and, to some extent, has not been bettered.
In it Hill writes, "England in 1640 was still ruled by landlords and the relations of production were still partly feudal, but there was this vast and expanding capitalist sector, whose development the Crown and feudal landlords could not forever hold in check. There were few proletarians (except in London), and most of the producers under the putting-out system being also small peasants. But these peasants and small artisans were losing their independence. They were hit especially hard by the general rise in prices and were brought into ever closer dependence on merchants and squires. A statute of 1563 forbade the poorer 75 per cent of the rural population to go as apprentices into the industry. So there were three classes in conflict. As against the parasitic feudal landowners and speculative financiers, as against the government whose policy was to restrict and control industrial expansion, the interests of the new class of capitalist merchants and farmers were temporarily identical to those of the small peasantry and artisans and journeymen. But the conflict between the two latter classes was bound to develop since the expansion of capitalism involved the dissolution of the old agrarian and industrial relationships and the transformation of independent small masters and peasants into proletarians."[6]
Hill was extremely sensitive enough to his historical sources to understand and write about the social currents that brought people of different social backgrounds into a struggle against the king. From early in his career, he identified new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. These ideologists of the revolution used the Bible to find a precedent for their actions.
As Ann Talbot explains, "Hill's achievements were twofold. Firstly he identified the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution which overthrew the rule of one class and brought another to power in the case of Britain. Secondly, he recognised that the mass makes revolutions of the population and that for a revolution to occur, the consciousness of that mass of people must change since a few people at the top do not cause revolutions. However, the character of their leadership is crucial at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of continuing relevance today when historians increasingly reject any serious economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny group of conspirators.[7]
Sturza spends a lot of this book attacking Hill. In his conclusion, he chides Hill for not taking on the revisionists, but as Ann Talbot points out, Hill was a better historian than a political thinker. Also contained in the book's conclusion is Sturza's assertion that the English revolution was a "bourgois revolution from below and that petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, shopkeepers, early manufacturers, domestic traders and mariners…provided the horsepower of the revolution.'
Sturza's formulation is confusing and not an orthodox Marxist position. He would have done well to read and then quote the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky for a clearer understanding of how the revolution unfolded and how the social forces within it related to each other. Trotsky writes:
"The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents, and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place social self-determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the. Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called root and branch men or, in the language of our day, radicals, stood for a republic. The halfway position of the Presbyterians fully corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie -- between the nobility and the plebeians. The Independents' party, which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to its conclusion, naturally displaced the Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and the countryside that formed the main force of the revolution. Events unfolded empirically. In their struggle for power and property interests, both the former and the latter side hid behind a cloak of legitimacy."[8]
To conclude, The English bourgeois revolution is a complex subject, and one book does not do it justice. However, despite its limitations, Sturza's book gives the reader a good introduction to the topic. Further criticisms of the book will follow in a postscript to this review. Comments on the text and this review are welcome.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[2]https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html
[3] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
[4] https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewer/19991_alan-wallis/
[5]Revisionism's Wounded Legacies-John Morrill -Huntington Library Quarterly
Vol. 78, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 577-594
[6] The English Revolution 1640- www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution
[7] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[8] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
Thomas Rainborowe – Dangerous Radical by Stanley Slaughter-CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (19 May 2015)
"I desire that those that had engaged in it should speak, for really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly. Sir, I think it's clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under; and I am confident that when I have heard the reasons against it, something will be said to answer those reasons, in so much that I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no that should doubt of these things."
Thomas Rainborowe
Stanley Slaughter's book Thomas Rainborowe -Dangerous Radical is one of the many forgotten books which litter the study of the English bourgeois revolution. Which is a shame because it is not a bad book. Unlike many historians, I do not believe its subject matter Thomas Rainsborough is a forgotten hero of the 17th century English revolution.
It must be said that Slaughter's job was not made easy by the scarcity of archival sources. NothingRainsborowe wrote has survived, and if it were not for his intervention in the discussion at Putney 1647, which elevated him to one of the foremost radical voices of the English revolution, he would have remained just another excellent military figure.
The English revolution produced many fine and brave individuals. Thomas Rainsborough was one of the best. He was an extraordinarily gifted soldier, and his expertise was as a siege master. Like many of his generation, he showed reckless courage in battle. Only Oliver Cromwell stood above him in military skill.
But as Slaughter's well-written and interesting biography states, he was best known for his radical politics. His radical politics were the main reason the Royalists assassinated him with the collaboration of presbyterian parliamentarians. As Ian Gentles writes : "Rainborowe continued to be a thorn in the side of the military grandees. In October and November he played a leading part in the army general council's debates at Putney on the Leveller Agreement of the People. He poured scorn on Cromwell and others who said of the projected constitution, 'Itt's a huge alteration, itt's a bringing in of New Lawes', commenting, 'if writinges bee true there hath bin many scufflinges betweene the honest men of England and those that have tyranniz'd over them' (Clarke Papers, 1.246). When the grandees sought to prolong the discussion of the army's engagements, Rainborowe insisted that they move on to address the Agreement of the People. When Ireton attacked the principle of universal manhood suffrage, Rainborowe took up the challenge in words that still ring in our ears after more than three-and-a-half centuries."[1]
The exact circumstances of his murder are still a bit murky, and many wild conspiracy theories still abound, such as Oliver Cromwell organising the murder. What is known is that the perpetrators of this murder were given free rein to carry out their deadly deed. Slaughter draws attention to the relative ease the royalist assassins were able to assassinate a leading player in the English revolution and escape unscathed without as much as a scratch back to Pontefract, passing through the lines of the parliamentary forces who were more hostile to the radical Ransborowe than they were to the Royalist they were supposed to be fighting.
It is perhaps an understatement to say that Rainsborowe was a controversial figure hated by Royalists and Presbyterians. It was his misfortune to serve in a parliamentary Navy that was, on the whole, Royalist in its political persuasion.
Not only were they hostile to Ransborowe's appointment, they were still politically loyal to the king and were opposed to Parliament's treatment of Charles Ist. They sided with the Presbyterians in Parliament in calling for the disbandment of the New Model Army :
THE DECLARATION Of the Navie, being THE True Copie of a Letter from the Officers of the Navie, to the Commissioners: With their Resolutions upon turning out Colonell RAINSBROUGH from being their Commander.
28th.May, 1648.
Worshipfull;
THese are to certifie you that wee the Commanders, and Officers of the Ship Constant Reformation, with the rest of the Fleet, have secured the Ships for the service of King and Parliament, and have refused to be under the Command of Colonell Rainsbrough, by reason wee conceive him to be a man not wel-affected to the King, Parliament and Kingdome, and we doe hereby declare unto you, that we have unanimously joyned with the Kentish Gentlemen, in their just Petition to the Parliament, to this purpose following, videlicet.
First, that the Kings Majesty with all expedition be admitted in Safety and Honour, to treat with his two Houses of Parliament.
Secondly, that the army now under the Command of the Lord Fairfax, to be forthwith disbanded, their Arrears being paid them.
Thirdly, That the known Laws of the Kingdome may be Established and continued, whereby we ought to be Governed and Iudged.
Fourthly, That the Priviledges of Parliament and the Liberty of the Sub∣jects may be preserved.
And to this purpose we have sent our loving Friend Captaine Penrose, with a Letter to the Earle of Warwick, and we are resolved to take in no Commander whatsoever, but such as shall agree and correspond with us in this Petition, and shall resolve to live and dye with us, in the behalfe of King and Parliament, which is the Positive Result of us.[2]
As Ian Gentles correctly points out, not only was Rainsborowe one of the "most vivid actors of the English revolution" he was also one of the most important. It bewilders me that so few biographies exist, the most recent being Adrian Tinniswood 2013 book.[3] It is hoped that this will change soon.
[1] Rainborowe [Rainborow], Thomas (d. 1648) Ian J. Gentles
https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/23020
[2] https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A82191.0001.001/1:1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
[3] The Rainborowes Hardcover – 5 Sept. 2013- Jonathan Cape
The New Model Army-Agent of Revolution-by Ian Gentles--Yale University Press-400 Pages-19 Apr 2022
"The natural condition of mankind is a state of war in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" because individuals are in a "war of all against all"
Thomas Hobbes
"I would rather have a plain russett-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a gentleman and nothing else."
Oliver Cromwell
When history moves with the speed of a cart-this is itself rationality and itself regularity. When the popular masses themselves, with all their virgin primitiveness, their simple crude decisiveness, begin to make history, to bring to life directly and immediately "principles and theories", then the bourgeoisie feels fear. And cries out that "rationality is receding to the background".
Vladimir Lenin
Ian Gentles new book is the definitive account of how the New Model Army became an armed party and was the motor force of the English Bourgeois revolution. The book is meticulously researched and extremely well written.
The military history of the New Model Army is well known, but where Gentles book differs is that it is a political history of the rise and fall of the world-famous 17th-century army. As the book title suggests, it was truly an "agent of the Revolution". While one of the most formidable fighting forces ever put together, it was also one of the most radical apart from the army led by Leon Trotsky after the Russian Revolution. Formed in 1645, it played a crucial role in the aristocracy's overthrow and brought to power one of the finest representative of the English bourgeoise.
Leon Trotsky said of the New Model Army "the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian Guard and as the political representative of a new class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers' and officers' deputies ("agitators"). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents' army.
This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves powerless to oppose with its own army the "model army" of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of the Levellers – the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian regime. But this new two-power system does not succeed in developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor can have, their historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is established for a period of years.[1]
Gentles, a leading authority, examines every aspect of the New Model Army. It killed a King and carried out pioneering military tactics occupying London three times, creating a republic and keeping Cromwell in power as Lord Protector until his death. The book has been expanded to 1660, which means it covers the expedition to the West Indies in 1655 and the Restoration in 1660, which, paradoxically, the NMA made happen.
The army was a hotbed of radical and religious ideas and beliefs. Gentles is no stranger to this subject. His new book is touted as a fully revised version of his 1992 work, but in reality, it is a different book.
As Gentles explains in an interview: "The first edition has been condensed to about half its original length. It assimilates much new research, particularly on the Levellers and army politics (by David Scott, John Rees, Rachel Foxley, Philip Baker, Elliot Vernon, Jason Peacey and others), as well as important new work on the army's military history by James Scott Wheeler, Glenn Foard, Andrew Hopper, Malcolm Wanklyn, Ismini Pells and others). The new edition adds chapters on the Protectorate (1653-9) and the Restoration (1659-60). It adds substantial new material to the chapters on Ireland and Scotland, extensively using the recently published correspondence of Cromwell's son Henry to illustrate the army's increasing dissatisfaction with the Protectoral regime. For Scotland, it illuminates the role of Robert Lilburne and George Monck in bringing that nation to heel, using a previously undeciphered manuscript to add vividness to the narrative of Glencairn's uprising in 1654. It also provides an in-depth, shocking account of the New Model's disastrous expedition against the Spanish Caribbean colony of Hispaniola, from which Oliver Cromwell never recovered his confidence. Finally, it provides a detailed, and significantly different interpretation of the army's role in the Restoration, explaining how that epochal event was brought about without bloodshed."[2]
As Gentles states, the book contains the latest historiography from the last three decades on the radical groups inside the New Model Army. He does not go along with the various revisionist historians who have deliberately downplayed the influence of groups such as the Levellers inside the army.
He writes, "The Levellers were very influential, despite what other historians have said. As early as March 1647, they hitched their wagon to the New Model Army, regarding it as their main hope for achieving their programme. The Leveller leaders spent a good deal of time at army headquarters in the mid-summer of 1647, striving to politicise it. In October and November, they virtually won over the Council of the Army, with the exception of the conservative Grandees, to back the Agreement of the People. A year later, when the army was desperately in need of political allies, the Levellers got it to adopt the Agreement of the People with the sole proviso that it be approved by Parliament. The decisive falling out between Leveller and army leaders did not occur until the spring of 1649, and even then, many officers remained supporters of Levellerism, which they labelled 'The Good Old Cause', up until the eve of the Restoration."[3]
As Gentles's book shows, the study of the NMA is integral to understanding how the English bourgeois revolution came about and succeeded. One surprising thing about the book is how little of Gentles' historiographical proclivities are in this book. He does not subscribe to a' Three Kingdoms' approach to the English civil war – as Jasmin L. Johnson wrote, contained within this approach 'is a tendency to bounce back and forth from country to country and from campaign to campaign, causing confusion and obscuring the effects that developments in one theatre of operations might have had on the others'.[4]
While Gentles is not immune to the siren calls of revisionist and post-revisionist historians, he places the actions of the NMA as part of a 'people's revolution. This tends to indicate that the influence of Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning is not entirely dead.
As was said earlier, Professor Gentles is one of the few modern-day historians who does not downplay the influence groups such as the Levellers had inside the NMA. His new book offers a fresh insight into the complex relationship between Oliver Cromwell and Leveller leaders such as John Lilburne.
Gentles does not spend much time on military matters in this new book, and he acknowledges that Cromwell had no formal military training. Gentles, it seems, does not rate him highly as an army figure which is a little strange because if you read Royalist-supporting military historians like Peter Young, you get a much more accurate picture of Cromwell's military prowess.
Gentles believes that Cromwell's adventures in Ireland are a blot on his record and suggests that Cromwell's overriding concern in Ireland was the neutralisation of Royalist threat and that the attack on, and massacre of, Catholics was a by-product of that action. Cromwell's hatred for Catholicism was prevalent amongst the rising bourgeoisie of the 17th century. He further suggests that Cromwell played a key part in developing Irish nationalism.
Quite where the NMA fits into Gentles's belief that the leaders of the revolution belonged to a 'Junto' is not explored. The definition of Junto is a group of men united together for some secret intrigue', with the champion of this new historiography being John Adamson. The main theoretical premise of his book The Noble Revolt is to view the Civil War as basically a coup d’état by a group of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the King. According to Diane Purkiss, these nobles were 'driven by their code of honour. They acted to protect themselves and the nation. Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex and Warwick move from the sidelines to occupy centre stage, as do their counterparts among Scottish peers. They, not the rude masses, plucked a king from his throne.
I recommend this book to general readers and more academically minded students, as it is intelligent and well-researched. It has extensive footnotes, a lengthy bibliography, and excellent pictures, and it deserves a wide readership and should be on every universities book list.
[1] From Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution (1931)
[2] https://aspectsofhistory.com/author_interviews/ian-gentles-on-the-new-model-army/
[3] https://aspectsofhistory.com/author_interviews/ian-gentles-on-the-new-model-army/
[4] Jasmin L. Johnson, ‘Review of Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652’, H-War (February 2008)
The English Bourgeoisie Did Not Always Love its Monarchy.
"A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.
The communist Manifesto-Karl Marx
"The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock, it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again."
Barbara W. Tuchman-August 1914
"if the King were in the body of the enemy, he would as soon discharge his pistol upon him as upon any private man," and if they did not think likewise, they ought not to enlist under him."
Oliver Cromwell
"The attempt to minimise or eradicate the history of republicanism in England in the seventeenth century is one of the British establishment's most important and longest-running projects. Unlike in the United States and France, where the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 have become a celebrated part of the national story, the English Revolution is systematically marginalised in the British education system and public life."
Georgi Plekhanov
God save the Queen, She's not a human being, and There's no future And England's dreaming
God Save the Queen-Sex Pistols
Why was the life of Elizabeth II the cause of so much love and adoration? It begs the question, what exactly was her contribution to humanity? After all, she lived a long and privileged life. She was a billionaire with more money than most people can dream of and belonged to a family that deeply sympathised with the Nazis. Remember Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform. Or the picture in the tabloid press of members of the Royal family giving Nazi salutes.
As for the funeral, as Chris Marsden says, it takes place amidst the spectre of war and revolution.[1] Marsden's excellent article delves into history to expose the absurdity of the whole affair. Speaking of a previous royal funeral, that of Edward VII, the American historian Barbara W. Tuchman says in the book The Guns of August, "The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock, it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again."
Another article on wsws.org examines the bourgeoisie's sudden deep love affair with the royals. Joseph Scalice's scathing article points out that "Monarchy is an institution of colossal stupidity, a barbaric relic of the feudal past; its persistence is an embarrassment to humanity. Founded on heredity, shored up with inbreeding, intermarriage and claims of divine right, the monarchic principle enshrines inequality as the fundamental and unalterable lot of humanity. It maintains this lot with the force of autocratic power."[2]
Although the English bourgeoisie buried "the ghosts of its republican ancestors long ago", that time was the 17th century when things were different. Then the English bourgeoisie killed a king, established a republic and got rid of the house of lords, a tad different from today's fawning over a bunch of crooks, child traffickers and Nazi lovers.
The English bourgeoisie does not like to be reminded of its revolutionary past. As the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov wrote in his extremely perceptive essay:
"The attempt to minimise or eradicate the history of republicanism in England in the seventeenth century is one of the British establishment's most important and longest-running projects. Unlike in the United States and France, where the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 have become a celebrated part of the national story, the English Revolution is systematically marginalised in the British education system and public life. England passed through her revolutionary storms in the seventeenth century, and there were then two revolutions: the first led, among other things, to the execution of Charles I, while the second ended with an animated banquet and the rise of a new dynasty.
But the English bourgeoisie, in the evaluation of these revolutions, manifests very divergent views: while the first, in its eyes, does not even deserve the name 'revolution' and is simply referred to as 'the great rebellion, the second is given a more euphonious appellation; it is called 'the glorious revolution. The secret of this differentiation in evaluating the two revolutions has already been revealed by Augustin Thierry in his theses about the English revolutions. In the first revolution, the people played an important role, while in the second, the people participated hardly at all. When, however, a people mount the stage of history and begin to decide the destinies of their country according to its power and best understanding, then the higher classes (in this case, the bourgeoisie) get out of humour. Because the people are always 'raw' and, if the revolutionary devil begins to pervade it, also becomes 'coarse', the higher classes have a way of always insisting upon politeness and gentle manners—at least they demand these of the people. This is why the higher classes are always inclined to put upon revolutionary movements if prominently participated in by the people, the stamp of 'rebellions'.[3]
It is not only the English bourgeoisie that would like to see the English revolution buried along with its brief republican past. As Leon Trotsky wrote, many historians have sought to " vulgarise the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial." These historians have not exactly covered themselves in glory over the death of Elizabeth II.
Historian Clive Irving who is not exactly a Marxist called the funeral a 'façade' and said that the Royal Family should 'atone' for slavery. Irving said the Royal Africa Company, founded by Charles II in 1666, "concealed a very evil enterprise which was shipping slaves from Africa to the Caribbean colonies.'Not exactly calling for a Marxist insurrection to replace the Monarchy, but this did not stop the torrent of abuse he received from several sycophantic historians
"Zareer Masani, a historian and author, responded to Irving's comments by saying: 'His comments are pretty old hat because these kinds of comments have been made about the Monarchy for the last decade by Black Lives Matter and those sorts of groups. I don't see anything new. The Empire was overall very positive for most parts of the world. There were mistakes and violence in pockets, but on the whole, it was a benevolent institution which gave most of the world foundations for modern nationhood and economy. I don't think it has anything to apologise for.'
Perhaps the most stupid and crass comment came from one historian who wrote, "'The British crown stand above politics and outside politics, both domestic and international.[4] At last, the Queen has a fitting epitaph.
Working people need to wake up and smell the coffee, the Monarchy is no friend of the working class. In Requiem For a Dream, Hubert Selby Jr writes, "Eventually we all have to accept total responsibility for our actions, everything we have and has not done. I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we can mourn its passing”.
Notes
Edward VII – King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India (1841-1910)
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/19/srjc-s19.html
[2] The adulation for Elizabeth II: The capitalist class celebrates the principle of monarchy-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/17/pers-s17.html
[3] George Plekhanov-The Bourgeois Revolution-The Political Birth of Capitalism
[4] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11231847/Queens-funeral-Historians-slam-royal-biographers-comments-state-funeral-fa-ade.html
Review-Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris-Hutchinson Heinemann-1st edition (September 1st 2022)
"There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation, instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism."
The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt" (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe.
"If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start, they might be miles away from one another, and yet eventually, we are bound to meet. We can't avoid it."
Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate
It is perhaps an understatement to say that Robert Harris is a remarkably versatile and clever writer. He has written numerous books on wide-ranging subjects such as Ancient Rome and The Second World War and a book set 800 years in the future. Titles including 'Fatherland', 'Munich' and 'An Officer and a Spy.
His latest narrative-driven book examines one of the most contentious periods in British, if not world history, The English Revolution. It is well-written and researched.
The book covers Charles I execution and the subsequent pursuit of two leading regicides who signed the king's death warrant. Colonel Will Goffe and Edward Whalley were exiled to America in 1660, where they were welcomed with open arms by many colonists who were Puritans and had supported their political stance against the king. Both men were high-ranking soldiers in the New Model Army, and Whalley was Oliver Cromwell's cousin. Both played an important part in the successful English revolution.
Harris's book treads an already well-trodden path. The last few years alone have seen numerous books on the subject covered in his book.[1]The book appears well researched, but Harris, like many other historians, has found a dearth of information about what Walley and Goffe did in America. So like all good writers, he makes things up and employs a method favoured by the 18th-century writer, poet and philosopher Novalis, who wrote, "There are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events to seem imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect."[2]
Regarding historiography, the book is part of a new wave of studies, both fiction and non-fiction, concentrating on different aspects of the Royalist cause in the 17th century.
Not all historians are fans of narrative-based historical writing. When C V Wedgwood produced her splendid book A King Condemned-The Trial and Execution of Charles Ist, it was criticised by some historians. In the foreword of the 2011 edition, Clive Holmes said: "Wedgwood's relationship with academic historians was not an easy one, and the immediate reception of this work by the professionals in their flagship journals was cool and even condescending."
While Harris's invention of the character Richard Naylor is legitimate and interesting, one can't help feeling that Harris is trying to persecute the two regicides again. He seems a bit miffed that they escaped the so-called royal justice of Charles II. Further hostility came from the pen of the Guardian newspaper, Andrew Taylor writes, "It's not easy to make Whalley and Goffe sympathetic to a modern sensibility. They were hardcore Puritans who believed that only the elect would go to heaven, that their aggressively righteous ends justified their often ruthless means and that the world would end in 1666."[3]
Just like their modern counterparts, the late 17th English bourgeoisie would rather forget their revolution of the 1640s; hence The 1660 Act of Oblivion(the title of the book), which was an act of parliament that was supported by Charles II to draw a line under the events of the 1640s and pretend they never happened.
'The wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men's bodies": the execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London, 1649. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
But it cannot be denied that the killing of the king had, as Ann Talbot recounts, "a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a dreadful mistake, no monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria's reign".
Also as Christopher Hill put it so well, "In 1660 passive obedience was preached in all pulpits; a King was brought back "with plenty of holy oil about him," because this was necessary for Parliament, for the possessing classes, threatened by social revolution from below. A white terror was introduced by the returned émigrés, and an attempt was made to drive from political life all who did not accept the restored régime in Church and State (the Clarendon Code, the Test Act). Educational advances, like the purge which had made Oxford a centre of scientific research, were reversed. All this broke the revolutionary-democratic movement for the moment, though it fought back again in the sixteen-seventies and -eighties. In 1662 a Presbyterian minister, who had been deprived of his living by the Restoration, wrote in words that recaptured the fears of many respectable members of the possessing classes at that time: "Though soon after the settlement of the nation we saw ourselves the despised and cheated party ... yet in all this, I have suffered since, I look upon it as less than my trouble was from my fears then ... Then we lay at the mercy and impulse of a giddy, hot-headed, bloody multitude."[4]
Harris's book, albeit fictitious in parts, shows that this manhunt dominated the reign of Charles II. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognised the growing danger of rebellion. Charles II made one mistake in giving a public funeral to one of the regicides. Over twenty thousand people attended, testifying to the still considerable support for Republican ideas.
Conclusion
One of the difficulties of writing about this period of English history is that, as one writer put it, "intricacies of religious faith and faction can seem distant and abstruse to a modern audience". But Harris's book is timely as the United Kingdom is living through a period of constitutional upheaval and faces the distinct possibility of breaking up. Act of Oblivion is an enjoyable read and has a ring of authenticity. It is pointless recommending this book, and Harris's books sell in the millions, but it is a good read.
Notes
1. The Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660 was an Act of the Parliament of England (12 Cha. II c. 11), the long title of which is "An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion". This act was a general pardon for everyone who had committed crimes during the English Civil War and subsequent Commonwealth period, with the exception of certain crimes such as murder (without a licence granted by the King or Parliament), piracy, buggery, rape and witchcraft, and people named in the act such as those involved in the regicide of Charles I. It also said that no action was to be taken against those involved at any later time and that the Interregnum was to be legally forgotten.
[1] See Charles I's Executioners -Civil War, Regicide and the Republic By James Hobson- Pen & Sword History-Published: 4th November 2020. https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2021/04/charles-is-executioners-civil-war.html andKillers of the King - The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I Hardcover – Charles Spencer 11 Sep 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing - ISBN-13: 978-1408851708-https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2014/10/killers-of-king-men-who-dared-to_23.html
[2] The Mystery Of Marie Rogêt" (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/08/act-of-oblivion-by-robert-harris-review-regicides-on-the-run
[4] The English Revolution 1640- https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/
The London Revolution 1640-1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England-Michael Sturza-The Mad Duck Coalition, New York, 2022. 230 pp., $25
"The 'great' national historian Macaulay vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial."
Leon Trotsky
"The dreams of a Milton, a Winstanley, a George Fox, a Bunyan, were not realised; nor indeed were those of Oliver himself: 'Would that we were all saints'."[1]
Christopher Hill
"English academics always hated revolutions so that there is an in-built pleasure in being able to get back, as some of them tried to do, to saying nothing important had happened. French, Russian and American historians have accepted revolutions as part of their tradition, whereas we've always hushed ours up and transferred it to the Glorious Revolution of 1688."[2]
Christopher Hill
The London Revolution 1640-1643 does not contain any new research from previously used new primary archival sources. It, however, stands on the shoulders of previous work and provides the uninitiated with a useful summary of the main points of the English revolution.
Sturza's defence of the concept of an English revolution is to be welcomed, as is his attempt to explain the English Revolution from the standpoint of a historical materialist outlook. As Frederick Engels so eloquently put it, "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but changes in the modes of production and exchange."[3]
The book offers a basic understanding of the main historical events for the reader new to the English revolution. But its main task is to highlight the revolution's fundamental political and class character. Many of the main revolutionary figures of the English Revolution were moved, as Sturza outlines in the book, by definite social, political and economic ideas. Still, their ideas were often cloaked in religious form. Many varied social currents brought people of diverse social backgrounds into a struggle against the king. They sought to understand the new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. They turned to the only source available to understand these ideas, the Bible.
Sturza's book pays considerable attention to the works of previous Marxists while also examining current historiography, which has been dominated over the past few decades by revisionist and post-revisionist ideologues. Sturza correctly explains that revisionism was an academic articulation of capitalism's attack on the working class. Reagan-Thatcher's right-wing agenda was enforced by a violent assault on the working class. The high point of this assault in the UK was the year-long civil war conducted by the British police against the coal miners' strike of 1984-85.
The English revolution was not the only revolution under attack from the revisionists. The French, Russian and, very recently, the American Revolution have all come under sustained attack from revisionist historians.
What makes Sturza's book different from the previous historiography, according to Alan Wallis, professor of history at New Jersey City University, is that "unlike most other writings on the English Revolution, the English Revolution was driven by petty-bourgeois artisans under militant Puritan leadership rather than the moderate gentry in the House of Commons, as is usually claimed by historians who deny or ignore the importance of leadership in carrying out any successful revolution. Sturza illustrates how the protests and street battles in the early 1640s foreshadowed the Civil War, which many historians have presented as an inexplicable bolt from out of the blue."[4]
One of those historians who thought the revolution was a bolt from the blue was the dean of revisionism, John Morrill. Morrill's essay 'Revisionism's Wounded Legacies' neatly encapsulated his opposition to any theory that remotely smacked of revolution or Marxism, prompting one colleague to ask him if there was ever a civil war in the first place. Morrill explained that his Revisionism "was a revolt against materialist or determinist histories and historiographies."[5].
However, Morrill made one insightful remark in that essay in that he correctly states that every historian writing on the English revolution had to define their attitude to the work of Christopher Hill. The same must be said of Sturza. Christopher Hill, whose astonishing early book, The English Revolution 1640, had defined the English revolution as a bourgeois revolution, has achieved widespread acclaim and, to some extent, has not been bettered.
In it Hill writes, "England in 1640 was still ruled by landlords and the relations of production were still partly feudal, but there was this vast and expanding capitalist sector, whose development the Crown and feudal landlords could not forever hold in check. There were few proletarians (except in London), and most of the producers under the putting-out system being also small peasants. But these peasants and small artisans were losing their independence. They were hit especially hard by the general rise in prices and were brought into ever closer dependence on merchants and squires. A statute of 1563 forbade the poorer 75 per cent of the rural population to go as apprentices into the industry. So there were three classes in conflict. As against the parasitic feudal landowners and speculative financiers, as against the government whose policy was to restrict and control industrial expansion, the interests of the new class of capitalist merchants and farmers were temporarily identical to those of the small peasantry and artisans and journeymen. But the conflict between the two latter classes was bound to develop since the expansion of capitalism involved the dissolution of the old agrarian and industrial relationships and the transformation of independent small masters and peasants into proletarians."[6]
Hill was extremely sensitive enough to his historical sources to understand and write about the social currents that brought people of different social backgrounds into a struggle against the king. From early in his career, he identified new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared. These ideologists of the revolution used the Bible to find a precedent for their actions.
As Ann Talbot explains, "Hill's achievements were twofold. Firstly he identified the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution which overthrew the rule of one class and brought another to power in the case of Britain. Secondly, he recognised that the mass makes revolutions of the population and that for a revolution to occur, the consciousness of that mass of people must change since a few people at the top do not cause revolutions. However, the character of their leadership is crucial at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of continuing relevance today when historians increasingly reject any serious economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny group of conspirators.[7]
Sturza spends a lot of this book attacking Hill. In his conclusion, he chides Hill for not taking on the revisionists, but as Ann Talbot points out, Hill was a better historian than a political thinker. Also contained in the book's conclusion is Sturza's assertion that the English revolution was a "bourgois revolution from below and that petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, shopkeepers, early manufacturers, domestic traders and mariners…provided the horsepower of the revolution.'
Sturza's formulation is confusing and not an orthodox Marxist position. He would have done well to read and then quote the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky for a clearer understanding of how the revolution unfolded and how the social forces within it related to each other. Trotsky writes:
"The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic church were the party of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The Independents, and the Puritans especially, were the party of the petty bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the form of a struggle over the religious structure of the church, there took place social self-determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois lines. Politically the. Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the Independents, who then were called root and branch men or, in the language of our day, radicals, stood for a republic. The halfway position of the Presbyterians fully corresponded to the contradictory interests of the bourgeoisie -- between the nobility and the plebeians. The Independents' party, which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to its conclusion, naturally displaced the Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois masses in the towns and the countryside that formed the main force of the revolution. Events unfolded empirically. In their struggle for power and property interests, both the former and the latter side hid behind a cloak of legitimacy."[8]
To conclude, The English bourgeois revolution is a complex subject, and one book does not do it justice. However, despite its limitations, Sturza's book gives the reader a good introduction to the topic. Further criticisms of the book will follow in a postscript to this review. Comments on the text and this review are welcome.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[2]https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html
[3] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
[4] https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewer/19991_alan-wallis/
[5]Revisionism's Wounded Legacies-John Morrill -Huntington Library Quarterly
Vol. 78, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 577-594
[6] The English Revolution 1640- www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution
[7] "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill- www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[8] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
Regicide-The Trials of Henry Marten-John Worthen-Haus Publishing-30/08/2022-ISBN-13: 9781913368357
Henry Marten
"Let that ugly Rascall be gonne out of the Parke, that whore-master, or els I will not see the sport.[1]
Charles I
"And therefore, Sir, to give you your due and right, I must ingenuously a•… knowledge, that I have for a long time looked upon you, as one of the great p•…lars of the Liberties of the Commons of England, and your name amongst all ju•… and unbiassed men, hath been extraordinary famous this present Parliament, therefore, and for this, you suffered an expulsion of the House, and a reproachfull a•… unjust imprisonment in the Tower of London, by the guilded men of the time who (you then discovered) carried two faces under one hood; & many monet•… (if not some yeares) you continued an ejected person from your just place in th•… House"[2]
Rash oaths unwarrantable-John Lilburne
"He was a great lover of pretty girles, to whom he was so liberall that he spent the greatest part of his estate". He was a great and faithfull lover of his Countrey, and Never gott a farthing by Parliament. He was of an incomparable Witt for Repartes; not at all covetous; not at all Arrogant, as most of them were; a great cultor of Justice, and did always in the House take the part of the oppressed".
John Aubrey
John Worthen's biography of Henry Worthen is both intriguing and illuminating. It is a sympathetic portrait of one of the leading figures of the English revolution. Marten was a republican way before it became fashionable, being the only convinced Republican in the Long Parliament at the outset of the civil war and was one of the few leaders of the English revolution to be intimately connected with the Leveller movement.
The book is deeply researched, drawing extensively on letters Marten wrote while awaiting trial. He was accused of organising the trial of Charles I and being one of the signatories of the King's death warrant. Amazingly, these letters remained intact since, during his captivity, his letters to his mistress Mary Ward were stolen and published in an attempt to destroy his reputation. However, their publication revealed a thoughtful, intelligent and tender man. Worthen's use of them is to be commended. They are an extraordinary source material.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Marten was at the fulcrum of the English bourgeois revolution. But history has not been kind to Henry Marten. Today, he is a neglected historical figure. If any person needed to be rescued from the condescension of history, it was Marten. It has not helped that several conservative and revisionist historians have heaped a pile of dead dogs on his historical reputation. Many have repeated old accusations that he was a womaniser and have tended to downplay his importance or close connection to the Leveller movement.
The unseriousness of these historians is perhaps encapsulated by the article in the august publication, The History of Parliament Blog, by Dr David Scott called Sex in the Long Parliament, in which he writes, "No sex survey of the Long Parliament, however brief, can omit its supposedly most libidinous member, the arch-republican MP for Berkshire, Henry Marten. Parliamentarians and royalists alike denounced him as a libertine and 'whoremaster’. Yet this moral outrage owed less to his womanising than to the shamelessness with which he abandoned his wife and lived openly with his mistress, to whom he seems to have remained faithful to the end of his life in 1680. The greatest sexual offence a Long Parliamentarian could commit was refusing to acknowledge it as an offence at all. If this were a defence of Marten's reputation, I would hate to see him attacking him.[3]
Worthen does not buy into Marten being a whore-master. Charles I's accusation, alongside many others, has been largely accepted down through the ages. A far more reasoned explanation can be found in Sarah Barber's article for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. She writes, "His reputation for whoring seems to have been generated by the flagrant way in which he breached conventional mores by openly living with a common-law wife, Mary Ward, whose brother, Job, was parliamentarian commander of the fort at Tilbury. There is evidence that they were a couple from as early as 1649 when they lavishly entertained visiting dignitaries and kept liveried servants together. They may well have been a couple from Marten's earliest time in London in 1640. If so, this was a relationship that remained constant for forty years. It was, however, adulterous, and Marten was quite open about it. Mary referred to herself and was referred to by others as Mary Marten. There were frequent plays on the word 'leveller' to argue that Marten's radical political stance was, in fact, a synonym for the seduction of women, and satires on Mary to imply his possession of a 'creature', in the same way, that his regiment and his political power were bought. The couple had three daughters: Peggy, Sarah, and Henrietta (Bacon-hog).[4]
Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Worthen's book is his failure to pursue more in-depth research into Marten's close connection to the Leveller movement, particularly his association with its leader John Lilburne. Further research is needed also regarding Marten’s time in the New Model Army and to the extent of Leveller's ideas permeating the Army. Did Marten spread Leveller inspired ideas amongst his troops, and how did he come by the secret codes that the Levellers used to hide their correspondence?.
According to Sarah Barber, "Marten developed a close working relationship with the Leveller leaders during the late 1640s. He was closest to John Wildman, who was to marry Lucy Lovelace. Wildman was named with Marten in a cypher outlining sympathetic individuals and regiments, as well as identifying opponents, during the army agitation of summer 1647. Throughout their lives, Marten and Wildman retained their cypher letters as pen names. John Lilburne also trusted and respected Marten. The latter chaired the committee charged with examining Lilburne's imprisonment, a committee that was unable to secure Lilburne's release, and in Rash Oaths Unwarrantable. The Leveller published an invective against Marten. Marten was hurt by Lilburne's personal attack and drafted a reply, 'Rash censures uncharitable', but did not publish it. The two seem to have mended their relationship and developed mutual respect. Marten also knew several minor Leveller figures. He took part in negotiations to draw up an Agreement of the People and was praised by Lilburne as the only parliamentarian to actively do so in late 1648. Marten approved of the idea of a fundamental constitution and was later, with Edward Sexby, to assist the frondeurs in drawing up a similar agreement for the French rebels".[5]
Despite Worthen's reluctance to deeply pursue Marten's connection with the Levellers, this is a much-needed attempt to restore Marten's historical importance. Hopefully, this book gets a wide readership and opens up a debate about the much-maligned Marten.
Notes
S. Barber, A revolutionary rogue: Henry Marten and the English republic (2000)
Henry Marten and The Levellers at the National Portrait Gallery-john Rees- www.youtube.com
About the Author
JOHN WORTHEN is a biographer and historian. Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham from 1994-2003, he is the author of critically-acclaimed biographies of D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and Robert Schumann.
[1] Aubrey's Brief Lives-By John Aubrey
[2] Early English Books Online- https://proquest.libguides.com/eebopqp
[3] Sex in the Long Parliament- https://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2019/08/22/sex-in-the-long-parliament/
[4] https://www-oxforddnb-com.
[5] https://www-oxforddnb-com
The Making of Oliver Cromwell. 424pp.Yale University Press. £25 $35. By Ronald Hutton.
So restless Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious arts of peace,
But thorough advent'rous war
Urged his active star.
Andrew Marvel- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland
"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."
Leon Trotsky[1]
"No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going."
-Oliver Cromwell.
"I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else."
-Oliver Cromwell, letter to Sir William Spring, September 1643.
In the first part of his introduction, Ronald Hutton tries to justify why there is a need for a new biography of Oliver Cromwell. He admits the market is a little crowded ( there have been five full-length academic studies alone since 1990), but the historian is on very dodgy ground already if the first words he utters are an apology. On the whole, the book has been well received and heavily reviewed. It is not that surprising because Hutton's book is largely a very conservative piece of historiography. Also, if the historian Thomas Carlyle were alive today, he would have sent a strongly worded email to the Bristol University Professor Ronald Hutton asking why he had heaped a further dead dog on top of the great leader of the English bourgeois revolution.
The biography has been welcomed by the more conservative-minded writers who have had enough of being kind to Cromwell as Anna Keay writes, "The Making of Oliver Cromwell is radical, powerful and persuasive, and it will cause a stir. It stands as a landmark challenge to the hagiographical tendencies of some of the historiography. Hutton's assertion that Cromwell is 'definitely not somebody to be taken simply at his word' is utterly convincing".[2]
Cromwell is a bit of a strange choice for a biography, given Hutton's area of expertise. He is a prolific historian of early modern England's political, military, cultural, and social history books. He has covered subjects such as the Royalist war effort, high politics, and the social history of witchcraft and paganism.
Hutton's new book is the first of a three-part biography on one of the most controversial figures in British history. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was the only English commoner to become the overall head of state. It must be said from the start that this book is a very conservative piece of historiography. It contains nothing new about Cromwell, and the author has not presented any new archive research. It seems doubtful that Hutton has examined in much detail the new work on Cromwell by the historian John Morrill.[3]
If Cromwell were alive today, it is a safe bet that Hutton would not be on his Christmas card list. His recent hatchet job in the BBC History magazine is testimony to that.[4] Hutton believes that historians have failed to appreciate that Cromwell was "more pragmatic and more devious" than has been shown in the previous historiography and that he was "about 50% saint and about 50% serpent.'
This first volume is primarily a military history. Hutton's book contains no real or deep insight into the "making of Cromwell". Hutton admits somewhat grudgingly that Cromwell had a spectacular military career but believes that Cromwell had a large amount of luck on his side and that he took the glory of victory away from his other commanders.
As Hutton is a distinguished historian of 17th-century England, you would have expected him to examine in greater detail the political context of Cromwell leadership of the English bourgeois revolution. However, instead, he concentrates, like all conservative historians, on Cromwell's early religious experience. From a historiographical standpoint, Hutton borrows heavily from John Adamson, who subscribed to Cromwell being part of a "Junto". As historian Jared van Duinen points out, "When historians discuss the Long Parliament, they frequently refer to a hazy and often ill-defined collection of individuals invariably centred around the figure of John Pym. This assemblage is variously referred to as 'Pym's group', 'Pym and his allies', or 'Pym and his supporters. Probably the most common appellation has become 'Pym's junto', or more often simply the 'junto'. Over the years, this junto has assumed a variety of historiographical guises, and its role within the Long Parliament has been the subject of some debate".[5]
What political analysis Hutton offers he believes that Cromwell's politics should be seen in the context of a balancing act between the radical groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and a group of "Independents", both on the battlefield and within parliament. Hutton offers no political analysis of the class forces involved in this dual power struggle that erupted during the English revolution. The Levellers are not mentioned in his book, and neither does he go into much detail as to the class nature of the so-called "Junto".
A historian has the right to use any source material he chooses to back up his argument, but Hutton could have done no worse than to consult the writings of a man who knew a little bit about revolutions. As Leon Trotsky points out, "The English Revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a great revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. At first, the royal power, resting upon the privileged classes or the upper circles of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The protracted conflict between these two regimes is finally settled in open civil war. The two governmental centres – London and Oxford – create their own armies. Here the dual power takes a territorial form, although, as always in civil war, the boundaries are very shifting. Parliament conquers. The King is captured and awaits his fate. It would seem that the conditions are now created for the single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie.
 |
| Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) |
But before the royal power could be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully interferes in social life, not merely as an armed force but as a Praetorian Guard and as the political representative of a new class opposing the prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers' and officers' deputies ("agitators"). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived: that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents' army. This leads to open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves powerless to oppose with its army the "model army" of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of the Levellers – the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose to the rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own veritably plebeian regime".[6]
Hutton is correct when he states that the war radicalised Cromwell. But is unable to answer why this is the case, how a simple member of the gentry with no military experience rose to be one of Englands greatest military commanders and leader of the first bourgeois revolution. Hutton did not have to go very far to look for answers but has declined to do so. He makes no mention of the great historian Christopher Hill's work, Gods Englishmen.[7] Hill sought to place Cromwell in a wider social, political and economic context. Hill was critical of conservative historians like John Morrill and Conrad Russell, who, like Hutton, tend to minimise the revolutionary significance of figures like Cromwell, writing, "People like Morrill and Russell are taking things aboard. Russell said of Cromwell, for instance, that he was the only member of parliament of whom we have records before 1640 who tried to help the lower orders in his work for the fenmen – but he does not draw any conclusions from that, yet this is one of the most important aspects of Cromwell. He had a much broader approach than most of the gentry".[8]
Hill's advocation and practice of a materialist conception of history are foreign to Hutton. I doubt he has heard of the great Marxist writer Georgi Plekhanov whose book The Role of the Individual in History should be the first port of call for any historian writing biography. Although the great Russian Marxist G.V Plekhanov was writing about a different period of history and different historical characters, his perceptive understanding of the role great figures play in history could be applied quite easily to Cromwell.
Plekhanov writes, "In the history of the development of human intellect, the success of some individual hinders the success of another individual very much more rarely. But even here, we are not free from the above-mentioned optical illusion. When a given state of society sets certain problems before its intellectual representatives, the attention of prominent minds is concentrated upon them until these problems are solved. As soon as they have succeeded in solving them, their attention is transferred to another object. By solving a problem, a given talent-A diverts the attention of talent B from the problem already solved to another problem. And when we are asked: What would have happened if A had died before he had solved problem X? – we imagine that the thread of development of the human intellect would have been broken. We forget that had A died, B, or C, or D might have tackled the problem, and the thread of intellectual development would have remained intact in spite of A's premature demise.
Conclusion
It must be said that before I read this book, I had little hope that it would be an objective assessment of the life of Oliver Cromwell. Hutton's book does not disabuse me of that. It can be only hoped that the next two books contain a degree of insight and analysis missing in the first. I will not hold my breath.
Cromwell was the leader of the bourgeois English Revolution and deserved a better epitaph than this from Hutton. I will leave that to the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky, who wrote, "'In dispersing parliament after parliament, Cromwell displayed as little reverence towards the fetish of "national" representation as in the execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by the grace of God. Nonetheless, it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge for Cromwell's execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell's corpse upon the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by any restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the restoration because what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen.'
[1] Leon Trotsky's Writings On Britain-Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
[2] Young Ironsides-The Making of Oliver Cromwell-By Ronald Hutton-https://literaryreview.co.uk/young-ironsides
[3] Why We Need A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell-https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-we-need-new-critical-edition-of-all.html
[4] https://www.pressreader.com/uk/bbc-history-magazine/20210708/282041920106086-See also My article-I Come To Bury Cromwell Not Praise Him-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2021/07/i-come-to-bury-cromwell-not-praise-him.html
[5] Pym’s junto’ in the ante-bellum Long Parliament: radical or not? https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/journals/9/Seminar/duinen_pym.html. See also my article Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground” https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2011/10/does-work-of-british-historian-john.html
[6] The History of the Russian Revolution-Volume One: The Overthrow of Tzarism-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch11.htm
[7] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gods-Englishman-Cromwell-English-Revolution/dp/0140137114
[8] https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html
Review: The Mayflower in Britain: How an icon was made in
London, Graham Taylor- Amberley Publishing, 2020.
Steve Cushion
Most accounts of the Mayflower voyage of 1620 concentrate on
the history of the Pilgrims in North America, which is hardly surprising as the
Mayflower, the Pilgrim Fathers and Plymouth Rock have become part of the
foundation mythology of what was to become the United States of America. The
strength of this book is that it concentrates on the previous history of the
Pilgrims themselves in Holland and England, thereby giving a greater
understanding of their motivations and intentions.
The Pilgrims were “Separatists” meaning that they believed
that the Church of England was too corrupt to be reformed and so set up their
own organisation. This was illegal in England during the reigns of Elizabeth
and James I as the Church of England was very much part of the state’s
mechanism of control. To escape persecution, members of this sect, which would
probably be called a “cult” today, emigrated to the Dutch town of Leiden where
they set up a community in relative freedom, led by their pastor John Roninson,
and where others of their persuasion joined them.
These Separatists, also known as “Brownists” after Robert
Browne who had formed an earlier such separate church organisation seen as
their forerunner, wanted to set up what would become known as a “gathered
church”, that is a church based on government by consent of those who agreed a
covenant voluntarily. The Leiden group eventually became dissatisfied by their
exile. Their children were becoming more Dutch than English, while the
Brownists saw the English as God’s chosen people, and their economic situation
was far from ideal. So they decided to set off for North America to found a
settlement which could be run according to their principles. This, however,
required financing.
In order to pay for the ships and supplies, the future
colonists needed financial backing, which came from a group of London
merchants. The book describes well the way in which the early modern London
financial services industry operated. The organisers of the Mayflower voyage,
therefore, had to get involved with some London merchants, some of whom more or
less shared their beliefs, but others just wanted a fast buck from a colonising
enterprise. As the book says: “They recognised in each other’s causes the
mirror image of their own, and all they asked for was freedom to pursue their
trade deals or practise their religion” and “progress towards toleration was
always interwoven with progress to free trade“. What is not mentioned is that
one area of free trade in which the London merchants were very keen was the
slave trade. We are told that “An Act of Parliament of 1689 ‘allowed anyone to
export cloth anywhere’“.[1] Equally important but not mentioned was the Trade
with Africa Act 1697 which ended the Royal Africa Company’s monopoly in the
slave trade. This was where the real money was to be made.
However, whatever the motives of the financial backers of the Mayflower voyage, the Pilgrims themselves seem united in their opposition to slavery and their desire to get on well with the indigenous people they would meet. But, while recognising the obvious good intentions of the Pilgrims, it may be interesting to consider how these principles were put into practice. The book says little about Myles Standish, the Plymouth colony’s military leader and slips quickly over his massacre of a group of warriors of the Massachusett nation at Wessagusset. Having been told that this group of warriors intended to attack an English colony, Standish invited them for a meal and murdered them while they were his guests. True, Standish was not himself a Brownist, but he was hired in Holland by the future Pilgrims and they must have known that he was a brutal mercenary. To quote a recent BBC news item: “a hard man who got his retaliation in first“. The book, having described John Robinson’s objections to the killings, says: despite Robinson’s ethical strictures, the effect was not too damaging. As it was an action done in concert with Indian allies there was no racial element as such and the number of Indians supporting Plymouth actually increased“.[2]
This is to view the matter from an English perspective. The
Plymouth colony was allied with the Pokanoket people led by their Sachem,
Massasoit. The Pokanokets had been in dire straits when the Mayflower arrived,
devastated by smallpox and threatened by the neighbouring Narragansett and
Massachusett peoples. Massasoit saw his opportunity and was able to use his
alliance with the well-armed Plymouth colony to vastly improve his position.
Central to this was Standish’s massacre at Wessagusset, which seems to have
terrified many of the surrounding people into either fleeing or accepting the
domination of Massasoit, who was able thereby to form the Wampanoag confederacy
under his authority.
Massasoit was a remarkable political operator and there must
be a suspicion that he manipulated the whole affair, possibly inventing or
exaggerating the threat that Massachusetts intended to attack the English
settlers. Be that as it may, Massasoit was certainly able to use his alliance
with the English to destroy his enemies. Edward Winslow, a later governor of
Plymouth colony, in describing the effect on other indigenous nations in the
locality, wrote:
“This sudden and unexpected execution hath so terrified and
amazed them, as in like manner they forsook their houses, running to and fro
like men distracted, living in swamps and other desert places, and so brought
manifold diseases amongst themselves, whereof many are dead“.[3]
This highlights the point that, whatever their intentions
may be, colonists arrive in a situation with its pre-existing politics and
divisions where they cannot be neutral. And, before long, the Plymouth colony
had to contend with another neighbour, the puritan-led Massachusetts Bay
colony.
The book is very clear that the Separatists should be
distinguished from “Puritans”, who agreed that the Church of England was
corrupt, but felt it could be reformed. The image of the puritans that emerges
from the book is one of the viciously intolerant bigots. The problem for the
Pilgrims was that in the decade after John Winthrop set up the Massachusets
Bay colony in 1630, 21,000 more settlers arrived, dwarfing the Plymouth colony
which, in any case, had a much poorer harbour. From then on it was Winthrop and
the puritans who set the pace. Even the radical Brownist, Roger Williams,
founder of Providence Plantation on Rhode Island, was instrumental in
persuading the Narragansetts to side with the colonists during the 1637 war
between Massachusetts Bay and the Pequot nation; not that it did him or his
colony any good in the long run as they were excluded from the 1643 military
alliance of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven, known as
the United Colonies of New England. After the English victory, many Pequot
prisoners of war were sold into slavery in the puritan colonies of the West
Indies.
Maybe I could take the liberty of using this review to reply
to the book’s accusation that Danny Reilly and myself, in our book Telling the
Mayflower Story: Thanksgiving or Land Grabbing, Massacres & Slavery?:
“held [the Mayflower pilgrims] responsible for the puritan
persecutions in New England from Williams to Salem, and they were held
responsible, as the first successful colonists in New England, for colonialism,
slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans“.[4]
We clearly need to apologise for a lack of clarity. Our main
purpose was to document how the history of the Mayflower has been used as
propaganda throughout the history of the USA, frequently to sanitise a White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacist version of democracy.
Let there be no misunderstanding, we are not blaming the
Mayflower colonists for genocide and slavery, but we are saying that, out of
the many thousands of early settlers, the romantic story of this small group
has been used consistently to conceal genocide and to whitewash the deep
involvement of New England in the business of slavery.
Once the beaver had become virtually extinct through
over-hunting, the region needed another source of income and turned to
supply the slave islands of the English Caribbean with horses, timber,
candle oil, flour, dried fish and barrels. Rhode Island, the successor to
Providence Plantation, became a centre of the slave trade. The 18th century saw
the rise of the New England Colonies as slave carriers rather than direct
exploiters of slave-labour as the English slave colonies and New England became
mutually economically dependent.
An important trading triangle went between New England to West
Africa then on to the West Indies. A slave could be purchased in Africa for 150
gallons of rum which cost £3 to produce in North America and could be sold for
between £30 and £80 in Barbados. As Boston, Salem and Nantucket becoming the
pre-eminent slaving ports in the region, distilling became the largest
manufacturing industry in New England.
While some of the Mayflower settlers obviously maintained
their principles, others were swept along with the logic of colonisation. Thus,
on the one hand, Roger Williams set up Providence Plantation and, after his
earlier misguided alliance with Massachusetts Bay, maintained peace with the
Narragansetts for 40 years, while on the other hand, Edward Winslow sided with
John Winthrop against religious toleration and ended up as part of Oliver
Cromwell’s “Western Design” that vastly extended England’s slave economy by
seizing Jamaica.
The author has spoken of the way in which the Chartists,
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln have stressed the anti-slavery element of the
Mayflower story. More commonly, however, it has been used to promote
free-enterprise capitalism and conceal the legacy of genocide and slavery. As
Munira Mirza, one-time member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who moved
speedily to the right and became Deputy Mayor of London under Boris Johnson who
subsequently promoted her to Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, wrote:
It is the story of how liberal values were born in northern,
Protestant Europe and how they eventually flourished throughout America. No one
should gloss over the horrific crimes and brutality of many English settlers –
they are a stain on history and ought to be acknowledged in the commemorations
too. But the early ideas of those first few Pilgrims and City of London
investors also drove the eventual defeat of slavery, and have shaped our own
modern ideas of equality and justice, democracy and freedom. None of this would
have been possible without early capitalism and the forces it unleashed.[5]
While disagreeing with the book’s conclusions and rejecting
the use that has been made of it by the likes of Munira Mirza, I recognise this
book as an important contribution to the debate, with a wealth of detail on the
early years of the Pilgrims in Leiden. Anyone interested in the political and organisational
world of the dissenting religious sects of the late 16th and early 17th
centuries will find it most useful.
Steve Cushion is joint author with Danny Reilly of Telling
the Mayflower Story: Thanksgiving or Land Grabbing, Massacres & Slavery?,
Socialist History Society
and
Up Down Turn Around, The Political Economy of Slavery and
the Socialist Case for Reparations, Caribbean Labour Solidarity
________________________________________
[1] Mayflower in Britain, p.330 & 314 [page references
are to the Kindle version]
[2] Mayflower in Britain, p.231
[3] Quoted in: Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower, A Voyage to
War, Penguin, 2006, p.154
[4] Mayflower in Britain p.330
[5] Munira Mirza, Let’s celebrate the pilgrims, not demonise
them, UnHerd, 2018
Ann Hughes on ‘Side-Taking in the English Civil War’
I have spent just over half an hour this morning watching a
video recording of Professor Ann Hughes talking to an audience at Cheadle and
Marple College on 29th September 2018 on the subject of the choices people
made on which side to support in the conflicts of the 1640s in England. England
was her main focus although she did have comments to make on the Scottish
revolt against Charles I of 1638 and the Irish Rebellion of 1641 later in her
remarks.
She had some very sensible remarks to make about the nature
of English society in the pre-Civil War period, on the importance of the spread
of literacy and of the availability of news in print, on economic and social
changes affecting the fortunes of the upper ranks of society, on the prosperity
of the ‘middling sort’ and the difficulties of the poor.
There was also guidance on divisions over how far the Church
of England had been fully or partially ‘reformed’ and on reactions to Charles
I’s ecclesiastical policies that aroused fears of a return to Popery. Ann
Hughes made some important comments too on the degrees to which the Long Parliament
and the King succeeded in appealing to potential supporters in the country via
print and oath-taking.
One or two of her claims did strike me as questionable. It
was not just in Holland in the late-sixteenth century that print played a vital
role in fuelling conflict: the same was true, for example, in the French Wars
of Religion and, indeed, in the Frondes of the period between 1648 and 1653 in
the same country. But I do have more fundamental issues to raise which might
not, perhaps, have been appropriate for an audience of sixth-formers.
First of all, there is the issue of economic and social
change before 1640 or 1642. One of the key features of English society was the
strengthening of the position of large landowners from c.1580 first analysed by
W.R.Emerson: their dominance had increased, not diminished. This had profound
implications because of the links of family and locality, political and
religious affiliation upon which she remarked in the case of the 2nd Lord
Brooke’s influence in Warwickshire. These linkages lay beyond the reach of the
Parliamentary, Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes of the 1640s and 1650s and
made ‘revolution’ in the sense in which she and many other historians have used
the term impossible. There were ‘grands soulevements’ in this period but,
whatever else may be said, no revolutions in the Marxist sense.
The second major point I should like to make is that, in
England as in Ireland and Scotland, there was a significant retreat from the government by bargaining and consent under Charles I’s rule. There was more
emphasis on central direction and less willingness to respond to local
objections. The Book of Orders, Forest boundary extensions and Ship Money
testify to this in England: the failure to observe the Graces in Ireland and
the attempt to recover Church property there; and the Act of Revocation, the
Book of Canons and the revised Prayer Book in Scotland testify to these
processes. There was more in common between the Stuart kingdoms than could be
acknowledged in so brief a compass.
The events of the 1640s and 1650s exacted a terrible price
in human and animal lives and the destruction of property. No one denies the
legacy of political, philosophical and religious speculation that they left.
But, if these conflicts were highly likely by 1640, so, too, was the failure of
the protagonists to create a new ‘reformed’ world.
by Chris Thompson
A morning’s reflection
Like most people, my daily routine is fairly fixed. I check
my incoming e-mails, look at the Google alerts I have for topics in early
modern history and then look at twitter for items of interest posted by
historians. I do not look as often as I should at the account of Susan Amussen,
the widow of the late David Underdown, but this morning, thirty-five years
after their marriage, she put up a photograph from their celebrations that
conveyed her absolute delight on that day.
My original intention had been to comment on Neil
McKendrick’s memoir on the life of Jack Plumb, the existence of which I
discovered via Keith Livesey’s blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. It arrived on the
last day of August and I finished reading it on Wednesday.[1] I do remember
Plumb delivering the James Ford lectures in Oxford in Hilary Term of 1965 and
hearing from him how the Tory Party of the late-seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries was now finished.
But I had no idea of the personal animosities and academic
feuds which Plumb was pursuing in Cambridge and elsewhere. Needless to say, I
was surprised to learn a day late when reading the last volume of Isaiah
Berlin’s correspondence that Plumb had had a heart attack whilst dancing too
vigorously at the Buckingham Palace party after the marriage of Lady Diana
Spencer to Prince Charles. Plumb apparently had not received a sufficiently
prestigious card of invitation.[2]
More seriously, I spotted on the website of the National
Archives a piece by Richard Knight on the levying of Ship Money in the 1630s.
He has been working on the Privy Council’s registers for the 1630s which,
inevitably, contain a good deal of material on this subject. Oddly though, he
has not used Alison Gill’s highly important 1991 Sheffield University thesis
which illustrates how a collection of the levy collapsed in the late-1630s
after the judgment in Hampden’s case.
Christopher Thompson 4th September 2020
[1] Neil McKendrick, Sir John Plumb. The Hidden Life of a
Great Historian. A Personal Memoir. (EER Publishers. Brighton, Sussex. 2020)
[2] Affirming. Letters 1975-1997. Isaiah Berlin. Edited by
Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle. (Pimlico. London. 2017), page 174.
A Short Note on Lawrence Stone’s article on ‘The Revival of
Narrative’
Quite by chance, I came across Lawrence Stone’s 1979 article
on this subject yesterday evening. It was originally published in Past and
Present and subsequently appeared in his 1987 collection of essays, The Past
and Present Revisited. I have commented before on the way in which Stone, who
was at Princeton University from 1963, lost touch with the evolution of
historiographical thinking in the U.K. about the origins, course and outcomes
of the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Inevitably,
perhaps,
Stone was more than surprised by the development of
‘revisionism’ from the middle of that decade onwards. This sense of
disassociation has something to do, I suspect, with Stone’s account of the
works of “the new British school of young antiquarian empiricists” led by
Conrad Russell and John Kenyon and urged on by Geoffrey Elton. According to
Stone, they were writing political narratives implicitly denying that there was
any deep-seated meaning to history save for the accidents of fortune and
personality and trying to remove any sense of idealism or ideology from the two
English revolutions of the seventeenth century. This was pure neo-Namierism
just when that phenomenon was dying as an approach to the eighteenth-century.
Stone speculated that this attitude to political history might stem from the
inexorable economic decline and reduced power of Britain.
There was something quite odd about this analysis. Elton and
Kenyon were historians of Stone’s own generation and, while Elton had certainly
objected to the kind of economic and social determinism that appealed to Stone
as an explanation of the English Revolution, neither he nor Kenyon could be
accurately described as a “revisionist”.
Russell himself was in his forties by 1979 and roughly a
decade or so older than figures like Kevin Sharpe or John Morrill. His act of
intellectual liberation from the presuppositions of Tawney, Stone and Hill was
a much slower process than that experienced by his younger contemporaries. It
was also based, although this point has not been fully grasped by most
specialists in seventeenth-century political history, on a mistaken reading of
early Stuart Parliamentary history.
From as far back as R. G. Usher’s work in 1924, the
existence of “opposition” had been disputed: John Ball’s brilliant Cambridge
Ph.D. on Sir John Elliot had dealt a death blow to Whig interpretations while
J.H.Hexter had repudiated the idea of a struggle for sovereignty in 1958:
J.S.Roskell had explained as early as 1964 that ideas about the House of
Commons exercising ‘power’ were fallacious before the end of the seventeenth
century.
Had Stone been better informed about political history, he
might have made much more telling criticisms of the so-called ‘revisionists’.
Between Stone and those he criticised in 1979, there was more than just a
difference in approach to the study of this period. Like Christopher Hill, he
had been considered up until the mid-1970s as being at the forefront of
re-interpreting the seismic events of the 1640s and 1650s.
But suddenly there had been a significant change in the
historiographical and intellectual atmosphere. The old assumption that
political history simply reflected material changes in the economy of English,
Welsh, Scottish and Irish societies, that, indeed, its course had been
essentially explained already, was exploded. Stone like many others was no
longer a fashionable guide to these events. Admittedly, he and others tried to
push back as the commentaries produced by Hexter and his allies showed. It was
too late. The ‘antiquarian empiricists’ now commanded the field, at least until
c.1990. Lament it as he did, Stone’s time was over.
C Thompson
I first met Valerie Pearl in the summer of 1966 when she was
a lecturer at Somerville College, Oxford. I had gone to see her at the
suggestion of my supervisor, Christopher Hill, to ask her advice on the 2nd
Earl of Warwick’s mercantile connections in London in the 1640s. She impressed
me with her depth of knowledge and her scholarship as she did when I met her by
accident the following autumn on a train from Oxford to Paddington.
I was not, I fear, a very good conversationalist and had to
improve greatly in the following spring when Hugh Trevor-Roper asked me to
assist her on a project then being funded by the University’s Faculty of Modern
History. I got to know her in the Manuscript Room of the British Library where
she was pursuing her research into the Parliamentary politics of the 1640s.
After a while, I learnt how well-informed she was about academic politics and
what a good sense of humour she had.
I was saddened to note how little attention her death in
2016 attracted at that time. She had been born in 1926, the daughter of a
trades union official, Cyril Bence, who was later Labour M.P. for East
Dunbartonshire from 1959 to 1970. Valerie Bence was educated in Birmingham
before entering St Anne’s College, Oxford. Hugh Trevor-Roper’s letters suggest
that she was at that stage of her life attracted to Marxism: her doctoral
research on the city of London in the early stages of the English Civil War was
certainly supervised by Christopher Hill of Balliol College, the leading
Marxist historian of the period then in Oxford even though she was later more
drawn to Trevor-Roper’s views.
Her thesis was, so I understand, lent by Hill to Perez Zagorin,
then on the far left himself, and had to be published rather hurriedly by the
Oxford University Press in 1961 under the title London and the Outbreak of the
Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics. It was to be her
only book but was seminal in inspiring later work on the city of London in the
latter part of the twentieth century.
The 1960s were undoubtedly her best period as a historian.
Tall, blond-haired with dark spectacles and very elegantly dressed, she wrote
and published important articles on the middle group in the House of Commons
after John Pym’s death and on the Royal Independents whilst a lecturer at
Somerville College, Oxford. Unfortunately, her husband became ill and she was
unable to take up a Fellowship at Somerville College because she could not move
full-time to Oxford. Instead, she accepted a Readership in London History at
University College, London at the invitation of Joel Hurstfield and Robin
Humphreys.
The History Department there lacked the stellar figures to
be found in Oxford (with the exception of the young Nicholas Tyacke) and, after
producing articles on Puritans and Fifth Columnists in the capital and on
London’s Counter-Revolution, her output came effectively to a halt. In 1981,
she accepted an invitation to become President of New Hall, Cambridge in
succession to Rosemary Murray and found herself submerged not just in the
administrative duties of that post but also in the difficult politics of that
college. When she retired in the mid-1990s, she had transformed that college’s
fortunes but had not fulfilled her potential as a historian. Sadly, she was
never to do so.
The obituaries published after her death were brief and not
very informative. In her prime, she was a formidable scholar with extensive knowledge
of the politics of the 1640s, far better informed than most contemporaries of
hers. Valerie Pearl was a woman of charm and high intelligence as well as
someone with a firm conviction in doing what was right for her family, friends
and institutions. Her passing needs greater acknowledgement and her
historiographical legacy more praise.
Chris Thompson
On Christopher Hill By Charles James
The number of people whose doctoral research was supervised
by Christopher Hill must, I suspect, be diminishing year by year. It is over a
decade and a half since he died and longer still since he ceased being active
as a historian. His allies, former students and academic proteges are
inevitably being culled by mortality too. My own memories of him are mixed: in personal
terms, we got on perfectly well over several decades even though I was never
sympathetic to his approach to the early modern period or to his political
views.
My first encounter with Hill was as an undergraduate when I
heard him give a series of lectures in Balliol College’s hall which later found
their way into print in his book, Society and Puritanism. His general points
were buttressed by copious quotations from late-sixteenth and early to
mid-seventeenth century printed sources, most of them pamphlets and sermons. He
had a rather off-putting habit of sniffing after every two or three sentences
which I found rather disconcerting.
Two and a half years later, I found myself assigned to him
as my supervisor for my prospective research. Our initial talk took place in
his office as Master of Balliol. He was interested in finding out what my
social origins were, what the cost of my watch (which was one of the very first
to show dates) had been and to invite me to the Monday evening parties to which
his other pupils and girls from St Hilda’s College, where his wife taught, came
for drinks. And that was about it. (I gave up on the Monday evening parties
after attending one or two because I could not hear myself think due to the
noise.)
Later meetings took place in a room where he had a chair
held by a chain coming down from the ceiling. He used to sit in this chair
swinging slightly from side to side whilst saying nothing. I found this silence
disconcerting: it was only a year or two later that I was told that this was an
old Oxford technique to encourage students to be forthcoming about their work.
It did not work for me.
Much more seriously, Christopher Hill, for all his
encyclopaedic knowledge of printed sources, was completely at sea as far as
manuscript sources were concerned. I never saw him reading manuscripts in the
Bodleian, in the British Museum or the Public Record Office or in any county
archive then or in the better part of forty years that followed. Since I was
desperately searching for the lost archives of the people I was investigating,
his inability to help was a problem I had not anticipated. His comments on my
written work were rather perfunctory too, probably because he soon recognised
that I was not a follower or potential follower of his Marxist approach in any
sense at all. As a potential protégé or candidate for academic jobs, I was
without a promise from his point of view.
I did see him once or twice after I ceased being a
postgraduate – in Malet Street in London and again at The Huntington Library in
California. He and his wife were friendly and polite but I got the distinct
impression that he had found the changes in the historiography of pre- and
post-revolutionary England since the mid-1970s invalid, unacceptable and
nonsensical. He had gone on writing as if they had not happened and thereby
lost touch with later generations of historians. This was sad but it happens
sooner or later to most academic historians. I was pleased to have known him
although never convinced by his arguments at any stage.
On the Removal of the Oliver Cromwell Statue, Yet Again
“And if a history shall be written of these times and
transactions, it will be said, it will not be denied, but that these things
that I have spoken are true”.
Oliver Cromwell
“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth
piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be
sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another
drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be
said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice
toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to
see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the
nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his
widow and his orphan to do all which may
achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all
nations.”
Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
The last few weeks have seen the removal of statues in the
United States and Britain that were related to the slave trade. While this may
seem justifiable for the moment, the indiscriminate nature of the removal of
statues is troubling, especially when now statues of revolutionary figures
such as George Washington, who led the American Revolution and Abraham Lincoln
who led the Civil War that ended slavery are being removed.
The attacking of revolutionary figures has now crossed the
Atlantic to Britain with the calls for statues of Oliver Cromwell to be
removed. The only thing missing in this reactionary nonsense is the call for
the exhuming of his body in order to drag it through the London streets and
place his head on a spike above Westminister Hall again.
Any historian or general reader of English history will know
that the calling for the statue of Oliver Cromwell to be removed from outside
Parliament is a yearly occurrence. Two years ago the Sunday Telegraph ran an
article called “Parliament’s statue of Cromwell becomes the latest memorial hit
by ‘rewriting history’ row”. The article’s author Patrick Sawer must have had a
slow day in the office because in the article he says a bitter row has broken
out between historians. His article was stretching things a bit. The one
historian quoted by the newspaper was Jeremy Crick, described as “a social
historian” who has called for the statue to be pulled down.
His justification for this being Cromwell’s anti-religious
zeal and comparing Cromwell to the actions of the Taliban. He says “Its
banishment would be poetic justice for his Taliban-like destruction of so many
of England’s cultural and religious artefacts carried out by his fanatical
Puritan followers.”
It is hard to take Crick seriously. Even a cursory search
would find that he has written next to nothing on Cromwell and is hardly a
world authority on Cromwell and the English revolution. It would seem that the
only thing Crick specialises in is the calling for “unloved statues” to be
pulled down.
What makes this year, so very different is that it is a
Labour Party member that is calling for it. Lord Adonis who is a Labour Peer
and a “Remainer” has called for the statue to be torn down because Cromwell
committed “genocide” in his conquest of
Ireland (1649-53).
The peer said: “I think Cromwell’s statue should be removed
from outside Parliament and put in a museum. Cromwell was a military dictator
who ended up abolishing Parliament and committing genocide in Ireland. He has
no place outside Parliament – unlike Churchill, who led the successful national
and international resistance to Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship.”
It must be said that this “debate” while having a strong
historical interest is also an expression of how reactionary and right-wing the
Labour Party has become. It is also an expression of how large sections of the
English bourgeoisie cannot defend or even remember its revolutionary
traditions.
The English bourgeoisie has had an ambivalent and
contradictory attitude towards Cromwell and for that matter, the English
revolution. While paying lip service to the fact that he was the father of
Parliamentary democracy albeit with a bit of military dictatorship thrown in,
they have always been wary of drawing attention to their revolutionary past.
They would prefer that people saw Britain’s history as being tranquil. That any
change that took place was gradual and progress was peaceful through class
compromise without the violent excess of revolution. This illusion is more
important in light of today’s explosive political and economic situation.
It is perhaps all the more ironic that it is a section of
the Tory party that has opposed the removal. As the Ashfield Conservative MP
Lee Anderson said: “I walk past the Cromwell statue every single day to work
and he is a daily reminder to me of our history, good and bad. I would strongly
suggest he stays there and that it should be Lord Adonis who is removed from
the House of Lords and put in a museum.”Anderson accused Adonis of having “a
juvenile, one-dimensional view of history”.
Several Irish historians have opposed the removal with
Professor Louise Richardson arguing that the statue was of educational value
and should be preserved no matter how controversial. She said that it was wrong
to pretend that history should be changed because people do not agree with it.
The erasing of revolutionary figures and revolutions for
that matter from history has a long pedigree. The most infamous being Joseph
Stalin’s removal of leading Bolsheviks such as Leon Trotsky from the historical
record.
The successful removal of the Cromwell statue would set a
dangerous precedent. It would embolden all those inside and outside of
academia, especially those who have been involved in a tendency in historiography
as Professor James Oakes points out “to erase revolutions from all of human
history. First, the English revisionists said there was no English Revolution,
and then François Furet came along and said there was no French Revolution. We
have historians telling us that the Spanish-American revolutions were really
just fought among colonial elites that got out of hand and happened to result
in the abolition of slavery”.[1]
If Cromwell were alive today, he would be more than a bit
angry towards today’s English bourgeoise who owes everything it has to his
leadership during the English revolution.
Marxist’s, on the other hand, have no ambivalence towards
the great bourgeois revolutionary, and workers and youth as the Russian
revolutionary Leon Trotsky said can learn a lot from Cromwell’s leadership: ”
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”.[2]
To conclude the consistent controversy over this statue does
beg the question of why does it keep coming up. Firstly the issue of the
English revolution has never been a mere question of studying a past event; it
is because many of the significant issues that were discussed and fought for on
the battlefield in the 1640s are still
contemporary issues. What do we do with the monarchy, the issue of social
inequality addressed by groups such as the Levellers? Until these and many more
are resolved, we will keep getting more calls for Cromwell’s statue to be
removed.
________________________________________
[1]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/06/pers-j06.html
[2] www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
Susan Myra Kingsbury and The Records of the Virginia Company
of London
For more than a century, Susan Myra Kingsbury has been a
major figure in the historiography of early colonial Virginia. Her edition of
The Records of the Virginia Company of London published between 1906 and 1935
offers an essential foundation for all subsequent studies of the early years of
the first permanent English settlement in North America. The works published
last year (2019) to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of
the Virginia Assembly and the almost simultaneous arrival of the first African
slaves inevitably drew on her volumes.
Susan Kingsbury was born in San Pablo, California in 1870
and was educated in that State before becoming a teacher at Lowell high School
in San Francisco from 1892 to 1900. Subsequently, she went to Columbia
University in New York to study colonial economic history.
Whilst a student there, she travelled to England to collect
documentary material for her Ph.D. thesis entitled An Introduction to the
Records of the Virginia Company of London for which she was awarded her
doctorate in 1905. Thereafter, her career took her into posts in industrial and
technical education, economics and social work. She retired as Professor of
Social Economy at Bryn Mawr College in 1936 and died at the age of 79 in
November, 1949.
Unfortunately, no copy of her thesis appears to be available
online at present. However, given its length at just over two hundred pages,
it is likely that it was identical to the work published by the Government
Printing Office in 1905 entitled, An Introduction to Records of the Virginia Company
of London with a Bibliographical List of the Extant Documents.
It was produced with a foreword by Herbert Putnam, the
Librarian of Congress, praising her work and the counsel of her adviser,
Professor Herbert L. Osgood of Columbia University. A year later, when the
first two volumes of The Records of the Virginia Company of London edited by
S.M.Kingsbury (and containing the Court Book of the company from 1619 to 1624)
were published, Herbert Putnam and Herbert L. Osgood again provided prefatory
remarks. The text of Dr Kingsbury’s introduction was identical to that of 1905
(and probably to that of her thesis as well).
The extensive list of documents she provided for the company
and colony from just before 1609 also appears to be identical to that published
in Volumes 3 and 4 of The Records of the Virginia Company of London which
appeared in 1933 and 1935 respectively. A handful of emendations were made to
include material from the proceedings of the Privy Council relating to Virginia
and to note that one or two documents could no longer be traced. Some material,
which had come to light since 1905-1906 and which had been published elsewhere,
e.g. in the Sackville Papers before 1623, was omitted. But, to a very large
extent, all four volumes edited by Susan Kingsbury reflected work she had done
by 1905.
This coverage of the extant archives was not, however,
complete. She had reproduced only seventy eight of the documents relating to
Virginia from the Ferrar Papers held in Magdalene College, Cambridge. As David
Ransome’s more recent work has shown, there were five hundred and fifteen such
documents in that collection. Similarly but on a much smaller scale, her
assumption that the colonial papers of the Duke of Manchester then held in the
Public Record Office in Chancery Lane, London constituted the entire archive of
Sir Nathaniel Rich and the 2nd Earl of Warwick was also mistaken.
There were and are scattered pieces of evidence related to
Virginia’s colonisation still to be found elsewhere in English archives. When
Wesley Frank Craven composed his study of The Dissolution of the Virginia
Company (published in 1932), he paid a thoroughly well-deserved tribute to
Susan Kingsbury’s invaluable edition of the company’s records. He was right to
do so as later historians would wholeheartedly agree but the hunt for supplementary
sources still.
Christopher Thompson
29th June, 2020
Michael Mendle, ed. The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army,
the Levellers, and the English State. Cambridge University Press, 2001. xii +
297 pp. + 1 illus. $64.95. Review by Keith Livesey
“I think that the
poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and
therefore truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man that is to live under
a government ought first, by his own consent, to put himself under that
government”.
Although the debate was recorded by William Clarke using shorthand, his documents lay dormant for over 243 years. They were found by a librarian at Worcester College Oxford who told the historian Charles Firth and the rest is history.
The discovery of these documents has been called a “serendipitous find” and has led to a significant amount of historiography surrounding the events at Putney. It is strange given the extraordinary radical nature of the debates that most of this historiography has been dominated by a set of conservative/revisionist historians. The collection of essays that came out of a conference held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1997, the 350th anniversary of the debates continues this conservative historiographical stranglehold.
One such contributor Blair Worden said it was “fitting that
the 350th anniversary was celebrated in two places: in Putney Church, with
speeches by Christopher Hill and Tony Benn, representatives of the tradition
that has looked east to Moscow; and, in the conference from which this book has
emerged, in Washington, the capital of the free world”.[1]
It is, of course palpably not true. Two themes run through
the book. Theme one is to play down the influence of the Levellers, and theme
two is to oppose a Marxist analysis of the English bourgeois revolution. The
Putney debates started on October 28th 1647. A Meeting of the army’s General
Council of the Parliament’s New Model Army met to discuss the state of the
revolution and more specifically the Levellers document The Agreement of the
People and the more conservative document The Heads of Proposals.
A Counter document the Heads of Proposals was issued by the
Grandees. A much more moderate document. “Heads of Proposals” was the document
to be adopted later on by Cromwell’s government. It recommended a written
constitution and led to Cromwell being given powers that bordered on a
dictatorship. Oliver Cromwell came to the Putney debates in 1647 from a
position of considerable political and military strength. Although the fact
that he still needed to invite radical elements within the army to the Putney
Debates meant that he and his general’s position of power had been far from
consolidated.
In the months leading up to Putney Cromwell and his generals faced a growing threat to their leadership. They faced a two-pronged attack from the Presbyterians and the radical groups. One of the most important radical tracts printed by October 29th was called A Call to All Soldiers of the Army by the Free People of England which was a defence of the radical regiments and demanded a purge of the parliament amidst a call for the agitators to meet as an ‘exact council’ and to act with the ‘truest lovers of the people you could find’. One of the main aims of the document was to expose the “hypocrisy” and “deceit” of Cromwell and Ireton. It must have been with extreme reluctance that Cromwell invited the agitators to Putney. In doing so his aim was to defeat these forces politically at Putney and then militarily later on.
Politically Cromwell was to the right of the English bourgeois revolution. In many ways his actions at Putney were largely opportunistic, he promised the Levellers to look into their demands but in reality, he had no intention of adopting the Agreement. He read very little outside of the bible and had only a superficial understanding of the radical tracts produced during the early period of the revolution. An interesting PhD dissertation topic would be to examine what was in his library at the time of his death.
It is clear that Cromwell at Putney completely
underestimated his political opponents in the army. The documents presented by
Leveller supporters in the army clearly shocked and dismayed this conservative
of gentleman. The debates brought to the surface deep seated ideas regarding
property, democracy and the future course of the revolution. Political
divisions were becoming sharper in the run up to the Putney Debates. Even
deeper divisions among historians have meant that there is no agreement as to
how radical the army was or when its radicalisation started. This
radicalisation did not fall from the sky. The ideas that came to fore at Putney
were not only exacerbated by war they were provoked by grievances over pay and
condition, the fact of the matter is that these developed into broader
political demands is because they were the products of longer gestation.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this collection of
essays is the absence of any examination of what was said at Putney as Rachel
Foxley points out “it is sad that an entire volume on the Putney debates should
have so little room for analysis of the vocabulary and dynamics of the debates
in terms of political thought. There is much more work to be done here. The
debates are more than a script written for the actors by simple circumstance,
and all we now know about their context should enable us to read their content
in genuinely illuminating new ways”.[3]
If any proof was needed about the overarching conservative
nature of these essays, it is that most of them were influenced by leading
revisionist historian Mark Kishlansky who attended the conference but did not
write an essay for this collection. Kishlansky classified the period as being
marked by its “vaunted peace and harmony,”However, this was not a period that
was marked by its its “vaunted peace and harmony”. The radicalisation brought
about by heated attacks on the army by the Presbterains provoked one writer to
say “it is objected to us, that we would have toleration of all sectaries,
schismatiques, heretiques, blasphemies, errours, licentiousnesse, and
wickednesses”.[4]
The hostility to the radicalisation of the soldiers was
given further political expression by the Presbyterian faction in parliament
when it published its ‘Declaration of Dislike’ in the House of Commons. The
document provocatively called the soldiers “enemies to the State and disturbers
of the public peace”. The document represented a declaration of war against
both independent and radicals alike. It was an expression growing class
differences contained within and outside of parliament. As Austin Woolrych
commented, “seldom can ten words have done more mischief than Holles’s ‘enemies
of the state and disturbers of the public peace”.[5]
There existed a growing nerviness inside the Presbyterian
party within parliament that was caused by the growing calls inside the army
for more democracy, protests against social inequality and an end to property.
In answer to the The Declaration of Dislike the army said “We were not a mere
mercenary army, hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state, but called forth
and conjured by the several declarations of parliament to the defence of our
own and the People’s just Rights and Liberties”.[6]
This would have sent
shockwaves through the Presbyterian Party. Austin Woolrych in his essay takes a
very cautious approach to the Putney Debates. Woolrych somewhat controversially
states that the army had “refrained from political activity despite the
tendency of the Presbyterians both religious and political, to portray it as a
hotbed of sectaries and radicals.” If this is true then did Putney drop from
the skies? Is there no connection between the activity of the army before
Putney and during? Surely history is not just a series of unconnected episodes.
Woolrych continues
“Anyone who strains to hear the voice of the soldiery in the Putney
debates should be aware that, apart from one brief interjection by an unnamed
agent, the only troopers who spoke that day were Sex by and Everard, and on the
other two days recorded by Clarke the only others who opened their mouths were
Lockyer and Allen. No agitator of a foot regiment is known to have spoken. Out
of just fifty officer-agitators listed in October, twelve spoke in the course
of the three-recorded days five of them only once, and very briefly. We should
be very cautious about treating the Putney debates, wonderful as they are as
the typical voice of the army’?[7]
This theme of downplaying the influence of the radicals at
Putney is continued by other essayists. While it is true that the ordinary
soldiers were thin on the ground, the politics that were debated at Putney had
a deep resonance inside the army. Even Woolrych is forced to describe such
incidents where ‘open incitements to mutiny and were already bearing poisoned
fruit. Fairfax had lately ordered Colonel Robert Lilburn’s foot regiment to
Newcastle, for sound military reasons but a party of new agents bearing copies
of the Case of the Armie overtook it and urged it not to let the army be
divided.Thereupon its soldiers turned back, held an unauthorised rendezvous and
refused to obey their officers. Other regiments were in a state of incipient
mutiny before the debates at Putney were would up”.
One thing not mentioned by Woolrych is that Presbyterians
alongside the Independents had a lot to lose if Lilburne and his
revolutionaries had their way. A large number of MP’s had grown rich out of the
civil war and intended to keep their newfound wealth come what may. Many in
parliament had grown rich from the change of relations of land ownership,
although the enclosure and the sequestration church holdings had begun before
the civil war it was continued with during the first revolution with fresh
impetus. The Long Parliament had got rid of the Episcopate and to administer
its interests, it organised a committee for the sale of church lands.
Often the officers and soldiers of the New Model Army were
permitted to buy land cheap. Sometimes exchange for their unpaid salary and at
half price. Fifth Monarchist’s like Lieutenant colonel Thomas Harrison became
very rich out this process.According to Evgeny Pashukanis “The Civil War
between Parliament and the Crown thus had, as a result, the mass transfer of
property (which was partly annulled upon the Restoration). Not less than half
of all the movable property and half of the lands, rents and incomes of the
noblemen who fought on the side of the Crown fell under sequestration. In order
to raise the sequestration, it was necessary to pay a composition in the amount
of approximately one-fifth of the total value. Such an operation was conducted
in 1644 on not less than 3,000 “gentlemen”. The direct profit from this measure
was received by the Presbyterian party which then held sway in parliament, a
party whose members became rich buying land cheaply, squeezing out the
Royalists who had fallen under sequestration, with money at usurious interest,
and finally, releasing sequestration for a bribe. The corruption which
developed gave one of the major trump cards to the Independents and their
struggle against the parliamentary majority. In the interest of justice it
should be noted that after this when Cromwell’s army triumphed over parliament,
the Independent majority of the “Rump” began to engage in the same dirty
business”.[8]
Cromwell may have led the debate at Putney, but thanks to
Barbara Taft’s excellent essay we get to know better the real theoretical
leader of the Grandees at Putney which was Henry Ireton. Ireton and other
members of the General Council of the new Model army resided in Putney church
essentially to discuss the Levellers Agreement of the People from October 28th to
November 11th 1647. According to H N Brailsford’ When one compares these
debates with those of its sittings at Reading in July, it is clear that in
three months the temper and outlook of the army were changed. At Putney, the
mood was sultry and tense’. While it true that the grandees and the agitators
were moving roughly in the same direction in July by October a huge chasm was
to open up between them “.[9]
It is clear from the Clarke transcripts that Cromwell was no
great theoretician but it worth quoting one of his better contributions: While
it took Cromwell a little while to understand what was going on at Putney when
he saw the Levellers Pamphlet The Agreement of the People he reacted in this
way on October 28th “These things that you have now offered, they are new to
us: they are things that we have not at all (at least in this method and thus
circumstantially) had any opportunity to consider of, because they came to us
but thus, as you see; this is the first time we had a view of them. Truly this
paper does contain in it very great alterations of the very government of the
kingdom, alterations from that government that it hath been under, I believe I
may almost say, since it was a nation –I say, I think I may almost say so. And
what the consequences of such an alteration as this would be, if there were
nothing else to be considered, wise men and godly men ought to consider. I say,
if there were nothing else to be considered but the very weight and nature of
the things contained in this paper. Therefore, although the pretensions in it,
and the expressions in it, are very plausible, and if we could leap out of one
condition into another that had so specious things in it as this hath, I
suppose there would not be much dispute – though perhaps some of these things
may be very well disputed. How do we know if, whilst we are disputing these
things, another company of men shall not gather together, and put out papers
plausible perhaps as this? I do not know why it might not be done by that time
you have agreed upon this, or got hands to it if that be the way. And not only
another, and another, but many of this kind. And if so, what do you think the
consequence of that would be? Would it not be confusion? Would it not be utter
confusion? Would it not make England like the Switzerland country, one canton
of the Swiss against another and one county against another to go on along with
it, and whether those great difficulties that lie in our way are in a
likelihood to be either overcome or removed”.?
While Cromwell was no great thinker Ireton was. Ireton was
ambitious, and with a class understanding to match. He had a valuable ability
to process complicated theoretical arguments and respond to them on the spur of
the moment. Ireton’s goal at Putney was to diffuse the more radical elements of
the Leveller programme and if possible, co-opt them into the Grandes strategy
if this failed Cromwell and Ireton were not adverse to use force to achieve
their aims. Ireton would use the Levellers up to a point as a bulwark against
the Presbyterians in Parliament they were after all according to E. Bernstein” were the first among the people
and the simple soldier agitators in the army to understand the necessity of
energetic opposition for the counter-revolutionary elements of Parliament”.[10]
It was a dangerous game played by Cromwell and Ireton
according to Pashukanis “One can have doubts about the degree to which Cromwell
and the other leaders of the Independents truly wished to remain loyal to the
Presbyterian majority in parliament. But there is no doubt that the soldiers’
organisations never entered into their calculations for the purpose of their
struggle with parliament. It is one thing to put pressure on parliament by
relying upon a disciplined armed force subordinate to oneself, but entirely
another thing to create an illegal organisation embracing the mass of soldiers
and awakening their independent activity, an organisation which immediately and
inevitably had to bring forth socio-political demands extending far beyond the
ideas of the moderate Independents”.[11]
As was said earlier, the historiography of the Putney
Debates has been dominated by right-leaning historians. It is beginning to
change as left historians begin to even up the score. It is worth quoting one
of them John Rees who recently wrote “The main axis of debate on both sides
assumes that what is under discussion is a universal male franchise. Cromwell
and Ireton object to this proposal on the basis that if the poor are given the
vote, they will use it to take property away from the rich. Rainsborough
responds that unless the poor are given the vote ‘, I say the one parte shall
make hewers of wood and drawers of water’ of the rest and ‘the greatest parte
of the Nation bee enslav’d’. Sexby argued that though the soldiers had little
property in the kingdom that they must be included in its political settlement.
Only on one occasion during the Putney debates does Leveller
Maximillian Petty retreat from the idea of universal male suffrage. Petty
suggested that servants or those dependent on others might be excluded from the
franchise. This reads as a rather off-the-cuff response to debate with Henry
Ireton, who has himself admitted that the franchise might be ‘better than it
is’. John Rede also adds an interesting cautionary note. He says that those who
have given themselves over to ‘voluntary servitude’ should also be excluded
from the vote”.[12]
As was already mentioned by Rachel Foxley, the essays
collected in this book could have done with more of the actual debate. Perhaps
the famous exchange of these debates was between Colonel Rainborowe, leader of
the Levellers in parliament and H. Ireton, Cromwell’s son in law. Rainborowe
stated that ‘The poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the
greatest he and therefore every man that is to live under a government ought,
first, by his own consent. To put himself under the government’.
He continues ‘Sir, I see that it is impossible to have
liberty but all property must be taken away. If you say it, it must be so. But
I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath
fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to
make him perpetual slave. We do find in all presses that go forth none must be
pressed that are freehold men. When these gentlemen fall out among themselves,
they shall press the poor scrubs to come and kill one another for them’. Do
these comments represent an individual or did his words echo a much wider yet
unconscious expression that Putney represented not just the people that took
part but had a broader significance in the army and within the country itself”.
To the participants at Putney his words would have seemed
revolutionary but as Christopher Hill argued ‘The Leveller conception of free
Englishmen, was thus restricted, even if much wider, than that embodied in the
existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men
entitled to vote. But manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it”.[13]
Ireton recognised that if the franchise were widened, it
would threaten the Independents interest. As Hill again explains ‘Defending the
existing franchise, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine “that by a man being
born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands
here and of all things here”. The vote was rightly restricted to those who “had
a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom”. Namely, the persons in whom all
lands lies and those incorporation’s in whom all trading lies”.[14]
Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them
and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded all free Englishmen. If
by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free. Who
could freely dispose of their labour? Then Ireton could see no reason why men
had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to point out
that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in parliament
and they will give equal property rights to everybody.
The centrepiece of this collection of essays is the one by
John Morrill and Phillip Baker. This type essay is what Jim Holstun called a
“revisionist manifesto”.Their refusal to call the Levellers and their
supporters agitators preferring the less radical sounding adjutators sets the
tone for the rest of their essay. Morrill’s and Baker’s argument is that main
voice at the Putney debates of 1647 was that of New Model Army soldiers not of
the Levellers. They argue that these soldiers were not as radical as some
left-leaning historians have made out.
What is also is clear is the influence of Mark Kishlansky on
this essay. Even amongst conservative historians, this essay was controversial.
So much so that it provoked a heated debate at the conference with other
historians providing in writing their differences. It is a shame that a
modern-day William Clarke did not record the debate.
The Levellers undoubtedly were a petit-bourgeois party.
While some historians including Morrill protest that capitalist relations were
not that developed to describe them as such. There were sufficient
bourgeois-capitalist relationships, at the 1640s to warrant such a claim.
Indeed, capitalist relations had not developed to a large extent into the
English countryside, to such an extent demands could not enter into their
programme for a general division of land.
The Levellers appeared and were organised as a political
party in the years 1645-46. They were responsible for many of modern-day
political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions,
leafleting and the lobby of MPs. Their strength mainly lay in London and other
towns and had quite considerable support in the army. The movement was an
extremely disparate group-containing a group called the Diggers or as they have
been called the True Levellers, another group the Ranters were on the extreme
left wing of the revolution.
The Levellers called for a democratic republic in which the
House of Commons would be more important than the House of Lords. A Leveller
would have wanted redistribution and extension of the franchise, legal and
economic reform on behalf of men of small property, artisans, yeoman, small
merchants, and the very layer which made up the Levellers themselves.
Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City
of London, a decentralisation of justice and the election of local governors
and stability of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic
to the poor, which stemmed from their religion which essentially was not
different from that of Cromwell, they had no concrete programme to bring about
social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their
class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no
stage did the Levellers constitute a mass movement.
This contradiction caused some tension between their concern
for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property
owners. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore they accepted
that inequality would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor
to be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained ‘I am no
advocate for the poore further than to provide bread and necessaries for them,
without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore
make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient’.
Knowing that they could not come to power through the
presently constituted electorate, the Levellers attempted to find constitutional
ways of getting around it. As was said before it seems the overriding influence
on these essays such as Morrill’s and Bakers is the arch revisionist historian
Mark Kishlansky who agrees with much in this chapter of the book. Kishlansky,
like Morrill is hostile to a Marxist interpretation of the English bourgeois
revolution.
He writes ‘Much has been written about the ideology of the
army, but most of it misconceived. A principal reason for this has been
historians have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers
created a commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and
logical grounds. There were men of low birth among the new Model’s officers,
and much has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still
might be made of obscure officers like Sponger and Creamer whose surnames
suggest backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a
Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. Yet a careful study of the
armies social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more
traditional in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still
does not meet the real objection to existing interpretation- the fallacy of
social determinism’.
This revisionist domination of Putney debates historiography
is beginning to change. Several left-leaning historians such as John Rees have
started to challenge the largely right-wing conceptions typical of the essays
in this collection.
In his recently published essay,[15] Rees makes the
following observations. “Perhaps the most famous discussion of the relationship
between the Levellers and the labouring classes of the mid-17th century comes
in the Putney debates of 1647. These critical discussions between the most
senior officers of the New Model Army, elected representatives from the army
rank and file, and civilian Levellers have rightly fascinated historians.
One issue to which historical debate has frequently returned
concerns whether or not the Leveller spokespeople at Putney advocated the
expansion of the franchise implied in the Agreement of the People, first
presented at Putney. Should it include the poorest males in society, or should
servants and wage labourers be excluded from the vote? It might be said that
this issue has been over-analysed by historians. Jason Peacey, for instance,
has suggested that historians have tended to divorce the study of a Levellers
from the broader spectrum of radical Parliamentary opinion of which they were a
part and also that they have concentrated too narrowly on the franchise debate
at Putney. Both issues are of relevance here. The Levellers certainly were part
of, indeed emerged from, a wider current of radical parliamentarianism. And the
debate over the constitutional settlement of the nation after the First Civil
War was one in which Levellers were engaged in debate with a much wider
constituency of parliamentarians, some of whom contributed directly to the
content of the Agreement of the People. Others held opinions with which the Levellers
had to contend, even if they disagreed with them or distrusted those advancing
them. We will see this dynamic at work throughout this discussion. But for all
the differentiation among them, it is still the case that the Levellers were a
distinct political movement. They recognised themselves as such, and their
opponents did likewise”.
To conclude Michale Mendle’s book despite it’ revisionist
historiography is an important contribution to the debates about the Putney
debates. One worrying aspect has been the lack of challengers to the right-wing
nature of the historiography. Despite the huge passage of time, the debates
still provoke much heat is testimony to their importance. It is now high time
that left-leaning historians begin to step up to the plate and challenge this
right-leaning historiography.
Notes
John Rees’s paper The Levellers, the labouring classes, and
the poor-John Rees-
https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21256-the-levellers-the-labouring-classes-and-the-poor
was first given at Honest Labour: exploring the interface between work and
nonconformity, a regional day conference of the International John Bunyan
Society, organised in association with the University of Bedfordshire, Keele
University, Loughborough University and Northumbria University in April 2019.
It will appear in the forthcoming issue of Bunyan Studies.
[1] The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and
the English State
edited by Michael Mendle
[2] Introduction-The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the
Levellers and the English State edited by Michael Mendle
[3] Review by: Rachel Foxley Source: The Historical Journal,
Vol. 46, No. 4 (Dec., 2003), pp. 1010-1011
[4] Vox Militaris: Or an Apologetical Declaration Concerning
the Officers and Souldiers of the Armie, under the Command of his Excellency
Sr. Thomas Fairfax, (London: 11 August [Thomason]),
[5] Taken from Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen),
page 36-37.
[6] From the Representation of the Army 1647
[7]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-levellers-radical-political-thought.html
[8] Evgeny Pashukanis Revolutionary Elements in the History
of the English State and Law
[9] The Levellers and the English revolution (1961)
[10] E. Bernstein, Socialism and Democracy in the Great
English Revolution (1919), 3rd German edition, p.78. – See also E. Bernstein,
Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution
(1930), Allen and Unwin, London [eds.]
[11] Evgeny Pashukanis Revolutionary Elements in the History
of the English State and Law
[12] The Levellers, the labouring classes, and the poor-John
Rees-
https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21256-the-levellers-the-labouring-classes-and-the-poor
[13] The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714-By Christopher
Hill-p129
[14] Taken from
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2015/04/
[15] The Levellers, the labouring classes, and the poor-John
Rees- https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21256-the-levellers-the-labouring-classes-and-the-poor
Old Hat, Nouvelle Vague and the Historiographical Surprises
of the mid-1970s
Changes in historiographical perspectives are a recurrent
feature in the work of academic historians. Established explanations and
current orthodoxies come to be challenged and repudiated. One generation of
historians wedded to these older interpretations gives way to another.
Conflicts and disputes between the two are by no means unknown. But, with the
passage of time, new explanations and orthodoxies come to be established and
the quarrels of the past remain of interest to the surviving participants and
to later students of the discipline.
This is particularly true in seventeenth-century history
when the long-term economic and social explanations for the events of the 1640s
in England in particular came to be challenged and superseded. Figures like
Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone apparently thought that their
interpretations were sound and generally accepted as their contributions to the
Folger Institute’s conference on ‘Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688 and
1776’ suggested. Both men had been educated at the University of Oxford where
Hill remained as Master of Balliol while Stone had decamped to Princeton in
1963.
Two of the other major participants in the ‘Storm over the
Gentry’, Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper, were also Oxford dons while
J.H.Hexter, the remaining figure of significance in that spectacular
historiographical episode was in the U.S.A. where he had reached a
rapprochement with Stone after 1964.
This focus on Oxford was also apparent amongst the figures
who came to challenge the determinism underlying the works of Hill, Stone,
Manning and others. Conrad Russell, Nicholas Tyacke, John Morrill and Kevin
Sharpe had all been undergraduates and postgraduates at Oxford before securing
posts at other universities. There had been a feeling amongst Oxford historians
in my recollection that it was the most important centre for work on the
English Revolution and that what was going on elsewhere was interesting but not
of critical significance.
In my own case, I was aware that, in Cambridge, for example,
there was new work being done by the Cambridge Group on Population Studies and
by historians of political thought like John Dunn and Quentin Skinner. Quite
how far-reaching the impact of this work proved to be only became clear to me
rather later. As far as Princeton was concerned, I was reasonably well-informed
since I saw Theodore Rabb in the Institute of Historical Research or the
British Museum during his annual visits in the summers.
What was going on in the rest of the U.K. or in the U.S.A.
was something I learnt about in both institutions. What is surprising about the
revolt against the Whig-Marxist or quasi-Marxist synthesis of the early-1970s
is that it came as a more or less complete surprise to Hill, Stone and other
historians of their persuasion. One of Stone’s pupils at that time recently
told me that he had had no idea what was going on amongst younger historians in
Oxford or in the U.K. More surprisingly still in theory, neither had
Christopher Hill. But Christopher Hill had never been a denizen of archive
repositories or of seminars addressed by postgraduates other than his own. (It can also be detected in the comments of
figures like Brian Manning and even of David Underdown, although his pupil,
Mark Kishlansky, probably knew better than most about the new forms of
interpretation.)
Their sense of surprise was more than evident in the
reactions to ‘revisionism’ in the editions of the Journal of Modern History and
in Past and Present devoted to refuting the antiquarian empiricism of the new
generation of early modern historians. Why did the ‘old guard’ fail to hold
their ground? The answer to that question lies partly in their assumptions –
for example, in believing that the political history of early-Stuart England
had been satisfactorily explained by S.R.Gardiner and Wallace Notestein;
partly, one suspects, because the researches in local or county history
inspired by Thomas Barnes and Alan Everitt were irreconcilable with theories
about ‘class conflict’: but, mainly, because, they had been overtaken by the
passage of time and the increasingly severe problems faced by their own
interpretations. The historiographical past belonged to them: the future, at
least until c.1990, to their critics.
Killing Beauties by Pete Langman- Unbound Digital (23 Jan.
2020)400 pages
KILLING BEAUTIES is a
well-written semi-interesting piece of historical fiction. Langman sets his
novel during the Protectorate of the 1650s. The novel focusses on the extremely
dangerous world of the Royalist spies.
Having read the book from cover to cover, I find the premise
a little implausible. Without spilling too much of the plot, I find it hard to
believe that Cromwell’s foremost spy catcher John Thurloe would fall for a
sister of a leading Royal Royalist Edward Hyde, the Earl of Clarendon writer of
a History of the rebellion.
The book seems to be well researched and has a degree of
erudition you would expect from a PhD holder whose subject was Francis Bacon.In
terms of historiography Langman’s book joins a growing army of such like
publications that promote the Royalist cause against the nasty parliamentarians
who cut the head off a beloved king. Langman was influenced by his partner Dr
Nadine Ackerman’s research for her book invisible agents[1]
As Langman explains “I was introduced to Susan and Diana by
my partner, Dr Nadine Akkerman, as she was researching her (bloody splendid)
book Invisible Agents: Women and espionage in seventeenth-century Britain. She
was not that far into the task before it seemed as if Nadine was operating more
as Spycatcher than a researcher, and it was only in the face of her relentless
work that the she-intelligencers slowly gave up their secrets. As Nadine put
ever more flesh on their archival bones, we began to realise that they were the
perfect protagonists to star in a work of historical fiction. What was so
promising about this pair was partially the fact that they were operating in
the same circles at the same time, and yet don’t appear to have met, and
partially the fact that their lack of excitement about the idea of being caught
led to their tracks being pretty well covered over.[2]
While I found Langman’s book, a moderately interesting read,
I found his method even more fascinating. As he explains in this
interview”There are two approaches available to the historical novelist: to
fictionalise history or historicise fiction. A fictionalised history is one in
which a story is woven around actual events, while historicised fiction is one
in which historical detail is inserted into a story. I would say I chose the
former, but it would be more accurate to say that the former chose me.
Archives do not tell us everything. There are always gaps.
Sometimes you can fill them in by using other sources (though this needs to be
approached with care), but sometimes they simply insist on remaining as gaps.
The primary site of divergence between the historian and the novelist is in the
way they approach these gaps: for the former, they are traps; the latter,
portals. I could make the gaps work with me rather than against me.”
To conclude, I have read better historical fiction books,
and I have read worse. My overriding feeling that a PhD holder of Langman’s
calibre should be writing academic books, not historical fiction. Maybe his
next book will prove me wrong.
Postscript
The book is published by Unbound it was the first
crowdfunding publisher founded in 2011. A list of people who pledged support
for the book to be published is in the back and front of the book. A brave new
world
[1] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=nadine
[2] https://thewritingcoach.co.uk/category/thewritingcoach/
Gerald Aylmer and the Discussion Group on the State
By Chris Thompson
I have just spent part of my time searching for material on
the response of Robert Brenner to the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and
thinking about whether I should buy the first volume of the latter’s series of
works on the World System. During the course of these searches, I found an
on-line copy of Spencer Dimmock’s defence of Brenner’s work on the rise of
capitalism and also a reference to Gerald Aylmer’s participation in the work of
the Discussion Group on the State until his death.
I had been aware of the existence of this group, partly
through the book by Corrigan and Sayer entitled The Great Arch and partly as a
result of a conversation many years ago with John Morrill, who had known Aylmer
much better than I ever did. I then found a tribute by Derek Sayer to Gerald
Aylmer in the Journal of Historical Sociology for March 2002.
Sayer’s account began with a description of his initial
meeting with Aylmer, then newly installed as Master of St Peter’s College,
Oxford, and the evolution of the plans for an informal conference to be held
there each year on the evolution of the English State (although that
restriction to England was never fully enforced). Approximately twenty
scholars, sometimes a few more, sometimes a few less, were invited to discuss
short papers that were circulated in advance and to elaborate on their contents
for about ten minutes or so before wider discussions began amongst those
present. There were sessions on Thursday evenings, two the following morning
and evening and one or two on the final Saturday morning.
Interestingly enough, there were no formal ‘discussants’
nominated to reply to the papers and no plans for publication. Gerald Aylmer
evidently thought that participants would be bolder in the discussion if they
did not expect their papers to be dissected or their remarks to be published
shortly thereafter. They could be and often were drawn out of their periods of
expertise with fruitful results. Of course, some sacrifices had to be made –
Aylmer like Sayer and Patrick Wormald had to give up smoking in the DGOS’s
sessions – and some papers did, in due course, make it into print once their
authors had reflected on the responses they had received from those present.
All in all, Sayer paid a gracious tribute to Gerald Aylmer
and his role in this informal group. But there may be a wider point to be made
here. I am certainly interested in what people in other disciplines have to
say. As a historian, however, I
personally find it very difficult to listen to or read the observations of
scholars in other disciplines, whether historical sociologists or political
scientists or philosophers, advancing arguments or making comments about
subjects in which I am interested without having consulted the sources for the
period. All too often they base these observations on the secondary works they
have consulted without any direct knowledge of the records at all. Frequently,
these arguments are made in the service of ideological causes that I find
unconvincing.
Nonetheless, it is pointless to complain about sociologists
or political scientists or anyone else going to the past to find ammunition.
That process cannot be stopped. But their arguments and conclusions remain
subject to historical examination, a point Gerald Aylmer understood as well as
anyone.
The Decline of Magic. Britain in the Enlightenment, by
Michael Hunter -London: Yale University Press, 2020
“I am a lumper, not a splitter. I admire those who write
tightly focused micro-studies of episodes or individuals, and am impressed by
the kind of quantitative history, usually on demographic or economic topics,
which aspires to the purity of physics or mathematics. But I am content to be
numbered among the many historians whose books remain literary constructions,
shaped by their author’s moral values and intellectual assumptions.”[1]
Keith Thomas
There never was a merry world since the fairies left off
dancing and the parson left conjuring.
—John Selden (1584–1654)
Michael Hunter is an Emeritus Professor of History at
Birkbeck and is the author of various essays and books. A world-renowned expert
on Robert Boyle (1627-1691). His book Boyle: Between God and Science (2009) won
the Roy G. Neville Prize. He has produced a catalogue of Boyle’s vast archive
and was given the task of editing Boyle’s Works (14 vols., 1999-2000).
Given this level of expertise and knowledge, you would have
thought he would have been more careful in the opening pages of his new book in
describing the 17th-century scientific revolution as “so-called”. In a 2001book
review [2]
, Hunter again cast doubt on there being a scientific
revolution by putting quotation marks around the term.We should be thankful for
small mercies when he correctly surmises the problem some historians have in
using the term scientific revolution; he writes “The concept of a ‘Scientific
Revolution’ — a radical transformation of ideas about the natural world that
occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — seems to have survived
the attacks on it in recent years by revisionists who stress the continuity
between old and new ideas in the period. On the other hand, it has become more
rather than less difficult to write about the topic. This is partly due to the
accumulation of research and partly to the proliferation of different
approaches to the subject.
The Marxist view of science as being moulded by social
forces still exerts a strong influence on ideas about developments in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This period saw the emergence not only of
modern science but also of modern capitalism, raising questions about how the
two are related. There was a powerful intellectualist reaction against this
view in the postwar years, associated particularly with the historian of
science Alexandre Koyré, which stressed the internal dynamics underlying the
evolution of scientific ideas. This tradition, too, remains very much alive.
More recently, we have seen the rise of cultural history, which looks for
subtler social and institutional links between ideas and their context”.
Given Hunter’s well-known aversion to anything Marxist maybe
it was the word revolution that Hunter objected to and not the term scientific.
His reticence over the term scientific revolution is not surprising since
Hunter is part of a group of historians of early modern science and medicine,
according to Andreas Sommer who “have challenged simplistic popular accounts,
according to which the ‘decline of magic’ in western culture was due to
progress in the sciences or open-minded empirical approaches to ‘occult’
phenomena”.[3]
Hunter’s aversion to science’s role in the decline of magic
is a significant departure from the previous historiography. His book has been
compared to Keith Thomas’s Religion and the decline of magic. Thomas correctly
had science playing the lead role in the decline of both religion and science.
As Roger L. Emerson correctly points out “Keith Thomas ended
Religion and the Decline of Magic by claiming that the works of Isaac Casaubon,
Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, John Ray, and other like-minded men in the Royal
Society, along with a host of continental philosophers, had made it possible
for magical thinking to be overthrown among the elite intellectuals and for
religious claims to be chastened by “rationalism.” Beliefs in things like
second sight and communion with witches and fairies were being relegated to the
lower orders. He noted the role in this process of social developments, such as
the wider and quicker dissemination of news by more presses and better roads,
the optimism which came with the increased ability to predict and control
events in one’s life, and of the emergence of attitudes that gave the new
sciences and medicine more purchase on a world which seemed less magical and
spirit-haunted. He so saw these developments as being based in the “methods of
the scientists,” which he characterised as “controlled experiment and
innovation,” methods which were not those of the religious or the magicians.[4]
Thomas’s viewpoint has since the 1970s been consistently
under attack. Hunter has been one of many historians that have sought to
undermine some of Thomas’s historiography, and in particular his insistence on
science playing the most prominent role in the decline of religion and magic.
The central premise of Hunter’s new book is that it was not
scientists that were predominantly responsible for the decline of both magic
and religion but freethinkers. Hunter states ‘Insofar as there was a political
dimension to this, it was arguably not in the struggles of Whigs and Tories but
in the inexorable growth of the state and the establishment in this period of
what J.H. Plumb aptly described as “political stability.” And this went with an
increasing emphasis on the pursuit of an essentially civil religion which
Deists like John Toland had pioneered.’ (175).
Hunter is careful enough not to rubbish too much the part
science played in the decline of magic but downplays its role citing the fact
that many leading scientists of the day defended the “reality of supernatural
phenomena.”
Hunter’s book has been widely reviewed and widely praised
with very few if any hostile reviews. The book is well written and well
researched which does not come as a surprise given Hunter’s stature. It is
beautifully produced by Yale containing many varied illustrations and
photographs. Some of the reviews have been a little over the top, such as
“Hunter’s book deserves to become another classic.”— “This is an important and
remarkable book” “Definitely a book to think with, and Hunter brings new
figures to scrutiny”.
The majority of reviews skate over Hunter’s very dangerous
downplaying of science’s preeminent role in the decline of magic and religion.
As Jeremy Black points out “The scholarly move away from an emphasis on science
leads to the observation that assertion, rather than proof, was important to
the dismantling of belief in magic. Particular case- studies take up much of
the relatively short text (there are valuable notes and interesting
appendices), before the conclusion, which offers a pulling together of the
case-studies and themes, including a review of other literature.”5]
The elevating of “freethinkers” above both scientists and
politicians for being responsible for the decline of both religion and magic is
one dimensional. Hunter’s attitude towards science is replicated by an attitude
towards politics in which he downplays the role of politics in the decline of
religion and magic As this paragraph from the book shows “‘Scepticism about
witchcraft had escaped from its dangerous affiliations with freethinking to
become an acceptable viewpoint for orthodox thinkers of various houses. The
truth is that party politics were tangential to the major attitudinal change
towards magic that was now coming about: one is here reminded of the rather
fruitless debate over the party-political affiliations of Newtonianism in the
same period that occurred some years ago, which ended in an almost total
stalemate.’ (174)
Hunter’s chapter on the Englightenment and the rejection of
magic is both small and disappointing. Given that the subtitle of the book is
Britain in the Enlightenment you get a lot of Britain but very little
Enlightenment.
Hunter should be applauded for his work on the
“freethinkers” of the period covered in the book such as John Toland. But his
assertion that these “freethinkers” were leading the struggle against religion
and magic is contentious. As the Marxist writer David North correctly states it
was the scientist who led the way “Until the early seventeenth century, even
educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the
mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old
Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding,
especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year
of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of
the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future
conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course,
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the
liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political
structures that rested upon it, was well underway.
The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general
intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of
thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial
restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas. Religion began to encounter the
type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority
introduced a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for
centuries, was the inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating
scepticism encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of
Genesis led thinking people to wonder whether it was not possible for man to
change the conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world. The prestige
of thought was raised to new heights by the extraordinary achievements of Sir
Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who, while by no means seeking to undermine the
authority of God, certainly demonstrated that the Almighty could not have
accomplished his aims without the aid of extraordinarily complex
mathematics.”[6]
Britain and the Englightenment
Perhaps one of the most disappointing aspects of the book is
that it only concentrates on Britain’s place in the Englightenment. While a
historian is free to choose the subject, putting the decline of religion and
magic in a European context would have given the book a much more
multi-dimensional outlook.
British enlightenment thinking could be perhaps best summed
up as a more pragmatic approach summed up by John Locke who said “our business
here is not to know all things, but those, which concern our conduct. It has
been argued that the enlightenment “baby’s first words were spoken in English”.
Enlightenment figures in Britain had a profound effect on
thinking around the world as Voltaire wrote, “without the English reason and
philosophy we would still be in the most despicable infancy in France”. Diderot
translated into French the works of people such as Shaftesbury, and the idea of
the Encyclopedia came from a scheme to translate Ephains chamber Encyclopaedia.
Having said that there was a dialectical relationship
between the English Enlightenment and Europe. The Scottish economist Adam Smith
absorbed much of what the physiocrats were saying in France. The philosophy
Jeremy Bentham derived his utilitarianism partly from a study of Helvetius.
The American declaration of independence was heavily
influenced by the thinking of John Locke, whose idea that there were no innate
principles in mind reflected much of the thinking on the continent of Europe.
Diderot summed the universal friendship fostered by enlightened thinkers when
he said of David Hume “my dear David, you belong to all nations, and you will
never ask an unhappy man for his passport”.[7]
Perhaps the hardest thing for these Enlightenment figures to
do was to define what was the Enlightenment. According to Norman Hampson, who
is one of the leading authority on the subject defined it as “less a body of
doctrines than a shared premise from which men from different temperaments
placed in different situations drew quite radically different conclusions”.
Maybe they held a common language but
talked with different accents.
John Gray in his book The Great Philosophers: Voltaire: said
of Giovanni Battista Vice
(23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744) “that historical epochs may
be so different that their values cannot be recaptured without the tremendous
effort of imagination. Herder’s claim that different cultures may honour goods
that cannot be combined and which are sometimes incommensurable. Pascal’s
distinction between l’espirit de teometrie and le espirit de finese and its
collollary that truth cannot be contained within the confines of any system or
discovered by applying any one method- such ideas are alien to the humanist
spirit of the Enlightenment. They limit too narrowly what can be known by human
beings and what can reasonably be hoped for them to be acceptable to any
enlightened thinker”.
To conclude, readers should approach this book in the spirit
of the Enlightenment, which was “Sapere Aude” dare to know”. Hunter’s
revisionist outlook should also be approached with caution. I would urge the
reader to read around the subject before judging this book as another classic.
[1] The Magic of Keith Thomas-Hilary Mantel-
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/magic-keith-thomas/
[2] How the old became new Revolutionizing the Sciences:
European Knowledge and its Ambitions,1500–1700 by Peter Dear Palgrave: 2001.
208 pp. £45 (hbk), £14.99 (pbk)
[3]
https://www.forbiddenhistories.com/hunter-decline-of-magic/
[4] https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5397
[5] https://thecritic.co.uk/discussing-magic/
[6] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism
By David North-24 October 1996-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
[7] The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and
American Enlightenments – 1 Aug. 2004-by Gertrude Himmelfarb
Rachel Willie. Staging the Revolution: Drama, Reinvention
and History, 1647-72. Manchester University Press, 2015. It is not often that a
book cover nearly outshines the book itself, but Rachel Willie’s first book is
close to being upstaged by the cover showing Wenceslas Holler’s illustration of
Aesop’s fable ‘Of The Rebellion of the Arms and the Legs’.[1]
As the blurb for the book states it “is an exciting attempt
to understand the complex politics of the 1660 restoration through the use of
“textual and visual narratives”. The use
of art or in this case, the use of drama to understand and explain the
counter-revolution that took place during the Restoration period is a positive
development.
Willie’s use of art as the cognition of life is in the
spirit of great Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky if not his politics. As
Voronsky writes “What is art? First, art is the cognition of life. Art is not
the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression of
merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not
assigned the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like
science, art cognises life. Both art and science have the same subject: life,
reality. But science analyses, art synthesises; science is abstract, art is
concrete; science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science
cognises life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form
of living, sensual contemplation.”[2]
Willie’s book from a historiography standpoint is
revisionist through and through. Willie is part of a new generation of British
historians whose Historiography is an explicit rejection of previous Whig and
Marxist historiography.
While not ignoring what passes for Marxist historiography
her uncritical attitude towards Margot Heinemann[3] is especially troubling.
Heinemann was intimately connected to the Stalinist perspective of Peoples
history practised by the British Communist Party. The Communist Party sponsored
a form of “People’s History” first came to prominence after A.L. Morton’s
People’s History of England was published. As Ann Talbot points out, Morton
obscured the class character of earlier rebels and revolutionaries and popular
leaders “regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary
tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the
bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an
unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the
fascist Axis countries.[4]
Heineman is only mentioned twice in the book, so it is hard
to gauge how much she influences Willie. My guess is quite a bit, and the
extent of her influence will probably come out during further projects by
Willie.
While Heinemann is used from a political standpoint, her use
of Jurgen Habermas is down to her agreement with his philosophical outlook.
Habermas was a crucial figure in the anti-Marxism Frankfurt School.Much of Habermas’s
writings were borrowed by cultural theorist such as Stuart Hall who in turn
borrowed certain conceptions from the Italian left-wing figure Antonio Gramsci,
particularly the latter’s notion of cultural hegemony in addressing popular
culture as a preferred sphere of political activity. As Paul Bond writes
“Gramsci was attractive not merely for his cultural writings—many of which were
produced during solitary confinement under the Mussolini fascist regime—but
also for his attacks on economic determinism, his explicit rejection of the
theory of Permanent Revolution and his justification of the nationalist
orientation of Stalinism: As Gramsci declared, “To be sure, the line of
development is toward internationalism, but the point of departure is ‘national’—and
it is from this point of departure that one must begin”.[5]
Willie’s theoretical outlook appears to be an amalgam of all
three.Willie’s absentmindedness towards Habermas’s politics is another
troubling aspect of the book. As Uli Rippert[6]
points out, Habermas
represents the political transformation that took place in many of his
generation from the late 1960s who protested against the Vietnam War but have now thrown their lot in
with German bourgeoisie’s imperial designs and warmongering.
Willie’s usage of the work of Hannah Arendt is perhaps the
most baffling. Arendt was a liberal opponent of fascism who was an apologist of
Martin Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies. Arendt bent over backwards in her attempts
to downplay Heidegger’s Nazi connections saying “Heidegger himself corrected
his own ‘error’ more quickly and more radically than many of those who later
sat in judgment over him—he took considerably greater risks than were usual in
German literary and university life during that period.”[7]
To conclude, while being a useful introduction to the study
of Restoration drama, it is beholden of Willie in the future to defend her
choices of political and philosophical friends.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belly_and_the_Members
[2] Art as the Cognition of Life, Selected Writings
1911-1936, -Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky,Mehring Books, Michigan,
1998,-ISBN 0-929087-76-3, 554 pages,
[3] Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition
Drama under the Early Stuarts, 1980
[4] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill
by Ann Talbot-25 March 2003
[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political
career dedicated to opposing Marxism-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
[6] Jürgen Habermas—Germany’s state philosopher turns 85
By Ulrich Rippert-18 June 2014-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/18/habe-j18.html
[7] Quoted in The Case of Martin Heidegger, Philosopher and
Nazi-The Cover-up-By Alex Steiner
4 April 2000- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2000/04/heid-a04.html
More Like Lions Than Men-Sir William Brereton and the
Cheshire Army of Parliament, 1642-46-Andrew Abram -Helion & Company.
This is a superbly written, researched and beautifully
illustrated book. It follows the military exploits of Sir William Brereton and
the Cheshire army of Parliament 1642-46.
Sir William Brereton was a typical member of the early
English bourgeoise. He was “model puritan magistrate” and active businessman.
He travelled to such places as Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, France and the
United States where he acquired a property in New England. He was a pioneer in
estate management.
From a political standpoint, before the war, he was no
rebel. He received a baronetcy from the duke of Buckingham in 1627 and did not
resist Charles I’s imposition of Ship money. As John Morrill points out,
Brereton was “easily labelled a Puritan in the 1630s as any gentleman can be.
He was a Protestant nationalist with marked anti-Catholic views”.[1]
At the outbreak of hostilities between the Parliament and
King Brereton felt that in order to defend his business interest and religious
beliefs, it would be prescient to side with Parliament. Politically
conservative he became a well-established adherent of a godly reformation in
the Long Parliament.
Civil War In Cheshire
As Abram points out, Brereton’s early military exploits were
none too successful. He was despatched by Parliament to seize Chester but
failed miserably and was forced to return to London. Again when he tried to
remove Royalist forces from Cheshire, his campaigns were nothing to write home
about. It was only when he was given substantially more resources did military
victories start to flow. These victories prompted Royalist to pump more men
into the area. In total, 12000 men were sent to oppose Brereton. His subsequent
victory over the Royalist army and his courageous actions and superb military
acumen earned him the praise of Thomas Fairfax leader of the Parliamentary
forces and a march through the streets of London.
Radicalism
During the last eighteen months of the war, Brereton kept
letter books which contained a gold mine of information on Parliament’s
military, administrative, and political actions during the civil war.
Five letter books survived the war containing over some 2000
letters. The letters show that like a large number of participants in the war,
Brereton underwent something of a
radicalisation. According to Morrill “Brereton may also have already
been linked to the radical congregationalist Samuel Eaton, just returned from
exile in New England, whose sermons not only challenged the basis of all
existing church government, discipline, and liturgy but also took up radical
social causes”.[2]
Brereton became an important member of the ‘war party’ in
the Long Parliament. He was especially close politically to lords Saye and
Wharton, and Oliver St John and Henry Vane. He became a vital army grandee, and
like Oliver Cromwell, was excluded from the Self Denying Ordinance that
prevented members of Parliament from holding military commissions. He was named
as a judge at the regicide but got cold feet and did not appear at the trial of
the King. This action almost certainly saved his life as after the Restoration
of 1660; he was allowed to continue to live in Croydon Palace.
Historiography
Abram’s book exhibits no real discernable historiography
other than being influenced by the work of John Morrill and his book Revolt of
the Provinces. Morrill’s work is deeply hostile to Marxist historiography
rejecting what he called the “rather triumphalist claim that you could now
produce a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins
of the English revolution. It was that I think, which several people quite
independently reacted against”.
Morrill’s historiography was characterised by his theory of
the civil wars being ‘Wars of Religion and a “revolt of the Provinces”.Abram’s
book appears to be a military version of that historiography.
To conclude, as I said at the beginning of this article the
is well researched and uses a range of primary sources, a large number of which
have never been published. The book is beautifully illustrated, and the artwork
of Alan Turton and Dr Lesley Prince takes it to a different level. For any
military history enthusiast, the book is a must-read.
________________________________________
[1]Sir William Brereton and England’s Wars of Religion-John
Morrill-Journal of British StudiesVol. 24, No. 3 (1985), pp.
311-332-https://www.jstor.org/stable/175522[2] Sir William Brereton and
England’s Wars of Religion-John Morrill-Journal of British StudiesVol. 24, No.
3 (1985), pp. 311-332-https://www.jstor.org/stable/175522
The Poor in the English Revolution-1640-1649
“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England
bath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore, truly, Sir, I think it
is clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his
own consent to put himself under that government. “
Colonel Rainborowe – New Model Army Soldier-Putney Debates
“the necessitous people [the poor] of the whole kingdom will
presently rise in mighty numbers; and whosoever they pretend for at first,
within a while, they will set up for themselves, to the utter ruin of all the
nobility and gentry of the kingdom.”
Quoted in Christopher Hill The English Revolution 1640
“thus were the agricultural people, firstly forcibly
expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and
then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the
discipline necessary for the wage system.”
Karl Marx [Capital]
“This Commonwealth’s freedom will unite the hearts of
Englishmen together in love, so that if a foreign enemy endeavour to come in,
we shall all with joint consent rise to defend our inheritance, and shall be
true to one another. Whereas now the poor see, if they fight and should conquer
the enemy, yet either they or their children are like to be slaves still, for
the gentry will have all. Property divides the whole world into parties, and is
the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere.” When the earth
becomes a common treasury again, as it must, then this enmity in all lands will
cease.”
Gerrard Winstanley, Digger Leader
IntroductionWhen it comes to the matter of the poor during
the English Revolution, there have primarily been two trends in the English
Revolution historiography. The first is either to ignore them entirely or to
place them in the forefront of the leadership of the English revolution
alongside radicals from previous centuries representing an unbroken thread of
radicalism that goes right up to the present day.
I do not claim that there was no “revel, riot and rebellion”
during the English Revolution, but the English revolution was made by the
bourgeoisie, not the working class which was still in its infancy.
There was, however, a significant radicalisation of the poor
during this time. As this quote shows, “Against the king, the laws and religion
were a company of poor tradesmen, broken and decayed citizens, deluded and
priest-ridden women, . . . there rode rabble that knew not wherefore they were
got together, tailors, shoemakers, linkboys, etc. on the king’s side. .all the
bishops of the land, all the deans, prebends and learned men; both the
universities; all the princes, dukes, marquises; all the earls and lords except
two or three; all the knights and gentlemen in the three nations, except a
score of sectaries and atheists. “[1]
It was these “sectaries and atheists” that conservative
thinkers like Richard Baxter sought to warn the ruling elite about when he
wrote “A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of England . . . adhered
to the king. And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the
poorest of the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry
and were for the king. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the
smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the
greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men,
especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such
manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and
civility in the land, and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the
strength of iniquity”[2]. Baxter was one of the most politically astute commentators
on the English revolution. His writing expressed a general fear amongst the
ruling elite of growing social unrest.
Historiography
It is not in the realm of this essay to examine every single
piece of historiography connected with the poor during the English revolution.
It is however hard not to disagree with the words of Lawrence Stone who
described the history of the 17th century as “a battleground which has been
heavily fought over…beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by
ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way”.
A large number of these ferocious scholars have ignored the
radicalisation of the poor during the English Revolution or when they did
comment on it was done so coupled with a persistent attack on Marxist historiography,
with figures like Christopher Hil and Brian Manning taking the brunt of this
assault.
While it is clear that up until the late 1960s, there
appeared to be a consensus amongst historians studying the English revolution
that a study of the poor had to be linked with socio-economic changes that were
taken place in the 17th century.The late 1970s, saw this disappear and was
replaced with a consistent attack on Marxist historiography. During an
interview by John Rees and Lee Humber, the left-wing Christopher Hill was asked
this question “There is a marked trend to separate out various aspects of the
revolution, so that cultural development is seen in isolation to, say, economic
ones, a trend which is part of a much wider debate taking in the arguments
around postmodernism. Would you agree that this is also a great challenge to
the economic and social interpretation of history?
Hill’s answer was “Yes, all this linguistic stuff of the
literary historians ignores the social context. I think that’s a very
unfortunate phase that literary criticism seems to be going through. I had
thought that one of the good things of the last few decades was the way
historians and literary critics seemed to be coming together on the 17th
century and producing some sort of consensus. This is now in danger with all
this linguistic guff. I suppose it’s quite difficult for people trained in one
discipline to take on board the lessons learnt in others, but any new consensus
will have to be one based on looking at society as a whole including literature
and religion.”[3]
As the Marxist economist, Nick Beams also points out “One of
the most frequently employed caricatures of Marxism is the claim that it argues
that ideology is just a cover for the real economic motivations of social
actors. Accordingly, Marxism is “disproved” by the discovery that individuals
act, not according to economic motives but based on powerful ideologies.
Marxism does not deny that historical actors are motivated and driven into
action by their ideological conceptions, and it does not claim that these
ideologies are simply a rationalisation for the real economic motivations.
However, it does insist that it is necessary to examine the motives behind the
motives—the real, underlying, driving forces of the historical process—and to
make clear the social interests served by a given ideology—a relationship that
may or may not be consciously grasped by the individual involved”.
LeadershipWhile it is essential to understand what motivated
the poor to “revel, riot and rebellion” it is even more critical to understand
the relationship between the poor and its leaders, which on this occasion
during the English Revolution were the various radical groups such as The
Levellers and Diggers and to a certain extent the Ranters.
As Leon Trotsky wrote “In reality leadership is not at all a
mere “reflection” of a class or the product of its own free creativeness. A
leadership is shaped in the process of clashes between the different classes or
the friction between the different layers within a given class.”[4]
The Levellers, while being sympathetic to the poor, their
perspective of bringing about deep-seated change was hampered by their class
outlook that being of small producers, conditioned by their ideology. This
contradiction caused some tension between their concern for the poor and their
position of representatives of small property owners. They had no opposition to
private property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always
exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. As
John Cooke, a regicide and sympathetic to the Leveller cause explained ‘I am no
advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them,
without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore
make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient’. [5]
In order to overcome their contradiction, knowing full well
that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate
or through the control of the army, the Levellers attempted to find not a
revolutionary solution to their problem but a constitutional one.
A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement
of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be
reformed based on certain fundamental ‘native rights’ safeguarded even from a
sovereign parliament: religious toleration, no tithes. The attack on Parliament
as sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in
the first place. The agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial
parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by
accepting the agreement were to have the vote.
While this was extremely radical for the time ‘freeborn
Englishmen’ excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute
‘the people’. As Christopher Hill wrote: “The Leveller conception of free
Englishmen, was thus restricted, even if much wider, than that embodied in the
existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of
men entitled to vote. However, manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The
generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more
democratic than they were”[6].
The generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of the
Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their own
supporters against them. Oliver Cromwell correctly recognised that if the
franchise was widened, it would threaten his majority in Parliament. As Hill
explains ‘Defending the existing franchise, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine
“that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall
dispose of the lands here and of all things here”. The vote was rightly
restricted to those who “had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom”.
Namely, the persons in whom all lands lies and those incorporation’s in whom
all trading lies.’[7]
Diggers
The other substantial leadership of the poor came from the
Diggers. Hill, in his seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down, believed
that Winstanley and his Diggers, “have something to say to twentieth-century
socialists”. In this, he meant that they were an anticipation of future
struggles. Hill was cognizant that despite their radicalism, the social and
economic conditions had not yet matured for them to carry out a “second
revolution” which would have seen the overthrow of Cromwell and broader use of
the popular franchise.
John Gurney, who was perhaps the foremost expert on the
Diggers recognised the leader of the Diggers Gerrard Winstanley was one of the
most important figures to appear during the English Revolution commenting “the
past is unpredictable.’ So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all but
one of his 67 years, he lived in obscurity, and then he died forgotten.
Generations of historians passed over him either in silence or derision. He
entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of
David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of
the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits’ scarcely worthy of being
recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth
contained only two references to him, one a bare mention of his name. Then in
the early 20th Century, Winstanley was rediscovered, and he has exerted a
magnetic pull on left-leaning intellectuals ever since. He is variously
credited as the father of English communism, socialism or environmentalism,
depending on which is seeking paternity. His notice in the Victorian DNB was a
scant 700 words; in the new DNB, it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has
been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works,
the second complete works in a century, more than have been accorded either
Hobbes or Locke.”[8]
While the Diggers were far more radical in their perspective
for the poor, they shared the same class position as the Levellers. No matter
how radical their ideas at no point could they overturn class society through
revolution. The only class that could have achieved their aims was still in its
infancy.
Historians such as John Gurney are a rare bread today in
that his study of the poor was done so from a relatively left-wing standpoint.
While Hill and Manning tended to dominate the study of the poor during the English
revolution, there were a group of historians that were less incline to support
a Marxist interpretation of the poor but were sufficiently influenced to carry
out important work.
One of many historians that fit the above criteria was D.C.
Coleman. While not being close to Marxism was undoubtedly influenced by
left-wing historians such as Hill.
Coleman was a multidimensional historian according to his
obituary he “was sceptical about
politics and thought religion was largely nonsense. He realised that people
were subject to motivation of a variety of sorts and that economic rationality
could provide only a partial explanation. He made use, therefore, of economic
theory, but did not regard it as the be-all and end-all in the attempt to
explain human social behaviour over time, the essence of what he thought
economic history should be about.[9]
Coleman points out in one of his writings that early
capitalists were conscious that profit could be made by exploiting the large
and growing working class. Coleman quotes J Pollexfen who writes , ‘The more
are maintained by Laborious Profitable Trades, the richer the Nation will be
both in People and Stock and … Commodities the cheaper”.[10]
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Coleman’s research was
his publishing figures on the levels of poverty which are stunning. The levels
of child labour that would not look out of place in a third world country
today, stating “If the economists and social pamphleteers wanted a larger body
of labouring poor, there is no lack of evidence that in mere numbers the poor
already formed a very substantial part of the total population. Contemporary
comment upon the numbers of poor stretches back into the sixteenth century, at
least, and forward into the eighteenth. To Bacon, labourers and cottagers were
‘but house beggars’; to a writer of the 1640’s it. Seemed reasonable to suppose
that ‘the fourth part of the inhabitants of most of the parishes of England are
miserable, poor people, and (harvest time excepted) without any subsistence’,
the comprehensive and well-known investigations of Gregory King in the 168o’s
and 1690s tell an even grimmer tale. He classed 23 per cent of the national
population as ‘labouring people and out servants’ and a further 24 per cent as
‘cottagers and paupers’, estimating that both groups had annual family
expenditures greater than income.”[11]
Another historian worth reading is Steve Hindle; he is
especially important and essential reading. Hindle’s work should be read in
conjunction with that of Hill and Manning.
His work on the Levellers backs up my earlier assumption
that while Levellers such as John Wildman were sympathetic to the poor, there
was also a fear that the levels of poverty and a dearth of food could get out
of hand. Wildman states ‘The price of food [is] excessive’, wrote the Leveller
John Wildman from London in 1648, ‘and Trading [is] decayed’. It would; he
thought, ‘rend any pitifull heart to heare andsee the cryes and teares of the
poore, who professe they are almost ready to famish’. ‘While our divisions
continue, and there be no settlement of the principles of freedom and justice’,
he insisted: trading will but more decay every day: Rumours and feares of
Warre, and the Army coming now into the City, makes Merchants unwilling to
trust their goods in the City, and exchange beyond sea falles, and there will
be no importing of goods, and then there will be no exporting and so the staple
commodities of the kingdom which maintains the constant trade, will not tend to
the advantage of the labourers, and then most of the poore in the kingdom which
live by spinning, carding, & will be ready to perish by famine”.[12]
Wildman was echoing a common fear and worry amongst sections
of the lower middle class that the impact of the failed harvests of 1647-1650.
According to Hindle “Wildman was accordingly convinced that ‘a suddain
confusion would follow if a speedie settlement were not procured’.
Hindle goes on “Wildman’s vivid analysis of the relationship
between harvest failure, economic slump, political crisis and popular protest
is proof enough that those who lived through the distracted times of the late
1640s were well aware of the interpenetration of economic and constitutional
dislocation. It is surprising, therefore, that historians have made so little attempt
to take the harvest crisis of the late 1640s seriously”.
Another famous exponent of regional studies of the poor is
A. L. Beier. One of his studies was Poor relief in Warwickshire 1630-1660.
Beier presented in this essay a view that was supported by a significant number
of historins that the study of the regional poor was an important part of a
wider national study of the poor.
Beier warned about trying to read too much into these local
studies, but a study of such areas as Warwickshire was legitimate. He writes
“It would, of course, be dangerous to generalise from the example of one county
to the whole of England, but the degree of typicality of Warwickshire and
Professor Jordan’s findings are encouraging. To study other counties from this
point of view may yield interesting comparisons and the discovery of new
variables, particularly if areas are found where relief administration in fact
collapsed. More generally, however, and assuming that poor relief did not
collapse in England during the Interregnum, of what significance was its
continued functioning? First, it is clear that the devolution towards local
control which took place in this period did not mean collapse or even falling
efficiency in administration whether the sort of zealous efficiency
characteristic of the Puritan rule was continued after I660 is another question
deserving of study.[13]
________________________________________
[1] Christopher Hill-The English Revolution 1640-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/[2]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution[3] John
Rees and Lee Humber-The good old cause-An interview with Christopher Hill-
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html[4]
The Class, the Party-and the
Leadership-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm[5] Unum
Necessarium:John Cooke, of Graies Inne,
Barrester.http://famineanddearth.exeter.ac.uk/displayhtml.html?id=fp_00502_en_unum[6]The
Century of Revolution: 1603–1714 [7]The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714[8]
Gerrard Winstanley and the Left-John Gurney-Past & Present, Volume 235,
Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtx017[9]
Professor D. C.
Coleman-Obituary-https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-d-c-coleman-1600207.html[10]
Labour in the English Economy during the 17th Century-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1956.tb01570.x[11]
Labour in the English Economy during the 17th
Century-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1956.tb01570.x[12]
Dearth and the English revolution:the harvest crisis of 1647–50-By Steve
Hindle-https://www.huntington.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/dearth-and-the-english-revolution-echr.pdf[13]
A. L. Beier Poor relief in Warwickshire 1630-16601 – Past and Present 1966
Disaffection and EverydayLife in Interregnum England. By
Caroline Boswell. Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political, and Social
History. Boydell Press, 2017.
“There is no locus of
great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the
revolutionary. Instead, there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a
special case.”
Michel Foucault,
May the weary traveler turn from life’s dusty road and in
the wayside shade, out of this clear, cool fountain drink, and rest
R. E. Speer, “Robert Burns,” Nassau Literary Magazine 43
(1888): 469.
“Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on
revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary expression,
Trotskyism”.
Paul Bond
Disaffection and Everyday Life is a significant addition to
our knowledge of how the English Revolution and the subsequent Interregnum
impacted the daily lives of “ordinary people.”
Caroline Boswell’s work harnesses previous work by other
social and political historians such as Christopher Hill and David Underdown.
She gives us a much closer approximation of how national politics impacted the
daily lives of the population. Her book shows that there was a significant
radicalisation amongst the poorer sections of the population.
Through her formidable study of the mass production of
pamphlets situated in a large number of urban archives, she was able to get at
“the heart of popular experiences of revolution.” As Carla Pestana states in
her review of the book “anyone who has read the social history of
seventeenth-century England produced over recent decades knows that scholars
have unearthed a rich archive of confrontations in marketplaces, animated
disagreements in taverns, and riots in the streets. Such moments of social and
political tension come to the attention of the authorities, make their way into
court documents and other sources, and await industrious modern researchers’
efforts to come again to light. Numerous
works recount such tales, in order to understand attitudes toward gender,
economic justice, and a host of other issues. In these sources, the voices of
common men and women emerge, mediated though they are by the often fraught
occasions that caused them to
be recorded.
[1]
Much of the material uncovered showed that rich people on
both sides of the barricades still used everything in their power to retain or
grab back their wealth. Boswell highlights the case of Sir Arthur Haslerige’s
treatment of his tenants.
The Royalist’s exploited the state of flux in society during
the Interregnum in order to seek the overturn of the revolution and
re-establish the monarchy. Utilising popular drinking venues Royalist
balladeers and pamphleteers spread their propaganda far and wide.
While Parliament also used the printing presses to counter
the Royalist propaganda, they were not averse to using military force to suppress
discontent. Boswell relates how Colonel Hewson ordered his troops to fire at
London apprentices playing football in 1659, killing at least four of them.
While Boswell is careful not to exaggerate the hostility to
the Cromwellian regime, the significant amount of discontent amongst the
population was an indication of the narrow social base that Cromwell rested on.
The army played a pivotal role in keeping things under control. There seemed a
general hostility towards the soldiers, who were
“despised” for their heavy-handed action[2]
While Boswell has collected a formidable array of
information, her reading of the numerous pamphlets is at times uncritical as
this example from a previous essay shows “In January 1650, the royalist
pamphleteer John Crouch described a scuffle between a group of Londoners and a
troop of soldiers in his scurrilous newsbook The Man in the Moon. Though Charles I’s execution had been carried
out a year before, Crouch continued to employ tropes long drawn out by royalist
pens in an attempt to undermine the nascent Commonwealth. Themes of subversion,
sexual slander and humiliation pervade this anti-Puritan narrative. Crouch
related how ‘two or three Companies’ of ‘Rebell’ soldiers had seized a group of
stage players on St John’s Street. Having deprived the players of their garb,
the troopers marched them to Westminster for breaking Parliament’s ordinance
against stage-plays. One soldier stayed behind the crowd with design of gaining
‘some plunder’, at which time he happened across a ‘skimmington’ riding near
Smithfield Market. This popular shaming ritual involved a man imitating the
army’s Lord General Thomas Fairfax on horseback. The ‘General’ held a skimming
ladle while ‘Baskets’ of Colonel Thomas Pride’s ‘Graines’ were held out in
front of him. Fairfax’s ‘Doxie’ sat behind him, her face to the horse’s
tail.”[3]
Her account of the shooting at the football match relies
heavily on Royalist news pamphlets as does much of the book. While there was
undoubted dissatisfaction amongst the poorer section of the population, it is
hard to figure how much Royalist publications fabricated this.
Historiography
Boswell’s book is part of a veritable cottage industry of
works that examine the social and cultural history of the Seventeenth Century.
Even a cursory look at her footnotes and bibliography, it is clear as Carla
Pestana points out Boswell “plumbs the rich records of English localities to uncover
arresting stories. The book includes many vignettes. Altercations in streets,
taverns, doorways of private homes, and elsewhere all came to the attention of
authorities who recorded them for Boswell’s perusal. She offers a thoughtful
and sensible analysis of these altercations and their meanings, by and large.”
Her use of an eclectic mixture of historians ranging from
Steve Hindle, Michael Braddick, Andy Wood, while a delight for the reader shows
a historian who has yet to establish her take on the debate. The book also has
shades of John Morrill’ s(1976) Revolt of the Provinces about it.
As John Reeks points out, “Morrill’s argument that national
politics “took on local colours and [was] articulated within local contexts”
has become Boswell’s “intersection” of “quotidian politics” with the “politics
of revolution”. Nevertheless, the fundamentals are very similar, and the
disaffection of Boswell’s 1650s bears more than a passing resemblance to what
Morrill uncovered for the 1630s and 1640s.”[4]
While acknowledging a debt to the past left-leaning
historians such as Christopher Hill, Boswell’s historiography is also heavily
influenced by modern-day genres of Linguistic Cultural and Spatial turns. All
these genres emanate from the Post Modernist school of historical study, and
all three are hostile to a Marxist understanding of historical events.
John Reeks writes he “was left with no clearer understanding
of the difference between a “site” and a “space” at the end of the book than at
the beginning, or the historical significance of such distinctions. At times
this tendency reads like amusing idiosyncrasy, but it can also give rise to
mind-bending tautology: “to understand the politics of disaffection, we must
consider how disaffection transformed – and was transformed by – the politics of
everyday life”.
The application of Cultural Studies in British universities
is now very pervasive. It would seem that every new book that comes out has a
dash of Cultural Studies about it. Many of the conceptions contained within the
genre are borrowed from the Italian left-wing figure Antonio Gramsci,
particularly the latter’s notion of cultural hegemony in addressing popular
culture as a preferred sphere of political activity.
As Paul Bond points out in his obituary of Stuart Hall
“Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism,
directed above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The
academic field sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class
and onto other social formations, thus promoting the development of identity
politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to
the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s
onwards.”[5]
Conclusion
The book is exceptionally well-researched and contains
valuable material for future study but I agree with John Reeks that Boswell
needs to cut out the Spatial Turn language and just present her readership with
“ a straightforward piece of political history”.
[1] Reviewed by Carla Pestana (University of California, Los
Angeles) Published on H-War (January, 2019) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey
(Air War College) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53344
[2] Page 145
[3] Popular Grievances and Royalist Propaganda in
Interregnum England-Caroline Boswell- The Seventeenth Century -Volume 27, 2012
– Issue 3
[4] John Reeks (2019) Disaffection and everyday life in
Interregnum England, The Seventeenth Century, 34:1, 129-130
[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political
career dedicated to opposing Marxism
By Paul Bond-5 March 2014-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s
Protectorate-Paul Lay-Head of Zeus, 352pp, £19.99
n terms of historical interest, Cromwell’s protectorate is a
poor relation to the English bourgeois revolution. As Ted Valance points out,
the Protectorate“has too often been dismissed as merely a dreary Puritanical
prelude to the restoration of monarchy”.
Having said that Providence Lost does go a little way in
rectifying this anomaly. The book is a well written and researched and is a
solid albeit conservative piece of historical study.Paul lay is a gifted
writer. His book is mostly narrative-driven but does contain some useful
insights, but even his skill and experience cannot make the Protectorate as
dramatic as the English revolution.
The book covers the years 1653 to 1659. The Protectorate
replaced the short-lived English republic and replaced it with the dictatorship
of the Major Generals with Cromwell at its head. While Lay’s book is not
without analysis,but it would be better for the use of work of the great social
historian as Lay calls Christopher Hil. Hill succinctly describes the social,
political and economic processes that“ dissolved the Long Parliament forcibly
in 1653, nominated a convention of his own adherents (the Barebones
Parliament), which revived the social and economic demands of the petty
bourgeoisie and had to be hastily dissolved. Cromwell was then proclaimed
Protector under a Constitution (the Instrument of Government”), which was
rigged to conceal the dictatorship of the Army officers. He called a Parliament
under this constitution on a new £200 franchise, by which moneyed men were
admitted to vote and the lesser freeholders excluded. But Parliament and Army
quarrelled, Parliament was dissolved, and a period of naked military
dictatorship followed under the Major-Generals, in which the Cavaliers were
finally disarmed. Ultimately Cromwell and his Court circle (representing
especially the new civil service), under pressure from the City, came to
realise that the Army had done its job and that its maintenance now meant a
crushing burden of taxation on the propertied classes, for which no compensating
advantages were obtained”[1].
Once Cromwell had crushed all opposition to his and the
army’s rule, he gave the bourgeoisie free rein to launch their conquests both
at home and abroad. The short term failure of the conquests abroad gave Lay his
book title. The launching of Cromwell’s imperial enterprises gave a massive
impulse to the early capitalist class. It is, therefore, no accident that
perhaps the most dubious and money-grabbing members of the petty bourgeoisie
were chosen to lead the attempted overseas conquests. In doing so they marked
the end of the “Good Old Cause” leading Edward Burrough, later to lament “where
is the good old cause now?…and what is become of it? In whose hands does it
lie? [2]
Like many aspects of the English revolution to the
Protectorate is open to many interpretations not all historians agree that
there was a naked military dictatorship, some like Austin Woolrych[3] tend to
downplay the extent of the dictatorship.
Although not a historian in the strictest sense the Russian
Marxist Leon Trotsky took a different view in that “Under Cromwell’s leadership
the revolution acquired all the breadth vital for it. In such cases as that of
the Levellers, where it exceeded the bounds of the requirements of the
regenerate bourgeois society, Cromwell ruthlessly put down the “Lunaticks.”
Once victorious, Cromwell began to construct a new state law that coupled
biblical texts with the lances of the ‘holy’ soldiers, under which the deciding
word always belonged to the pikes. On 19th April 1653, Cromwell broke up the
rump of the Long Parliament. In recognition of his historical mission, the
Puritan dictator saw dispersed members on the way with biblical denunciations:
“Thou drunkard!” he cried to one; “Thou adulterer!” he reminded another. After
this Cromwell forms a parliament out of representatives of God-fearing people,
that is, an essentially class parliament; the God-fearers were the middle class
who completed the work of accumulation with the aid of strict morality and set
about the plunder of the whole world with the Holy Scriptures on their lips”[4]
Trotsky had a specific economic and class approach. This
type of approach is mostly absent from Lay’s book. The book is mainly devoid of
economic analysis, especially the economic base of the Major Generals. When he
does mention other historians, they are mostly conservative in nature.
Christopher Hill is only mentioned once as a footnote. Hill did not write much
on this subject, but when he did, it was worth reading, especially his early work.
His study of some of the Russian historians in work such as
Soviet Interpretations of the English Interregnum was groundbreaking. Hill
takes a far more historical materialist approach to the Protectorate in that he
saw historical developments in class terms as this quote from his essay Soviet
Interpretations of the English Interregnum highlights “There were rifts within
classes as well as between them. The squires particularly occupied a double
position-they were hostile to the old order but were themselves landlords,
interested in enclosing, in keeping the peasantry in their place. This accounts
for their re-alliance with the defeated Cavaliers after they had attained their
ends: there was a common enemy to fear. Their fear of further social revolution
held the squires back from completely finishing with the old landed order and
so destroying the economic roots of the monarchy. 1659 marks a series of
desperate attempts to conserve the republic without social reforms. But none of
the groups that won power could reunite the interests of their class as a
whole. Charles II was the most satisfactory heir to Oliver Cromwell if he was
prepared to accept the revolution. And that is what the declaration of Breda
did by referring all questions to parliament. ” Let the king come in,”
Harrington had said, ” and call a parliament of the greatest cavaliers in
England, so they be men of estates, and let them sit but seven years and they
will all turn commonwealth’s men”. [5]
One question Lay’s book does not satisfactorily answer is
why did so much power end up in so few hands? While Lay would not be caught
dead using Leon Trotsky and Hill for political reasons could not, Trotsky is
well worth reading for his clear-sighted analysis on the class nature of
Cromwell’s rule. In his essay Two traditions: the seventeenth-century
revolution and Chartism he shows that
“Different classes in different conditions and for different
tasks find themselves compelled in particular and indeed, the most acute and
critical periods in their history, to vest an extraordinary power and authority
in much of their leaders as can carry forward their fundamental interests most
sharply and fully”. Cromwell’s Protectorate was one such example. “For one era
Oliver Cromwell, and for another, Robespierre expressed the historically
progressive tendencies of development of bourgeois society.” [6]
Western Design
As Lay points out the foreign policy of Cromwell would set
the template for British capitalism imperialist conquests for centuries to
come. The future empire, as was the protectorate, would be built on slavery.
A significant part of Cromwell’s foreign policy or Western
Design” was based on writings of a dubious former Dominican friar, Thomas
Gage[7]. Gage himself writes, “I humbly pray your Excellency [Cromwell] . . .
direct your noble thoughts to employ the soldiery of this Kingdom upon such
just an honorable design in those parts of America. The fact that Cromwell took
advice from Gage was a severe miscalculation that would end in disaster and
humiliation for the English bourgeoisie. It is perhaps fitting that Cage met
his end dying of dysentery upon arrival in Jamaica.
The failure of the western Design” caused significant
problems for the Cromwell and his generals. A regime based on military power is
only as good as its last victory. The defeat of Cromwell’s army and navy by the
Spanish despite having numerical superiority caused Cromwell to increase his
power at the expense of the already narrow franchise. Thus began the Rule of the Major-Generals”.
This “military dictatorship” carried out a campaign of
intimidation and brutality that would have been unthinkable even under the
Monarchy.Parliament’s brutal punishment of the Quaker James Nayler in 1656 (his
tongue was bored with a red-hot iron) for imitating Christ’s entry in Jerusalem
was one such episode. As Rowan Williams writes in his book review, this was one
of only many cases of “judicial sadism.”
The debacle at the hands of the Spanish also led to the
escalation of attacks by class forces hostile to the Cromwell regime. A spate
of Royalist/Leveller plots and assassination attempts were only foiled because
of Cromwell’s vast spy network under the leadership of John Thurloe.
Historiography
Lay’s book has been reviewed by substantial sections of both
big and small media with the majority praising the book. The book is attractive
to review because of its conservative historiography. Lay somewhat unusually
presents very little in the way of a conclusion at the end of the book.
Despite Lay being a trustee of the Cromwell Museum even a
cursory read of the book tells us that Lay only goes so far with his admiration
for Oliver Cromwell. He certainly feels ill at ease with the revolutionary
nature of the Cromwellian revolution. Lay expresses horror at Cromwell’s and
other regicides killing of the King and believes the act was illegal.
Lay’s hostility to the revolutionary acts carried out by the
English bourgeoisie is mirrored by Rowan Williams former Archbishop of
Canterbury who in his review of Lay’s book said “It is a pattern familiar in
revolutionary narratives: the point at which it ought, at last, to be obvious
to all that the revolution was right and justified when one could be confident
of being on the side of history, keeps slipping over the horizon. Someone must
be blamed, and the revolution inexorably descends into factional warfare. In
recent decades, analysis by political thinkers such as Raymond Williams and
Gillian Rose has stressed the inevitability of “long revolutions”, and the
dangers of messianic end-of-history aspirations and the bloodshed that
accompanies them. This should remind us of the foolishness of speaking as
though history had “sides yet still the left and the right resort to such
defaults. Lay’s book sheds light on this process, despite the fact that
Cromwell’s must have been, historically, one of the least terror-ridden of revolutions”.
[8]
Whether you could call Lay, a Whig historian is open to
debate. His book does have a whiff of the Whig interpretation of history. As
revolutions go you get the feeling that Lay would be more at home with the
“Glorious Revolution” when James II quit his throne and his kingdom overnight,
and William of Orange was installed as king. This was the kind of palace
revolution that Lay would prefer rather than the 1640 revolution.
Conclusion
To conclude my criticisms of Lay should not put off anyone who
would like to know more about the subject. Readers also should not be put off
by any of significant criticisms from reviewers of Lay’s conservative approach
to history.Lay probably feels the Protectorate was a failure, and with the
restoration of the monarchy, not much had really changed. But as Trotsky said
“Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse upon the gallows. But pre-Cromwellian
society could not be re-established by any restoration. The works of Cromwell
could not be liquidated by the thievish legislation of the Restoration because
what has been written with the sword cannot be wiped out by the pen”.
[1] ] The English Revolution
1640-https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/
[2] To the Whole English Army(1659)
[3] Commonwealth to Protectorate-by Austin Woolrych
[4] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and
Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
[5] Soviet Interpretations of the English
Interregnum-Christopher Hill-The Economic History Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May,
1938), pp. 159-167
[6] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and
Chartism
[7] For further information on the life of Cage see
https://johnjburnslibrary.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/the-many-faces-of-thomas-gage/
[8] Oliver Cromwell, the man who wouldn’t be
king-https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/01/oliver-cromwell-man-who-wouldn-t-be-king
The Peculiar History Of The Sect Known As The Quakers
(Bristol radical Pamphleteers) Pamphlet – 2011-by Jim McNeill “..yet my mind
was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me that words
and writings were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and
if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing,”
Gerrard Winstanley
Where is the good old cause now?…and what is become of it?
In whose hands does it lie?
Edward Burrough, To the Whole English Army(1659)
Friends, Meddle Not with the Powers of the Earth,
George Fox
Despite being only sixteen pages long, The Peculiar History
Of The Sect Known as the Quakers poses a number of questions, who were the
Quakers? Why were they persecuted? Why did they stop being radical? How did
some of Bristol’s Quakers become so rich?
Jim McNeill’s excellent pamphlet give partial answers to the
above questions and encourages the reader to read around the subject. Even a
cursory look at the early history of the Quakers tell us that they were a mass
of contradictions. During the English Revolution, the Quakers were closely
aligned with other radical groups such as the Levellers and Diggers.
As Alan Cole explains “for nearly thirty years after the
defeat of the Levellers at Burford, no political party emerged which could
claim the effective support of the English radicals. Throughout this period the
main centres of resistance were the Puritan sects and the history of the
radical movement of the time, therefore, is closely bound up with the history
of religious dissent. It is this fact which lends peculiar interest to the
history of the early Quakers. For the rise of the Quakers spans the period from
the breach between Cromwell and the radical movement to the emergence of the
new Country Party at the end of the 1670’s; and conversely, the decline of
Quakerism in England may be traced back to the final defeat of the popular
movement and the political compromise of 1688. Moreover, the first Quakers had
had close connections with the earlier radical movement. Like the Levellers,
most of them came from the class of petty traders and handicraftsmen, although
it is worth noting that the movement made more headway among the peasantry than
the Levellers had done. Over half the early Quaker leaders were directly
connected with the land, and throughout the century the movement remained
strong in the rural districts of the north and west”[1].
McNeil is one of only a handful of left-wing historians who
have examined the Quakers in the context of their role in the English
revolution. Christopher Hill’s output on the Quakers was reduced amounted to a
lecture at Friends House in London in 1993 and his book The World Turned Upside
Down he devoted one chapter which included the Ranters alongside the Quakers.
This is not down to a lack of resources. Hill’s limited work on the Quakers
contained very little original research.
In many ways, the Quakers are the forgotten radicals of the
English revolution. As Jean Hatton[2] points out in her excellent biography,
the Quaker leader George Fox is hardly known outside the Quaker movement. If
ever a person needed rescuing from the condescension of history, Fox is it.
Mcneill poses an interesting question in his pamphlet? How
did an early movement that expressed egalitarian strivings of the more poorer
sections of society end up playing such a crucial role in the early development
of capitalism? As McNeill points, it was Quakers that founded most of the big
banks that now operate like a colossus over the world.
One answer not really explored by McNeill lies in the class
nature of the Quakers. While containing some plebian elements, this was
essentially a movement in modern terms of what would be the lower middle class.
If truth be told, it was mainly the plebian elements that gave the movement its
radical edge.
As McNeill points out the early Quaker movement exploded
during the English revolution alongside side other radical groups, Seekers,
Ranters, Antinomians, Seventh Day Baptists, Soul sleepers, Adamites, Diggers,
Levellers, Anabaptists, Mennonites, Behmenists, Muggletonians to name but a
few.
In Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down[3]he
explains the reasoning behind this explosion of radicalism and a world that was
turned upside down, Hill writes: “From, say, 1645 to 1653, there was a great
overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England. Old
institutions, old beliefs, old values came in question. Men moved easily from
one critical group to another, and a Quaker of the early 1650s had far more in
common with a Leveller, a Digger, or a Ranter than with a modern member of the
Society of Friends”.
It is interesting that Hill’s in the book puts the Quakers
with the Ranters in his only stand-alone chapter in the book. As Hill points
out that Ranters were often confused with Ranters. George Fox leader of the
Quakers would spend a large amount of his time trying to distance his movement
away from the Ranters.
In 1652 Quakerism was at the height of its power, but from
then onwards its radicalism started to wane very badly. As Hill explains the
ebbing of the Quaker movement “In time of defeat when the wave of revolution
was ebbing, the inner voice became quietist, pacifist. This voice only was
recognized by others as God’s. God was no longer served by the extravagant
gesture, whether Nayler’s entry into Bristol or the blasphemy of the Ranters.
Once the group decided this way, all the pressures were in the direction of
accepting modes of expression not too shocking to the society in which men had
to live and earn their living. The radicals were so effectively silenced that
we do not know whether many held out in isolation with Milton. We do not even
know about Winstanley. But what looked in the Ranter heyday as though it might
become a counter-culture became a corner of the bourgeois culture whose
occupants asked only to be left alone.”
It is no coincidence that its move away from its early
radicalism coincided with the rise of capitalism which it played an extremely
important part. During the early part of the 18th century and 9th century,
Quakers went on to be an indispensable tool in the development of capitalism.
They were especially important in the field of technological innovations. Industrial capitalism would rely heavily on
Quaker’s inventions.
As Steven Davison points out “They build many of the key
industries, establish many of the most important companies, build its financial
infrastructure, develop new modes of organization, and pioneer humane treatment
of workers. At the same time that they are engaging the world of business,
industry and commerce with incredible energy and invention, they are
withdrawing from engagement with the world in virtually every other area of
life. Friends maintain this double culture for two hundred years. In England,
they become fabulously wealthy; in America, they do pretty well4].
[1] The Quakers and the English Revolution: Alan Cole -Past
& Present, No. 10 (Nov. 1956), pp. 39-54
[2] George Fox: A Biography of the Founder of the Quakers
Paperback – 1 Sep 2007-by Jean Hatton
[3] The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the
English Revolution (Penguin History) Paperback – 12 Dec 1991
[4] Quakers & Capitalism: A Brief
Recap-throughtheflamingsword.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/quakers-capitalism-a-brief-recap/
Does the17th Century English Bourgeois Revolution need a
reset
“Every sociological definition is at bottom a historical
prognosis”. Leon Trotsky
A social order that was essentially feudal was destroyed by
violence, a new and capitalist social order created in its place”
Christopher Hill
‘a battleground which has been heavily fought over…beset
with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to
fight every inch of the way’. Lawrence Stone
Introduction
The last three decades have witnessed a non-stop onslaught
by revisionist historians against the conception that England during the
seventeenth- century witnessed a bourgeois revolution. The purpose of this
essay is to reset the conception of a bourgeois revolution and reestablish it
as part of our understanding of those unprecedented events that took place
nearly four hundred years ago.
The historian most connected with the English bourgeois
revolution was, of course, Christopher Hill. Hill was a member of the Communist
Party until 1956 and was the author of the groundbreaking essay The English
Revolution 1640. In his introduction, Hill wrote “the object of this essay is
to suggest an interpretation of the events of the seventeenth century different
from that which most of us were taught at school. To summarise it briefly, this
interpretation is that the English Revolution of 1640-60 was a great social
movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old
order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into
the hands of a new class, and so the freer development of capitalism was made
possible. The Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I
was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative
landlords. Parliament beat the King because it could appeal to the enthusiastic
support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the
yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever
they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really
about. The rest of this essay will try to prove and illustrate these
generalisations”.(1)
Hill knew that defending and proving his thesis would be
easier said than done. He would be attacked both inside and outside the
Communist party. He would spend most of his academic career seeking to defend
and then re-define what he meant by a bourgeois revolution.
In his 1940 essay he acknowledges how difficult it was to
offer a precise definition of a bourgeois revolution, he writes”The Marxist
conception of a bourgeois revolution, which I find the most helpful model for
understanding the English Revolution, does not mean a revolution made by the
bourgeoisie’. There was no self-conscious bourgeoisie which planned and willed
the revolution. However, the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution
because of its outcome, though glimpsed by few of its participants, ‘was the
establishment of conditions far more favourable to the development of
capitalism than those which prevailed before 1640’.(2).
The 1940 essay was a breathtaking piece of work that
deserved to be labelled groundbreaking. Although Hill was unsatisfied with what
he wrote describing the essay, the work of “a very angry young man, believing
he was going to be killed in a world war.”
Hill is correct when he says that the 1640 “bourgeois
revolution was not consciously willed by the bourgeoisie”, but he was as Ann
Talbot explains “sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the
social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle
against the king and well-grounded enough in history to identify new and
revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as
the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood
historical precedent for some theory to explain what they were doing.”(3)
Despite Hill’s belief that the bourgeoisie did not know what
they were doing Talbot believed that Hill was”sufficiently astute to realise
that when the people execute their king after a solemn trial and much
deliberation, it is not the result of a misunderstanding but has a profound
revolutionary significance entailing a complete break with the feudal past.
Although the monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was
soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no
monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until quite late in
Victoria’s reign”.
Not everyone in the Communist Party welcomed Hill’s
groundbreaking work on the English Revolution. The CP’s Labour Monthly carried
several articles attacking Hill’s conception of the English bourgeois revolution.
A certain P.F wrote “When the king and the bourgeoisie began
to realise that the system of government which up to then had worked rather
satisfactorily would have to be changed somehow, the king looked for allies.
The king was, as we have said, not simply a helpless instrument in the hands of
the bourgeoisie but had a certain independent power corresponding to the stage
or transition between the classes. In order to keep this power and to extend
it, the king turned for support to the feudal remnants and to the reactionary
sections of the bourgeoisie. With the help of these groups, he tried to reign
against the majority of the bourgeoisie, especially the industrial and merchant
bourgeoisie. Out of this conflict developed the Great Rebellion, the Civil War.
The Great Rebellion, therefore, is, in my opinion, not the war of liberation of
a suppressed bourgeoisie against feudalism – as was the Revolution of 1789. It
represents rather a new and very important step forward in the progress of
bourgeois society, a fight for the abolition of absolute monarchy, against the
remnants of feudalism, against the reactionary sections of the bourgeoisie,
against every element which might retard the vigorous development of bourgeois
capitalist society.(4)
One staggering point about Hill’s original article is the
fact that it was allowed to be published by such an ossified Stalinist party.
P.F’s comment was essentially reformist and was merely trumpeting Joseph
Stalin’s Menshevik two-stage political position.(5)
Hill’s ability to write against the CP’ss party line on
historical questions are explained by Talbot who said there was “something
Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism. They seem to
have been capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist
approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the
line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their investigations as far
as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It was an approach that was
further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of academic life that enabled
them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history that never brought them
into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political questions.
It has been said that as Hill began to write on different
aspects of the revolution, this meant he had abandoned the concept of the
bourgeois revolution. One essay, in particular, has been cited as marking a
change in Hill’s stance on the revolution. Published in Three British Revolutions,
1641, 1688, 1776 Ed J A Pocock (Princeton U.P 1980) some historians believe it
contained a change and repudiated his previous theory of the bourgeois
revolution. While it is correct to say that Hill did in his early career
concentrate on economic questions in this 1980s essay: A Bourgeois revolution,
he said that” a revolution embraces all social life and activities.
Hill started to pay attention to the radicals of the English
revolution. Groups such as the Levellers and Diggers were given far more prominence
in his writings. Even his writings on these groups were influenced by his time
in the CP. He owes a tremendous debt to the unfortunately underused historians
of the former USSR. Hill was constrained to use only the ones cleared by the
Russian CP.
One outstanding writer not cleared by the CP was Evgeny
Pashukanis. Whether Hill studied Evgeny Pashukanis is an open point. Pashukanis
makes this point on the Levellers “Generally, the dissolution of the bases of
the feudal order in these two and a half centuries was a great step forward;
the contours of the new social relationships appeared much more clearly, and
the anti-feudal ideology assumed mature forms. Therefore, in the seventeenth
century at the extreme left wing of the revolutionary movement we now find a
party (the Levellers) which developed a broad and consistent programme of a
bourgeois-democratic nature; the elimination of royal authority and the Upper
House, the universal right to vote, the separation of church from state (the
abolition of the tithe), the elimination of estate-corporate privileges,
freedom of trade, direct income tax, the cessation of the plunder of common
lands, and the abolition of all remnants of serfdom in land relations including
even copyhold.
He continues”It is particularly important to note the
demands of the Levellers concerning the radical restructuring both of judicial
establishments and of court procedure. The age of mercantile capital, and the
absolutism corresponding to it at the political level, was distinguished in the
judicial area by the rule of casuistry, procrastination, bribe-taking and
arbitrariness. Mercantile capital, developing on the basis of shackling forms
of exploitation, is not only congenial to serf and police arbitrariness but is
directly involved in it, for it facilitates the exploitation of the small
commodity producers. The major monopolistic trading companies are much more
interested in having good ties with the throne than in a fast, impartial and
scrupulous court, the more so since in their internal affairs they enjoy broad,
and even judicial, autonomy. On the contrary, the Levellers-by virtue of the
fact that they acted as champions of the most general conditions of development
of bourgeois-capitalist relations-had to turn their attention again to judicial
reform. John Lilburne in his work, The Fundamental Laws and Liberties,
incidentally formulates two classical principles of the bourgeois doctrine of
criminal law: no one may be convicted other than on the basis of a law existing
at the moment of commission of the act, and the punishment must correspond to
the crime according to the principle an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
Lilburne himself was, of course, the first man in England to succeed in being
served with an indictment.
“The Levellers found their support among the peasants, small
rentiers, craftsmen and workers. It is enough to recall the influence which
they enjoyed in the London suburbs, in particular in Southwark, which was
populated by weavers. However, their main support was the army. Here we
encounter a fact imposing a characteristic imprint on the whole course of the
first English Revolution: it was not accompanied by any significant agrarian
movement. Proceeding from the Levellers, the attempt to transform the political
structure of England of that day into a consistent bourgeois-democratic
condition was never supported by a massive peasant uprising. For this, of
course, there were fully sufficient reasons. In the first place, by that time
serf dependence no longer existed in England. Almost everywhere, the corvée had
been replaced by money rent. The cause of the greatest discontent had
therefore, been eliminated. In the second place, the class divisions of the
English peasantry, about which we spoke above, had gone rather far by the time
of the Great Revolution. A rich upper stratum, separated from the general mass,
tried to improve its farming at the expense of the less wealthy strata.
Winstanley, the leader and ideologist of the “Diggers”, who attempted to
realize something like agrarian communism, thus draws this contradiction
between the rich freeholders and the poor: they (the freeholders) exhaust the
common pastures, put an excessive number of sheep and draft animals on them,
and as a result the small renter and peasant farmer hardly manage to feed their
cows on the grazing ground.” The rich upper strata of the country took an
active part in the destruction of the old common system, in particular, the
enclosure of the common lands. In this instance, it united with the landowners
against the rural poor. Here we see, mutatis mutandis, the same alignment of
class forces which Stolypin tried to realize among us with the help of his
agrarian legislation. It is clear that this destroyed the political power of
the peasant movement against the landowners”.(6)
Hill defended his study of the radicals saying that ” some
will think that I overemphasize the importance of the defeated radicals at the
expense of the mainstream achievements of the English revolution. However,
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.”
While it is rare for any historian today to come to the
defence of Hill’s writing on the radicals of the English Revolution or any
subject for that matter covered by Hill, it is to Justin Champion’s credit that
he did so in his lecture Heaven Taken by Storm. Champion writes “Hill handled
ideas in his three significant books Intellectual Origins of the English
Revolution, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution, and The
World Turned Upside Down. Alongside those broader historical landscapes, Hill
also offered profound studies of significant literary figures such as John
Milton and John Bunyan. These works collectively ought to prompt discussion
about what type of Marxism Hill subscribed too. His historical writing allowed
space to consider the role of ideas, assessments of the individuals who
produced them, and the consequent agency or outcomes of those moments of
intellectual intervention. Hill did not employ the deterministic treatment of
ideas as mere epiphenomena of economic infrastructure or class affiliation so
frequently evident in the hostile caricature of his work. Much of the crude
assault on the value of Hill’s history has been shaped by the distinct lack of
conceptual engagement with the published evidence of his Marxist methodology.
The best way to remedy this occlusion is to examine those under-read
contributions by the man himself.(7)
As Champion points out in his essay if there was one
constant feature of Hill’s work, it was that he understood the relationship
between base and superstructure. As Karl Marx was the leading proponent of this
theory, it is worth seeing what he wrote. If there is one major criticism is
that Hill did not quote enough of Marx in his books.
It is clear from the Pocock essay that later in his career,
Hill concentrated more on superstructure than he did on base. This shift must
be said coincided with his leaving of the Communist Party in 1956. Perhaps his
last great book on economic questions was Economic Problems of the Church
written in 1956 although he would later return to the subject from time to
time. The book A Century of Revolution published in 1961 was one such time.
Hill’s essay The English Revolution was, in many ways, a
piece of classical Marxism. Not the last word on the subject but he did defend
in the teeth of Stalinist opposition several fundamental Marxist conceptions.
It is hard to fathom how much Hill read of the great Russian Marxist Leon
Trotsky but his understanding of qualitative changes in history mirrors that of
Trotsky.
As Trotsky explains “Quality is an aspect of something by
which it is what it is and not something else; quality reflects that which is
stable amidst change. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change
(become more or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else;
quantity reflects that which is constantly changing in the world (“the more
things change, the more they remain the same”). The quality of an object
pertains to the whole, not one or another part of an object, since without that
quality it would not be what it is, whereas an object can lose a “part” and
still be what it is, minus the part. Quantity, on the other hand, is an aspect
of a thing by which it can (mentally or really) be broken up into its parts (or
degrees) and be re-assembled again. Thus, if something changes in such a way
that has become something of a different kind, this is a qualitative change”,
whereas a change in something by which it still the same thing, though more or
less, bigger or smaller, is a “quantitative change”. In Hegel’s Logic, quantity
and quality belong to being.(8)
One unfortunate by-product of Hill concentration on social
or political aspects rather than the economics of the revolution was his
adoption of the genre “Peoples history”. This particular bad piece of Stalinist
baggage was taken by Hill when he left the CP. His approach to this type of
history was directly influenced by the politics of the bureaucracy.
As Ann Talbot eloquently states “The Communist Party
sponsored a form of People’ss History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s
Peoples History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. Peoples
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.
Stone- Manning
Hill’s concept was not without its admirers or supporters.
One such supporter in the early days of Hill’s career was the American
historian Lawrence Stone. Stone it is said described the history of the 17th
century as ‘a battleground which has been heavily fought over…beset with mines,
booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every
inch of the way’.
Stone took a position similar to the Christian Socialist
historian R.H. Tawney, which sought to explain the cause of the English Civil
War from the standpoint of a growing and politically influential section of the
gentry. The growth of this gentry had over the preceding years led to a
destabilising of the English State. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper “inverted
this theory, arguing that in fact the Civil War was caused in part by court
gentry who had fallen on bad times”.
In his book, The Causes of the English Revolution Stone does
present a convincing case for the defence of the English revolution. It is
broken down into two parts with four chapters; the fourth is an update on
Stone’s previous position written in 1985. Part one is titled Historiography
sub titled Theories of revolution. Stone does work through a number of
sociological and Marxist theories as to the revolutionary nature of the English
Civil war. Stone’s enquiry on the nature of the English Revolution was prompted
by his time at Princeton University in America. While teaching at Princeton he
came under extensive attack by his students for his leanings towards a
social/economic read Marxist interpretation of the Civil War.
Stone may have considered himself a young Marxist, but he
was nothing of the kind. Stone had a major problem in that he never really
understood the difference between genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic
determinism.
As Nick Beams points out in his outstanding essay
Imperialism and the political economy of the Holocaust “One of the most
frequently employed caricatures of Marxism is the claim that it argues that
ideology is just a cover for the real economic motivations of social actors.
Accordingly, Marxism is disproved by the discovery that individuals act, not
according to economic motives but on the basis of powerful ideologies. For
example, the right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson maintains that since
no business interests on either side of the conflict desired World War I—it
served the immediate economic interests of neither—its origins cannot be said
to lie within the capitalist economic system. It should be noted, in this
regard, that no business or financial interests want recession either. However,
recessions nevertheless occur, and they arise from the contradictions of the
capitalist economy. Marxism does not deny that historical actors are motivated
and driven into action by their ideological conceptions, and it does not claim
that these ideologies are simply a rationalisation for the real economic
motivations. However, it does insist that it is necessary to examine the
motives behind the motives—the real, underlying, driving forces of the
historical process—and to make clear the social interests served by a given
ideology—a relationship that may or may not is consciously grasped by the
individual involved”.(9)
Stone, after he wrote this book, moved away from any
association with Marxist historiography and in his own words became as he put
it in an interview in 1987, “an old Whig.” The problem is that Stone tried to
drag Hill into the same pit, stating that “Hill and I are thus now in agreement
that the English Revolution was not caused by a clear conflict between feudal
and bourgeois ideologies and classes; that the alignment of forces among the
rural elites did not correlate with attitudes towards ruthless enclosure; that
the Parliamentarian gentry had no conscious intention of destroying feudalism;
but that the result, first of the royal defeat and second of the consolidation
of that defeat in the Glorious Revolution forty years later, was decisive.
Together they made possible the seizure of political power by landed,
mercantile and banking elites, which in turn opened the way to England’s
advance into* the age of the Bank of England, the stock-market, aggressive
economic liberalism, economic and affective individualism, and an agricultural
entrepreneurship among the landed elite to whose unique characteristics.”.This
was Stone’s epitaph not Hill’s
Brian Manning
Brain Manning was made of sterner stuff. Manning studied
under Hill and was profoundly influenced by him. He started his academic career
politically tied to the Labour Party later in life he was politically attached
to the radical left group the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). This was a
handicap that was to hamper his work for the rest of his relatively short life.
To what extent you could call Manning a Marxist historian”
is open to debate. Usually, these labels are given by people who are too
intellectually lazy to explain what they mean by that term.
In history, accuracy matters. For too long historians have
thrown around terms like Marxist without any real understanding of what they
mean. Whether conscious or not, they do a disservice to any student studying
the English revolution.
Manning first meaningful involvement in politics was through
the Labour Party, but it was not until the 1980s that Manning rejected the
Labour Party and joined the International Socialists forerunner of the
Socialist Workers Party(SWP). The SWP was attractive to Manning as they fitted
into his schemer of history from below. The Communist Party historians heavily
influenced the SWP.
Manning was a student under Hill in the early 1950s and
admired the great historian. In an obituary he wrote “The undoubted dominance
of Christopher Hill in the history of the English Revolution may be attributed
to his prolific record of books and articles, and his continuous engagement in
debate with other historians; to the breadth of his learning, embracing the
history of literature, the law, science, as well as religion and economics; to
the fact that his work set the agenda and the standard to which all historians
of the period had to address themselves, whether in support of or opposition to
his methods and interpretations; but above all to the inspiration he drew from
Marxism. The English Revolution took place in a culture dominated by religious
ideas and religious language, and Christopher Hill recognised that he had to
uncover the social context of religion in order to find the key to
understanding the English Revolution, and as a Marxist to ascertain the
interrelationships between the intellectual and social aspects of the
period”.(10)
Manning developed close links with the Communist Party when
he left Balliol College, Oxford. Having his first teaching post at Kings
College London, then Manchester University finally ending up at University of
Ulster. A critical development in Manning’s historical trajectory was when he
served on the editorial board of the Magazine Past and Present, which was close
to the Communist Party Historians. While opposing what he called “Soviet
Communism” during his time on the editorial board he was not opposed to
collaborating with British Communists historians.
Much of Manning work concentrated more of the radical groups
in the English Revolution such as the Levellers, diggers etc. According to Alex
Calinicos “At the end of the 1980s, Brian started to attend and speak at the
Marxism week of discussion organised by the Socialist Workers Party every July
in London. What drew us together was a shared commitment to the Marxist theory
of history and an enthusiasm for the English Revolution. (Some of us – John
Rees, for example – have always found it hard to distinguish between the two:
there was a plan in 1994, as far as I remember never executed, to take a
minibus to the battlefield of Naseby to gloat over the destruction of Stuart
power by the New Model Army 350 years earlier.) Not the best epitaph a
historian would want.
Norah Carlin is a little bit scathing of Manning’s defence
of the English revolution, Manning’s work had alarming absence of explicitly
Marxist explanation. Manning, for example, states his position on the nature of
the class struggle in the Civil War in nine lines of his preface, and in a form
which makes it almost impossible to recognise it as Marxist. Left-wing
historians seem more concerned to establish their fair use of evidence than to
engage in the development of a Marxist understanding of the class struggle”.
Revisionist revolt
While the development of revisionist historians attacking
Hill and the concept of the English bourgeois revolution was an objective
occurrence, it must be said that Hill did very little to counter this
phenomenon. He was after all a better historian than he was a political
thinker.
Hill’s complacency was expressed in this statement we should
not take these fashions too seriously: they go in cycles, and it is no doubt my
age that makes me a little sceptical of latter-day “revisionist” historians who
try to convince us that there was no revolution in 17th century England, or
that if there was it had no long-term causes or consequences.’
As Norah Carlin explains The New History which has grown up
especially in the last twenty years makes no bones about its hostility to
Marxism. In the 1950s, the most vicious attacks on the Marxist interpretation
of the Civil War (by Hugh Trevor-Roper, as right-wing politically and as nasty
personally as you could hope or fear to find) nevertheless offered an
alternative explanation in terms of social conflict, namely the struggle of the
impoverished gentry against the overgrown Renaissance state. But from the
mid-1960s it became right-wing orthodoxy to deny that the Civil War was a class
conflict at all. By 1973, the introduction to a widely-used textbook by Conrad
Russell could claim that ‘For the time being … social change explanations of
the English Civil War must be regarded as having broken down.’
Lest anyone should think that that places the burden of
providing an alternative explanation on the shoulders of right-wing historians,
the task of explanation is either postponed until we have enough new
biographies of seventeenth-century politicians and studies of day-to-day
debates in Parliament; or cynically denied altogether. One historian has even
taken Marxists to task for over-explaining the phenomena of the past’. We must
allow, he says, for the role of sheer muddle and misunderstanding in
history.(11) Carlin had a far greater understanding of the dangers of
revisionism than Hill. You would have thought that her own Party(SWP) would
have taken on board her warnings regarding the rise of this anti-Marxism.
While publishing her two significant essays on the English
revolution, they nonetheless stayed with Hill baggage and all. Perhaps one day
Carlin will write about her time in the SWP and its relationship with Hill. As
Carlin states “Ironically, the left organisation I belonged to for many years
regarded me as a heretic because I did not agree with every last word written
by Christopher Hill, including his claims that the gentry were ‘the natural
rulers of the English countryside’ and that ‘the Bible caused the death of
Charles I’. As I said in the 2019 memorial lecture, I value Hill’s contribution
to the historiography of the English Revolution very highly indeed, but his
writings are not the last word on everything! It is only when there is no more
debate that history ceases to be interesting”(12)
________________________________________
1.The English Revolution
1640-https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/2.The
English Revolution
1640-https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/3.”These
the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill by Ann
Talbot 25 March 2003.wsws.org 4.The Peasant’s Revolt: A Reply and a Rejoinder-
https://marxists.architexturez.net/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/periodicals/labour_monthly/1940/12/english_revolution_reply.htm5.See-
Trotsky, Leon, The Permanent Revolution (1928) and Results and Prospects
(1906), New Park Publications, London, (1962)6.Evgeny Pashukanis-Revolutionary
Elements in the History of the English State and Law(1927)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm7Heaven Taken by
Storm: Christopher Hill, Andrew Marvell and the Dissenting
Tradition-https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4311-heaven-taken-by-storm-christopher-hill-andrew-marvell-and-the-dissenting-tradition8.The
ABC of Materialist Dialectics-(December 1939)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm9.Imperialism and the
political economy of the Holocaust-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/holo-m12.html10.Brian Manning-Turning
Point in History-(March 2003)11.Norah Carlin-Marxism and the English Civil
War-(Autumn 1980)
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/carlin/1980/xx/civilwar.html12,Interview
with Historian Norah Carlin-
https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/12/interview-with-historian-norah-carlin.html
Hill and Timofeeva
By Christopher Thompson
Marina Valerevna Timofeeva’s 2009 thesis on Christopher
Hill’s analysis of the 17th-Century English Bourgeois Revolution is another
matter. It was submitted to the Ural State University at that time and appears
not to be available on-line or in print at present. An abstract of the thesis
can, however, be found and seems to be the prelude to an analysis of his
writings from the start of the Second World War until he stopped writing in the
1990s. To the best of my knowledge, its existence and apparently formidable
length have not been known hitherto. Dr Timofeeva’s objective was to emphasise
the significant contribution Christopher Hill had made to the development of
Marxist historiography in the West drawing on his published works, the tributes
of friends and colleagues in the 1978 and 1988 festschrifts dedicated to him
and on appreciations that appeared in newspapers and periodical publications.
Hill’s own papers now held in the library of Balliol College, Oxford do not appear
to have been used.
On the other hand, she does deploy material from authors in
the former Soviet Union and its successor states to support her analysis. Until
reading her abstract, I was unaware of the works of Pavlova, Sharifzhanov and
Meshcheryakova on the historiography of the bourgeois revolution’. Nor did I
know about the analysis of Repina on the ambiguities of the Marxist concept of
the English Revolution of the seventeenth-century. It is clear that large
sections of Hill’s corpus of works had been translated into Russian, Polish and
other eastern European languages with official sanction and that they had and
still have a measure of influence in those countries that they have lost in the
U.K. and other English-speaking countries.
There are also indications that Dr Timofeeva’s sympathies
lie with Christopher Hill’s evolving approach to the English Revolution, to
issues of class and cultural and intellectual changes up to and after 1640. His
reaction to the rise of ‘revisionism’ in the mid-1970s also appears to have
elicited her approval. His concept of a ‘revolution from below’ built of social
and economic transformations is one she accepted. And she was able to draw upon
methodological studies of British and Western historiography, some of them her own,
equally unfamiliar to British scholars and historians in North America and
elsewhere.
It would be altogether wrong in my view to disregard such a
study which, in its full form, must be a work of formidable length. It would be
a mistake too to dismiss the other sources upon which she has drawn as
misguided or not as well-informed as they might have been. But Dr Timofeeva
like her fellow historians in Russia is clearly a person of intelligence and
with an admirable degree of diligence. What she appears, prima facie, to have
lacked is the contact with academic historians of the period in Britain and
elsewhere whose work has taken the study of mid-Stuart England and Wales,
Ireland and Scotland along way forward since Christopher Hill was in his prime.
She does not seem to have heard of the problems of multiple kingdoms or, if she
has, it does not figure in the abstract of her thesis. There have been major
historians in the field since the days of Conrad Russell. Inevitably, the
influence of historians fades after their deaths. This is what has happened to
Christopher Hill. But attempts to preserve his memory and to acknowledge his
contribution have begun here in the U.K. Perhaps, her work will come to be
acknowledged here too.
Regicide or Revolution? What Petitioners Wanted, September
1648 – February 1649-Norah Carlin- £18.50-Publisher Breviary Stuff
‘Popular petitions
were at the very heart of the revolutionary crisis of 1648-1649, and this book
is unique in recovering their meaning, the context in which they were issued,
and the people who wrote and supported them. Essential reading.’
John Rees-The Leveller Revolution
‘The petitions Norah Carlin has transcribed and carefully
contextualized in Regicide or Revolution? represent an incredibly important
cache of materials for understanding the crisis of the English Revolution, the
trial and execution of Charles I. Carlin convincingly demonstrate that these
petitions were not straightforward demands for bloody retribution. Rather,
their content varied considerably, incorporating radical demands for legal,
social and constitutional reform, giving historians a highly important window
into the ideals and aspirations of the ‘well affected’ both within and outside
the army. The collection should be required reading for scholars and students
of the English Revolution, and the general reader alike.’
Ted Vallance, University of Roehampton, London
There are two types of historians. The first type is the
historian that spends a tremendous number of hours deep mining archives to
produce a book. The second type is the historian that writes about the former.
Norah Carlin has produced a book that firmly places her in
the first type of historian. It takes a skilful historian like Carlin to
produce a book out of such a large and significant number of texts. The English
revolution is one of the most worked-over topics in English history, and rivals
only the American, French and Russian revolution in books produced. It is to
Carlin’s credit that she has created something new and highly interesting.
It is widely accepted amongst historians of the English
revolution that the many petitions addressed to Parliament and the army in the
five months before Charles I’s execution influenced the events that led to his
trial and death.
However, more Conservative historians have argued that the
petitions had little effect and represented little more than a propaganda campaign
by a small number of political and military leaders.
It is to her eternal credit that Carlin has undertaken the
task to carry out a wide-ranging examination of over sixty texts. As Carlin has
said, the book has been nearly twenty years in the making.The sheer number and
diversity of the texts in the book indicate a tremendous politicisation of a
significant layer of the population. It would not be an overstatement to say
this is a groundbreaking book. Every text begins with a context and ends with a
background analysis. It is clear that a lot of work and time went into this
book.
In a recent interview, Carlin described this process, “this
involved trawling the contemporary printed material in the British Library’s
Thomason Tracts (now available online), which is a sheer pleasure to me, and
printed record sources like the Commons Journal. From there, I moved on to
whatever manuscripts related to the petitions survive. I also researched each
regiment, county and town involved as far as I could without greater
specialisation, mainly in secondary sources (some of the Victoria County
Histories are a good starting point) but sometimes going back to the national
or local archives when I felt existing literature didn’t deal satisfactorily
with a particular issue”[1]
Dual Power
Carlin clearly believes that the majority of the texts came
from plebeian elements
in other words, from the rank and file activists. These
texts then gained a wider audience. They also testify to the dual nature of
power during this short period as Leon Trotsky describes so well : “the English
Revolution of the seventeenth century, exactly because it was a great
revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this
alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war.
At first, the royal power, resting upon the privileged
classes or the upper circles of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops –
is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the circles of the squirearchy that are close
to it. The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament
supported by the City of London. The protracted conflict between these two
regimes is finally settled in open civil war. The two governmental centres –
London and Oxford – create their own armies. Here the dual power takes a
territorial form, although, as always in a civil war, the boundaries are very
shifting. Parliament conquers. The king is captured and awaits his fate.
It would seem that the conditions are now created for the
single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie. But before the royal power could
be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent
political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents the pious
and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully
interferes in social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian
Guard, and as the political representative of a new class opposing the
prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state
organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers’ and officers’
deputies (“agitators”). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived:
that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army. This leads to
open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves powerless to oppose with its own army
the “model army” of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends
with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the
Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of
Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of
the Levellers – the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose to the
rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own
veritably plebeian regime. But this new two-power system does not succeed in
developing: the Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie have not
yet, nor can have their own historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with
his enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one,
is established for a period of years[2]
Carlin tackles a number of important issues in the book. One
of the most important issues is to what extent were the authors of the various
texts merely responding to political events or were the cause by their actions
of subsequent events.
She writes “The petitions were responding to events as they
occurred, and we must avoid the temptation to see them as causing the events
that followed – especially the king’s execution, which has been a focus for
hindsight almost since it happened. None of them calls openly for the king’s
death, and even among those that call for vengeance for the blood spilt in the
civil wars, only a few name him directly. Much express concern for the common
people’s rights and liberties, and a substantial minority call for a radical
redefinition of the English constitution, with the House of Commons at its
centre as representative of the people. Some list reforms in the law and
society that reveal a wider vision of revolution for England, and very many
expand on their own interpretation of the civil wars and more recent
events”.[3]
The texts in Carlin’s book clearly show that England was
going through a profound transformation. The debate about whether to kill the
king was unprecedented and had its roots in objective processes. Carlin is
enough of a Marxist to believe that such events are not merely spontaneous
occurrences but are decades if not centuries in the making. Whether the participants
are conscious of what they are doing is not the most important point. To be
more precise during the English bourgeois revolution some of its actors were to
a certain extent semi-conscious of what they were doing it is a different
matter during a socialist revolution such as the Russian revolution where the
actors were entirely conscious of what needed to be done.
This does not undermine the English Revolution’s lasting
historical significance. As Karl
Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Men
make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not
make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing
already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead
generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
SWP
It is a pity that Carlin has not written more on the English
revolution. Her first book Causes of the English Civil War (Historical
Association Studies) was written in 1998 and gave a very good introduction to
the English revolution. It introduces the reader to the various strands of
historiography. During her time in the Socialist Workers Party(SWP), she
produced two groundbreaking essays that should have prompted the State
Capitalist organisation to produce more work on the subject and challenge the
growing threat of a number of revisionist historians that were seeking to
denigrate any Marxist understanding of the revolution.
Carlin in both compositions makes some critical points
worthy of much further study, three of which stand out. She believed that
England witnessed a bourgeois revolution, that so-called Marxist historians
have not done enough to stem the tide of revisionism that undermined both Whig
and Marxist historiography and the need for a more precise understanding of the
class nature of the radical groups like the Levellers and how they fit into the
concept of a Bourgeois revolution. Carlin’s work did not sit very well with the
SWP’s orientation to Historians like Christopher Hill and Brian Manning.The SWP
rejected Carlin’s historiography and adopted of the genre of “Peoples History
which was developed by the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG).
Of the CP Carlin makes this point “Hill left the Communist
Party in 1957 after playing a not very memorable role on the Commission for
Inner-Party Democracy and ended up as Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Given
the nasty and personalised tone of the right-wing attack, it is hardly
surprising that defending Hill should come to be almost a significant activity
in itself, yet the striking fact is that when a collection of essays by former
pupils of his was got together to mark his retirement at the end of the 1970s,
not one article made any explicit reference to Marxism, only one contributor
(Brian Manning) could be regarded as in any sense a Marxist, and several
(including the advocate of muddle quoted above) were openly anti-Marxist. There
is something slightly odd about ‘Britain’s greatest Marxist historian’ (as he
is described continuously in journals such as New Left Review and History
Workshop) raising no successors”.[4]
She recently elaborated more on her time inside the SWP when
she challenged the almost religiously orthodox position of the SWP towards
Hill. She states “Most left political tendencies have recognised the importance
of the subject to some extent in recent times, though some have got bogged down
by making a shibboleth of some over-simplified interpretation. Ironically, the
left organisation I belonged to for many years regarded me as a heretic because
I didn’t agree with every last word written by Christopher Hill, including his
claims that the gentry were ‘the natural rulers of the English countryside’ and
that ‘the Bible caused the death of Charles I’. As I said in the 2019 memorial
lecture, I value Hill’s contribution to the historiography of the English
Revolution very highly indeed, but his writings are not the last word on
everything! It’s only when there is no more debate that history ceases to be
interesting”[5]
Conclusion
Carlin should be congratulated for producing a marvellous
book that deserves to be in every university library. The ideals and principles
emanating from the texts were the mainstays of the revolution. But in the final
analysis, the English revolution was a bourgeois revolution, and there existed,
inevitably, a gap between the ideals its participants proclaimed and their real
social-economic and political purpose. However, the revolution did pave the way
for the vast expansion of capitalism and produced the first capitalist
nation-state.
About the author
Before retirement, Norah Carlin was a Principal Lecturer in
History at Middlesex University (London). She is also the author of The Causes
of the English Revolution (Oxford, Blackwell for the Historical Association,
1999) and a number of articles on aspects of the seventeenth-century English
revolution. Having moved back to her native Edinburgh some years ago, she is
currently pursuing research on the kirk and rural society in Scotland in the
century after the Reformation.
The book can be purchased directly from Breviary
Stuff-https://www.breviarystuff.org.uk/norah-carlin-regicide-or-revolution/
or from
Amazon-https://www.amazon.co.uk/Regicide-Revolution-Petitioners-September-February/dp/1916158609/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Norah+Carlin+%E2%80%93+Regicide+or+Revolution%3F&qid=1577832099&sr=8-1
[1]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/12/interview-with-historian-norah-carlin.html
[2] The Seventeenth-Century revolution- Leon Trotsky’s
Writings on Britain-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/britain/v1/ch01a.htm
[3] Review : Regicide or Revolution? What Petitioners
Wanted, September 1648 – February 1649-Norah Carlin £18.50 358pp / 156x234mm /
paperback ISBN 978-1-9161586-0-3
[4]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2018/04/norah-carlin-socialist-workers-party.html
[5] http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/12/interview-with-historian-norah-carlin.html
Interview with Historian Norah Carlin
Norah Carlin’s new book
– Regicide or Revolution? What Petitioners Wanted, September 1648 –
February 1649 is out now and is published by Breviary Stuff. I caught up with
her and asked a few questions about the book.
Q. What made you pick the subject of Regicide or Revolution
and what were the difficulties if any in researching such a wide-ranging
subject matter. Basically, I would like to know how you write and approach a
subject.
A. I was spurred on by hearing once too often (at a
350th-anniversary conference) that the motives for regicide were not political
as we would understand them, but religious fanaticism and superstition. The
army was said to be have been committed since April 1648 to the death of the
king as a ‘man of blood’, and too many books claim that this was also the main
content of the late 1648 petitions from soldiers and others. I knew this was
not true of the ones I had read, so I set out to find and read them all.
This involved trawling the contemporary printed material in
the British Library’s Thomason Tracts (now available online), which is sheer
pleasure to me, and printed record sources like the Commons Journal. From
there, I moved on to whatever manuscripts related to the petitions survive. I
also researched each regiment, county and town involved as far as I could
without greater specialisation, mainly in secondary sources (some of the
Victoria County Histories are a good starting point) but sometimes going back
to the national or local archives when I felt existing literature didn’t deal
satisfactorily with a particular issue.
Q. What is your take on recent historiography on the subject
of regicide and revolution?
A.Recent debate has centred on whether the trial of Charles
I was intended all along to lead to his execution. The petitions feed into this
with their very varied approach to ‘bringing offenders to justice’. Most of
them don’t name the king explicitly, and when they do even fewer attack Charles
I personally in the way that some well-known pamphleteers and politicians did.
But they are also full of interesting political ideas that could move the
discussion away from that narrow theme onto wider issues of what the English
Revolution was, what motivated it, and what it achieved.
Q.Since, your first articles on the English revolution, were
in the early 1980s, how would you say your historiography on the revolution has
changed if at all. How do you see future historiography developing?
A.My main focus remains the many faces of English radicalism
in this period, a subject that spreads (like the Leveller movement was said to
do at the time) in ever-widening but concentric circles.
Q.The English revolution clearly holds a tremendous interest
for you why is that. Also, do you think that left political tendencies have
neglected the subject?
A.I think it’s because of the mass of material relating to
popular action and radical ideas. Nowhere else in early modern Europe do you
have anything like William Clarke’s record of the Putney Debates, or the range
of pamphlets and news in print.
Most left political tendencies have recognised the
importance of the subject to some extent in recent times, though some have got
bogged down by making a shibboleth of some over-simplified interpretation.
Ironically, the left organisation I belonged to for many years regarded me as a
heretic because I didn’t agree with every last word written by Christopher
Hill, including his claims that the gentry were ‘the natural rulers of the
English countryside’ and that ‘the Bible caused the death of Charles I’. As I
said in the 2019 memorial lecture, I value Hill’s contribution to the
historiography of the English Revolution very highly indeed, but his writings
are not the last word on everything! It’s only when there is no more debate
that history ceases to be interesting.
Until very recently I would have said the subject also
suffered from a lack of mainstream media attention, but since the December 2019
BBC2 documentary ‘Killing a King’ there is bound to be a resurgence of
interest, and I hope it lasts.
QWhat are you planning to do next?
A.I have a book that was written some time ago but should be
published soon, on the history of a grand house in Essex, Old Copped Hall near
Waltham Abbey, where I have regularly taken part in an ongoing archaeological
project. Over the centuries from 1258 to 1748 its owners were involved in all
the major events in English history from the Barons’ Wars to the South Sea
Bubble, and I was pleased to go back to periods I had studied long ago so as to
write about each of them. One owner, the second Earl of Middlesex, even
happened to be on Parliament’s team negotiating with Charles I at Newport in
late 1648, right at the heart of ‘Regicide or Revolution?’ I am also writing up
some research on Scottish local society in the age of the Reformation that I
have done since moving back to Scotland.
I am pleased to call myself ‘a jobbing historian’ because I
enjoy taking on a variety of subjects where I find surprising and interesting
connections as well as contrasts — always centred on how the world has been
changed, on the understanding that it is possible for human action to change it
again. I hope these are relevant answers to the questions you asked.
What Historians have said about the book
‘Popular petitions were at the very heart of the
revolutionary crisis of 1648-1649 and this book is unique in recovering their
meaning, the context in which they were issued, and the people who wrote and
supported them. Essential reading.’
John Rees, author of The Leveller Revolution
‘The petitions Norah Carlin has transcribed and carefully
contextualized in Regicide or Revolution? represent an incredibly important
cache of materials for understanding the crisis of the English Revolution, the
trial and execution of Charles I. Carlin convincingly demonstrates that these
petitions were not straightforward demands for bloody retribution. Rather,
their content varied considerably, incorporating radical demands for legal,
social and constitutional reform, giving historians a highly important window
into the ideals and aspirations of the ‘well affected’ both within and outside
the army. The collection should be required reading for scholars and students
of the English Revolution, and the general reader alike.’
Ted Vallance, University of Roehampton, London
At last, the army petitions of 1648-9 have found their
editor and historian. Every student of the English Revolution will be indebted
to Norah Carlin for bringing together in one place the soldiers’ petitions,
from all over England and Wales, that demanded justice. However, they conceived
it, after the first and second civil wars. Each petition has been carefully
edited, set in a context, and assessed in what is an authoritative edition of
very important documents in the history of relations between Parliament, army
and people.’
Stephen K. Roberts, Director, History of Parliament Trust
About the author
Before retirement Norah Carlin was a Principal Lecturer in
History at Middlesex University (London). She is also the author of The Causes
of the English Revolution (Oxford, Blackwell for the Historical Association,
1999) and a number of articles on aspects of the seventeenth-century English
revolution. Having moved back to her native Edinburgh some years ago, she is
currently pursuing research on the kirk and rural society in Scotland in the
century after the Reformation.
Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and
Continuity-Catriona Murray-London, Routledge, 2017, ISBN: 978-1472424051;
202pp.; Price: £115.00
For a Tear is an Intellectual thing;
And a Sigh is the sword of an angel king;
And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty’s bow.
William Blake
“When does the artistic image appear convincing? When we
experience a special psychic state of joy, satisfaction, elevated repose, love
or sympathy for the author. This psychic state is the aesthetic evaluation of a
work of art. Aesthetic feeling lacks a narrowly utilitarian character; it is
disinterested, and in this regard, it is organically bound up with our general
conceptions of the beautiful (although, of course, it is narrower than these
concepts). The aesthetic evaluation of a work is the criterion of its
truthfulness or falseness. Artistic truth is determined and established
precisely through such an evaluation.
Art as the Cognition of Life-A Voronsky
Catriona Murray’s Imaging Stuart Family Politics is an
award-winning and beautifully illustrated book. It carries with it a
significant amount of original research and encompasses a cross-disciplinary
approach while maintaining a high academic standard.
Having said that the book suffers a little from a one-sided
approach in that it examines the English revolution solely from the standpoint
of the monarchy. To her credit Murray rather than examining the images used in
the book in isolation, does attempt with varying degrees of success to locate
them within the socio-political context of the revolution.
In a convoluted way, Murray’s book shows the class nature of
the Stuart dynasty. King Charles I’s use of art to defend his position was a
novel solution in his and many eyes, but the fact that it did not succeed was
not for want of trying. For all his political acumen which was not a lot King
Charles did not understand the class forces he was up against. In pure
desperation, he even used his children as propaganda as this cynical quote from
Charles states We are moved both for
your sake and the sake of the kingdom itself, over which you are ruling;
because as children are a source of solace to parents, thus are they a source
of support for kings; for the more children there are, the deeper are the
roots, and the more numerous are the supports, upon which the stability of a
kingdom rests.[1]
This clearly failed,
and in the end, like all dictators, he used war to solve his crisis.
Historiography
“ I hope that my book will encourage scholars to reconsider
the significant part of the visual in Stuart politics and to reassess a body of
fascinating material which performed a crucial, if, at times, unpredictable,
role in early modern public communication”.
Murray recognises that the history of emotions is a very
young discipline and that by default her book is a very specialised piece of
historical study reflecting the early days of the discipline. Trying to place
it in the historiography of the English revolution is, therefore, a complicated
task.The book is part of a trend to examine the English revolution, mainly from
the standpoint of the monarchy and its use of imagery and religion.The book
stands on the shoulders of historians, Roy Strong, Oliver Millar, and Kevin
Sharpe.
Again the use of Christopher Hill work would have given the
book a better balance. As Hill points parliament and radicals during the
revolution were not adverse in using art as a propaganda weapon he states
“Politics was invariably expressed in religious language and imagery. (Gerrard)
Winstanley used the stories of Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, to express his
class analysis of society; the younger brother would overcome his oppressing
elder brother. David and Goliath, Samson and the Philistines, were symbols of
revolt against tyranny. Existing corrupt society was designated as Sodom,
Egypt, Babylon.[2]
Murray’s study of the use of imagery during the English
revolution is a little one-sided. A multi-sided approach to the discipline is needed
if one is to use art to cognize the complicated nature of the revolution. Her
approach is Conservative, to say the least.
While it is only recently that through the work of the Fred
Choate and David North that the work of the great Russian Marxist scholars such
as Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky is coming to light, Murray’s book would
have a better one if she had at least consulted figures like Voronsky who spent
his life examining the role of art in society.
As Voronsky States on page 98 of his book Art as the
Cognition of Life “What is art? First of all, art is the cognition of life. Art
is not the free play of fantasy, feelings and moods; art is not the expression
of merely the subjective sensations and experiences of the poet; art is not assigned
the goal of primarily awakening in the reader ‘good feelings.’ Like science,
art cognizes life. Both art and science have the same subject: life, reality.
But science analyzes, art synthesizes; science is abstract, art is concrete;
science turns to the mind of man, art to his sensual nature. Science cognizes
life with the help of concepts, art with the aid of images in the form of
living, sensual contemplation.”[3]
There is no getting away from the fact that the book is a
beautifully illustrated and well-written book. It is hoped that in the future,
Murray examines the more complicated use of imagery by parliamentary forces.
[1] The Royal Correspondence of King James I of England (and
VI of Scotland) to his Royal Brother-in-Law, King Christian IV of Denmark,
1603-16, ed. Ronald M. Meldrum (Brighton, 1977), p. 11.
[2] God and the English Revolution-Author(s): Christopher
Hill-Source: History Workshop, No. 17 (Spring, 1984), pp. 19-31-Published by:
Oxford University Press
[3] Art as the Cognition of Life: Aleksandr Konstantinovich
Voronsky-Mehring Books-https://mehring.com/art-as-the-cognition-of-life.html
How to Do Good to Many: The Public Good Is the Christian’s
Life – 13 Nov 2018by Richard Baxter & Jordan J Ballor (Editor) Christian’s
Library Press
“It is a sign he is a branch cut off and withered who careth
little for any but himself” (292).
Richard Baxter, How to Do Good to Many
“And let all men take their common and special opportunities
to do good: time will not stay; yourselves, your wives, your children, your
servants, your neighbours, are posting to another world; speak now what you
would have them hear; do them now all the good you can. It must be now or
never; there is no returning from the dead to warn them” (323-34).
Given the extraordinary literary output by Richard Baxter,
it is hard not to agree with Richard Schlatter that figures like Baxter have
been largely overlooked by historians both left and right. Baxter was a
prodigious writer turning out more than 130 books. So many books that it is
difficult to count. Many of the books are folios with over 1 million words in
length.
While prominent figures like Baxter have largely been
forgotten, the same cannot be said about the English revolution. The last two
decades have seen a never-ending stream of literature.
The revolution still provokes significant interest and
controversy. The purpose of this little review is to try and place Baxter
within the context of the English revolution and to a certain extent, rescue
him from the condescension of history.
While many significant figures of the revolution have
sketchy biographies, this cannot be said of Baxter, who was born in 1615. From
an early age, Baxter began to see things in class terms describing his father
as “a mean Freeholder”. Like many families at the beginning of the revolution,
Baxter’s family life was tough, and the family was “entangled by debts”.
However, his poverty did not stop Baxter from thinking that Godly People were the best’.
Baxter was heavily influenced by his family’s acceptance of
Puritanism. Baxter was later to recognise his father as the “Instrument of my
first Convictions, and Approbation of a Holy Life’. In class terms, Baxter was
part of a growing and influential lower middle class who would clash so
spectacularly with the King and Aristocracy in the English revolution.
Like other middle-class people around him, Baxter had the
drive to try and achieve ‘Academick Glory’, and ‘wanting Academical Honours’.
This he did not achieve through university but by becoming self-taught. Baxter “became one of the most learned of
seventeenth-century divines.” Baxter puts this down to God. His praise of God
is a running theme throughout his writings and is central to the book How to Do
Good to Many: The Public Good Is the Christian’s Life. The book is a guide for
the middle class on how to do good. There is nothing controversial in the book;
much Baxter’s political and social outlook is missing. This is a little strange
given that Baxter was profoundly moved by the massive social, political and
religious upheavals brought about by the English revolution.
While Baxter’s work is cloaked in religious trappings, once
you break open the shell of religiosity, it is clear to anyone that a study of
his political and philosophical writings play an essential part in our
understanding of the events of the 17th-century English revolution.
From a political standpoint, Baxter was on the right-wing of
the Presbyterians. He kept his distance from Oliver Cromwell and other leaders
of the revolution. To use a modern term, Baxter took a typical centrist
position also attacking anyone associated with the left-wing of the revolution,
including Independents such as Hugh
Peters. The “sectaries” like Thomas Rainborow and any Leveller, in general,
were “tools of Anabaptists’,. Anyone who sought to widen the franchise was seen
as Anabaptists by Baxter.
Early on in his life, Baxter took up an extreme and class
position on the poor. He did not believe that men “from the Dung-cart (could)
to make us laws, and from the Ale-house and the May-pole to dispose of our
religion, lives, and estates. When a pack of the rabble are got together, the
multitude of the needy and the dissolute prodigals if they were ungoverned,
would tear out the throats of the more wealthy and industrious…. And turn all
into a constant war”.
It would be easy to dismiss Baxter’s writing on the poor as
an exception, but in reality, they partly expressed a real fear amongst the
ruling class that the revolution would lead to a wider franchise and more
importantly a revolution against property. which to a certain extent happened.
If you strip away all the religious superstructure at the
base of Baxter’s writings are hatred of the masses. His Holy Commonwealth,
which is probably his most famous book is a manifesto against a more
comprehensive democracy except for the chosen few namely people like him.
Baxter‘s hostility to the poor was expressed most vehemently
in his opposition to the Leveller’s.
When Baxter was in the New Model Army as an army Chaplin, he
opposed the Levellers in debate accusing
them publishing “wild pamphlets” as “changeable as the moon “and advocating “a
heretical democracy”. The irony of this being that Baxter’s books themselves
were burnt and he was labelled as a subversive like the Levellers he
criticised.
Printing Revolution
You could say that this book by Baxter is the product of two
print revolutions. One took place in the seventeenth Century the other in the
twenty-first century. Baxter’s original book was part of an influential print
culture that exploded during the English revolution. As Joad Raymond writes ”
The publication of one of the first popular printed works, Mercurius
Gallobeligicus, in 1594 ushered in a new era of the printed word to England in
the form of pamphlets and newsbooks. These works quickly gained popularity by
the middle of the seventeenth century, amplifying communication among all
levels of society”.[1] Given Baxter’s prodigious output it has been said that
he “was the first author of a string of best-sellers in British literary
history”.
This book is also part of another print revolution no less
important. The print revolution in the twenty-first century has seen the rise
of books printed by their author or publisher. This particular edition was
initially printed in the United States, but my copy says it was printed in the
United Kingdom by Amazon. In some cases, it is difficult to tell the origin of
the country a book is printed in since ships outfitted with printing presses
now print vasts quantities and deliver them to any country in the world.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is Baxters
appeal to merchants to behave themselves as good Christians. As Christopher
hill recounts in his book The English Revolution 1640 “The political theorist,
Hobbes, describes how the Presbyterian merchant class of the city of London was
the first centre of sedition, trying to build a state-governed like the
republics of Holland and Venice, by merchants for their interests. (The
comparison with the bourgeois republics is constantly recurring in
Parliamentarian writings.) Mrs Hutchinson, the wife of one of Cromwell’s
colonels, said all were described as Puritans who “crossed the views of the
needy courtiers, the encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd
nobility and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or
conversation, or anything good.”[2]
As was said at the beginning of this review, Baxter is an
overlooked writer but along with Thoms Hobbes and James Harrington[3] is a
crucial figure if one wants to understand the nature of the English revolution.
Baxter’s writings give us a more in-depth insight into culture and politics
during the civil war.
According to one writer “The largest single group among
Baxter’s correspondence consists of some seventy men who became nonconformist
ministers at the Restoration, but the interest of the letters is not confined
to the history of nonconformity, ecclesiastical affairs, or theological
controversy. Baxter was an acute enquirer into matters arcane and mundane,
inveterately interested in both public affairs and individuals’ experience,
encyclopedically industrious in establishing the grounds for the opinions
which, for over half a century, he freely discussed in letters with persons of
every walk of life, from peers, the gentry, and members of the professions, to
merchants, apprentices, farmers, and seamen. The result is not merely a rich
historical archive: the range of this correspondence, the vitality of its
engagement with a great variety of topics, the immediacy of its expression, and
the unpredictability’s of its mood and tone make this collection a record of
felt experience unique among early epistolary archives”.
To a certain extent Baxter was sensitive enough to recognise
the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into
struggle against the king. Baxter used the only tool available to him. He
“ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some theory
to explain what they were doing”.
Baxter chose the parliamentary side because he felt that
“for the debauched rabble through the land emboldened by his (the kings) gentry
and seconded by the common soldiers of his army, took all that were called
Puritans for their enemies”.
While it is correct to place Baxter’s writings alongside
that of Hobbes and Harrington
Schlatter believes that Baxter’s opposition to Hobbes and
Harrington were that they believed in a secular state, but Baxter did not.
Having said that Baxter closely followed the writings of
Hobbes and Harrington declaring
“I must begin at the bottom and touch these Praecognita
which the politicians doth presuppose because I have to do with some that will
deny as much, as shame will suffer them to deny.”
Baxter was heavily critical of Hobbes whose “mistake”
according to one writer “was that in his doctrine of “absolute impious
Monarchy’ he gives priority to man by making sovereign the will of man rather
than the will of God. Baxter deplored any attempt to draw criteria for right
and wrong from man’s As for Harrington; his great fallacy consisted in denying
God’s sovereignty by making “God the Proposer, and the people the Resolvers or
Confirmers of all their laws.” If his [Harrington’s] doctrine be true, the Law
of nature is no Law, till men consent to it. At least where the Major Vote can
carry it, Atheism, Idolatry, Murder, Theft, Whoredome, etc., are no sins
against God. Yea no man sinneth against God but he that consenteth to his Laws.
The people have greater authority or Government than Gods in Baxter’s view,
such conceptions of politics and its practice as those of Hobbes and Harrington
is suited to atheists and heathen”.
While being critical his writings bore similarities to both
Hobbes and Harrington.According to Geoffrey Nuttall “in politics as well as an
ecclesiastical position as continually taking a ‘moderate’ position which from
both sides would bring him charges of betrayal or insincerity.”
To the consternation of many revisionist historians, a case
can be made that the English revolution was fought along class lines. As Baxter
himself put it at the time: “A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of
England . . . adhered to the King . . . And most of the tenants of these
gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the others call the
rabble, did follow the gentry and were for the King. On the Parliament’s side
were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in
most of the counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders
and the middle sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which
depend on clothing and such manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the
strength of religion and civility in the land, and gentlemen and beggars and
servile tenants are the strength of iniquity”.[4]
Conclusion
To conclude Schlatter offers some advice on how we should
understand Richard Baxter’s place in the English revolution “students of Baxter
must look backwards, for he stands near the end of a tradition which, although
someone is always trying to revive it as a weapon in the never-ending war on
liberty and democracy has been long been dead. To understand Baxter’s politics
we must reflect on that long political tradition which achieved its first and
most magnificent expression in the City of God, which flourished in the Middle
Ages and Reformation, and died in the Age of Reason”.
Comment by C Thompson
Dear Keith,
I
read your most recent post on the works of Richard Baxter and their
significance with interest. I am afraid I do not think your interpretation is
correct. Because Baxter like many of his contemporaries recognised that there
were economic and social distinctions in English society does not mean that
they were class-based or that they supported an interpretation of the events of
the 1640s as an example of class conflict in the Marxist sense.
The use of terms like “lower middle class” is anachronistic
and the view of the capacity of those at the lower end of the social scale to
take political decisions was not just a reflection of upper class prejudices. I
am hard-pressed to think of any early modern historians nowadays who would use
such terms. There was, moreover, no real prospect at any stage of small groups
like the Diggers, still less the Levellers, overthrowing the economic and
social order. In any case, the complex mechanisms for conciliation and
negotiation between different individuals, social groups and localities have
yet to be fully explored. Baxter cannot be re-moulded in this procrustean
sense.
With
good wishes, Christopher
[1] Joad Raymond, The Invention of the English Newspaper:
English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1996), 6
[2]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/
[3]See James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography – 10 Oct
2019-by Rachel Hammersley
[4] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/
S.Roskell, Perspectives in English Parliamentary History
By C Thompson
Academic essays which survey the state of particular areas
of historical interest rarely have long shelf lives. They are creatures of the
moment, useful to undergraduates but soon outdated by the passage of time. As
new articles and books appear, their utility declines and, before long, they
are forgotten. Nonetheless, there have been surveys of this kind which
encapsulate the understanding of historians at a particular point in time and
which pose an interesting contrast to later claims.
The essay composed by the distinguished medievalist,
J.S.Roskell, on perspectives in English Parliamentary history and published in
the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library in March, 1964 falls into this
category.[1]
Roskell took as his subject the development of Parliament
from the medieval period onwards up until the year 1700 and made some critical
points about the point at which the institution became an indispensable and
permanent part of the country’s constitution.
In the pre-modern period, Parliament depended on the
sovereign’s will for its meetings: such meetings were extraordinary and
occasional events. Until Parliament became a regular part of the constitution,
it could not control royal governments. J.E.Neale’s works on Tudor Parliaments
made it clear that it was not the business of Parliament to supervise the
government of England. It was true that the House of Commons had gained a
degree of control over attendance and of freedom from arrest. But Queen
Elizabeth had contested with success claims by M.P.s like Peter Wentworth to
speak on matters like the royal succession and, indeed, on religion.
Restiveness in opposition is one thing but the thing it was not was power.
“So much”, Roskell concluded, “for the treat to personal
monarchy and the preparation of the constitutional revolution of Stuart times.”
Under James and Charles, too, the right to free speech proved illusory in
practice: M.P.s could be and were confined during and Parliamentary sessions in
1614, 1621, 1626, 1629 and the spring of 1640. It was not until the Bill of
Rights of 1689 that there was any constitutional safeguard for freedom of
speech.
The acid test of Parliamentary power rested on the control
of direct and indirect taxation. This had actually contracted under the Tudors
because of the life-time grant of Tonnage and Poundage in the first Parliaments
of their reigns. The bargaining power of the House of Commons was thereby
reduced. It was not withheld until 1625 but Charles I still collected taxes
without Parliamentary authority. As long as a King could dissolve Parliament at
his discretion and could use his prerogative to choke opposition, it was
impossible for the House of Commons to secure the abolition of levies like
impositions and Ship Money collected on the basis of royal authority backed by
judgments in the courts of law.
If Parliament was to control taxation, it was necessary to make
its grants conditional upon their appropriation to specific purposes and to
ensure that these were adhered to. This requirement was resurrected in 1624 and
1641 but only made invariable post-1688. The auditing of such grants was only
indisputably re-established in 1667.The real break, Roskell argued, came with
the end of the power of the Crown to govern effectively without Parliament.
What the Tudors had created was not the “power” of the House of Commons, much
less authority, but merely potentiality. What was being fashioned under the
early Stuarts was the procedural means to secure power but not, critically,
power itself. The new practices identified by Wallace Notestein were the means
to an end but control over the Crown itself was not established. The great
divide in Parliamentary history came in the late-seventeenth century when
Parliaments had to meet regularly, when taxes had to be voted year by year,
when, in fact, they became a regular part of the constitution.
The significance of this essay lies in its summary of
historical understanding in the mid-1960s. Roskell was perfectly clear that
Parliament was not an institution wielding power and that its existence
depended upon the willingness of monarchs to summon it. He was no less clear on
its pre-1640 role as an extraordinary and occasional event. It could not
control the government nor could it prevent levies or taxes without
Parliamentary approval being collected. Monarchs could and did disregard
privileges like freedom of speech when they chose: they could and did
incarcerate members of both Houses during Parliamentary sessions and after
adjournments and dissolutions. Procedural changes did not give either House
“power” as such.
This analysis undermines claims for the novelty of Conrad
Russell’s assault on the Whig interpretation of Parliamentary history when it
was made over a decade later. Historians like John Ball in his study of Sir
John Eliot’s role in Parliaments between 1624 and 1629 had already disposed of
such an interpretation while J.H.Hexter in 1959 had repudiated the claim that
there was a struggle for sovereignty between the Crown and Parliament. The
views Russell criticised were antique and no longer current in the
historiography of the period. Roskell’s essay confirmed this verdict.
1.J.S.Roskell, Perspectives in English Parliamentary
History. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. Volume 46, No.2 (March, 1964),
Pp.448-475.
Alternatives to the terms ‘the Great Rebellion’, the
‘English Revolution’ and the ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’
by Christopher Thompson
I have never been entirely happy with the terminology used
by historians to describe the events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British
Isles and Ireland. Clarendon’s use of the phrase the ‘Great Rebellion’ appears
inadequate in the light of scholarship since c.1970 or so on the interactions
between the three Stuart realms while the term ‘the English Revolution’ carries
the weight of improbable Marxist claims about the rise of the bourgeoisie and
proto-proletarian agitation.
More recently, investigations of the interactions between
Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales have suggested that the ‘Wars of the Three
Kingdoms’ provides a better title but this does not fully provide for the
requirements of internal pressures and struggles within those kingdoms.
Having looked around for an alternative terminology, I
wonder whether the French terminology for ‘great uprisings’ may be more
appropriate, i.e. ‘Les grands soulèvements dans les îles britanniques et en
Irlande’ or ‘ le grand soulèvement’, since the conflicts of the 1640-1660
period seem to me to have more in common with the revolt of the Low Countries
after 1566-1567 or the French Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598 and the
Frondes of 1648 to 1653. I should be interested to learn what others think on
this subject.
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and
Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century,Yale University Press, 2014, 904 pages.
Nature and Nature’s
laws lay hid in night, / God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.
Alexander Pope
“This summer of the King’s being here was a very strange
year in all His Majesty’s three kingdoms if we duly consider the heavens, men
and earth. I conceive the heavens were offended with us for our offence
committed to one another for, from Mayday till the 15th of September, we had
scarce three dry days together. His Majesty asked me whether that weather was
usual in our Island. I told him that in this 40 years I never knew the like
before.”
John Oglander
This is a door stopper of a book which runs to over 600
pages. The central premise is that the weather played the most crucial part of
the wars and revolutions that plagued the 17th-century.
It is true that the weather in the 17th century has given
Parker some ammunition for his theory.
The diaries of the rich and famous such as Pepys and John
Evelyn recorded a large number of “extreme weather events”.Pepys and Evelyn
referred to prolonged droughts, terrifying and summers and winters so cold or
hot the likes of which had never been seen before. Parker describes this period
as a ‘Little Ice Age’. This ice age saw temperatures plummet to levels not seen
since the last glaciation 13,000 years ago.
Historians, both new and old, have portrayed the 17th
century as a time of tremendous political turmoil that stretched across Europe
and Asia. It is not for nothing that Eric Hobsbawm described it as The General
Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century.
The century began with the Thirty Years War which devastated
large swathes of Europe and destabilised many European governments. This
murderous war devasted vast areas of Germany. Civil wars and revolutions in
both France and England occurred. The century also saw the disintegration of
the Spanish empire. One commentator described it as ‘one of the epochs when
every nation is turned upside down’. To describe and understand this century,
both Hobsbawm and Hugh Trevor-Roper popularised the term ‘the General Crisis’
to describe the events of the 17th Century. To my knowledge, they did not call it
the generally bad climate crisis.
Geoffrey Parker book while acknowledging this as a time of
crisis, divorcees the material base of this crisis from its superstructure.
This is despite his monumental researches and bibliography and the source list
of nearly 150 pages.
Parker’s book is filled with cataclysmic events, while it is
undeniable that these events were made worse by extreme weather events.I do not
agree with Parker’s theory and is many respects could be interpreted as a
reactionary and retrograde theoretical position.
In his essay Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of
Socialism the Marxist writer David North points out “Until the early
seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the
ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life
were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had
been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642).
Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man
from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that
rested upon it, was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly
changed the general intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense
of the power of thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without
the artificial restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas.
He continues “religion began to encounter the type of
disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced a
new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the
inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating scepticism
encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led
thinking people to wonder whether it was not possible for man to change the
conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.The prestige of thought
was raised to new heights by the extraordinary achievements of Sir Isaac Newton
(1642-1727) who, while by no means seeking to undermine the authority of God,
certainly demonstrated that the Almighty could not have accomplished his aims
without the aid of extraordinarily complex mathematics.Moreover, the phenomena
of Nature were not inscrutable but operated in accordance with laws that were
accessible to the human mind. The key to an understanding of the universe was
to be found not in the Book of Genesis but in the Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica. The impact of Newton’s work on intellectual life was
captured in the ironic epigram of Alexander Pope: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay
hid in night, / God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
Not everyone saw the light. In his groundbreaking book
Leviathan, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes concluded that the life of man is
‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Despite his pessimism, Hobbes is a
significant figure in the 17th century. Hobbes played a vital role in the
development of materialist philosophy. Hobbes was a writer clearly influenced by
European political and philosophical developments, and they, in turn,
influenced his philosophy; it was a dialectical arrangement.
The writer Jonathan Israel has also suggested that the
Fronde in France and the Masaniello rising in Naples was just as important in
terms of their impact on Hobbes as the English revolution. The international
character of the English revolutionary movement was the product of processes
that can be understood and not the blind working out of climatic changes. These
can be traced to the beginnings of the Enlightenment, which according to Israel
was “the unprecedented intellectual turmoil which commenced in the
mid-seventeenth century,” and was associated with the scientific advances of
the early seventeenth century, especially those of Galileo. These scientific
advances gave rise to “powerful new philosophical systems” producing a profound
struggle between “traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God,
and the universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which stood independently
of any theological sanction.”
Parker mentions Hobbes on numerous occasions and is very
selective in his use of the philosopher to back his theory up. Hobbes
materialist outlook is somewhat overlooked by Parker. As the Marxist writer,
Ann Talbot states, Hobbes “ describes the life of man in a state of nature as
“solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” The state of nature was the
condition into which human society fell when civil society broke down. For
Hobbes, the state of nature was not an abstract, theoretical construct; it was
something that existed in large parts of Europe and could cause him to alter
his travel plans“.[1]
The historian’s Debate
Despite Parker’s book being published in 2013, he has been
working on this thesis since the 1970s. The debate over the General Crisis
theory had been rumbling since the early 1950s carried into the 60s and 70s and
to this day has still not been resolved. It was by all accounts “ an intense and occasionally acrimonious
debate among historians as to what caused the political catastrophes of the
17th century – whether, indeed, anything one could call a “general crisis” had
taken place”.
This debate was not over whether the weather was responsible
for the period of wars and revolutions. The debate started with a two-part
article published by the Communist Party historian Eric Hobsbawm in the 1950s.
His thesis of a general economic and political crisis was challenged by Hugh
Trevor-Roper, who put the turmoil down to a conflict between society and the
state.
It is hard to disagree with Hobsbawm premise of a “ General
Crisis”. It was not meant to the last word on the subject but to start a
debate. Hobsbawm returned to the subject with a second paper. Hobsbawm seemed
to be following the advice of Spinoza who said: “the order and connection of
ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”.
Hobsbawm’s the “general crisis” -like many ground-breaking
essays provoked significant controversy from a number of historians who opposed
the emphasis on the social and economic origins of the revolutions that were
carried out throughout Europe. Also, a number of historians which included the
Dutch historian Ivo Schöffer and Danish historian Niels Steengsgaard who
refused to believe that there was any “general crisis” at all.
Eric J. Hobsbawm’s essay, which was printed in two parts in
1954, as The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century”
and “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, sought to present a Marxist
analysis of the transformation from a feudal society to a capitalist one in the
17th century. This transformation was held responsible for the revolutions,
wars and social unrest that took place throughout Europe. Hobsbawm put forward
that most of the social and economic structures associated with capitalism had
grown and developed during the “long sixteenth century.” He believed that
feudal “elements fatally obstructed growth” of capitalism. He clearly believed
that a revolution was needed to clear away the feudal rubbish in order for a new
capitalist system to develop. The most pronounced expression of this process
was to be found in England.
Hobsbawm writes, “It will be generally agreed that the I7th
century was one of social revolt both in Western and Eastern Europe. This
clustering of revolutions has led some historians to see something like a
general social-revolutionary crisis in the middle of the century. France had
its Frondes, which were important social movements; Catalan, Neapolitan and
Portuguese revolutions marked the crisis of the Spanish Empire in the I64os;
the Swiss peasant war of I653 expressed both the post-war crisis and the
increasing exploitation of peasant by town, while in England revolution
triumphed with portentous results. Though peasant unrest did not cease in the
West – the “stamped paper ” rising which combined middle class, maritime and
peasant unrest in Bordeaux and Brittany occurred in 1675, the Camisard wars
even later- those of Eastern Europe were more significant. In the i6th century,
there had been few revolts against the growing enserfment of peasants. The
Ukrainian revolution of I648-54 may be regarded as a major servile upheaval. So
must the various ” Kurucz ” movements in Hungary, their very name harking back
to Dozsa’s peasant rebels of I5I4, their memory enshrined in folksongs about
Rakoczy as that of the Russian revolt of I672 is in the song about Stenka
Razin. A major Bohemian peasant rising in i68o opened a period of endemic serf
unrest there. It would be easy to lengthen this catalogue of major social
upheavals – for instance by including the revolts of the Irish in 164I and
1689.”
A different approach to the “general crisis” debate was
taken by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who opposed Hobsbawm’s Marxist approach and put
forward a theory that sought to explain the crisis from a Court versus Country
standpoint. This also provoked heated discussion. Historians such as Roland
Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, E. H. Kossmann and J. H. Hexter who in
a paper,[2] expressed all sorts of differences with Roper. An example of the
heat generated came from the Italian Marxist historian Rosario Villari, who
said: “the hypothesis of imbalance between bureaucratic expansion and the needs
of the state is too vague to be plausible, and rests on inflated rhetoric, typical
of a certain type of political conservative, rather than on effective
analysis.”
He also accused Trevor-Roper of denying the importance of
the English Revolution. Villari believed that “general crisis” was part of a
Europe-wide revolutionary movement. Along similar lines propounded by Hobsbawm.
Roper wrote not from the standpoint of a Marxist but he
agreed with Hobsbawm that in the early part of the 17th century in Western
Europe there was a substantial number revolutions which led to numerous
break-down of monarchies and governments the cause was “a complex series of
demographic, social, religious, economic and political problems “English Civil
War, the Fronde in France, the Thirty Years’ War in Germany and the disputes in
the Netherlands, and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and
Catalonia, were all expression of the same problems”. Roper rejected the
Marxist analysis of the crisis as a struggle of a rising capitalist class,
which sought to replace the old Feudal system.
Conclusion
It is complicated, to sum up, a book that runs for over 600
pages. It would take a better historian than me to defeat Parker’s theory.
Unlike the previous debate, it would appear that the publication of this book
has not been substantially challenged in academia.It is hard not to see the
book as an attack on the historical materialist approach to history that has
been the hallmark of revisionist historiography that has dominated university
life for the last few decades if not more. Having said that the book is well
written deeply researched, and Parker argues his point well. I just do not
agree with it.
[1] The ghost of Thomas Hobbes-By Ann Talbot -12 May 2010-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/hobb-m12.html
[2] Discussion of H. R. Trevor-Roper: “The General Crisis of
the Seventeenth Century.”
Roland Mousnier, J. H. Elliott, Lawrence Stone, H. R.
Trevor-Roper, E. H. Kossmann, E. J. Hobsbawm and J. H. Hexter-Past &
Present-No. 18 (Nov., 1960), pp. 8-42
Some Thoughts on The BBC slanders the English Revolution: a
reply by Alan Woods –22 July 2019
There are several things
I would like to take issue with in Alan Wood’s extraordinary long attack
on the BBC or more precisely its Channel Four documentary titled: ‘Charles I,
Downfall of a King’.
Woods begins his polemic with this opening paragraph, “I did
not believe that it was possible for the low esteem in which I hold modern
academics in general, and bourgeois historians in particular, to sink any lower
than it already was. However, that belief was misplaced. I have just had the
misfortune to watch a three-part series put out by BBC Channel Four with the
title: ‘Charles I, Downfall of a King’. I now hold the intellectual qualities
of our modern historians at a slightly lower level than those of Mr Bean. At
least Mr Bean can be mildly amusing at times, but our self-appointed
intellectuals lack even that redeeming virtue”.
Woods talks about “experts and self-appointed
intellectuals”. I am not up on the libel laws of Britain, but Wood needs to
reign in his scattergun approach. The historians appearing on the programme
were all professional historians and have written several books on the subject.
Woods is writing his first book on the subject, so a little humility would not
go amiss.
The second thing to comment on is Woods disdain for modern
academia. There are ways of polemicising about the general level of thought in
academia. Unfortunately, Wood’s way is not a very good one. Also, it is one
thing to attack the political bias of the historians that took part in the
programme; it is another to dismiss their contributions to an understanding of
the English revolution. The majority of those historians taking part have
written thoughtful books on the subject. Those historians who have written
narrative-driven books such as Charles Spencer are well worth a read.
If wood would like to view how an orthodox Marxist tackles
modern academia, he could do no worse than consult the writings of David North,
the quote below is taken from his lecture Eighty Years of the Fourth International:
The Lessons of History and the Struggle for Socialism Today[1].
Under the subtitle, The impact of academic attacks on
Marxism North writes “Of course, young people cannot be blamed for their
limited knowledge of the revolutionary upheavals of the past century. From whom
and from where are they to acquire the necessary knowledge? The capitalist
media indeed will not dispense knowledge that may contribute to the overthrow
of the existing social order. However, what about the universities, with their
many learned professors? Unfortunately, the intellectual environment has been
for many decades deeply hostile to genuine socialist theory and politics.
Marxist theory—rooted in philosophical materialism—was long ago banished from
the major universities.
Academic discourse is dominated by the Freudian
pseudo-science and idealist subjectivism of the Frankfurt School and the
irrationalist gibberish of post-modernism. Professors inform their students
that the “Grand Narrative” of Marxism is without relevance in the modern world.
What they actually mean is that the materialist conception of history, which
established the central and decisive revolutionary role of the working class in
a capitalist society, cannot and should not be the basis of left-wing politics”.
Before moving on to other things, it is worth a comment on
the title of Wood’s polemic. Woods believes that the BBC has slandered the
English revolution. Slander is a strange word to use. Maybe Wood is preparing a
libel action against the BBC, or he has not been paying too much attention to
the many BBC history programmes which have all been written very conservative
standpoint. Woods is correct in that the BBC has shunned this subject up until
now, but this has been the response by other media such as cinema and
commercial television.
Woods does make a correct point that “Our historians do not
like to talk about this because it contradicts everything we have been led to
believe for decades, and indeed centuries. Now, at last, they finally decided
to talk about it because the present crisis in Britain has upset all the old
comforting illusions. We are living in the most turbulent period, probably in
the whole history of Britain – certainly for a very long time. Moreover, if we
are to seek some point of reference in history for events that are unfolding
before our eyes, it is impossible to ignore what occurred in this country in
the stormy years of the 17th century”.
I do agree that Hilton should have made more of Rees.
However, this is the BBC, what do you expect. One criticism I have made, and it
is in my review[2] is that the historians who contributed to the programme went
into it blind, not knowing the historical bias of the programme.
Woods correctly states that the programme was the product of
the current postmodernist trend in history. This trend in history as in many
subjects glorifies irrationalism, through the cultivation of backwardness and
religious prejudice against the search for objective truth. My problem with
Wood on this matter is that he has given the programme importance it does not
merit. The BBC four programme does not constitute slander or betrayal of the
English revolution it is what it is a very conservative history programme why
elevate it to world-historical importance it does not have.
Woods finishes his over eleven thousand word polemic saying
“With the honourable exception of John Rees, the self-styled ‘experts’ in this
series cannot conceal their spiteful attitude towards long-dead
revolutionaries. This extreme vindictiveness can hardly be explained by the
events that happened so long ago. Behind it lies an unspoken fear that
revolution can recur in our times”.
It is not surprising that Wood announced at the end of his
article that he is writing a book on the English revolution. It is hoped that
his scattergun approach to history is reigned in and that his attitude towards
revolution is re-examined. Wood’s record on the subject of revolution is not a
very good one as his support for Hugo Chavez would imply.
Woods wrote in his glowing obituary of Chavez. “ Hugo Chávez
is no more. Always a fighter, Chávez spent his last months in a life and death
struggle against a cruel and implacable enemy – cancer. He fought bravely to
the very end, but finally, his strength gave out. On Tuesday, March 5, at 4.25
pm the cause of freedom, socialism and humanity lost a great man and the author
of these lines lost a great friend”[3].
However, a more orthodox Marxist assessment of Chavez would
be “Chavez’s nationalist rhetoric, his government’s diversion of revenues from
the country’s protracted oil bonanza to pay for social assistance programs and
its forging of extensive economic ties to China earned him the hatred of both
Washington and a fascistic ruling class layer in Venezuela. They did not,
however—as both he and his pseudo-left supporters claimed—represent a path to
socialism. Chavez was a bourgeois nationalist, whose government rested firmly
on the military from which he came and which continues to serve as the crucial
arbiter in the affairs of the Venezuelan state”.[4] The moral of this article
is that people living in glass houses should not throw too many stones.
________________________________________
[1] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/09/codn-o09.html[2]
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2019/07/review-charles-i-downfall-of-king-lisa.html[3]
A tribute to Hugo Chávez-
https://www.marxist.com/a-tribute-to-hugo-chavez.htm[4] Hugo Chavez and
socialism-8 March 2013-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/03/08/pers-m08.html
Review: A Glorious Liberty-the ideas of the
Ranters-A.L.Morton-Past Tense-2007.
If there was ever a
group of people that needed rescuing from historical obscurity it was
the 17th-century radical group the Ranters. It is clear that
without the intervention of the historians around the Communist Party of Great
Britain, especially Christopher Hill and A L Morton groups like the Ranters
would have been consigned to a few footnotes of history.
Morton is well known for his work A People’s History of
England. It was the founding book of the Communist Party Historians Group
(CPHG). As Ann Talbot writes “the Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s
History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in
which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular
leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national
revolutionary tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of
the bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form
an unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the
fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical
foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working
class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a
democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill
was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who
were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of
Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr.[1]
The pamphlet A Glorious Liberty is taken from A L Morton’s
book The World of the Ranters[2]
Despite working under
the domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s ideological straightjacket
Morton, who was probably the world’s leading authority on the Ranters sought to
make an objective assessment of the Ranters who up until then had mostly been
described as “madmen”. In historical terms, the Ranters had a short shelf life.
They came to life towards the end of the civil war and changed their political
and social form into the Cromwell Protectorate.
According to Morton “The Ranters formed the extreme left
wing of the sects which came into prominence during the English Revolution,
both theologically and politically. Theologically these sects lay between the
poles of orthodox Calvinism, with its emphasis on the power and justice of God
as illustrated in the grand scheme of election and reprobation, with its
insistence upon the reality of Hell in all its most literal horrors and upon
the most verbal and dogmatic acceptance of the Scriptures, and of antinomianism
with its emphasis upon God’s mercy and universality, its rejection of the moral
law, and with it, of Hell in any but the most figurative sense, and its
replacement of the authority of the Scriptures by that of the inner light. The
political views of the Ranters were the outcome of this theology. God existed
in all things: I see that God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and
Fowle, and every green thing, from the highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall;
and that God is the life and being of them all, and that God doth really dwell,
and if you will personally; if he may admit so low an expression in them all,
and hath his Being nowhere else out of the Creatures.[3]
Like many of the radical groups during the English
revolution, the Ranters were a relatively new phenomenon. It is open to debate
how new their ideas were. Morton was able to trace their antecedents down
through the centuries.Joachim of Fiore in the twelfth century was identified as
one source of Ranter inspiration. “The Ranters, like Joachim of Fiore and the
Anabaptists of the Reformation, proclaimed the coming age of the Holy Spirit,
which moved in every man. The key difference from orthodox Calvinism or
Puritanism is that in those more orthodox creeds, the workings of the Holy
Spirit were closely tied to the Holy Word — that is, the Bible. For the Ranters
and other Inner Light Groups, however, all deuces were wild. The Ranters
pursued this path, too, to pantheism: as one of their leaders declared: “The
essence of God was as much in the Ivie leaf as in the most glorious Angel.”[4]
One exciting aspect of the Ranter storyline is their
associations with other radical groups like the Levellers. Both groups took
part in a revolution, and some of their leaders were soldiers in the New Model
Army. The social base for both movements was similar. There were, however,
significant religious and behavioural differences.One significant difference
was that the Ranters appealed far more than the Levellers to the lower sections
of the population. In class terms, this would have been a very embryonic
working class.
They appealed to the “poorest beggars, “rogues, thieves,
whores, and cut purses”. These are “every whit as good” as anyone else on
earth. Morton explains “ In Coppe and Clarkson, in Foster and Coppin there is,
in different degrees and forms, a deep concern for the poor, a denunciation of
the rich and primitive biblical communism that is more menacing and urban than
that of Winstanley and the Diggers. Like the Diggers, and unlike Lilburne and
his followers, they were ready to accept the name of Leveller in its most
radical implications, but with the difference that for them God himself was the
great Leveller, who was to come shortly “to Levell with a witnesse, to Levell
the Hills with the Valleyes, to lay the Mountaines low”. It is hardly
accidental that the Ranters began to come into prominence soon after the
Leveller defeat at Burford and would seem to have attracted a number of
embittered and disappointed former Levellers. Where Levelling by sword and by spade
had both failed what seemed called for was a Levelling by miracle, in which God
himself would confound the mighty by means of the poorest, lowest and most
despised of the earth”.[5]
Coupled with their appeal to the poor was their attack on
the rich.” The rich, Foster declared, grudge the poor even a piece of bread,
but “all things are the Lords” and he is coming shortly to bring down their
pride, who “because of your riches have thought yourselves better than others;
and must have your fellow-creatures in bondage to you, and they must serve you,
as work for you, and moyle and toyle for you, and stand cap in hand to you, and
must not displease you, no by no meanes”.Coppe, who like Foster drew much of
his imagery from the Epistle of St. James, addressed himself to the poorest and
most depressed strata of society, at a time when the slum population of London
was suffering terrible hardships as a result of the wartime dislocation of
trade and industry”.
Like many of the radical groups, their appeal was not only
to the poor but to the leaders of the revolution, namely Cromwell. Cromwell was
acutely aware of the dangers of these groups posed. If a broad section of the
population could have been provoked into carrying out large scale riots over
many issues such as high food prices, low wages and hunger it would have posed
a grave danger to the regime.
While most social and economic conditions were favourable to
the Ranters, they had no real means of carrying through their program. Although
many Ranters had served in the New Model Army, many were pacifists at heart. As
this quote from Morton’s book brings out
“And maugre the subtilty, and sedulity, the craft and cruelty of hell
and earth: this Levelling shall up;Not by sword; we (holily) scorne to fight
for anything; we had as live be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with
whores i’th market place; and account these as, good actions as taking the poor
abused, enslaved ploughmans money from him… we had rather starve, I say, than
take away his money from him, for killing of men.[5] .
Ranters pacifism was an integral part of their philosophy
according to Morton “It came partly from the nature of their theology, with its
emphasis on the inevitable coming of the new age of liberty and brotherhood.
God, they felt, was abroad in the land and they needed only to proclaim his
purpose. However, it came also from the precise political situation in which
Ranterism developed. In February 1649 when A Rout, A Rout was written, Charles
had just been beheaded and the Council of State was in effective control. In
the two parts of Englands New Chains Discover’d we can sense the feeling of the
Levellers that they had been outwitted and betrayed. In a few weeks, their leaders
would be in prison: in a couple of months their last hope would be destroyed at
Burford”.Already a sense of defeat, that something had gone wrong with the
expectation of a New England was in the air. It was in this situation, with the
left in retreat and the turning point of the Revolution already passed, that
the Ranters became prominent. With ordinary political calculation failing. Many
people began to look for a miraculous deliverance”.
J C Davis
Not every historian welcomed Morton’s resurrection of the
Ranters. Morton knew that it was effortless for some politically motivated
historians to dismiss the Ranters as “madmen” or lunatics.Morton’s work on the
Ranters came under severe attack.
Unsurprisingly this attack came from the right and took the
form of a full-frontal assault calling into question the very existence of the
Ranters. Leading this assault was the very conservative historian J C Davis. It is no surprise that Davis’s book
Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians was Kenneth Baker
education secretary under Margaret Thatcher’s favourite book. According to
Davis, the Ranters were impossible to define and 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”[6]
.
The debate over the Ranters did not generate the same kind
of heat as other more higher profile historian’s spates. The importance of this
did force Christopher Hill into battle. Hill reluctantly wrote a reply to
Davis. “I must declare an interest. This book attacks Norman Cohn, A. L.
Morton, myself and others for believing in the existence of the Ranters.
‘Ranters’ put forward antinomian and libertine views at the height of the
English Revolution. Suppressed in 1651, they continued to exercise some
influence into the 18th century. Professor Davis recognises that contemporaries
believed there were people whom they called Ranters. However, he wishes to
restrict them to three or four individuals. Anything more was the creation of
hostile pamphleteers. It was not an easy negative to prove, not much easier to
disprove. Some, including the present reviewer, may think neither exercise
worth while. But lest anybody should take Professor Davis’s book too seriously,
it may be worth stating some arguments against his case. Professor Davis starts
from what he calls a ‘paradigm’ of Ranter beliefs, allegedly drawn from other
historians. But it is a very selective paradigm. It excludes some beliefs which
contemporaries thought characteristic of Ranters – mortalism, for instance, the
belief that the soul dies with the body, which Bunyan thought ‘the chief
doctrine of the Ranters’. It also excludes Ranter subversion of the traditional
subordination of women, which outraged Bunyan even more. Davis argues that if
we are to be convinced of the existence of Ranters, we must find ‘a sect with
clear leaders, authoritative tests on entry, and controls over numbers’ (43).
Of course, he cannot find them”.[7]
Conclusion
It is a shame that this debate has gone cold. It is hoped
that modern-day historians return to this subject and start to give it the
treatment it deserves. Nigel Smith has started this process with his collection
of Ranter writings[8] and the work carried out by Ariel Hessayon is worth looking at (see,
Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters,research.gold.ac.uk.As Hessayon writes “Yet that
is not the end of the matter since there remains much to be done. With the
partial exception of Coppe, we still need detailed accounts of the Ranters’
reading habits and possible influences on their thought. Moreover, we await
research on the lesser-known individuals that comprised ‘My one flesh’,
together with a reconstruction of their social networks. The same may be said
of members of several other spiritual communities, notably those clustered
around Sedgwick and those named in News from the New-Jerusalem. We also require
meticulous studies of Bothumley, Coppe
(particularly after 1648), Coppin, and Salmon. So it is fair
to suggest that despite all that has been said about them, there is another
book on the Ranters still to be written”.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[2] The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the
English Revolution – 12 Jul 1979
by Arthur Leslie Morton
[3] The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the
English Revolution – 12 Jul 1979
by Arthur Leslie Morton
[4] [The article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective
on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 9: “Roots of
Marxism:www.mises.org/library/early-christian-communism
[5] “a glorious Liberty”the ideas of the Ranters-A L Morton
[6] Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the
Historians-Davis
[7] The Lost Ranters? A Critique of J. C. Davis Author(s):
Christopher Hill Source: History Workshop, No. 24 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 134-140
[8] A Collection of Ranter Writings: Spiritual Liberty and
Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution
Review: The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some
Contemporaries by Christopher Hill, Verso, 2016
“Innocence, Once
Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.” ―
John Milton
Wretched Catullus, stop being a fool,
and what you see has perished, consider perished.
Blazing suns once shone for you.
when you would always come where the girl led,
a girl beloved by us as no girl will be loved.
There when those many playful things happened,
things which you wanted, nor was the girl unwilling,
truly, blazing suns shone for you.
Now, now she is not willing; you, powerless, must not want:
do not follow one who flees, do not live miserably,
but, endure with a resolute mind, harden yourself.
Catullus
“We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s
own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are
foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world
what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to
acquire, even if it does not want to”.
Karl Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher
to Ruge (1843)
The Restoration, which again established Charles II as king
of England in 1660, has been covered by historians prodigiously but nearly
always from the standpoint of the victors. The vanquished have had very few
champions. In this book, Christopher Hill sought to redress this anomaly.
Hill primarily focusses on the radical groups such as the
Levellers, Ranters and Diggers that fought to push the English revolution
further than the bourgeoisie wanted it to go. The explanation for the demise of
the radicals mentioned above and others is a hugely contested issue. As we
shall see later on in this review, Hill’s Marxist analysis of this process came
under sustained critique. Some ignored the book or just attacked Hill for
merely being a Marxist historian.
Hill the Marxist
Hill was enough of a Marxist to realise that with
significant political defeats comes a reconsideration of values. These
reconsiderations usually take two directions.Those who were in the vanguard of
the revolution, such as the writer John Milton were enriched by the experience
of defeat. Milton despite threats on his life defended until the very end of
his life the revolutionary thought that had guided his life and used it as the
basis to train future generations in other words
Milton’s was “improving man’s condition in this world, not
the next”.
The second group which included the Quakers, capitulated,
went backwards and politically renounced the revolution and searched for a “new
word”. In The Experience of Defeat, Christopher Hill explored these occurrences
as a social process and not down to individual weaknesses.Hill was able in the
publication of this book to draw upon well over forty years of experience to
still, argue that this period of defeat was an essential learning curve for any
future revolutionaries.
For Hill, the English revolution was the first of the great
European revolutions. It was caused by significant social, political and
economic changes that occurred in English society during the previous century.
The 17th century saw the rise of a new social group, the bourgeoisie. Correctly
Hill rejected the concept that the defeat of the revolution was down to the
weakness of this or that individual he saw the defeat of the revolution as a
social process. In many ways, his understanding, although he would not have
seen it because he never acknowledged having read Leon Trotsky, there are
similarities between Hill and Leon Trotsky’s approach.
Trotsky himself was familiar with gaining and losing power.
Many historians have explained Trotsky’s loss of power and his defeat to Stalin
due to his vanity or weakness in political infighting. Trotsky opposed this
facile explanation. Of course, there are differences between the Russian
revolution and the English revolution, but we are talking about social processes
here that are similar.
As the Marxist writer David North explains “Trotsky
explained that he saw his life not as a series of bewildering and ultimately
tragic episodes, but as different stages in the historical trajectory of the
revolutionary movement. His rise to power in 1917 was the product of a
revolutionary upsurge of the working class. For six years his power depended on
the social and political relations created by that offensive. The decline in
Trotsky’s personal political fortunes flowed from the ebbing of the
revolutionary wave. Trotsky lost power not because he was less skilled a
politician than Stalin, but because the social force upon which his power was
based—the Russian and international working class—was in political retreat.
Indeed, Trotsky’s historically conscious approach to politics—so effective
during the revolutionary years—placed him at a disadvantage vis-à-vis his
unscrupulous adversaries during a period of growing political conservatism. The
exhaustion of the Russian working class in the aftermath of the Civil War, the
growing political power of the Soviet bureaucracy and the defeats suffered by
the European working class—particularly in Germany—were, in the final analysis,
the decisive factors in Trotsky’s fall from power”.[1]
There is no doubt that Hill’s fascination with the radical
groups of the English revolution stemmed from his political persuasion. From
the very start of his career as a historian, Hill argued that England had
undergone a bourgeois revolution.
It is true that this book covers some of the same ground as
the groundbreaking The World Turned Upside Down, published in 1972 but this is
an entirely different type of book which attempts to draw the lessons of
revolution for future generations. At the end of the book, he asks the same
question as John Bunyan, “Were you, doers or talkers, only? What canst thou
say?”
The defeat of these radicals must have knawed at Hill. It
must have perplexed the losers as well. Why was the “new presbyter is but old
priest writ large,’ or why the Saints had visibly failed to reign”.Hill was one
of the few historians who understood the difficulty these revolutionaries faced
when mounting a revolution as Hill says “I think it is right to say that the
revolution wasn’t planned. One of the things that should be made more of is
that no one in England in the 1640s knew they were taking part in a revolution.
American and French revolutionaries could look back to England, the Russian
revolutionaries had an ideology of revolution based on English and French
experience, but no one in England could draw on such experiences. The very word
revolution emerges in its modern sense in the 1640s. So that the English
revolutionaries are fumbling all the time, they have not got a Rousseau or a
Marx to guide them. The examples of the Netherlands and the French Huguenots
were discussed in the 17th century as religious or nationalist revolts. The
only text they could look to was the Bible, but of course, the bible says such
different things that you can get any theory out of it so that it proved
totally unsatisfactory. One of my arguments in my new book is that it was the
experience of its uselessness as an agreed guide to action in the 1640s and
1650s that led to its dethroning from its position of absolute authority. That
was a major problem for the English revolutionaries; they had no theory to
start from.[2]
Hill lets the revolutionaries and their supporters speak.
John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the
people if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ This
attempt to blame the general population for the defeat of the revolution was a
popular theme of the defeated. One that the revisionist historians jump upon to
say that 17th-century England was a less revolutionary society than it is
sometimes made out to be.
Another accusation that was not without foundation was of a
sell-out by the leaders of the revolution. A charge frequently levelled at
Cromwell and the grandees. One of Cromwell’s major opponents Major General
Lambert said
‘the world’s mistake in Oliver Cromwell’.
Thomasson Tracts
When this book was published, Hill suffered numerous
criticisms. One prominent critic accused him of only using published sources
but as Ann Talbot points out “If later historians have made far greater use of
unpublished manuscript sources, this to some degree reflects the extent to
which Hill made the published sources his own so that they have had to look for
new material.[3] Conrad Russell, in his review of the book, does make a valid
point not about Hill in particular but the difficulty most if not all
historians have in using the Thomasson Tracts.[4].
Russell writes “perhaps the biggest historiographical
question the book leaves behind it is a problem of how to put the Thomason
Tracts into perspective. The Thomason Tracts, like Shakespeare, are a
phenomenon so big that there is a risk that it may overshadow everything around
it. As an archival phenomenon, indeed, it has no parallel in the previous history
of the world. A collection in which Hobbes and Milton rub shoulders with
doggerel, scandal sheets and ephemera is something so striking that it must be
given a central place in the interpretation of the period.
Yet even something so immense as the Thomason Tracts must be
read in context, and it is very hard to know-how to do this. The great dearth
of archives (extending even to private estate documents) deprives us for the
years 1642 to 1660 of much of the material we are used to relying on for the
previous and subsequent periods. When this fact is set beside the fact that the
censorship deprives us of any equivalent printed material for the years before
and after the Thomason Tracts, we have a real risk that the Tracts may upstage
the rest of the evidence, or perhaps, more subtly but no less dangerously, a
risk that, in trying to prevent them from upstaging the rest of the evidence,
we may not give them the importance they deserve”.[5]
Revisionists
Russell derided Hill for his belief that there was a
‘sell-out’ of the revolution. Russell believed that “there was no such thing as
the radical cause.”. Others criticised Hill because he placed Milton not only
in a literary context but as an essential player in the revolution. Hill “had
failed to prove his contention that Milton was engaged in a conscious or
unconscious dialogue with the Revolution’s “radical underground.”
Russell consistently challenged Hill. Many times his
hostility like many revisionists stemmed from their opposition to Hill
connecting his left-wing politics and historical research. This hostility to
Hill’s politics was the theme of Justin Champion’s lecture.He writes “In 2014,
a special issue of the journal Prose Studies was published which aimed to
interrogate the legacy of Christopher Hill’s World Turned Upside Down, and in
particular to ‘consider damaging flaws in the conceptualisation of the book and
in its underlying methodology’. The premise of that assault was based on Hill’s
first historical crime: that he was an avowed Marxist. Combined with that was a
second complaint, (according to the charge sheet) that he constructed histories
on the basis of printed sources alone, rather than the golden standard of
archival research. In the revisionist account of Hill’s work, these two aspects
of criticism have tended to be collapsed into one complaint: that his
scholarship was shoddy, and bent to his deeper Marxist commitments at the
expense of empirical fact. Here, I will challenge both the accuracy and
coherence of these uncharitable and hostile charges.[6]
Conclusion
What conclusions can be drawn from Hill’s book The
Experience of Defeat? Hill ends the book with these words: ‘In 1644 Milton saw
England as “a nation of prophets”. Where are they now?’.Despite the hostility
towards this book, it is a valiant attempt to answer the above question but as
Ann Talbot possess “What any serious reader interested in history or politics
wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books are we reading the work of an
apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely
struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has
to be said that this is a complex question”.
[1] Leon Trotsky’s place in history-By David North -21
August 2015-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/21/reco-a21.html
[2] John Rees and Lee Humber-The good old cause an interview
with Christopher Hill- From International Socialism 2 : 56, Autumn 1992, pp.
125–34.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
[3] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill- 2003
[4]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomason_Collection_of_Civil_War_Tract
[5] www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n18/conrad-russell/losers
[6] Heaven Taken by Storm: Christopher Hill, Andrew Marvell
and the Dissenting Tradition The first annual Christopher Hill Memorial Lecture
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4311-heaven-taken-by-storm-christopher-hill-andrew-marvell-and-the-dissenting-tradition
Review: Charles I: Downfall of a King-Lisa Hilton-BBC Four-2019
Lisa Hilton’s BBC series Charles I: Downfall of a King is a
significant but profoundly flawed piece of work. Hilton’s series uses the 50
days over the winter of 1641-1642 to argue that this period sowed the seeds of
civil war. For Hilton, there were no long term causes of the English revolution
instead she says “I want to discover how our government could fall apart and
the country become bitterly divided in just a few weeks”. For her, this was the
result of intrigues between the “an arrogant, aloof king out of touch with his
people”, and a scheming Parliamentarian John Pym.
Hilton’s series is mainly narrative-driven. She is not
entirely out of her depth and is a gifted historian and writer of fiction, but
the fact that this is narrative based history shows her inexperience with this
subject and severely limits our understanding of what was a complex piece of
history that still is fought over by today’s historian with a ferocity that
would have made participants in the revolution blush.
It would appear that Hilton has not written on the English
bourgeois revolution hence her need to attract a large number of established
historians to provide some analysis..One of the most striking aspects of the
programme apart from Hilton’s stunningly blue eyes was the number of high
calibre historians that were seduced into appearing on the TV series. On
Charles side were Leanda de Lisle, Jessie Childs and Charles Spencer. Spencer
being filmed in front of his stunning Van Dyck “War and Peace”. The portraits
show two aristocratic brothers-in-law who fought on opposite sides. On the side
of the “Junto” John Rees, Justin Champion et al.Even more surprising is the
fact that these historians went into this programme blind with their
contributions given without discussion on what type of historiography was being
used.
Hilton’s narrative concentrates on the MP John Pym and his
so-called “Junto” of supporters in and outside parliament. From a
historiographical standpoint, Hilton’s examination of Pym and his Junto friends
relies heavily on a significant culling from John Adamson’s book The Noble
Revolt. This is a little strange given the fact that Adamson does not appear in
the series.
Hilton also believes that if Charles had shown a bit more
political understanding, then this dirty civil war might have been avoided.
Hilton’s philosophy reminded one of Leon Trotsky’s attack on the ‘great’
national historian Macaulay when he said that Macaulay, “vulgarises the social
drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with
platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.”
One disappointment was Hilton’s use of John Rees. Despite
being an ex-member of the SWP Rees has written an excellent book on the
Levellers. Rees describes in his book the role of the Levellers during this
time as an independent political force. Hilton portrays them as bit players in
Pym’s Junto and describes and then dismisses the radicalisation of the young
London population as being radicalised”
and having a “toxic masculinity” fuelled
by “testosterone, ale and religious fervour.”
It is to Hilton’s credit that she encourages a study of the
various documents issued during the revolution. During the time examined by the
programme, there was an explosion of printed documents, the likes of which had
never been seen before. Why therefore was more not made of Joad Raymond’s
expertise in this matter. This is very puzzling.[1]
The most critical document studied by the programme is by
Pym, and his Junto called The Grand Remonstrance.[2]
Hilton description
of Pym’s pamphlets as “Stuart-age social
media” is flippant and lazy.The Grand Remonstrance is a veritable declaration
of war against the king. While careful not to blame the King for all the ills
of the country, the document nonetheless outlined the bourgeoise’s defence of
its material interests. While commenting on the documents, political
importance, Hilton leaves out Parliament’s defence of its economic interests.
Point 18 describes “Tonnage and Poundage hath been received without colour or
pretence of law; many other substantial impositions continued against the law,
and some so unreasonable that the sum of the charge exceeds the value of the
goods.
Point 19. The Book of Rates lately enhanced to a high
proportion, and such merchants that would not submit to their illegal and
unreasonable payments, were vexed and oppressed above measure; and the ordinary
course of justice, the common birthright of the subject of England, wholly
obstructed unto them. Point 20 And
although all this was taken upon pretence of guarding the seas, yet a new,
unheard-of tax of ship-money was devised, and upon the same pretence, by both
which there was charged upon the subject near £700,000 some years, and yet the
merchants have been left so naked to the violence of the Turkish pirates, that
many great ships of value and thousands of His Majesty’s subjects have been
taken by them, and do remain in miserable slavery.
The document confirms the unbridgeable schism between the
King and Pym. This period was ably described by Leon Trotsky who wrote “The
English revolution of the seventeenth century, precisely because it was a great
revolution shattering the nation to the bottom, affords a clear example of this
alternating dual power, with sharp transitions in the form of civil war. At
first the royal power, resting upon the privileged classes or the upper circles
of these classes – the aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie
and the circles of the squirearchy that are close to it. The government of the
bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament supported by the City of London. The
protracted conflict between these two regimes is finally settled in open civil
war. The two governmental centres – London and Oxford – create their armies.
Here the dual power takes a territorial form, although, as always in the civil
war, the boundaries are very shifting. Parliament conquers. The king is
captured and awaits his fate.[3]
Reviews of the series have been mixed. One review caught the
eye, which is indicative of the bad treatment given to a new generation of
female historians. Adam Sweeting in a review entitled Charles I: Downfall of a
King, BBC Four review – beheaded monarch upstaged by the exotic presenter
belittles Hilton’s presenting skills saying she is the “very antithesis of the
Mary Beard school of history, Hilton prowls towards the camera more like a
catwalk model than a mere academic. With her piercing blue eyes,
platinum-blonde hair and collection of fashionably on-trend scarves, she could
fit right into the cast of Sky Atlantic’s Mediterranean odyssey of conspiracy,
priceless artworks and even pricier sports cars, Riviera. As well as a
historian, she is also (as LS Hilton) a novelist. Her book Maestra was compared
to 50 Shades of Gray. So was Domina, of which one critic wrote: “It has got
sex, shopping, a few Old Masters and plenty of murder. Times have certainly
changed since Lord Clark brought us Civilisation, but perhaps Hilton is surfing
the zeitgeist, stripping history down to its rawest emotions and primal urges.
Watch out, Alice Roberts and Suzannah Lipscomb..”[4]
Sweeting is not the only writer to be unhinged by attractive
female historians. The male historian David Starkey has put it on record that
he is not in favour of “feminised history”. Starkey was suitably chastised for
his entry into the world of male historian’s chauvinism.
Conclusion
Despite saying some critical things the series is watchable
and provides a useful but limited introduction to one aspect of the complex
history of the English revolution. It is hoped that some of the more glaring
mistakes are corrected or edited out as one reviewer pointed out it “It is the
Whore of Babylon, not the Whore of Babel”.The end speech is also a little
strange given that her entire programme was biased in favour of the Monarch
Hilton is forced into a silly “attempt to redress the balance with a bizarre
speech to the effect that without the execution of Charles I there would have
been no French Revolution”.
[1] The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture-Volume One:
Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660-Edited by Joad Raymond
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Remonstrance
[3] From Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution
(1931)
[4] https://theartsdesk.com/tv/charles-i-downfall-king-bbc-four-review-beheaded-monarch-upstaged-exotic-presenter
A Man of Contradictions: a Life of A.L. Rowse-Richard
Ollard, Allen Lane, 1999
“As for the individual, everyone is a son of his time; so
philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as foolish to
fancy that any philosophy can transcend its present world, as that an
individual could leap out of his time or jump over Rhodes”.
Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right (1821)
“I confess that he gets on my nerves. I have admired some of
his work. However, the ipse behind the work – what a lot of that ipse there
is!”.
Herbert Butterfield
To describe Rowse as Richard Ollard does in his book as a
man of contradictions is probably the biggest understatement of both the 20th century and 21st Century. Ollard’s
book is worth reading if only because of his attempt to place Rowse in the
context of his time.I no intention of studying Rowse until I wandered into his
historical orbit after reading Spirit of English History published in 1943 at
the height of the war with Germany. Hence the dedication of the book to Winston
Churchill.
For a man who dabbled with Marxist politics in the 1930s,
this book is about as far removed from orthodox Marxism as you could get. It
would be correct to say that Rowse was closer to Hegel than Marx. Hegel, in his
book the Philosophy of History, also talked about a “world Spirit “ in history.
Hegel writes. “It is only an inference from the history that its development
has been a rational process; that the history in question has constituted the
rationale necessary course of the world spirit-that spirit whose nature is
always the same but which unfolds this is one nature in the phenomena of the
world’s existence.”[1]
This analysis is echoed by Julia Stapleton who writes “The
very title of one volume, The English Spirit (1945), would be anathema to a
Marxist, despite his somewhat unconvincing attempt at the same time to include
the character of the people in his broad definition of the underlying
(economic) conditions of British history. The English Spirit was launched with
an impressive print-run of 10,000 copies (Ollard, p. 179). In this collection
of essays, Rowse is the epitome of the national intellectual, depicting and
celebrating a unifying national tradition rooted in literature and life in
which the thorny issue of class is completely passed over. Its inspiration is
much more George Santayana – whom Rowse quotes admiringly – than Marx[2]
Much of Rowse’s patriotism and defence of the empire would
make even the right-wing historian Niall Ferguson blush. The massive sales of
this book tended to reflect the brief outburst of patriotism during the war,
which largely dissipated after 1945, when the threat of social revolution
became a reality.As Ollard states in his book, Rowse was not an easy man to
live with. Much has been made of his childhood and the influence his mother and
father had on his later life, and this is explored in the book. While these
influences may have impacted on his social attitudes and relationships to the
public and other historians, I believe that far more external forces made Rowse
the figure he was. After all most of his life spanned a century that was shaped
by wars and revolutions.Saying this, I am not belittling Rowse who was a man of
some intellect and insight, who had to struggle to get where he did. This
struggle is accurately recorded in the book. Rowse was the son of a china clay
miner, both his parents were semi-literate. According to Robert Thomas” Rowse
was a brilliant student who learned to read by the age of 4, became obsessed
with speaking precisely correct English and worked so hard to win the only
Cornwall scholarship to Oxford that it almost ruined his already precarious
health”.[3]
In his autobiography Rowse claims “I owe what I am to the
struggle, it isolated me from others, it concentrated me within the
unapproachable tower of my resolve; I was determined to do what I wanted to do;
I was left sufficiently to myself, for nobody was interested, to carry on what
I wanted in my own way and nourish the inner life of my own imagination”.Even a
cursory read of Ollards book would show the reader that Rowse’s connection with
Marxism was tenuous, he never joined the Communist Party and rejected
dialectical materialism, and despite reviewing Leon Trotsky’s History of the
Russian Revolution, he had no connection with any Trotskyist group. This one of
the contradictions alluded to in the title. Rowse’s writings were according to
Julia Stapleton “accompanied by a sustained profession of Marxist faith. At its
most elementary level, this took the form of an insistence on the shallowness
of any history which does not see with understanding and sympathy how
throughout the ages the burden has always rested on the people.”.[4]
While Rowse was not overtly hostile to Marxism, his empathy
towards certain aspects of it needs explaining. Readers could no worse than
examine what the historian Robert Ashton had to say when writing about the
English Revolution, Ashton makes an interesting point on why some historians
while not being Marxist did use Marxist ideas.Ashton said “The idea of
religious, political and constitutional issues as an ideological superstructure
based on foundations of material and class interests has been influential far
beyond the ranks of Marxist historians. It has indeed been adopted, in part at
least and with a radically different emphasis, by some of their more formidable
and determined opponents.
Julia Stapleton in her review makes the point “he
exemplified the wider tensions in British intellectual life in the middle
decades of the twentieth century: a residual English nationalism and liberalism
bequeathed by a declining but still seductive Whig ideal and a Marxism which
posed a serious challenge to, but never entirely succeeded in displacing the
latter This was certainly true of ‘ formative years in the 1930s. Such tensions
were bound to become accentuated in a writer whose own personality was
perpetually under the strain of oppositional forces. However, there is surely
further scope for exploring these and other intellectual currents which
informed ‘ work. For example, another historian who felt the charms of both
Marxism and Whiggism in the 1930s and 40s was Butterfield himself.
‘Anti-intellectualism married to a vehement patriotism was also not exclusive
to him, but was shared by other contemporary writers such as Arthur Bryant and
Francis Brett Young, as well as Betjeman”.
Rowse’s attitude towards Trotsky is worth examining. Ollard
only mentions Trotsky once in the book to tell us that Rowse read his
Literature and Revolution book.Rowse has a certain sympathy towards the Russian
revolution but only to a certain point.
Moreover, you cannot compare his review to the large number of hatchet
jobs on Trotsky from several current historians who have written on Trotsky.
Rowse writes “For the real claim of this book is not that it
is an impersonal, a scientific history; though, indeed, it is a brilliant
example of a very rare species, a history that is inspired by the conception of
society and the forces at work in it, implied by historical materialism. This,
in short, is a Marxist history, but not the Marxist history of the Revolution;
for that we shall have to wait for some future Pokrovsky, altogether more impersonal,
more objective; but, no doubt, that will be a much duller affair whereas this
is alive and tingling in every nerve. It has all the brilliant qualities, and
the defects, of its author’s personality. It has extreme definiteness of
outline, a relentlessness towards his enemies that goes with it, dramatic sense
and visual power, a remarkable sympathy for the moods of the masses with a gift
for vividly portraying them – the qualities we should expect from a great
orator; and, in addition, the political understanding of a first-rate political
figure”.[5]
Rowse seems to hold a respect for the writer, and this can
be seen in this quote “It was impossible to expect Trotsky to suppress his own
personality in the book; not only for the reason that he is Trotsky, but
because, after all, he played such an Important part in the Revolution. To have
suppressed him would be a falsification of history. However, he does go much
further towards impersonality than one would have thought possible from one of
his temperament. He writes throughout in the third person; he keeps himself in
the background of the picture. The book gives an impression of a highly
exciting personality, but not one of egoism; and, with one notable exception,
it leaves an impression of fairness, at least not of unfairness. In the light
of events, he seems justified in his merciless characterisation of the Tsar and
Tsarina, Miliukov, Kornilov, Kerensky, and many of the Socialists. The
exception is, of course, Stalin”.[6]
This part of the review ends Rowse’s attempt at an
‘objective’ review. Rowse clearly did not understand the political divisions
that separated Trotsky from Stalin. Contained within Trotsky’s writing after
the death of Lenin is his irreconcilable political differences with Stalin.
This does not really interest Rowse.
To him, the political struggle was just a personal feud with
Stalin. Rowse claims this has “has
prevented him(Trotsky) from recognising Stalin’s part in the Revolution.
Whenever he comes near the subject, the history tends to turn into a political
pamphlet; and one is tempted to think that Trotsky writes history, as the
celebrated Dr Clifford was said to offer extemporary prayer, for the purpose of
scarifying his enemies. Nobody would guess from his account that in the October
Revolution, though Trotsky was the President of the Military Revolutionary
Committee of the Soviet, which organised the insurrection, Stalin was
responsible for the organisation of the Bolshevik Party, apart from the Soviet
in which other parties were included, to the same end. Over the struggle within
the party in October, when Lenin was forcing them into insurrection, and the
party was divided in opinion, it seems needless to attack Stalin, as the editor
of Pravda, for trying to tone down the differences: it is the function of a
party organ to gloss over the differences within the party, before the eyes of
the outside world. Nor, though Trotsky allows that Stalin’s defects are not due
to lack of character, as in the case of Kamenev and Zinoviev, the two opponents
of the insurrection, is it reasonable to attack him on the ground of his
caution. There are leaders and leaders. It is true that Stalin is not of the
tempestuous, romantic type of revolutionary like Trotsky, but he is none the
less a great leader. He reminds one rather of Burghley in our own history, who
had a great gift for taking cover. But that did not prevent him from being bold
and courageous in policy, as in the case of the great leap in the dark of 1559
when this country was committed finally and decisively to the Protestant
Reformation. And so, too, Stalin is the man, after all, who have taken the
plunge of committing Russia to the Five Years’ Plan”.
This glorification of Stalin would not look out of place
with other more modern ones carried out by historians such as Ian Thatcher and
Robert Service. His review of Leon Trotsky ‘s book does expose Rowse‘s own
political agenda he was after all a member of the Labour Party. Despite Rowse’s empathy towards Trotsky, he shared
the Labour Party’s inbuilt hostility to Trotsky and Trotskyism.
Philosophy
There many problems with Ollards book. Perhaps the most
serious is his blindness to Rowse’s indifference to the philosophy of
history.According to Edward Hallett Carr Dr A. L. Rowse, more justly critical,
wrote of Sir Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis — his book about the First
World War — that, while it matched Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution
in personality, vividness, and vitality, it was inferior in one respect: it had
“no philosophy of history behind it.” British historians refused to be drawn,
not because they believed that history had no meaning, but because they
believed that its meaning was implicit and self-evident. The liberal
nineteenth-century view of history had a close affinity with the economic
doctrine of laissez-faire – also the product of a serene and self-confident
outlook on the world. Let everyone get on with his particular job, and the
hidden hand would take care of the universal harmony. The facts of history were
themselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently
infinite progress towards higher things. This was the age of innocence, and
historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap of philosophy to cover
them, naked and unashamed before the god of history. Since then, we have known
Sin and experienced a fall; and those historians who today pretend to dispense
with a philosophy of history are merely trying, vainly and self-consciously,
like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the Garden of Eden in their garden
suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer be evaded”.
To conclude Ollards book provides the reader with a kind but
a basic introduction to A. L. Rowse. Two significant failings of the book are
that it does not address Rowse’s political perspectives in any great detail and
does not examine his lack of interest in the philosophy of history.Julia
Stapleton adds “There is much self-indulgence in language and imagery, and the
footnoting is slipshod, even allowing for an understandable contempt for the
dry-as-dust nature of modern scholarship. At one point, for example, the reader
is referred to the already sizeable literature on the subject without any
further details (p. 68). Nevertheless, this is an extremely rewarding book, and
it has undoubtedly set the framework for any future studies of Rowse”.
1] Philosophy of History, G Hegel,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm
[2] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/100
[3] A. L. Rowse, Masterly Shakespeare Scholar, Dies at
93-.OCT. 6, 1997-
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/06/world/a-l-rowse-masterly-shakespeare-scholar-dies-at-93.html
[4] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/100
[5] An Epic of Revolution:Reflections on Trotsky’s
History(The History of the Russian Revolution)
Published: The End of an Epic: Reflections on Contemporary
History, Macmillan, 1947
[6] An Epic of Revolution:Reflections on Trotsky’s
History(The History of the Russian Revolution)
Published: The End of an Epic: Reflections on Contemporary
History, Macmillan, 1947
The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley -Thomas N. Corns
(Editor), Ann Hughes (Editor), David Loewenstein (Editor) OUP Oxford (24 Dec.
2009)
“Not a full year since, being quiet at my work, my heart was
filled with sweet thoughts… That the earth shall be made a common treasury of
livlihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons; yet my mind was not at
rest, because nothing was acted, and thoughts run in me that words and writings
were all nothing and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost
not act, thou dost nothing”.– Gerrard Winstanley
“The life of this dark kingly power, which you have made an
act of Parliament and oath to cast out, if you search it to the bottom, you
shall see it lies within the iron chest of cursed covetousness, who gives the
earth to some part of mankind and denies it to another part of mankind: and
that part that hath the earth, hath no right from the law of creation to take
it to himself and shut out others; but he took it away violently by theft and
murder in conquest.” The Law of Freedom in a Platform
The release of the complete works of Gerrard Winstanley was
and is a major historical event. A vast collection of Winstanley’s writings in
one place was decades overdue. Put together by three well-respected scholars
the edition will be seen by future historians as a definitive edition.The
editors have drawn on the previous work of John Gurney and James Alsop among
others. This edition also contains original archival discoveries. The
collection also contains extensive notes which denote a substantial amount of
work undertaken in the archives.
It is fitting that the new volumes are dedicated to the
memory of Christopher Hill who carried out an incredibly important piece work
to place the Digger movement and the “True Leveller” Winstanley in an objective
and historical materialist context.Hill, in his seminal study, The World Turned
Upside Down, believed that Winstanley and his Diggers, “have something to say
to twentieth-century socialists”. In this, he meant that they were an
anticipation of future struggles. Hill was cognizant that despite their
radicalism, the social and economic conditions had not yet matured for them to
carry out a “second revolution” which would have seen the overthrow of Cromwell
and broader use of the popular franchise. Despite over thirty years of
revisionist attacks on Hill’s work The World Turned Upside Down continues to be
the defining work that historians have to work around.
It has unfortunately not stopped revisionist historians from
attacking his work, Michael Braddick describes the modus operandi of the
revisionists who “have tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to
cast it in its own terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye
over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical heroes. In
Winstanley’s case, this led to an emphasis both on the strangeness of his
thought for twentieth-century socialists and on the fact that he was a Digger
leader only briefly in a long and, in many other ways, very respectable life.
His Digger year, 1649, falls in the middle of four years of prolific and
exhilarating publication, but that period of his life appears in the historical
record as an irruption into an otherwise rather unremarkable and anonymous
biography”.[1]
This deliberate playing down of Winstanley and the Diggers importance
is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the writings of the late Mark
Kishlansky. According to Kishlansky, Winstanley was “a small businessman who
began his career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain, and in between
sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. For revisionists, the years
when the world was turned upside down stand in the same relation to the course
of English history as Winstanley’s wild years either side of his fortieth
birthday due to his subsequent life as a churchwarden”.
To answer Kishlansky, it is not the point to talk up or talk
down Winstanley and the Diggers but to place him and them in the proper context
of the English Revolution. It is true that Winstanley was a businessman, but
his radicalism coincided with one of the most revolutionary chapters in English
history. This shows us that at certain times, men and women are moved by such
profound events such as wars and revolution. Their thoughts and actions may
move at a glacial pace in calmer times; during revolutions, they speed up
dramatically.
Kishlanksky does inadvertently raises an important question.
What was the relationship between Winstanley’s religion, his economic status
and his politics? As the Marxist writer Cliff Slaughter says “for the understanding
of some of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a
necessity. What is the relationship between the social divisions among men and
their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure long
periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the
‘Utopians’ wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a
reasonable arrangement of social relations to proceed to its construction? It
was out of the examination of questions like this in the German school of
criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a
scientific view of society. ‘The criticism of religion is the beginning of all
criticism”[2].
Biography
An essential part of the two volumes is that it establishes
a much more accurate record of Gerrard Winstanley’s life. It substantially
complements the Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies article by J.C Davies
and J. D.Alsop very well[3]
Davies and Alsop’s article should be studied with extreme
caution. The historians both come from a conservative strand of historiography.
Their article plays down Winstanley’s communistic beliefs and places his
radicalism in the camp of religion rather than an early form of socialism,
Davies and Alsop write “The central historical
puzzle remains: how could someone who came from and returned to a conventional,
or quiescent, background have articulated a thoroughgoing repudiation of the
values and institutions of his society, based on a penetrating analysis of its
underlying weaknesses? One approach has been to impute an intellectual debt to
others—Thomas More, Francis Bacon, the Familists, or other sectarians—but there
is no evidence to sustain these links. Another has been to emphasise the
radical nature of his thought—the discursive breach with his
contemporaries—either by an intellectual leap into predominantly secular modes
of thought or, by contrast, through drawing on occult or hermeticist thinking.
Neither claim stands up to a reading of his work as a whole”.
It may be more instructive to see him as revealing of the
transformative potentials inherent in vernacular scripture and protestant
social thought as well as within the tensions of early modern communities
polarised by economic inequality but straining for communal self-government. He
was not the only writer of his time to suggest the inequitable and unchristian
nature of private property and its unequal distribution, or that applied
Christianity would end material inequalities, or that the millennium will bring
this about if men would not. But he was the most systematic in formulating
alternatives, the most prepared to argue through the relationship between God
and the creation which justified a more equitable society and the divine
history which was bringing it to pass, as well as the most remorseless in
pursuing the logic of the rhetoric of the English revolution as a way to
persuade his contemporaries of the justice of this vision. In short, Winstanley
and his ideas remain pivotal for the understanding of the limits of the
possible within seventeenth-century discourse and action”[4]
Winstanley was born in 1609 and died 10 September 1676, long
life by 17th century standards. Although much of his early life remains a
mystery, he was the son of Edward Winstanley. In 1630 he moved to London and
took up an apprenticeship, and in 1638, he was a freeman of the Merchant
Tailors’ Company.His adult life is unremarkable he married Susan King, who was
the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639. It is clear that without
the English revolution, his life would have probably moved at the same
pedestrian pace as before. However, like many, his world was turned upside
down. His business took a beating during the early part of the war, and in 1643
he was made bankrupt. He moved to Cobham, Surrey, where he found unskilled work
as a cowherd.
During the highpoint of the English bourgeois revolution
from 1648 to 1649, he issued five religious tracts; these tracts are in the
two-volume set of his complete writings. It is known that in early 1649,
Winstanley and William Everard met with a small number of similarly minded men
to dig on common land on St George’s Hill in Walton parish, near Cobham.
Winstanley’s perspective was put into practice through the
occupation of land. In 1650 he felt bold enough to send out others to expand
the Digging. The South of England and areas of the Midlands were settled.
Michael Braddick believes “Winstanley’s five earliest tracts
were prompted by the anxiety and suffering of the war years: the certainty that
this crisis was in some sense divine in origin, and intended as a prompt to
sinners to seek reformation, was for many people matched by disabling
uncertainty about what form that reformation should take. Winstanley’s writings
offered comfort and spiritual advice that was essentially personal, directing
believers to look inside themselves, and that led increasingly towards
criticism of scripture and learned commentary as guides to practical action”.
Perhaps Winstanley’s most remarkable body of work is The New
Law of Righteousness. In this, he argued for a form of Christian/Communism.Verses
44 and 45 of the Book of Acts, outline his fundamental core beliefs “All who
believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their
possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. At the
beginning of time, God made the earth. Not one word was spoken at the beginning
that one branch of mankind should rule over another, but selfish imaginations
did set up one man to teach and rule over another.”[5]
It is possible to trace Winstanley’s radical thought in The
New Law of Righteousness back through history. While I do not share some
historians perspective that England had an unbroken line of radicalism, it
clear that Winstanley draws inspiration from previous radicals such as Watt
Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt (1381)and the European Anabaptists. Much of
Winstanley and that of the Diggers thought was a primitive form of Christian
Communism. Although the writer David Petegorsky has argued that “to search for
the sources of Winstanley’s theological conceptions would be as futile as to
attempt to identify the streams that have contributed to the bucket of water
one has drawn from the sea.” [6]
Hill was very fond of Petegorsky’s work saying “Petegorsky’s
book was a shining light in the dark days of 1940. It is a pioneering study of
Gerrard Winstanley, and it still offers the best analysis of his ideas.
Petegorsky’s book did not attract the attention it deserved. Petegorsky, alas,
did not live to publish the major works which would have transformed our
understanding of the English Revolution.”[7]
In A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England
Winstanley elaborated this egalitarian viewpoint
“The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought
into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their
fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left
this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did
not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of
the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of
your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the
third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power
be rooted out of the land”.[8]
In The Law of Freedom, you can see the influence of European
Anabaptists who believed that all institutions were by their nature, corrupt.
Winstanley agrees with their early anarchism. When he states ” nature tells us
that if water stands long, it corrupts; whereas running water keeps sweet and
is fit for common use”. Winstanley believed that in order to combat this
corrupting nature, called for all officials to be elected every year. “When
public officers remain long in the place of judicature they will degenerate
from the bounds of humility, honesty and tender care of brethren, in regard the
heart of man is so subject to be overspread with the clouds of covetousness,
pride, vain glory”.
Winstanley’s most well-known work is The Law of Freedom
published in February 1652 and written after the failure of the commune. The
failure of which must have hit Winstanley hard both physically and
intellectually because his next move was to appeal to Cromwell who had no
intention of helping.Winstanley appeal was in vain “now you have the power of
the land in your hand, you must do one of these two things. First, either set
the land free to the oppressed commoners, who assisted you, and paid the Army
their wages; and then you will fulfil the Scriptures and your engagements, and
so take possession of your deserved honour. Or secondly, you must only remove
the Conqueror’s power out of the King’s hand into other men’s, maintaining the
old laws still.”[9]
“For you (Cromwell) must either establish Commonwealth’s
freedom in power, making provision for everyone’s peace, which is
righteousness, or else you must set up Monarchy again. Monarchy is twofold,
either for one king to reign or for many to reign by kingly promotion. And if
either one king rules or many rule by king’s principles, much murmuring,
grudges, trouble and quarrels may and will arise among the oppressed people on
every gained opportunity.”
In the pamphlet True Levellers Standard Advanced, Winstanley
sought to develop his ideas regarding future developments. Many of his
arguments were later to become standard socialist perspectives. The Digger
communes were only the first part of a programme that would see people refusing
to ‘work’ for rich people. The land would be ‘a common treasury for all’.
Nobody would be for hire, and the Diggers would not hire
themselves. Rent would be a thing of the past. In their day, these attitudes
were revolutionary. However, the SWP (Socialist Workers Party) and some other
radical organisations have tended to equate this type of action with a
20th-century proletariat withdrawing its labour from the capitalist class in a
sort of general strike. While communistic in its approach it must be said we
are talking about a working class that’s in a very embryonic state, not an
industrial proletariat led by a Communist party. The fact that Cromwell and his
allies in the rising bourgeoisie could easily defeat the Diggers both
politically and militarily tends to confirm my point.
John Gurney’s Winstanley and the Left
According to John Gurney Marxist writers in the 19th century
such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky believed that Winstanley’s work had
provided a framework for a new socialist society.The author of The Common
People (1984) John F. Harrison,believed: “Winstanley has an honoured place in
the pantheon of the Left as a pioneer communist. In the history of the common
people, he is also representative of that other minority tradition of popular
religious radicalism, which, although it reached a crescendo during the
Interregnum, had existed since the Middle Ages and was to continue into modern
times. Totally opposed to the established church and also separate from (yet at
times overlapping) orthodox puritanism, was a third culture which was
lower-class and heretical. At its centre was a belief in the direct
relationship between God and man, without the need of any institution or formal
rites. Emphasis was on inner spiritual experience and obedience to the voice of
God within each man and woman.”[10]
Gurney’s last essay Gerrard Winstanley and the Left, is a
very significant piece of work. It lays the critical groundwork for a further
examination of the left’s attitude towards the English revolution. Gurney
understood when writing about left-wing historiography on the English
Revolution that you had to be aware of the pratfalls, especially when writing
about the Communist Party Historians Group. One must be cognizant of the
enormous amount of Stalinist baggage these historians carried around. It must
be said that some of this baggage was not always in perfect condition.In many
ways, this essay is a microcosm of Gurney’s whole body of work. He was very
much at the height of his powers when he wrote this article. Gurney
acknowledges that it is only recently that the words of Winstanley have been
fully appreciated. However, he believed
that it is not the case that nothing of note was written before the 20th
century. He thought that Winstanley’s ‘extraordinarily rich body of writings’
were read and studied between the years 1651 and the 1890s.
As he wrote in the essay “The historical legacy of the
Diggers is usually seen as being very different from that of their
contemporaries, the Levellers. If the Levellers were misremembered, the Diggers
have been understood as being primarily forgotten before the 1890s, with
professional historians playing little part in their rediscovery. It took, we are told, the Marxist journalist
and politician Eduard Bernstein to rediscover Winstanley quite independently of
academic historians when he spent part of his exile in London working on the
section on seventeenth-century English radical thinkers for Karl Kautsky’s Die
Vorla¨ufer des neueren Sozialismus.
Later, in the 1940s, it was Marxist historians associated
with the Communist Party of Great Britain who is said to have picked up
Bernstein’s baton and created the image of a communist and materialist
Winstanley which remains familiar to this day. The left’s responsibility for,
and role in, the rediscovery and promotion of the Diggers can, therefore, seem
quite clear and uncomplicated. There are, however, several problems with this
interpretation. For one thing, the Diggers had, before the 1890s, never fallen
from public view to the extent often imagined. It seems that they were reasonably
well known over the centuries — and perhaps even more accurately remembered
than the mainstream Levellers, who were often confused with them. It is also
evident that early detailed research on the Diggers was not confined to the
left and that Bernstein was by no means alone in taking an interest in
Winstanley’s writings in the 1890s”.
Gurney continues “the Russians have a saying: ‘The past is
unpredictable.’ So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all but one of his
67 years, he lived in obscurity, and then he died forgotten. Generations of
historians passed over him either in silence or derision. He entirely eluded
the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in
the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of the Civil War
radicals, judged his exploits ‘scarcely worthy of being recorded’, and S.R.
Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth contained only two
references to him, one a bare mention of his name. Then in the early 20th
century, Winstanley was rediscovered, and he has exerted a magnetic pull on
left-leaning intellectuals ever since. He is variously credited as the father
of English communism, socialism or environmentalism, depending on which is
seeking paternity. His notice in the Victorian DNB was a scant 700 words; in
the new DNB, it has ballooned to more than 8000. Now he has been canonised by
the publication of an Oxford edition of his complete works, the second complete
works in a century, more than have been accorded either Hobbes or Locke”.[11]
Gurney spent most of his life studying the area around where
he lived. However, his work on the Diggers and Gerard Winstanley was far from
parochial. In many ways, he was instrumental in bringing a fresh perspective to
the Diggers and Winstanley. He produced two books on them Brave Community: The
Digger Movement in the English Revolution published in 2007 and Gerrard
Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy of 2013[2].
Both books took our understanding of the Diggers to a new
level.
Gurney was clear that the study of Winstanley should not
solely be of historical value but must have a contemporary resonance. He says:
“Today knowledge of Winstanley is widespread, and he has become one of the
best-known figures from the period of the English Revolution. There have been
numerous plays, novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often
been cited as an inspirational figure by politicians of the left.
More specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained
prescient, inspiring generations of activists and social movements”. He
believed that Winstanley “has in recent years also been invoked by freeganism,
squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs,
greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists and libertarians have laid
claim Who was to him as a significant precursor”.
The Diggers and Levellers were part of a group of men that
sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking
place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the real ‘Ideologues of
the revolution’ and had a specific capacity for abstract thought. While the
Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, which stemmed from their religion, they
had no programme to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent
overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers,
conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or that matter did the
larger group the Levellers constitute a mass movement.
George Sabines
As most people interested in Winstanley will know these two
volumes of collected works replace the work of the distinguished American
political scientist and historian of political thought, G.H. Sabine. Sabine
produced his work under challenging conditions during the beginning of the
Second World War in 1941. Sabine did not have the luxury of the internet.
According to one writer it has “for almost 70 years,
remained a serviceable edition of Winstanley’s works and an invaluable resource
for students of the English revolution. It was reprinted in 1965. However,
increasingly it has come to seem marred by an outdated grasp of the
biographical facts of the lives, both of Winstanley and his associates in the
famous ‘digging’ experiments; by the discovery of some further, textual
material; by an absence of annotation of the texts, and by Sabine’s
selectivity. While his edition remains reasonably comprehensive, Sabine
reproduced only extracts of Winstanley’s first three tracts, reducing what in
the Oxford edition now amounts to 306 pages to about ten. Sabine’s
justification for this was partly space and ‘partly because less interest
attaches to books written before Winstanley’s discovery of communism’. But, as
he demonstrated elsewhere in his introduction, the communism is almost impossible
to understand without the religion”.
Over time Sabine’s viewpoint that Winstanley’s politics were
of a type ‘utopian socialism’ has come under sustained attack from the same
revisionists who downplay Winstanley’s radicalism. While Sabine avoided
completely secularising Winstanley’s politics, his labelling Winstanley as a
Utopian Socialists is not far off the mark.
Conclusion
One writer posted this critical question To what extent,
then, does the new edition and its apparatus represent a breakthrough or is it
a consolidation of more recently received wisdom?.My feeling it is a
combination of both. It should be left to future historians to make a judgement
on the merits of this collection.As Ariel Hessayon perceptively writes “for now
at last Winstanley, the ‘foremost radical of the English Revolution’, who
stands shoulder to shoulder with John Donne, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Andrew
Marvell and John Bunyan as one of the ‘finest writers’ of a ‘glorious age of
English non-fictional prose’ (vol. 1, p. 65) has an indispensable scholarly
edition of his writings befitting both his undoubted literary talents and
profound insights. A complete edition of his writings what is more, which will
constitute the bedrock of future studies that ‘typically follow, rather than
precede, the establishment of a complete and reliable text’.[12]
[1] Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (Revolutionary
Lives) Paperback – 20 Nov 2012
by John Gurney (Author)
[2] Cliff Slaughter-Religion and Social
Revolt-www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/slaughter/1958/05/religion.html
[3] www-oxforddnb-com.
[4] https://www-oxforddnb-com.ezproxy2.londonlibrary.co.uk/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-29755?rskey=49ov9f&result=4
[5] Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousness (1649)
[6] https://spartacus-educational.com/STUwinstanley.htm
[7] Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War
[8] https://www.bilderberg.org/land/poor.htm
[9] The Law of Freedom in a Platform-
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/winstanley/1652/law-freedom/introduction.htm
[10] John F. Harrison, The Common People (1984) page 199
[11] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left-John Gurney-Past &
Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtx017
[12]
Reviews_in_History_-_The_Complete_Works_of_Gerrard_Winstanley_-_2012-03-08.pdf
Oliver Cromwell (Profiles In Power) Barry Coward,216 pages,
Longman; (22 Aug 2000) ISBN-10: 0582437512
Barry Coward’s book is a valuable introduction to the
complex and controversial world of Oliver Cromwell. His book has become a
standard textbook on the period. While not an orthodox biography Coward manages
to keep an open mind on the significant issues surrounding Cromwell and quite
prepared to change his mind, a hallmark of Coward.
Coward makes no secret of his admiration of Cromwell being a
paid-up member, and former president of the Cromwell Association means his
biography is a little partisan.Coward’s biography has entered into an already
crowded field. The high interest means that historians can finally begin to
strip away the myths surrounding Cromwell. Many of these myths and falsehoods were
spread by hostile biographers. The fact that we have started to learn more
about Cromwell’s early life is down to significant work by historians such as
Andrew Barclay[1]
The previous historiography has acknowledged Cromwell’s
early religious influences as a young man, especially from Dr Thomas Beard.
Coward, however, pours cold water on this. He does not believe that Cromwell
was ‘Lord of the Fens’ or “an opponent of capitalist syndicates.” Coward does
not believe Cromwell’s class position made him a champion of popular
rights.Cromwell, in his own words, describes his class position when he said “I
was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in
obscurity. I have been called to several employments in the nation — to serve
in parliaments, — and (because I would not be over tedious) I did endeavour to
discharge the duty of an honest man in those services, to God, and his people’s
interest, and of the commonwealth; having, when the time was, a competent
acceptation in the hearts of men, and some evidence thereof”.[2]
One shortcoming of the book is that it fails to place
Cromwell within the huge changes, both socially and economically that was
taking place in England at the time. To do so would give the book a far more
multi-dimensional approach to Cromwell. Such an approach was by F.A.
Inderwick’s who showed “A complex character such as that of Cromwell, is
incapable of creation, except in times of great civil and religious excitement
and one cannot judge the man without at the same time considering the
contending elements by which he was surrounded. It is possible to take his
character to pieces, and, selecting one or other of his qualities as a
corner-stone, to build around it a monument which will show him as a patriot or
a plotter, a Christian man or a hypocrite, a demon or a demi-god as the
sculptor may choose”.[3]
Coward correctly believes that Cromwell’s political views
were radicalised by his interpretation of the James Ist bible. Cromwell from a
very early period before hostilities had even broken out opposed the King. One
of his first actions before the war had officially broken out was to raise a
troop of soldiers to seize money bound for the King. Cromwell was adamant that
religion was an important factoir in the struggle against the King saying
“Religion was not the thing at first contested for at all but God brought it to
that issue at last; and gave it unto us by way of redundancy, and at last it
proved to be that which was most dear to us” [4]
.
Cromwell it must be said saw further than any of his
contemporaries in need from a proletarian army to combat the King. His famous
words “I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he
fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is
nothing else.” [5]
Need little
explanation.
Coward’s biography is a million miles away from a Marxists
approach to Cromwell contained in Christopher Hill’s Gods Englishman. Coward
believed that because there were “middling sort “on both sides of the
revolution, hence there was no bourgeois revolution. For Coward it is “more
important in explaining why divisions over religious and policy issues did not
spill over into rebellion and attacks on the social order, is the fact that such
divisions cut across ‘class’ lines. Indeed, although there was (as has been
seen) a significant disparity in the distribution of wealth in early modern
London between ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’, there was also a massive group who it
is best to call (as they did at the time) ‘the middling sort’, tradesmen,
merchants, craftsmen and their apprentices. It is significant that analyses of
different religious and political groups in Civil War London show no
significant difference in their social composition; most notably, they all show
large contingents of the middling sort.
People from the same social groups are to be found on all
sides. They are to be found amongst the Levellers and the radical gathered
churches, but also amongst the readers of Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena and the
militant conservative crowd who invaded the chamber of parliament in July 1647.
The point quite simply is that what was lacking in Civil War London was the
ingredient of class division or class hostility that might have made, for example,
excise riots the breeding ground for radical protest and demands” [6]
Ann Talbot in her essay counters this argument saying “the
prevailing academic orthodoxy is that there was no bourgeois revolution because
there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social classes can be
found on either side of the struggle. Even Cromwell, it is argued, can better
be understood as a representative of the declining gentry rather than the
rising bourgeois. He and those around him aimed not at revolution but wished
merely to restore what they believed to be the ancient constitution of the
kingdom.
The whole unpleasant episode could have been avoided if only
Charles II had been a little wiser. Hill, of course, was well aware that there
were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the civil war and
small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side. He had read enough Marx and
Lenin to know that one could not expect a chemically pure revolution in which
the members of one social class lined up one side of the barricades and those
of the other on the opposite side. However, he was sensitive enough to his
historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse
social backgrounds into a struggle against the King and well-grounded enough in
history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic
guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the
Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some theory to explain what
they were doing”.[7]
The logic of Coward’s rejection of a class-based analysis of
the ideological battles that occurred during the revolution leads him to make
the outstanding claim that the New Model Army was not political from the outset
and that the Levellers did not politicise it. Coward says the army
spontaneously gravitated to radical solutions overpay and grievances. This
downplaying of the ideological debates that took place in the military is a
major weak point in the book. It is therefore not surprising that Coward
devotes so little to the Putney Debates 1647.
What conclusions did Cromwell draw from the debates at
Putney? The dangers of a Levellers inspired mutiny against the Grandees were a
real possibility. Alongside Ireton, he saw a growing danger of losing control
of the New Model Army to the radicals. This army was already to the left of
Cromwell and would move against both the King and Cromwell himself if left to
its own devices. Cromwell’s nervousness over the Levellers was expressed when
he said: “I tell you sir; you have no other way to deal with these men [the
Levellers] but to break them in pieces” [8]
.
It does not need a leap of faith to believe that the
conclusions Cromwell drew from Putney was the need to purge the army of
radicals and began to move to military dictatorship under his control. In the
chapter Cromwell and the Godly Reformation, 1653-54 Coward outlines Cromwell
move towards a military dictatorship. On-Page 96, Cowards explains following
the Barebones Parliament; there was a definite playing up of a fear of social
revolution.
What was Cromwell’s heritage? The fact that his name still
elicits such hatred or admiration is down to the still contemporary class
nature of the Civil War period. Even today, there are sections of the ruling elite
who still refuse to be reminded that Britain had a violent revolution which was
not the British way of doing things. Coward tends to hold this position as
well.
Coward’s fixation with Cromwell’s attempt at Godly
Reformation misses Cromwell’s legacy in establishing the rule of the English
bourgeoisie. On this score, the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky offers a better epitaph for
Cromwell “In dispersing parliament after parliament, Cromwell displayed as
little reverence towards the fetish of “national” representation as in the
execution of Charles I he had displayed insufficient respect for a monarchy by
the grace of God. Nonetheless, it was this same Cromwell who paved the way for
the parliamentarism and democracy of the two subsequent centuries. In revenge
for Cromwell’s execution of Charles I, Charles II swung Cromwell’s corpse upon
the gallows. However, pre-Cromwellian society could not be re-established by
any restoration. The works of Cromwell could not be liquidated by the thievish
legislation of the restoration, because what has been written with the sword
cannot be wiped out by the pen.[9]
“
To conclude that Coward’s biography of Cromwell is one of
the better ones and deserves to be the standard textbook on the subject. Any
biography of Cromwell involves a lot of hard work. As Karl Marx said, “There is
no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb
of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits”. Reaching a
scientific understanding was hard work. Conscientious, painstaking research was
required, instead of philosophical speculation and unwarranted, sweeping
generalisations” [10]
[1] Electing Cromwell: The Making of a Politician (Political
and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period)
[2] Speech to the First Protectorate Parliament (12
September 1654)
[3] Th Interregnum, 1648-60
[4] Speech made on the Dissolution of the First Protectorate
Parliament on 22 January 1654
[5] Letter to Sir William Spring (September 1643) “A few
honest men are better than numbers.”
[6] (London and the Civil War)
[7] “These the times, this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill
[8] The English Wars and Republic, 1637–1660-By Graham E.
Seel
[9] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and
Chartism
[10] 1872 Preface to the French edition of Das Kapital Vol.
1,
The Civil Wars 1637-1653 Martyn Bennett,1998, Sutton Pocket
Histories he decade of the 1990s witnessed the publishing of large numbers of
books that sought to overturn previous Whig and Marxist historiography. The
revisionist historians who carried out this revolt were clear on what they were
against a little less clear on what they wanted to replace the previous
historiography with.
Alongside Bennett’s book, you had John Morrill’s Revolt in
the Provinces: The English People and the Tragedies of War, 1634-1648 by Mark Stoyle. Loyalty and Locality: Popular
Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War, The English Civil War and
Revolution: Keith Lindley, The English Wars and Republic, 1637-1660, to name
just a few.It is not possible in this short article to examine the reasons for
the rise of such disparate historiography suffice to say it was hostile to any
Whig or Marxist historiography which sought to explain the war from the
standpoint of it being a bourgeois revolution and not just a civil war.
In this well-written book, Bennett favoured another type of
historiography that was prevalent at the time called the Wars of the Three
Kingdoms. The term was not a new one. It dates back to 1662 when James Heath’s
book A Brief Chronicle of all the Chief Actions so fatally Falling out in the
Three Kingdoms, was first published.Bennett explains his reasoning behind his
choice of historiography, “The enduring symbol of the crisis which gripped the
British Isles during the middle of the seventeenth century is the name given to
it, `The English Civil War’. This symbol is itself problematic and can even act
as a barrier to a clear understanding of what happened in that turbulent
century. It may be argued that calling the conflict the English Civil War
limits the scope of our perceptions. By labelling it an English event, we can
marginalise Scotland and Ireland and perhaps even ignore Wales altogether. Yet
all four nations were involved in the rebellions, wars and revolutions that
made up the period” [1]
Bennett’s book starts with examining the war from the
standpoint of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales in the first three chapters.
As one writer put this historiography was “a trend by modern historians aiming
to take a unified overview rather than treating some of the conflicts as mere
background to the English Civil War. Some, such as Carlton and Gaunt, have
labelled them the British Civil Wars.
This type of explanation for the revolution was popular with historians
based outside England. One such historian Jane Ohlmeyer argued “Proponents of
the New British Histories agree that British history should not be enriched
English history which focuses on Whitehall and uses events in Ireland and
Scotland to explain developments in England. Yet the traditional terms used to
describe the conflict which engulfed Britain and Ireland during the 1640s,
which include ‘Puritan Revolution’, ‘English Revolution’, and more recently
‘British Civil War(s)’, tend to perpetuate this anglocentrism.
None of these reflects the fact that the conflict originated
in Scotland and Ireland and throughout the 1640s embraced all of the Stuart
kingdoms; or that, in addition to the war enjoying a pan-British and Irish
dimension, each of the Stuart states experienced its domestic civil wars. The
phrase ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ acknowledges the centrality of the various
civil wars fought within the Stuart kingdoms as well as the interactions
between them.[2]Bennett while supporting the “wars of three kingdoms”
historiography does explain its limitations warning “against thinking that this
current interpretation of the war is the last word, historical fashions come and
go. It may be as well to paraphrase Mark Twain: reports of the death of the
English Civil War may yet be greatly exaggerated”.[3]
Martyn Bennett book is precise in the type of terminology
used, as Bennett argued, the type of terminology used says a lot about how the
historian “reflects and reinforces the interpretations we make”. This approach
is commendable. As Edward Hallett Carr once wrote:”if, as Collingwood says, the
historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis
personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of
the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This
is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent
undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones
of St. Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St. Jude’s to ask what sort of chap
Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history,
always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone
deaf or your historian is a dull dog.”[4]
The date spread used in this book 1637-1653 is not one I
have come across. The throwing around of dates seems to have been popular in
the 1990s. Bennett explains his reasoning “Imposing the dates 1642-1651 on the
civil wars renders them relatively meaningless outside the bounds of England
and Wales: calling them the ‘English’ Civil War is similarly problematic. The
term English Civil War became common during the last century, adding to the
range of titles available – from the contentious ‘English Revolution’ to the
‘Great Rebellion’ and the ‘Great Civil War’. Yet such a title does obscure the
involvement of the other nations as effectively in the book market as it does
in popular entertainment” [5]
Bennett uses the term revolution in a couple of times in the
book but does not believe this was a bourgeois revolution. The book does not
provide any insight into the socio-economic problems that gave rise to the
conflict. Bennett, to his credit, does believe that the war was a product of
long term political changes to the base and superstructure of English society.
The book gives a good explanation of what took place during
the war. Chapters 1-6 deal primarily with this and can be seen as a good
introduction. Perhaps the most interesting and informative chapters are 7-8.
Chapter 7 called Revolution in England and Wales gives an essential insight
into the growing divergence of views within parliament and the growing threat
posed by the Levellers. Chapter 8 gives a presentable account of the views and
actions of the Levellers.
The book is quite striking in its minimal use of
historiography. He mentions only one other historian, but this is compensated
by the excellent notes at the back of the book.To conclude It is a short book
of 114 pages, it should not be seen as an in-depth or analytical study of the
revolution. At best, it should be seen as an excellent introduction to the
conflict. It would have a been a better book if Bennett had given more of his
take on the revolution.
[1] What’s in a Name? the Death of the English Civil War:M
Bennett-https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-98171389/what-s-in-a-name-the-death-of-the-english-civil-war
[2]
https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Three_Kingdoms
[3]
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-98171389/what-s-in-a-name-the-death-of-the-english-civil-war
[4] What Is History
[5]
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-98171389/what-s-in-a-name-the-death-of-the-english-civil-war
Black Tom: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution
(Politics, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain) Paperback – 1 May
2013-by Andrew Hopper
“Sir Tho. Fairfax, a
man of military genius, undaunted courage and presence of mind in the field
both in action and danger [was also] but of a very common understanding in all
other affairs, and of a worse elocution; and so a most fit tool for Mr. Cromwel
to work with”.
Sir Phillip Warwick, Mémoires of the Reigne of Charles I
(1702)
Andrew Hopper’s book is the first modern academic study of
Sir Thomas Fairfax. Books of this type usually make or break a historian. It is
to Hopper’s credit that he has dug deeper than other previous historians were
prepared to go to rescue Fairfax’s historical reputation and place him in the
correct hierarchy of participants of the English revolution. He was second only
to Cromwell in importance during the English revolution.
Hopper contends that it was Sir Thomas Fairfax, not Oliver
Cromwell, who created and then commanded Parliament’s New Model Army from 1645
to 1650. However, this book is not purely a military history but a political
assessment of Fairfax’s role in the successful outcome of the English bourgeois
revolution.The book combines narrative and thematic approaches to give a more
nuanced understanding of a complex figure. The first part contains a historical
biographical study and evaluation of Fairfax as a military figure who showed
tremendous bravery and military acumen. He also had a political mindset and
when needed, defended his politics as if he was still in battle. The second
part of the book is what Martyn Bennet called “a themed analysis”.
The comment made in the opening paragraph that these types
of books can make or break a historian may be a little exaggerated, but given
the paucity of previous biographies of Fairfax, it is not by much. There is a
touch of rescuing Fairfax from the condescension of history about Hoppers
biography. As Fairfax wrote himself in the 1660s ‘my retirement makes me seem
dead to the world’ (p183). It, therefore, takes a brave historian to go against
the centuries-long orthodoxy that portrays Fairfax as a relatively minor figure
during the English revolution. This book is the first step towards rectifying
this misnomer.
From a biographical standpoint, Fairfax is a hugely complex
and contradictory character. He began the revolution fighting for King Charles
I against the Scots in the Bishops’ Wars (1639) where he commanded a troop of
Yorkshire Dragoons. He switched sides and became the general of the New Model
Army the most radical army of its kind in the world. Politically he was in the
camp of the Independents. He ended his days a key figure in the restoration of
Charles II. Hopper is perhaps one of the most well-equipped historians to
explain Fairfax’s change of allegiances having written a book called Turncoats
and Renegadoes.
Martyn Bennett’s review[1] captured the many faces of Sir
Thomas when he wrote Sir Thomas is
usually shown to be politically conservative during this period, allowing
others, such as Cornet Joyce or Cromwell to make the running: his absence from
much of the Putney debates seems to underline this political inertia. Hopper
argues that this is not the case; Fairfax may have been pushed firmly into the
army’s political maw by the impugning of his honour by Presbyterian MPs, but he
took up its position with gusto. Although he later pretended he had not:
Fairfax approved of the army’s radicalisation, and its accusations of treason
levelled against the 11 Presbyterian MPs at the centre of the attack on the
army. He supported the mutiny against Sydenham Pointz, commander of the
Northern Association Army, and an ally of the parliamentary Presbyterians, and
used it to gain control of all the armed forces in the country. Furthermore,
during the second civil war, Hopper reads Fairfax’s anger at the renewed
conflict as anti-royalist, rather than anti-disorder or anti-rebellion: placing
the monarch to be the root of the problem. The execution of Sir Charles Lucas
and Sir George Lisle must then be seen in this light”.
One of the most substantial aspects of the book is Hopper’s
insistence(correctly I might add) that Fairfax should be given much more credit
for his part in leading the New Model Army. His leadership of the army meant a
successful outcome of not only the war but the revolution itself. Hopper also
believes that Fairfax deserves far more recognition for his part in the
radicalisation of the New Model Army. Fairfax was not the passive
military/political figure shown in previous histories of the revolution.
If there was one criticism of Fairfax, it was his
prevarication at critical moments. As Hopper points out, it is not that Fairfax
was apolitical but when events around him moved at breakneck speed his inertia
at times allowed others to carry out actions in his name, in other words
allowing others to dictate the course of the revolution. One such event being
the King’s trial although a commissioner of the High Court of Justice, Fairfax
did not attend the King’s trial. When his name was called in the courtroom, his
wife Anne famously cried out: “He had more wit than to be here.”
Leveller Suppression
This is not to say that that he could not act decisively,
especially when he saw that the revolution might be taken in a direction the
bourgeoisie did not want it to go. He dealt firmly and personally with the
Leveller Mutinies of April and May 1649. When Cromwell pleaded for mercy to be
shown to the Levellers Fairfax made sure one of the Leveller leaders Robert
Lockyer was executed, making Lockyer a Leveller martyr with thousands attending
his funeral. Fairfax dealt extremely severely with further mutinies most
notably at Burford where he led a force of nearly 4000, in crushing Leveller
resistance in a late-night attack.Three more Levellers were made martyrs.
Fairfax justified his action saying “the power of the army
(which I once had) was usurped by the forerunners of confusion and anarchy …
the arbitrary and unlimited power of this new counsel would act without a
General, and all that I could doe could not prevaile against this streame … For
now, the officers of the army were placed and displaced by the will of the new
agitators who with violence so carried all things as it was above my power to
restraine it”.
t is not to say that doing the bourgeoisie’s dirty work and
acting as their attack dog did not bother Fairfax who deep down had some
political limited sympathies with aspects of the Leveller programme. In a
letter to Lenthal, he states ‘It will be your glory and your honour to settle
this poor Nation upon foundations of Justice and Righteousnesse … for the
poore
people … may see you will improve your power for their good,
and then your Enemies shall be found
lyars’.[2]
Restoration
As Hooper brings out, Fairfax did not exactly cover himself
in glory during his retirement and was extremely lucky not to be hanged
alongside other regicides. Some of his relatives were not so lucky. Part of
this luck was because he played such a significant role in overseeing the
restoration of the monarchy. When the Protectorate collapsed in 1659, Fairfax
Carried out communication with General Monck. Fairfax agreed to use his
influence in raising an army in Yorkshire in order to smooth the passage of
Charles II to the throne.
Strong opposition to the Restoration came in the form of
Colonel Robert Lilburne and General Lambert. Fairfax’s intervention in
Yorkshire enabled Monck’s forces to deal with both Lambert and Lillburne and
pave the way for Restoration. Monck, it seems was the supreme opportunist
leading one writer to call him “a turncoat of heroic proportions”. A Commander
in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower of Cromwell.
After the death of Cromwell, he played the pivotal role in the Restoration of
the monarchy where he was given the unheard of sum of £100,000 a year for the
rest of his life to ease his pain of being a turncoat.
Conclusion
In this book, Hopper does not examine in any great detail
the charge that Fairfax was a turncoat of similar proportions to Monck, but it
is pretty clear that such a case could be made. Thanks to relatively lazy
historians, many other facets of Fairfax’s life have not been explored. Hoppers
book, at last, gives a much more accurate picture of Fairfax warts and all.
It is clear that that this was not an easy book for Hopper
to write and he has had to combat the previous historiography that Fairfax was
a reluctant revolutionary, swept along by events. At certain moments this was
true, but in other events, he was decisive and followed his political
principles. Many previous biographies have been one dimensional Hopper presents
readers with a three-dimensional Fairfax. It is true that Fairfax as one writer
puts it been “reluctant at certain points to carry on with the developing
radicalisation of politics, but he strove to remain at the head of the army at
all times”. This a finely researched and well-written book. Hopper restores
Fairfax to his rightful place in the English revolution.
[1] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/637
[2] A Full Narrative of all the Proceedings betweene His
Excellency the Lord Fairfax and the Mutineers
[10 May 1649], BL, Ε 555/27, p
Was Oliver Cromwell Really Framed
“Whether the proletarian revolution will have its own ‘long’
parliament we do not know. It is highly likely that it will confine itself to a
short parliament. However, it will the more surely achieve this the better it
masters the lessons of Cromwell’s era.”
Leon Trotsky —Where Is Britain Going?
“What is History but a fable agreed upon”. Napoleon I.
Despite the title which comes from one of Tom Reilly’s books
on Oliver Cromwell[1] this article is not so much concerned with the rights and
wrongs of Reilly’s defence of Cromwell although that will be discussed it is
more concerned with the economic and political motives which drove the plunder
of Ireland by the English Bourgeoisie in the late 1640s. The second part of the
article will address the heat generated by another historikerstreit debate.
While much of the historiography of this period has
concentrated on Cromwell, it should be borne in mind that he was not the only
player in this game and was working under the political direction of Parliament
and also under the economic and political direction of the English bourgeoisie.
Before the invasion of Ireland Cromwell had to do two
necessary things both crucial to a successful outcome in Ireland. First was the
execution of Charles I. Although in the short term far from stabilising an
already unstable ruling elite the execution lead sections of the bourgeoisie to
pursue negotiations with the Royalists both in England and Ireland. One of the
reasons for the invasion was to subdue a possible Royalist/Catholic revolt and
to secure Cromwell’s and a large section of the English bourgeoisie’s strategic
political and economic interests in that country.
Second, Cromwell was charged by Parliament to deal with the
growing radicalisation of the New Model Army. One manifestation of this
radicalism was the Leveller inspired revolt over the army being shipped to
Ireland to put down the revolt.The Levellers held contradictory views on
Ireland but showed solidarity with them as in the case of William Walwyn who
wrote, “the cause of the Irish natives in seeking their just freedoms…was the
very same with our cause here in endeavouring our rescue and freedom from the
power of oppressors”.[2]
When Cromwell moved against the Levellers earlier in the
revolution, he did so reluctantly not so now. Cromwell and his generals
ruthlessly attacked and crushed the mutinies in the army. As Christopher Hill
said the generals “were now the government; and the government decided Ireland
had to be subdued once and for all.” [3]The bourgeoisie rewarded Cromwell for
his actions against the Levellers. He was given an honorary degree by Oxford
University, a city already known for its steadfast support of Royalism. The
City of London held a banquet in his honour.
The English Bourgeoisie and The Conquest of Ireland.
The Cromwellian conquest began the British colonisation of
Ireland. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, this conquest was solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short’.’ As can be seen with the heated historian’s debate this
episode has caused bitterness that has carried on for centuries. For centuries
the Irish and English Catholics were seen as second class citizens an did not
become full political citizens of the British state again until 1829. They were
also barred from buying land interests until 1778.
The English Bourgeoisie from the beginning saw Ireland as a
money-making adventure. As an incentive to make the conquest easier it got parliament
to pass an “Adventurers Act” in 1642 in
order to invite the “Middling Sort” to invest in the army. The greater the
investment the great the return of land. Cromwell himself had loaned over 2,000
pounds and had been promised land in Leinster. Christopher Hill correctly
states Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland was “the first big triumph of English
imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy”.[4]While many of the
bourgeoisie stumped up money for their adventure in Ireland Parliament felt a
little more cooperation was a need and this came in the form of a series of
ordinances which was a demand for money with menaces. In February 1648: it
issued An Ordinance For raising of Twenty thousand pounds a Month for the
Relief of Ireland.
The Citation reads“Whereas it hath pleased God of late so to
bless and prosper the Forces of this Kingdom in the Kingdom of Ireland, and to
give them such Success against the inhumane and bloody Irish, as that those
Rebels are reduced to very great straights, and our Affairs put into such a
condition, as gives very great hopes to put that War to a happy and speedy
period (if there be now an effectual and vigorous prosecution of the Advantages
we have) with seasonable Supplies, the want whereof hath hitherto hindered the
compleating of that work, notwithstanding that great sums have been at several
times raised and spent for that service: The Lords and Commons in Parliament
assembled, taking these things into their consideration, and also how much the
honour and interest of this Kingdom is concerned, in the reducing of Ireland to
the obedience of the Crown of England. And of how absolute and indispensible
necessity it is for the Peace and Tranquillity of this Kingdom, that this
relation should be compleat; And considering also in how great want, both of
food and clothing these Forces are, And that after so much good service, and
such great Success and Victory against the Rebels, themselves are in danger to
be lost by Famine and Nakedness, and this Kingdom to lose the fruit of all
their service and success, if there be not speedy care taken to provide against
these Necessities: Therefore although the said Lords and Commons are very
sensible of the great burthens that have been and still are upon this Kingdom
in other Taxes and Payments, which the exigency of Affairs by the late Troubles
have necessitated to be laid and levied; And that by a late Ordinance there
hath been Sixty thousand pounds per mensem charged upon the Kingdom for the
service of England and Ireland, of which notwithstanding by reason of the said
exigencies and necessities, no part can possibly be spared for the Kingdom of
Ireland, They have thought fit to order and Ordain, and be it Ordained by the
said Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, and by the authority of the
same, That for the intents and purposes aforesaid, the Sum of Twenty thousand
pounds a moneth shall be charged, rated, taxed and levied upon all and every
the several Counties, Cities, Towns, Liberties, places and persons hereafter
mentioned, according to the several Proportions, Rates, and Distri butions in
this present Ordinance expressed; the same to be paid in monethly to the
several Collectors to be appointed for the receiving thereof, and so to
continue for the space of six moneths, the moneths to be accounted according to
the moneths in the Kalender, and not according to Twenty eight days for the
moneth, beginning from the First day of February, 1647”[5].
One striking feature of these ordinances is the list of
small “investors” who stumped up money for the plunder in Ireland in which well
forty per cent of Irish land changed owners. While the making of money was one
of the prime movers for the treatment meted out to the mainly Catholic
population religion was another. The majority of the Irish poor were Catholic.
As Hill states there was substantial anti-Irish prejudice in England, writing
“The hatred and contempt which propertied Englishmen felt for the Irish is
something which we may deplore but should not conceal”.[6]
The Irish socialist James Connolly while not blaming the
English bourgeoise for everything that befell the Irish people after the
conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the seventeenth century wrote
perceptively “ Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source,
so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of
the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. If we
would understand the national literature of a people, we must study their
social and political status, keeping in mind the fact that their writers were a
product thereof, and that the children of their brains were conceived and
brought forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland, at the same time as
she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the vehicle of
thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold loss,
the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from a prolonged
arrested development. During the closing years of the seventeenth century, all
the eighteenth, and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish people were
the lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish peasant,
reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his tribeland and
controlling its administration in common with his fellows, was a mere
tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the hands of an
irresponsible private proprietor. Politically he was non-existent, legally he
held no rights, intellectually he sank under the weight of his social
abasement, and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had been
conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands
of a ruling class and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of
`Woe to the vanquished’[7].
Cromwell, Ireland and the Historians
The subject of Oliver Cromwell in Ireland is a contentious
one, to say the least so much so that significant numbers of historians have
steered well clear of the topic. The debate over Cromwell in Ireland has tended
to reveal more about 20th-century politics than early modern historiography.
Broadly speaking the historiography is divided into two camps. On the one side,
we have Tom Reilly and his supporters who believe that “Cromwell was Framed”.
Reilly’s books have been aimed at demolishing some myths about Cromwell’s and
for that matter Parliaments behaviour in Ireland. Tom Reilly’s first book
claimed that no civilians were killed in Drogheda by Cromwell’s forces and that
Cromwell did not intentionally target civilians during his anti-Catholic
campaign. “There were no eyewitnesses who give us ideas of civilian deaths,” he
said of the two sieges, claiming that it was two propagandists who spread the
word about Cromwell. Reilly maintains that Cromwell had “no deliberate policy
to kill the innocent”. He sees his book as “the start of Cromwell’s
rehabilitation”.
Reilly is currently organising the conference and a
collection of new essays. In an email sent to a number of writers and
historians inviting them to take part, including this writer Reilly explained
his project “this new book will be an attempt to harness the variety of current
perceptions of Cromwell’s Irish campaign by a range of established and early
career scholars, within the context of the war in Ireland 1641-1653. Cromwell’s
reputation is variously construed and depends greatly upon standpoint and the
nation from which it is looked at. In England and Wales he is regarded as a
figure of national importance, from Scotland there is a great deal of
antipathy, as he is seen as part of a long history of English interference. In
Ireland however, Cromwell’s reputation remains most controversial and where
most of the accusations of his being a ‘war criminal’ are levelled. It is
intended that most if not all of the essays will address this controversy
directly, placing Cromwell’s reputation generally and especially in Ireland
into the context of modern scholarship and research. It will be a fresh, new,
balanced and contemporary series of perceptions of Oliver Cromwell from a
miscellany of academics which it could be hoped will contribute to peace and
reconciliation initiatives that were borne out of the Good Friday Agreement
throughout the island of Ireland”.
Some questions arise from this project. If a number of
participants go along with Reilly’s opinion that Cromwell was an honourable
enemy and that he was framed by historians who want to harm his record, then
this is hardly going to be an objective assessment of Cromwell’s historical
reputation.Perhaps the most disconcerting part of the email was Reilly’s belief
that the book and conference will “be a fresh, new, balanced and contemporary
series of perceptions of Oliver Cromwell from a miscellany of academics which
it could be hoped will contribute to peace and reconciliation initiatives that
were borne out of the Good Friday Agreement throughout the island of Ireland”.
While I have nothing against the group of writers and
historians who will contribute to the conference and later book I do have a
problem with Reilly’s promotion of the Good Friday Agreement. Reilly’s defence
of Cromwell is connected to his stance on the agreement in that he would like
to prevent the “escalating deterioration
of Anglo Irish relations over the years”.Reilly’s promotion of the Good Friday
Agreement is politically naïve and dangerous given that “The Good Friday
Agreement was patched together by the United States, Britain and Ireland as a
means of creating a more stable economic environment for corporate investment
in the North. Irish workers were excluded from any real say so over the future
course of events. The US in particular, which is the largest and most
influential investor in the island, was concerned to replicate the success of
the Southern Irish Republic which had been transformed over the preceding
decades into a boom area for corporations seeking an avenue into European
markets. But plans to extend the cheap labour economy north of the border
depended upon establishing a stable political and economic framework for
investment by ending the sectarian-armed conflict, and enabling greater
collaboration between London and Dublin.”[8]
The opposition to his thesis on Cromwell in Ireland is
equally reckless and dangerous. Reilly’s historiography has many opponents among
them are the historians Simon Schama, John Morrill and Micheál Ó Siochrú[9].
Simon Schama in 2001 threw a live hand grenade into the debate when he referred
to Oliver Cromwell’s alleged massacre of 3,000 unarmed enemy soldiers at the
Irish town of Drogheda in 1649 as a ‘war crime’ and ‘an atrocity.” Schama
claimed in his History of Britain series on BBC2. Whether Schama believes
Cromwell was a “war criminal” is not essential; his use of inflammatory
language is not conducive to a healthy debate of the subject.As Bernard Capp,
professor of history at Warwick pointedly wrote “War crimes are a
twentieth-century term, not a seventeenth-century one, and its use is
problematic,’ said ‘It is true he treated the enemy in Ireland much harder than
elsewhere, but there was a strong military rationale.”A bloodthirsty episode
would have served the purpose of driving the war to a speedy conclusion,’”.
John Morrill[10] while being a little more restrained
believes that Cromwell if not a war criminal was insensitive to the suffering
caused by his soldiers. He writes “the principal evidence against Cromwell
comes from his reports sent to the Speaker of the English Parliament. They are
the words of a General insensitive to the suffering of others; conditioned by
the relentless propaganda of the previous ten years into believing that Irish
Catholics were collectively responsible for the torture and killing of
thousands of unarmed Protestant settlers; convinced that he was the divinely
ordained instrument of retribution.
He wrote of Drogheda:‘In the heat of action, I forbade them
to spare any that were in arms in the town, and, I think, that night they put
to the sword about 2,000 men. Divers of the officers and soldiers being fled
over the Bridge into the other part of the Town, where about one hundred of
them possessed St Peter’s steeple [and two other Towers]… I ordered the steeple
of St Peter’s to be fired where one of them was heard to say in the midst of
the flames: ‘God damn me, God confound me: I burn. I burn’ …. The next day, the
other two Towers were summonsed. When they submitted, their officers were
knocked on the head, and every tenth man of the soldiers killed, and the others
shipped [as slaves] to the Barbadoes… The last Lord’s Day before the storm, the
Protestants were thrust out of the great church called St Peter’s, and they had
a public Mass there; and in this very place near one thousand Catholics were
put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety. I believe all the friars were
knocked promiscuously on the head but two; the one of which was Fr Peter Taaff…
whom the soldiers took and made an end of; the other was taken in the round
tower, under the repute of lieutenant, and when he understood that the officers
in the Tower had no quarter, he confessed he was a friar; but that did not save
him.’[11]
Morrill concludes his essay by saying that “Cromwell failed
to rise above the bigotry of his age in respect of the Irish people. He did
rise above it in other respects (especially in his commitment to religious
liberty in Britain). As a general, he behaved differently in Ireland from how
he behaved in England and Scotland. There were massacres at Drogheda and
Wexford in hot and cold blood. Cromwell’s contempt for the Catholic clergy
meant that he permitted them to be slaughtered. However, whether he broke the
laws of war then prevailing, and whether he was anything like as brutal as many
others in the Irish wars, whether indeed he should be blamed for things much
worse than what happened in Drogheda and Wexford, is still difficult to
establish”.
The historian most associated with the opposition to
Reilly’s views on Cromwell in Ireland is Micheál Ó Siochrú. In a review of Ó
Siochrú book God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland
Jason Peacey perceptively points out the dilemma faced by most historians
writing about Cromwell “ the civil wars that engulfed the three kingdoms of
England, Ireland and Scotland in the mid-17th century remain a battlefield, and
generation after generation they retain a capacity to provoke passionate debate
and heated historical controversy. Within this field, however, there is
probably no single individual more likely to generate historiographical heat
than Oliver Cromwell, utterly convincing analysis of whose complex personality continues
to elude even the greatest of scholars. Moreover, within scholarship on
Cromwell and the Cromwellian period, there is no more controversial topic than
his attitude towards, and activity in, Ireland. Cromwell’s name retains the
capacity to inflame passions, and in at least some quarters he has become
synonymous with religiously inspired brutality and atrocity, with something
little short of ethnic cleansing, and with tyranny and military dictatorship.
At the same time, however, he is capable of making the ‘top ten’ in a 2002 BBC
poll of In a review of greatest Britons’”.[12]
Ó Siochrú repeats Morrill’s claim that Cromwell ‘uncritically accepted’ the horror stories
regarding the rebellion, and the claim that the rebellion had no justification
or back-story (p. 19), and who was determined to exact revenge upon the Irish
Catholic population, irrespective of their involvement in the rising.I have the
same problem with Ó Siochrú as with Reilly in that a lot of what he writes is
more to do with Irish politics than it is to do with historical accuracy. Ó
Siochrú believes that Cromwell’s use of violence was not justified “but a
pre-determined exercise in religious and ethnic vengeance”. “Even by the
standards of the time [Cromwell’s] behaviour was beyond the pale,”
I wish Tom Reilly and his friends well with their conference
and their book. I look forward to reviewing it. It is hoped that he will
produce a more objective account of Cromwell and the English bourgeoise’s
adventure in Ireland. It is the least the Irish people deserve. It is also
hoped that the new historiography produced by the book will not add to the
already crowded book market lending justification to the centuries-long plunder
of Ireland.
________________________________________
[1] Cromwell was Framed: Ireland 1649 by Tom Reilly[2]
Cromwell, Our Chief Of Men By Antonia Fraser[3] God’s Englishman: Oliver
Cromwell and the English Revolution.[4] The English Revolution 1640-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/[5]
‘February 1648: An Ordinance For raising of Twenty thousand pounds a Moneth for
the Relief of Ireland.’, in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660,
ed. C H Firth and R S Rait (London, 1911), pp. 1072-1105. British History
Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp1072-1105
[accessed 18 February 2019].[6] God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the
English Revolution[7] Labour in Irish History by James Connolly[8] Northern
Ireland election: An attempt to rescue the Good Friday AgreementBy Steve James
-26 November 2003-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/11/nire-n26.html[9]
God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of IrelandMicheál Ó Siochrú
London, Faber and Faber, 2008, ISBN: 9780571218462; 336pp.; Price: £14.99[10]
“Was Cromwell a War Criminal?” by John Morrill[11] ‘For the Honourable William
Lenthall, Esquire, Speaker of the Parliament ofEngland: These.’Dublin, 17th
September, 1649.[12]https://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/777
Roger Howell and the Origins of the English Revolution-by
Chris Thompson
I was privileged whilst an undergraduate at the University
of Oxford to spend two terms being taught sixteenth and seventeenth-century
English and European history in St John’s College by the late Roger Howell. He
was then a Research Fellow at that college having completed his D.Phil. on the
subject of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the English Civil Wars. He was certainly the
best and most demanding tutor I ever encountered as an undergraduate, a man
with a gift for teaching that I have only ever seen equalled by one person, the
existentialist philosopher, Dr Jan Rogan.
Sadly, from my point of view, Roger Howell shortly
thereafter returned to his own alma mater, Bowdoin College in Maine, where he
became President of that institution until his premature death in the
late-1980s. I only ever saw him once again in the North Library of the British
Museum in the late-1960s when he was on a brief visit for his own research.
I had no idea until earlier today that Roger Howell had ever
written a short pamphlet on the origins of the English Revolution published in
1975.[1] Its contents were and are unknown in detail to me apart from the
comments made by Richard T. Hughes of Pepperdine University who reviewed it in
the Sixteenth Century Journal.[2]
According to Hughes, Howell argued that it was the House of
Commons which upset the constitutional balance inherited from Queen Elizabeth
by her Stuart successors despite its members subscribing to the myth of a
balanced constitution.
Its members did not force the issue before 1640 because of
their vested interests. Charles I, by contrast, was in the right when he
claimed that he was the victim of Parliamentary innovation and the defender of
the traditional constitution.
Puritanism as Howell defined it involved a concern for moral
improvement and hostility to the laxity of the extravagant Court although
Hughes thought that Howell had underestimated the degree to which Calvinists
aimed to re-shape English society entirely. He was, however, more impressed by
Howell’s brief discussion of the impact of the new science and of scepticism on
views of the hierarchy in Church and State.
Unfortunately, I have not been able so far to locate a copy
of this pamphlet. But my initial and indirect impression is that Roger Howell
had become out of touch with the main currents of historical work in this
period by the time of its composition. Other historians based in the U.S.A.
Lawrence Stone at Princeton, for example – experienced the
same process. Howell’s argument that the House of Commons in particular and
Parliament in general proved to be constitutionally aggressive would not have
found favourable reception from figures like Conrad Russell or Kevin Sharpe at
that time.
Nor would his claim that Kings James and Charles were
conservative defenders of the ancient constitution have carried much weight
amongst historians in the 1970s or, perhaps, now. But whatever my reservations
based on second-hand knowledge, nothing diminishes my gratitude to Roger Howell
for his skill as a teacher. It was and remains a privilege to have known him.
[1] Roger Howell, Jr., The Origins of the English
Revolution. (Forum Press, Missouri. 1975)
[2] The Sixteenth Century Journal. Volume 7, No.1 (April,
1976), p.106.
Review: The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and
the English Revolution-Michael Braddick-OUP, pp.416, £25
‘If there were none living but himself John would be against
Lilburne, and Lilburne against John.’ Henry Marten
‘We are all in his debt: rather than rebuke him for his
failings, we should honour him for his courage.’ Michael Braddick
Michael Braddick’s political biography of John Lilburne is a
welcome fresh Perspective on the Leveller leader. It continues a recent trend
of examining the Leveller movement and Lilburne’s place in the English
revolution. Braddick’s book is a readable account of Lilburne’s life, and it is
hard to believe the first biography of Lilburne to appear for nearly 60 years.
It is quite shocking to find that it was 1961 that H.N.
Brailsford’s published his Levellers and the English Revolution (1961) a
book-length study of the subject aimed at a general public.
Brailsford’s book is worth reading as John Rees writes
“Brailsford’s was the first book-length account to fully integrate the
economic, social and religious background of the Levellers with a description
of the political dynamic of the revolution, the Levellers’ role as an organised
revolutionary current within it and an estimate of the ideological advances
that Leveller thought represented. If nothing else it was a considerable work
of synthesis. However, it was more than this. Throughout the book, but
particularly in the chapters on ‘The Leveller Party’ and ‘The Moderate’,
Brailsford presented more forcefully than any writer before him a picture of
the Levellers as a functioning political organisation of an entirely new type”.
On one level it comes as no great surprise that Lilburne has
received much greater attention than before. Any study of Lilburne and the
Leveller movement offers the historian a far greater insight into the complex
issues of the English bourgeois revolution. On a another level, the plethora of
recent studies is a response to the growing social polarisation existing in
today’s capitalist society. These books can give valuable advice to workers in
order that they might prepare for the great struggles facing them today.
Despite the passage of time many of the issues tackled by Lilburne and the
Levellers are still with us today.
The book is well written and attempts to strike a balance
between the minutiae of Lilburnes life with that of an objective assessment of
the English revolution. Braddick manages this feat a few times but overall his
objective understanding of the revolution and Lilburnes place in it falls
short. On the other hand, the book is “bright and accessible”, and maintains a
high academic standard of both research and writing..
Braddick’s book compares well with John Rees’s last book The
Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640-1650.
Rees’s book does benefit from his 2014 doctoral thesis which is well worth a
read and deserves publication. Like Braddick Rees has to a lesser extent played
down his analytical and thematic approach of a dissertation. However, both
offer “an absorbing and fluent narrative of the political life of the foremost
radical group to emerge during the English Revolution”.
While there are many similarities between the two books,
there are some significant differences. I cannot speak for Rees, but I am sure
he would not agree with Braddick’s assertion on page 298 that Lilburne was not
a political theorist.
The more you read of Lilburne’s publications, the more
confident the reader will become of how politically conscious Lilburne was. He
did not merely react to events. On some occasions, anticipated the ebbs and
flows of the revolution and acted accordingly.
He was highly conscious of his status as a gentleman. Like
Cromwell he was acutely aware of his status “I was brought up well-nigh ten
yeares together, in the best Schooles in the North, namely at Auckland and New
Castle.” He claimed knowledge “in the Latin tongue”, and “Greeke also”.
Braddick has done extensive research including a significant
study of the 20,000 pamphlets collected between 1640 and 1660 by the bookseller
George Thomason held at the British Library.[1]
Like most of Braddick’s books, this one is written in short
sentences. While not being narrative driven it does contain a large number of
interesting facts that keep the reader honest. According to Russell Harris QC
“It brings the judicial and penal infrastructure of the time alive with
revealing glimpses of its main institutions. The Fleet, for example, was a
prison run by private owners who built houses for the inmates within the
grounds and then let them out at commercial rates. As long as the inmates were
up to date with their rent, the warders were forbidden to enter the homes and
prisoners could live a relatively normal comfortable domestic existence”.[2]
It is clear from Braddick’s book that John Lilburne was a
fascinating, contradictory and complex character. Lilburne is second only to
Cromwell in historical importance as regards the English revolution. Lilburne
was the second son of a modest gentry family, sharing in many ways the class
background of Oliver Cromwell. Braddick’s book is very good at showing how
Lilburne’s experience of political activism sharpened and clarified his ideas.
Lilburne was the most high profile figure in the political
radicalisation that went on during the English revolution. He could have chosen
a relatively peaceful and prosperous life but instead chose a life that saw him
accused of treason four times and put on trial for his life on numerous
occasions twice acquitted by juries. His bravery in battle was only surpassed
by Oliver Cromwell himself. He fought in major battles rising to the rank of
Lieutenant Colonel.
To his credit, Braddick does attempt to give Elizabeth
Lilburne more than a walk-on part in the revolution. There has, however, been a
crying need to have a full-length study on the tremendous politicisation of
women on both sides of the barricades.
Women Levellers mounted large-scale demonstrations and
organised petitions for social equality. They were met with differing levels of
brutality depending on which class they belonged to. Overall middle-class women
were treated with derision, but mostly no violence was committed against them.
This is not the case with the poorer sections of the women’s movement who were
often treated severely by MP’s and soldiers alike.” Many were thrown into
prison, mental institutions, or workhouses. Middle-class women were quietly
escorted away by soldiers and told to ‘go back to women’s work”. One MP told
them to go home and wash their dishes, to which one of the petitioners replied,
“Sir, we scarce have any dishes left to wash”’.
While the book correctly explores the extraordinary and
dramatic life of ‘Freeborn John and presents a picture of his political
activism, it would be a mistake to believe that Lilburne and the Levellers were
merely prisoners of the radical spontaneity that was produced by the
revolution.
While it would be wrong to say that Liburne was communist or
Marxist in his thinking and actions, he did attempt to guide his work with a
historical understanding. These revolutionaries were handicapped by the fact
that they had very little precedence for their actions and the ideologists of
the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for
some theory to explain what they were doing.
It would be fair to say that Lilburne and the Levellers in
political terms punched way above their weight. Without land, established
profession, or public office he succeeded in establishing a movement that was
able many times to influence the course of a revolution. All this as Braddick
states while seeming to have spent around 12-and-a-half years in prison or
exile’.
As Marx said “the weapon of criticism cannot, of course,
replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material
force, but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the
masses. The theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates
ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be
radical is to grasp the root of the matter. However, for man, the root is the
man himself”.[3]
To some extent, Lilburne tried to understand the objective
nature of his ideas. While Henry Marten’s quote ‘If there were none living but
himself John would be against Lilburne, and Lilburne against John is not far
off the mark, the fact that Lilburne and the other leading members of the
Leveller wrote hundreds of publications established them as the central
theoreticians of the revolution.
While Rees does not deny that the Levellers should be
approached from the perspective of the history of ideas, he believes “they were
activists, not utopian theorists, and they wrote and campaigned to achieve
political change”.
Braddick’s Historiography
The publication of this book which is the first full-length
biography of John Lilburne for over sixty years marks a significant shift in
Braddick’s historiography. Despite having the secondary title of the book as
John Lilburne and the English revolution, it is still unclear to the extent
that Braddick believes there was an English revolution. If you go back to
previous work such as his book God’s fury, England’s Fire which was heralded as
a new history of the English Civil Wars Braddick advocated the theory that
there was a “war of Three Kingdoms” not a revolution. This was the perspective
adopted by Austin Woolrych’s important book of six years ago, Britain in
Revolution, 1625-1660. Woolrych believed that that the war began with the
revolt of the Scottish Covenanters and ended in the Cromwellian conquest of
Ireland. He believed that this was not an English revolution but the “war of
three kingdoms”.
For Braddick, “one vital feature of the period is that it
generated ideas in politics, religion and natural philosophy that foreshadow
the 18th-century Enlightenment. It was, he says, a time of “creative chaos”.
Indeed chaos and confusion dominate his story. The two sides in the war, he
tells us, “consisted of complex coalitions of allies, with varying concerns and
differing degrees of conviction and commitment”. The Thomason tracts reveal a
babble of discordant voices and conflicting viewpoints.
The moral he draws is disconcertingly postmodernist. After
his long, carefully grounded, empirically based narrative, Braddick in his
final paragraphs abruptly dissociates himself from the “hubristic pomp” of
professional historians who seek a definitive account of the period. Instead,
he plumps for indeterminacy. “Experiences of these conflicts,” he declares,
“were plural, ambiguous, divided and contrasting; their potential meanings
equally diverse.” They deserve to be remembered, he tells us in a one truly
awful concluding sentence, “not for a single voice or consequence, but because
they provide many pieces of knowledge for our discourse”[4].
Braddick believed the term “Leveller movement” was
misleading and that the Levellers were not a party or a group. As John Rees
writes “Michael Braddick is similarly sceptical of the Levellers’ ‘practical
significance to the events of the 1640s’. No doubt this view in part explains
the absence of a book-length study. It is, after all, hard to write a book
about something that is supposed barely to exist.”.
Whether Braddick took this criticism to heart is another
matter. His new book on Lilburne and the Levellers does seem to show a
radicalisation of Braddick especially when it is rumoured that his next major
project is a biography of Christopher Hill. A long overdue book if ever there
was one.
Historical revisionism
There is one major flaw in this work, and it is the fact
that Braddick, unlike John Rees, is extremely reluctant to take on a large
number of conservative revisionist historians that have held sway in the last
twenty or so years.
Much of the historiography of the later 20th century and
early 20th century has been dominated by historians who argued that the war did
do not have any long-term causes. Popularised by historians such Conrad Russell
and John Morrill. There second argument primarily aimed at historians like
Christopher Hill was that there was not English Bourgeois revolution some like
John Morrill has gone so far as to deny any revolution took place.
In a 1994 article published in New Left Review, Morrill
defended his historiography saying “It is unfair to say that Conrad Russell and
I, for example, have denied that there is a social context of the revolution.
Time and again, I have argued that the processes of social change occurring in
the long sixteenth century created a new kind of political culture that helps
to explain why England had the kind of civil war it had, though not whether it
had a civil war. I have commented at length (in for example my 1993 volume The
Nature of the English Revolution) on the changing nature of noble power, the
homogenization of an elite culture based on land, literacy and the
secularization of the wealth and authority of the Church; and I have argued
that the process of social change (which I see in more neo-Malthusian terms
than Brenner would ever allow) creates ‘contexts within which yeomen,
husbandmen and labourers struggled to make free and informed political choices’
of a kind not possible in previous centuries. The English civil war was a
different kind of civil war from anything that came before. Revisionism need
not mean the lack of a social interpretation, so long as that means social
contexts rather than social causes. Since Brenner is explicit that Merchants
and Revolution do not argue for the inevitability of the Revolution, simply
that a political collision between the monarchy and the landowning class was
inherently likely, this fuzziness about what exactly he intends by ‘social
interpretation’ is fairly debilitating”.[5]
This quote does give us a clearer picture of Morrill’s
political and historical outlook. He was hostile to any Marxist interpretation
of the English bourgeois revolution. In the above essay, he explicitly denies
that there was any connection between economic development and its reflection
on the ideas of men and women.
Morrill’s revisionism was significantly analysed in John
Rees’s PhD thesis. It is a shame that the thesis was not published in book form
because it offers one of the most political assessments of the origins of the
revisionism.
According to Rees “The revisionist challenge to liberal and
left interpretations of the English Revolution synchronised with almost
suspicious exactitude with the end of the post-war boom and the abandonment of
the welfare state consensus. This change, beginning in the mid-1970s, achieved
its electoral representation when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of
Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan president of the US in 1980. One of the
arguments made against the left by the revisionists was that they read their
current political preoccupations back into history. However, if that was
sometimes true of the left, it was also undoubtedly true of some revisionists.
You can almost hear the snap of Gordon Gekko’s red braces in the background as
J C D Clark quotes approvingly a letter to the Times Educational Supplement,
British political science was particularly torpid until the electoral shock of
1979. Too many existing political scientists belong to the generation of 1968~a
provenance that almost disqualifies them from a comment on late 20th-century
politics. Revisionism drew on the work of, among others, Conrad Russell, Mark
Kishlansky, Kevin Sharpe, John Morrill, and Peter Laslett.88 The major themes
of revisionism were a stress on the accidental nature of the revolution rather
than on its long-term social and economic causes; a localist denial of
nationally operative causes of the revolution; an insistence that religious
issues were more central to the revolution than previous historians had
allowed; an attempt to deny that the revolution involved class conflict or that
the mass of people had much impact on its outcome; a corresponding emphasis on
‘high politics’ as a key determinant of events.”[6]
Conclusion
As Rees correctly states “There can be no tradition and no
debate where there is no knowledge”. It is therefore to Michael Braddicks
credit that his new book has furnished us with a large amount of Knowledge
about Lilburne and the Levellers.
Braddick’s book represents a significant contribution to our
understanding of the English Revolution and valuable addition to our understanding
of the English revolution.The Common Freedom of the People is an important
book. It draws on a wide range of sources but has a few flaws the biggest is
his reluctance to take on the revisionist revolt. A minor but still annoying
admission is that it does not have a bibliography. The book is highly
recommended and should be on university booklists.
[1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/thomason-tracts
[2]
https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/book-review-the-common-freedom-of-the-people
[3]A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right-
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm#32%5B4%5D
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview5
[5] Conflict Probable or Inevitable John Morrill-
https://newleftreview-org.ezproxy2.londonlibrary.co.uk/I/207/john-morrill-conflict-probable-or-inevitable%5B6%5D
Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English Revolution-John Rees-
http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf
Review : Witchcraft: Suzannah Lipscomb A Ladybird Expert
Book-
The most striking
aspect of this book is why a celebrated historian and broadcaster would write
such a book. It is true that Lipscomb is a leading light and outstanding
communicator in her field, but it is a bit like William Shakespeare putting in
a script for EastEnders.
Another anomaly is while the book is beautifully illustrated
by Martyn Pick the number of illustrations is half the book. Given the complex
nature of the subject, you would have thought Ladybird would have given more
space for analysis. On the other side, the book is an entertaining,
straightforward but minimal introduction to the subject.
Even a gifted writer like Lipscomb clearly is uncomfortable
with explaining a complex historical issue in such a short space. She does slay
some of the more apparent myths that have developed about the subject.
Lipscombe is correct that the witch trials were not carried out by
“ecclesiastical authorities but by judicial courts. This is a good point, but
it does not explain the fact that the worldview of the ruling elite carrying
out what amounts to legal murder was backward and medieval.
The book is not without exciting information who knew that
“men could be witches too. Across Europe, 70–80 per cent of people accused of
witchcraft were female – though the proportions of female witches were higher
in certain areas: the bishopric of Basel; the county of Namur (modern Belgium);
Hungary; Poland; and Essex, England. But one in five witches were male across
Europe, and in some places, males predominated – in Moscow, male witches
outnumbered women 7:3; in Normandy 3:1”.
In Lipscombe’s defence, she does believe that “causality is
not simple.”, But given her limited space, her arguments are not fully
developed. Many of the witchhunts carried out were in times of famine, war and
plague but many were not. She correctly states that war, disease and famine did
create the social and political conditions to carry out a near genocide against
large sections of the population.
Perhaps Lipscomb most crucial point is made on page 22 under
the heading The Dawn of Modernity she makes this point, “most people lived in
small village communities and depended on each other. They lent, borrowed, gave
and forgave. It was only the way to get along. But in tough times, people turn
in on themselves. They start to look after number one. A neighbour who would
not offer help or charity, who enriched himself by expanding his farm as others
were forced to give up theirs, or who begged for handouts when everyone was
suffering could foster resentment, bitterness and suspicion. These feelings
were the product of a transition from old to new ways. In grand socio-economic
terms, what was happening was a shift towards capitalism. The witch-trials were
the blood red finger of modernity”.
I know Marx said that capitalism came into the world
dripping with blood but blaming it for the witch-trials is a bit much. As
Lipscomb points out the trials and their decline was the product of the
transition from Feudalism to capitalism. But the trials were more a product of
Feudalism, than early Capitalism and their fall was a product of the
development of more scientific ways of thinking which brought about the decline
religious doctrine.As the Marxist David North explains “Until the early
seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the
ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life
were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had
been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well underway”[1].
I very rarely do not recommend a book to be read so I will
not break this tradition. The book has severe political and historical
limitations. Also who exactly is it aimed at? On the plus side, it is
gloriously illustrated. So read it don’t read it you pay your money you take
your choice.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
The Oliver Cromwell Statue “Controversy”
And if a history shall be written of these times and
transactions, it will be said, it will not be denied, but that these things
that I have spoken are true.’
“I will not cozen you by perplexed expressions in my
commission about fighting for King and Parliament. If the King chanced to be in
the body of the enemy, I would as soon discharge my pistol upon him as upon any
private man; and if your conscience does not let you do the like, I advise you
not to enlist yourselves under Me.”
It would appear that every year a story appears in the
right-wing press regarding the merits of the statue of Oliver Cromwell situated
outside Parliament in London. This year is no exception.
The Sunday Telegraph ran an article called “ Parliament’s
statue of Cromwell becomes the latest memorial hit by ‘rewriting history’ row”.
The article’s author Patrick Sawer must have had a slow day
in the office because in the article he says a bitter row has broken out
between historians.
This is stretching things a bit. The one historian quoted by
the newspaper is a one Jeremy Crick, described as “a social historian” has
called for the statue to be pulled down.
His justification for this being Cromwell’s anti-religious
zeal and comparing Cromwell to the actions of the Taliban. He says “Its
banishment would be poetic justice for his Taliban-like destruction of so many
of England’s cultural and religious artefacts carried out by his fanatical
Puritan followers.”
It is hard to take Crick seriously. Even a cursory search
would find that he has written next to nothing on Cromwell and is hardly a
world authority on Cromwell and the English revolution. It would seem that the
only thing Crick specialises in is the calling for “unloved statues” to be pulled
down.
Source of controversy
It must be said the English bourgeoisie has always an
ambivalent and contradictory attitude towards Cromwell and for that matter the
English revolution. While playing lip service to the fact that he was the
father of Parliamentary democracy albeit with a bit of military dictatorship
thrown in they have always been wary of drawing attention to their
revolutionary past. They would prefer that people saw Britain’s history as
being tranquil. That any change that took place was of a gradual nature and
progress was peaceful through class compromise without the violent excess of
revolution. This illusion is more important in light of today’s explosive
political and economic atmosphere.
If Cromwell were alive today, he would be a bit angry at
this attitude given that today’s modern bourgeoise owes everything it has to
his leadership during the English revolution.
Marxist’s, on the other hand, have no ambivalence towards
the great bourgeois revolutionary, and workers and youth as the Russian
revolutionary points out can learn a lot from his leadership
“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. The observations on the Puritans’ army made by the historian
Macaulay are here not without interest:
“A force thus composed might, without injury to its
efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other
troops, would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general, soldiers
who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates, and pass
resolutions on high questions of state, would soon break loose from all
control, would cease to form an army, and would become the worst and most
dangerous of mobs. Nor would it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any
regiment religious meetings at which a corporal versed in scripture should lead
the devotions of his less gifted colonel, and admonish a back-sliding major.
But such was the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-Command of the
warriors whom Cromwell had trained that in their camp a political organisation
and a religious organisation could exist without destroying the military
organisation. The same men who, off duty, were noted as demagogues and field
preachers, were distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by
prompt obedience on watch, on will and the field of battle.”[1]
While it is a bit much to call this a controversy, it does
beg the question why does it keep coming up. Firstly the issue of the English
revolution has never been a mere question of studying a past event; it is
because many of the significant problems that were discussed and fought for on
the battlefield are still contemporary issues. What do we do with the monarchy,
the issue of social inequality addressed by groups such as the Levellers? Until
these and many more are resolved, we will keep getting more stories calling for
Cromwell’s statue to be removed.
[1]
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
Review: Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in
Seventeenth-Century Britain by Dr Nadine Akkerman-Oxford University Press-2018
Have we not an equal
interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities
contained in the Petition of Right?’ ‘if this principle were true that all
subjection and obedience to persons and their laws stood by electing them,
then…all women at once were exempt from being under government’.
Nadine Akkerman’s new book is a superb introduction to the
little-known world of female spies during the later stages of the English
Revolution. In this book, she manages to combine academic rigour with the art
of a novelist. Given the lack of material on female spies Akkerman’s abilities
to deep mine, the archives are impressive.
According to the blurb on the jacket of the book, she has
previously written extensively on Women’s history and curated several
exhibitions. In the years 2015/2016, she was a fellow at the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences. Akkerman is the
world authority on Charles II ’s aunt Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia. She is very
much a hands-on historian complimenting her research on spies by producing Youtube
videos about invisible inks.
The book is packed with original research. Akkerman’s use of
primary sources acquaints the reader with long-forgotten texts, and as one
writer puts it “ with a fresh eye, she corrects the mistakes of past
cataloguers and transcribers who left out essential sentences. Akkerman has
immersed herself in archives, libraries, and private collections, transcribing
hundreds of letters, breaking cypher codes and their keys, studying invisible
inks, and interpreting riddles”.
Akkerman’s book is an attempt to rescue these invisible
agents from the condescension of history. She is careful not to ‘regurgitate
myths’, and challenges previous historical conceptions. Her defence of
Elizabeth Murray, accused as a double agent Royalist and Oliver Cromwell’s
mistress, is an example of her wearing history on her sleeve.Akkerman correctly
lauds these female spies who often worked on their own with little or no
support. She demonstrates the diverse backgrounds of Royalist and Parliamentary
agents.
In many ways this a groundbreaking work. Akkerman introduces
us to women that have been long forgotten by historians or in some cases never
been researched. It is clear that in writing this book, Akkerman faced enormous
problems. Her subjects were criminally underresearched and given the nature of
their occupation hard to track down. She contends that there were more than
just the handful of seventeenth-century female spies such as Aphra Behn and
Elizabeth Murray. The others just haven’t been discovered.
One that was not given extensive treatment by Akkerman is
the formidable Elizabeth Alkin. Like many in Akkerman’s book far too little is
known of her life, even her birth date is a guess (c. 1600 – c. 1655).She wore
many hats including publisher, nurse and spy for the Parliamentarian armies
during the English Civil War. She was famous enough to have been given her
derogatory name by the Royalists as “Parliament Joan”.Spying seemed to run in
her family she was the wife of Francis Alkin, a spy for the Parliamentarians
who was according to Wikipedia hanged early in the English Civil War by
royalist forces for his activities. The loss of her husband meant not only did
she keep spying, a dangerous occupation in itself she managed to look after
three children.
Her involvement in publishing needs further research.
According to her Wikipedia page “In the seventeenth century, daily news was
published in newsbooks which tended to be small eight-page publications, the
forerunners of newspapers. They were usually sold on the street by what the
historian Bob Clarke describes as “semi-destitute female hawkers, known as
Mercury Women”. Those publications supporting the royalist cause were closed
down and the publishers prosecuted, and Alkin became involved in uncovering
those behind the publication. In 1648 the royalist newsbooks the Mercurius
Melancholicus and the Parliament Kite both referred to her attempts to uncover
them, and the following year the Mercurius Pragmaticus called her an “old
Bitch” who could “smell out a Loyall-hearted man as soon as the best
Blood-hound in the Army”.
Her role as a double agent was to get information on the
Royalist newsbooks. To do this she acted as a Royalist newsbook seller between
1650 and 1651, According to historian Bob Clarke, Alkin used royalist titles,
to gain the confidence of royalist sympathisers. Wikipedia cites the historian
Marcus Nevitt who disagrees, and believes that Alkin was “reappropriating
Royalist titles for Parliamentarian consumption Akkerman believes the war gave
women opportunities that they would have never had in peacetime. Many women
were actively involved in defending their property. Many disguised themselves
as men so they could fight. Some ran family businesses when their husbands were
killed.
Most importantly they got involved in politics. Finding the
figures for female participation is difficult. But it is undeniable that large
numbers on both sides of the barricades took part. It is a shame that this is
not addressed to an any great extent in the book. An evident radicalisation of
women took place during the English Revolution. This radicalisation was not met
with open arms.
According to Heather Delonnette, “All this political
activity was not received with complete acceptance. The term ‘fishwife’ became
used as a disparaging term for the women who involved themselves in these
protests. This type of behaviour was considered abnormal for women at the time
despite their increased activity in other spheres, as we have seen. Women’s
involvement in politics was the source a series of jokes claiming that there
would soon be a ‘Parliament of Women’ where women would have superiority over
their husbands and fathers, a world truly ‘turned upside down’”.
Women Levellers mounted large-scale demonstrations and organised
petitions in favour of social equality. They were met with differing levels of
brutality depending on which class they belonged to. On the whole middle-class
women were treated with disdain, but mostly no violence was committed against
them. This is not the case with the poorer sections of the women’s movement who
were often treated severely by MP’s and soldiers alike.” Many were thrown into
prison, mental institutions or workhouses. Middle-class women were simply
escorted away by soldiers and told to ‘go back to women’s work”.
Ann Hughes correctly states that “Women’s political activism
did not begin in the twentieth century. Women from all social ranks have been
involved in popular protests, religious conflicts and aristocratic conspiracies
from the earliest times. In the English civil war, women acted as spies and
couriers; they defended their homes from soldiers and worked hard to protect
their families from the ravages of political division and war; they played a
prominent part in the novel religious freedoms of the period, founding new
congregations and insisting that men had no authority over their consciences or
their souls. But they did not claim the vote or other formal political rights
for women, despite their ‘equal interest’ in the freedoms of the commonwealth.
The prevailing notion was that institutional political power was confined to
men of some property, heads of households, whose wives, children, and servants,
as their dependents, could not be political actors”.[1]
Historiography
A further small weakness of the book is that Akkerman does
not expand on her choice of the ”War of Three Kingdoms” to explain the nature
of the English civil war. The book is also part of a growing market of
“royalist studies” and Gender studies. This would tend to situate her book
within the two significant historiographical themes; Royalist conspiracy and
Gender Studies.Akkerman’s book is part of a growing trend of Royalist studies
over the last five years. In fact, you cannot enter a bookshop history section
without tripping over them.
Conclusion
In some respects, the book is painful reading. It shows that
the treatment of women during the seventeenth century is still shockingly close
to their treatment in the twenty-first century. As Akkerman points out that
male chauvinism was one of the reasons why so many female Royalist spies were
either not caught or treated with leniency, although not all were spared. The
book is well written and is never dry. The book moves at a pace but does
contain needless phrases such as ‘mud sticks’ and ‘sniff out information’. The
reference to Madonna seems out of place with the overall academic presentation.
Let us hope that Akkerman continues with this line of enquiry and sheds more
light on a forgotten army of women still left in the archives.
Notes and references
Royalist Agents, Conspirators and Spies: Their Role in the
British Civil Wars, 1640-1660-Geoffrey Smith-Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, ISBN:
9780754666936; 252pp.; Price: £60.00
Geoffrey Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile 1640–60 (Basingstoke,
2003).
Literature of Exile in the English Revolution and its
Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Philip Major (London, 2010).Back to (2)
David Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy 1649–1660 (New Haven,
CT, 1960).Back to
P Higgins, ‘The reactions of women, with special reference
to women petitions’, in Manning, Politics, Religion and the English Civil War,
p. 197.
Clarke, Bob (2004). From Grub Street to Fleet Street.
London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-7546-5007-2.
About the Author
Nadine Akkerman is a Reader in Early Modern English
Literature at Leiden University. She has published extensively on women’s
history, diplomacy, and masques, and curated several exhibitions. In the
academic year 2015/16, she was Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). She is the editor of
The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (OUP, three volumes,
of which the first appeared in 2011), for which her prize-winning PhD (2008)
serves as the groundwork. She is currently writing a biography of Elizabeth
Stuart (forthcoming from OUP). In 2017, the World Cultural Council recognised
the transformative effect of her work in the form of a Special Recognition
Award.
[1]
https://blogs.keele.ac.uk/womens-political-activism-in-the-english-civil-war-acdf5ebc4a34
Marxism and the English Revolution
(I have just received Chris Thompson’s email regarding my
article Norah Carlin, The Socialist Workers Party and the First English
Revolution posted on the 15th April. At this moment I cannot reply to Chris at
length as I would like to. This will be done at a later date. I would, however,
invite more debate on the subject. I do stand by my interpretation of Carlin’s
work which in my view despite having substantial political differences with
Carlin her two essays are an important contribution to the development of a
orthodox Marxist historiography on the English revolution).
I read your latest post with great interest and considerable
surprise, surprise because it is wrong not just in a factual sense but also
interpretatively. All of the historians you mentioned with the exception of
Tawney have been personally known to me including Norah Carlin who was a
colleague of mine at the Enfield College of Technology in 1971-72 and the
Middlesex Polytechnic in 1972-73. She now lives in Scotland and can be tracked
down via Twitter. Let me deal with your points in a little more detail.Hugh
Trevor-Roper. He was not a Tory in the modern sense at all but, as he himself
stated and Adam Sisman’s biography confirmed, “an eighteenth-century Whig”. He
had an exceptional range of knowledge and a wonderful command of the English
language. He was a generous supervisor of postgraduates and critical only of
those whose arguments he found unsound or whose pretensions – e.g. Lawrence
Stone – he thought unfounded. His objections to Tawney’s arguments in favour of
the “rise of the gentry” and his alternative hypothesis proved immensely
stimulating to early modern historians of England (and Wales) in the 1950s and
1960s. The debates over Court and Country in that period testify to that too.
Christopher Hill. It is quite wrong to suppose that Hill
failed to object strongly enough to Trevor-Roper’s arguments about the
significance of the ‘mere’ or ‘lesser’ gentry in the period up to and during
the English Revolution. On the contrary, as the comments of mine that you
published not long ago showed, he was a vigorous and public critic of
Trevor-Roper’s case in the journal Annales and in History in the 1950s. Brian
Manning was one of his pupils. Both men were severe critics in Past and Present
of the analysis of the membership of the Long Parliament offered by Brunton and
Pennington in 1954. Non-Marxist analyses were the subject of vituperative
attacks from members of the historians’ group of the Communist Party of Great
Britain.
There were and are many different strands in Marxism and
Marxist historiography. It was, however, evident no later than 1960 that
attempts to classify the English Revolution as the product of a transition to
capitalism or as a ‘bourgeois’ revolution could not be sustained. If you look,
for example, at Valerie Pearl’s study of London, the connections between the
leaders of the Long Parliament, whether peers or gentry, and the radicals who
captured control of the city are obvious even if one does not have to accept
them in the form later advanced by Robert Brenner. The sects and groupings that
emerged later in the course of the 1640s were neither bourgeois nor petty
bourgeois nor simply representative of artisanal or peasant groups. There was,
in any case, a well-developed tradition long before the rise of the Levellers
and Diggers that English people had rights protected by common law that could
not and should not be overridden by arbitrary actions by the sovereign. The
entire effort to apply procrustean Marxist terminology to the analysis of the
period had failed.
The revolt against economic and social determinism had begun
long before the rise of ‘revisionism’ in the mid-1970s. Conrad’s Russell’s work
reflects his, no one else’s, belated emancipation from the dogmas of his time
as an undergraduate. John Morrill’s interest at that time in the politics and
religious tensions in the provincial communities of England and Wales was more
influential in the long run as, indeed, was the interest Kevin Sharpe took in
the imagery, self-representation and values of the Stuart Courts. I should add
that Trevor-Roper was the first to point to the issues raised by the problems
of ruling over multiple kingdoms in 1968, a subject about which figures like Koenigsberger
wrote well before Russell took up the subject. Marxists like Hill and Manning
never addressed the difficulties the hypothesis about the role of multiple
kingdoms posed for their interpretations of the English Revolution in a full
sense nor have their putative successors done so effectively since then.
The entire debate about the causes, course and significance
of the English Revolution has moved on a long way since Norah Carlin’s comments
in and after 1980. The public sphere and the significance of news, the
importance of the Atlantic archipelago, the interrelationships between the
peoples of the British Isles, are all vital topics for current investigation. I
should add that important research is currently being carried out into the
bargaining mechanisms that operated in English and Welsh societies to ensure
that people of differing social ranks could live peacefully together and to
trace how those at the bottom were linked those higher up the social hierarchy.
The one aspect that no longer carries much interest is the revival of the
Marxist approach. It is dead and cannot be resuscitated.
Norah Carlin, The Socialist Workers Party and the First
English Revolution.
Abstract.
In 1980 Norah Carlin, historian and member of the Socialist
Workers Party (SWP) published her essay Marxism and the English Civil War[1].
In 1983 she released a second called the First English Revolution. Both
articles were of a polemical nature. They exuded the need for a complete change
in how we saw the English revolution. While Carlin did not express it the most
important conclusion to be drawn from them was the need for new Marxist
historiography based on the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. This need
was palpable.
Carlin in both compositions makes some critical points
worthy of much further study, three of which stand out. She believed that
England witnessed a bourgeois revolution, that so-called Marxist historians
have not done enough to stem the tide of revisionism that undermined both Whig
and Marxist historiography and the need for a more precise understanding of the
class nature of the radical groups like the Levellers and how they fit into the
concept of a Bourgeois revolution. Carlins work did not sit very well with the
SWP’s orientation to Historians like Hill and Manning.The SWP rejected Carlin’s
historiography and adopted of the genre of “Peoples History” which was
developed by the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG). This essay will
examine the SWP’s refusal to pursue Carlin’s call to action and why it instead
collaborated with historians that were associated with the Stalinist Communist
Party of Britain.
Introduction
If Carlin thought defending a Marxist theory of the English
Revolution was hard in the 1980s, she should try doing it now. For nearly four
decades any historian who sought to favour Marxist historiography has come up
against a battery of revisionist historians with their heavy weapons of
anti-marxism. When challenged, the revisionists have been able to hide behind
an academic establishment whose anti-Marxism has become legendary.
Given this near-unanimous global academic hostility to
Marxism, it is surprising that Carlin fails to place this anti-Marxism within
the context of the broader “Marxism is Dead” campaign.In the field of study of
the English revolution, Carlin traces the beginning of this anti-Marxism to the
1950s. Perhaps the most famous and nastiest attack on the Marxist conception of
the English Bourgois revolution came from the typewriter of Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Roper was a very right-wing historian and politician. He had a habit of being
an offensive, personally abusing any historian he did not agree with,
especially if that historian had any connection with Marxism.
Another titan of revisionism was Conrad Russell who in the
introduction to a widely-used textbook[2] said “for the time being … social
change explanations of the English Civil War must be regarded as having broken
down.’ Also during the 1970s, John Morrill put forward his theory that war was
precipitated in 1642 by local interests and local rivalries in particular
provincial areas. Morrill’s work was useful to a point but said nothing about
why such conflicts developed.
Carlin cites another historian who went even further complaining
that Marxist historians have over explained the past and that ‘We must allow,’
he says, ‘for the role of sheer muddle and misunderstanding in history[3].’
Unfortunately, this muddle and misunderstanding have followed us right up to
the present day. Today’s revisionists are clear what they are against but have
nothing to replace Whig or Marxist historiography except what Carlin calls
“craftism”.
In both essays, Carlin spends some time trying to understand
why it has been difficult to defend and expand Marxist historiography as
regards the concept of the English Bourgeois revolution. She is correct to say
that outside of the CPHG very few “Marxists” have written on the subject. This
goes for the Trotskyist movement as well. Outside of Leon Trotsky himself and a
small contribution from C.L James nothing much substantial has been written.
If a significant new Marxist historiography is to be
developed, then it must take on board the best of the old work. This work must
have as its foundation a solid exposition of Marx and Engels writing on
Historical materialism. After that, the best is undoubtedly from a Marxist
standpoint the work of Christopher Hill. His most outstanding work was the
seminal essay written in 1940 The English Revolution, 1640 (part of a Communist
Party education pamphlet. It was reissued in 1955. Apart from this work how
much has been written from an orthodox Marxist position.Carlin believes far too
little. Despite Hill’s significant contribution, the fact that no other
historian has even come close to developing orthodox Marxist historiography is
troubling.
On this Carlin makes this point “Hill left the Communist
Party in 1957 after playing a not very memorable role on the Commission for
Inner-Party Democracy and ended up as Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Given
the nasty and personalised tone of the right-wing attack, it is hardly
surprising that defending Hill should come to be almost a significant activity
in itself, yet the striking fact is that when a collection of essays by former
pupils of his was got together to mark his retirement at the end of the 1970s,
not one article made any explicit reference to Marxism, only one contributor
(Brian Manning) could be regarded as in any sense a Marxist, and several
(including the advocate of muddle quoted above) were openly anti-Marxist. There
is something slightly odd about ‘Britain’s greatest Marxist historian’ (as he
is described continuously in journals such as New Left Review and History
Workshop) raising no successors”.
Carlin believed it became easy for revisionist historians to
mislabel other historians as Marxist even though they were patently not. One
glaring example is that of R H Tawney. Tawney it must be said is well worth
reading and was a historian of note.It has however been effortless to attack
his work on the gentry. As Carlin notes “The other major influence on the
Marxist orthodoxy of the last forty years has been R.H. Tawney’s work on the
rise of the gentry. Though Tawney did not see himself as a Marxist, he
identified the English Civil War as a bourgeois revolution; but in his version,
the bourgeois revolution was made by and for the landed gentry. Whatever the
precedents for this view in passing remarks by Marx or Engels, Tawney’s
treatment of the question has caused utter havoc for the class interpretation
of the English Civil War. It has shaped the development of right-wing history,
in the concern to deny it, as well as the stagnation of Marxist history in the
concern to defend it”.
The mistake made by Tawney was to see the gentry as a class
in itself. If the matter of class was so clear cut then why were there gentry
on both sides of the civil war? For that matter why was the bourgeoisie on both
sides.This stagnation of Marxist historiography had some consequences. Firstly
it allowed the revisionist’s historians to consolidate and develop their
arguments. Secondly, the historians that came out of the Communist Party
instead of deepening the study of the common nature of the revolution started
to do work around the radical groups of the revolution such groups as the
Levellers, Diggers and to a lesser extent the Ranters at the expense of a more
orthodox Marxist historiography.
This type of history appealed to the SWP who promoted it at
every opportunity especially when one of its most capable exponents Brian
Manning came into their party. While much of Mannings work is worth reading, it
is not explicitly Marxist. As Carlin points out “Manning, for example, states
his position on the nature of the class struggle in the Civil War in nine lines
of his preface, and in a form which makes it almost impossible to recognise it
as Marxist. Left-wing historians seem more concerned to establish their fair
use of evidence than to engage in the development of a Marxist understanding of
the class struggle”.
The Bourgeois Revolution
Carlin correctly states that “The ‘rise of the gentry’ thus
becomes a gaping trap for Marxists into which perhaps only Perry Anderson of
New Left Review has jumped with both feet. For Anderson, the English Civil War
was ‘a “bourgeois revolution” only by proxy’, because it was made by a section
of the ruling class. But if a bourgeois revolution can be made by proxy from
above, can a proletarian revolution? If a section of the ruling class could
break the last bonds of feudalism on behalf of the bourgeoisie, could not a
part of the bourgeoisie set up socialism on behalf of the working class?”.
How do we get out of this trap?. As Carlin states a Marxist
analysis of the gentry and for that matter, the bourgeoisie has to be made not
via Tawney but Marx and Engels. Also at some point, an orthodox Marxist
appreciation of Hill must also be made. After all, he was the only historian
that consistently made a defence of the notion of a bourgeois revolution.
Hill like Marx was clear that the revolution paved the way
for a victorious bourgeoisie and we witnessed the rise a new social order. This
was a victory over feudal property relations. Marx correctly states “it is
certainly true that feudal relations were not delivered one concentrated blow.
Feudalism [in England – eds.] was destroyed but disappeared only gradually.
This process extended over many centuries during which certain aspects of the
feudal order displayed surprising adaptability and vitality”. This approach was
indeed taken on board by Hill and to a lesser extent Manning.
Carlin in her essay elaborates that the “new class of
merchants and manufacturers played a crucial role in the development of the
revolution.They represented new wealth and wanted political power to go with
it. They made their money not out of old feudal rights of land and peasants but
out of the profits from goods produced by the growing wage workers. Carlin
correctly believed that this process of reducing all the workforce to the level
of wage-labourers began at least two centuries before the industrial revolution
and Marx called it the ‘primitive accumulation of capital”.
Who was the leader of this new class and the revolution?
Carlin was in no doubt that without Cromwell and his New Model Army the
revolution would not have been the same. Carlin believed that Cromwell made
England safe for capitalism. The Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky was very clear on
this point “At a certain moment in political history the fate of ‘democracy’
hung not upon parliament but — however terrible this might be to scrofulous
pacifists! — upon the cavalry, Cromwell very quickly realised that the fate of
his class would be decided by cavalry. He said to Hampden: “I will raise such
men as have a fear of God before them and make some conscience of that.”
The Left and Revisionism
According to Carlin, Hill and Manning must take some blame
for the rise of revisionism. On the surface of things, it would seem that
Carlin had a contradictory attitude towards Hill and Manning. This not the
case. Carlin praises Hill and Manning for their work on the English bourgeois
revolution and that any new historiography should incorporate much of their
best writings.
However, when it comes to taking on the revisionists attack
Marxist historiography, their contribution does leave a lot to be desired. It
is clear that the SWP saw these two as bulwarks against the revisionist
onslaught. At best this a was lousy piece of judgement at worse they sacrificed
a struggle against revisionism over a closer relationship with these two
historians who were in one way or another closely tied to the apron strings of
the Communist Party.
If you examine Hill’s role, to his credit he did albeit in a
lesser extent play a role in the “storm over the Gentry” debate. His defence of
Tawney is still worth reading today. In many senses, this was a missed
opportunity to do some severe damage to the anti-Marxists. The fact that Roper
was able to walk away from this debate mostly unscathed merely emboldened
further hostile attacks of Marxist historiography.
Gifted as a historian as Hill was he did not understand the
need for a consistent struggle against revisionism. This stems not from his
understanding of history but his complete lack of Marxist political
consciousness. When the SWP did try to prompt Hill into a more active role in
the struggle the results were not good. In an interview with John Rees and Lee
Humber, this question was asked, How do you see the development of the debate
around the English Revolution over recent years? Would you agree that the
revisionists have taken some ground?
Hill’s answer was “they have made a lot of useful points,
but their more extreme views are now being attacked by the younger generation
of historians. Although the revisionists had all sorts of useful ideas, they
had a narrow political approach in that they tried to find the causes of the
English Revolution solely in the years 1639–41. This simply assumes what you
are setting out to prove. If you look just at those years then, of course, it’s
a matter of political intrigue and not long-term causes. I think people are
reacting against that now. The better of the revisionists are themselves
switching around a bit. John Morrill, for instance, who thought everything
depended on the county community and localism, is now taking a much broader
point of view. And Conrad Russell has become aware that long-term factors have
to be taken into account – he doesn’t like it, but he recognises that religion
has some long-term effects on what happened in 1640, a rather elementary point
but he left religion out altogether in the early days. Now he’s bought it in.
He still leaves out the cultural breakdown in society of that period, but he is
moving a bit. I think a consensus will arise and then there will be another
explosion in 20 years or so. These debates occur regularly – ever since 1640
people have been arguing about what it was all about”.
Not a bad answer but when asked about dropping some of his
earlier jargon. And how important is the Marxist approach in studying history?
Again his answer gave too many concessions to the revisionists, he said “I took
a conscious decision in the 1950s to guard against political jargon after a
lovely young woman from the Communist Party told me she thought my book on 1640
had done more harm than good because of the language I used. I’ve striven not
to use sectarian language since. Some words can have an amazing effect on
people. Using the word ‘bourgeoisie’ is a red rag to most academics. Even the
most intelligent of them, Lawrence Stone, for example, believe that the
bourgeoisie must have something to do with the towns and that if you can prove
that the gentry were the main capitalists in England in the 17th century,
you’ve disproved the idea of a bourgeois revolution. But to have to explain
this every time you use the word bourgeois is a bore. It’s much easier just to
leave out the word bourgeois – but of course, it’s very easy to slide from
dropping the word to dropping the idea. Initially, I thought I had to drop the
jargon to get people to take me seriously. I have changed some of my ideas,
naturally, but not I hope my basic approach”[4].
Carlin took exception to Hill’s approach inside the SWP. To
what extent this was discussed inside their party I cannot tell at this moment,
but as will be brought out in the third part of this essay it cut across their
overtures to Hill and Manning.
Radicalism and the English revolution
Carlin also calls for a class analysis of the radical groups
that formed the left wing of the revolution.One gaping hole in the
historiography of these groups has been the failure to examine what Russian
historians wrote on these groups. To be more precise those historians who
opposed the Stalinist bureaucracy and paid for it with their lives.
Hill to his credit at the beginning of his career started to
examine Russian historians. As early as 1938 he wrote Soviet Interpretations of
the English Interregnum published in The Economic History Review. Hill took a
big chance with this article in the sense that he quotes the brilliant Soviet
Writer Evengy Pashukanis who in 1937 was denounced as a “Trotskyite saboteur in
1937 executed by Stalin.
It goes without saying that any starting point when dealing
with the radical groups should be Hill’s early work on the bourgeois revolution
and the Soviet historians. Caution should be taken with Hill’s early work as he
was still a member of a party that supported the mass extermination of the best
elements of the October revolution.
Carlin correctly states that the vanguard of the revolution
in 1642 was the radical groups that carried out political work in the early
party the revolution. To what extent these groups were organised as a party has
been open to fierce debate only recently a new revisionist work by Gary De Krey
denies they were assembled as a party but were one element in a broad
independent movement.
Another matter that needs to be solved is the correct
terminology when describing the class nature of the radical groups. So far they
have been variously described by Marxists as ‘the petty bourgeoisie’, ‘the
middling sort of people’, ‘small independent producers’ and ‘plebeian
elements.’
While Carlin does not like the term petty-bourgeois to
describe the class base of the say the Levellers in this paragraph, she
describes precisely this class. “Many of those who took part in the revolt of
1640–42, in the New Model Army during the war and in radical movements later,
were indeed small independent producers. In feudal society, the small producer
enjoyed ownership or possession of the means of production, and wage-labour was
typically a temporary or supplementary source of livelihood – for the near-landless
peasant family, for the journeyman on his way to being an independent master
craftsman, and even for domestic servants, who saved their wages for marriage
and a household of their own. Under capitalism, wage-labour has become the
norm, and the small independent producer exists only in competition with
large-scale capitalist production.
“England in the seventeenth century was in transition from
feudalism to capitalism, and the separation of the labourer from the means of
production was the crucial issue for the development of the capitalist mode of
production. As Marx recognised, this proletarianisation of the labour force
preceded the accumulation of capital on a large scale: it was the essence of
‘so-called primary accumulation’ or ‘the first revolutionising period of feudal
production”.
Another contentious subject raised by Carlin is the extent
there was a working class involved in the revolution. It should be pointed out
that this was a working class at the beginning of its existence and bore no
relation to the working class today. According to Carlin, there was a
substantial number of proletarians. But how you quantify what part they play is
difficult. It is clear that further research is needed. But Carlin insists that
“ large numbers of wage-earners must have taken part in the riots and
demonstrations of the period. Unfortunately, the bias of contemporary
propaganda is compounded by that of recent historians, both Marxist and
non-Marxist, who seem determined to belittle working-class participation.”
She continues “he reputation of the Levellers has fallen low
in the ‘orthodox’ Marxist version in the last twenty years. The view that they
were not such radical democrats after all, that they would have denied the vote
to the whole of the working class, and that their political theory foreshadows
bourgeois rather than socialist thought, originated with C.P. Macpherson in
1962. It is still propagated by Christopher Hill among others. Coupled with
this is the idea that Leveller democracy was premature because the potential
electorate was backward and even reactionary”.
When she says it is wrong to see the Levellers as merely the
most revolutionary section of the bourgeoisie, I cannot agree with it. They
were precisely that. That does not mean that we should not recognise their
struggle and deepen our understanding of the class nature of all these radical
groups
The Diggers, or True Leveller according to Carlin were a far
more revolutionary outfit. According to her they “went further than the
Levellers in identifying the fact that private property was at the heart of
their problems. She believes that “it is wrong to dismiss the Diggers as
backwards-looking ‘agrarian communists’. Their great achievement was to go
beyond medieval ideas of the redistribution of wealth to propose the continuing
creation of wealth by collective production
Carlin, The SWP and History from Below.
To what extent Carlin’s substantial essays were discussed
inside the SWP is open to conjecture. In my opinion, her essays should have
been given far more attention that they were. If that were to happen, they
would have had to tone down their overtures towards the Stalinist Communist
Party and its “Peoples History.”
As Ann Talbot succinctly puts it “ the Communist Party
sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s
People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr”.
This turn towards the Peoples History also fitted in with
the SWP’s political perspective at the beginning of the 1980s. The SWP
leadership drew some pretty negative conclusions from the series of defeats
suffered by the working class in the 1970s. The downturn in the class struggle
which saw the victory of Thatcher meant for the SWP that for the task was not
to build a revolutionary leadership, but to develop “a broader radical left
that can begin to present a credible and principled alternative to capitalism.”
Tony Cliff wrote in an infamously pessimistic article. So,
the downturn continues. There are not going to be set-piece confrontations. The
question of intervention means individual intervention in individual disputes.
In ninety cases out of a hundred, we will do it from outside. In ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred, we’ll do it in a very low key[5]. Two years after he
wrote this piece the biggest strike in working-class history outside of the
1926 General strike broke out in 1985-86.
In the field of history, this took the form of a closer
relationship with Hill and Manning with the SWP publishing some of his books
and him speaking at their Marxism conferences. Manning Joined the SWP from the
Labour Party, and the majority of his work was published by the SWP.
Other radical groups also opposed Carlin’s attack on Hill
and to a lesser extent Manning. Workers Liberty sprang to Hill’s defence “the
SWP’s Norah Carlin, herself a gifted historian of the 17th century, is surely
wrong and sectarian to say flatly that Hill was “not a Marxist”. I think we
might, instead, read Hill’s oeuvre as a rather heroic example of the
development of a Marxist research with Hill constantly seeking to renovate
theory in the light of new empirical evidence and critique, developing
falsifiable hypotheses on the foundation of the “hardcore” of the research
programme”[6].
Carlin remained unrepentant and in a further attack on the
genre of Peoples History. In a review of People’s History and Socialist
Theory-History Workshop Series.Carlin writes “Many contributors do regard
themselves as committed Marxists, and explicitly discuss the relationship
between Marxist history and political activity. But the conclusions they come
to (except feminist ‘fragmentism’) are always negative. ‘Given the political
formlessness and difficulties of our times,’ says Ken Worpole, it is better to
concentrate on the ‘long-revolution’ which seems to be composed of
working-class autobiographies. Robert Colls regards the History Workshop forum
as ‘a surrogate politics for those depressed by the dismal political options of
a country which no longer has a radical movement worthy of the name.’ Bob
Scribner, though he admires the ‘People’s History’ work of the German Communist
Party in the early 1920s, thinks that ‘In so far as … the historian is actively
involved in politics, there is a problem of time and resources to carry out
historical investigations with the necessary rigour.’
What the high point of Carlin’s defence of her political
position came with the joint article was written with Ian Birchall called
Kinnock’s favourite Marxist-Eric Hobsbawm and the working class-(Autumn
1983)[7].Carlin writes of Hobsbawm “the working class that Hobsbawm now sees
vanishing never really existed; it was a myth of the Stalinist era. For
Hobsbawm is not so much a prophet as a casualty, the product of an age which
distorted Marxism until it became unrecognisable. From Hobsbawm the historian
we can still learn much, though his work needs a more critical assessment than
it has yet received. But we should be extremely unwise to take him as a guide
in the present struggle”.
Conclusion
In summing up, her work Carlin is correct to say that we are
no nearer an answer to the development of genuine Marxist historiography on
many historical topics, not just the English revolution.It is also correct to
say that for too long The struggle for Marxism inside academia has taken a
defensive position.Carlin concludes “the reflexes of the siege mentality –
uncritical defence of ideas or personalities because of their long-standing
identification with the Marxist cause, and the refusal to even examine anything
new revealed by a hostile source – have not helped our understanding of class
struggle in the past or the present. “The restoration of Marxist theory to the
history of the revolution is an essential requirement. This is a historical
field in which theory has disappeared perhaps more thoroughly than in any
other. The mechanical orthodoxy of the Stalinist period was followed by a
period of adaptation to bourgeois academic ‘standards’ in which theory was
apparently regarded as too provocative to mention. This has now been overtaken
by the ‘poverty of theory’ debate in which some Marxist historians are claiming
lack of a theoretical perspective as a positive virtue. A full and free
discussion in explicitly Marxist terms is the touchstone by which both old
ideas and new ones must be measured”.
Further Reading.
Kinnock’s favourite Marxist-Eric Hobsbawm and the working
class- Norah Carlin & Ian
Birchall-www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/birchall/1983/xx/hobsbawm.htm
The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649-Norah
Carlin-The Historical Journal
Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun. 1987), pp. 269-288
1.https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/carlin/1983/04/engrev.html
2.C. Russell, (ed.) The Origins of the English Civil War
(1973)3C. Russell, (ed.) The Origins of the English Civil War (1973)
4.John Rees and Lee Humber-The good old cause-An interview
with Christopher Hill-From International Socialism 2 : 56, Autumn 1992, pp.
125–34.Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.5.Building in the downturn-(April
1983)-Tony Cliff
-www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1983/04/building.htm6.http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2017-07-26/christopher-hill-and-making-english-revolution
Claire Canary’s Review of Thomas Alcock: A Biographical
Account by Susan Margaret Cooper
Of course, it’s something of an irony that a debauchee who
took sexual promiscuity to new levels employed somebody called Alcock. This
fact was nicely pointed out in the play and film The Libertine and, when I saw
both productions, I assumed the cheeky Cockney character to be a creation of
writer Stephen Jeffreys, the surname a perfect way to squeeze in a giggle or
two.It was, therefore, a surprise for me to find Thomas Alcock not only existed
in reality but also boasted a top education and social respect. The name may
mean nothing to you. If you’re into Restoration England though, I can assure
you the names of some he’s linked with will ring more than a distant bell.
As biographical accounts go, this must have posed a
challenge to Susan Margaret Cooper, as seeking out information on lesser-known
individuals such as Mr Alcock is never an easy task. However, the book is
satisfyingly full of facts and speculation is logically discussed, taking the
reader along the route with the author as she connects her findings to put
forward theories and explanations.While the ins and outs of one person’s life
remain the focus of the work, Cooper also makes room for a bit of historical
context in her work. From the provocations of the Civil Wars in which Alcock
grew up to the happenings of the Monmouth Rebellion he fought against, there’s
just enough detail to set the scene but not distract from the subject. This
helps immerse even non-historians and is interesting reading in itself. Getting
down to the nitty-gritty though, some of the real gems to be found in this book
are the documents the author has uncovered and reproduced as both images and
transcripts.
I dread to think how long it took to copy type from
17th-century handwriting, especially with such attention to detail. You’ll find
the original spellings, unexpected capitalisation and use of superscript
bringing the transcripts to life as you read. Adding similar feeling to the account
is an array of pictures, with portraits putting faces to names, a 20th-century
shot of one of Alcock’s homes and publication title pages all serving as a
perfect illustration.Assessment of the personality of anyone from the past is a
tricky matter to approach.
The objective is always safer than subjective when it comes
to something like this and Susan Margaret Cooper has stuck to relating the data
but in doing so she’s opened up a nice window into the heart of this man. The
word ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ crop up several times in the book and exemplify
the close bonds he evidently formed with those he met, especially, it appears,
those he worked for.
Without the amazing research of Cooper, however, we would
have no real insight at all into this man, as letters she has uncovered reflect
something of his character, while her report that he was chosen as an
arbitrator demonstrate the high regard he seems to have been held in.Thomas
Alcock was associated with a wide range of people. Two of the most intriguing parts
of this book, however, takes us back to that employer immortalised in a film
for his hedonistic ways. When it comes to Alcock’s time under John Wilmot,
Second Earl of Rochester, the shocks come in two forms.
On the one hand, things get spooky thanks to some remarkable
ghost stories. But perhaps the bigger jaw-dropper is not in the supernatural
but in the indisputable true story of deceit that’s enough for a movie of its
own. Thomas Alcock: A Biographical Account is non-fiction. But some of the
content really gets your imagination going.The effort put into this research is
evident and, what’s more, has paid off. It’s the sort of work that can answer
historians’ questions, with figures, names, places etc. all included throughout
and the revelation of new information makes this a publication to celebrate. By
sharing Alcock’s story, we can better understand a person who has long since
passed but, like each and every other being on Earth deserves to never be
forgotten.
TheaurauJohn Tany (1608–1659)
This article was
kindly sent to me by Ariel Hessayon. Ariel has just finished editing the
collected works of TheaurauJohn Tany (1608–1659) to be released by Breviary
Stuff Publications in March.You can buy the book here
https://www.breviarystuff.org.uk/the-refiners-fire/
Now know I am a mad man. And ye declare me so to be, it will
be a weaknesse in you to question me [TheaurauJohn Tany, The Nations Right in
Magna Charta (1650), p. 8]I say, and many know, that by madness I came to
knowing, and in time God will make me speak plain knowledge, that by all shall
be acknowledged
[TheaurauJohn Tany, Theous Ori Apokolipikal (1651), pp.
62–63]
On Friday, 23 November 1649 Thomas Totney, a puritan and
veteran of the English Civil War, was working in his goldsmith’s shop at ‘The
Three Golden Lions’ in the Strand. He was to claim that after fourteen weeks of
self-abasement, fasting and prayer the Lord came upon him in power,
overwhelming his wisdom and understanding, smiting him dumb, blind and dead in
the presence of hundreds of people. Next his body began to tremble and he was
tied down in his bed. During his indescribable sufferings he saw the Passion of
Jesus. Then he was transported into God’s presence in the ‘High and holy Mount’
where he beheld a great light shine within him and upon him, saying ‘Theaurau
John my servant, I have chosen thee my Shepherd, thou art adorned with the
jewel of Exceliency’. He was convinced that the Lord had spoken unto him,
changing his name from Thomas to TheaurauJohn.
Totney was baptized on 21 January 1608 in the parish of
South Hykeham, Lincolnshire, the third but eldest surviving son of John Totney
and Anne, née Snell. His father, although a poor farmer and never of the parish
elite, was a respectable member of the local community. Nothing is known of
Thomas’s education, yet it seems likely that by the age of seven he would have
learned to read and by the age of nine, if his family could still cope without
him, he would have learned to write. In April 1626 he was bound as an
apprentice in London to a fishmonger but was not taught their trade. Instead he
received instruction in his master’s adopted profession, that of goldsmith. On
receiving his freedom he married a daughter of Richard Kett, a prosperous
Norfolk landowner whose great-uncle had been executed as leader of the 1549
East Anglian rebellion; Kett’s uncle was burned for heresy in 1589 and his
father imprisoned for the same offence. Rather than serving as a journeyman,
Totney quickly established himself as a householder – a costly progression
suggesting he received a charitable loan or financial assistance from family
and friends. He set up in St. Katherine Creechurch, a location favoured by
small retailers for its inexpensive rents, his shop marked by an unknown sign
near Aldgate. To ensure that Totney’s business activities fell within their
orbit he was translated to the Goldsmiths Company in January 1634. However,
along with the majority of ‘remote’ goldsmiths he resisted a Company initiative
which had gained royal approval, to vacate his dwelling and relocate in
Cheapside, the hub of the goldsmiths’ trade.
Totney remained in St. Katherine Creechurch for another six
years. There he heard the fiery sermons of Stephen Denison on the immutability
of God’s decrees of predestination. It was a doctrine that troubled Totney
until his epiphany. When his first son was born in December 1634 Totney refused
to have him baptized, for which he was presented before an ecclesiastical
court. Following his wife’s death he remarried by licence during Lent, probably
on Friday, 25 March 1636. This was the first day of the New Year in the old
calendar and his actions hint at a type of confrontational godliness and
perhaps also zealous Sabbatarianism. Upon his father’s death in 1638 he went to
Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire to manage the family farm. In the summer of
1640, probably while serving as one of the parish’s petty constables, he played
an important part in resisting the collection of ship money. By his own account
he was imprisoned in London and his horse distrained on the county sheriff’s
authority. A series of payments in 1642 show his support for those opposed to
Charles I. Moreover, he claims to have witnessed one of Captain Oliver
Cromwell’s orations delivered at Huntingdon to newly mustered volunteers.
Totney later possessed a great saddle, musket, pair of pistols and sword,
suggesting he served as a harquebusier. By December 1644 he had returned to
Little Shelford where he resumed his duties as a local tax official, as well as
taking up sequestered land and providing quarter for Parliamentarian soldiers
and their horses. Following the outbreak of a second Civil War, Totney
uprooted. He rented out his lands to a local villager and moved with his family
to St. Clement Danes, Westminster. In June 1648 his second wife died and was
buried in the parish.
After his supposed revelation Thomas Totney assumed the
prophetic name TheaurauJohn Tany. TheaurauJohn he understood to mean ‘God his
declarer of the morning, the peaceful tidings of good things’. While his former
surname may have been vocalized as Tawtney, his new last name was usually
pronounced Tawney. Because he had a speech impediment he may have dropped the
consonant. In addition, he appropriated the coat of arms azure, three bars
argent surmounted by the crest a hind’s head erased, gules, ducally gorged, or.
This device, borne by Sir John de Tany of Essex during the reign of Edward I,
appears on several of his works. Furthermore, he declared himself ‘a Jew of the
Tribe of Reuben’ and took the titles High Priest and Recorder to the thirteen
Tribes of the Jews. Tany justified his claims by inventing a fantastic
genealogy that traced his descent from Aaron, brother of Moses, through the
tribe of Judah and by way of the ten tribes of Israel, the Tartars and the
Welsh. He also circumcised himself. Thereafter, believing he had been given the
gift of tongues with which to preach the everlasting gospel of God’s light and
love to all nations, he went forth armed with sword and word. Crying vengeance
in the streets of London, he declared woe and destruction upon that bloody
city, prophesying that the ‘Earth shall burn as an Oven’ and all the proud, the
wicked and the ‘ungodly shall be as stubble to this flame’. Drawing on the
potent image of Christ as goldsmith, purging dross and corruption in a furnace,
Tany forged his prophetic identity – the messenger foretold by Malachi. He
claimed his authority rested with the one who sent him, God:
but who may abide the day of his appearing? for he is like
fullers sope, a refiners fire.
Insisting that the restitution of the Jews was at hand and
that he had been sent forth to gather them and proclaim ‘Israels return’, Tany
set about enacting a millenarian mission to restore the Jews to their own land.
In the manner of the children of Israel before him, he began living in a tent,
perhaps modelled upon the tabernacle, which he decorated with a symbol
representing the tribe of Judah. He preached in the parks and fields around
London and gathered a handful of followers. His message was strong, denouncing
the clergy as ‘diabolical dumb dogs, Tythe-mongers’, who fleece rather than
succour the people. Gospel injunctions also made him demand justice:feed the
hungry, clothe the naked, oppress none, set free them bounden, if this be not,
all your Religion is a lye, a vanity, a cheat, deceived and deceiving.
Tany’s first publication was a broadside entitled I
Proclaime From the Lord of Hosts The returne of the Jewes From their Captivity
(25 April 1650). It is likely that Captain Robert Norwood, a wealthy London
merchant, paid for its printing. In early September 1650 Tany was at Bradfield,
Berkshire at the same time as William Everard, one-time leader of the Diggers.
There was bedlam. It was reported that the rector, John Pordage, fell into a
trance while preaching and that bellowing like a bull he ran to his house.
There Pordage found his wife upstairs clothed all in white from head to toe,
holding a white rod in her hand. Moreover, an adolescent was said to have
fallen into a very strange fit, foaming at the mouth for two hours. He dictated
verses concerning the destruction of London and demanded to go there to meet a
goldsmith.
Tany next published two tracts: Whereas TheaurauJohn
Taiiiiijour My servant (15 November 1650) and THE NATIONS RIGHT in Magna Charta
(28 December 1650). Both demonstrated his earnest desire for social
reformation, the latter exhorting the common soldiers to dissolve Parliament
and call fresh elections. His next offering Aurora in Tranlagorum in Salem
Gloria seems to have been written on three consecutive days in late December
1650. It was printed by a Baptist who had previously printed a ‘very dangerous’
book. The publisher was Thomas Totney’s brother-in-law. It was sold by Giles
Calvert from his shop at ‘The Black-spread-Eagle’ at the west end of St. Paul’s
Cathedral. In January 1651 Tany wrote the first of the epistles that eventually
comprised THEOUS ORI APOKOLIPIKAL (1651) and Second Part OF HIS Theous-Ori
APOKOLIPIKAL (1653). On 6 March he was apparently brought before the
Westminster Assembly of Divines, responding to their questions with
thirty-seven of his own queries. Nonetheless, they accounted him mad. Perhaps
shortly thereafter he forsook his trade.
On 25 March 1651 Tany preached at Eltham, Kent and then
again on 13 April at Norwood’s house in St. Mary Aldermary. In May Norwood was
excommunicated from his gathered church. The following month an indictment was
prepared jointly against Norwood and Tany. The indicters seem to have
understood Tany as some type of Ranter, as one of ungodly conduct who
allegorized the Bible and internalized hell; as an antiscripturian universalist
who repudiated gospel ordinances and averred that men might live as they
wished; as one who glorified sin and maintained that the soul is God. Yet as
Norwood recognized, only two of the charges fell within the scope of the
Blasphemy Act of August 1650 – the allegations that Tany and Norwood
affirmed:the Soul is of the essence of GodThere is neither hell nor damnation.
As their own accounts of the trial’s proceedings make clear,
the defendants adamantly maintained that their words had been misrepresented,
altered and taken out of context. Even so, on 13 August 1651 they were
convicted jointly of blasphemy by a jury of twelve men at the London sessions
of the peace held in the Old Bailey. They were each sentenced to six months
imprisonment in Newgate gaol without bail or mainprize. Conditions for those
that could not afford the services of the gaoler were apparently intolerable.On
27 October 1651 legal proceedings were initiated in the Court of Upper Bench
appealing the verdict. After several sessions the case was deferred until the
next law term. More hearings followed. On 4 February 1652 Tany appeared before
the Court. That same morning God spoke to a London tailor named John Reeve,
revealing to him that he had been chosen as the Lord’s ‘last messenger’, or so
Reeve was to claim. Reeve and his cousin Lodowick Muggleton, a freeman of the
Merchant Taylors’ Company, announced themselves to be ‘the two Witnesses of the
Spirit’ foretold in the Revelation of Saint John. In addition, they denounced
Tany as a ‘counterfeit high Priest’ and pretended prophet, marking him as a
Ranter, the spawn of Cain. A few days later the judges of the Upper Bench made
their judgement: Lord Chief Justice Rolle washed his hands of the business. On
16 February 1652 Tany and Norwood having served their sentence were each
released on £100 bail pending good behaviour for one year. Thomas Totney’s
former master and another man later described as a goldsmith, provided
sureties. In Easter term Norwood initiated a new legal appeal. After several
hearings the judges deferred proceedings until the following law term. On 28
June 1652 they reversed the guilty judgement against Norwood and Tany,
resolving that their opinions had been made to rigidly conform to the
strictures of the Blasphemy Act. For whereas the Act made it unlawful to
maintain that ‘there is neither Heaven nor Hell, neither Salvation nor Damnation’,
the defendants who affirmed that:ere is ‘no Hell nor Damnation’, are not within
the Statute, for tho by Implication if there be no Hell there is no Heaven, yet
the court is not to Expand these words by Implication but according to the
Letters of the Stat[ute].
Within a month of his release Tany published a pamphlet he
had written in Newgate entitled High Priest to the IEVVES, HIS Disputive
challenge to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the whole Hirach. of
Roms Clargical Priests (March 1652). Echoing Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Tany
proclaimed the return of ‘Israels Seed’ from captivity. About 1 January 1653 it
appears from his own account that Tany underwent another purificatory ritual.
He refrained from speaking for thirty-four days, isolating himself for
twenty-one of them. On the fourteenth day he transcribed an edict to ‘all the
Jewes the whole earth over’, which was to be engraved in brass and sent to the
synagogue in Amsterdam. He signed this proclamation with his new name and
titles, ‘Theauroam Tannijahhh, King of the seven Nations, and Captain General
under my Master Jehovah, and High-Priest and Leader of the Peoples unto
HIERUSALEM’. Together with some other material it was issued by an unknown
publisher under the title HIGH NEWS FOR HIERUSALEM (no date). It exasperated
one reader, who complained ‘truly I skill not the man, nor his spirit; in his
writing he offends against all rules of Grammar, Geography, Genealogy, History,
Chronology, Theology & c, so far as I understand them’.
In March 1654 a list of some thirty ‘Grand Blasphemers and
Blasphemies’ was submitted to the Committee for Religion, which included:XIX. A
Goldsmith that did live in the Strand, and after in the City, and then at
Eltham; who called his name Theaurau John Tany, the High Priest, & c.
Published in Print, That all Religion is a lie, a deceit, and a cheat.
Writing from ‘the Tent of Judah’ on the ‘Tenth DAY NISAN’
(probably 16 April 1654), Tany addressed a millenarian epistle ‘Unto his
Brethren the QUAKERS scornfully so called, who ARE the Children of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob; who ARE circumcised in Heart’. He saluted them as descendants
of the Jewish race, an elect remnant who spoke a pure language and trembled at
the word of God. On 8 May 1654 he issued an edict to all ‘earthen men and
women’ announcing that he would shortly proclaim the Law and Gospel from his
tent standing in the bounds of the Middle Park at Eltham, Kent. On 8 June 1654
he read out a speech in which he laid claim to the crowns of France, Reme, Rome,
Naples, Sissiliah and Jerusalem, as well as reaffirming an earlier claim to the
crown of England. He did this by repeating Pontius Pilate’s reply to the chief
priests of the Jews after Pilate had written ‘JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE
JEWS’ as the title to be put on Christ’s cross:What I have written, I have
written.
On the morning of Saturday, 30 December 1654, in the week
that Cromwell was offered the crown, Tany solemnly made a large fire at Lambeth
into which he cast his great saddle, sword, musket, pistols, books and bible.
He crossed the River Thames in a rowing boat and made his way to Parliament,
ascending the stairs into the lobby outside the door. Unable to deliver a
petition he departed, returning after about an hour oddly attired with a long,
rusty sword by his side. Pacing up and down the lobby he suddenly threw of his
cloak and began slashing wildly, but was disarmed before anyone was hurt. He
was brought to the bar of the House and questioned by the Speaker. He refused
to remove his hat, was evidently mistaken for a Quaker and committed to the
Gatehouse prison. Having been examined by the Committee for regulating
printing, he wrote to the Speaker requesting liberty to have an audience with
Cromwell. He then attached a great lock and long chain to his leg as a symbol
of ‘the people of Englands Captivity’. Legal proceedings were transferred to
the Court of Upper Bench but on 10 February 1655 he was bailed upon habeas
corpus.
Two days later a fire broke out in Fleet Street. In the
following months London was engulfed by several more unexplained fires which
were interpreted as a sign of the impending destruction of the world.
Eventually an arsonist was apprehended who may have been in the pay of William
Finch, one of Tany’s disciples. In September 1655, after weeks of heavy rain
and widespread floods, Tany ‘in one of his old whimsies’ pitched his tent in
the large tract of open ground between Lambeth Marsh and Southwark known as St.
George’s Fields. A satirical newsbook writer thought him ‘a madman’ fitter ‘for
Bedlam then a Tent’.
On 7 June 1656 Tany married for a third time at St.
Saviour’s, Southwark. His wife was Sara Shorter, possibly a waterman’s
daughter. Three days later, on 10 June he pitched his tent on Frindsbury Street
near ‘The Black Lion’ in Frindsbury, Kent. That day, according to the
title-page of his last known work, Tany read the law ‘unto the people ISRAEL,
belonging to the returning from Captivity’. Then, sometime after 16 June 1656,
Tany set sail, perhaps from Kent, bound for the:Wars, wars, wars, wars, wars,
wars, wars.He crossed the English Channel successfully and at an unknown date
arrived in the United Provinces, perhaps to gather the Jews of Amsterdam. Some
three years later, now calling himself Ram Johoram, he was reported lost,
drowned after taking passage in a ship from Brielle bound for London. He was
survived by his eldest daughter and probably also a second daughter and second
son.
During his prophetic phase Tany wrote a number of remarkable
but elusive works that are unlike anything else in the English language. His
sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular
prophecies and legal treatises, as well as scriptural and extra-canonical
texts, and the writings of the German Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme. Indeed,
Tany’s writings embrace currents of magic and mysticism, alchemy and astrology,
numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, Hermeticism and
Christian Kabbalah – a ferment of ideas that fused in a millenarian yearning for
the hoped for return of Christ on earth. The English Revolution freed men and
women both self-taught and formally educated to speak their minds and challenge
their times. But only by contextualizing and then unravelling the mind of this
exceptional person can we truly appreciate what it meant to be living in a
world turned upside down.
(Dr Ariel Hessayon’s research interests include early modern
ideas, religion, politics, literature and popular culture. Dr Ariel Hessayon is
a co-convenor of the seminar on seventeenth-century British History at the
Institute of Historical Research and would welcome enquiries from those
interested in doctoral research in areas relating to radicalism in early modern
England).
Notes
1 The images used in this article were given by kind
permission of Harvard University, Houghton Library.
2 Ariel’s ODNB entry can be found here
http://www.oxforddnb.com/search?q=TheaurauJohn+Tany+%281608%E2%80%931659%29&searchBtn=Search&isQuickSearch=true
3 Wikipedia entry-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theaurau_John_Tany
An Evening with Charles Spencer
Charles Spencer has
spent the last few weeks touring the country publicising his new book To Catch
a King. The basic story is of Charles II escape from parliamentary forces
during the second civil war.The evening spent at Waterstones Kensington High
street with Spencer was a pleasant one, and the event itself was well
organised.The major problem I have in reviewing this event or his books is that
we have opposed political and historical worldviews. That will not change.
Having said that Spencer from a human standpoint is a kind
man and a skilful narrative led historian.Aside from the rigour of his work he
has a passion for history that is admirable in a historian. His book Killers of
the King was the second highest selling history book in the UK in 2014[1].
Spencer is a natural speaker almost like a raconteur. In
fact, he speaks as he writes. His books are pure narrative, but that does not
mean he is sloppy with his research.He made some interesting points during the
evening. Perhaps his most important was a downgrading of the study of the
English revolution in schools both private and public.In an interview, Spencer
recounts “‘When I was a boy, you learned about the English Civil War. Now you
do not. Part of that is because history is no longer a compulsory subject after
a certain age. ‘The Tudors and the Nazis are much easier periods to attract
students to. If you are a history teacher you want to keep your job, so you go
for the easy areas.”
Like many who write on the Revolution Spencer had
descendants who were active during the civil war.The windows in his chapel were
rescued from another Spencer house that was burned down during the English
Civil War.“I think I would have done what my ancestor did. He was very anti the
king during the build-up to the Civil War, but when it came to the actual
conflict, he decided he could not draw his sword against his king.
‘Reluctantly, he became a royalist.”Another aspect of Spencer, the historian,
is his openness to suggestions for future work from readers. His choice of
subject for his latest book was in fact given to him by a reader.
When I asked him a question about Ollards book and other
historians such as the great Whig historians he made some interesting points.
He saw himself as primarily as a narrative historian, but he believes that
parallels exist between the past and the present.He is not reticent about
describing his work as ‘popular history’. A Genre that that was mastered by
historians such as Sir Thomas Macaulay, E. P. Thompson and A. J. P.
Taylor..Spencer is not yet in that league, but his work does command serious
attention and is well worth the price of his books.
PS
A review of To Catch a King will be done at a later date.
Notes
The escape of Charles II after the battle of Worcester
Hardcover – 1 Jan 1966-by Richard Ollard
King Charles II Paperback – 6 Jun 2002- Lady Antonia Fraser
[1] See my review
-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/killers-of-king-men-who-dared-to_23.html
Claire Canary’s Review of Of Ink, Wit and Intrigue:Lord
Rochester, in Chains of Quicksilver by Susan Cooper-Bridgewater ISBN: 9781783063079
Most of those who
know of John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester have something of a preconceived
image of him. While that image is not altogether false, Of Ink, Wit and
Intrigue allows us to see a more rounded man and brings into the limelight the
side of him that is usually cast in shadow. Here, Susan Cooper-Bridgewater has
brilliantly shown how wrong it is to define anyone by reputation alone.
The book is written in the first person, narrated by the
earl himself. This is what really gives the readers insight. We get to feel his
emotions, see events through his eyes and understand how and why he is who he
is.The author was very courageous to make Rochester the narrator, but her clear
familiarity with the period and subject himself enabled her to handle the
challenge perfectly. There is some wonderful 17th-century phraseology to be
found in this book, keeping us firmly embedded in the era throughout, but it
never goes over the top, so is still easy to follow in a 21st-century head.The
research that must have gone into this is astonishing. The author has had
academic work published but this book uses the information in an imaginative
way. Tale upon tale is told with amazing detail and many of the locations
themselves are described so vividly that it seems likely the author has visited
them to get that feel for them.
Adding extra feel is the picture of the 17th century that’s
painted throughout. Through the food, the carriages, the clothes, the theatre
and the medicine, we get a real taste of life in Restoration England.
Enthusiasts for the period will recognise many of the names that pop up and the
number of dates that are given are proof of just how much painstaking effort
must have gone into getting the facts right.As well as fact, though, this is
partly fiction, and it’s impossible to tell which is which. In his all-too
brief life, Rochester got up to some pretty shock-inducing stuff, so what may
seem fabrication is just as easily truth and vice versa.
As can be expected from this infamous rake, he self-indulges
in wine and women to a professional standard, but he certainly has a few other
tricks up his sleeve too. Even people who aren’t into history will find plenty
to entertain and, despite the joy of seeing the lesser-known aspects of
Rochester, the accounts of his famous “bad boy” behaviour do not
disappoint!However, it is Rochester as a father, husband and lover that makes
this book stand out most for me. Through his sensitivity as all three, we see
the John Wilmot that surely existed but is never properly acknowledged.
As promised, there’s ink, wit and intrigue and the intrigue
is provided to a T in the epilogue, which takes us right up to Georgian times.
I don’t know quite how she did it but Susan Cooper-Bridgewater managed to
change the atmosphere to match the new era, so, as well as the Restoration
fans, anyone into the 18th century will find something here for them too.
A book to do His Lordship proud! I reckon he’d love to read
it, but so should everyone else.
The book can be purchased at http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=2570
or
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ink-Wit-Intrigue-Rochester-Quicksilver-ebook/dp/B00HHZX832
White King: Charles I – Traitor, Murderer, Martyr Hardcover
– 11 Jan 2018 by Leanda de Lisle-432 pages: Chatto & Windus.
“So ye shall not
pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land
cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him
that shed it”.
—King James Bible Numbers 35:33.
Introduction
Leanda de Lisle new book continues a trend of modern-day
revisionist biographies of Charles I[1]. It is difficult to conceive of this
book being written or having the considerable press coverage it has received
had it been published thirty years ago.
The dominance of Whig and Marxist historiography of the
English revolution would have prevented it or at least provided it with a bumpy
ride.If historians like Lisle had dared to raise their head above the
precipice, they would have had it shot off.Another by-product of this
revisionist assault has been the attempt to de-politicise the English
revolution. A development that was highlighted by Martin Kettle no less when he
reviewed the ongoing Charles I: King and Collector exhibition at the Royal
Academy in London. Kettle makes the point “the 1640s battles between authority
and liberty may not have produced another civil war. However, iterations of the
divide have resonated down the centuries – from the Glorious Revolution of
1688-9, through the Whig-Tory rivalry of the 18th century, the advance of
liberalism and reform in the 19th century, and of labourism and equalities in
the 20th. It is not hard to see, in contrast between a privileged and
dissipated political figure such as Boris Johnson and a puritanical one such as
Jeremy Corbyn, that there are 17th-century echoes in our own binary times too.
He continues “most of those who enter the Royal Academy
galleries over the next three months for its new exhibition, Charles I: King
and Collector will be given no inkling of this. They will come to look at
stunning pictures by Van Dyck, Holbein, Titian and Mantegna among many others.
Civil war, however, is conspicuous by its almost total absence from the new
show. Only the fact that we arrive with some knowledge of Charles I’s notoriety
and eventual execution ensures that this absence of politics is itself a huge
and silent presence”[2].While Lisle’s book to date not been seriously
challenged, the general dominance of revisionist historiography has been by a
new set of historians that are partly influenced by Marxist methodology or in
some cases Whig orthodoxy. There is still a long way to go. Historiography
today is still dominated by a plethora of obscure revisionist books. A process
aptly named by the historian Norah Carlin as Craftism.
White King
Many things will strike the reader when reading this book.
My first impression is that Lisle believes that the 1640s English revolution
was somehow an aberration and in the final reckoning an event that was not
typically English.The book is part of a tradition believes that “English
history has developed by gradual evolution, without sudden or violent
transformations, by process of compromise and co-existence”. Lisle’s prose has
a sedateness about it when she writes about Charles I. Compare that to how she
writes about his enemies, they are usually described as rabble or a mob. Her
use of the word Junto to describe the parliamentary opposition tries to portray
them as something foreign.As one reviewer put it “De Lisle’s parliamentarians
are an irascible group, resembling not so much freedom fighters as the tea
party; on the other hand, the author’s Charles often seems the voice of
reason”[3].
It is safe to surmise that Lisle does not believe a
revolution took place at all. However, the problem for Lisle is that facts are
a stubborn thing. If a massive civil war, a kings head being chopped off, a
republic and a commonwealth do not make a revolution, then what
does.Alternatively, as Norah Carlin eloquently points out “many attempts have
been made to explain it away. The present favourite among English academics is
that it was a result of a misunderstanding and miscalculation among a political
elite. These men were not ‘wild-eyed fanatics … they were men of substance and
wealth, men of broad acres with a stake in the country,’ writes J.H. Hexter.
They were ‘for the most part deeply conservative men who sincerely believed
they were defending ancient and traditional rights,’ says another historian, R.
Ashton”[4].
Lisle believes Charles I was “defending ancient and
traditional rights” and that parliament was acting illegally against this. Any
reader looking for an objective account of the war will have to look elsewhere.
Cromwell only appears halfway through the book and is portrayed like many other
parliamentary military figures as bloodthirsty maniacs. The treatment of the
Levellers reduces them to a footnote of history.
Narrative-Driven
Despite being an excellent narrative driven writer Lisle’s
approach can only take us so far in understanding the complex events of the
English revolution.Her concentration on the narrative to the detriment of
theory does not get us very far.
While it is essential to understand what went through the
minds of the leading actors of the revolution such as Charles I, Olver
Cromwell, Ireton, and Harrison to do so would only give us a partial
understanding of why a king’s head was cut off and a republic established.
Lisle is free to adopt whatever theoretical approach she wants to portray
historical events. However, historians such as Lisle’s preoccupation with
narrative is one-sided.The rise of narrative history has been at the direct
expense of Marxist historiography and has done untold damage to our
understanding of the English revolution. While I am sure that Karl Marx was not
on her reading list for this book, she could have done no worse than to take on
board his understanding of the relationship between historical figures and
their place in history.
Marx states that “the production of ideas, of conceptions,
of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity
and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving,
thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct
efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as
expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics,
etc., of people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. –
real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their
productive forces and the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its
furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious
existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all
ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura,
this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the
inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process”[5].
Media
Lisle’s book has been well received by the media. Not
surprisingly the right-wing media have gone overboard with praise not
commensurate with the actual importance of the book. The reason for this lies
not so much in history but politics. In fact, the reviews tell us more about
the state of modern-day politics than they do about seventeenth-century
politics.
As a reviewer of her book puts it “Recent elections in
Britain and the United States have produced surprisingly dysfunctional
governments. De Lisle’s fine, revisionist view of Charles may arouse nostalgia
for a time when national leaders, elected or not, looked out for the zealous
majority”.
One review stands out, the basic premise of which is that we
are passing through enormous change. Capitalism is in crisis. We have a growing
threat of nuclear and social inequality is at levels not witnessed for nearly a
century we need a strong leader to counter the growing threat of the mob.The
author of this review in the Evening Standard is Andrew Marr. His review
entitled Basic civility and respect must prevail over the rule of the mob,
according to him “The reign of Charles I shows that the 17th- century’s version
of angry social media led to bloody violence”.Marr continues “I have been
reading a fascinating book on British politics which suggests that we really
should worry. The bad news is that it shows a direct connection between angry
and inflammatory language, and violence, up to and including murder. The better
news, I suppose, is that it is about the 1620s and 1630s.
Leanda de Lisle’s White King is a new biography of Charles
I, which attempts to make a case for that arrogant, incompetent Stuart monarch
who famously lost his head on Whitehall one cold January afternoon in January
1649.She does a good job. Charles was a sensitive and thoughtful man, a great
lover of art who believed himself to be doing the right thing and was a
genuinely committed family man. In the end, I was not convinced, however: like
so many other British rulers he became too entangled in continental European
politics, trying to take this country to war with catastrophic results.“I was
shocked by the behaviour of Charles’s opponents in the lead up to civil war. I
had been taught they were parliamentary heroes, and yet they had deliberately
fanned religious and ethnic hatreds to recruit to their cause, in the worst
examples of populism. This propaganda still informs English culture, not least
in popular memory of Charles’s maligned queen, Henrietta Maria. Incidentally,
she was called Queen Mary at the time (they considered calling her Queen
Henry!), hence Maryland, which was named after her. I have stuck to Henrietta
Maria, so not to confuse”.
So what, you might ask, does any of this have to do with
social media? The answer is that the breakdown in relations between Charles and
various parliamentary factions, at least one of which was set on Civil War, was
hugely influenced by the new media of the day, propaganda broadsheets and the
very earliest newspapers”.The ruling elites answered to this problem in the
17th century is the same as in the 21st century, and that is to censor it. The
use of the Star-chamber to kill dissent has chilling resonance with today’s
attempt by Google and Facebook to do the same. Marr’ solution is that we must
we “must hang together in adversity”.
Conclusion
Lisle’s book is not without merit. White King is
exceptionally well written and researched. In places, Lisle writes like a
novelist. She uses rare and entirely new archival sources. The book would be
acceptable to both the general reader and the academic alike. As is usual with
Chatos and Windus the book is beautifully bound with an abundance of colour
photos.
The book is excellent if you want a read that does not
require you to think too much. If you are happy with a book that verges on
propaganda and should carry a government health warning, then this is your
book. If not steer well clear.
[1] See my review Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark
Kishlansky 144 pages Publisher: Allen Lane (4 Dec 2014) ISBN-10: 0141979836
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/a-review-charles-i-abbreviated-life-by.html
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/25/dont-mention-civil-war-english-still-fighting-charles-1-exhibition-royal-academy
[3]
https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/leanda-de-lisle/the-white-king/9781610395601/
[4]Norah Carlin-The First English Revolution-(April 1983)
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/carlin/1983/04/engrev.html
[5]Karl Marx. The German Ideology. 1845
-Part I: Feuerbach.Opposition of the Materialist and
Idealist Outlook-A. Idealism and Materialism –
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
John Lilburne and the Levellers-Reappraising the Roots of
English Radicalism 400 Years On-Edited by John Rees-© 2018 – Routledge-158
pages
“Though we fail, our
truths prosper” – John Lilburne.
“That an inequitable thing it is for one man to have
thousands, and another want bread, and that the pleasure of God is, that all
men should have enough, and not that one man should abound in this worlds good,
spending it upon his lusts, and another man of far better deserts, not be worth
two pence, and that it is no such difficulty as men make it to be, to alter the
course of the world in this thing, and that a few diligent and valiant spirits
may turn the world upside down, if they observe their seasons, and shall with
life and courage ingage accordingly.”
— attributed to William Walwyn
‘Each generation … rescues a new area from what its
predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as ‘the lunatic fringe,”‘
Christopher Hill.The essays contained in this book are primarily the product of
a conference held at Bishopsgate Institute to celebrate the 400th anniversary
of the birth of John Lilburne leader of the Leveller Party. The remit of this
new book is a daunting one. To reappraise any historical topic or figure is
usually a fraught undertaking to do so after 400 years have passed has to be
applauded. This article will examine the extent the authors of these essays
have achieved this aim.The central thrust of this collection of essays is to
establish John Lilburne (1615–1657), or ‘Freeborn John’ as the central
revolutionary figure of the English Revolution. The book also contends that his
party the Levellers played a significant part in this glorious revolutionary
period.
The subjects covered in the book range from an examination
of Lilburne’s writings and ideas, the role he played as a lead activist in the
revolutionary drama. Personal and political relations with his wife Elizabeth
are examined, his exile in the Netherlands, and contentious decision to become
a Quaker.If Thomas Carlyle was correct about removing the dead dogs from
Cromwell’s reputation, the same could be said about Lilburne. Looking back, it
is hard to believe that Lilburne was such a feared figure and was subjected to
“sophisticated propaganda campaigns”. Out of all this Lilburne has, according
to Mike Braddick, become the ‘celebrity radical’.On a more serious note, The
book is also testimony to the strength and contemporary nature of his ideas. As
Edward Vallance points out, it is debatable whether the radicals of the
eighteenth century or even nineteenth-century would have been so radical
without Lilburne laying the foundations for their revolutionary activity.
The last decade or so has seen a significant rise in the
interest in John Lilburne and his Leveller Party. In the last few years alone
there have been four significant studies beginning with Elliot Vernon, and P.
Baker’s the Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional
Crisis of the English Revolution followed by Rachel Foxley’s The Levellers:
Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. John Rees’s The Leveller
Revolution. A further examination of the Levellers will be released at the End
of October by, Gary S. De Krey Following the Levellers, Volume One, volume two
will be released in 2018.
All these studies attempt to answer one primary question How
radical were the Levellers. This is a contentious issue even today? Out of
these studies and I am well aware of generalising too much there appear to be
two strands. One takes a more cautious and conservative approach this is
represented by the essays contained in Elliot Vernon and P. Baker’s The
Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the
English Revolution and more radical approach as represented by these essays.The
Paper by Elliot Vernon and Phillip Baker called What was the first Agreement of
the People tends to argue that the Levellers were far from a cogent group but
were, in fact, part of a far more significant political grouping centred on the
Independent Alliance. They argue that” the very concept of ‘the Levellers’, in
the sense of a political group which, in Taft’s opinion, existed from mid-1646
‘as a distinct party with a programme and an organisation to advance it’, is
problematic in itself. As is now well documented, at the level of nomenclature,
any talk of ‘the Levellers’ before the Putney debates is a terminological
anachronism, for although the word had been used to describe enclosure rioters
earlier in the century, it was not first used as a proper noun until Nov. 1
1647.
Naturally, the absence of a name does not preclude the
existence of such a grouping, and a small number of individuals, including
Overton and William Walwyn, evidently came together in the mid-1640s through
their involvement in a petitioning campaign in support of Lilburne and their
common belief in religious toleration.22 For both Gentles and David Como, the
triumvirate of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn was sufficiently interconnected by
1645 or 1646 to constitute the leadership of an identifiable group with their
distinctive political agenda.23 Yet, and in common with Kishlansky,24 we
maintain it remains difficult to distinguish members of this group from the
much larger alliance of political and religious Independents, sectaries, and
self-styled ‘well-affected’ Londoners. They banded together at the same time
through their support for the New Model Army and common hostility to
Presbyterianism” [1].Another question that comes to mind is what accounts for
this plethora of studies. Which mostly have taken on the revisionist
historiography. The historian Christopher Hill answered this when he was asked
in 1992 How do you see the development of the debate around the English
Revolution over recent years? Would you agree that the revisionists have taken
some ground?He replied “They have made a lot of useful points, but their more
extreme views are now being attacked by the younger generation of historians.
Although the revisionists had all sorts of useful ideas, they had a narrow
political approach in that they tried to find the causes of the English
Revolution solely in the years 1639–41. This simply assumes what you are
setting out to prove. If you look just at those years then, of course, it is a
matter of political intrigue and not long-term causes.
“I think people are reacting against that now. The better of
the revisionists are themselves switching around a bit. John Morrill, for
instance, who thought everything depended on the county community and localism,
is now taking a much broader point of view. Moreover, Conrad Russell has become
aware that long-term factors must be considered – he does not like it, but he
recognises that religion has some long-term effects on what happened in 1640, a
rather elementary point but he left religion out altogether in the early days.
Now he has bought it in. He still leaves out the cultural breakdown in the
society of that period, but he is moving a bit. I think a consensus will arise
and then there will be another explosion in 20 years or so. These debates occur
regularly – ever since 1640 people have been arguing about what it was all
about”. This analysis is being vindicated today.
Also, I believe the attempt to reappraising both Lilburne
and the Levellers is a partial reflection of contemporary events. We are, after
all witnessing social upheavals that have few parallels in history. Maybe the
fact that we could be on the brink of a nuclear war between North Korea and
America has sharpened a few minds.Introduction: John Lilburne, the Levellers,
and the English Revolution by John ReesThe writer John Rees is quickly becoming
a leading expert on John Lilburne and the Levellers. Rees acknowledges in this
introduction that despite being called Levellers at the Putney Debates of 1647,
they were, in fact, a recognisable political entity well before that.
It was clear very early on that Lilburne, and his Leveller’s
represented a force that went well beyond their class base. Moreover, their
propaganda began to reach a broad section of society. You only have to funerals
of Levellers that were killed by Royalists such as Thomas Rainborough or
Levellers killed by Cromwell to see that the sheer size of these funerals
indicates a level of support beyond their class.Lilburne was a member of the
gentry. As Rees points out, this was a “discontented and volatile group”.
Lilburne and his fellow Levellers could have a reasonably comfortable life, but
they choose to tackle injustice poverty and a lack of democracy by carrying out
political agitation.Rees correctly points out that Lilburne’s ability to reach
a broad audience was done not just with his physical bravery and undoubted
talent as an agitator but helped enormously by the growth of new technology
such as the colossal growth of secret printing.He sums up “How Lilburne’s
reputation and the history of the Levellers have come down to us is long,
complex and contested. There has never been a moment when it has not interacted
with contemporary politics or refracted through modern political debate. In
Reborn John? Edward Vallance charts the first of these great transitions as
radicals and others in the eighteenth century debated the lineage of the first
modern revolutionary leader and the movement he represented”.
Chapter 1: John Lilburne and the Citizenship of ‘Free-born
Englishmen’ (Rachel Foxley)This essay was not written for the Conference; it
is, in fact, a reprint from 2004. It is quite ironic that as Foxley wrote this
essay back in 2004, citizenship rights were being attacked all over the world.
Many people were and are still being stripped of their citizenship by
governments who have cynically used the Magna Carta to do this.People seeking
to defend these rights could do no better than study Lilburne’s struggle to
establish them in the 17th century. As Foxley correctly brings out in her essay.Lilburne
had used the Magna Carta to justify extending citizenship rights to a broader
section of the population. His battle-cry for democracy was a progressive one
in that it sought to eradicate social relations based on Feudal laws and social
customs.
As Hoffman and Read point out “In the context of medieval
England itself, the social reality behind the formal rights of freemen and the
continuing struggles of the peasantry was revealed in the Peasants’ Revolt of
1381, 166 years after the Magna Carta. Led by Watt Tyler and Jack Straw, 60,000
peasants marched on London to demand the abolition of serfdom, tithes, and the
poll tax. The rallying cry of the peasants was the rhyme “When Adam delved and
Eve span, who was then the Gentleman?”Nevertheless, the formal rights and
freedoms, and constraints on arbitrary power, enunciated in the Charter also
contained universal content. Essentially, they gave early expression to the
assertion of the inherent rights of man, however necessarily constrained and
formed within the current historical realities and class relations of the early
13th century England. These political rights were the subject of centuries of
struggles waged by the masses against the property-owning classes in England,
the Continent and, later, America[3].
When Lilburne fought for his and other citizenship rights,
his ideas were also were constrained and formed within the current historical
realities. These realities were not products of his gifted mind but reflected
material reality.Foxley correctly points out that there is no consensus amongst
historians as to what Lilburne meant by citizenship. “Lilburne’s writing
emerges out of the context of parliamentarian argument during and after the
first civil war. There has been a tendency to classify political theories of the
early to a mid-seventeenth century in England by asking whether they resulted
from historical or theoretical modes of thought”. Alternatively, put another
way does social being determined social consciousness.
This subjective was taken up by the Russian Marxist Evgeny
Pashukanis who pointed out “the contrast between the Levellers and those
movements which sought social revolution and attacked the existing property
relations was, so to speak, confirmed. However, this was only the case if we
are to be satisfied by the consideration of ideological formulae and not the
objective meaning of the given revolutionary movement. The ideology of the
Levellers was a typical bourgeois ideology, and the overwhelming majority of
the Levellers acted as defenders of the principle of private property and this
by no means contradicts the fact that the victory of the Levellers’ movement
should have objectively led to the most decisive infringement on the right of
feudal property. Moreover, this success and this victory could not have found
its expression other than in the elimination of feudal ownership. Therefore,
when the opponents of the Levellers accused them of attacking property, and of
favouring communism, this was not merely slander. It was a statement of
uncontested fact that for the privileged feudal owners, the radical democratic
transformation for which the Levellers strove would have presented a most real
threat. The affirmations of the leaders of the Levellers, concerning their
adherence to the principle of private property, were a very weak consolation.
And, on the contrary, the preaching of the communality of ownership and the
clouded communist ideology of the extreme left leaders of the German peasant
war, was, in fact, less of a threat to embryonic capitalist social
relationships, but was instead the banner of the implacable, most consistent
opponents of feudal ownership and all serf and semi-serf relationships. It is
here that it seems possible for us to find a series of elements which bring the
two movements closer together even though they are so different in their
ideological bases”.[4]
Like many of the historians who have contributed essays to
this collection, Foxley believes that the Levellers were radical to a degree,
but she does not believe they were revolutionary. She tends to separate the
ideas developed by the Levellers from their material base in society. Foxley is
correct to point out that revisionist historians have not only attacked Marxist
conceptions of the Leveller’s ‘The revisionist historians who have rewritten
the history of the seventeenth century have questioned almost every aspect of
the historical reputation of the Levellers’. How far Foxley intends to go in
defence of the Leveller’s is another matter.It is open to question to what
extent Foxley herself has adapted to this revisionist assault. One criticism of
her is a concentration on Leveller political theory to the detriment of their
economic and social base.As John Rees correctly points out that this “approach
runs the risk of producing the effect that the philosopher Hegel describes as
‘night in which all cows are black’, meaning that it is impossible to
differentiate the object of study from its background.
Chapter 2: Lilburne, Toleration and the Civil State (Norah
Carlin)Norah Carlin who wrote the Causes of the English Civil War and has
published much on religious toleration during the English revolution correctly
states in this chapter that Lilburne was a man of profound principle and
unlikely to compromise on the matter of perspective or strategy.Carlin’s
chapter covers a subject that has been widely neglected by modern-day
historians that is religious toleration. As she correctly points out in a
previous essay,”out of the Independent and Separatist congregations of London,
there emerged in 1646, under attack from the Presbyterians, a movement for
religious toleration. As the Presbyterians organised for their attempted coup
in 1647, it became evident that this movement would have to defend civil
liberties as well, for one of its leaders, John Lilburne, was thrown into
prison for his writings. Moreover, as the soldiers of the New Model Army began
to organise spontaneously in their defence against disbandment, a group of
those active in the movement turned to address the army and work among the
soldiers for a new constitution that would guarantee both religious and civil
liberties. This is the group known to their contemporaries and history (though
they disliked the name themselves) as the Levellers.[5]
The amount of irreligion in the English revolution has been
contested by numerous historians. Christopher Hill in his pamphlet Irreligion
in the Puritan Revolution quoted Richard Baxter who believed that those who
rejected mainstream religion were ‘a rable’ “if any would raise an army to
extirpate knowledge and religion, the tinkers and sow-gelders and
crate-carriers and beggars and bargemen and all the table that cannot read….
Will be the forwardest to come in to such a militia” It is understood Baxter
argued for their suppression with violence if necessary.
Carlin’s viewpoint and many other aspects of the Leveller’s
philosophy has as John Coffey mentions in his paper Puritan and Liberty “fallen
on hard times”. Meaning that the sustained attack of the revisionists has won the
day. Carlin rejects this premise.Carlin-like Coffey believes that the
revisionist historians have deliberately downplayed the extent of religious
toleration argued by groups such as the Levellers. Carlin brings out that
Leveller views on toleration were not confined to their own organisation but
spread to the New Model Army whose airm “is to over throw Presbyterie, or
hinder the settlement thereof, and to have the Independent government set up,
we doe clearely disclaime, and disavow any such designe; We one∣ly
desire that according to the Declarations (promising a provi∣sion
for tender consciences) there may some effectuall course be ta∣ken
according to the intent thereof; And that such, who, up∣on
conscientious grounds, may differ from the established formes, may not (for
that) bee debarred from the common Rights, Liberties, or Benefits belonging
equally to all, as men and Mem∣bers of the Common wealth, while
they live soberly, honestly, and inoffensively towards others, and peaceably
and faithfully towards the State”.[6]Carlin’s work on toleration of the various
religious groups is a refutation of the current wave of revisionism which seems
to reject everything that has been written on the Levellers from a left
viewpoint. Carlin has held a relatively consistent position on the Levellers.
She perhaps holds the most orthodox Marxist positions on their development and
class outlook. Her article Marxism and the English Civil War should be the
starting point for any discussion on the English revolution.
While not agreeing with every statement, she makes her views
on the Levellers are worth a read and study. She believes that far from being a
radical wing of the Independents she belives the Levellers “broke with Puritan
politics and even with Puritan language to develop a secular and democratic
perspective. Their main social base was the small independent producer, and
their most important achievement was their intervention in the army in 1647,
which forced Cromwell and the army officers at least to listen to them for a
few months. Their programme, designed to separate political power from wealth,
foreshadowed the nineteenth century People’s Charter, and their organisation in
the City of London on a ward-by-ward basis – with weekly subscriptions, a
central committee, a regular newspaper and door-to-door canvassing – was the
seed from which all grassroots organisations were to spring” [7].
Her summation of the Levellers is also significantly
different from many contemporary radical historians in that she believes that
“It is wrong to see the Levellers as simply the most revolutionary section of
the bourgeoisie. Both their social criticism and their political principles
were opposed to the continued growth of capitalism. That the reforms they
proposed could not have stopped the development of capitalism in practice is
another matter. The least that can be said of the Levellers is that they made a
long-range social forecast of an era of exploitation, oppression and
imperialism, and tried to stop it from happening. In doing so, they left a
legacy of organisational and political principle which bore fruit in the
development of Chartism and the nineteenth-century working-class movement. They
deserve, at the very least, our recognition of their struggles” [8].
Chapter 3: Women and the Levellers: Elizabeth and John
Lilburne and their associates (Ann Hughes)This chapter is a long-overdue
appreciation of not only Elizabeth Lilburne but other women Levellers. The
Leveller women were the backbone of the movement. It is safe to say that the
influence of the Levellers would not have been so significant without the
political work of female Levellers. Indeed without the intervention of his wife
Lilburne himself would have been killed.Studies of the role of women during the
English revolution both in the past and present have been few and far between.
Ann Hughes’s last book, Gender and the English Revolution, was an attempt to
rectify this anomaly.History and for that matter, historians have not been kind
to women who took part in political activity on both sides of the English Civil
War. There is a dearth of material on women’s struggle at this time. As far as
I can ascertain no significant biography exists of two of the most famous
Leveller women Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne. It is only now that
Lucy Hutchinson is now getting serious attention. For the last few hundred
years, she has only been known as the wife of Col Hutchinson.
While being part of the Leveller movement of the party they
were in some respects an independent movement themselves. It is high time that
a serious study of the women who took part in the English revolution.After all,
as one Leveller petition put it “have we not an equal interest with the men of
this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of
Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs,
liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from men, but by due process
of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the neighbourhood” [9]?Leveller
women did not fight just as individuals. According to historian Gaby Malhberg
the wives of leading figures of the English revolution “formed their networks,
discussing political issues in the absence of their husbands.”If their male
counterparts underestimated women Levellers, this was nothing to the treatment
they received when they started to carry out political agitation independently.
When Women Levellers mounted large-scale demonstrations and
organised petitions for social equality, they were met with differing levels of
brutality depending on which class they belonged. Overall, middle-class women
were treated with derision, but mostly no violence was committed against them.
It is not the case with the poorer sections of the women’s movement who were
often treated severely by MP’s and soldiers alike.” Many were thrown into
prison, mental institutions or workhouses. Middle-class women were quietly
escorted away by soldiers and told to ‘go back to women’s work”.While it is
difficult to gauge the size of the support for the women Levellers, one cannot
be blind to the fact that when The Levellers organised petitions, ten thousand
Leveller women signed them. Many of these petitions were calling for equality
with men as this quote states:”Since we are assured of our creation in the
image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a
proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth, we cannot but wonder
and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought
unworthy to petition or represent our grievances to this honorable House. Have
we not an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and
securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other the good laws of the
land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties, or goods to be taken from us more
than from men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of
the neighbourhood? Moreover, can you imagine us to be so sottish or stupid as
not to perceive, or not to be sensible when daily those strong defences of our
peace and welfare are broken down and trod underfoot by force and arbitrary
power” [10].
To conclude even the small amount of research needed for
this article has uncovered that for historians who like a challenge detailed
study writing of the radical women of the 17th century will in the future
provide us with a much deeper understanding of the radical Women today who are
still struggling for social equality today could do no worse than study the
struggles of the women Levellers.
Chapter 4: Lilburne and the law (Geoffrey
Robertson)Robertson concentrates in this chapter not so much on Lilburne’s
political activity but his impact on English law. It is hard not to agree with
Ed Valance that “his legal struggles exerted a tangible influence on British
law, helping to change legislation relating to libel, the power of juries and
even the legal status of slaves on British soil” [11].
It is again ironic that the very democratic rights that
Lilburne fought for are coming under sustained attack today. As Robertson
warned, “in a country where Parliament is now the sovereign, that any attempt
to pass laws that deny to the people the rights which “Freeborn John”
extrapolated from the Great Charter – to a jury trial, access to justice, free
speech and to call government to account – will be struck down by the High
Court because they are rights which may now be implied from the Australian
Constitution. You cannot have a true democracy without Magna Carta’s guarantee
of the rule of law” [12].
Chapter5: John Lilburne as a revolutionary leader (John
Rees)John Rees points out in this chapter that Lilburne was many things to many
people. To say that he was a complex character would not be an overstatement.As
Rees brings out despite his many weaknesses he was a man of profound principles
“I walk not, nor act, from accidents,” but from principles, and being
thoroughly persuaded in my soul they are just, righteous and honest, I will by
God’s goodness never depart from them, though I perish in maintaining them.”
Rees is correct to call Lilburne a revolutionary leader of
what was a revolutionary movement or party. Rees believes that Lilburne far
reacting to events in an empirical way had a strategic sense in that his
writings and ideas were a guide to action, not the other way around. Rees’s
work in this chapter is an extension of his PhD thesis[13]. Rees has sought to
oppose some prevailing views of the Levellers one such attitude is that
Levellers had no history before the 1640s. This point has proved most
controversial because up and till now there has been little evidence to counter
this view.Rees’s also counters some historians who have tried to present Lilburne
as a leader of a free collection of radicals. Rees provides extensive evidence
to the contrary. While not being a party in the modern sense, they nonetheless
were a well organised and firmly coherent group.
As Rees puts “by 1646, the group’ both in the eyes of their
opponents and in the internal ideological support they deliver to each other,
is a functioning collective organisation’.Perhaps Rees’s most salient point in
the chapter is at the end when he points out that Lilburne had no revolutionary
precedent for his actions.Chapter 6: Print and principles: John Lilburne, civil
war radicalism and the Low Countries (Jason Peacey)Peacey has written
extensively on the secret and not so secret printing world of the Levellers,
and it is an area that requires a lot more work to give us an even more precise
evaluation of the Levellers and their influence.While ground-breaking is
perhaps an overused word in the lexicon of English revolution studies, it is
justified in Peacey’s case. In many ways, the study of the printing
capabilities of the Levellers holds many secrets to their popularity and their
influence.
Like many historians in this book Peacey has challenged many
of the conceptions held by revisionist historians. Many of these revisionists
have sought to downplay not only the radicalism of the Levellers but also an
influence as Dr David Magliocco points out in his review of Peacey’s Print and
Public Politics in the English Revolution.”Historians to have long been
fascinated by the mid-century collision of print and revolutionary politics.
Thus whilst acknowledging that this field has been ‘hotly contested’, Peacey
boldly claims that it has, nonetheless, been ‘inadequately conceptualised’. At
one level then this work is a counter-blast to the preceding claims of
revisionism. Alongside their insistence that printed sources could not provide
access to historical truth, revisionists questioned earlier assumptions about
the social depth and geographical reach of early modern political culture.
The print itself, and the revolutionary politics it had been
associated with, were both written out of their accounts of the mid-17th
century. Certainly, as Peacey recognises, revisionism itself now occupies an
increasingly marginalised position. Social historians, for instance, have
demolished the notion of an apolitical (but silently conservative) ‘country’.
Similarly, post-revisionists have demonstrated the
importance of print in fostering ideologically-engaged publics. While
acknowledging these advances, Peacey takes both groups to the task. Social
historians, he claims, have failed to connect local and national contexts and
to properly integrate print into their accounts. Post-revisionists, for their
part, have been unwilling to tackle the issue of reception, while concentrating
on explicitly ‘public’ genres within print” [14].Peacey points to another area
that needs to be studied, and that is Lilburne’s and the Levellers debt to the
Dutch and their radical pamphlets culture. Lilburne drew a lot from the work of
the Dutch.
Chapter 7: The resurrection of John Lilburne, Quaker (Ariel
Hessayon)There is no small degree of controversy surrounding Lilburne’s
conversion to Quakerism. The historian Christopher Hill believes that after the
defeat of the Levellers many former Levellers joined the Quakers.As Hill says
“The spread of Quakerism, emptying the churches of Anabaptists and separatists,
witnessed both to the defeat of the political Levellers and the continued
existence and indeed an extension of radical ideas”. Hessaayon believes Hill’s
comments were an “overstatement.” Hessayon believes that although Lilburne may
have changed movements, Lilburne was still Honest John Changing one shirt for
another.
Chapter 8, Reborn John? The eighteenth-century afterlife of
John Lilburne.As Christopher Hill correctly observes ‘Each generation … rescues
a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as
‘the lunatic fringe”.
The purpose of Ed’s chapter is to examine Lilburne’s
political afterlife. He does a superb job. The fact that Lilburne and his work
have endured down the centuries is not solely due to his personality or his
undoubted courage and sacrifice.Vallance is clear not to personalise his
struggle but attempts to place it in a more objective light. “there is a danger
that in emphasising the separateness of historical epochs, historians have
undervalued the degree of intellectual sympathy and continuity between the
radicalism of the seventeenth century and that of the eighteenth. We do not
need to invest in a grand narrative of an English’ radical tradition’ to
acknowledge that the English Revolution of the seventeenth century had both
intellectual and practical consequences for the eighteenth century. A life
which ended in political retreat in Eltham in 1657 was resurrected in the 1700s
to take up the ‘temporal sword’ once more.
Conclusion
This collection will be of enormous interest to academics,
researchers, and readers with a general interest in the English Civil War and
the radical political tradition. Hopefully, with the book being published in
paperback, at a reasonable price would mean it is getting the more large
readership it deserves.As AL Morton said, “A Party that held the centre of the
stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation’s history, voiced the
aspirations of the unprivileged masses, and was able to express with such force
ideas that have been behind every great social advance since their time, cannot
be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten”
.1] The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the
Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution- Authors: Vernon,
Elliot-Editors: Baker, P. (Ed.)
[2] The Historical Journal, vol 47 December 2004.
[3] The Magna Carta and democratic rights. By Richard
Hoffman and Mike Head .15 June 2015.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/15/citi-j15.html
[4] Evgeny Pashukanis-Revolutionary Elements in the History
of the English State and Law (1927)
[5]Norah Carlin-The First English Revolution-First published
by Socialists Unlimited for the Socialist Workers Party in April 1983. -(April
1983)
[6] A Declaration, or Representation from his Excellency, S.
Tho. Fairfax, and of the Army under his Command.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A39976.0001.001/1:2?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
[7] Marxism and the English Civil War-(Autumn 1980) From
International Socialism 2: 10, Autumn 1980, pp. 106–128.
[8] Marxism and the English Civil War-(Autumn 1980) From
International Socialism 2: 10, Autumn 1980, pp. 106–128.
[9] To the Supreme Authority of England, the Commons
Assembled in Parliament. The Humble Petition of Divers Well-Affected Women of
the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets and
Parts Adjacent. Affecters and Approvers of the Petition of Sept. 11, 1648. (May
5, 1649)
[10] Ibid., 11 1648. (May 5, 1649)
[11]Reborn John? The Eighteenth-century-Afterlife of John
Lilburne-by Edward Vallance
[12]
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/government-ignores-magna-carta-at-its-peril-20150609-ghkby5.html
[13] Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English
Revolution. [14] http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1614
A Short Interview With Historian David Flintham
You have said that
your interest in this particular field of history was inspired by the 1970 film,
Cromwell. Could you expand on this?
As a small boy, my parents took me to see the film Cromwell
(we were on holiday in Littlehampton) staring Alec Guinness and Richard Harris.
Soon afterwards, I had to have the Ladybird book about Cromwell, and the Airfix
1/12 scale models of Charles I and Cromwell (my first ‘grown up’ book about the
Civil Wars was Peter Young and Richard Holmes’ 1974 book). Yes, I know that the
film is is historically inaccurate, but it inspired me.On this point of
‘Hollywood history’, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to mention the ‘Braveheart
effect’. When Braveheart was released 2 decades ago, there were so many
complaints about its lack of historical accuracy. My counter to this is that a)
it is entertainment and not history; and b) it created a wave of interest in
the subject which enabled historians to write ‘proper’ histories which, without
the interest generated by the film, may never have been published.
Why is there so little academic interest in London During
the English Civil War?
The point I’m trying to get over here is that there is so
little academic interest in London militarily during the English Civil Wars.
The political, religious, and economic aspects have been very well covered
academically, but the military aspects far less so, and, Stephen Porter’s 1996
book aside, not in one place (e.g. the trained bands on their own, the
fortifications on their own, arms production on its own, etc. etc.)
How does your participation in Civil war reenactment help
your true understanding of a subject that interests you?
I’ve not re-enacted in more than 25 years, so feel am unable
to comment here.
Could you elaborate on the historiography of your subject?
This is an interesting question.I supposed the ‘foundation’
of my book would have to be Norman Brett-James’s ‘Growth of Stuart London’.
I’ve looked at every book about 17th century London since, but as I indicated
earlier, in the main, these focus on the demography, politics, economics,
religion and sociology of the capital.So I looked beyond London itself, and the
following have been important: London Trained Bands – the research by Alan
Turton, Keith Roberts and Wilfred Emberton ; fortifications – the research by
David Sturdy, Victor Smith, Peter Harrington (plus my own contribution); Arms
industry – Peter Edwards (general), and Charles ffoulkes (cannon), Wayne
Cocroft (gunpowder). I would also add Stephen Porter’s 1996 collection of
essays, and Stephen Porter and Simon Marsh’s 2010 book on the battles of
Brentford and Turnham Green. And finally, but by no means least, Peter Gaunt’s
1987 ‘The Cromwellian Gazetteer’ .
What future projects are you involved in?
I am involved in a project that for a while has been
attempting to set up a community-based archaeological project on an ECW
siege-site. I am currently searching for a suitable site.One of the projects I
have been working on (for a while) is a ‘register’ to list/identify all the
sieges (of any type) from the Bishop’s Wars to the Restoration. This is
certainly a ‘work in progress’.As for my next book project, I’m writing a
comparison between the fortifications of London and those of Oxford, and after
that, it’s the sieges of the 2nd and 3rd Civil Wars.
Civil War London: A Military History of London Under Charles
I and Oliver Cromwell Paperback-by David Flintham-Helion Books 2017
“From which I may say
that London was never truly London till now; for now she sits like a noble lady
upon a royall throne, securing all her encroaching pendicles under the wings of
a motherly protection; yet these limits were never heretofore granted till the
Parliament, for their better safety, confirmed this construction, that (Grand
Cayro excepted), I have not seen a larger inveloped compasse within the whole
universe.[1]”
William Lithgow
“And it was also Ordered that there should be Bulworkes
presently raised in the Fields before the Citty, to Fortifie the same against
any Invation …”
A Continuation of Certain Speciall and Remarkable Passages
-24 October 1642
David Flintham’s new book is a valuable contribution to our
knowledge of London during the English civil war. London was without a doubt an
essential city economically and militarily for both Royalist and Parliamentary
forces during the English Revolution. It is hoped that Flintham’s excellent new
book stimulates further research.The historians who have written on London have
recognised its importance. Some have gone as far as saying that King Charles
Ist leaving London led to his defeat. As Flintham outlines in his book, London
was not an easy city to defend. At the start of the war, Parliament quickly
recruited amongst the capital’s citizens.
Using extensive photographs and illustrations, Flintham has
expertly put together a vivid picture of how Londoners constructed a vital
system of fortifications. Like today, it was not an uncommon sight to see armed
soldiers patrolling the capital.The hallmark of any good book is to give its
reader a new insight into the subject, and Flintham’s book does that, who knew
that London had a considerable section of its population who were neutral
during the war.Another strength of the book is that the author an acknowledged
expert on London’s Civil War defences and had visited the places he talked
about in the book and photographed them a trait that the late historian John
Gurney did to good effect.
As I said, London was of vital importance to both sides
during the Civil Wars. Parliament recognised that at some point Charles 1st
would seek to try to win his capital back. So in August 1642, Parliament issued
‘Directions for the Defence of London’.It urged its trained bands to “take a
speedy cause to put the City into a posture of defence, to resist and oppose
all such force, to fortifie all the passages into same, suburbs and places
adjoining whether the same be within the said City and Libertie;”[2].
Flintham is sceptical as to Parliament’s motives for such
large-scale construction “In considering the effort which was put into the
construction of the Lines of Communication, the question arises the Royalist
threat that great that the defences needed to be constructed quickly to protect
the capital? Or was the construction of the defences seen as a way of
channelling Londoners’ energy away from protesting at the way the war was going
and the conditions they were living under?”.
London must have a been an extremely tense city in which to
live in. In his Lecture London and the English Civil War the historian Barry
Coward uses an eyewitness account by William Lithgow to describe the atmosphere
during wartime :”Lithgow’s comments are not only a fantastic contemporary
eyewitness account of what was happening in Civil War London, but in inviting
comparisons with post-invasion, present-day Baghdad – constant military
activity, a collapsing economy and a society fractured by internal political
and religious divisions and the tearing down of statues – they provide an
excellent introduction to the historical question that this article addresses:
why did London not collapse into an anarchy of disorder, why did the capital
not fall apart under the impact of the Civil War, why did the capital’s social,
economic, political, religious and governmental structures survive the massive
stresses and divisions brought about by the war that is reflected in Lithgow’s
eyewitness account?
What makes this the intriguing historical problem is that as
the major part of this article will show, London was subjected to pressures by
the Civil War that could easily have rent apart its social, economic and
political order, in the process shattering its internal stability. As will be
seen, the general character of London on the eve of the Civil War made it a
very unstable, volatile place in normal times, and the extraordinary conditions
of Civil War brought massive additional economic problems, political divisions,
religious controversies and a ferment of ideas that shook the stability of the
capital. Yet, shaken though the stability of London was, there was no real
threat that the social and political order in the capital would disintegrate
into anarchy or revolution “.
While the first part of the book is given over to describing
how London fortified during the civil war, the second part provides us with a
Gazetteer of Civil War London. This part of the book in no way diminishes the
first it enhances it. Much work has gone into not only researching the places
listed in the book, but Flintham has used an extraordinary amount of shoe
leather in visiting and photographing these places. The book was a pleasure to
read and hopefully gets a wide readership. It is an excellent introduction to
the military history of the civil war and deserves to be on university
booklist.
[1]
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2017/06/30/londons-forgotten-civil-war-fortifications-walk-4/
[2] http://www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/whimount.html
The Glorious Revolution 1688: Britain’s Fight for Liberty,
by Edward Vallance 372pp, Little, Brown, £20
Edward Vallance has
joined a crowded market of books and articles both academic and non-academic
that have sought to evaluate the Glorious Revolution of 1688.It is noticeable
that the last decade has seen a more serious study of this neglected period.
The book is one of the better ones. It is well-written, researched and appeals
to the general reader and academic alike.Vallance begins the book with two quotes.
One from Thatcher and one from Karl Marx. It takes a brave historian to quote
both. It takes an even braver one to claim that their positions on the Glorious
Revolution was similar.
In her Revolutions of 1688–89 speech said Thatcher said this
“there are many important conclusions to be drawn from those momentous events
300 years ago. First, the glorious revolution established qualities in our
political life which have been a tremendous source of strength: tolerance,
respect for the law and the impartial administration of justice, and respect
for private property. It also established the tradition that political change
should be sought and achieved through Parliament. It was this which saved us
from the violent revolutions which shook our continental neighbours and made
the revolution of 1688 the first step on the road which, through the successive
Reform Acts, led to the establishment of universal suffrage and full
parliamentary democracy.
“The events of 1688 were important in establishing Britain’s
nationhood, and they opened the way to that renewal of energy and
resourcefulness which built Britain’s industrial and financial strength and
gave her a world role. They demonstrated that a free society will always be
more durable and successful than any tyranny”.It is quite striking that
Thatcher believed that England’s place in the world stemmed from what amounts
to a coup and foreign invasion to boot. Maybe Ted Vallance had his tongue
firmly in his cheek when he wrote the book, but it is stretching a little to
compare the two.
In his analysis of the Glorious revolution, Marx was
scathing of both the Whigs and Tories. This on the Whigs gives us a real
insight into his position “Ever since the “glorious revolution” of 1688 the
Whigs, with short intervals, caused principally by the first French Revolution
and the consequent reaction, have found themselves in the enjoyment of the
public offices. Whoever recalls to his mind this period of English history,
will find no other distinctive mark of Whigdom but the maintenance of their
family oligarchy. The interests and principles which they represent besides,
from time to time, do not belong to the Whigs; they are forced upon them. By
the development of the industrial and commercial class, the Bourgeoisie. After 1688
we find them united with the Bankocracy, just then rising into importance, as
we find them in 1846, united with the Millocracy”.[1]
Vallance could have called upon another revolutionary if he
had any doubts on the nature of the British bourgeoisie’s position which was to
either played down this revolution or erase it from collective memory.The
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky commentated on this phenomenon “In the
seventeenth century England carried out two revolutions. The first, which
brought forth great social upheavals and wars, brought amongst other things the
execution of King Charles I, while the second ended happily with the accession
of a new dynasty. The British bourgeoisie and its historians maintain entirely
different attitudes to these two revolutions: the first is for them a rising of
the mob – the “Great Rebellion’; the second has been handed down under the
title of the “Glorious Revolution”. The reason for this difference in estimates
was explained by the French historian, Augustin Thierry. In the first English
revolution, in the “Great Rebellion”, the active force was the people; while in
the second it was almost “silent”. Hence, it follows that, in surroundings of
class slavery, it is difficult to teach the oppressed masses good manners. When
provoked to fury they use clubs, stones, fire. Moreover, the rope. The court
historians of the exploiters are offended at this. However, the great event in
modern “bourgeois” history is, none the less, not the “Glorious Revolution” but
the “Great Rebellion”.[2]
The labelling of the revolution as the “Glorious Revolution”
or the “bloodless revolution” tends to denote that this revolution was peaceful
or bloodless.Vallance’s book counteracts this argument. Vallance believes the
revolution was neither peaceful or bloodless.His book which is largely
narrative driven explains in concise form how the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688
came about.
Historiography
The book is successful in providing a basic introduction to
the historiography of the revolution. A solid read around the subject of the
Glorious Revolution will tell the reader that the “Whig interpretation of this
so-called bloodless of revolutions has dominated historiography. The term the
“Whig interpretation of history” can be traced back to Sir Herbert
Butterfield’s slim volume of that name. Butterfield’s book was written
primarily as a polemic against the Marxist theory of history. Whig
historiography has always been associated with Victorian society, which oversaw
a degree of stability that that had not been the case in the previous two
centuries. This type of history saw Britain as having a special
destiny.According to the Marxist writer Ann Talbot, there is a sense “that in
Britain things were done differently and without continental excess was not
entirely new. Burke had expressed it in his Reflections on the French
Revolution, but there were plenty of voices to gainsay him and the social
disturbances in the years of economic upheaval that followed the Napoleonic
Wars were a testimony to the contrary. Luddism, anti-corn law agitation, the
anti-poor law movement, strikes and most of all Chartism demonstrated that
Britain was not an island of social peace.
She continues “the Whig interpretation of history had deep
roots in the consciousness of the British political class. The visitor to
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire can still see in the great entrance hall a
fireplace inscribed with the legend “1688 The year of our liberty.” It refers
to the “Glorious Revolution” when James II quit his throne and his kingdom
overnight, and William of Orange was installed as king. This was the kind of
palace revolution that the British ruling class increasingly preferred to look
back on rather than the revolution in the 1640s when they had executed the
king, conveniently overlooking the fact that James would not have run if he had
not remembered the fate of his father—Charles I” [3].
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Macaulay and for that matter, the majority of Whig
historians exhibited a sort of Whig triumphalist view that the Glorious
Revolution saved England from the full dictatorship of James II and the
revolution led to a constitutional monarchy which gave England civil and
religious liberty and rule of law.According to Blair Worden “Macaulay’s account
is thought of as the summit of Whig historical partisanship, but to him, 1688
was the triumph not of a party but a nation when the best of the Whigs joined
with the best of the Tories”.[4]Macaulay’s overtly fawning political approach
put him firmly in the camp of what Trotsky called a “court historian”. Karl
Marx attacked Macaulay’s writing for being one-sided and complacent and a
‘systematic falsifier of history’.
GM Trevelyan
George Macaulay Trevelyan a British historian and academic
was the ultimate whig historian. He was heavily tied to the political
establishment, and his work reflected this fact. In his book The English
Revolution, 1688–1698[6] he portrays James II as a tyrant. Despite this, the
book has become a standard text for any university course.On the plus side, he
was a readable and talented historian. This was was spotted at an early age the
Fabian writer Beatrice Webb who recounts when she met the historian in 1895 “He
is bringing himself up to be a great man, is precise and methodical in all his
ways, ascetic and regular in his habits, eating according to rule, exercising
according to rule… he is always analysing his powers, and carefully considering
how he can make the best of himself. In intellectual parts, he is brilliant,
with a wonderful memory, keen analytical power, and a vivid style. In his
philosophy of life, he is, at present, commonplace, but then he is young – only
nineteen.”
However, not all historians were smitten by Macaulay’s
partisan approach. Geoffrey Elton accused him of being “not very scholarly
writer” who wrote, “soothing pap… lavishly doled out… to a broad public”. John
P. Kenyon thought he was an “insufferable snob” with “socially retrograde
views”.It must be said that some these comments border on character
assassination. Macaulay is worth reading and was one of the few historians to
link both the English revolution of the 1640s and Glorious revolution in what
could be interpreted as being part of an extended seventeenth century.
The Communist Party Historians Group
Much of what passed for a Marxist analysis of the Glorious
revolution was written by the historians that were in the Communist Party
Historians Group. Having said this, they did not write an awful lot.The
necessary myth of the “Glorious Revolution” was the aim of Christopher Hill’s
first published article. This article was written under the pseudonym E.C. Gore
in 1937. It appeared in the magazine Communist International and is extremely
difficult to track down.Hill wrote very little on the Glorious revolution
preferring to concentrate on the English Revolution 1640. His writings on this
subject as Ann Talbot says “contained a concise statement of the arguments that
Hill was to spend the rest of his life elucidating”.
In many ways, the Communist Party’s attitude towards the
revolution has a strange similarity to the position of the British bourgeoisie,
and that is to play down its importance.
Socialist Workers Party (SWP)
The SWP put a relatively orthodox position on the revolution.
According to Duncan Hallas, “1688 represented the completion of the
stabilisation of the English revolution, and it represented it in the most
conservative form possible, consistent with the establishment of a stable
bourgeois administration”.They like the Communist Party have not bothered with
the period. With other revolutions, it has always co-opted historians to write
on them but not so the Glorious revolution.
Current Historiography
Vallance rejects the commonly held view, especially amongst
Marxist historians that the English revolution and the Glorious revolution are
linked in what should be termed the Long Seventeenth Century.Revisionists and
post-revisionists have according to one writer have “rebranded 1688 as a
dynastic revolution serving Dutch interests – especially conflict with France –
rather than the defence of England’s “ancient constitution”.Vallance’s book is
firmly in the Post-revisionist camp in that rejects both Marxist and Whig
historiography. Vallance does not seem to want to post a new historiography
appears to be happy arguing that the revolution was “less bloodless, less
glorious”.
On this matter, his viewpoint is like Steve Pincus whose new
book also sought to overturn the two dominant schools of historical interpretation.
According to Graham Goodlad, Steve Pincus’s new study of the Glorious
Revolution challenges the familiar Whig orthodoxy, originally expounded by
Macaulay in the nineteenth century, and refined by successive generations of
historians. According to this tradition, the replacement of James II by William
and Mary was the work of a politically conservative elite, intent on restoring
a balanced, historic constitution that had been threatened by the
authoritarian, pro-Catholic actions of a misguided monarch. Pincus rejects both
this interpretation and the more recent version of revisionists like John
Miller and Mark Goldie, who have argued that James’ principal aim was to secure
religious toleration for Catholics and Protestant Dissenters – a goal which led
him into conflict with the narrowly Anglican prejudices of the English landed
class. Pincus holds that both approaches underestimate the truly revolutionary
nature of the struggle between the followers of James and William of
Orange”.[5]
Conclusion
It is evident from the significant number of new books on
the subject of the Glorious Revolution that the period is gaining something of
a renaissance.The centuries-long domination of Whig historiography has come
under sustained challenge. Despite being clear what they reject both
revisionists and post-revisionist historians are unclear what they want to
replace both Whig or Marxist historiography with.While classical Marxists such
as Karl Marx have laid the foundations for a serious study of the Glorious
revolution from the standpoint of historical materialism very few historians
who professed to be Marxist, have built upon this platform. This theoretical
indifference to an important period in the history of Britain is puzzling. Even
more dangerous is that it mirrors the attitude of the bourgeoisie itself.
[1] Karl Marx in the New York Tribune 1852- The Elections in
England. — Tories and
Whigs-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/08/06.htm
[2] From Chapter 4 of Terrorism and Communism (1920)
[3] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill-Ann Talbot -25 March 2003-
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[4]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3650499/The-truly-glorious-revolution.html
[5] http://www.historytoday.com/graham-goodlad/1688-first-modern-revolution
The Rise of the New Model Army Paperback – 12 Jan 2008 Mark
Kishlansky- Cambridge University Press; Reprint edition ISBN-10: 0521273773
They lived, they
suffered, they died. Thomas Hardy
This version of Mark Kishlanksy’s The Rise of the New Model
Army in paperback form is a meticulously-researched but highly controversial
study of the rise of the New Model Army. Kishlansky challenges the fundamental
assumptions upon which all previous interpretations of the New Model Army have
been based.It is Kishlanksy’s contention in the run up to the formation of the
New Model Army to be more precise the years 1643–6, Parliament far from being
in conflict operated as “model of consensus”.
So, for him, the New Model Army was not a direct result of
Cromwell’s attempt to prosecute a far more aggressive and radical war against
the King, and by radical I mean Leveller influenced. For Kishlansky radicalism
hardly existed and the army was a by product of Consensus and compromise.It was
only after this consensus broke down did the army develop a political voice and
become radicalised. The historian Ivan Roots is critical of Kishlansky’s
attitude towards the army when he wrote “The New Model Army, ‘departing little
from the armies it replaced’, is seen as a child of compromise. Not until the
spectre of defeat was lifted in 1646 did ‘adversary politics’ seriously disturb
Westminster internally, encouraging outside pressures. Factious now, Parliament
failed to comprehend genuine professional grievances – arrears of pay and
whatever – and by denying the right to petition politicised the Army, equating
national liberties with soldiers’ rights, making it seem more radical than it
really was. (To all this the Levellers were irrelevant.) Stung in its honour
the Army, reluctant but in good order, entered London in August 1647 to restore
‘a free and lawful parliament’ against internal and external ‘faction and
interest’. At this point, the story breaks off – on the brink of a revolution
as yet undefined”.[1]
Kishlansky in the book discounts the belief that the army
had a relatively worked out perspective and was beginning to act as a political
force. He believed that “From disparate and inchoate ideas the army formed its
self –justification, and the process by which this happened, as do so many
others of similar circumstances, remain mysterious”. The dictionary definition
of inchoate used for our purpose is: not organised; lacking order, this is not
correct.It is clear the army had some form of collective ideology. The actions
it took before and after Putney proved this. This is perhaps why Kishlansky
stops short of discussing the Putney debates in his book.The Levellers
persistent agitation had turned the New Model Army into a potent military and
political force that had to be recognised.
Kishlansky attacks the concept that it is possible to draw
wider political conclusions from the debate that took place in the New Model
Army. He believed that Ideology inside the army had been exaggerated and
misconceived.He writes ‘Much has been written about the ideology of the army,
but most of it misconceived. A principle reason for this has been historians
have assumed that the lowly social origins of many of the officers created a
commitment to radical ideology. This is false on both factual and logical
grounds. There were men of low birth among the new Model’s officers, and much
has been made of Pride the drayman and Hewson the cobbler more still might be
made of obscure officers like Spongers and Creamer whose surnames suggest
backgrounds in trades and service. The army also contained a Cecil, a
Sheffield, and three colonels who were knights. A careful study of the armies
social origin, which lends support to the view that they were more traditional
in nature (of solid status in rural and urban structures) still does not meet
the real objections to existing interpretation- the fallacy of social
determinism’.[2]
If we were to accept Kishlanskys assertion that “From 1645
to March 1647 there is almost no evidence of political activity within the New
Model Army: for fifteen months the soldiers fought; for eight they waited”.What
is his point? Ideas do take the time to develop, and they do change under the
pressure of political and economic changes. There is not a mechanical
relationship between economic changes, and their political expression there is
a dialectical one.Kishlansky’s hostility to Marxist historiography is well
known and runs through all of his work. He does not believe that class has any
bearing on how a person thinks or behaves and rejects ‘the conception that
social being determines social consciousnesses. A by-product of this
intellectual myopia has led him to downplay the amount of radical literature
available to the army. Kishlansky calls for a complete rethink on what ideas
did motivate individual soldiers.
Book Reviews
The book was well received by some high profile historians.
Bernard Norling comments which have been echoed by many other reviewers said “
A more fitting title would be “The Efforts of the House of Commons to Govern
England, 1640-1647[3]”.
Some commentators have picked up on that Kishlansky stops
short of discussing the Putney Debates of 1647. It would appear that he is
looking to fit his ideological positions into a highly particular time frame
something he has accused other historians particularly Christopher Hill of
doing.Kishlansky walks a tightrope with this book. It is not easy to combine
one’s ideological convictions and still produce an objectively written book.
Very few historians have managed it. Kishlansky has a habit in this book of
letting his conservatism get the better of him.
Christopher Hill and the CPHG
Kishlansky defends his positions like an animal protects her
offspring. He has a no holes barred approach to historical work. This approach
has led him into many scrapes. He seems to have reserved most his ire for the
historians who came out of the Communist Party of Britain. Despite the
Stalinisation of the Party, these historians produced a level of work that has
not been surpassed.Despite launching many unprovoked and in some cases
disrespectful attacks especially on Christopher Hill, it must be said that the
CPHG returned very little fire. Hill’s conception of the revolution and the New
Model Army are well known and do not need to repeating here suffice to say as
Ann Talbot writes Hill “recognised that revolutions are made by the mass of the
population and that for a revolution to take place the consciousness of that
mass of people must change since revolutions are not made by a few people at
the top although the character of their leadership is crucial at certain
points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of continuing
relevance today when historians increasingly reject any serious economic or
social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny
group of conspirators”.[4]
Kishlansky accused Hill of being “ immune to criticism”. An
attack that was answered by Alex Calinicos “Well, if the criticism Hill’s work
has encountered were all of the quality of Kishlansky’s shabby attack who could
blame him for ignoring it? The insinuation that refusing to follow the tide of
historiographic fashion is morally equivalent to sending dissidents off to the
Gulag Archipelago is typical of a critique which proceeds by insult and
innuendo rather than by anything resembling a careful argument.[5]
Conclusion
This book is not without merit, and Kishlansky is a capable
writer. It has been pointed out that the book seems to have been hurried and
that many mistakes occurred that should not have given the quality of the
publishers.The discounting of sources such as Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,
Edmund Ludlow, Bulstrode Whitelocke, and Richard Baxter on account of bias and
their supposed unreliability is bizarre, to say the least.As one writer said,
“This strategy enabled Kishlansky to conclude that Cromwell’s New Model Army,
far from being the mainspring of revolution, was the product of a politics of consensus
and, in its early years, at any rate, lacked any radical consciousness. In the
1980s, the age of Margaret Thatcher, the Levellers, Diggers, and other radical
groups, whose seemingly modern doctrines had so fascinated an earlier
generation, were consigned to the historiographical sidelines”.The Rise of the
New Model Army book was the by-product of the revisionist domination during the
last three decades of English Revolution historiography, and the reader should
be aware of that. The American historian Mark Kishlansky embraced the
revisionist doctrine fully. While recommending the book the reader should be
aware of the Historians politics.
[1] The Rise of the New Model Army -Ivan Roots-History Today
[2] Ideology and Politics in the Parliamentary Armies,
1645–9-Taken from Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649-Editors: John
Morrill-ISBN: 978-0-333-27566-5
[3] The Rise of the New Model Army by Mark A. Kishlansky
Review by: Bernard Norling- The Review of Politics, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Jan. 1981),
pp. 139-141
[4] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[5] https://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n23/letters
1666: Plague, War and Hellfire Hardcover by Rebecca Rideal-
304 pages-Publisher: John Murray- ISBN-10: 1473623537
Let the flaming
London come in view, Like Nero’s Rome, burnt to rebuild it new
The Second Advice to a Painter by Andrew Marvell
“sure, so sad a sight was never seen before as that city is
now lying in ashes”-
Lady Elmes
It is fair to say that 1666 was not a very good year to be
in London or England for that matter. In rapid succession, she was struck by a
deadly plague that wiped out swathes of the population. The second war with the
Dutch caused mayhem and much bloodshed for both nations and to end with London
was struck by a deadly fire.All these events are told with a fair degree of
panache by Rebecca Rideal in her new book. The book which reads like a
historical novel with bits of academic essay thrown is based on a significant
amount of original archival research and makes use of little-known sources. It
is safe to say the that Rideal did her fair share of “grubbing in the
archives”. Rideal has claimed her approach is novel, but this has been hotly
contested.Regarding publications, 1666 joins a very crowded market. Lloyd and
Dorothy Moote’s The Great Plague and Adrian Tinniswood on the Fire of London
are two which come to mind.
Rideal has not attempted to differentiate her book from
these by claiming to have found new evidence. However, she does try to place
the events in a more broader context of the bourgeois society. Rideal is
correct to point out that 1666 was a crucial turning point in English history.
The devastation caused by these events did, however, enable the bourgeoisie to
hasten further the process of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
It was also a time when some of the finest representatives
of the bourgeoisie were around. 1666 saw Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity,
complementing Robert Hooke’s microscopic discoveries. It was also when the
great John Milton completed Paradise Lost. Last but not least was the
rebuilding of London by Christopher Wren. The three events mentioned in the
book came at a time when England in the seventeenth century witnessed a
fundamental change.As the 21st-century Marxist writer David North wrote the
“17th century started to fundamentally change the way man saw the world. Up
until then, mankind’s worldview had largely been dominated by the Aristotelian
worldview. Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still
generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the
universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But
its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the
publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543,
which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and
provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho
Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from
the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested
upon it, was well under way.[1]
The book outlines that the fire and plague cruelly exposed
the class divide and class relations in England at the time. The poor endured
the most of both plague and fire. The rich could either stay in their
well-built houses to wait out the fire and plague, or they could move out of
the city with their possessions. The poor had no such luxury.As Lady Ann Hobart
complained in a letter “I am almost out of my wits, we have packed up all our
goods & cannot get a cart for money, they give 5 & 10 pound for carts …
I fear I shall lose all I have and must run away … O pity me.”
As Rideal explains the fire was only extinguished when the
rich allowed some of their houses to be blown up or knocked down to provide a
firebreak. If the rich people had acquiesced to their houses being blown up
earlier the fire could have done less damage.The fire caused widespread panic
and paranoia. Riddeal cites one gruesome incident in graphic detail when a
Frenchwoman in Moorfields had her breasts cut off after the chickens she was
carrying under her apron were mistaken for fireballs. Many foreign nationals
especially French or Dutch were accused of starting the fire was attacked by
the mobs.
Style
1666 is a debut book and tells the story of that year in
narrative form and borrows heavily from the genre of History from Below. The
book written during her research on her PHD is orientated to the general reader
but does retain a good academic level. Her use of anecdotal evidence is very
well done.The reader will see in her book a contradiction in that it is part
“public history” and part academic history. This reflects Rideal’s current
predicament. A foot in both camps is a difficult place to be but not entirely
impossible, but Rideal will have to make a choice.Given her life history, I
would say she will continue with a more publicly minded history. She was born
in Chester in 1983. She studied history at Leeds University. Her MA was
completed at University College London. She is a founding member of the History
Vault and had an early career in television. This would tend to point her
future career more in the public history arena.
Her main historiographical interest lies with a study of the
17th-century England. Her time spent in television will keep her in good stead
for the future. If she does manage to combine Public history with a more
academically minded history, then that would be a novel approach.She describes
this method. “The thing is I am a procrastinator,” she says, “and the way that
I combat procrastination is by coming up with something that in my mind is even
more important than the thing I am supposed to be doing. So I start something,
and that takes over everything, and then I start something else.”Much of her
book is grounded by using contemporary accounts. Although she sometimes gets
carried away causing one writer to say that her style is more to do with live
television than with dead history. She recognises this saying “There are
probably lines in there that I will cringe about afterwards. There are
certainly some that I took out because I was pushing it too far. I am really,
nervous about this being published because I’m so nervous about the way I’ve
written it, the language that I’ve used, the fact that I’ve written a narrative
history before I have written a PhD. I feel very, very conscious of all those
things. It is frightening.”
The book does not follow a logical pattern and tends to jump
from one event to another. This seems to be the unorthodox style that Rideal
has adopted. Once you get used to it does make the reading interesting and
allows the historian to set a fast pace almost novel-like. The question being
does Rideal want to pursue this style of history writing or as she comes to the
end of PHD pursue a more conventional academic style?
Twitter Wars
Not everyone is comfortable with her style which is their
right, but as a historian, she should start to develop a thicker skin. That
does mean she must put up with the personal abuse she has received on Twitter.
Much of the abuse appears to be provoked by the fact that she is an attractive
female historian. The general thrust of the abuse is the simple fact that she
is a female trying to make a living out of public history writing.The writer
Graham Smith has sympathies for Rideal when he recounts “I have some sympathy
with these grumblings. Back in 1982, I returned from completing an MA in Social
History at Essex to my first university armed with a poster for Leonore
Davidoff’s course. I was just pinning it to a noticeboard when the department’s
senior professor of economic history spotted me and declared, ‘Women in
History, Graham? Whatever next?’
However, as others have pointed out, the fact that the
struggle to go beyond hegemonic discourses continues suggests that winning once
is not enough. My belief is that evidence of a new generation reinventing ways
of taking up that fight should be a cause for celebration rather than
condemnation. As tends to happen on Twitter, battle-lines were drawn, allies
and enemies were quickly made, and exchanges sharpened after those initial
criticisms of Rideal. On one side were historians who clearly identified with
Rideal, especially those aiming to make a living from producing popular
histories. On the other, for the most part, were historians working in
universities, some of whom began to question whether Rideal was even qualified
to write early modern history”.[2]
He continues “these days, the battles within ‘the
profession’ are mainly over resources and too often fuelled by egotism. With
its proponents organised into warring tribes according to the periods and
places they study or corralled into sub-disciplinary groupings, History is
fractious even within the academy. In all this sound and fury, and despite
constant internal sniping, the discipline has been traditionally slow to
innovate, and much of the sparring is about maintaining rather than extending
boundaries. It is worth noting, for example, that those pioneering courses in
women’s history and oral history at Essex were taught in the Sociology
Department. While members of other disciplines frequently offer support for new
ideas, historians – too often operating as lone scholars – revel in knocking
lumps out of one another, reserving spite for those who try to innovate. The
result is that in open competition for resources, most obviously for research
grant income or in the formation of mutually beneficial research partnerships,
historians do not achieve the same results as, say, political scientists or
human geographers. Nor are we as prepared to look after our researchers or
early career colleagues as would be the case in economics or
sociology”.Although I use Twitter, I am not a fan of using it for public
debates on historical matters. It is too short and how you can explain complex
historical differences in 140 character it is just absurd.
Criticism
The book has been well received but that is not to say it is
without criticism. One writer has pointed out that the book tends to
concentrate too much on what was known about an individual at the time and to
leave it at that according to one reviewer “she refers several times to
mysterious rumours about Sabbatai Zevi, the charismatic rabbi who, in Turkey in
1665, proclaimed himself the Messiah. “Questions over the authenticity of
Sabbatai abounded,” she says and leaves it at that as if nothing more can be
known. However, there is a vast amount of scholarship on this extraordinary
man, whose conversion to Islam in 1666 shocked the entire Jewish world; we do
not need to confine ourselves today to contemporary rumours”.[3]
My criticism of her does not arise from the book which is
very enjoyable it stems from her theoretical position or historiography.
Recently she stated, “The time of the grand histories that are all about male
figures is coming to an end,”. “I think people are understanding now that there
were women around, too, and they were doing important things.”
The main advocate of this type of history was the historian
Thomas Carlyle. If that were all she was staying, then no one would have too
many complaints. However, as the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky was fond of
saying “every sociological definition is at bottom a historical prognosis.”
Rideal’s prognosis is that more history should be written
from the standpoint of Gender and race. It is high time that the absurdities of
basing a study of history on race, gender, and sexual orientation end. The
fundamental division in society is not race or gender but that of class.As
North explains “The logic of class interests’ rules politics. This is a basic
truth that is frequently forgotten, especially by academics, which tend to
evaluate political factions by subjective criteria. Moreover, their judgments
are influenced by their own unstated political biases, particularly when it is
a matter of evaluating a dispute between opportunists and revolutionists. To
the petty-bourgeois academic, the policies advocated by the opportunists
usually appear more “realistic” than those advanced by the revolutionaries.
However, just as there is no innocent philosophy, there are no innocent
politics. Whether foreseen or not, a political program has objective
consequences”.
Conclusion
Rideal is a gifted young historian her debut book 1666 is an
enjoyable book. Her chosen subject is probably one of the most interesting
times in not only British history but world history. If Rideal wants to write
more academically minded stuff which she will have to for her PHD, then she
will have to develop a different technique because the one used for this book
will not do as it has severe limitations. This is not to say that Rideal’s book
does not meet main academic standards. Her use of source material is carefully
chosen mostly and up to date, and she provides footnotes for all citations and
statistics.There is no point hoping the book gets a wide readership as it
already has but I would recommend taking on summer holiday.
[1] quality, the Rights of Man, and the Birth of
Socialism-By David North
[2]Beyond Us and Them: Public History and the Battle for the
Past on Twitter by Graham Smith-
[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/plague-fire-and-war-for-london-1666-was-truly-an-annus-horribili/
Further Reading
[1] See Buettner, Ricardo, and Katharina Buettner, ‘A
Systematic Literature Review of Twitter Research from a Socio-Political
Revolution Perspective’, in ResearchGate, 2016
[2] Oh, O., C. Eom, and H. R. Rao, “Role of Social Media in
Social Change: An Analysis of Collective Sense-Making During the 2011 Egypt
Revolution,” Information Systems Research, vol. 26, no. 1, pp.210–223, 2015.
[3] Lea, Richard, ‘Rebecca Rideal: “The Time of the Grand
Histories Is Coming to an End”’, The Guardian, 25 August 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/25/rebecca-rideal-the-time-of-the-grand-histories-is-coming-to-an-end
[accessed 3 September 2016].
Cromwell’s Buffoon: The Life and Career of The Regicide,
Thomas Pride (Century of the Soldier) Hardcover – 15 May 2017-by Robert
Hodkinson- Helion and Company.
‘that he was very
sorry for these three nations, whom he saw in a most sad and deplorable
condition’ Thomas Pride
(Weekly Intelligencer, 1–8 Nov 1659, 212).
There are still many prominent figures who played major
parts in the English Revolution who have not had the academic research and
publicity they deserve. Colonel Thomas Pride is one of those persons.To some
extent that anomaly has been-been changed in Pride’s case. Robert Hodkinson’s
semi-biography of Pride is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how
people from very humble backgrounds rose to prominence during the English
Revolution.Colonel Thomas Pride is commonly known for being the driving force
behind ‘Pride’s Purge,'[1] which saw the mass and very forcible expulsion of
MP’s from parliament paving the way for the execution of the King.
Aside from this momentous event, little else is known about
this important and pivotal historical figure. In a recent article explaining
his approach to researching Pride Hodkinson made this point “Fifteen years ago,
reconstructing the biography of a man in this way – almost from scratch – would
have been a great deal more difficult. Many of the sources used to research
Cromwell’s Buffoon are now readily accessible online or can be located through
online databases. Digitised parish registers, searchable through
Ancestry.co.uk, were invaluable in retracing Pride’s family tree, which allowed
me to unravel its numerous strands and confirm the dynastic links between
Pride’s family and those of other dominant figures of the period: by marrying
his children to the nieces and nephews of Oliver Cromwell and General Monck,
Pride could consolidate his place in the Protectorate establishment”.
Pride’s position within the Cromwellian revolution did not
sit well with conservative historians during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Biographies which were few and far between described Pride as “an
ignorant, illiterate fellow” and “a useful man to Cromwell in all his projects.
A buffoon to him”.
As Hodkinson explains the development of the internet gives
the possibility of a more objective account of Pride can be made. Hodkinson
believes the internet has revolutionized research especially when looking at
figures such as Pride. Online digital resources allow a researcher a lot more
thorough study of historical documents than at a reading room.Hodkinson
graduated from the University of Derby in 2010 with an MA in Humanities. He
went on to win a prestigious vice-chancellor’s prize for his dissertation on
the contemporary poetry of the First World War. He is not an orthodox
historian. His history is very hands on, and his interest in Pride developed
from his role in the Sealed Knot battle re-enactment society going so far to
take on the role of Colonel Thomas Pride.
The scarcity of facts about pride’s life precludes an
orthodox biography. Despite the absence of information, Hodkinson makes it
clear that Colonel Thomas Pride was a prominent figure during the English
Revolution and was party to one of the key events of the war.The arrest and
exclusion of 140 Members of Parliament at Westminster in December 1648 was
known as Pride’s Purge. The event had no precedent, and no event subsequently
has even come close to its impact. The purge of MPs hostile to the revolution
paved the way for the execution of the King. It is open to debate whether Pride
was acting consciously, but he must have had some political understanding the
nature of his act after all Pride sat as a judge at the King’s Trial and was
one of the 59 signatories of the death warrant.
Hodkinson’s well-researched book documents Pride’s rise from
businessman and brewer. The book is indeed a groundbreaking piece of work.For
once the blurb from the jacket cover is correct in that “Cromwell’s Buffoon is
a ground-breaking examination of why and how a former apprentice boy rose in
status to challenge the ruling elite and affect the death of a monarch. The
first full-length biography of its subject, it is a fascinating story of a man
who, until now, had all but vanished from history”.Hodkinson’s book is
significant in another way in that it challenges current conservative
historiography. Hodkinson notes that Marxist Historiography despite having
fallen out of favor can explain through the use class conflict theory how someone
like Pride can play a pivotal role in history.
The book to some extent relies on the only other piece of
significant research on the life of Pride, the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography by Ian J. Gentles Who brilliantly describes how Pride carried out his
famous purge “His regiment joined with Richard Deane’s and Thomas Harrison’s to
present a petition demanding that parliament should proceed against the king
‘as an enemy to the kingdom’ (Several Petitions Presented to his Excellency the
Lord Fairfax, 1648, 8). It was also part of the 7000–strong force that occupied
London at the beginning of December 1648. Although David Underdown has
questioned whether Pride was ‘anything more than the obedient instrument of a
policy dictated by others’ (Underdown, 141), he was quite possibly a member of
the subcommittee of six officers and MPs who, on the night of 5 December, made
the arrangements for the purging of the House of Commons of its conservative or
Presbyterian members. There is no doubt about his enthusiasm for the policy
concerted by Ireton and others, for it was Pride who on the morning of the 6th
set a guard around the house. He then stood on the stairs leading to the
entrance, flourishing his list of members to be secured. Presently Thomas, Lord
Grey of Groby arrived to help him with identifications. About forty-five
members were arrested and four times that number were secluded or stayed away.
Pride carried out the political cleansing with courtesy except in the case of
the lawyer William Prynne.
The cantankerous member for Newport tried to force his way
past, but Pride with the help of his soldiers pushed him down the stairs and
hustled him away to nearby Queen’s Court. Prynne is said to have demanded, as
he was being carried off, ‘By what authority and commission, and for what
cause, they did thus violently seize on and pull him down from the House’, to
which Pride and Sir Hardress Waller pointed to their soldiers with swords
drawn, muskets at the ready, and matches alight, answering ‘there was their
commission’ (The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, 18.449).
This violence against the House of Commons became known as Pride’s Purge. The
colonel and his regiment were richly rewarded for their services. Twelve days
after the purge the committee of the army ordered that he should be paid £2600
on account for his regiment. During December 1648 and January 1649 warrants
totalling £7691 were issued for the pay of his Regiment. Hardly any other
regiment was as generously treated at the climax of the English revolution”.[2]
Pride’s Politics
Given the sparsity of information, Hodkinson has done a
tremendous job in piecing together a picture of the politics that drove Pride
forward. Pride had like a lot of Puritan Independents ties with London’s
Baptist churches. These churches according to the book were at the forefront of
the independent religious movements of the 1630s.The Baptists had many of the
same political and religious characteristics as other radical sects of the
English revolution. However, Hodkinson dismisses the notion that Pride had any
sympathies with the Levellers. He states that while “Pride and the Levellers
may have had certain principles in common, and mutual enemies, the fact that by
1649 Pride was a wealthy and self-interested London businessman meant that any
commonality he may have had with the Levellers stopped far short of their other
political goals, such as the release of enclosed lands to common ownership”.
Pride it seems was much closer to the Fifth Monarchist movement
that gained strength towards the end of the revolution. Hodkinson eastablishes
that Pride had connections to some Fifth Monarchist men like William Goffe,
whom Pride served with throughout the revolution. Significantly both Pride and
Goffe signed the death warrant of Charles 1st.
Despite Thomas Pride’s role as a regicide, Hodkinson does
not believe he was a Republican. According to him.“There were certainly
Republican elements in the regiment he commanded, which emerged in the Overton
Plot of 1654 and after Cromwell’s death in 1658. Pride was able to curb his
soldiers’ republicanism for most of the 1650s. The fact they supported the Rump
Parliament against Richard Cromwell following their colonel’s death is a
testament to the force of Pride’s command and strength of his personality”.
Money and Death
It would be a cynical historian who believes that Pride’s
action during the revolution was motivated by greed. However, we should not be
naïve to think that monetary considerations did not play a part. It is clear
that Pride was more than adequately rewarded for his services to the
revolution. As Gentles[3] points out somewhat cynically “as a revolutionary
insider, he had had no difficulty obtaining redemption of his debts.” His
wealth at death was £12,015 or more.
The Restoration period did not treat Pride very well. After
death, he was labeled a traitor, and along with other dead regicides, he was to
have his body exhumed and hanged at Tyburn alongside Cromwell, Ireton and
Bradshaw. In pride’s case, this, in fact, did not go ahead because his body
could not be found.
Conclusion
Cromwell’s Buffoon is a fascinating account of Thomas Pride.
Given the sparsity of information, Hodkinson has managed to bring to life a
forgotten participant of the English Revolution. The book combines political,
social and military history. It is hoped that this book gets a wide circulation
and should be on university reading lists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride%27s_Purge
[2]http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22781
[3] http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22781
Interview with Robert Hodkinson-Author of Cromwell’s Buffoon
The book Cromwell’s
Buffoon -The Life and Career of the Regicide Thomas Pride, has just been
released. Helion publishers kindly sent me a review copy. Before the report
comes out, I am publishing a short interview with the Author Robert Hodkinson.
What drew you to the subject of Thomas Pride?
Some years ago I joined the English Civil War re-enactment
group, The Sealed Knot. While researching Thomas Pride with a view to
portraying his soldiers on the battlefield, I was interested to find that there
was very little known about the man, despite the fact that references to
‘Pride’s Purge’ appear in practically every book on the Civil War ever written.
I realised that I had found not only a gap in our knowledge of a famous
seventeenth-century figure but an opportunity to undertake some exciting new
research in the archives. The more my research revealed about Thomas Pride, the
more interesting a figure he became, and I realised I had uncovered the story of
the man whose life could draw together all the threads of Civil War
historiography: social, political, religious and military.
Did Pride have any connection to the Leveller movement?
Thomas Pride had ties with London’s Baptist churches, which
were at the forefront of the independent religious movements of the 1630s.
Baptists shared the Levellers’ ideals of religious liberty and the abolition of
tithes, both of which were espoused by Pride himself in the later 1640s. But
while Pride and the Levellers may have had certain principles in common, and
mutual enemies, the fact that by 1649 Pride was a wealthy and self-interested
London businessman meant that any commonality he may have had with the
Levellers stopped far short of their other political goals, such as the release
of enclosed lands to common ownership.
Would you describe him as a Republican, and how much
connection did he have to the Fifth Monarchists?
As the Fifth Monarchists emerged from among London’s
Baptists, it is not surprising that Thomas Pride had connections to some Fifth
Monarchist men, notably William Goffe, with whom Pride served alongside for the
whole of the Civil Wars and whose signature appears next to Pride’s on Charles
I’s death warrant. But although Thomas Pride was instrumental in bringing about
the execution of Charles I he was not a Republican himself and was a supporter
of Cromwellian government during the 1650s. There were certainly Republican
elements in the regiment he commanded, which emerged in the Overton Plot of 1654
and after Cromwell’s death in 1658. Pride was able to curb his soldiers’
republicanism for most of the 1650s. The fact they supported the Rump
Parliament against Richard Cromwell following their colonel’s death is a
testament to the force of Pride’s command and strength of his personality.
Is there any other research possibilities to further our
knowledge of Pride?
The length of time that this project has run, and the depth
of the research undertaken, means that I feel confident that I have unearthed
all the surviving information that we have on Thomas Pride. One thing that my
research never revealed was the whereabouts of his final resting place, which
appears to have been kept a secret to prevent his remains falling into the
hands of the Royalists. If further research could reveal the site of Thomas
Pride’s burial, both he and I would be very grateful.
What are you working on at the moment?
I don’t think my appetite for researching and discovering
more about the English Civil War will ever be satisfied. At present, I am
working on a new proposal for Helion military history publishers on Fairfax’s
sieges and the New Model Army’s storming of Bristol in 1645.
Lawrence Stone and the Historiography of the Gentry
Contoversy
By Christopher Thompson
The controversy over the economic and social origins of the
English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years
ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper,
Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different
interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the
British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like
Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented
with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the
major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of
the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic
articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in
England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form,
in Chapter 2 of his work, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642,
published in 1972. It is with this account that this note is concerned.
Stone began the earlier version of his essay with a
description of the genesis of the controversy. He found it in R.H.Tawney’s
article on the rise of the gentry between 1558 and 1641 published in 1941.
Tawney had detected important changes in the distribution of landownership in
the period before the English Civil War due to the decline in the fortunes of
old-fashioned landlords and the rise of a new class of gentry able to adopt
modern methods of estate management and to profit thereby. As a result, the
political structure of the country shifted in and after 1640 to accommodate
these economic and social changes. Tawney’s argument was underpinned by
statistics claiming to show a fall in the size of the peerage’s manorial
holdings compared to those of the gentry and a contraction in large manorial
holdings in contrast to a growth in medium-sized manorial holdings. Apparent
confirmation on the decline of the aristocracy was offered by Stone himself in
an article published in 1948 which argued that the late-Elizabethan peerage was
weighed down by debts due to over-spending and on the brink of financial ruin.
Only the largesse of King James VI and I averted aristocratic collapse.
Stone was admirably frank in retrospect in admitting to his
use of extravagant language in this article, to his statistical errors and
failings over his employment of corollary evidence in response to Hugh
Trevor-Roper’s initial criticisms. Nonetheless, he maintained a revised version
of his original position in 1952. This proved the catalyst for Trevor-Roper’s
wider assault on Tawney’s thesis in the following year: according to
Trevor-Roper, the difficulties of the lesser or mere or small gentry were more
characteristic of the pre-Civil War period than the advance of newly-risen
gentry who were able to profit from Court offices, the law and mercantile
monopolies. These lesser gentry constituted the ‘Country party’ whose supporters
overthrew the Caroline regime in 1640, who advocated decentralization, reform
of the law, the reduction of offices, etc., and who were the mainstay of the
Independents in the latter half of the 1640s and in the 1650s. Subsequently,
J.P.Cooper demolished the framework upon which Tawney and Stone had erected
their manorial figures. By then, Stone asserted, the way had been cleared for
the general acceptance of the Trevor-Roper thesis.
In fact, according to Stone, it was not until 1958-1959 that
Trevor-Roper’s arguments were seriously criticised when Christopher Hill and
Perez Zagorin exposed the fragile nature of his assumptions about the lack of
profitability of agriculture for landowners in general, about the Court as a
highway to riches and about religious radicalism as a refuge from economic
decline. There were serious problems too over Trevor-Roper’s analysis of the
Parliamentary politics of the 1640s and identification of the Independents as
the party of the small gentry. J.H.Hexter was equally critical of Tawney and
Trevor-Roper: the former was obsessed by the Marxist theory of the rise of the
bourgeoisie and the latter by economic motives rather than by ideals and
ideology, politics and religion. Hexter preferred and proffered an analysis
based on the decline of the aristocracy in military rather than economic terms,
the assumption of political leadership by the House of Commons instead of the
House of Lords, and the traditional constitutional and religious explanations
for the breakdown of the 1640s.
By the time Hexter’s essay first appeared in 1958, Stone was
engaged in a major study of the aristocratic archives which had become
available since 1945 and which culminated in his book, The Crisis of the
Aristocracy, 1558-1641, published in 1965. He claimed in his discussion of the
social origins of the English Revolution that this book offered a synthesis of
his own and Hexter’s ideas about the problems facing the late-Tudor and
early-Stuart peerage. Stone argued that the aristocracy had lost military
power, landed possessions and prestige: their incomes under Elizabeth had
declined due to conspicuous consumption but recovered under James and Charles
due to royal largesse and rising landed incomes. The King and the Church of
England were nonetheless left dangerously exposed by the crisis in the affairs
of the landed elite after pursuing unpopular constitutional and religious
policies up to 1640. The prior decline of the aristocracy made the upheavals of
that decade possible. He expected criticisms of his arguments in 1965 and
conceded that a range of questions over the fortunes of the gentry would be
raised: the debate would inevitably continue. Seven years later, there had
indeed been criticism but also, in his view, the development of a more sophisticated
view of the causes of the English Revolution.
This account of the historiography of the gentry controversy
looked straightforward enough and attracted no attention in 1965 or 1972.
Lawrence Stone had claimed that the publication of Trevor-Roper’s essay on The
Gentry 1540-1640 in 1953 and of J.P.Cooper’s analysis of the statistics on
manorial holdings produced by Tawney and Stone himself had apparently “cleared
[the way] for general acceptance of the Trevor-Roper thesis.” He had gone on to
maintain that it “was not until 1958 and 1959 that the Trevor-Roper thesis in
turn came under serious criticism” from Hill, Zagorin and Hexter, the latter of
whom was also critical of Tawney. But these arguments were and are
fundamentally at variance with the record.
Take Hill for example. The essay Stone cited was entitled
Recent Interpretations of the Civil War. It had been given as a paper to the
Mid-Wales branch of the Historical Association in January, 1955 and was
published in Volume LXI of History in 1956. It had a number of specific
objections to Trevor-Roper’s categorization of the gentry, to his alleged
elision of the terms “mere”, “lesser” and “declining” gentry, to his belief
that it was the Crown rather than the peasantry from whom rising gentlemen
secured their gains and so on. This essay was reproduced in Hill’s volume of
essays entitled Puritanism and Revolution published in 1958. In Zagorin’s case,
he had published a paper in the Journal of World History in 1955 entitled ‘The
English Revolution 1640-1660’ in which he took the view that Trevor-Roper’s
criticisms of Tawney and Stone remained to be substantiated and that it was
unlikely that the revolution could be regarded as rising of the excluded “mere
gentry.”A year later, in 1956, Zagorin gave the paper entitled ‘The Social
Interpretation of the English Revolution’ at the meeting of the American
Historical Association: an enlarged version of his text expressing his
objections to Trevor-Roper’s arguments appeared in the Journal of Economic
History and is noted in Stone’s bibliography in 1965.
It was incidentally at this AHA meeting that Hexter’s essay,
Storm over the Gentry, was given its first outing. Furthermore, when Past and
Present organised a conference on seventeenth-century revolutions in London in
July, 1957, the consensus of historians present was, according to Eric
Hobsbawm, “unfavourable to Prof. Trevor-Roper’s views that they [the gentry]
represented a declining class”, a verdict endorsed as far as this meeting was
concerned by J.H.Elliott many years later. J.H.Hexter’s famous essay in
Encounter in 1958 was, as those who read it in its original version or in the
longer 1961 version, more hostile to Tawney and Stone and comparatively benign
in its analysis of Trevor-Roper’s case. Conscripting Hexter to the ranks of the
latter’s critics is a difficult exercise to perform. It was, in any case,
simply not true to argue that there was a delay until 1958-1959 until
Trevor-Roper’s arguments came under critical scrutiny. On the contrary, there
had been serious, perhaps partially-organised, scepticism expressed well before
then.
Why did Stone offer this clearly erroneous account? There
are two possibilities. Either he had forgotten the facts and thus misled
himself and his readers. This seems unlikely, prima facie. Alternatively, this
exercise may have been undertaken deliberately. There is some evidence to
support the latter explanation. In the spring of 1964, Hexter invited Stone to
give a lecture at Washington University in St Louis “undoubtedly [as] some sort
of peace-offering to one of the many victims of his scalding wit” according to
John M.Murrin, then a colleague of Hexter and later of Stone at Princeton. Both
the invitation and the lecture were a success.
But whereas, in 1958, Stone had regarded Hexter’s views on
the military decline of the aristocracy as inadequate in explaining the
peerage’s problems in the 1640s, by 1965, Stone was prepared to claim that The
Crisis “developed a new interpretation, an amalgam of some of my earlier ideas
and those of J.H.Hexter.” What contribution Hexter had made to this new
synthesis is difficult to detect since he was mentioned only once in the text –
and not at all in the chapter on Power – and only twice in its footnotes. There
is really no positive evidence for Hexter’s influence on Stone’s opus. But a
rapprochement had occurred. When Hexter published his review of The Crisis in
the Journal of British Studies in 1968, his critical faculties so evident a
decade before had been largely suspended and his overall verdict was laudatory.
Hexter had become a “friend” of Stone as Murrin explained in the festschrift to
mark Stone’s retirement and contributed to the volume of essays marking
Hexter’s own retirement.
Was Stone ignorant about the course of the ‘gentry controversy’
between 1953 and 1958 or 1959? Given his direct participation in it, this
appears highly unlikely. On balance, the erroneous account he offered in 1965
and again in 1972 and the unsubstantiated deference to Hexter seem to owe more
to a desire to placate and neutralise a potentially serious critic and to
recruit him to Stone’s camp. If this is a tenable line of argument, it
illustrates Stone’s failings as an historian in a particularly revealing way.
The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642 – By Lawrence
Stone – Foreword by Clare Jackson – Routledge-202 pages – 2017.
“A battleground which
has been heavily fought over…beset with mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned
by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.”
Lawrence Stone
“An erring colleague is not an Amalekite to be smitten hip
and thigh.’
R H Tawney
Lawrence Stone first published his book The Causes of the
English Revolution 1529-1642 in 1972. The book provoked significant controversy
and was subjected to some hostile reviews from mainly conservative revisionist
historians. It is safe to say that Routledge’s new publication as part of their
Classics series will not cause the same vitriol. Stone who died in 1999 has
become something of a forgotten historian. This new publication should at least
elicit a reappraisal of his work.
Stone was optimistic about this book. “The moment seems
right, therefore to stand back and try to see the forest rather than the
individual trees[1].” Stone recognised that the area of history he was writing
about had been fought over many times. He famously described the history of the
17th century as ‘a battleground which has been heavily fought over…beset with
mines, booby-traps, and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight
every inch of the way.’
Lawrence Stone was many things to many people. To some, he
was a Marxist historian, to others a social historian or as he in later in life
called himself an “an old-fashioned Whig.” While it is true that he seemed to
shift his position to fit in with ever-changing historiography, he was
nonetheless a first-rate historian “making sure that history is never
boring.”History and for that matter, politics were not dull when he published
this book. From 1968-1975 the world witnessed wave after wave of crises and
revolutionary upheavals. The early seventies saw the collapse of the Bretton
Woods system on August 15, 1971. President Nixon suspended the convertibility
of the dollar into gold. In the aftermath of August 1971, world capitalism
became increasingly susceptible to destabilising shocks. The crisis was in the
words of one writer was ‘the culmination of the process of disequilibrium that
had been under way for the previous 37 years. I would like to say that Stone’s
book reflected those times but that would not be the case. When Stone wrote
this book, he had long ago abandoned any pretence of being close to a Marxist
position on the English revolution.
Storm Over the Gentry
Even from a brief look at Stone’s career, the Storm over the
Gentry debate had a profound effect on how he interpreted historical events.
Stone’s original theory to explain the English Revolution was that the
aristocracy was on the verge of bankruptcy. Which was not a bad theory however
it rested upon “hastily gathered and imperfectly understood the evidence.” It
received criticism “for its use of sociological jargon.” In 1948 he wrote the
article “The Anatomy of the Elizabethan Aristocracy.” that argued that
revolution was the product of the rise of the gentry and decline of the
aristocracy. A similar position to that of R.H. Tawney in 1941. Unlike Tawney
Stone made some methodological mistakes which were jumped upon by Hugh
Trevor-Roper and Christopher Thompson[2].
Thompson would say of Stone “he was not, in the strict
sense, a scholar at all and was perfectly prepared to lie about his critics. It
is no surprise that both have ceased to be relevant to the historiography of
the early modern period[3].” It must be said that the criticism was out of
proportion to Stone’s purported crime and was politically motivated. The Storm
over the Gentry debate exposed more importantly that a significant group of
historians was prepared to take on any historian who even remotely espoused
Marxist historiography.
It was Stone’s misfortune that fell under the influence of R
H Tawney in 1947 and was labelled a liberal historian. This was widely
inaccurate but served the purpose of some right-wing conservative historians.
Stone met Tawney during the war. Tawney was the leading social historian of
Tudor and Stuart England. It was during this period they discussed research
projects. According to the National Oxford Biography of Stone “His impatience
to get on with ‘real’ history earned him a reputation for arrogance during his
post-war undergraduate year; on one occasion he stormed out of a revision class
conducted by a newly appointed Christ Church tutor, Hugh Trevor-Roper.Roper
never forgave him for this [4].“
Roper was also apparently angry that after he had given
Stone the transcripts from the Recognisances for Debt in the Public Record
Office in Chancery Lane Stone used, without Trevor-Roper’s advance knowledge or
permission, in his 1948 article in The Economic History Review. It was this
action – this “act of thievery” as Menna Prestwich described it – that provoked
Trevor-Roper’s strong language in his immediate response.While these two
incidents may have turned up the heat they did not cause the Fire. Political
motivations were involved, and the debate was fought along class lines. Stone
had a major problem in that he never really understood the difference between
genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic determinism. He also never really
grasped the political nature of the conservative historian’s attack.
Stone never really deepened the reader’s knowledge of the
political persuasion of Roper or other historians such as J H Hexter who Stone
describes as a Liberal. Hexter’s close links along with Roper to the American
Encounter magazine which had close ties to the CIA could have been exposed to
Stone.In the 1950s Hugh Trevor-Roper went to a conference in Berlin which was
mostly made up of anti-communist. Among the other guests were Stalinist
intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur
Koestler.The conclusion of the conference was the founding of the Congress for
Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter. Trevor-Roper wrote extensively for
the magazine Encounter, is it any wonder that Stone who was mistakenly
described as a Marxist historian would feel the brunt of Roper’s tongue.
The Cause of the English Revolution
The writing of the Cause of the English Revolution confirmed
that that Stone had abandoned any link to a Marxist analysis of the English
Revolution. Despite Stone’s shift to a more conservative historiography, the
Causes of the English Revolution is nonetheless an enjoyable read at over 177
pages.As Stone explains his take on the revolution; to concentrate upon
Clarendon’s ‘Great Rebellion’ or Miss Wedgwood’s ‘Civil War’ is to miss the
essential problem. The outbreak of war itself is relatively easy to explain;
what is hard is to puzzle out why most of the established institutions of State
and Church – Crown, Court, central administration, army, and episcopacy –
collapsed so ignominiously two years before”.
The book divided into two parts with four chapters; the last
is an update on Stone’s previous position written in 1985. Part one is titled
Historiography Subtitled Theories of revolution. Stone’s use of sociological
jargon can be off-putting at first. Stone cites his students questioning of the
Marxist explanation of the English civil as his reasoning behind the book. His
students attacked the Marxist interpretation of the Civil War.According to
Robert Darnton “When Lawrence Stone arrived in Princeton and unpacked his
intellectual baggage, he released a fresh set of ideas, which are still buzzing
in the air, not merely here but everywhere in the country. Is it any wonder
that Stone does not do a magnificent job of defending Marx and Engel’s
historical materialism?.Stone never really understood the political nature of
the attacks upon him. Outside of academia, Stone was always seen as a Marxist
historian even when his later work had no connection with Marxist
historiography.
This did not stop the attacks on Stone. Even as late as 1985
Stone was on the receiving end of a bitter and unprovoked attack in the pages
of the Conservative Arts Magazine The New Criterion. Under the headline,
Lawrence Stone, and Marxism, Norman Cantor, a New York University historian, In
the June issue asserts “Stone was—and is—an English Marxist.” He implies that
Lawrence Stone used his “extensive patronage powers” as director of the Shelby
Cullom Davis Centre at Princeton University to promote Marxism.
Cantor was answered not by Stone but by Robert Darnton who
wrote “I find those statements distressing. I have known Lawrence Stone for
seventeen years and consider him an old-fashioned liberal. Although he is a
great admirer of Tawney’s, he is not and never being a Marxist. He is indeed
the director of the Davis Centre, but he does not rule over it with absolute or
even partial sovereignty. A committee, of which I have twice been a member,
makes every decision on the election of fellows and the selection of seminar
topics. The history department approves those decisions and passes on the
Centre’s budget. And aside from its mode of operation, the Centre has never
favoured Marxism or any of the other ideologies that Cantor names. His way of
calling names strikes me less as a defence of liberalism than as a revival of
McCarthyism. It discredits him and the liberalism he purports to defend. I
think he should make a public apology.
Cantor did not and in fact reiterated his previous charge “I
did say that Stone was and is an English Marxist and I do not retract this
statement. On the contrary, I confirm it. Stone’s first publication, in 1948,
was an article in support of a thesis propounded in 1940 by the famous Marxist
historian, R. H. Tawney. This thesis attributed the cause of the English Civil
War of the 1640s to class conflict, to the “rise of the [bourgeois] gentry.”
Stone explicitly supported Tawney’s Marxist model: “Confronted with the rise of
the gentry, merchants, and lawyers, a new class whose political aspirations and
whose views on foreign policy differed fundamentally from those of the
aristocracy, the hold of the latter upon the springs of political power were
bound to be loosened.” Lest it is thought that this was a juvenile work that
Stone later repudiated, we find him even in 1985 still insisting the Tawney
class-conflict rise of the gentry thesis “to be largely true.” One of the
amazing things about Stone’s career as a historian has been the remarkable
consistency of his devotion to Tawney, the leading English Marxist scholar of
the first half of the twentieth century. In 1965 Stone published a very long
volume on the crisis of the English aristocracy in the seventeenth century.
Here the Marxist model tricked out with various social and cultural aspects,
was repeated, except that the emphasis was now on the aristocracy falling to
make way for the gentry. In a book, I published in 1968—The English: A History
of Politics and Society to 1760—I pointed out that this was essentially a
variant of the same tired Marxist Tawney model of the origins of the English
Civil War.[5]
Stone did not answer this mean spirited and anti-communist
attack. The problem is that with all these hostile attacks on Stone is that not
only has his reputation has been dragged through the mud but that revisionist
and in some cases anti-communist historians have not been answered and
refuted.Despite having political differences with Stone, I agree with David
Cannadine when he said “Lawrence Stone belonged to a remarkable generation of
British historians who dominated and defined their subject for nearly half a
century, and which included Christopher Hill, G.R. Elton, Asa Briggs, J.H.
Plumb, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson. They all wrote widely and well, and
reached a large audience in universities and far beyond. But in many ways,
Stone was the most creative – and the most controversial – of them all.”For
Christopher Hill echoed those sentiments when he wrote “Lawrence Stone’s deep curiosity,
his enthusiastic if critical appreciation of what is novel, and his courteous
and tolerant if a trenchant statement of disagreements makes him and a good
reviewer. He has a gift for summing up epigrammatically what most of us would
say in several laborious pages”.
[1] The Causes of the English Revolution- 1529-1642: By
Lawrence Stone-A Book Review- James Capps
[2]
See-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/christopher-thompson-on-lawrence-stone.html
[3] A Comment on Goldman on Tawney, Stone, and
Trevor-Roper-C Thompson
[4] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography-
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/72453
[5] Lawrence Stone and
Marxism-http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Lawrence-Stone-and-Marxism-6637
The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart
England (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History)
Matthew Neufeld 2013.
It is evident from
Mathew Neufeld’s book The Civil Wars after 1660 that the English bourgeoisie
and aristocracy during the latter part of the 17th century did not look back at
the English revolution of the 1640s with any fondness.Neufeld does not believe
that a bourgeois revolution took place in the 1640s, but his book does provide
us with an insight into the thinking of the Restoration bourgeoisie about this
momentous event in the British and international history.From a historical and
political standpoint, the restoration of the British Monarchy in 1660 was seen
as a Glorious and peaceful Revolution, unlike the English revolution which was
considered “nasty, brutish and short”. The book is beautifully illustrated as
you would expect from a Boydell publication. Neufeld clearly spent a lot of
time in the archives and used published histories, memoirs, petitions, and
sermons to significant effect.
Neufeld’s book published in 2013 was part of a growing
academic and general interest in the Restoration period. For scholars, this is
a fascinating time especially when archives covering the period are beginning
to be digitised. One example of this is the Inventory of Puritan and Dissenting
Records, 1640–1714, by Mark Burden, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel
Halcomb (2016)[1]However, despite the plethora of books on or around the
restoration period and an increase in interest from historians Neufeld’s book
is the only full-length study on the topic since Blair Worden’s Roundhead
Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (2001).
The book is divided into six chapters each of which outlines
the lengths the bourgeoisie and aristocracy went to forget the English
revolution. As Neufeld points out, the purpose was to prevent a real revolution
breaking out during the restoration. Much of the propaganda produced during the
Restoration was aimed at blaming Puritanism for the Revolution. The Monarchy
was absolved from any wrong doing. The thing that strikes one when reading this
book is the extent of rewriting history to suit political ends.According to
Robert D. Cornwall “There were efforts both to forget the English Civil War and
the Interregnum as an aberration and the need to remember to prevent something
like this happening again. With monarchy and episcopacy linked, much of the
work of remembering was designed to make sure that the Puritan impulse that was
often blamed for the Wars and Interregnum be kept at bay”.
What lay behind this blaming of Puritanism for the
revolution was the need during the late Stuart period to justify the
Restoration settlements. Anyone who disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy was
labelled a dissenter and punished accordingly. The restoration time was an
extremely volatile political and social situation.As Lloyd Bowen points out
“the king’s preferred medicine was a kind of official amnesia, articulated
first in the Declaration of Breda and then enshrined in the Act of Indemnity
and Oblivion. Passed by the Convention Parliament in 1660, the Act’s stated desire
was to ‘bury all seeds of future discords’ by wiping the slate clean, outlawing
even ‘terms of distinction [and] … words of reproach any way tending to revive
the memory of the late differences’. But this public face of oblivion and
toleration failed to endure in the face of the profound religious and political
tensions which remained after the devastating civil war.
The government subsequently put in place an apparatus of
religious discrimination and persecution which helped rapidly undermine the
broad coalition of support which had brought about the ‘miracle’ of Oak Apple
Day 1660”[2]. As Neufeld states, the bourgeoisie went to great lengths to wipe
out the memory of the English revolution. The high point of this amnesia was
The Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660[3].As Neufeld points this act has a
contemporary feel with “post-conflict reconciliation” seen in South Africa and
Northern Ireland, but perhaps, most importantly, was the Spanish bourgeoisie’s
attempt post-Franco to forget the Spanish Civil War.The Pact of Forgetting
according to Alberto Reig Tapia was “In practice, this presupposed suppressing
painful memories derived from the dictatorship’s division of the population
into ‘victors’ and ‘vanquished[4]’.
Critique
While Neufeld’s book, on the whole, has been well received
one writer accused it of being Anglo-centric. Lloyd Bowen says that “while it
is true that calls for a more ‘British’ perspective in early modern histories
can be rather trite genuflections towards de rigueur historiographical fashions,
and while it is equally true that scholars can only do so much and that
England’s story deserves its star billing, there is nevertheless a serious
point to be raised in a study of the public remembering of the civil wars that
does not have an index entry for ‘Ireland’. He continues “The harrowing
memories of 1641, or of Drogheda, surely had their place in the public
consciousness of the period, while Scotland’s rather cursory treatment in a
period that witnessed the Act of Union also requires rather more justification
and discussion than it receives”[5].
Perhaps another criticism and a more serious one at that has
been Neufeld’s failure to examine class relations during the later part of the
17th century. The conflict between the Whigs and the Tories is not seriously
considered. I am not saying that every historian has to take on board vast
swathes of Marxist writing, but a use of Karl Marx’s book on the subject would
not have gone amiss.
Perhaps this one from Capital “The “Glorious Revolution”
brought into power, along with William of Orange, the landlord and capitalist
appropriators of surplus-value. They inaugurated the new era by practising on a
colossal scale thefts of state lands, thefts that had been hitherto managed
more modestly. These estates were given away, sold at a ridiculous figure, or
even annexed to private estates by direct seizure. All this happened without
the slightest observation of legal etiquette. The Crown lands thus fraudulently
appropriated, together with the robbery of the Church estates, as far as these
had not been lost again during the Republican revolution, form the basis of the
today princely domains of the English oligarchy. The bourgeois capitalists
favoured the operation with the view, among others, to promoting free trade in
land, to extending the domain of modern agriculture on the large farm system,
and to increasing their supply of the free agricultural proletarians ready to
hand. Besides, the new landed aristocracy was the natural ally of the new
bankocracy, of the newly-hatched haute finance, and of the large manufacturers,
then depending on protective duties. The English bourgeoisie acted for its own
interest quite as wisely as did the Swedish bourgeoisie who, reversing the
process, hand in hand with their economic allies, the peasantry, helped the
Kings in the forcible resumption of the Crown lands from the oligarchy. This
happened since 1604 under Charles X. and Charles XI[6].
Memoirs
As was mentioned earlier Neufeld must have spent a
significant amount of time in the archives. His book uses three main pieces of
literature. 1. Ludlow’s Memoirs (1698 – 9) 2. Thomas Carlyle’s edition of
Oliver Cromwell’s letters and speeches (1845); 3. S. R. Gardiners histories
(1893). The first chapter covers the years 1660 -1673. Neufeld outlines the use
of officially written records which on the whole tend to blame the Puritans for
the outbreak of the civil war. Chapter two examines the relief petitions of
injured soldiers alongside the memoirs of Sir Hugh Cholmley and Richard Atkins.
Neufeld uses these two sources to “‘vindicate their sense of personal identity”
(p. 56).Chapters 3 and 4 takes a different tack in that they examine how
historical writings of the civil war began to change. Neufeld detects a slight
shift away from the Whig-dominated historiography to what has been called
‘historical parallelism’ (p. 105). Chapter five examines John Walker’s the
Sufferings of the Clergy during the Grand Rebellion (1714). Chapter six
concentrates on printed sermons. Neufeld’s again links these histories with the
changing political landscape of the late 17th and early 18th century.
Historiography
Like much of modern historiography this book was difficult
to place. Firstly, the use of memory is always fraught with danger especially
when examining the English revolution. Neufeld’s historiographical approach has
been labelled by one writer as a ‘presentism’ perspective, whereby memory of
the past is constructed and reconstructed to suit the current interests of
ruling elites. Neufeld is not Marxist, but this approach does owe a small debt
to Marxism.Secondly, much of the history of this period has been dominated by
Whig historians, as Ann Talbot explains “the Whig interpretation of history had
deep roots in the consciousness of the British political class. The visitor to
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire can still see in the great entrance hall a
fireplace inscribed with the legend “1688 The year of our liberty.” It refers
to the “Glorious Revolution” when James II quit his throne and his kingdom
overnight, and William of Orange was installed as king. This was the kind of
palace revolution that the British ruling class increasingly preferred to look
back on rather than the revolution in the 1640s when they had executed the
king, conveniently overlooking the fact that James would not have run if he had
not remembered the fate of his father—Charles I”.
Neufeld’s book is part of a growing debate amongst
historians about this period. A new generation of revisionist academics is
asking new questions. One such question is did the restoration period represent
a watershed in the political, cultural, and social of English history.John
Morrill in his book After the Civil Wars (2000) answered in the negative saying
that “one unfortunate side-effect of decades of searching for the holy grail of
‘the causes of the civil war’ in the century before 1640, and the assumption that
nothing could be the same afterwards, has been to create an almost impermeable
barrier between the periods before and after 1660”.
Another side of the debate has been to downplay the
historical significance of this period. Unfortunately, much of this has been
dominated by left-leaning historians such as Christopher Hill. In fact, one of
his earliest works was “The myth of the “Glorious Revolution” elaborated in
Hill’s first published article, which appeared in the Communist International
under the pseudonym E.C. Gore in 1937.Hill downplayed the significance of the
restoration period “ some would say that Hill’s work has had the effect of
downplaying the importance of the Restoration period, since he sees the
Glorious Revolution as a mere footnote to the more important structural
revolution of the mid-century, with the years after 1660 being for the radicals
a period of disillusionment and introspection brought on by the experience of
defeat.”
Conclusion
Neufeld’s book is an excellent piece of history writing.The
book is a backhanded and unconscious compliment to the Marxist analysis of the
restoration period.It is hoped that the book reaches a wide readership
especially those interested social, cultural, and political histories. For
scholars working in memory studies, this is a goldmine.As Neufeld puts it in
his conclusion: “The Restoration was a kind of revolution, attended with a
dramatic change of regime with long-lasting political, social, and
ecclesiastical consequences” (p. 246). Although not the last word on the
subject, it is hoped that it stimulates a new debate on the subject.
[1]
http://www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk/online-publications/dissenting-records/
[2] Dr Lloyd Bowen, review of The Civil Wars after 1660:
Public Remembering in Late Stuart England, (review no. 1502)
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1502
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indemnity_and_Oblivion_Act
[4] Alberto Reig Tapia, Memoria de la guerra civil, Madrid
1999, quoted in The Splintering of Spain, p.9, Cambridge University Press, 2005
[5] Dr Lloyd Bowen, review of The Civil Wars after 1660:
Public Remembering in Late Stuart England, (review no. 1502)
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1502
[6] Karl Marx. Capital Volume One-Chapter Twenty-Seven:
Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the
Land-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs: The Entring Book,
1677-1691 – Mark Goldie Boydell Press 2016
“Pepys’s ebullience
matched the heady early years of the restored monarchy under King Charles II.
But Morrice describes the dark days of political crisis, show trials, religious
persecution, and the fear of ‘popery and arbitrary power’ that gripped the
nation in the 1680s, and culminated in the second overthrow of Stuart
monarchy,”
Dr Mark Goldie.
‘If Samuel Pepys’s is the best-known diary in English
history, then Roger Morrice’s is perhaps the least known”.
Given the wealth of material and the insight this book
provides into the political life of the second half of the 17th century, it is
very strange that the work of Roger Morrice is not that well known or that his
fame is not that of Samuel Pepys.This book should go some way to rectify this
anomaly. It has has been adapted, with a new substantial introduction and
updated bibliography, from the first volume of the Entring Book of Roger
Morrice. If you look at the task involved, then it is not that difficult to
understand why this great diary laid dormant and virtually untouched.
While some historians have known of Morrice’s work for years
it was unknown to the wider public and getting it to a wider audience took
seven years, the original target was five. It has made the collaboration of six
leading international academics to bring these stories to life. The research
team, led by Mark Goldie, of Cambridge University, has worked through 1,500
pages, which amounts to nearly one million words of 17th-century English. It
includes 40,000 words written in an old shorthand, all of which had to be
decoded by a specialist.The collection has a 319-page introduction by Mark
Goldie and 250 pages of appendices. There have been two previous attempts to
publish a full transcript. But a project of this size could have only come
about with the development of computers.
As John Morrill said “even with these advantages its
completion required the tireless work of six major scholars (or seven if we
include Frances Henderson, who teased out the shorthand passage and a large
number of “postdoctoral galley slaves transcribing and editing”.Morrice clearly
understood he was writing in dangerous times and used shorthand to disguise
what he was writing. He also knew that if caught he would be accused of
sedition. He would disguise some of the names of people he was writing on.
Who Was Roger Morrice
To answer this question as Mark Goldie found out is a
difficult one. A swift look at Mark Goldie’s biography of Morrice for the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography(ODNB)will not tell you very much. Given
the huge amount, he wrote of other people, this is a contradiction, to say the
least.We do not have an accurate birth date 1628/9 is as close as we can get,
he died in 1702. From a class standpoint, he was probably from the yeomanry. At
birth, he was a registered as ‘plebeian’.A young man when the English
revolution took place. We know little about his attitude towards it. He studied
at Magdalen Hall, Oxford in the early 1650s. At St Catharine’s College,
Cambridge, in 1654 he graduated BA in 1656 and proceeded to get an MA in 1659.
Later in life, he became closely connected with a large
number of Puritan elites who had taken part in the English Civil War. He
friendly with the likes of Baron Holles of Ifield and the eminent lawyer Sir
John Maynard. Both were parliamentarian veterans of Puritan persuasion.Morrice
started writing at a dangerous time, and his personal experiences certainly
shaped his writing. It was really in London where Morrice became what today
would be an investigative journalist. He would frequent coffee houses which
unlike today were hotbeds of political gossip. His notes would have been done
in his secret handwriting to avoid being caught.
According to Goldie “Like all journalists, Morrice needed
good sources, and he was lucky to have a very leaky secretary on the privy
council called Richard Collings,”.Morrice became a commentator and collector of
manuscripts. As a by-product of his journalism, he became well connected in
Presbyterian circles. It was rumoured that he was supplying newsletters to a
group of Presbyterian Whig politicians.So trusted politically he was given
responsibility for the distribution of the will of Richard Baxter. He also was
responsible, for distributing Baxter’s library and publishing future works. A
young John Toland was the eager recipient of some of Baxter’s library.
Morrice was clearly very conscious of what he was doing in
aiding the Puritan cause so much so that he wanted to write a history of
Puritanism and even and even drafted an outline in the 1690s.Politically
Morrice was a conservative Puritan and was not afraid to publish his thoughts
in the in the ‘Ent’ring book’ he hated what he called the ‘hierarchists’ and
‘fanatics’, While applauding the ‘sober churchmen’ and ‘old Puritans’. He was
also scared of the London Mobs.In a diary entry dated December 1688 he states
“The Mob was up in most parts of the Town all Tuesday night and committed many
tumultuous insolencies, and made an invasion upon Liberty and Property to the
great grief of all Wise men, and to the great Scandall of the City. They
gathered together in the evening about most of the known Masshouses in Town
(the Ambassadors Chappells that were open and publick not escaping) and
particularly about the Masshouse in Lyncolns Inn Fields. They tooke out of
those Mass-Chappells all the furniture, Utensills, and combustable materialls
and brought them into the Streete and there burnt them. They have since pulled
down, burnt and carryed away all the Timber in most of them and the Girders and
Joysts. They were pulling up the ground Joysts on Tuesday night about midnight
and multitudes were carrying away Bricks in baskets so that they have left
scarce any thing but the bare Walls. They have seized upon and exposed to
Rapine all the rich furniture and Plate in the Spanish Ambassadors house, and
the Treasures of severall Papists that were deposited with him.”
It is evident from Morrice’s diary that Puritanism was not
dead and buried during the latter half of the 17th century.Puritans according
to one writer “worked through parliament, the royal court, and the households
of gentry, merchants, lawyers, and clergy. Setting out to galvanise civil
society, they mobilised public opinion, organised electorates, and deployed the
arts of journalism, influence, and persuasion”.Morrice’s diary began 1677 and
ended in 1691 During that time he wrote about the reigns the reigns of Charles
II, James II, and William III and Mary II. Despite what some historians have
written this England and to be more precise the English bourgeoisie was in a
constant state of crisis. Much of what we know about this period has been
dominated by the Whig interpretation of history which as deep roots in the
consciousness of the British political class.
As Ann Talbot states “The visitor to Chatsworth House in
Derbyshire can still see in the grand entrance hall a fireplace inscribed with
the legend “1688 The year of our liberty.” It refers to the “Glorious
Revolution” when James II quit his throne and his kingdom overnight, and
William of Orange was installed as king. This was the kind of palace revolution
that the British ruling class increasingly preferred to look back on rather
than the revolution in the 1640s when they had executed the king, conveniently
overlooking the fact that James would not have run if he had not remembered the
fate of his father—Charles I[1].
Morrice lived in this period political and social reaction.
On the continent, absolutist monarchies were securing their powerful grip on
trade.The English ruling class did not want to return to the instability of the
English revolution and sought a period of political and social stability to
achieve economic growth to compete with its rival mercantile powers. From 1660
to 1688 they tried to reach a political compromise that would at once secure
them the gains of the revolution while establishing a stable form of
government.Morrice documented any threat to this stability In the diary, he
wrote of the persecution of those he were a danger to the ruling elite, their
laws and their established Church, such as the Quakers and Puritans, “Eleven
young men and women were seized at a chapel and convicted, fined and jailed,
where they are put to hard labour,” he wrote “The government has violated the
fundamental laws of the kingdom and advanced arbitrary power and infringed liberty
and property… and judges convict offenders… without any trial by juries,” he
wrote on January 23, 1679.
He described suspects being tortured for plotting against
the king, on October 16, 1684, one victim was to “keep him from sleeping, which
they did without intermission for nine or 10 days. When he was ready to die …
the balls of his eyes swollen as big as tennis balls … they tormented him by
the thumbs”.
Conclusion
“It is a huge source of material that will play a very
significant role in helping historians and students understand the period,” “It
shows England in a very different mood to the Pepys diary, which was
celebrating getting rid of the Puritans.” Goldie is correct, and he and his
team have done a tremendous service to make the study of this period easier and
more rewarding.It would be a mistake, however, to just see Morrice’s work as a
historical relic or curiosity they have a contemporary ring to them. A serious
study of them will give the dedicated reader a deeper insight into the problems
we face today. The Entring Book should help us to ask questions about nature of
modern day communication and who controls the information. To what extent does
gossip, rumour and the advent of fake news guide our political views. If
Morrice were alive today, he would have a field day
[1] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill By Ann Talbot
A review of Brian Manning, The Far Left in the English
Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks, 1999), £7.95
“The object of this article is to suggest an interpretation
of the events of the 17th century different from that which most of us were
taught at school… This interpretation is that the English Revolution of 1640-60
was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789.’ “
Christopher Hill’s essay on the English Revolution published
in 1940.
Brian Manning, alongside Christopher Hill, is mostly
identified with the conception that England witnessed a bourgeois revolution in
the middle part of the seventeenth century. Manning wrote most of the books
under conditions of an unrelenting attack on the concept of a bourgeois
revolution.
Most of this difficulty came working inside university
history departments that were extremely hostile to any Marxist
historiography.Manning did most of the work as a member of the Socialist
Workers Party (SWP). His chosen party favoured the genre “people’s history” or”
history from below. This genre was not a product of Marxism but that of
Stalinism. As Ann Talbot succinctly puts it “the Communist Party sponsored a
form of “People’s History, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History
of England in which the class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and
popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national
revolutionary tradition.
This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the
bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an
unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the
fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical
foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working
class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a
democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill
was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and Eric Hobsbawm, who
were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of
Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr”.[1]
Whether Manning chose the title of his book is not
important, it reflected his newfound co-thinkers in the SWP. The use of the
term Far Left is a contentious one. No other historian including Hill used the
term.Despite Norah Carlin saying that Hill did not leave behind a group of
like-minded Marxist thinkers, Manning was deeply influenced by his former
teacher. A student of Hill in the l in the early 1950s wrote “The undoubted
dominance of Christopher Hill in the history of the English Revolution may be
attributed to his prolific record of books and articles, and his continuous
engagement in a debate with other historians; to the breadth of his learning,
embracing the history of literature, the law, science, as well as religion and
economics; to the fact that his work set the agenda and the standard to which
all historians of the period had to address themselves, whether in support of
or opposition to his methods and interpretations; but above all, to the
inspiration he drew from Marxism. The English Revolution took place in a
culture dominated by religious ideas and religious language, and Christopher
Hill recognised that he had to uncover the social context of religion to find
the key to understanding the English Revolution, and as a Marxist to ascertain
the interrelationships between the intellectual and social aspects of the
period”.[2]
Being influenced by Hill certainly made Manning a better
historian. By all accounts, he was a very good teacher who “urged his students
not to take notes, but to listen and think.” The SWP was his political home,
but he had other namely the Communist Party with its adoption of the genre
“People’s History”. According to Jim Holstun, “Manning’s work puts English
workers at the very centre of the English Revolution as innovative political
actors and theorists in their own right. His approach contrasts strongly with
the usual somnambulistic turn to the ruling class initiative and frequently inverts
its causal sequence”.[3]
One consistency throughout his life was a tendency good or
bad not to criticise is adopted home whether on the board of the magazine Past
and Present, which was heavily dominated by the Communist Party and its
historians. Or in the SWP. The SWP’s theoretical approach to history has
“economist”. Despite a thin veneer of Marxism, The SWP has an opportunist
approach to historical events as Leon Trotsky pointed out “One of the
psychological sources of opportunism is superficial impatience, the lack of
confidence in the gradual growth of the party’s influence, the desire to win
the masses with the aid of an organisational manoeuvre or personal diplomacy.
Out of this springs the policy of combinations behind the scenes, the policy of
silence, of hushing up, of self-renunciation, of adaptation to the ideas and
slogans of others; and finally, the complete passage to the positions of
opportunism.” (Marxism and the Trade Unions, New Park, p. 74)
Manning’s tendency in glorifying certain spontaneous
movements of the radical groups during the English revolution slotted in nicely
with the SWP’s mantra of fighting for the English revolution”. Suffice to say
this is not an orthodox Marxist approach to historical questions.While
professing to have a historical materialist approach to the study history,
their adoption of the history from below genre would suggest otherwise. Their
attitude towards developing Marxism in the working class is best summed by a
historian former member Neil Faulkner who wrote “Since 2010, I have formed many
new and rewarding political friendships, and these have contributed, I believe,
to a richer, more nuanced understanding of the Russian Revolution. Not least,
the degeneration of the British Left over the last two or three decades- which
is a generic process, not something restricted to the SWP-has given me a
clearer understanding that the masses build revolutionary parties themselves in
a struggle; that is, they do not arise from voluntarism, from acts of will by
self-appointed revolutionary ‘vanguards’; they do not arise from what has
sometimes has been called ‘the primitive accumulation of cadre. Revolutionaries
should organise, but they should never proclaim themselves to be the party”.[4]
That this kind of glorification of spontaneity was tolerated
inside a party that professed to Marxist was truly unbelievable. The SWP, while
paying lip service to the Marxist theory of history, would maintain an
“enthusiasm for the English Revolution”. As Alex Calinicos would say “there was
a plan in 1994, as far as I remember never executed, to take a minibus to the
battlefield of Naseby to gloat over the destruction of Stuart power by the New
Model Army 350 years earlier”.[5]Not a serious approach to history never mind
politics. In all my time writing history, I have never come across someone who
would contemplate taking sides with one section of the petty bourgeoisie’s
destruction of the Monarchy.
Of a far more serious problem was the SWP’s refusal to
challenge Manning’s attitude towards Cromwell. As Calinicos recalls “I remember
him saying that he had never cared for Oliver Cromwell, who reminded him of
Stalin. This statement would not look out of place amongst the more
conservative historians who have also compared Cromwell to Stalin.Again this is
not a Marxist approach towards Oliver Cromwell. As the Marxist Leon Trotsky
wrote “The editor of the Daily Herald recently expressed his doubts as to
whether Oliver Cromwell could be called a ‘pioneer of the labour movement’. One
of the newspapers. Collaborators supported the editor’s doubts and referred to
the severe repressions that Cromwell conducted against the Levellers, the sect
of equalitarian of that time (communists). These reflections and questions are
extremely typical of the historical thinking of the leaders of the Labour
Party. That Oliver Cromwell was a pioneer of bourgeois and not socialist
society there would appear to be no need to waste more than two words in
proving. The great revolutionary bourgeois was against universal suffrage for
he saw in it a danger to private property.
It is relevant to note that the Webbs draw from this the
conclusion of the ‘incompatibility’ of democracy and capitalism while closing
their eyes to the fact that capitalism has learnt to live on the best possible
terms with democracy and to have taken control of the instrument of universal
suffrage as an instrument of the stock exchange. [It is curious that, two
centuries later, in 1842 in fact, the historian Macaulay as an M.P. protested
universal suffrage for the very same reasons as Cromwell. — L. D.T.]
Nevertheless, British workers can learn incomparably more from Cromwell than
from MacDonald, Snowden, Webb, and other such compromising brethren. Cromwell
was a great revolutionary of his time, who knew how to uphold the interests of
the new, bourgeois social system against the old aristocratic one without
holding back at anything. This must be learned from him, and the dead lion of
the seventeenth century is in this sense immeasurably greater than many living
dogs”.[6]
As his book, the Far Left in the English Revolution shows
much of Manning’s work during his SWP membership concentrated more of the
radical groups in the English Revolution such as the Levellers, diggers and to
a lesser extent Ranters. Manning’s obituary, written by Alex Calinicos, was
entitled A True Leveller.The SWP were Manning’s main publisher with titles such
as 1649: Crisis of the Revolution (1992) and Revolution and Counter-Revolution
in England, Scotland, and Ireland 1658-60 (2003)They republished The English
People and the English Revolution.
Te Far Left Manning talks about in his book are the various
radical groups that sprang to life during the English Revolution. Much of the
past historiography examining the Levellers, Diggers has been dominated by the
school of historical research called ‘history from below’. Manning’s book is a
good attempt to establish the class nature of what Manning calls the Far
left.Most of Manning’s work has centred on three major class formations. For Manning,
the ‘middling sort’ was key to an understanding of the English Revolution.
Manning his book took on board that “not every conflict between groups in
society springs from class antagonisms, but when two groups stand in a relation
of exploiters and exploited it is a class relation: and when one group seeks to
exploit another group, and the latter group resists, they become engaged in the
class struggle”.
The problem for a Marxist historian in writing on this
period of history is that ‘classes, while they existed, were still in embryonic
form. But this did not stop Manning from using Marxist theory to denote what
was a class struggle. Manning is correct to warn of the difficulties of an
exact definition of the working class. We are talking about the seventeenth
century after all, not the twenty-first when class distinctions are clear. As
Engel’s pointed out in his Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, ‘In every great
bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the
more or less developed forerunner of the modern proletariat.’
Manning’s work on the Far Left of the English Revolution has
been criticised from the right I might add for concentrating too heavily on the
work of other historians. One blogger wrote “This book is a general survey
rather than the result of detailed original research. The sources cited are
mostly secondary works, along with some contemporary pamphlets. As far as I can
tell, the footnotes do not mention any manuscripts at all. You do not have to
be a document fetishist to see this as a limitation. The archives are full of
unexplored opportunities. Concentrating only on what has been published in
print closes an awful lot of possibilities. For example, early-modern court
records are full of poor people saying things that they were not supposed to
say, and the fact that they were punished afterwards cannot erase the fact that
they said it. The most glaring omission is when Manning mentions that plans for
a Fifth Monarchist revolt were carefully recorded in a manuscript journal, but
does not cite the manuscript.[7]Manning is correct to point out that different
forms of the class struggle were taking place in the seventeenth century.
Manning correctly believes that a period of dual power existed between the king
and parliament and later between the Presbyterians and the Independents.
Trotsky points out “The conditions are now created for the
single rule of the Presbyterian bourgeoisie. But before the royal power could
be broken, the parliamentary army has converted itself into an independent
political force. It has concentrated in its ranks the Independents, the pious
and resolute petty bourgeoisie, the craftsmen and farmers. This army powerfully
interferes in the social life, not merely as an armed force, but as a Praetorian
Guard, and as the political representative of a new class opposing the
prosperous and rich bourgeoisie. Correspondingly the army creates a new state
organ rising above the military command: a council of soldiers’ and officers’
deputies (“agitators”). A new period of double sovereignty has thus arrived:
that of the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independents’ army. This leads to
open conflicts. The bourgeoisie proves Powerless to oppose with its own army
the “model army” of Cromwell – that is, the armed plebeians. The conflict ends
with a purgation of the Presbyterian Parliament by the sword of the
Independents. There remains but the rump of a parliament; the dictatorship of
Cromwell is established. The lower ranks of the army, under the leadership of
the Levellers the extreme left wing of the revolution – try to oppose to the
rule of the upper military levels, the patricians of the army, their own
veritable plebeian regime. But this new two-power system fails in developing:
The Levellers, the lowest depths of the petty bourgeoisie, have not yet, nor
can have their own historic path. Cromwell soon settles accounts with his
enemies. A new political equilibrium, and still by no means a stable one, is
established for a period of years.[8]
Despite its slim appearance, the book is one of the few to
examine the plight of the poor during the English revolution. Manning is
correct to point out that the poor have received scant attention from
historians.
His usage of the great Marxist thinkers such as Marx, Engels,
Trotsky, Lenin to explain complex political formations is to be commended. He
attempts to use previous Marxist Writings on the bourgeois revolution to
attempt to answer the question of who were the poor and what class did they
belong to.
The poor were not one homogenous group. As manning explains,
they were made up of differing class formations. Therefore, to talk of a
working-class as we know it today would be mistaken. As Marx wrote, ‘The
expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of
subsistence, and the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of
the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital.'[9]
Manning explores the contradiction at the heart of many of
the radical groups which despite speaking on behalf of the poor against the
rich defended private property to safeguard the small producers’ ownership of
the means of production. He correctly points out that in the end, these
radicals could not develop a consistent revolutionary consciousness and
organisation. Which in the end, led to their downfall?.Manning does not spend
too much time examing the various examples of “riot, revel and rebellions. He
examines two revolts The Corporals Revolt 1649 and The Coopers Revolt,1657.
These parts of the book read more like a novel and tend to look out of place
with the more theoretical parts.
To conclude Manning book is a very good attempt at analysing
the revolutionary groups of the seventeenth century in the teeth of severe
opposition from revisionist historians and their hostility to Marxist
historiography.Manning had a far clearer understanding of the political nature
of revisionism than Hill did. But Jim Holstun warned that “Manning maybe too
optimistic about the decline of the historical revisionist project, and about
the prospect for a revived practice of ‘history from below’, at least in
British history departments. Revisionism has indeed been subject to powerful
critiques by, among others, a group of ‘post-revisionist’ historians who are eager
to restore a consideration of ideology and political conflict to 17th-century
history.”
Ivan Roots’s obituary of Brian Manning in The Independent
states that Manning’s work is not very popular inside British history
departments because of its Marxist nature. Given the hostility to Marxism
inside the universities, this is hardly news. To give Manning his due, he was
consistent in his theoretical work and deserved a wider audience.
[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[2] Obituary: Turning Point in History-Brian Manning.
http://socialistreview.org.uk/272/obituary-turning-point-history
[3] Brian Manning and the dialectics of revolt-Issue:
103-29th November 2004-James Holstun-
http://isj.org.uk/brian-manning-and-the-dialectics-of-revolt/
[4] ] A Peoples History of the Russian Revolution. Neil
Faulkner. Pluto 2017
[5] Obituary: A True Leveller- June 2004-Alex Callinicos-
http://socialistreview.org.uk/286/obituary-true-leveller
[6] Two traditions: the seventeenth-century revolution and
Chartism- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/britain/ch06.htm
[7]
http://www.investigationsofadog.co.uk/2008/04/01/brian-manning-and-marxism/
[8] Leon Trotsky-The History of the Russian
Revolution-Volume One: The Overthrow of Tzarism-
[9] Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist
Accumulation- Capital Volume
One-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
Oliver Cromwell (Penguin Monarchs): England’s Protector
Hardcover – 23 Feb 2017 by David Horspool
I am all for swimming
against the historical tide and have done so on many occasions, but then I am
not a professional historian, and I do not have an editor to tell me when I
make a stupid mistake or to leave some things well alone.So why did no one tell
David Horspool that arguing Oliver Cromwell was a monarch is not the cleverest
thing to do.It is not as though we have hundreds of historians who favour this
type of bad historiography. What was the nature of the discussion at Penguin? I
would have paid money to hear it. Maybe If he had done it in the form of a
counterfactual argument, then this is a different matter. It is also a little
strange that the book does not present an argument for Cromwell inclusion as a
monarch.
It is no secret that Cromwell took on some of the trappings
of a king including being called ‘His Highness’. He also took on some of the
rituals of court and lived in palaces of Whitehall and Hampton Court. But
Oliver Cromwell was not a king, and therefore it is no accident that some of
the greatest historians of the subject refused to label him that.So why does a
giant publishing firm ask a historian to argue the opposite? One answer would
be the type of series that Penguin wants to have. The last ten years or so have
seen an increase in studies that concentrate on Royalism. While there is
nothing wrong with that, unfortunately, most of these studies have attempted to
rehabilitate the monarchy (see my review of Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by
Mark Kishlansky.[1]
David Horspool book is a well-written introduction to the
life of Oliver Cromwell. However, I did expect at least a defence of why
Cromwell was listed in a series on the monarchy, but this does not happen.I am
also a little disturbed that no historian so far has attacked this mild
falsification of history. I may be old fashioned, but if this book appeared
twenty years ago, there would have been a historian’s fight.So far, the only
review of this book has been in the Guardian.[2] Which unsurprisingly decides
to take a somewhat cynical view. The reviewer tells us “the controversial
inclusion of Oliver Cromwell in the Penguin Monarchs series will doubtless
elicit a few tuts of disapproval from royalists. Well, it should elicit a few
from left minded historians.
You get the feeling that David Horspool was not entirely
happy with the prospect of defending the impossible conceding that the
inclusion of Cromwell in the list of monarchs should be “in square brackets”.
However, Horspool as the Guardian review says, “reminds pedants, monarchy means
a sole ruler, not necessarily the holder of a royal title.”This is stretching
things a bit, and it is not something a serious historian should or would stoop
to. This brings me to my main critique of the book. In some ways, the book
expresses a growing problem modern historiography of the English revolution in
that the issue of class is not discussed.
As Horspool brings out, Cromwell was a member of the gentry.
If the reader is concentrating on whether Cromwell was a king, then Cromwell’s
connection with the revolution is completely submerged.As the Historian, Brian
Manning brings out in his review of Oliver Cromwell by Roy Sherwood “Charles
was a hereditary monarch. Sherwood shows that Cromwell became a ‘king in all
but name’, but he does not consider that before the civil war, despite his
aristocratic connections and his status as a ‘gentleman’, his economic
position, as John Morrill shows the English Revolution[4], ‘was essentially
that of a yeoman, a working farmer’: ‘Cromwell’s economic status was much
closer to that of the “middling sort” and urban merchants than to that of the
county gentry and governors. He always lived in towns, not in a country manor
house; and he worked for his living. He held no important local offices and had
no tenants or others dependent upon him beyond a few household servants.’
He continues, “Karl Kautsky pointed out that the role of
‘great men’ in history should be related to the group or class which they
represented or symbolized. In the English Civil War Charles, I defended
aristocracy and episcopacy, and his strength came from his party. Sherwood
should have asked who made Cromwell’ king in all but name’. He should have
considered the power-hungry politicians, the seedy financiers, and the
sycophantic journalists who pushed him forward and, more broadly, the lords of
manors who rightly trusted him to defend their rank and property, the clergy
who successfully pressed him not to abolish their tithes (the tax which
supported them), and the lawyers who managed to keep him from reforms of the
legal system that would have reduced their profits”.[3]
The other aspect of Cromwell is that in the last resort his
power rested on the New Model Army. He clearly took into consideration that it
would not sit well with the army if he became king. I mean they had just fought
two bloody civil wars and killed a king. Cromwell knew full well that to take
the crown would be political as well as military suicide.To conclude the book
is well written, it does not offer a new perspective on the life of Cromwell.
If Horspool is looking for debate then hopefully a few historians will come out
of their comfort zone and give him one.
[1] http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=charles
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/oliver-cromwell-by-david-horspool-review
[3] Brian Manning-The monarchy and the military-(September
1999) Socialist Review 233.
The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in
England, 1640–1650, by John Rees – published by Verso Books, price £25.
It is hard to believe
as Michael Braddick points out in his excellent review[1] that this book is the
first full-length study of the Levellers since 1961. Having said that John Rees
new book more than makes up for that. The Leveller Revolution is a tremendous
advance in the study of the Leveller movement and its place in the English
Revolution.Over the last five years or so interest in the Levellers, both
mainstream and in academia has grown significantly. The Leveller Revolution
follows on from a growing number of studies such as Rachel Foxley’s book The
Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. The Agreements
of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English
Revolution, Vernon, Elliot, Baker, P to name just two.
Media Interest
This interest has been reflected in response to Rees’s book
from mainstream and academic media with reviews in the Financial Times, TLS,
and The Spectator magazine, just to name a few. Why the interest as Braddick
poses? One reason being is that the left learning sections of the media inside
and outside academia have always had a fascination with the Levellers. The
right seeks to tie the Levellers to the Labour Party and dampen any talk of
Revolution [2].
Another reason is that the problems that the Levellers
grappled within the 17th century are unfortunately are alive and kicking in our
century. The third reason for such interest in the book and this is not to
denigrate the book which is of a very high standard or the integrity of the
author, but the book does appear at a very precipitous time in so much that
capitalism is going through a great crisis and what usually happens is that
working people start looking for answers to today’s problems in the past. It
is, therefore, important for a historian to present and objective account of
any subject they write about. Rees manages a pretty good job.
Much of the groundwork for this new book was done in Rees’s
PhD thesis[3]. Unfortunately, his new book is only partially based on that.
However, nonetheless, it deepens our understanding of these revolutionaries and
most importantly counters decades of conservative revisionist historiography.
The book works well on several levels. It does not give a general history of
the English Revolution, but it does give a significant understanding of the
Revolution that coursed through 17th century England. It reads like a novel but
maintains a very high academic standard.Second, only to the Russian Revolution,
I doubt there has been a decade of revolutionary struggle that equals 1640-1650
of the English Revolution. This decade produced a revolutionary army the likes
the world had not seen. An entire army had, in another historical first,
elected its representatives from every regiment, challenged their commanders
and altered the entire political direction of the Revolution.
A republic was fought for and established. The House of
Lords was abolished. A king was executed by his people for the first time in
history. As for the national church, it was reorganised, and its leader, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, tried and executed.As the regicide, Thomas Harrison
said, “It was not, a thing done in a corner.” A group of revolutionaries was
born that sought to establish a society based on communistic lines, and their
theoretical writings and perspectives proceeded the development of Marxism by
some 250 years.
The Levellers
The political movement known as the Levellers appeared in
the early days of the Revolution. Despite small in numbers, they played a
pivotal role in the character and direction of the Revolution.While it is
correct to say, the Levellers appeared during the revolutionary decade
1640-1650 Rees has opposed the prevailing view that they had no history before
that. This point has proved most controversial because up and till now there
has been little evidence to counter this view. And it is not just conservative historians
that have this view.The book challenges historians to study more of how the
Levellers organised. While acknowledging the difficulty researching underground
activity from this far in the past Rees believes it is still possible and backs
this assumption up with evidence and presents it in a very convincing way.
Rees’s book also counters some historians who have tried to
present the Levellers as just a loose collection of radicals. Rees provides
extensive evidence to the contrary. While not being a party in the modern
sense, they nonetheless were a well organised and strongly coherent group. One
strength of the book is how Rees traces how the Levellers used secret printing
presses and how they utilised churches as bases for their political activity.
The congregation of these churches were not passive bystanders but circulated
radical Leveller pamphlets and books.
As Rees puts “by 1646, the group’ both in the eyes of their
opponents and in the internal ideological support they deliver to each other, is
a functioning collective organisation’ (pp.142-4). Rees correctly centres the
activity of the Levellers around its leader John Lilburne. From a very early
stage in the Revolution, Lilburne saw the importance of underground printing
[4].
In a few short years, Lilburne had become widely known,
especially in London as a radical against the King. He was imprisoned by
Charles I for distributing illegal pamphlets in the late 1630s.Perhaps the most
important aspect of the book is Rees’s uncovering of the huge amount of
material that was printed illegally by the Levellers. Rees is convinced that
these radical pamphlets pushed the Revolution in a leftward direction. The
early part of the Revolution saw the growth of a republican movement with Henry
Marten, who was a Leveller sympathiser being the first MP to advocate a
republic.To describe the movement as a party is perhaps premature, but
nonetheless, they took on many characteristics of a party that would not look
out of place today. As Rees says, there was then a ‘dense fabric of political
opposition in the capital during the early days of the Revolution, and in some
cases from before that, from which the Levellers emerged as an organised
current. Underground activity in churches and taverns, combined with the secret
printing and petitioning activity … provided schooling in organised politics
which would feed into the foundations of the Leveller movement. The point where
meetings in churches and taverns spill over into mass street demonstrations is
possibly an early decisive moment of transition. This is the point where
clandestine or semi-clandestine activity becomes irrefutably public opposition
to established authority’ (p.65).
Rees’s research has given us a far closer approximation as
to the class character of the Levellers. While it is correct to characterise
them as revolutionaries, they were a movement of the petit bourgeoisie and not
the what could be loosely termed at the time the working class.For the Russian
Marxist Evgeny Pashukanis “the Levellers undoubtedly were a petit-bourgeois
party. While some historians protest that capitalist relations were not that
developed to describe them as such, I believe that there were sufficient
bourgeois-capitalist relationships, at the 1640s to warrant such a claim[5].Their
call for suffrage was not universal, although even their call for a wider
franchise was a revolutionary demand. They were a minority and could not
mobilise the one class that would have given the poorer sections of society
against Cromwell and his bourgeois allies. Much of their social composition was
made up of the “middling sort” of lesser gentry, merchants, and craftsmen that
made up the same social base as Cromwell.
Historiography and Revisionism
It would not be too controversial to say that Historians
over a long period have underestimated the size and importance of the Levellers
and other radical groups to the English Revolution.The nineteenth-century Whig
historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay was deeply hostile to any
revolutionary movement. This conservative historian had profound difficulty in
understanding the revolutionary actions of Oliver Cromwell or for that matter,
the class forces he represented. He could only offer the ‘incurable duplicity’
of the latter of Charles 1st.
Macaulay’s reason for the radicalism in the army as ‘the
refractory temper of the soldiers’, who were ‘for the most part composed of
zealous republicans’.Many historians followed Macaulay’s lead into the 20th
century in dismissing the Levellers. Probably the most important aspect of this
book is to challenge this revisionist onslaught.Current historiography has
certainly carried over much of the worst traits of Whig attitudes towards the
Levellers. Some have ignored them completely, such as John Adamson others have
portrayed them as having little or no influence on the outcome of the war. John
Morrill mentioned them twice in his book The Revolt of the Provinces.
There have been oppositional voices. Edward Vallance has
uncovered a persistent influence of John Lilburne’s politics on radicals in the
1700s. He concludes ‘historians have undervalued the degree of intellectual
sympathy and continuity between the radicalism of the seventeenth century and
that of the eighteenth’.[6]The Conservative orientated revisionist is
downplaying of the significance of the Levellers was a by-product of their
assault on Marxist historiography. It is a shame that Rees does not go into
greater detail the political basis of such revisionism. In his PhD thesis, he
believes “the revisionist challenge to liberal and left interpretations of the
English Revolution synchronised with almost suspicious exactitude with the end
of the post-war boom and the abandonment of the welfare state consensus. This
change, beginning in the mid-1970s, achieved its electoral representation when
Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan
president of the US in 1980[7]
He continues “In a way, revisionism was never only about the
English Revolution. Very similar arguments were deployed at much the same time
about the French and the Russian Revolutions. Moreover, the revisionists
depended on a wider conservative turn in social theory. The Althusserian school
of the 1970s, which became the post-structuralist school, which became the post-modernist
school which fed the ‘linguistic turn’, provided a theoretical tool-box for the
revisionists and those that came after them.Perhaps the most often cited attack
on the Levellers is that they had no representation in the army. This
downplaying of the army radicalism was led by Mark Kishlansky, Rees answers
this “In my opinion the revisionist insistence that the Levellers were exterior
to the army is overstated. Many Levellers were of the army themselves. Lilburne
had an exemplary and widely publicised military record. But Lilburne was not
alone in this. Leveller William Allen served in Holles’ regiment. Leveller
printer William Larner served as a sutler in Lord Robartes’ regiment. Thomas
Prince fought in the London Trained Bands until he was injured at Newbury in
1643. John Harris ran an Army printing press. Leveller ally Henry Marten had
close engagement in military affairs in London and eventually raised his own
regiment in Berkshire. Thomas Rainsborough and his brother William were
Leveller sympathisers. Edward Sexby was a central figure in the actions of the
Agitators. Army chaplains Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison supported the
Levellers. This list is indicative but far from exhaustive. It does not include
most of the figures directly involved in the mutinies at Ware in 1647, and at
Bishopsgate and Burford, both in 1649. These connections add weight to Foxley’s
observation that the Putney debates’ marked not the end but the beginning of a
potentially fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals’ and
that this ‘reverses the picture painted by the standard revisionist
historiography’ “(p. 158)[8].
Roll of Women
I am glad that Rees spends some time on the role of Leveller
women during the English Revolution. Rees explains that not only ‘mechanicals’
could be found preaching but a significant number of women (p.63).History and
for that matter, historians have not been kind to women who took part in
political activity on both sides of the English Civil War. There is a dearth of
material on women’s struggle now. As far as I can ascertain no major biography
exists of two of the most important Leveller women Katherine Chidley and
Elizabeth Lilburne.Women Levellers mounted large-scale demonstrations and
organised petitions in favour of social equality. They were met with differing
levels of brutality depending on which class they belonged to. Overall
middle-class women were treated with derision, but largely no violence was
committed against them. This is not the case with the poorer sections of the
women’s movement who were often treated severely by MP’s and soldiers alike.”
Many were thrown into prison, mental institutions, or workhouses.
Middle-class women were simply escorted away by soldiers and
told to ‘go back to women’s work”. One MP told them to go home and wash their
dishes, to which one of the petitioners replied, “Sir, we scarce have any
dishes left to wash”‘ (pp.290-1).
Leveller women did not fight just as individuals. According
to historian Gaby Malhberg the wives of leading figures of the English
revolution “formed their networks, discussing political issues in the absence
of their husbands. Edmund Ludlow recorded, for instance, that he had little
hope of a pardon from the King because the wife of his fellow republican Sir Henry
Vane had informed Elizabeth ‘that she was assured [General George] Monke’s wife
had sayd she would seeke to the King, upon her knees, that Sir Henry Vane,
Major Generall [John] Lambert and myself should be hanged.”
This extraordinary Revolution radicalised many women into
political action. As Rees points out one of John Lilburne’s most important
collaborators, Katherine Chidley, also emerged from the context of the gathered
churches. She published a remarkable defence of independent congregations, and
religious leadership by the socially inferior, including women, becoming a key
figure in Leveller publishing and organising (pp.38-40).It is not an accident
that Rees who is a radical today, has donated so much of his time to the
Leveller movement. In his latest book, he states “I have tried to…examine the
Levellers as a political movement integrating activists from different
constituencies, and creating still broader alliances with other political
currents, for the joint pursuance of revolutionary ends. (Rees, The Leveller
Revolution, p. xx)
In many ways, this is the perspective of the current SWP.
Rees who is an ex-member of the Socialist Workers Party SWP) still observes its
attitude towards historical events. The SWP from the very beginning of their
development adopted the British Communist Party approach to historical events.
The English Labour history industry has presented several books and essays that
see an unbroken historical line of English radicalism.
As Ann Talbot succinctly put it “the Communist Party
sponsored a form of “People’s History, which is typified by A.L. Morton’s
People’s History of England in which the class character of earlier rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders was obscured by regarding them all as
representatives of a national revolutionary tradition. This historical approach
reflected the nationalism of the bureaucracy, their hostility to
internationalism and their attempts to form an unprincipled alliance with the
supposedly democratic capitalists against the fascist Axis countries. People’s
history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the policies of
Popular Front—the subordination of the working class to supposedly progressive
sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of political action to the defence
of bourgeois democracy—which provided a democratic facade to the systematic
murder of thousands of genuine revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the
approach that Christopher Hill was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney
Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who were part of the Marxist Historians Group and
came under the influence of Maurice Dobb and Dona Torr”.
This viewpoint has even been adopted by historians who have
no attachment to the SWP, Ed Vallance’s book A Radical History of Britain and
David Horspool’s The English Rebel are two that come to mind. It is a
perspective that says the English working class is inherently radical and
revolutionary and does not need a Marxist scientific world outlook.
To conclude, this is a very good book. It re-establishes the
Levellers as the leaders of the left-wing of the English Revolution. It
deserves a wide readership and should be read in conjunction with Rees’ PhD
Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English Revolution.
[1] Mike Braddick-Times Literary Supplement-March 24th, 2017
[2] Jeremy Corbyn is taking Labour back to the 1640s-David
Horspool-The Spectator-Jan 2017.
[3]
http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf
[4] See Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins
of Civil War-David R Como, Past and Present 2007
[5] Evgeny Pashukanis Revolutionary Elements in the History
of the English State and Law (1927)
[6] E Vallance, ‘Reborn John? p. 21
[7] Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English
Revolution John Rees Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014.
[8] Review of The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in
the English Revolution-Rachel Foxley by John Rees-
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1519
A cabinet of rarities’: the curious collections of Sir
Thomas Browne- Royal College of Physicians 30 January–27 – July 2017,
Monday–Friday only, 9am–5pm.
“His whole house and garden is a paradise and Cabinet of
rarities and that of the best collection, amongst Medails, books, Plants,
natural things”.
John Evelyn, ‘The Diary of John Evelyn’ (1671)
‘A cabinet of rarities’: the curious collections of Sir
Thomas Browne’ is a small, delightful and extremely informative new exhibition
at the RCP.
Sir Thomas Brown (1605–1682) was an RCP physician,
philosopher, collector, and polymath. It is hoped that the exhibition along
with ambitious plans to produce a collected works of Browne will go a long way
to re-establish his significant contribution to science, medicine, botany, and
literature.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682
Although Brown was an intellectual giant of the 17th century
there are aspects of his thought and work that would not look too out of place
in the 21st century. His attitude to life and death was a breath of fresh air.
Browne’s world view in many ways encapsulated the
contradictions of his age in the sense that in most of his thought and work he
was a materialist and a polymath but still held out that witches existed and
even testified in witch trials.
Thomas Browne’s world view was a product of mainly two
things, Firstly the age he lived as David North notes the “17th century started
to fundamentally change the way man saw the world. Up until then, mankind’s
worldview had largely been dominated by the Aristotelian worldview. Until the
early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that
the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of
life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority
had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well under way[1].
Education was important to Browne. In 1623 Browne went to
Oxford University. He graduated from Pembroke College, Oxford. He went on to
study medicine at some of Europe’s finest institutions Padua and Montpellier
universities, completing his studies at Leiden.
As the exhibition shows Browne has had a tremendous
influence on literary figures. Second, only to Shakespeare, he introduced over
700 new words into the English language such as electricity’ medical’,
‘anomalous’ and ‘coma’.
Great literary figures such as Virginia Woolf said ‘Few
people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, but those who do are a very good
person.’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edgar Allan Poe have cited him as a major
influence on their work.
Much of Browne’s collection of Plants, animal samples books
and paintings were housed at Browne’s home in Norwich the RCP exhibition has
managed to partially reconstruct a sample of this collection.The exhibition
contains a copy of Religio Medici. Browne was celebrated for his religious
toleration as well as his learning. Religio Medici is perhaps his best-known
work. In it, he wrote:“I could never divide myself from any man upon the
difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing with
me in that from which within a few days I should dissent myself”.
The collection also contains a cast of Browne’s own skull,
made in the years after 1840. His coffin was vandalized and his head and hair
sold on to a fellow collector. On show is a rare pirated copy of Sir Thomas’
masterpiece ‘Religio Medici’. Dated 1642.
The collection has been put together by the same team that
produced 2016 acclaimed exhibition ‘Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost
library of John Dee’.
The current exhibition is curated by researchers from Queen
Mary University of London (QMUL). Dr. Harriet Phillips, Research Associate,
Queen Mary University of London, and co-curator said”Sir Thomas Browne was an
extraordinary man. A literary sensation and a celebrated physician. A seeker of
curiosities almost without compare in his time, an exploder of myths, a coiner
of new words, a connoisseur of exotic animals and collector of rare plants.”
Conclusion
This exhibition is part of a larger project, led by Queen
Mary University of London, which is to edit the entire works of Thomas Browne.
Given Browne’s influence and intellectual status, his writings have never been
fully edited and no earlier edition is in print.The goal of the 8-volume
critical edition is designed to solve this anomaly. The large team of twelve
editors includes two AHRC-funded post-doctoral research associates Two
AHRC-funded Ph.D. students.“We hope that this exhibition, together with the
collected edition of his works now in progress, will help restore this singular
figure to his rightful place: as one of the most interesting men, not just of
the 17th century, but of English literary history.”
.
[1] Equality, the Rights of Man, and the Birth of
Socialism-By David North -24 October 1996-
A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and
His Church-by Christopher Hill-Verso 2017.
If anything
characterised Christopher Hill’s long career, he believed that to understand
any historical change one had to believe in the dialectical connection between
economics and politics and that the materialist base determines the
superstructure of social, intellectual, and political developments. Maintaining
this belief was not always easy. He came under fierce attack both inside the
Communist Party (he left in 1956) and out. This idea still permeates Verso’s
new edition of his biography of John Bunyan.
When this book was originally published, Hill was accused of
renouncing his Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution. Later, in life
Hill attempted to answer this charge during a talk he gave celebrating the
centenary of the publication of Marx’s “Das Kapital”.He recounted that Marx had
accidentally overheard some former comrades from the 1848 revolution. To a man,
they had become rich and decided to reflect on old times and asked Marx if he
was becoming less radical as he aged. “Do you?” said Marx, “Well, I do not”.
Bunyan’s Work
It is not an overstatement to say that John Bunyan’s work
has recognised the world over, especially The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is
certainly one of the most influential books written in the English language. It
has been translated into more than 200 languages and was wildly popular in
America. The great Russian writer Pushkin admired it. And was the first English
literary work to be translated into Polish. Today, while it is more likely to
read by children, it is safe to say that many households in Britain have a
copy. Bunyan wrote from a “class-conscious piety,” as one writer puts it “
contempt for the rich and a passionate defence of the poor, that helps to
explain why those writings exert an appeal that transcends the circumstances of
Bunyan’s own age”.
It is true to say that we are still grappling with the great
questions posed by the revolution in England in the 17th century. That issues
of social inequality, religious freedom, democracy and even communism are still
topics of discussion today bear testimony to the importance of studying this
period. Hill was correct when he said we are still beginning to catch up with
the 17th century. Hill’s examination of the life John Bunyan was done so in
recognition of the rupture of class antagonisms that brought about the English
revolution. Books like the Pilgrim’s Progress were an attempt to understand
these events and in Bunyan’s case offer a critique as well as a solution.
Hill’s excellent biography A Turbulent, Seditious, and
Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628-1688 2017, traced a multitude
of connections between The Pilgrim’s Progress and radical political movements.
Both from the 17th century and later political movements. While reading the
book, it should not take the reader long to figure out that this is not just a
children’s book. The book has a deeper political meaning and greater social
significance. Hill’s book helps us appreciate the political implications of
Bunyan’s allegory.The beauty of Hill’s book is that he carefully places
Bunyan’s ideas firmly within the context of the religious and political
conflicts that shaped the English revolution. As Hill states, he was “the creative
artist of dissent.” Bunyan was not on the same level of political maturity as
John Lilburne and certainly not as open in his use of politics to gain power.
However leading members of the gentry still saw him as a threat and acted
accordingly. Bunyan was to serve large swathes of his adult life in jail. Hill
argued that ‘Bunyan is the most class-conscious writer in English literature”.
He took a class stand in the sense of he was always on the side of the poor. It
is not an accident that “most of Christian’s opponents in The Pilgrim’s
Progress are Lords or gentry”.
Hill believed that Bunyan understood his working-class
position and wrote accordingly. But why use the allegorical style of writing.
It would not be too much of a stretch of the imagination that someone as
intelligent as Bunyan would be blind to the growth of science and philosophy or
that Newton, Boyle, Locke, and others had started to put mankind’s
understanding of the world on a more rational and materialist basis, so why the
allegorical style of writing.Hill believed that despite tremendous advances in
science and philosophy it was still a dangerous time politically for anyone to
attack the ruling elite. As Richard Ashcraft writes “Bunyan quite deliberately
used allegorical style, heavy-laden with metaphors and flights of fancy to
avoid jail. In part, of course, the decision was a tactical one; ridicule is a
powerful political weapon, and figurative language provides a rhetorical shield
against the sword of the magistrate. But Bunyan was writing primarily for an
audience of self-taught literate artisans like himself, and he knew that “words
easy to be understood do often hit the mark when high and learned ones do only
pierce the air.” Bunyan understood the creative power of popular prose, and “The
Pilgrim’s Progress” was “written by a man of the people for the people.”[1]
Having said that even the most stupid member of the elite
could not have failed to understand Bunyan’s use of these names which mirror
tiered social structure of 17th century England. Lord Hate-good, Mr Lyar, Sir
Having Greedy, Lord Carnal Delight, Mr By-ends, Mr Money-love of the town of
Coveting. “The pilgrim’s psyche is thus rooted in social and material life”.[2]
Biography
Bunyan was a teenager when he went into the Parliamentary
army. He was to receive a very quick education both militarily but more
importantly, this sensitive young man would have been exposed to the political
cauldron that was brewing in the army and in wider society.Rank and file
soldiers such as himself were exposed to radical ideas about religion,
democracy, social inequality, and early communist ideas. As Hill brings out in
his book, this would have led him to believe that another world was possible.Bunyan’s
radicalization did not take an overtly political form. His writings took the
form of an organised but allegorical attack on the religion of the day. To do
this, it was necessary to in the words of one writer “adopt a distinctive
political position in the context of 17th-Century English society”.
While Bunyan had been a soldier during the Revolution as he
grew into adulthood, he would have witnessed the ebb of the revolution and felt
at first hand the years of reaction. He would have been alarmed at the rate
that the revolution was being expunged from memory. It led him to write the
book Mansoul (in the Holy War) to cognize and oppose what was going on. It is
true is that Bunyan had many years to think about these issues. Having spent 12
years in prison. But like John Lilburne, the Leveller leader, it seemed only to
make him stronger politically.
Revisionism.
Even as I write this review of Hill’s book, I know that the
first line of attack will be that Hill’s work is outdated and should be studied
only as period pieces. Unlike Mark Kishlansky who once wrote “It is becoming
difficult to remember how influential Christopher Hill once was when E.P.
Thompson dedicated Whigs and Hunters to ‘Christopher Hill, I do not believe
that Hill is outdated. A more objective review of his work is long overdue.
Also, it is quite scandalous that no major biography of him has appeared.When
Kishlansky reviewed the book, he believed that Hill was “about to enter the
most productive years of his career. Two not altogether unconnected impulses
characterised them. The first was to champion groups and individuals who placed
personal freedom above political necessity; this resulted in his masterpiece,
The World Turned Upside Down (1972). The second was the flowering of his interest
in the great literary figures of the age, which yielded Milton and the English
Revolution (1977) and A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People (1988), his
book on Bunyan. Hill now turned violently against the mainstream of the
Revolution he had spent decades illuminating and towards the radical fringe
groups and iconoclastic individuals who posed extreme challenges to the social
order and religious discipline that successive revolutionary governments
attempted to maintain. Cromwell and Ireton at Putney became as oppressive a
power structure as Laud and Strafford had been at Whitehall. Hill called this
history variously, ‘history from below’, ‘total history’, or the ‘history of
the dispossessed’, though few of his subjects derived their social origins from
within even the bottom half of 17th-century society and most were so
self-consciously unconventional as to defy generalizations based on their
behaviour.[3]
“This work became part of a larger project in which Hill
sought to represent the dispossessed throughout history. He identified himself
with such ‘radicals’, once instructing a group of US scholars to turn their
attention to the study of Native Americans, and in a spirit of cleansing
self-criticism proclaimed: ‘One of the things I am most ashamed of is that for
decades I proudly illustrated the spread of democratic ideas in 17th-century
England by quoting the ringing Leveller declaration, “the poorest he that is in
England hath a life to live as the greatest he” … Every he? Every man? What
about the other 50 percent of the population?’ Here he may be anticipating the
movement for children’s rights, as even the Levellers were advocating only an
adult franchise and adults comprised only about 55 percent of the Early Modern
population”.[4]
He went on to call Hill a Rolodex historian who was “immune
to criticism”. The attack on Hill was wrong and was driven by political
considerations. I am not against healthy debate, but Kishlansky’s almost
vendetta like attacks were “clumsy and resentful”.
Hill was defended by his friend fellow former Communist
Party Member E. P Thomson who wrote “The testimony of Baxter, Bunyan,
Muggleton, George Fox and all Quakers, is disallowed because this served the
polemical purposes of marking out the permissible boundaries of sectarian
doctrine. This (which was McGregor’s old thesis) may indeed be true, but it by
no means disproves the reality of a Ranter ‘moment’. It is notorious that in
sectarian history (whether religious or secular) some of the fiercest polemics
are between groups which draw upon a common inheritance and share certain
premises. In its earliest years, Quakerism was involved in unseemly polemics
with the Muggletonians, in which each side accused the other of having gathered
up former Ranters among their adherents. I cannot see any reason this may not
have been true of both since both originated in the Ranter ‘moment’ and both
defined their doctrines and practices in part as a rejection of Ranter
excess.[5]
Hill’s insistence that Bunyan ‘moved in Ranter circles in his
youth’ – was backed up by 14 references to Bunyan’s Works in his book the World
Turned Upside Down, despite this he was attacked by J C Davis for saying that
the Ranters were a separate and coherent group (see J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth,
and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge University Press, 1986,
pp. 224)
Further Criticisms
Tom Shipley writes “Yet in other respects, and having
admitted Hill’s immense reservoir of knowledge, it can seem that there is too
much in his book of reading backwards from now. One warning sign is the
prevalence of phrases like ‘must have been’. Bunyan was in the army of
Parliament for several years, and in what appears to have been a particularly
‘bolshie’ unit (the adjective is peculiarly appropriate). It is true that
Bunyan hardly ever mentions this, but it ‘must have been an overwhelming
experience’; in this milieu, radical ideas circulated so much that the young
conscript ‘cannot but have been affected by them’. Maybe not. And quite likely
reminiscing about the Civil War would have been ‘contra-indicated’ after 1660.
But people can be stubbornly resistant to mere proximity. However, much
scholars like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to
take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that Margery Kempe, about whose
orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest
William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the
authorities who interrogated her had known that, they might have felt that this
was prima facie proof of contagion. Yet as far as one can tell, Sawtry had no
influence on Margery Kempe at all: on all disputed points of doctrine, she was
rock-solid. Maybe the teenage Bunyan was as imperceptive. At least the evidence
for his revolutionary radicalism must be stretched a bit.[6]
Although not a historian Shipley makes the case that Hill
cannot be sure that moving in radical circles inside the army Bunyan became
radicalised or that he was influenced to some extent. Again, this kind of
argument is petty. Because no one hears a tree fall in the forest does not mean
that the tree did not fall. Shipley attack on Hill’s historical materialist
outlook has been the stock and trade of every revisionist historian of the 20th
and 21 centuries. When Hill was attacked by Kishlansky for being “immune to
criticism” he was in some regards playing him a backhanded compliment given the
ferocity of the attacks like the one from Hugh Trevor-Roper he would have
needed to very thick skinned. Trevor-Roper complained of that Hill’s
‘scholarship is transformed into advocacy’. It is true that Hill was a partisan
historian and was proud of it.
As Ann Talbot wrote “As a historian, he stands far above his
detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if, with a critical
eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and faults as
much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product of his
time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by those who
have studied him closely.[7] The radical publisher Verso has done a great
service in bringing out this new edition of Hill’s biography of John Bunyan. It
is hoped that this is only the start of a revival of interest in the work of
the great historian.
[1]http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-22/books/bk-1211_1_john-bunyan
[2]
://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles/to-be-a-pilgrim-by-peter-linebaugh
[3]Kishlansky-Review
[4]
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n21/mark-kishlansky/rolodex-man
[5] On the Rant-E.P. Thompson-
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n13/ep-thompson/on-the-rant
[6]Danger-Men-Tom Shippey-
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n03/tom-shippey/danger-men
[7] Danger-Men-Tom Shippey-
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n03/tom-shippey/danger-men
Historical Research Plenary Lecture 2017: (sponsored by
Wiley) The English Revolution as a Civil War by John Morrill.
The first thing that strikes you about John Morrill’s lecture
was that it was a rare treat to hear a man with such erudition. Whether you
agree or disagree with his historiography, he is a man worth going out of your
way to see and listen to.Anyone who knows Morrill’s work will know that he
rejects the premise that a revolution took place in the 1640s’. He seems to
have spent most of his academic career opposing this conception. Wednesday
night’s lecture was no different. Morrill believes there was a series of civil
wars which fits into his support for the war of three Kingdoms
historiography.[1]
Morrill avoided a search for the origins of the English
Civil War’. He has recently written, that this ‘is the early modern historian’s
Holy Grail.’ Early on in his career, Morrill opposed the Marxist approach to
the English revolution. He rejected the “rather triumphalist claim that you
could now produce a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and
origins of the English revolution. It was that I think, which several people
quite independently reacted against”. Morrill characterized the Civil Wars as
England’s ‘Wars of Religion’.
He rejects the conception of a bourgeois revolution, and he
certainly does not believe that this period witnessed a transition from
feudalism to Capitalism. At one stage, he quipped that the Socialist Workers
Party(SWP) had asked him to lecture on the English revolution. He told them
that the only revolution whereby land was transferred in any great amount took
place in Ireland. They were not interested.Joking aside Morrill’s work on
Ireland is worth a look at. The massive land grab that was undertaken by the
English bourgeoisie was staggering. This smash and grab raids were done
brutally.At least half of Morrill’s lecture was given over to how
non-revolutionary the events of 1640s England were. However, even he did not
deny how much savagery was involved.
During his talk, the subject of the Clubmen arose..His
studies on the Clubmen movement is another indicator of his attempt to downplay
the revolutionary events. John Morrill was emphasizing the apathy felt by most
during the conflict, arguing previously that “A majority had no deep-seated
convictions behind their choice of side.”Many in England simply chose to
support the faction they felt gave them the best opportunity to preserve the
status quo; whether it be royalists, parliamentarians, or local neutralists
such as the Clubmen”.Morrill believes that many “ordinary” Englishmen were
unconcerned with fomenting revolutionary ideas. During his lecture, it was not
surprising to hear that Morrill rejected any social understanding of the
revolution.
This was a strange comment to make since even a cursory look
at his work shows he was influenced by the New Social history historiography in
an interview he describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the
forefront of the group “So there came along the new social history which opened
up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things
to happen for my period was the work which is most obviously associated with
Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews,
returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the Wrightson revolution, in
the way in which social history is done, had a huge impact on those of us who
were more interested in high politics. I mean popular politics, constructed
high politics. Wrightson’s importance for my work is again something that
people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally, in my
mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental”.
To conclude Morrill is worth listening to and his work read.
It is also hoped that his major project on the works of Oliver Cromwell is
finished and that it reaches a wider audience.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Three_Kingdoms
The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited: Essays in
Honor of John Morrill, edited by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell. Boydell
Press, 2013. 296 pp
The Russian Marxist
Leon Trotsky was fond of saying that “every sociological definition is at
bottom a historical prognosis.” When John Morrill stated that “the English
civil war was not the first European revolution but the last of the wars of
religion” [1] he was forming a historical prognosis of the English revolution
that has defended all his life.This collection of essays is a reply albeit
rather late to the publication, twenty years ago, of John Morrill’s significant
collection of essays The Nature of the English Revolution (1993). This current
volume of essays was written by former students, colleagues, and historians who
have collaborated with Morrill and broadly support Morrill’s historical
viewpoint.
While not all essays break new ground, some like John
Walter’s and Phillip Baker do. It is also evident that this volume of essays
will provoke further work on their related topics. There have been two
interrelated developments that have characterized the historiography of the
English Revolution over the last few decades. The first one has been the
systematic and protracted attack on Marxism in the form of hostility to the
method of historical materialism.
The second one and a by-product of the first has seen the
demise of a “grand narrative” as regards the English revolution. The theory
that England passed through a bourgeois revolution during the seventeenth
century was championed by historians Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. The
rejection of this theory has led to an increasingly specialized field of study
and with it the adoption of a smaller and more parochial narrative. An approach
conducted by John Morril and his book Revolt in the Provinces: The People of
England and the Tragedies of War, 1630-48.
From very early on in his career, Morrill opposed the
Marxist approach to the English revolution. He rejected the “rather
triumphalist claim that you could now produce a kind of social determinist view
of the long-term causes and origins of the English Revolution. It was that I
think, which some people quite independently reacted against” [2]. In his lower
narrative, Morrill characterized the Civil Wars as England’s ‘Wars of
Religion.’This recent collection of essays gives us an excellent opportunity to
examine the state of seventeenth-century English historiography, especially the
contemporary post-revisionist historians. The first thing that should strike
the reader about this collection of essays is the title. Why bother with the
English revolution since very few of the contributing writers, including
Morrill, believed that one took place. Moreover, as one reviewer pointed out,
the “global dimensions of the Revolution are barely acknowledged.”
Chapter one -Charles I and Public Opinion on the Eve of the
English Civil War (pp. 1-26) is by Tim Harris who is perhaps best known for his
work on the Post-Restoration period, in this chapter he examines the formation
of a Royalist Party. When we talk about a party, we cannot compare a
17th-century structure of today’s political parties, but the Royalist party did
begin to take on specific characteristics that we are familiar with such as the
use of propaganda which the king saw as a valuable tool against his enemies. As
Harris points out, the first use of this against the Scots did not work out too
well.
Harris’s chapter is something of an attempt to reevaluate
and rehabilitate Charles Ist. There is a view among contemporary
post-revisionist historians that it is crucial to concentrate on the king’s
strengths as opposed to his weakness of character.Harris does not sufficiently
convince this reader that Royalist forged a coherent ideology. Nevertheless, if
they did, Harris tends to divorce it from its economic base. Harris does not
investigate what social or class forces the disparate groups who fought for the
king represented.
Harris also rejects the conception of a long-term cause of
the war. G R Elton began the attack on this theory which has been peddled by
countless revisionist historians ever since. Harris also promotes the belief
that things went disastrously wrong for Charles through no fault of his own.
Harris belongs to the camp of historians who include Kevin Sharpe who regard
the personal rule as a period of constructive and welcome reform in
England.Chapter 2 Rethinking Moderation in the English Revolution: (pp. 27-52)
is by Ethan H. Shagan, whose article is closely related to his recent book[3] .
He admits that it does seem paradoxical that in the midst of the bloodiest and
revolutionary conflict England had ever seen all parties both left and right
sought the mantle of moderation.
Much of this moderation was a smokescreen to hide very
controversial political opinions. Take, for instance, the Levellers their main
publication was called the Moderate, but in reality, their political program
called for a more extensive franchise, a revolutionary act if there ever was
one. This outlook was summed up by the words of Col Thomas Rainsborough “I
think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the
greatest he “. An extraordinary call for social equality, given that the only
people who could vote were a tiny section of the population.In many ways, this chapter
more than the rest reflects current historiography to downplay the
revolutionary actions of the leading participates of the revolution. The
killing of a king, the establishment of a republic and to top it all a coup
d’état by the New Model Army are not the actions of reasonable men.
Chapter 3 The Parish and the Poor in the English Revolution
(pp. 53-80) is by Tim Wales. Wales essay is firmly in the spirit of John
Morrill. He examines the bitter political and religious conflicts within
Norwich in the middle 1640s. There is nothing wrong with exploring local
political events as long as they reflect broader socio-political groupings.
Wales’s chapter does not examine the connection between politics and economics.
Wales is one of many historians who reject a materialist
outlook as regards the English revolution. Historians like Christopher Hill
have been accused of being too “social determinist.” As the Marxist economist,
Nick Beams points out “Another “frequently employed caricatures of Marxism is
the claim that it argues that ideology is just a cover for the real economic
motivations of social actors. Accordingly, Marxism is “disproved” by the
discovery that individuals act, not according to economic motives but by
dominant ideologies. Marxism does not deny that historical actors are motivated
and driven into action by their ideological conceptions, and it does not claim
that these ideologies are merely a rationalization for the real economic
motivations. However, it does insist that it is necessary to examine the
motives behind the motives—the real, underlying, driving forces of the
historical process—and to make clear the social interests served by a given
ideology—a relationship that may or may not be consciously grasped by the
individual involved”[4]
To give Wales his due, he correctly states that the English
Revolution was a pivotal moment in how the poor were treated in England. This
period saw the escalation of taxes to fund poor relief that lasted well into
the restoration period. Chapter 4 Body Politics in the English Revolution (pp.
81-102) is by John Walter.Walter’s essay is a useful barometer of class
relations during the English revolution. His examination of the use of gestures
indicates a growing radicalism amongst the middling sort and sections of the
poor. The question of “hat honour” is important in that the refusal to take
one’s hat off in the presence of a superior person was seen as the height of
political opposition.
As one writer states “Walter discusses the body language
that reflected the lack of deference paid to figures of authority and status
during this period. I think this a critical point, as it struck at the very
heart of traditional English society. Turning one’s back or refusing to doff
one’s cap were tremendously symbolic actions. Walter does an excellent job in
calling attention to this relatively unexplored subject. One is reminded of the
story that King Charles II took his hat off in a conversation with the Quaker,
William Penn, saying that someone had to doff their hat in the presence of a
king”.Chapter 5 The Franchise debate revisited is by Philip Baker. Baker’s
essay adds substantially to a growing interest in the Levellers. The question
of the Levellers is one of the most contentious issues arising out of the
English revolution. Morrill wrote little on them, and his views on the Putney
are that no Levellers were present during the debates
Morrill argues that Leveller rhetoric was fundamentally
opposed to a standing army and that Lilburne’s experience made him suspicious
and out of touch with its rank and file. While Baker sees the Levellers as
radicals not revolutionary, his work is essential in so much that it
contributes significantly to our further understanding of this group.
The central plank of the Levellers manifesto was the call
for a democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important
than the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and
extension of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small
property, artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers, which made up
the composition of the Levellers themselves.
However, as Baker points out, there was a limit to the
extension of the franchise. The poor in the 17th century, and this contains a large
section of the population would not be given the vote. However, this does not
undermine the revolutionary implications of the call by the Levellers to widen
the franchise.As Andrew Hopper points out “Phil Baker’s contribution builds on
his recent work on the New Model Army and the Levellers to approach the issue
of the franchise from a new direction. In view of the “unacknowledged
republic,” he argues that Leveller thinking was shaped by office holding and
local political participation, specifically the world of London politics in
which many of their leaders had participated. Provocatively, he terms the New
Model’s concern that their rank and file had won the right to vote as “elitist”
because it fell short of advocating a universal male franchise. Based on the
experience of New Model soldiers and civilian Levellers, Baker concludes that
we should reconnect the disputed relationship between voting and governance in
early modern England and that a republican tradition of citizenship and
officeholding existed alongside a contemporary concern for the right to
vote.”[5]
As regards the Putney debates as John Rees shows many
Levellers were in the Army themselves. Lilburne had an exemplary and widely
publicized military record. But Lilburne was not alone in this. Leveller
William Allen served in Holles’ regiment. Leveller printer William Larner
served as a sutler in Lord Robartes’ regiment. Thomas Prince fought in the
London Trained Bands until he was injured at Newbury in 1643. John Harris ran
an Army printing press. Leveller ally Henry Marten had a close engagement in
military affairs in London and eventually raised his regiment in Berkshire.
Thomas Rainsborough and his brother William were Leveller sympathizers. Edward
Sexby was a central figure in the actions of the Agitators. Army chaplains
Jeremiah Ives and Edward Harrison supported the Levellers.”[6]
Conclusion
In total, there are eleven essays in this book. The articles
are well written and researched, and some do break new ground and explore new
trends in post-revisionist historiography. The one area that certainly does
need far more extensive research is the debates at Putney. It is clear that
despite his hostility to a Marxist Historiography, Professor Morrill has
produced a distinguished body of work. Despite having deep disagreements with
the essays, they are a fitting tribute to an outstanding historian. They will
be of interest to specialists and students and are written in a style that
would be acceptable to the general reading public interested in this period.
[1] The Religious Context of the English Civil War. John
Morrill
[2] Interview with John Morrill-www.estraint in Early Modern
Englan Paperback – 29 Sep 2011-by Ethan H. Shagan
[4] Imperialism and the political economy of the
Holocaust-By Nick Beams-wsws.org
[5] Reviewed Work(s): The Nature of the English Revolution
Revisited: Essays in Honour of John Morrill by Taylor and Tapsell Review by:
Andrew Hopper Source: Renaissance Quarterly , Vol. 67, No. 3 (Fall 2014), pp.
1020-1022
[6] John Rees, review of The Levellers: Radical Political
Thought in the English Revolution, (review no. 1519)
Hobbes Great Thinkers on Modern Life Paperback by Hannah
Dawson. Pegasus (14 Sept. 2015) ISBN-10: 1605988065
‘The School of Life
offers a radical if a simplistic account of the 17th Century philosopher Thomas
Hobbes. It takes a very skilled author to make a case for a writer who lived in
the seventeenth- century having anything to say to us in the 21st
century.Dawson’s book provides us with an interesting and thought inducing
attempt. Her book concentrates solely on Hobbes’s Leviathan and is part of
Alain de Botton’s The School of Life Series. Other philosophers include Freud,
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Byron, and Bergson.
From the beginning, Dawson is honest about her book. She
wants to rehabilitate Hobbes and “reveal the insights that he possessed despite
– and sometimes because of – the darkness, and the sparks that they might
ignite in our albeit very different twenty-first-century minds.” [1]Hobbes was
a significant figure in English philosophy. He was one of the first English
materialist philosophers to put politics on a scientific basis. Also very
controversially at the time he advocated a separation of state and religion.
Some say he laid the foundations for modern sociology. Recently it has become
fashionable to use Hobbes to navigate society and politics today.
As Dawson intimates in her book, Hobbes’s philosophical
outlook has made a strong resurgence not so much in academic circles which have
always taken a keen interest in his work but in today’s wider political
circles. Even today, Hobbes reputation provokes admiration and hatred in equal
doses. In 2009, Corey Robin wrote in the Nation lumping Hobbes with Italian
Futurists and Friedrich Nietzsche as a “blender of cultural modernism and
political reaction.” [2]
Given today’s levels of social inequality, it is of little
surprise that Hobbes’s ideas are provoking an interest. For many people around
the world, human life has become ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ The growing
international protest against these conditions has seen the rise of political
figures such as Donald Trump who advocates a semi-fascist totalitarian state to
maintain order and head off a revolution. It is safe to say that the
materialist side of Hobbes’ is not being resurrected.
Dawson is heavily influenced by Hobbes. She explains why she
decided to put her fascination with Hobbes into book form “Why on earth, then,
have I chosen him for this book? What could he, nasty, brutish Mr Hobbes, the
‘Monster of Malmesbury,’ possibly have to teach us about how to live well? In a
sense, it is precisely because of his gritty verdict on our human condition
that we need to listen to him. While we do not want to let him take us all the
way to the abyss of his authoritarian dystopia, we would do well to take note
of his clear-eyed assessment of the psychological forces that pit us against
one another, and the fact that, as uncomfortable as it is, we need to be
restrained” She continues “I can whistle about the streets or, indeed, in the
office or at home, safe in the knowledge that I probably will not be hit or
killed, in part at least because my would-be attackers are frightened of going
to jail and therefore leave me alone. This is the civilized and civilizing
foundation without which the fantastically plural coordination’s of society
could not hope to get underway. It is on this foundation that I am free to make
as much or as little of my life as I am able. This is why Hobbes helped me to
understand, and I should obey and value government. As the first great social
contract theorist, he shows us why we consent – even tacitly – to
authority.”.[3]
I do not detect Dawson’s tongue in her cheek, so I will take
these comments at face value. There is a degree of complacency here that is
very dangerous. I am sure Julian Assange would love to walk down the street and
whistle. I am sure the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing war in Syria,
Iraq, and Afghanistan would like to walk down a British street free from want.A
major weakness of the book is that it is not a very realistic picture of class
relations both in Hobbes time and ours. It was also very simplistic to intimate
that people get the government they deserve.As the Russian revolutionary
Marxist Leon Trotsky observed “There is an ancient, evolutionary-liberal
epigram: Every people gets the government it deserves. History, however, shows
that one and the same people may in the course of a comparatively brief epoch
get very different governments (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and
furthermore that the order of these governments doesn’t at all proceed in one
and the same direction: from despotism – to freedom as was imagined by the
evolutionists liberals. The secret is this that a people are comprised of
hostile classes, and the classes themselves are comprised of different and in
part antagonistic layers which fall under different leadership; furthermore,
every people falls under the influence of other peoples who are likewise
comprised of classes. Governments do not express the systematically growing
“maturity” of a “people” but are the product of the struggle between different
classes and the different layers within one and the same class, and, finally,
the action of external forces – alliances, conflicts, and wars and so on. To
this should be added that a government, once it has established itself, may
endure much longer than the relationship of forces which produced it. It is
precisely out of this historical contradiction that revolutions, coup d’etats,
counterrevolutions, etc. arise.[4]
Another danger contained in Dawson’s book is her attempt to
lift Hobbes off his materialist’s feet. She states “what he wants to teach us,
in addition to how we can escape debilitating fear, is what it means to be
free, and what it means to be good, to show us that – even at our most rational
– we are pressed on by our desires, and that we must be ever watchful of the
dangers of language and religion. Even if we violently disagree with Hobbes
much or indeed most of the time, he can teach us to meditate more carefully
than we are accustomed on the subjectivity, motivations, and opinions which
structure our lives”.[5]It is not in the realm of this review to examine the
relationship between Hobbes and Locke, but both were instrumental in
establishing a new materialist world outlook. Dawson’s paragraph is a direct
repudiation of much of the 17th century’s materialist philosophy.
As Dawson knows having written on John Locke (1632-1704) his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding disavowed the concept of innate ideas.
Locke believed that man’s thinking had an objective source, the external world.
As the Marxist writer David North states “If there were no “innate” ideas,
there could not be “innate” evil. Man’s thinking, and, therefore, his moral
character, was, in the final analysis, a reflexive product of the material
environment which acted upon him. Contained within this conception of human
cognition was a profoundly subversive idea: the nature of man could be changed
and improved upon by changing and improving the environment within which he
lived.[6]
How subversive was Hobbes? One biographer argued in 1691
that Leviathan had “corrupted half the gentry of the nation” [7].It can be said
without a doubt that the works of Hobbes provoked a storm of criticism
certainly within his lifetime and also after it. So what was it about them that
provoked such hostility?. There is an element of truth in the suggestion by Jon
Parkin” that the response was so violent because Hobbes ideas went far beyond
anything which his readers had come across before. “.[8]
During his lifetime and to a certain extent even today, his
name has become equated with materialism and worse still atheism,.The subject
of Dawson’s book Leviathan was written by Hobbes during one of the bloodiest
periods of English history. He was one of only a handful of writers who sought
to understand the complex social, economic and political development that was
the English revolution.Hobbes’s felt the fear of war and revolution more
acutely than most and attempted to construct a scientific and materialist
theory of politics. The philosopher hated the war and remained a firm supporter
of absolute monarchy at least up until the war ended then he like many ardent
Royalists only tolerated the new Cromwellian Protectorate when it restored law
and order. To say his work reflected this contradiction would be an
understatement which is why it inspired both hatred and admiration.
Leviathan is a difficult book to master, containing his
Royalist sympathies and anti-revolutionary sentiments. He had to deal with the
reality of a declining aristocracy and the rise of a new class, the
bourgeoisie. The book published in 1651 was seen in some quarters as Hobbes
making peace with Cromwellian revolution. He was starting to come to terms with
the fact that Cromwellian Protectorate was the best chance of a peaceful,
stable government.It is well known that he believed that humans during the 17th
century were nasty, brutish and short and that mankind’s nature is inherently
competitive and selfish. The central theme of his work was to utilize these
traits for the development of the new bourgeoisie.
Hobbes was not an isolated individual philosopher and had
support from philosophers such as Spinoza on the continent. It is a shame from
Dawson’s book that you do not get a clear picture of Hobbes influence on
writers from abroad, particularly in Europe. According to Quentin Skinner, the
writers on the continent had a much clearer picture as to the importance of
Hobbes work than in Britain. One of his most famous readers was the writer
Spinoza. According to Quentin Skinner, “it is a commonplace that Spinoza’s
Tractatus Politicius shows the effects of critical reflection on Hobbes’s
theory in its content and terminology as well as method.” [9]Even his enemies
had a grudging admiration for him, the third Earl of Shaftesbury “I must
confess a genius and even an original among these later leaders in philosophy.”
He was also not without influence in England. As C B
Macpherson wrote in the introduction to the Pelican version of Leviathan he
edited “they thought it dangerous because of the widespread acceptance it was
attaining amongst the reading classes”.[10]At an early age, he rejected the
prevailing Aristotelian philosophy, and at university, the dominance of
Aristotle meant that “the study is not properly philosophy but Aristolelelity”
[11] He accused the schools of acting as a “handmaiden to the Roman religion”
[12].Hobbes was luckier than most philosophers of his generation in that he was
able to secure valuable employment when he became a tutor to the Cavendish
family, who gave him extensive use of their library. He would spend most of his
long life as a teacher, secretary and to the Cavendish family. A shrewd move by
Hobbes as the job gave him access to some very influential people who also
protected him when things got dangerous. According to Hobbes, the time spent at
the Cavendish’s was the most crucial in his intellectual development.
This intellectual ferment as David North describes “started
to fundamentally change the way man saw the world. Up until then, mankind’s
worldview had largely been dominated by the Aristotelian worldview. Until the
early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that
the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of
life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority
had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well underway.[13]
Hobbes was indeed connected profoundly with what was to be a
massive leap in political and scientific knowledge, which would see the
dissolution of the medieval world view to be replaced by one based on science
and reason. The previous one having given mankind a somewhat limited
understanding of his place in the universe. Hobbes played a crucial role in laying
the foundations for the Enlightenment his most important work Leviathan
published in 1651 was one the first studies of what the early modern capitalist
state would look like.His book was groundbreaking because it laid the basis for
scientific principles on which to base that state. As Dawson states, Hobbes was
not democratically inclined. The ruler or rulers of his state would have to
rule it with an iron fist because as mankind’s life was solitary, poor, nasty,
and brutish and short, he believed to overcome this there had to be a “war
against all.”
In Chapter 8 On Religion as a Human, Construct Dawson is
correct in pointing out that it is hard to work out his thoughts on religion.
Hobbes knew he was on dangerous ground. Given that men had fought a war and
carried out a revolution because they believed they had God on their
side.Hobbes correctly believed that an understanding of religion was crucial in
solving the problem that beset the English state. His idea of a national
religion in which the sovereign ruled was dangerous. As G A J Rogers points out
his “mechanical determinism soon brought a charge of atheism. Although it would
be wrong to regard him as strongly religious, there is no reason to doubt his
claim that he was an Anglican, albeit with Calvinist leanings. He is often seen
as sanctioning absolutism, but he would reply that all he had done was to
describe the way in which societies work and that unless was recognized the
outcome would be disorder and social disaster”.
While his philosophical writings were more important than
his religious leanings. Their impact was to be momentous. His thoughts and
emotions were a product of his environment, and ideas remained in his brain
long after they had been first stimulated.According to Hobbes, “words are wise
men’s counters, they do but reckon by them, but they are the mony of fools. He
believed that words must never be allowed to take a life of their own. He
continues “the universe is corporal, body…. And that which is not body, is no
part of the world”.It is hard to separate Hobbes political views from his
philosophical ideas. He was acutely aware of choosing his words well. He drew
definite conclusions from the civil war.One aspect of the war which filled
Hobbes with dread was the spread of ideas put forward by the English
Dissenters. He believed their ideas were a form of madness.
According to Frederick C Beiser they were “the ultimate
source of enthusiasm, Hobbes is convinced, is the same as that for all human
actions, the desire for power. Whether he is aware of it or not the enthusiast
attempts to dominate people. He claims divine inspiration to win the allegiance
of a superstitious multitude: and then he promises them eternal happiness if
they obey his dictates”.[14]Hopefully, in the future, Dawson will include other
17th seventeenth-century philosophers in the Life series as it is important to
place Hobbes within the wider context of modern philosophy. Bacon would be a
good choice while it was Hobbes who developed the idea of mechanical determinism
in the latter half of the 17th century, it was Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who
was the real founder of English materialism.Frederick Engel’s described Bacon
as “The real progenitor of English materialism. To him, natural philosophy is
the only true philosophy, and physics-based on the experience of the senses is
the chief part of natural philosophy”. “Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without,
however, furnishing a proof of Bacon’s fundamental principle, the origin of all
human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on
Human Understanding, supplied this proof.”[15]
To conclude after he died in 1679, to be called a ‘Hobbist’
was one of the most diabolical insults. No one is referred to as a Hobbist
today, so why should we show an interest in his ideas. As George Orwell once
wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present
controls the past.” While there much to disagree with Dawson’s book, it is
nonetheless a significant contribution to a deeper understanding of this
philosopher, leading to a deeper understanding of our world.
[1] Life Lessons from Hobbes. Hannah Dawson. Pan Macmillan.
September 2013.-
[2] Corey Robin, “The First Counter-Revolutionary,” Nation,
October 19, 2009.
[3] Life Lessons from Hobbes. Hannah Dawson. Pan Macmillan.
September 2013
[4] Leon Trotsky-The Class, the Party and the
Leadership-From Fourth International, Vol.1 No.7, December 1940, pp.191-195.
[5] Life Lessons from Hobbes. Hannah Dawson. Pan Macmillan.
September 2013.
[6] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of
Socialism-By David North -24 October 1996
[7] The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought
Quentin Skinner: The Historical Journal, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1966), pp. 286-317
[8] Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel
Parker-Jon Parkin-
[9] The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political
Thought-The historical Journal- Volume 9, Issue 31966 , pp. 286-317
[10] Leviathan Thomas Hobbes- Pelican C A B Macpherson
[11] ] Images of Anarchy: The Rhetoric and Science in
Hobbes’s State of Nature-By Ioannis D. Evrigenis
[12] Leviathan-Hobbes
[13] ] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of
Socialism-By David North -24 October 1996-
[14] The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality
in the Early English-By Frederick C. Beiser
[15] Engels-Anti Duhring
The Poor in the English Revolution-1640-1649
“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England bath
a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore, truly, Sir, I think it is
clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his
consent to put himself under that government. “
Colonel Rainborowe – New Model Army Soldier-Putney Debates
“the necessitous people [the poor] of the whole kingdom will
presently rise in mighty numbers; and whosoever they pretend for at first,
within a while, they will set up for themselves, to the utter ruin of all the
nobility and gentry of the kingdom.”
Quoted in Christopher Hill The English Revolution 1640
“thus were the agricultural people, firstly forcibly
expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and
then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the
discipline necessary for the wage system.”
Karl Marx [Capital]
“This Commonwealth’s freedom will unite the hearts of
Englishmen together in love, so that if a foreign enemy endeavour to come in,
we shall all with joint consent rise to defend our inheritance, and shall be
true to one another. Whereas now the poor see, if they fight and should conquer
the enemy, yet either they or their children are like to be slaves still, for
the gentry will have all. Property divides the whole world into parties, and is
the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere.” When the earth
becomes a common treasury again, as it must, then this enmity in all lands will
cease.”
Gerrard Winstanley, Digger Leader
When it comes to the matter of the poor during the English
Revolution, there have primarily been two trends in the English Revolution
historiography. The first is either to ignore them entirely or to place them in
the forefront of the leadership of the English revolution alongside radicals
from previous centuries representing an unbroken thread of radicalism that goes
right up to the present day. I do not claim that there was no “revel, riot and
rebellion” during the English Revolution, but the English revolution was made
by the bourgeoisie, not the working class which was still in its infancy.
There was, however, a significant radicalisation of the poor
during this time. As Christopher Hill points out “Against the king, the laws
and religion were a company of poor tradesmen, broken and decayed citizens,
deluded and priest-ridden women, . . . there rode rabble that knew not
wherefore they were got together, tailors, shoemakers, linkboys, etc. on the
king’s side. .all the bishops of the land, all the deans, prebends and learned
men; both the universities; all the princes, dukes, marquises; all the earls
and lords except two or three; all the knights and gentlemen in the three
nations, except a score of sectaries and atheists”.[1]
It was these sectaries and atheists that conservative
thinkers like Richard Baxter sought to warn the ruling elite about when he
wrote “A very great part of the knights and gentlemen of England . . . adhered
to the king. And most of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the
poorest of the people, whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry
and were for the king. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the
smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the
greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially
in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such
manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and
civility in the land, and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the
strength of iniquity”.[2]
Baxter was one of the most politically astute commentators
on the English revolution. His writing expressed a general fear amongst the
ruling elite of growing social unrest.It is not in the realm of this essay to
examine every single piece of historiography connected with the poor during the
English revolution. It is however hard not to disagree with the words of
Lawrence Stone who described the history of the 17th century as “a battleground
which has been heavily fought over…beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes
manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way”.
A large number of these ferocious scholars have ignored the
radicalisation of the poor during the English Revolution or when they did
comment on it was done so coupled with a persistent attack on Marxist
historiography, with figures like Christopher Hil and Brian Manning taking the
brunt of this assault.While it is clear that up until the late 1960s, there
appeared to be a consensus amongst historians studying the English revolution
that a study of the poor had to be linked with socio-economic changes that were
taken place in the 17th century.
The late 1970s, saw this disappear and was replaced with a
consistent attack on Marxist historiography. During an interview by John Rees
and Lee Humber, the left-wing Christopher Hill was asked this question “There
is a marked trend to separate various aspects of the revolution, so that
cultural development is seen in isolation to, say, economic ones, a trend which
is part of a much wider debate taking in the arguments around postmodernism.
Would you agree that this is also a great challenge to the economic and social
interpretation of history?.
Hill’s answer was “Yes, all this linguistic stuff of the
literary historians ignores the social context. I think that is a very
unfortunate phase that literary criticism seems to be going through. I had
thought that one of the good things of the last few decades was the way
historians and literary critics seemed to be coming together on the 17th century
and producing some sort of consensus. This is now in danger with all this
linguistic guff. I suppose it is quite difficult for people trained in one
discipline to take on board the lessons learnt in others, but any new consensus
will have to be one based on looking at society as a whole including literature
and religion”.[3]
As the Marxist economist, Nick Beams also points out “One of
the most frequently employed caricatures of Marxism is the claim that it argues
that ideology is just a cover for the real economic motivations of social
actors. Accordingly, Marxism is “disproved” by the discovery that individuals
act, not according to economic motives but based on powerful ideologies.
Marxism does not deny that historical actors are motivated and driven into
action by their ideological conceptions, and it does not claim that these
ideologies are simply a rationalisation for the real economic motivations.
However, it does insist that it is necessary to examine the motives behind the
motives—the real, underlying, driving forces of the historical process—and to
make clear the social interests served by a given ideology—a relationship that
may or may not be consciously grasped by the individual involved”.
While it is essential to understand what motivated the poor
to “revel, riot and rebellion” it is even more critical to understand the
relationship between the poor and its leaders, which on this occasion during
the English Revolution were the various radical groups such as The Levellers
and Diggers and to a certain extent the Ranters.As Leon Trotsky wrote “In
reality leadership is not at all a mere “reflection” of a class or the product
of its free creativeness. A leadership is shaped in the process of clashes
between the different classes or the friction between the different layers
within a given class”.[4]
The Levellers, while being sympathetic to the poor, their
perspective of bringing about deep-seated change was hampered by their class
outlook that being of small producers, conditioned by their ideology. This
contradiction caused some tension between their concern for the poor and their
position of representatives of small property owners. They had no opposition to
private property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always
exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. As
John Cooke, a regicide and sympathetic to the Leveller cause explained ‘I am no
advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them,
without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore
make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient’.[5]
In order to overcome their contradiction, knowing full well
that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate
or through the control of the army, the Levellers attempted to find not a a
revolutionary solution to their problem but a constitutional one.
A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement
of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be
reformed based on certain fundamental ‘native rights’ safeguarded even from a
sovereign parliament: religious toleration, no tithes. The attack on Parliament
as sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in
the first place. The agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial
parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by
accepting the agreement were to have the vote.
While this was extremely radical for the time ‘freeborn
Englishmen’ excluded servants and the poorer sections that did not constitute
‘the people’. As Christopher Hill wrote: “The Leveller conception of free
Englishmen, was thus restricted, even if much wider, than that embodied in the
existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of
men entitled to vote. However, manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The
generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more
democratic than they were”.[6]
The generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of the
Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their supporters
against them. Oliver Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise was
widened, it would threaten his majority in Parliament. As Hill explains
‘Defending the existing franchise, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine “that by
a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose
of the lands here and of all things here”. The vote was rightly restricted to
those who “had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom”. Namely, the persons
in whom all lands lies and those incorporation’s in whom all trading lies.'[7]
The other substantial leadership of the poor came from the
Diggers. Hill, in his seminal study, The World Turned Upside Down, believed
that Winstanley and his Diggers, “have something to say to twentieth-century
socialists”. In this, he meant that they were an anticipation of future
struggles. Hill was cognizant that despite their radicalism, the social and
economic conditions had not yet matured for them to carry out a “second
revolution” which would have seen the overthrow of Cromwell and broader use of
the popular franchise.
John Gurney, who was perhaps the foremost expert on the
Diggers recognised the leader of the Diggers Gerrard Winstanley was one of the
most important figures to appear during the English Revolution commenting “the
past is unpredictable.’ So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all but
one of his 67 years, he lived in obscurity, and then he died forgotten.
Generations of historians passed over him either in silence or derision. He
entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of
David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of
the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits’ scarcely worthy of being
recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth
contained only two references to him, one a bare mention of his name.
Then in the early 20th Century, Winstanley was rediscovered,
and he has exerted a magnetic pull on left-leaning intellectuals ever since. He
is variously credited as the father of English communism, socialism or
environmentalism, depending on which is seeking paternity. His notice in the
Victorian DNB was a scant 700 words; in the new DNB, it has ballooned to more
than 8000. Now he has been canonised by the publication of an Oxford edition of
his complete works, the second complete works in a century, more than have been
accorded either Hobbes or Locke”.[8]
While the Diggers were far more radical in their perspective
for the poor, they shared the same class position as the Levellers. No matter
how radical their ideas at no point could they overturn class society through
revolution. The only class that could have achieved their aims was still in its
infancy.Historians such as John Gurney are a rare bread today in that his study
of the poor was done so from a relatively left-wing standpoint. While Hill and
Manning tended to dominate the study of the poor during the English revolution,
there were a group of historians that were less incline to support a Marxist
interpretation of the poor but were sufficiently influenced to carry out
important work.One of many historians that fit the above criteria was D.C.
Coleman. While not being close to Marxism was undoubtedly influenced by
left-wing historians such as Hill.
Coleman was a multidimensional historian according to his
obituary he “was sceptical about politics and thought religion was largely
nonsense. He realised that people were subject to the motivation of a variety
of sorts and that economic rationality could provide only a partial
explanation. He made use, therefore, of economic theory, but did not regard it
as the be-all and end-all in the attempt to explain human social behaviour over
time, the essence of what he thought economic history should be about.[9]
Coleman points out in one of his writings that early
capitalists were conscious that profit could be made by exploiting the large
and growing working class. Coleman quotes J Pollexfen who writes, ‘The more are
maintained by Laborious Profitable Trades, the richer the Nation will be both
in People and Stock and … Commodities the cheaper”.[10]
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Coleman’s research was
his publishing figures on the levels of poverty which are stunning. The levels
of child labour that would not look out of place in a third world country
today, stating “If the economists and social pamphleteers wanted a larger body
of labouring poor, there is no lack of evidence that in mere numbers the poor
already formed a very substantial part of the total population. Contemporary
comment upon the numbers of poor stretches back into the sixteenth century, at
least, and forward into the eighteenth. To Bacon, labourers and cottagers were
‘but house beggars’; to a writer of the 1640’s it. Seemed reasonable to suppose
that ‘the fourth part of the inhabitants of most of the parishes of England are
miserable, poor people, and (harvest time excepted) without any subsistence’,
the comprehensive and well-known investigations of Gregory King in the 168o’s
and 1690s tell an even grimmer tale. He classed 23 per cent of the national
population as ‘labouring people and out servants’ and a further 24 per cent as
‘cottagers and paupers’, estimating that both groups had annual family
expenditures greater than income”.[11]
Another historian worth reading is Steve Hindle; he is
especially important and essential reading. Hindle’s work should be read in
conjunction with that of Hill and Manning.His work on the Levellers backs up my
earlier assumption that while Levellers such as John Wildman were sympathetic
to the poor, there was also a fear that the levels of poverty and a dearth of
food could get out of hand. Wildman states ‘The price of food [is] excessive’,
wrote the Leveller John Wildman from London in 1648, ‘and Trading [is]
decayed’. It would; he thought, ‘rend any pitifull heart to heare andsee the
cryes and teares of the poore, who professe they are almost ready to famish’.
‘While our divisions continue, and there be no settlement of the principles of
freedom and justice’, he insisted: trading will but more decay every day:
Rumours and feares of Warre, and the Army coming now into the City, makes
Merchants unwilling to trust their goods in the City, and exchange beyond sea
falles, and there will be no importing of goods, and then there will be no
exporting and so the staple commodities of the kingdom which maintains the
constant trade, will not tend to the advantage of the labourers, and then most
of the poore in the kingdom which live by spinning, carding, & will be
ready to perish by famine”.[12]
Wildman was echoing a common fear and worry amongst sections
of the lower middle class that the impact of the failed harvests of 1647-1650.
According to Hindle “Wildman was accordingly convinced that ‘a suddain
confusion would follow if a speedie settlement were not procured’.
Hindle goes on “Wildman’s vivid analysis of the relationship
between harvest failure, economic slump, political crisis and popular protest
is proof enough that those who lived through the distracted times of the late
1640s were well aware of the interpenetration of economic and constitutional
dislocation. It is surprising, therefore, that historians have made so little
attempt to take the harvest crisis of the late 1640s seriously”.
Another famous exponent of regional studies of the poor is
A. L. Beier. One of his studies was Poor relief in Warwickshire 1630-1660.
Beier presented in this essay a view that was supported by a significant number
of historins that the study of the regional poor was an important part of a
wider national study of the poor.
Beier warned about trying to read too much into these local
studies, but a study of such areas as Warwickshire was legitimate. He writes
“It would, of course, be dangerous to generalise from the example of one county
to the whole of England, but the degree of typicality of Warwickshire and
Professor Jordan’s findings are encouraging. To study other counties from this
point of view may yield interesting comparisons and the discovery of new
variables, particularly if areas are found where relief administration in fact
collapsed. More generally, however, and assuming that poor relief did not
collapse in England during the Interregnum, of what significance was its
continued functioning? First, it is clear that the devolution towards local
control which took place in this period did not mean collapse or even falling
efficiency in administration whether the sort of zealous efficiency
characteristic of the Puritan rule was continued after I660 is another question
deserving of study.[13]
[1] Christopher Hill-The English Revolution 1640-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/
[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution
[3] John Rees and Lee Humber-The good old cause-An interview
with Christopher Hill-
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1992/isj2-056/hill.html
[4] The Class, the Party-and the Leadership-https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/party.htm
[5] Unum Necessarium:John Cooke, of Graies Inne,
Barrester.http://famineanddearth.exeter.ac.uk/displayhtml.html?id=fp_00502_en_unum
[6] The Century of Revolution: 1603–1714
[7] Christopher Hill-The English Revolution 1640-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/hill-christopher/english-revolution/
[8] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left-John Gurney-Past &
Present, Volume 235, Issue 1, May 2017, Pages 179–206,
https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtx017
[9] Professor D. C.
Coleman-Obituary-https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-professor-d-c-coleman-1600207.html
[10] Labour in the English Economy during the 17th
Century-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1956.tb01570.x
[11] Labour in the English Economy during the 17th
Century-https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1956.tb01570.x
[12] Dearth and the English revolution:the harvest crisis of
1647–50-By Steve Hindle-https://www.huntington.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/dearth-and-the-english-revolution-echr.pdf
[13] A. L. Beier Poor relief in Warwickshire 1630-16601 –
Past and Present 1966
The Life of R. H. Tawney: Socialism and History- Lawrence
Goldman-Bloomsbury 2013
The fact that
Lawrence Goldman’s biography is the first for well over half a century is an
indication of how far R H Tawney’s reputation and influence has declined. It is
hoped that this book is the start of a revival of an interest in Tawney’s
writings. The book is almost entirely drawn from the archive based at the
London School of Economics(LSE) and from personal material from his family.
Goldman takes a basic broadly chronological approach, and tries but does not
always succeed to work in the more serious political and history issues that
arose during his lifetime. The book delves heavily into Tawney’s life to the
detriment of a more in-depth study of his politics and historiography.Perhaps
the most striking thought when reading the book is the fact that Tawney’s
archive has hardly been touched. Goldman does not attempt to answer this
conundrum but I believe that despite Tawney being a Christian Socialist not a
Marxist his work has falling victim to the onslaught in academia led by large
numbers of revisionist historians who have sought to bury Marxist
historiography under a large number of dead dogs.
Early Life
Tawney came from a family that was academic and comfortably
well off. Like large numbers of his class he was privately educated in Tawney’s
case at Rugby and later went on to Balliol. It is without doubt Tawney’s social
background that heavily influenced his political and historical writings. As
one writer pointed out he “ brought a late Victorian and Edwardian ethical
sensibility to the economic and industrial troubles of the 1920s and 30s,”[1]It
is clear that it was his “ethical sensibility” that drove him to give something
back to society in the form of educating the working class. Tawney clearly had
an empathy with the poor. While rejecting Marxist theory he started the first
Workers’ Educational Association courses in Lancashire and the Black Country.
The education of workers and the unemployed through Workers
Educational Associations in one form or another was an international
phenomenon. The German Workers’ Educational Society in London was started in
1840 by a group of political refugees, who were members of the League of the
Just.When the Communist League was founded in 1847, its members played leading
roles in the society. Creating branches in many workings areas of London. The
importance of the society attracted Marx and Engels in 1849-50 who took more
responsibility for the political direction of the society.
The Society, unfortunately, was closed 1918, by the British
Government. Goldman believes that Tawney choose his field of study carefully.
His study of economics was clearly motivated by his attempt to understand the
origins of capitalism. Unfortunately, not by using a Marxist methodology,
rejecting using historical materialism as a method of examining capitalism.
Goldman is not really interested in looking into Tawney’s philosophy of
history. While rejecting Marxism, Tawney adopted an essentially utopian
approach to politics and for that matter history.
This approach can be seen in one of his most important and
famous books. He states “The distinction made by the philosophers of classical
antiquity between liberal and servile occupations, the medieval insistence that
riches exist for man, not man for riches, Ruskin’s famous outburst, “there is
no wealth but life”, the argument of the Socialist who urges that production be
organized for service not for profit, are but different attempts to emphasize
the instrumental character of economic activities, by reference to an ideal
which is held to express the true nature of man.”[2]Compare this to Marx “In
the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material
forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness”[3]
Tawney rejected Marx’s linking of base and superstructure.
Tawney never believed that socialism should have a material base. While he
believed that working men and women should have strong convictions his appeal
was to the heart and not the head.He was fond of quoting Oliver Cromwell who
during the English revolution commented on the type of person he wanted in the
New Model Army a “plain russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for and
loves what he knows”.Tawney’s socialism was suffused with Christian morality.
According to Goldman Tawney gave out good will and expected in return.
Declaring that “no political creed will ever capture their hearts which begins
by saying simply ‘we will give you a little more money’”. It is quite striking
that Tawney had a very low goal for socialism.
Would he have been a better historian if he had embraced
Marxist methodology I believe he would have been. But despite this handicap so
great was his influence at the time that his study of the period 1540-1640
became known as “Tawney’s century”.
Historiography
Probably the weakest part of the book is the treatment or
lack of it of the furious battles Tawney had with predominately right wing
historians. While it would have clear to even an O Level history or politics
student that Tawney was not a Marxist this did not stop him being attacked for
his perceived Marxist orientation.He was involved in certainly the biggest and
nastiest discussion of the 20th century. While some of today’s historians have
treated this debate as arcane they are wrong and do so for mainly ideological
reasons.The start of the battle occurred when in The Economic History Review of
1941, Tawney published ‘The Rise of the Gentry’ as Goldman puts it he “argued
that a change occurred in the ownership of property in the century before the
Civil War, with a new class of gentry replacing the old land-owing classes.
Tawney’s most important piece of empirical evidence was what later came to be
referred to as the ‘counting of manors’ – between 1561 and 1680 ‘the number of
landholders owning more than 10 manors fell from 612 to 347.
Impressionistically, the number of lesser landholders grew but the wealthiest
landholders were losing their grip and declining in numbers and wealth’ (p.
234).
While Goldman is light on historiography the book would have
been greatly improved if he devoted more time and space to this debate, which
he did not see as an objective exchange of opinions. Personal prejudice and
petty jealousy was to intercede. American historian Lawrence Stone became
involved in the debate. Stone visited Tawney during the second world war.The
story goes that Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was covering the same ground as Tawney
gave Stone some papers on the subject. Whether Stone deliberately gave Tawney
papers to further his research is open to conjecture. Trevor Roper saw this as
a slight and decided to ‘smash’ Stone.
According to the National Oxford Biography Stone had an
“impatience to get on with ‘real’ history earned him a reputation for arrogance
during his post-war undergraduate year; on one occasion he stormed out of a
revision class conducted by a newly appointed Christ Church tutor, Hugh
Trevor-Roper”.It would appear that Roper never forgave him for this but does
not explain Ropers vitriolic attack. Trevor-Roper accused Stone of failing to
understand the technological nature of the documents he studied and had
substantially exaggerated the level of indebtedness of the Aristocracy. See
also C Thompson Critic of Stone’s work) This ‘mistake’ did not warrant Roper’s
“academic vituperation”. Tawney was moved to defend Stone saying that ‘an
erring colleague is not an Amalakite to be smitten hip and thigh’.
On a broader point while Stone himself described his early
career as being a young Marxist perhaps his mistakes were the product of an
incomplete assimilation of the Marxist method of Historical Materialism. Stone
had a major problem in that he never really understood the difference between
genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic determinism.
In fact, Stone himself soon moved away from any link with
Marxist historiography and in his own words became as he put it in an interview
in 1987, “an old fashioned Whig”. Stone never really deepens the reader’s
knowledge of the political persuasion of Roper or other historians such as J H
Dexter who also weighted in heavily to the debate with Tawney. Stone mistakenly
described him as a Liberal.Hexter’s work is very readable but here is not the
place to evaluate its merit but it does warrant me to say that Hexter’s close
links to the American Encounter magazine which in turn had close links to the
CIA could have been exposed by Stone.
In the 1950s Hugh Trevor-Roper went to a conference in
Berlin which was largely made up of anti-communists, I am not sure if J H
Hexter went to as well but writer and some Stalinist intellectuals such as
Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, and Arthur Koestler. The result of
this conference was the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its
magazine Encounter. Trevor Roper wrote extensively for the magazine Encounter,
is it any wonder that Stone who was mistakenly described as a Marxist historian
would get such a hostile treatment.
This would in my opinion armed his readers with an
understanding of the fact that attacks on Stone’s and Tawney’s work were not
just motivated by historical accuracy but had a very right wing political
undertone.The attack on Stone was unwarranted for a number of reasons. The main
one being that after writing the Cause of the English Revolution he was moving
away from any link to a Marxist analysis of the English Revolution.But it
became clear that roper’s real target was Tawney. Goldman to his credit does
question whether Trevor-Roper was justified in attacking both in this manner–
‘why, if he had killed the child, did Trevor-Roper go on to kill the father?’
(p. 237). He chides Roper ‘for all the huffing and puffing Trevor-Roper had
merely offered an alternative and admittedly better model of social structures
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … Trevor-Roper had not vanquished
Tawney, merely corrected him … The judgement that he had delivered an
‘annihilating oposculum’ to Tawney’s article is in need of revision.
Trevor-Roper’s motivation was clearly ideological driven. He saw Tawney as a
Marxist that must be vanquished.
Conclusion
It is impossible in the space of this review to sum up the
importance of Tawney’s work or his legacy. To the modern reader Tawney was
clearly the archetypal absent-minded scholar, As Goldman points out he lived in
chaos. Goldman recounts a story that when Tawney invited William Temple (a
future archbishop of Canterbury) for a meal “and removed three musty volumes
from his bookshelf to reveal two cold chops on a plate” (p. 139).A L Rowse also
recounts a visit to Tawney ‘When I penetrated his study in Mecklenburg Square I
was amazed: not only the litter of books and papers on every chair, table or
ledge, but trays with scraps of food, unwashed teacups etc. …Tawney sat
imperturbably in the midst of the mess, he didn’t seem to notice the squalor’,
Historians I Have Known, pp. 93–4.These anecdotes while amusing should not be
an excuse for ignoring an important historian. The least he deserves is a
proper re-evaluation of his work. Certainly the “Storm Over the Gentry” debate
needs to be put in a more appropriate context. Hopefully Goldman’s book will
rekindle not just an interest but provokes other historians into doing some
long overdue work on Tawney.
[1] For the Common Good-Stefan Collini
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1362851.ece
[2] Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926),
[3]K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, with some notes by R. Rojas.
The Election of Jeremy Corbyn and “The rebirth of the
Levellers”
It would not be an overstatement to say that the election to
the leadership of the Labour party of Jeremy Corbyn is an event of some
significance. Corbyn has been the unwitting benefactor of the enormous social
hostility aimed at the growing enrichment at the expense of millions of working
people by a handful of the super-elite. There is, without a doubt, something
rotten in the state of Britain.
A tremendous amount of newspaper columns, most of it pretty
puerile has drawn attention to Corbyn’s left-wing politics. As Julie Hyland
correctly points out “Corbyn’s history is steeped in opportunist
petty-bourgeois politics. For all his votes against aspects of Labour policy,
he has been a loyal defender of the party throughout his 32 years on Labour’s
backbenches. No one can seriously propose that this party—which, in its
politics and organisation and the social composition of its apparatus, is Tory
in all but name—can be transformed into an instrument of working-class
struggle. The British Labour Party did not begin with Blair. It is a bourgeois
party of more than a century’s standing, and a tried and tested instrument of
British imperialism and its state machine. Whether led by Clement Attlee, James
Callaghan or Jeremy Corbyn, its essence remains unaltered”.[1]
One of the more interesting articles which appeared as a
byproduct of Corbyn’s election victory was by the historian Edward Vallance in
the Guardian newspaper.[2] The purpose of my article is to tackle the issues
raised by Vallance’s article rather than a polemic against Corbyn’s politics.
As in politics so in history, principled considerations need to guide any
analysis.
His article took note of an interview with the New Statesman
in which Corbyn sought to trace his radicalism back to mid-17th-century
England. The interviewer asked Corbyn what historical figure he most identified
with. It was not surprising that he named John Lilburne.
I am not against modern-day political figures identifying
with historical figures or having a good grasp of history, but much historical
water has passed under the bridge since 1640 and secondly to compare Corbyn’s
opportunist petty-bourgeois politics with the revolutionary Levellers. Their
leader John Lilburne is a little disingenuous.
John Lilburne was the de facto leader of the Levellers who
appeared in the mid-1640s and were England’s first radical political party.
They were responsible for many of modern-day political techniques such as mass
demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and the lobby of MPs. Their
strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had quite considerable
support in the army. The MP Henry Marten described Lilburne saying “If the
world were emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John
and John with Lilburne.”
The ‘movement’ contained other smaller groups of radicals
such as the Diggers known as the True Levellers and Ranters who were on the
extreme left wing of the Leveller movement. As Valance correctly points out
“Lilburne would forge a career as one of the most prominent radical figures of
the period. Along with the works of other writers, notably Richard Overton,
William Walwyn and John Wildman, Lilburne’s ideas formed the intellectual basis
for what came to be known as the Leveller movement”.[3]
How radical were the Levellers has preoccupied historians
and some politicians for centuries? This task has been more difficult with the
Leveller’s legacy being claimed by fascists such as the BNP[4], and the
semi-fascist UKIP[5] have adopted them as their own. UKIP MP Douglas Carswell
wrote on his blog that he thought the Levellers were proto-Conservatives who
favoured the small government, low taxes and free trade.
Would, for instance, would Carswell agree with the
egalitarian sentiment of Thomas Rainborowe a leading Leveller at the Putney
debates who said “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to
live, as the greatest he, and therefore … every man that is to live under a
government ought first, by his consent, to put himself under that government;
and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict
sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.” I
doubt it somehow.
It was correct for the early Marxists to look at the early
plebeian movements as precursors of the modern socialist movement. What needs
to be clarified is what a modern socialist movement looks like. The Communist
Party Historians Group (CPHG) alongside numerous radical groups such as the
Socialist Workers Party (SWP) tend to glorify the spontaneous movement of the
“middling sort” and to link it to working-class struggles today as if there was
some unbroken radical and democratic thread that would supersede the need for a
scientifically grounded Marxist revolutionary party.
If there is to be a rebirth of the Leveller historiography,
it must be done with a substantial appreciation of the historians and political
figures that flowered during the Russian revolution. One such figure was Evgeny
Pashukanis.[6] His area of expertise was legal history. His writings on the
radical movements of the 17th century are perceptive and well worth a study but
have been neglected by even today’s left-leaning historians. He rejected crude
historicism and opposed historians who saw the Levellers democratic demands as
utopian.
Pashukanis saw the English Levellers and Diggers as
“primitive precursors of Bolshevism”. In the introduction to his Revolutionary
Elements in the History of the English State and Law, one writer said “These
movements were primitive because they articulated their demands chiefly in
terms of bourgeois notions of distributive justice, yet they were also
precursors of Bolshevism because they attacked existing property relations and
recognised the necessity of forging political alliances with the urban workers
and rank and file soldiers. In praising the informal nature of the Levellers’
demands, and the democratic nature of their organisations, Pashukanis is
drawing an explicit parallel between the Levellers’ organisation and the
structure of the Soviets of Soldiers’ and Workers’ Deputies of 1917. The
Levellers’ failure lay in the fact that they were betrayed by the upper strata
of the peasantry, and that they were insufficiently prepared to resist the
authoritarian opportunism of Cromwell and his generals”.[7]
What is any serious student of the subject of the Levellers
to make of all this? Anyone who knows the history of the Levellers this is not
a simple question. It is very complex. You would search in vain amongst the MPs
mentioned including Corbyn of any sense of the revolutionary process (which the
Levellers took part in) that brought Oliver Cromwell to power as England’s
first non-royal head of state. Many MPs would lack any kind of historical
knowledge on this matter, and they would certainly downplay the revolutionary
nature of the Levellers. And more importantly, they would stay deathly silent
on their social writings.
Any serious student of the Levellers would have to contend
with is the fact that modern-day historiography is still partially dominated by
Fabianism. In Putney, there is an exhibition on the Putney Debates of 1647. The
information on Leveller involvement in the debates (which was considerable) was
largely dominated by politicians and historians with close association with the
British Labour Party and more precisely the Fabians.
Any debate over the Levellers has been dominated certainly
over the last century by figures in or around Social Democracy. Perhaps the
most important figure has been Tony Benn. Who before his death spoke at a
commemoration of Lilburne’s birth?. As Julie Hyland noted “Benn prides himself
on his “historical viewpoint”.
Through his father, the experiences of the 1930s became a
formative influence on him politically. From this tumultuous decade of fascism,
defeated revolutions, depression and war, he developed a loathing for class
conflict. This reinforced his belief that parliamentary democracy and social
reform were all that stood between Britain and chaos. [8]
Fabians such as Benn present the English revolution, not as
a revolution and the Levellers are not seen as revolutionaries but mere
radicals. Speaking about British Fabianism, Leon Trotsky wrote: “Throughout the
whole history of the British Labour movement there has been pressure by the
bourgeoisie upon the proletariat through the agency of radicals, intellectuals,
drawing-room and church socialists and Owenites who reject the class struggle
and advocate the principle of social solidarity, preach collaboration with the
bourgeoisie, bridle, enfeeble and politically debase the proletariat.”[9]
To conclude “The interest in the radicalism of the English
revolution is indicative of the current crisis in British political life “.
This is certainly the most interesting and accurate sentence in the whole of
Vallance’s article. Can a study of the Levellers tell us anything about
politics today? Firstly the fact that we are talking about the 17th-century
English revolution and its radical wing at all is because the issues like what
kind of democracy do we want, the rise of social inequality and how to tackle
it and in general what kind of society do we want are contemporary. Given the
explosive political situation today, it is understandable that the bourgeoisie
is a little nervous over a discussion of the revolution of 1640.
In many ways, the answer given to all these questions in
many ways mirror the answers given by Cromwell and other bourgeois leaders of
his day are similar to today’s politicians both Labour and conservative.
Cromwell opposed the abolition of private property and had no solution to the
rise in social inequality other than to send his army against anyone that
proposed it. For example, on May 17th, 1649, Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins
and Private Church rank and file Levellers were shot at the hands of Oliver Cromwell
troops. Like in the 17th-century real wealth and the power that goes with it
are still in the hands of a tiny, extremely wealthy elite who call the shots.
[1] The political issues posed by Corbyn’s election as UK
Labour Party leader14 September 2015-wsws.org
[2]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/levellers-corbynmania-jeremy-corbyn
[3]
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/levellers-corbynmania-jeremy-corbyn
[4] See Edward Vallance’s book-A Radical History of Britain:
Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – the men and women who fought for our
freedoms
[5]
http://ukiptruth.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/how-ukip-is-crippling-our-chances-of.html
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Pashukanis-see
[7] https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm
[8] The end of Fabianism in Britain- https://www.wsws.org
[9] Where is Britain Going?Chapter IV -The Fabian “Theory’of
Socialism
The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century by
Hugh Aldersey William 352 pages Granta (7 May 2015) ISBN-10: 1847089003
The Adventures of Sir
Thomas Browne in the 21st century is not an orthodox biography of the
17th-century scientist, antiquarian and prose writer. In many ways, this book
is more a comment on everyday life in the 21st century than in the 17th
century. To say that the science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams has an obsession
regarding Browne would be an understatement.The author who lives in Browne’s
home town of Norwich is aggrieved how few people recognize Browne’s name and
reacts with unrestrained anger at the fact that Browne’s private meadow, where
he studied wild plants, is now a car park. Browne’s former house is now a Pret
a Manger.
The book is a required taste but is not without merit.
Readers who get to the end will be pushed well out of their comfort zone. The
book has generally been well received except by the Spectator Magazine.[1]
Given the fact that nearly every major newspaper and magazine in Britain has
carried a review of the book, Granta must have exceptional publicity
department. The book would have been something of a gamble for Granta given
Aldersey-Williams constant comparing the debates over political and religious
differences of the 17th century with similar phenomena from our times.As the Scotsman
reviewer put it “It is a high-risk strategy to segue from the Civil War and the
Restoration of Charles II to Jimmy Savile and Richard Dawkins, the MMR vaccine
and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Morgellons and
the Mass Extinction Monitoring Organization, George Monbiot and Amanda Knox,
Mercedes hubcaps and the IgNobel Awards.[2]
The book has caused people who have read it to delve deeper
into the subject matter. The scientific and philosophical questions that Browne
grappled within the seventeenth century are still with us today. William’s to
his credit has recognized this.Thomas Browne was born in London in 1605. He
studied medicine in three different places starting at Oxford then Padua and
Leiden. When he finished these studies, he moved to Norwich in 1637, where
opened a practice and was a physician until he died in 1682. Before moving to
Norwich Browne started to put his thinking on scientific matters down on paper
his published work, Religio Medici was written around 1635 but not printed
until 1642.The book sought to reconcile Browne’s belief in scientific reason
with his religious belief. He did not see science as a barrier to belief saying
“is no vulgar part of faith to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to
reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses”.[3]
This contradiction between scientific objectivity and
religion would be a recurring theme throughout Browne’s work. The writer E J
Merton says of this contradiction “Here is Browne’s scientific point of view in
a nutshell. One lobe of his brain wants to study facts and test hypotheses on
the basis of them, the other is fascinated by mystic symbols and analogies.”
“The eclecticism so characteristic of Browne… Browne does not cry from the
housetops, as did Francis Bacon, the liberating power of experience in
opposition to the sterilizing influence of reason. Nor does he guarantee as did
Descartes, the intuitive truth of reason as opposed to the falsity of the
senses. Unlike either, he follows both sense experience and a priori reason in
his quest for truth. He uses what comes to him from tradition and from
contemporary science, often perhaps without too precise a formulation”.[4]
With his next book Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne went
on an offensive. It challenges what Browne called “vulgar errors”. Browne
challenged false belief and superstition. As the reviewer in the Guardian
points out “That combination of curious learning, reserved judgment, credulity
and proto-scientific method runs through his other major works. Hydriotaphia,
Urn-Burial (1658) meditates on death and cremation in the light of an
archaeological discovery of a cluster of urns containing burned bones in a
field near Walsingham. “Who knows the fate of his bones?” Browne reflects. The
Garden of Cyrus (1658) explores the benefits of planting trees in a
lattice-like arrangement and muses on the “mystical mathematics” of the number
five. Browne also wrote a glorious inventory of a fictional museum (Musaeum
Clausum) full of lost and impossible objects, such as “The Skin of a Snake bred
out of the Spinal Marrow of a Man” and a letter from Cicero’s brother
describing Britain in the age of Julius Caesar”.
Among several surprising things that Aldersey-Williams’s
extremely detailed book digs up is that Browne was an extraordinary inventor of
new words. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have him as the first
person to use the word “electricity”. It is a pity that the modern-day new
words such as “selfie” are not a patch on the words invented by Browne.
Browne’s new words show preciseness and beauty missing in today’s new additions
to the English language. But before we get carried away, he did invent words
such as “alliciency” or “zodiographer” which are not so catchy. It is also
disputed how many new words can be attributed to Browne.
I am not sure that I agree with Aldersey-Williams, who
believes that Browne’s “tolerant and forgiving” style provides a model for
writing and thinking about science today. Both Browne and Aldersey-Williams are
Deists in their philosophical outlooks. A strange omission from the book is the
belief that Browne was an early member of the Enlightenment.The Enlightenment,
according to Jonathan Israel, was “the unprecedented intellectual turmoil which
commenced in the mid-seventeenth century, “and was closely linked with the
scientific discoveries of people like Galileo. Whose scientific innovations
paved the way for “powerful new philosophical systems” producing a profound
struggle between “traditional, theologically sanctioned ideas about Man, God,
and the universe and secular, mechanistic conceptions which stood independently
of any theological sanction?”.[5]
Aldersey-Williams also tends to view Browne and his thought
in a very national framework. While it would have been next to impossible for
someone like Browne to see the connection between his scientific and
philosophical ideas and the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century.
Someone from the 21st century should have. Aldersey-Williams has like Browne
very little to say on the English Civil war.According to the ODNB (Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography) “Little trace remains of Browne’s life,
during the civil war and the interregnum, other than as author and family man.
His post-Restoration letters to his sons show awareness of public events and
strong opinions about the killing of Charles I, but the only political act
during the civil war and the interregnum of which evidence survives is his
refusal in 1643 (along with 431 other members of the gentry and professions) to
subscribe money to parliament for the recapture of royalist-held Newcastle.
After 1660, however, he played a more open role in the establishment. In
Religio medici (I.30) he had declared: ‘I have ever beleeved, and doe now know,
that there are Witches’ (a belief shared by Bacon, Harvey, and Boyle). The
anonymous account of A tryal of witches, at the assizes held at Bury St.
Edmonds for the county of Suffolk; on the tenth day of March, 1664 (1682,
41–2), ‘in the sixteenth year of … Charles II’, reports that Browne was:
clearly of Opinion, that [the seven alleged child-victims] were Bewitched; … he
conceived, that these swouning Fits were Natural, and nothing else but that
they call the Mother, but only heightned to a great excess by the subtilty of
the Devil, co-operating with the Malice of these which we term Witches, at
whose Instance he doth these Villanies.[6]
The English revolution which largely passed Browne by was a
world event and should be seen in broad international context within which the
political ideas associated with this war developed. According to C Talbot
“Israel in his book Radical Enlightenment suggests that the Fronde in France
and the Masaniello rising in Naples were just as important in terms of their
influence on European consciousness as the English Civil War”.
Aldersey-Williams philosophical prejudices tend him to
attack anyone who seeks to go further than him in his scientific understanding.
For him, modern writers such as Richard Dawkins are too dogmatic in their
insistence of separation between science and religious mysticism.
Aldersey-Williams tends to gloss overs Browne’s views on depression which are
far from helpful. Browne believed that periodical periods of melancholia “are
to be cherished as a proper response to the way we find the world”.Having said
that Browne’s dabbling with alchemy should be explained after all a much more
famous scientist of the time delved into it. Sir Isaac Newton it is true did
devote more of his time to the subject than he did writing the Principia.
As Chris Talbot points out “Newton did not succeed in
turning lead into gold, but he did succeed in discovering the law of gravity.
The project of the alchemists was to discover the natural process that had
created the elements such as lead and gold, to reproduce that process and to
harness it for the benefit of mankind. Given the technology available to
Newton, this was an impractical objective, but it took him two decades to find
that out. There was, however, nothing “unscientific” or “mystical” about the
objective. Alchemy was no more inherently mystical than algebra, which, as its
name suggests, came from the same Arabic source”.[7]To conclude this book is a
curious read, it is an unorthodox book, but it is a very good read. Not all of
Aldersey-Williams comparisons of the 17th century with 21st century come off,
but it is a legitimate literary exercise. I would like to recommend this book.
It is not for everyone’s taste if it sparks an interest in the extraordinary
political, scientific events of the 17th century then it deserves the wide
audience it looks to have achieved.
[1]
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9558902/its-amazing-how-many-different-subjects-sir-thomas-brownes-latest-biographer-doesnt-care-about/
[2]
http://www.scotsman.com/mobile/lifestyle/books/book-review-the-adventures-of-sir-thomas-browne-1-3761949
[3] Religio Medici https://archive.org/details/b24751182
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudodoxia_Epidemica
[5] Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of
Modernity 1650-1750.J Israel
[6] Sir Thomas Browne 1605–1682 R. H. Robbins –
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3702?docPos=4
[7] [8] Marxism and Science: An addendum to “The Frankfurt
School vs. Marxism” http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/scie-o28.html
God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, 1660–1720,
by Brodie Waddell. The Boydell Press. 2012; pp. 273. £60.
In his first book,
God, Duty and Community in English Economic Life, Brodie Waddell uses a
combination of genre, “cultural turn” and “history from below” to explain the
complex changes in the economy and politics of late Stuart England. However,
the book offers a much watered-down version of both. Suffice to say Waddell
rejects previous Whig And orthodox Marxist teleologies.Waddell’s particular
brand of people’s history historiography is heavily influenced by historians
who came from the Communist Party Historians Group. One of their many
contributions to the study of Early Modern England was the historiographical
genre “history from below” or ‘people’s history’. The influence of E P
Thompson’s book the Making of the English Working Class is palpable.
Thompson’s book and his other major works have a common
theme in that they tend to obscure the class character of rebels,
revolutionaries and popular leaders by regarding them all as representatives of
a national revolutionary tradition.Whether Waddell understands or cares where
his influences come from is open to question, but as Ann Talbot writes,
People’s history was an attempt to give some historical foundation to the
policies of Popular Front.The historians inside the CPHG were guilty in one
form or another of this political crime. Historians like David Parker have
played down the influence of the Soviet Communist Party on the historians
inside the CPHG. According to Parker the British Marxists were not “imprisoned
in a straight jacket –either economistic or Stalinist-from which they later
escape”. This is a very generous evaluation. Parker would appear to operate a
form of political blindness on this matter.
Despite being Waddell’s first book, he has a significant
body of work inside and outside academia. His blog contains numerous articles
based on people’s history genre. In 2013 along with other likeminded historians
they held an Online Symposium titled “The Future of History from Below”:
Waddell along with over twenty like-minded historians recently announced on the
blog[1] a follow up the online symposium, ‘The Voices of the People’. The
series of articles will further examine the history from below genre.While this
is an extremely useful exercise, I have several reservations. One is that at no
time has an orthodox Marxist historian been invited to contribute to the
subject and secondly none of the essays examine the political origins of the
genre in any great detail.
The revival of the history from below genre seems to
coincide with a growing dissatisfaction amongst some historians and the wider
public with capitalism. It cannot be a coincidence that we have over the last
six years witnessed the near-collapse of the capitalist system and growth of
social inequality unprecedented in over a century and seen the rise of a new
form of history from below historiography.Like a large number of revisionist
historians today Waddell sets out in his introduction a quite considerable task
of seeking to overturn large swathes of the previous historiography on his
chosen subject. However, his criticism of previous Marxist and Whig
historiography gives succour to more conservative revisionist historians.
Waddell concedes that for a substantial part of the
twentieth century early modern historiography in Britain and internationally
has been dominated by a disparate number of historians who in one way or
another profess to be Marxist or Marxist influenced. As Tom Leng points out
“notions of early modern social change have been informed by a series of
teleological transitions–from feudalism to capitalism, community to society,
and so on”.[2]It is debatable how much Marx and Engels Waddell has read, but
his book does not present their writings in any great detail. He does not agree
with their politics or historiography. In his book and his blog, he rejects the
notion that early modern society can be best understood as a transition from
feudalism to capitalism.
I believe the book would have benefited from a closer study
of Marxist methodology. In fact, like most modern history books Waddell’s is
very light on methodology. While not directly concerning the material in the
book Engels work on the family would have given us a deeper insight into the
lives of “ordinary 17th-century people, as Engels noted “According to the
materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final
instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.
This, again, is twofold. On the one side, the production of the means of
existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools
necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human
beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization
under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular
country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of
development of labour on the one hand and of the family on the other”.[3]
Waddell rejects Engel’s historical materialistic outlook. He
instead leans heavily on the work of E. P. Thompson whose work for too long has
been described as Marxist. Despite borrowing a few phrases or quotes from Marx
or Engels Thompson’s work is a negation of orthodox Marxism.Terms like “moral
economy” have been presented as a sort of Marxist analysis. The term “moral
economy” has usually been attributed to Thompson. However, it was the Russian
economist Alexander Chayanov who first expounded on this idea in the
1920s.Waddell’s book relies heavily on Thompson’s “moral economy”, but no
matter how you try you wrap it up Thompson’s theoretical mess, it has nothing
to do with any Marxist concepts or methodology. Waddell tends to separate what
people thought about religion, duty and community from the significant economic
changes that took place in the seventeenth century. Waddell like Thompson
rejects the relationship between base and superstructure.
As one reviewer put it “Waddell does not claim to be an
expert on new forms of economic development that came about during the later
Stuart period. In the latter half of the book, Waddell details the activity of
the people. He cites numerous strikes, protests, and communal actions that took
place across England between 1660 and 1720. Due to his political blindness,
these events cannot be placed in relation to their political or social context.
His tendency to separate base and superstructure means his observations are
superficial at best and are treated only as manifestations of a more general
sense of collective identity and agency.”
This separation between base and superstructure has become
the hallmark of several historians that write on the history from below genre.
Despite being labelled as out of date and unfashionable what Marx wrote on base
and superstructure is as relevant today as when it was written :”In the social
production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations,
which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political, and intellectual life”.
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a
certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely
expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within
the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development
of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins
an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead,
sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure.
In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between
the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can
be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge
an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a
period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from
the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations
of production”.[4]
While Waddell correctly points out in the book that the
lives of working people in early modern England, were to a degree influenced by
the economic changes taking place after the revolution. But he rejects the
premise that their social being determined their consciousness.Again the book
would have benefited from Marx’s analysis in The German Ideology: “The
production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly
interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the
language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men,
appear at this stage as the direct afflux from their material behaviour. The
same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics,
laws, morality, religion, and metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of
their conceptions, ideas”. [5]
Despite its shortcoming on the methodology, the book does
have merit. It is to Waddell’s credit that in order to present his ideas, he
uses a wide range of sources, low priced pamphlets, Sermons, songs, broadsides.
The books show his extensive use of archival sources such as court records,
guild and company records, and parish registers.The book is divided into three
sections, and each examines the concepts in the title, God, duty, and
community. One problem encountered by Waddell is the paucity of records that
enable us to have a good idea of how “ordinary” people viewed the religious
developments and how they impacted on economic life.It is clear that during the
English revolution traditional religious beliefs started to receive a beating
as David north points out “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated
people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries
of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament.
But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the
publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543,
which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and
provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho
Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from
the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested
upon it, was well underway.[6]
Waddell can reject Marx, Tawney and even Weber all he likes
but evidence point to large sections of society both poor and rich alike
sharing similar if not the same attitude towards God and to some extent
property.To conclude, despite calling for a new approach to historical
research, much of Waddell’s ideas have been developed already by a body of
writers and historians who advocated a “cultural turn”. Like many “new”
approaches Cultural Studies started life as an attack on revolutionary Marxism,
It is hoped that Waddell’s future work does not too far down this road.
[1] https://manyheadedmonster.wordpress.com/
[2] https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38233
[3] The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the
State: in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan preface to the First
Edition, 1884
[4] Marx, Karl (1977). A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers: Notes by R. Rojas.
[5] German Ideology, 1.c. p. 13-4.
[6] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism
By David North
Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration:
Philip Major, Ashgate March 2013
Phillip Major’s new
book is a welcome addition into areas of the English revolution that has been
long neglected. Major’s book on exile joins a recent number of books examining
royalist exiles, including Geoffrey Smith’s look into Royalist exiles during
the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, and by the same author The Cavaliers in
Exile 1640–1660.
Major’s research into royalist exile both internal and
external has according to one writer “contributed much new and original
research and written work on the subject exile”. Major’s work should be read
alongside numerous other studies which in the last five years have filled a
large number of gaps in royalist historiography.
Whether this has changed, our understanding of royalism
remains to be seen. Any increase in our understanding must be allied to a study
of the previous historiography from both left and right-wing historians.Given
the amount of material that remains to be archived and written about on the subject
of exile Major’s book is an important contribution to this research. The book
is both austere in look and content. One problem is Major’s use of nearly
impenetrable language that would put even the most enthusiastic reader off. I
understand that these type of books must have a certain academic tone; there is
a danger that this type of language becomes understandable available to a
select few.
The writer George Orwell hated this type of unnecessary
language writing “The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of
Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and
covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it
were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
spurting out ink. In our age, there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.”
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies,
evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad,
language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not
sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages
have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of
dictatorship.[1]
The date range covered by Writings of Exile 1640-1680 is
broad and difficult and is probably why Gaby Mahlberg felt that the book was a
little “disjointed”.Major’s approach was defended by the publishers saying “it
challenges conventional paradigms which assume a neat demarcation of
chronology, geography and allegiance in this seminal period of British and American
history. Crossing disciplinary lines, it casts new light on how the ruptures —
and in some cases liberation — of exile in these years both reflected and
informed events in the public sphere”.[2]
Major’s writing style is not for the faint-hearted. The
academic tone and language that permeates the entire book is set in Chapter One
Edward Hyde: Case Study of a Royalist Exile. Hyde was a significant figure both
during the revolution and the restoration of the monarchy. His History of the
Rebellion, according to one writer “served to formulate and crystallize the
social philosophy soon to be known as Toryism. As a historical rhetorician and
portrait painter, there can be no doubt that Clarendon ranks among the
greatest; the strength and resilience of the Tory view of history may be
estimated from its present prevalence and influence”.[3]
Hyde’s exile begun on Isles of Scilly, Jersey and other
places during the 1640s and 50s. His second exile was in Montpellier in the
late 1660s and 70s. His fall from power would have had a deep psychological
impact on him. However, Major’s book does not examine how politically Hyde
dealt with what was tantamount to a political exile. I am not sure the best way
to understand Hyde’s political exile is through his writings’ Contemplation of
the Psalms.During his periods of exile, Hyde attempted to form a broad spectrum
of political and religious alliances. While he would have experienced a great
deal of personal, psychological and family problems due to exile, he did not go
quietly into the good night.
In many instances, he sought to form a myriad of alliances
in order to pursue his political and social agenda. As Mahlberg said, looking
into his ties with republican and Leveller activists abroad would be a very
good research topic. She adds “There are intriguing links between Clarendon and
his protégé republican Henry Neville exiled to Italy in 1664 for their mutual
benefit, for instance, while the firebrand Algernon Sidney made various
overtures for office to the Restoration regime before plotting to topple it.
Further leads worth exploring point to Catholic Rome, where both royalists and
republicans had their secret networks, and towards the Huguenot south of
France, wherein the later 1660s we find both the fallen first minister Hyde and
the fallen republican Sidney.”[4]
While Major is within his right to study and research what
he wants. One should not draw from this study of Clarenden’s lesser religious
writings a belief that these should be elevated above his political or literary
writings.
Many Royalist exiles sought to ransack the bible in order to
understand what had happened to them. For many protestant Royalists “both the
Established Church and its liturgy remained decidedly alive, if maimed and
disoriented. Gathering in the private chapel of Sir Richard Browne, the
royalist diplomat in Paris, and under the chaplaincy of John Cosin, dean of
Peterborough, many Protestant royalists recast their newfound hardship in
familiar religious terms.
Whether forced into exile by parliamentary ordinance or
voluntarily following the Stuarts in hopes of restoration, those who attended
services at Browne’s chapel turned to Scripture and divine example in order to
comprehend defeat”.[5]In Chapter two ‘Ceremony and Grief in the Royalist Exile’
Major continues his theme of royalist exiles seeking to continue their
religious practices into exile. The chapter explores royalists’ attitude ‘to
the death of fellow exiles, as well as friends and family left behind in
England’.
According to Major “there is considerable evidence, much of
it again found in Evelyn’s Diary, for the continued observance by royalist
exiles of the full panoply of Church of England services, including those of
Holy Communion, christening, marriage and even the ordination of priests and
consecration of bishops. Yet while, while each of these ceremonies played an
important role in engendering a sense of cultural continuity amidst the rupture
of exile, the rites of burial provide a particularly poignant and recurring
motif in the extant contemporary literature. Exile is an extreme environment in
which people experience an acute sense of change and behave in revealing
ways”.[6]
Chapter 3 deals with ‘Royalist Internal Exile’. Major’s
focus is on the exile of royalists from London and their internment in the
countryside. These royalists built up a network of friends who shared political
and religious beliefs. The chapter is an elongated paper which appeared in the
Review of English Studies. It is pretty clear from Major’s work on the subject
of internal exile that the subject has been heavily under-researched.
Parliament during the civil war, according to Major, developed a large number
of measures to ensure large scale royalist exile.[7]
Again royalists refused to go quietly into internal exile.
Many royalists responded by launching a barrage of poetry in order to
understand their predicament. In (John) Berkenhead’s poem, ‘Staying in London’,
Major states, “provides a window into the royalist literary response to
banishment from London, and also allows us to explore its nuanced relationship
with other cavalier verse of defeat and exile. Communicating hope and fear,
secrecy and indecision, and the sometimes surprising level of enervation which
these combinations can generate, it also incorporates more unambiguous royalist
literary notions, such as imprisonment, though even these are by no means
always treated similarly.
Perhaps most singularly, the peculiar nature of exclusion
from London during the English Revolution, with its concomitant anonymity and
reduction in status, seems to turn the cavalier poet in on himself, to the
brink of self-loathing, until, ironically, he eventually longs to leave the
capitalç‘O tear me hence’ çof his own volition. On this evidence, like their external
equivalents, measures of internal exile such as the Act for Banishment have not
only far-reaching physical but also psychological, repercussions, not least for
those who attempt to defy them”.
Chapter four ‘William Goffe in New England’ discusses the
regicides exile in America. As Gaby Mahlberg mentioned in her review three
royalist chapters to one parliamentary is a little one-sided. You get the
feeling that if the other way around the author would be accused of undue bias.
I find this chapter the best. In the sense that Major writes in a manner that
is easier to understand without dumbing down history. Goffe was a significant
figure in the English revolution, and Major does give him the respect due. As
Major points out, there is a significant difference between royalist and
parliament exiles in so much that many of the parliamentary exiles were
regicides and were hunted down without mercy.[8]
Like Hyde in chapter one, Major tries to find similarities
between Goffe’s and Hyde’s use of the Psalms and other Biblical texts in their
exile writings. Like Hyde, earlier in the book Goffe spent large parts of his
exile wondering how he lost power so quickly and very rapidly become exiled in
a strange land. Major concentrates heavily on exiles turning to religious
literature, but research can only take us so far. Republican revolutionaries
like Goffe had no means of learning from past revolutionary struggles, so they
turned to the bible. Historians should not limit their research to a man’s
religious proclivities.
To conclude, as was said earlier, this book is not for the
faint-hearted. The book is part of a broad shift in the historiography of the
English revolution. The last twenty or so years have seen a major shift away
from the dominant Marxist historiography. One of the byproducts of this shift
is over the last five years we have witnessed a proliferation of Royalist
studies. Major’s new book enters into this territory. Despite being well
written and researched his use of language, which is largely impenetrable to
the wider reading public could lead to this type of historiography being open
to a select few.
[1] Politics and the English Language George Orwell, 1946
[2] “Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and
Restoration”
[3]
norton.com/college/english/nael/noa/pdf/27636_17th_U26_Hyde-1-3.pdf
[4]
https://thehistorywoman.com/2014/12/27/the-english-revolution-and-its-patriotic-exiles/
[5] The Devotional Landscape of the Royalist Exile, 1649–
1660 Mark R. F. Williams
[6] Funerary Rites in the Royalist Exile: George Morley’s
Ministry in Antwerp, 1650-1653
[7] ‘Twixt Hope and Fear: John Berkenhead, Henry Lawes, And
Banishment from London during the English revolution
[8] See review- Killers of the King – The Men Who Dared to
Execute Charles I Hardcover – 11 Sep 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing –
ISBN-13:
978-1408851708ttp://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/killers-of-king-men-who-dared-to_23.html
Review: The Crimson Ribbon by Katherine Clements ISBN-10:
1472204220 11 Sep 2014
The Crimson Ribbon is
a very well written and researched debut historical novel by Katherine
Clements. The supreme test of a historical novel is how well the author blends
fictional characters with real-life figures and events. The Crimson Ribbons
passes that test.The central character of the book is Ruth Flowers, a very
believable creation of the author’s imagination. Flower’s life intersects with
the real-life figures of Oliver Cromwell and Elizabeth Poole.Clements treatment
of Cromwell and Poole is very disciplined and accurate. It is always tempting
for a novelist to play fast and loose with history and historical figures.
Cromwell is a very well-known and written about figure and does not play a too
greater part in the book. Poole, on the other hand, is not well known, and
Clements has a bit more space to explore her life creatively.
The opening chapter of the book is very violent and explores
the treatment of women who stepped out of line with the authorities. The
English revolution brought about a significant politicisation of all sectors of
society none more so than women. In the 17th century, England women were
allowed to be seen but not heard.While it was dangerous for men to question the
existing political and economic setup, for women at the beginning of the 17th
century, it was nearly impossible. But women of all classes managed to be
heard, and some cases very loudly.
The explosion of printing presses enabled women with little
money to spread their ideas and propaganda to a wider audience than ever
before.But this had a severe price. The ruling elite correctly saw this
radicalisation of women as a direct threat to their power and privileges. The
women who spoke up, formed groups and joined the radical parties such as the
Levellers Fifth Monarchists and even Baptists or Quakers were seen as a plague
and in many cases labelled witches.
According to the writer John Carey “a woman could be
publicly humiliated, ducked or bridled merely for scolding her husband,
neighbours – or government”. The book highlights the precarious nature of women
who step outside the bounds of society. The descent into poverty, prostitution
and sometimes death was all too real. Given the growth, today of young women
who for one reason have left their family home and have descended into poverty
and homelessness with little protection from the state shows that despite the
novel being set in the 17th century it has a contemporary feel to it.
Clements character Ruth is well written and believable. The
fact that real-life characters similar to Flowers existed during the war has
largely passed historians by. Another aspect of the war that has only recently
been addressed is the tremendous growth of printing presses during the
revolution. Clements’s book appears to be the first novel to broach the
subject.[1] Much the way the internet has given a voice to people who would
never be heard so did the illegal printing presses in the 17th century.
Having read her writings, it is clear that Elizabeth Poole
was a very political young woman. She was close to a few of the radical groups
that were prevalent at the time and was close to the Fifth Monarchists.The
story of Ruth Flowers is used by Clements to keep the novel ticking over.
However the most interesting real-life character is Elizabeth Poole. It is
clear from extensive research on Poole that not much is known about her life;
even her birth and death are not agreed. According to the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, she was born 1622? died in or after 1668.
Poole’s main claim to fame was her intervention into the
debate over the fate of Charles 1st. According to Manfred Brod “It was into
this situation that Elizabeth Poole entered towards the end of December as a
kind of consultant prophetess. After some preliminary hearings of which little
is known, she was received in a plenary session of the council of officers on
29 December. She told of a vision she had had, in which the army, as a healthy
young man, cured the nation, as a sick woman, of its disease. [2]
The power of the army, she explained, came from God and must
not be given away. Several officers, including Ireton, spoke to approve of her
presentation. Immediately afterwards, Lilburne came in with a petition, A Plea
for Common-Right and Freedom, which contained detailed proposals for the
conversion of the council of officers to a national executive body. Poole had
been brought in to play a mediating role between officers and Levellers.There
appears to be no proof that Poole met Lilburne but is clear that she was very
sympathetic towards him and the Levellers and used their documents in her
arguments against Cromwell and Ireton.
“I Have considered the agreement of the people that is
before you, and I am very jealous lest you should betray your trust in it (in
as much as the Kingly Power is faln into your hands) in giving it up to the
people; for thereby you give up the trust committed to you, and in so doing you
will prove your selves more treacherous then they that went before you, they
being no wayes able to improve it without you. You justly blame the King for
betraying his trust, and the Parliament for betraying theirs: This is the great
thing I have to say to you, Betray not you your trust”.[3]
She then according to Brod in 1653 “Poole forced her way
into the pulpit of the chapel of Somerset House in London and preached in
favour of Lilburne, then on trial for his life. The congregation was a socially
prominent one, and the action was widely and sensationally reported in the
newsbooks”.[4]Despite being strong on plot and history, there is an overriding
weakness in the book, which is the near absence of politics. Clements use of
real figures such as William Kiffin (1616–1701), while being historically
accurate leaves out his political relationship with figures like Poole.Kiffin
in Clements book is correctly portrayed as being extremely hostile to Poole’s
indiscretions. However his real hostility is her perceived association with the
radical groups, especially the Levellers and Fifth Monarchists, according to
Michael A. G. Haykin “During the late 1640s and 1650s Kiffin emerged as a
skilled spokesman for the fledgeling Baptist movement. In 1646 Kiffin and
Knollys were involved in a public debate in Coventry with two paedobaptists,
John Bryan and Obadiah Grew. Kiffin was a signatory to the dedication in
Walwins Wiles (1649), an attack on the Levellers usually attributed to John
Price”.[5]
According to Brod “Kiffin also played a prominent role in
the expansion of the movement beyond London. Extant documents from places as
far afield as Wales and Northumberland, Ireland and the Midlands reveal
Kiffin’s involvement in planning the establishment of new churches and
associations, then in giving them advice and counsel, and generally in
providing stability to the Baptist cause during these early days of the
movement. One critical moment came in May 1658, when, at the meeting of the
western association of Baptist churches in Dorchester, some individuals who
were sympathetic to the potentially subversive politics of the Fifth Monarchy
movement sought to convince the representatives of the churches in the
association to espouse publicly the ideals and goals of this party. Kiffin, who
was present with other representatives from the churches in London,
successfully persuaded the western association not to commit itself in this
direction. While some of the Fifth Monarchy movement appears to have been relatively
harmless students of the Bible, others had definite revolutionary tendencies
and were convinced that they should take an active, even violent, role in the
fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel. Open and widespread adherence to these
views by the Particular Baptists would have had harmful and serious
repercussions for the Baptist movement.”[6]
Historical novels are notoriously hard to place within the
current historiography of the English revolution. Academic work is easier.
While researching her novel, Clements mentions Christopher Hill as one of her
influences. Hill, despite being an academic historian belonged to a group of
Communist Party historians who pioneered the history from below genre. Clements
book is a historical novel from below.I liked the book. It works on two levels;
it is a very well written book, and the storyline is plausible. The history is
well researched and accurate up to a point. An examination of the politics of
the characters in the book would have made the book a better read.
Apart from this nitpicking, I would recommend the book to
those interested in the subject. The Crimson Ribbon has been extensively
reviewed both in the mainstream media and given the number of blogs mentioned
in the blurb quite heavily in the blogosphere deserves a wide readership.
[1] See also Gutenberg’s Apprentice – 2014 by Alix Christie
[2] http://www.oxforddnb.com
[3] From the writings of Elizabeth Poole
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/index.html
[4] http://www.oxforddnb.com
[5] http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15521- Michael A.
G. Haykin
[6] Kiffin, William (1616–1701),
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15521
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill –
Lyttelton Theatre
The Play Light
Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill is currently playing to packed
audiences at the Lyttelton Theatre in London. The play has been well received
by a diverse audience.Past reviews have been on the whole appreciative. The
Financial Times said “Churchill shows us an age of unbelievable fluidity in the
social order…” The play reminds us sombrely that such moment of potential pass:
they either come to nothing in the first place, or the old order is soon
restored. Michelle Terry and Helena Lymbery each excel in the Putney sequence”.
The play is set amidst the English Civil war so knowledge of
this event is a must before seeing or reading the play. The blurb for the play
by Churchill sets the scene “1649. After years of bloody civil conflict, an
exhausted England is in the hands of radical extremists. Turning the country
upside down, Parliament’s soldiers kill the King and take power into their own
hands. Theirs is a war to establish Heaven on Earth. This is the story of the
most terrifying decade in our history. Struggling to find a voice in the face
of unspeakable suffering, a group of ordinary men and women cling to the belief
that they will be shown a glimpse of unspeakable, transcendent glory”.
Churchill wrote the play in 1976 and the first productions
of the play have a Kafkaesque sparseness to them with only a table and six
chairs for props. In contrast, today’s production is a little more expensive
but in places is visually stunning? Having not been performed for a good while
the play marked as one writer put it “a major UK revival of Churchill’s seminal
play brought to the stage by Polly Findlay and the stellar creative team behind
Thyestes (Arcola) and Eigengrau (Bush)”. The play also marked Churchill’s first
collaboration with the Joint Stock Theatre Group.
In her programme notes Churchill correctly bemoans the fact
that the English revolution and particularly its radical groups get scant
attention in modern school history. Churchill’s plays concentrates on three
main groups the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. While there are programmatic
distinctions between the groups there is much that unites them. While Churchill
does not examine the role of Quakers in her play many leading figures of the
Levellers, Ranters and Diggers would end their days paid up members of the
Quakers.
One word of warning the play as far as I can see does not
follow any chronological order. One critic cautioned that audiences may “find
themselves disoriented by the swirl of events and even by the style of
storytelling. In all productions it seems that six actresses and actors
repeatedly switch roles while playing dozens of characters. Identification is
often deliberately blurred.Churchill throughout her career to date has tackled
complex historical questions in a simple but thought-provoking way. Earlier
plays have included “Fen” which was about farmworkers in England and “Mad
Forest” on the Romanian revolution. She has also not been scared to use
theatrical different techniques such as the use collage form.
The plays title taken from the Digger Pamphlet The Light
Shining in Buckinghamshire [1]“JEHOVAH ELLOHIM Created Man after his own
likenesse and image, which image is his Sonne Jesus, Heb. I. verse 2. who is
the image of the Invisible God: now Man being made after Gods image or
likenesse, and created by the word of God, which word was made Flesh and dwelt
amongst us; which word was life, and that life the light of men, I Joh. 2. this
light I take to be that pure spirit in man which we call Reason, which
discusseth things right and reflecteth, which we call conscience; from all
which there issued out that golden rule or law, which we call equitie: the sum
me of which is, saith Jesus, Whatsoever yee would that men should doe to you,
doe to them, this is the Law and the Prophets; and James cals it the royall Law,
and to live from this principle is calld a good conscience: and the creature
Man was priviledged with being Lord over other inferior creatures, but not over
his own kinde; for all men being a like priviledged by birth, so all men were
to enjoy the creatures a like without proprietie one more than the other, all
men by the grant of God are a like free, and every man individuall, that is to
say, no man was to Lord or command over his own kinde: neither to enclose the
creatures to his own use, to the impoverishing of his neigh- bours, see the
Charter, I. Gen. from 26. vers. to the end of the Chapt. and see the renewing
of the Charter to Noah and his Sons, Gen. 9. from the I. vers. to the 18.
Despite much of the language of the play being couched in
religious phraseology it is clear that many people were starting to examine
their place in the world and were starting to express a profound disagreement
with the way they were being governed.As David north wrote “until the early
seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the
ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life
were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had
been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well under way.[2]
The Play
The play consists of two acts and examines the revolutionary
events before and after the Putney debates of 1647 . The first group examined
by Churchill are the Levellers. They were by far the biggest and most organized
of the revolutionary groups. The high tide for this group was the Putney
debates and Churchill correctly places an abridged account of them at the
center of the whole play.
That Levellers were not the only group to couch their
writings and speeches in religious garb. According to Marx “Cromwell and the
English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and
illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved
and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished,
Locke supplanted Habakkuk. Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions
served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old;
of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its
solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making
its ghost walk again”.[3]
Putney debates
While much of the play has been written by Churchill she
still manages to accurately and skillfully to weave real events and words
spoken at the time. By far the strongest part of the play is the partially
verbatim transcript of the Putney Debates of 1647, which saw rank and file
soldiers and commoners arguing for a broadening of the democratic franchise and
an end to social inequality this was opposed by Cromwell, Ireton and other
leaders of the revolution.The quotes for this production come from Geoffrey
Robertson’s book[4]. At the Putney Debates Cromwell was clearly taken by
surprise by the arguments of the Levellers. But once Cromwell and other
grandees recovered their composure they opposed every demand by the Levellers
to extend the franchise.
Ireton spoke for the Grandees when he said “no man hath a
right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom…
that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.” Thomas Rainsborough
a Leveller countered by saying “I really I think that the poorest hee that is
in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I
think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first
by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that
the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that
Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.”[5]
The Levellers were defeated at Putney and before long were
wiped out as a coherent political organization. The play does attempt to grope
for an answer why the Levellers and other revolutionary groups failed to
develop the revolution in a more left wing direction. In this matter Churchill
fails. But in this failure she is not alone. Accomplished historians like
Christopher Hill struggled to provide a significant answer to this conundrum.
Hill says “The Leveller conception of free Englishmen was thus restricted, even
if much wider, than the embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals
would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. But manhood
suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended
at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were”.
It is hardly possible in this review to explore in any great
detail but a sober evaluation should be made. The Levellers appeared to take on
many of the characteristics of a political party in the years 1645-46. This is
a contentious issue and has been disputed. They were the radical wing of the
Independent coalition and were responsible for many of modern day political
techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and
the lobby of MPs. As an aside William Clarke who provided us with the report of
the Putney Debates was an avid collector of books, pamphlets and leaflets found
in his collection was over eighty Leveller pamphlets. The Levellers strength
mainly lay in London and other towns and had not an insignificant support in
the army.
The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a
democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than
the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and extension
of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property,
artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers which made up the
composition of the Levellers themselves.The Levellers themselves were part of a
group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social
changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were
the true ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract
thought. Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City of London,
a decentralization of justice and the election of local governors and stability
of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic to the poor,
which stemmed from their religion they had no programme to bring about social
change, they never advocated a violent overturning of society.
Their class outlook, that being of small producers,
conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Levellers constitute a mass
movement. The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their
position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension.
They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that
inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to
be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained “I am no
advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them,
without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore
make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient”.
Knowing that they could not come to power through the
presently constituted electorate the Levellers attempted to find constitutional
ways of getting round it. A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the
Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war
and must be refounded on the basis of certain fundamental “native rights”
safeguarded even from a sovereign went against one of the most fundamental
reasons for the war in the first place. The Agreement amongst other demands,
called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted
into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.
The one real chance the Levellers had to put their ideas
into practice was to gain control of the army. The development of the new model
army was central to the outcome of the English civil war, who controlled the
army controlled state power. The Levellers had agitated for the arrears of
wages to be paid and that indemnity for actions committed during the civil war
be granted. This agitation had won them considerable support in the army.In the
end as Churchill writes in the Play the only thing the Levellers got out of
Putney was the promise of Cromwell to take things to a committee.To put it more
simply the generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of a majority of
the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their own
supporters against them. Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise
was widened it would threaten his position in parliament. Again Hill explains
“Defending the existing franchise Cromwell son in law, Henry Ireton rejected
the doctrine ‘that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that
power that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here’. The vote
was rightly restricted to those who ‘had a permanent fixed interest in this
kingdom’. Namely, ‘the person in whom all lands lies and that incorporation’s
in whom all trading lies”.
Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them
and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free Englishmen.
If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free.
Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no reason
why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to
point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in
parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument
completely confused Rainborowe and undermined his argument.
Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the Levellers
and the smaller groups within them such as the Diggers were becoming a
dangerous business. Cromwell said of what he called the ‘lunaticks’ “You must
break these men or they will break you” Cromwell declared. By May 1649 the
Levellers had been defeated in battle and their influence in the army and in
civilian life disappeared.
In many respects, the true revolutionary of the civil war
was Cromwell and his New Model Army. While not agreeing with the revisionists
that the Levellers were an insignificant movement, they should not also be
hyped into something they were not. They were essentially a movement of the
lower middle class that sought to extend the franchise on a limited basis. The
reason this failed was that the social and economic basis for their ideas had
not yet developed in this sense their egalitarian ideas were a foretaste of
future social movements, not communistic but more in the tradition of social
democracy.
Conclusion
The size and variety of the audiences for the play denote
that ideas discussed have a deep resonance with the people today and the play
does have a contemporary feel to it. The questions of democracy and of social
inequality, the treatment of women, wars and revolution and the subjugation of
Ireland is in many senses still with us. The play works on many levels. People
without a knowledge of the Levellers will still get a lot out of it. The more
academically minded person will also have their intellect satisfied. I would
recommend the play wholeheartedly.
[1] LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, or A Discovery of the
main ground, original Cause of all the Slavery in the world, but cheifly in
England: presented by way of a Declaration of many of the welaffected in that
County, to all their poore oppessed Country men of England, &c. First
Published: 1648, anonymous Digger pamphlet;
Source: From George Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard
Winstanley (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965)
[2] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism,
By David North 24 October 1996
[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx
1852
[4] The Putney Debates (Revolutions Series) Paperback – 22
Oct 2007
[5] —Putney Debates record book 1647, Worcester College,
Oxford, MS 65. Spelling and capitalisation as in the original manuscript.
John Gurney and the English Revolution
“Action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou
dost nothing”– Gerrard Winstanley
There is no denying that the death of John Gurney was a sad
and terrible moment for both his family and the history community. His passing
at such a young age of 54 of cancer, removes from the scene a gifted historian
whose work was starting to produce results on a level of the great Christopher
Hill, with whom he met at Oxford.
Gurney was not a Marxist historian, but his latest work
published after his death showed a profound shift to the Left in his thinking.
His paper Gerard Winstanley and the Left is insightful and thought-provoking.
It is certainly one of the best analysis of left-wing historiography of the
English Revolution.
Contained within his writings is an excellent example of the
Historians Craft. I never met him but had some correspondence with him towards
the end of his life. Even with this brief connection, I could tell he was a
historian of great ability and tenacity. This was recognised by his friends and
colleagues. In a tribute to him, Scott Ashley wrote “John was someone who in
both his professional and personal lives could sniff out a story and extract
the gold from the archive that made time and place shine fresh. To walk with
him around North Shields was to see the streets and buildings with different
eyes, not only in the sometimes prosaic now but as part of a more poetic then,
as home places to Commonwealth-era churchmen, eighteenth-century ship captains,
Victorian professionals. Among the many things I learned from John during the
years, I knew him was that being a historian and making a home, physical and
imaginative, were part of a common enterprise” [1].
Gurney spent most of his historical life studying the area
around where he lived. However, his work on the Diggers and Gerard Winstanley
was far from parochial. In many ways, he was instrumental in bringing a fresh
perspective to the Diggers and Winstanley. He produced two books on them Brave
Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution published in 2007 and
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy of 2013[2]. Both books took
our understanding of the Diggers to a new level.
John had many skills as a historian, but three leap out at
you. He could explain complicated historical issues in a way that anyone could
understand. Secondly, he brought his subject to life and thirdly his stamina to
spend significant amounts of time “grubbing in the archives”.To deep mine, an
archive may to a layperson seem odd, but this ability gave him a more in-depth
insight into the complicated problems faced by revolutionaries such as
Winstanley. These seventeenth-century revolutionaries were working without
precedents in which to guide their revolution.
If Gerard Winstanley is more well known and highly thought
of today, it is because of Gurney. It is hard not to agree with Michael Wood’s
claim that Winstanley’s place in the pantheon of English literature and
political thought should be higher than previously thought. Wood believes he
should be put alongside Hobbes and Harrington as one of the great writers of
English prose of the seventeenth century. We should not forget that Winstanley
was also a man of action as well as words. In 17th century eyes, he was as
dangerous revolutionary.
Historians Craft
Gurney’s attempt to recreate the past and therefore
understand it is done with much empathy and imagination. There is also a
doggedness and intellectual objectivity about his work. While some historians
seek to make an objective understanding of history, Gurney was almost religious
in his pursuit of historical truth.Gurney’s work exhibited a disciplined
approach to complex historical questions. He recognised that he did not know
everything about his area of study. But his work did show an honesty which
enabled him to have a greater understanding of his role in the presentation of
facts.
Gurney was also mindful of presenting his work in a way that
was never apart from its moment in time. Gurney’s approach was similar to the
French historian of feudal society, Marc Bloch, who wrote in his book, The
Historian’s Craft “In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood
apart from its moment in time. This applies to every evolutionary stage, our
own, and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: ‘Men resemble their times
more than they do their fathers.’
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy of 2013.
The book is a meticulously researched, scholarly and
well-presented. Gurney provides us with a good understanding of the origins of
the Digger movement. It has been praised for setting an “extremely high
standard for local histories of this sort and must rank alongside similar studies
such as Eamon Duffy’s acclaimed The Voices of Morebath.”Gurney was clear that
the study of Winstanley should be not solely of historical value but must have
a contemporary resonance. He says: Today, knowledge of Winstanley is
widespread, and he has become one of the best-known figures from the period of
the English Revolution. There have been numerous plays, novels, TV dramas,
songs and films, and Winstanley has often been cited as an inspirational figure
by politicians of the Left.
More specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained
prescient, inspiring generations of activists and social movements”. He
believed that Winstanley “has in recent years also been invoked by freeganism,
squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs,
greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists and libertarians have laid
claim Who was to him as a significant precursor”.Gurney’s book is invaluable
when it starts to trace the origins of Winstanley’s radicalism. Gurney did not
subscribe to the theory that it was solely down to the war radicalising people
such as Winstanley. Gurney believed that radical views were being expressed all
over the country before the outbreak of civil war.
In a previous essay, Gurney elaborates on why the Digger’s achieved
a level of local support in Cobham “Local support for the Diggers may also have
been connected with Cobham’s marked traditions of social conflict. The manor of
Cobham, a former possession of Chertsey Abbey, had passed into the hands of
Robert Gavell in 1566 and was to remain with his family until 1708. During the
later sixteenth century the Gavell family became involved in a long and
protracted series of disputes with their tenants. In a case brought in the
court of Requests by William Wrenn, a Cobham husbandman, Robert Gavell was
accused of overturning manorial customs and of infringing his tenants’ rights,
by seeking to extract more rent than was customarily paid, and by spoiling the
timber on Wrenn’s copyhold. He was also charged with attempting to escape the
payment of tax by shifting the burden on to his tenants, laying ‘a hevy burden
uppon the poorer tennants contrarye to the Ancient usage, equitie and
Consciens’Actions against Robert Gavell and his son Francis were resumed in the
court of Chancery during the 1590s by tenants seeking to halt the continued
assault on manorial custom” [3].
Who Were The Diggers
Gurney was one of the few contemporary historians involved
in the study of Early Modern England who understood the importance of class in
understanding the English revolution and its radical wing.The Diggers were part
of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social
changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were
the right ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract
thought. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from
their religion, they had no programme to bring about social change; they never
advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of
small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or
that matter did the larger group the Levellers constitute a mass movement. The
contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives
of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to
private property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always
exist, they merely argued for a lot of the poor to be made more equitable.
Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English
Revolution published in 2007
Gurney’s study of his local area in this case Surrey was not
done from a parochial viewpoint. A survey of local events correctly done can
add to a more broad and objective understanding of events.Brave Community was
the result of painstaking investigations. Somewhat surprisingly it was the
first full-length modern study of the Diggers.It was well-received by academic
historians. One review of Brave Community by Henk Looijesteijn described it as
“a study that successfully blends social and intellectual history in recreating
the environment in which one of the most original thinkers of
mid-seventeenth-century England originated and acted. As such, this book should
be regarded as the starting point for any student of Winstanley and the
Digger”.
Gerrard Winstanley and the Left
Gurney’s last essay Gerrard Winstanley and the Left is a
very significant piece of work. It lays the critical ground work for a further
examination of the Left’s attitude towards the English revolution. Gurney
understood when writing about left wing historiography on the English
Revolution that you had to be aware of the pratfalls especially when writing
about the Communist Party Historians Group. One must be cognizant of the
enormous amount of ideological baggage these historians carried around. It must
be said that some of this baggage was not in always in perfect condition.
In many ways, this essay is in microcosm a summation of
Gurney’s whole body of work. He was very much at the height of his powers when
he wrote this article. Gurney acknowledges that it is only recently that the
words of Winstanley have been fully appreciated. However, he believed that it
is not the case that nothing of note was written before the 20th century. He
thought that Winstanley’s ‘extraordinarily rich body of writings’ were read and
studied between the years 1651 and the 1890s.
As he wrote in the essay “The historical legacy of the
Diggers is usually seen as being very different from that of their
contemporaries, the Levellers. If the Levellers were misremembered, the Diggers
have been understood as being largely forgotten before the 1890s, with
professional historians playing little part in their rediscovery. It took, we
are told, the Marxist journalist and politician Eduard Bernstein to rediscover
Winstanley quite independently of academic historians when he spent part of his
exile in London working on the section on seventeenth-century English radical
thinkers for Karl Kautsky’s Die Vorla¨ufer des neueren Sozialismus.
Later, in the 1940s, it was Marxist historians associated with
the Communist Party of Great Britain who are said to have picked up Bernstein’s
baton and created the image of a communist and materialist Winstanley which
remains familiar to this day. The Left’s responsibility for, and role in, the
rediscovery and promotion of the Diggers can, therefore, seem quite clear and
uncomplicated. There are, however, a number of problems with this
interpretation. For one thing, the Diggers had, before the 1890s, never fallen
from public view to the extent often imagined. In fact, it seems that they were
reasonably well known over the centuries — and perhaps even more accurately
remembered than the main stream Levellers, who were often confused with them.
It is also evident that early detailed research on the Diggers was not confined
to the Left and that Bernstein was by no means alone in taking an interest in
Winstanley’s writings in the 1890s” [4].
Revisionism
Where does Gurney’s work fit in with today’s in today’s
historiography of the English Revolution? Due to no fault of his own Gurney’s
work on Winstanley is an oasis in a desert of revisionism.As Michael Braddick
points out, revisionists have “have tried to cut the English revolution down to
size or to cast it in its own terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a
critical eye over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical
heroes”.The historian Mark Kishlansky’ has a habit of cutting down the radical
heroes of the English Revolution. It is perhaps surprising that he recommends
Gurney’s book saying “this is a clear-eyed yet sympathetic account of one of
the most baffling figures of the English Revolution. Gurney’s painstaking
research provides a wealth of new information that is assembled into a highly
readable narrative. An informative and thought-provoking book.”
Kishlansky despite recommending Gurney’s book he is keen to
downplay Winstanley who according to him was “a small businessman who began his
career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain, and in between sandwiched
a mid-life crisis of epic proportions”.Kishlanksky inadvertently raises an
interesting question. What was the relationship between Winstanley’s religion,
his economic status and his politics? As the Marxist writer Cliff Slaughter
says “for the understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the
study of religion is a necessity. What is the relationship between the social
divisions among men and their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling
classes ensure long periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress?
Why were the ‘Utopians’ wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work
out a reasonable arrangement of social relations to proceed to its
construction? It was out of the examination of questions like this in the
German school of criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the
first time a scientific view of society. ‘The criticism of religion is the
beginning of all criticism[5]”.
Conclusion
Gurney’s work on Winstanley and the Diggers is the start of
a new form of historiography on the English Revolution. His work is
groundbreaking in many ways and is an antidote to revisionist historiography.
Gurney is correct to state there has never been what he calls a definable
left-wing interpretation of the Diggers and Winstanley or to be even more
precise there has never been a consistent classical Marxist position on the
Diggers. It is hoped that Gurney’s work is used to further our knowledge of the
radicals of the English Revolution and present a more unified theory as regards
these radical gentlemen of the revolution.
[1] Brave Community: A communal and personal tribute to our
friend and colleague, John Gurney (1960-2014)
[2]
https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=john+gurney
[3] Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger movement in Walton and
Cobham- John Gurney
[4] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left-John Gurney.
[5] Religion and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labour Review
Vol 3 No 3 June 1958
A Review: Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky
144 pages Publisher: Allen Lane (4 Dec 2014) ISBN-10: 0141979836
“And thus said Shimei
when he cursed, Come out, come out, thou bloody man, and thou man of Belial:
The LORD hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose
stead thou hast reigned; and the LORD hath delivered the kingdom into the hand
of Absalom thy son: and, behold, thou art taken in thy mischief because thou
art a bloody man.—King James Bible 2 Samuel 16:7, 8.[1]
So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood
it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed
therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.
—King James Bible Numbers 35:33.
“Even his virtues were misinterpreted and scandalously
reviled. His gentleness was miscalled defect of wisdom; his firmness, obstinacy;
his regular devotion, popery; his decent worship, superstition; his opposing of
schism, hatred of the power of godliness.Mark Kishlansky’s new biography of
Charles I is an extremely controversial work.Kishlansky believes that Charles
has been misunderstood by history a viewpoint that is not shared by the amongst
the majority of historians who study the English revolution. For Kishalnsky
Charles was not a “man of blood” as General Thomas Harrison called him and that
history has much-maligned this monarch.
Kishlanksy’s book is an aggressive defence of both Charles
and monarchy in general. “Princes are not bound to give an account of their
actions, but to God alone” Kishlanskyhas taken the quote and turned it into a
historical perspective.
According to him “Charles I is the most despised monarch in
Britain’s historical memory. Considering that among his predecessors were
murderers, rapists, psychotics and people who were the mentally challenged,
this is no small distinction.
“One of the basic premises of writing a biography is to put
the individual being written about the context of their times. In this case,
the English revolution. The revolution caused widespread devastation and
hundreds of thousands killed and wounded a reigning monarch is executed a republic
declared, and the House of Lords abolished, but there is very little of this
drama in Kinshlansky’s book. One of the main protagonists of the revolution
Oliver Cromwell only gets one mention.
Given that the English revolution was primarily a political
and religious dispute, Kishlanksy’s heavy emphasis on the individual mistakes,
misjudgments and general bad luck of the monarch is typical of his historical
methodology. In many senses, this biography is primarily a political
rehabilitation of Charles. The book takes on the form of a polemical essay
rather than a history book.It is not surprising that Kinshlansky’s
historiography regarding Charles has been a challenge in academia. As Clive
Holmes explains“Mark Kishlansky, in his rather implausible attempt to create a
historiographical uniformity, cites a series of quotations from a wide range of
historians. He then triumphally demonstrates that a proportion of these
comments are dubious or just plain wrong. I have argued here that Kishlansky’s
attempt to reconfigure the king as open and accessible by a study of his
progress itself entails overstatement and misunderstanding. Kevin Sharpe’s
guarded judgement on this topic, ‘it may still remain true that Charles was
less than assiduous in cultivating his people in general and his influential
subjects in particular’, is more compelling.51 But, ultimately, isolation is
not simply a matter of propinquity; we do not need to imagine Charles as
physically inaccessible, locked away from his people in either Van Dyck’s
studio or his damp hunting lodges, to judge him isolated.
His isolation was a function of his refusal to engage in
meaningful dialogue with ‘the people who count’, and of his consequent failure
to understand both the limitations imposed on his actions by the administrative
structure of England and the political and legal prejudices of those who
staffed that machinery at all levels. Kishlansky does not engage specifically
with all the negative comment that he recites in his introduction, imagining
that his vigorous refutation of some points will explode every aspect of the
professional consensus – Richard Cust’s ‘straw man’ may be a better image –
that he has constructed. But some of the arguments he dismisses by implication
seem basically right: not least Gardiner’s sense that it was the king’s lack of
empathy, his ‘want of imaginative power’, that was at the root of his failure
is still a most telling judgement”.[2]
Kishlansky defended his love affair with Charles in his
reply to Clive Holmes, Nearly every conflict between subjects and sovereign in
the early part of the reign of Charles I resulted from fear: fear that the king
would introduce popery, fear that the king would govern without Parliament,
fear that the king would not obey the law. Although Charles attempted to allay
each of these concerns, he learned to his cost that there was something
irrational about them, that his subjects ‘had not the will to be
pleased’.Leading men of his realm misinterpreted his intentions, misapprehended
his aspirations, misunderstood his motives and misconstrued his character. He
could not see himself as the king that they feared and therefore, could do
little to allay their suspicions. In the end, he could only conclude that he
was a case of mistaken identity.[3]
This theme of Charles not being understood is a continual
theme of the book. The theme is so strong even Amazon deemed it important
enough to put it on the cover blurb saying “In Mark Kishlanksy’s brilliant
account it is never in doubt that Charles created his catastrophe, but he was
nonetheless opposed by men with far fewer scruples and less consistency who for
often quite different reasons conspired to destroy him. This is a remarkable
portrait of one of the most talented, thoughtful, loyal, moral, artistically
alert and yet, somehow, disastrous of all this country’s rulers”.Of course, it
is Amazon’s right to promote the book anyway it sees fit, but as the above
quote suggests this has gone beyond standard promotion. Hopefully whoever wrote
the media blurb was not a historian for it reduces history to the level of a Janet
and John book. Firstly it must be said that the men who opposed Charles both
inside Parliament and out were men of principle and fought for those principles
through to the end.
Kishlanksy’s adoption of the bad man theory of history does
not enlighten us about Charles or the men who fought him. Kishlansky believes
of Charles that “Beneath the reviled and excoriated King of historical
reputation is a flesh-and-blood man trapped by circumstances he could not
control and events he could not shape.” Kishlanksy’s belief that individuals
are prisoners of external forces also does not get us very far.As Herbert
Spencer once wrote “You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on
the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he
appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown…Before he
can remake his society, his society must make him.”[4] Kishlanksy’s aim in this
book is to overturn centuries of the historiography that attempted to place
Charles in the context of his times rather than elevated him above it in some
supernatural way.
He believes that the long-held view of Charles and his reign
has been distorted and the centuries-long the historical narratives opposing
this view is mere “Parliamentarian propaganda.”Kishlansky’s rehabilitation of
Charles found support in a surprising place. A review of his book was written
on the Guardian website. It is widely sympathetic to Kishlanksy’s’ view.
Without examining in any detail what major historians have printed on the
subject matter, it produces quotes that back up Kishlansky hypothesis. It
uncritically quotes Kishlansky “What began as propaganda has been transmuted
into seeming fact.”
The Guardian article continues Kishlanksy’s theme that
Charles was battling against bad luck all through his life “Whichever side you
take, it’s hard to deny that Charles was plagued from early on by almost
comical levels of bad luck. As a young man, his daring incognito voyage to
Spain to woo the Infanta turned into a fiasco. Two decades later, not only
would his armies suffer crippling losses at the battle of Naseby, but Charles’s
correspondence would be captured: the public revelation of his efforts to
secure Catholic support against the forces of Parliament would be a devastating
blow to the king’s reputation. A botched attempt to attack and plunder Spanish
shipping in the first year of his reign set the tone for later military
ventures: ‘the winds, as always for Charles, were contrary’.[5]
Kishlanksy’s defence of Charles I is absolute and
unconditional. He rejects the standard view that Charles was intransigent. He
believes that the king bent over backwards to conciliate and to compromise with
Parliament. Kishlansky is perfectly in his right as an established historian to
counter prevailing historiography. It is a little surprising that he chooses to
do so in such a limited space is astonishing. But to overturn three centuries
of historiography is going to take a lot longer than 144 pages. As one writer
puts it, the “small amounts of evidence are made to bear an enormous
argumentative burden”.
Even the sympathetic Guardian reviewer was forced to admit
that Kishlanksy’s hoop-jumping was in danger of turning his reconsideration of
Charles into a “whitewash.”It is not within the scope of this review to go over
Kishlanksy’s previous written work, but it is evident from this new book that
his place as a pioneer of a transatlantic revisionist interpretation of early
Stuart history is secured. Kishlansky joins a growing number of major
historians such Kevin Sharpe, Conrad Russell and John Morrill who reject both
the Whig and Marxist historians who had seen the Civil Wars of the 1640s as
stemming from the growth of ideological opposition to the Stuart monarchs over
the previous half-century.
The revisionist school seek to challenge the “ideological
consensus” or as Kishlansky puts it the “fallacy of social determinism’ that
has existed since the 1920s. These historians reject any severe economic or
social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny
group of conspirators.To conclude In any review, I try to be as generous as I
can, and on the whole, I would recommend this short narrative on the life of
Charles I was a competent introduction to the subject. If that were all it was,
then I would have no trouble, but as this is more a polemic than a history book
it needs to be answered in the future in a more detailed manner.
[1] A Sermon produced thirty years after Charles’s death
[2] CHARLES I: A Case of Mistaken Identity[with Reply] Clive
Holmes, Julian Goodare, Richard Cust and Mark Kishlansky Source: Past &
Present, No. 205 pp. 175-237
[3] Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity Author(s): Mark
Kishlansky Source: Past & Present, No. 189 (Nov., 2005), pp. 41-80
[4]
https://fli.institute/2014/08/19/the-great-man-theory-of-leadership/
[5] Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky –
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/18/charles-i-an-abbreviated-life-king-mark-kishlansky-review
The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English
Revolution Rachel Foxley , Manchester University Press, 2013, ISBN:
9780719089367; 304pp. Price: £70.00
Rachel Foxley’s
excellent book is part of a growing recent interest in the Levellers. Most of
which seeks to place the Levellers rightful place in the English revolution.
Given the assault on the Levellers from revisionist historiography, it is not
surprising as John Rees points out in his review for the IHR (Institute of
Historical Research) that this book is “the first full-length study of the
Levellers for fifty years since H. N.Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English
Revolution was published in 1961”.[1]
The absence of a systematic study of this important
political group is to found not so much in history as in politics. While some
historians would like to keep politics out of history, there is and has been a
profound connection between a rightward shift in academic circles and the type
of history being studied and written about today.The book takes full account of
recent scholarship. It contributes to historical debates on the development of
radical and republican politics in the civil war period, the nature of
tolerationist thought, the significance of the Leveller movement and the extent
of the Levellers’ influence in the ranks of the New Model Army.
The importance of the Levellers has been a contentious issue
amongst historians for over fifty years. During this time a historian’s dispute
or Historikerstreith[2] has existed.The battle lines maybe a little blurred at
times but has characterised this dispute the most has been the full-frontal
attack on a Marxist interpretation of historical events.
It is not within the scope of this review to examine the
revisionist revolt whose origins can be traced back to G R Elton, but the
central focus of this disparate group of historians has been to attack any
Marxist conception of the historical study. A by-product of these attacks has
been to downplay the Levellers role in the English Revolution.As Rachel Foxley
points out in her introductory chapter on ‘The Levellers and the historians’
‘The revisionist historians who have rewritten the history of the seventeenth
century have questioned almost every aspect of the historical reputation of the
Levellers’ (p. 3).
Foxley is not immune to these attacks as the arch Leveller
revisionist Gary de Krey picks up in his review “Foxley’s presentation of
Leveller ideas is fresh and provocative, and it will undoubtedly draw
rejoinders and responses. She does occasionally make assertions about
historical questions that she has not fully pursued. Her discussion of the
exchange between New Model soldiers and the Leveller authors in 1647–8, for
instance, leads her into a less‐well‐investigated proposal for ‘cautious dialogue’ (p. 154) between the
generals and the Levellers. Here, her argument insufficiently tackles the depth
of suspicion that developed on both sides by late September 1647. She also
treats the Levellers as a ‘movement’ (in preference to the pre‐revisionist
‘party’) that began as early as
mid-1645. But any treatment of the Levellers as a movement from 1645 forwards,
albeit one without neat ‘contours’ (p. 5), structures Leveller history in
particular ways. It inevitably transposes the name and substance of the urban
Levellers of 1647–9 upon pre‐Putney London petitioners, pamphleteers
and protestors. But can these earlier political phenomena really be termed
‘Leveller’? That label emerged only around the beginning of November 1647; and
in 1645–7, Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn enjoyed a variety of political
contacts within a broader Independent coalition that contended with the
parliamentary Presbyterians. Exactly when a distinct Leveller faction broke
away from the Independent alliance is, in fact, a critical unresolved question.
It bears heavily upon the political self‐understandings of these authors as
well as upon the political identities of those who read and responded
positively to them. Yet, dividing developing authorships into pre‐Leveller
and Leveller phases could be equally problematic in a study of this nature”.[3]
It is open to question how much Foxley has adapted to this
revisionist assault. One criticism of the book is her concentration on Leveller
political theory. In other words, there is many superstructures but very little
base. She does insist that ‘revisionist treatments of the later 1640s cannot
wipe out the contribution of the Levellers to the radicalisation of
parliamentarian political thought.Foxley does not see the Levellers as an
independent group of radicals or revolutionaries but places their politics
within a broad parliamentarian alliance. A view would not look out of place
amongst other post revisionist historians. She then appears to contradict
herself by saying that we should not ‘dissolve them into an undifferentiated
part of that complex political world’ (p. 6). It would appear that Foxley has
not fully worked out her position regarding the class and political nature of
the Levellers.
One has sympathy for anyone who attempts a new evaluation of
the Levellers. Although describing another historical period, Hegel’s
perceptive remarks can be applied here it “not hard to see that our time is a
time of birth and transition into a new era. Spirit has broken away from its
former world of existence and imaging; it is about to sink all that into the past,
and is busy shaping itself anew.”[4]Given the limits of this review, it is
impossible to give sufficient justice to all the arguments presented by Foxley
in the book. However, there are some areas which need comment.Foxley is correct
to emphasise the originality of Leveller thought. She opposes that view that
the Levellers merely adapted arguments found within parliament’s supporters.
Despite their independence, the Levellers had alliances with many disparate
political groups and people.
The complicated relationship between the Levellers and other
political and religious groups and individuals makes it extremely hard to gauge
both the size and influence of the Levellers. This anomaly has been seized upon
by many conservative historians to dismiss the group as irrelevant.One of the
strengths of the book is that probes these relationships and attempts to
explain them within the context of the revolution. Given the complexity of this
work, it is entirely correct to say that Foxley’s work on the Levellers is far
from over.Foxley sees the Levellers as radicals and not revolutionaries. There
is a tendency within her work to see the Levellers as making things up as they
went along. To some extent, this is correct, the Levellers and their leaders
did react to events as John Rees put it they did it “in the midst of a
political crisis not in the seminar room,”[5].While this was true, they did not
spend all their time making up as they went along as Ann Talbot points out the
Levellers were the “ideologists of the revolution, and they ransacked the Bible
and half-understood historical precedents for some kind of theory to explain
what they were doing”.[6]
The Levellers were part of a broader and international
movement that sought in a limited way to move away from a purely biblical
explanation of political social and economic problems. This is not to say as
some left historians have done that they were proto-Marxists, but they should
be seen as a group of individuals who sought to go beyond previously held
beliefs.As the Marxist political writer David North says “Until the early
seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the
ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life
were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had
been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to
the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of
departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler
(1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not
yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition
and the political structures that rested upon it, was well underway. The
discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general intellectual
environment”.[7] In much of their political thinking, the Levellers were the
forerunners not only of the 18th century Enlightenment but of the socialist
movement.
The book highlights several significant moments of the
revolution that involved the Levellers which show that the Levellers attracted
a large audience than had previously thought.Citing the July 1646 publication
of the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens Foxley believes it ‘was the first
Leveller text to claim a mass following, a significant moment in the genesis of
the group.'(p. 36).John Rees claims that their work was carried out on a
considerable scale saying “In January 1648 it was claimed that 30,000 copies of
a Leveller petition were being printed for widespread distribution.28 The same
year opponents of the Levellers were complaining of Leveller plans to print
3,000 copies of a petition.29 The Remonstrance of Many Thousands of the
Free-People of England…and those called Levelers claimed this ‘is already
signed by 98064 hands, and more to be added daily’. Lilburne claimed that two
publications in 1649, the Manifestation and The Agreement of the People of 1
May, had a print run of 20,000 which were sent ‘gratis all over England’. In
March 1649 The Humble Petition of Divers wel-affected Women, a plea to free
Lilburne, Walwyn, Prince and Overton from their imprisonment in the Tower
collected 10,000 names using women ward organisers. In May 1649
Leveller-supporting apprentices in the Cripplegate Without ward were using the
same method.”[8]
Foxley also contests the view that the Levellers were solely
driven by religious thought. Of course, it is understandable that the political
thought of the day would be heavily cloaked in religious garb as she states
‘There is simply no need to go hunting in covenant theology or congregational
practice for Leveller political ideas of equality or “democracy,” or for a
prototype of the Agreement of the People.'[9]For me, the best or most important
chapter is the ‘Levellers and the army.’ Perhaps the most hotly challenged area
of Leveller historiography has been the extent of Leveller influence in the New
Model Army. Anyone who has argued that the Levellers had significant influence
in the army is accused of falling victim to the “fallacy of social
determinism.”
Austin Woolrych contentiously states that the army had
“refrained from political activity despite the tendency of the Presbyterians
both religious and political, to portray it as a hotbed of sectaries and
radicals.” If this is true then did Putney drop from the skies? Is there no
connection between the activity of the army before Putney and during? Surely
history is not just a series of unconnected episodes.According to Woolrych
“Anyone who strains to hear the voice of the soldiery in the Putney debates
should be aware that, apart from one brief interjection by an unnamed agent,
the only troopers who spoke that day were Sex by and Everard, and on the other
two days recorded by Clarke the only others who opened their mouths were
Lockyer and Allen. No agitator of a foot regiment is known to have spoken. Out
of just fifty officer-agitators listed in October, twelve spoke in the course
of the three-recorded days five of them only once, and very briefly. We should
be very cautious about treating the Putney debates, wonderful as they are as
the typical voice of the army’?
If ever an area of academic study needed more work then it
is the Levellers influence inside the New Model Army.As John points out with
“Independents, other army activists, and the Levellers all existed on a
political spectrum in which it is difficult to cleanly separate one set of
ideas or personnel from another.”[10]Other conservative historians have been
prominent in seeking to challenge the nature and extent of Leveller penetration
of the army, certainly before the high summer of 1647. John Morrill argues that
Leveller rhetoric was fundamentally opposed to a standing army and that
Lillburne’s own experience made him suspicious and out of touch with its rank
and file, Mark while Kishlansky has suggested that “the dynamics of army
relations with parliament could be explained adequately in terms of the
military’s sense of its honour, its legitimate demands as an army, and its own
experience in war and peace.”
Foxley believes this is “unjustified in the light of ‘the
petitioning campaign of spring 1647, the pre-existing cooperation between the
core of Leveller leaders, and the growing consistency of concerns and demands
in the sequence of joint and individual works associated with the Leveller
leaders’ (p. 15Foxley’s work on the Putney debates is hampered by the
constraints of the publishers. They could have perhaps given her more pages.
However, she presents significant proof of Leveller influence on the Grandees
of the army and establishes contact between the ‘civilian’ Levellers and the
military radicals. She concludes that ‘the revisionist story about Putney and
its aftermath cannot easily account for these continuing connections’ (p. 159).
But still, the political and historical blindness of some
revisionist historians towards the Levellers exists with some contending that
the Levellers “were exterior to the army.”As John Rees points out, many
“Levellers were of the army themselves. Lilburne had an exemplary and widely
publicised military record. But Lilburne was not alone in this. Leveller
William Allen served in Holles’ regiment. Leveller printer William Larner served
as a sutler in Lord Robartes’ regiment. Thomas Prince fought in the London
Trained Bands until he was injured at Newbury in 1643. John Harris ran an Army
printing press. Leveller ally Henry Marten had close engagement in military
affairs in London and eventually raised his own regiment in Berkshire. Thomas
Rainsborough and his brother William were Leveller sympathisers. Edward Sexby
was a central figure in the actions of the Agitators. Army chaplains Jeremiah
Ives and Edward Harrison supported the Levellers “. [11]
These connections add weight to Foxley’s observation that
the Putney debates’ marked not the end but the beginning of a potentially
fertile alliance between civilian Levellers and army radicals’ and that this
‘reverses the picture painted by the standard revisionist historiography’ (p.
158).One aspect of the Levellers underplayed in the book were their
relationship with Cromwell and their inability to go beyond their social
base.Leveller ideas had their roots primarily in the lower strata of society,
as Cliff Slaughter states “they become anathema to the victorious upper-middle
classes. It was as necessary for Cromwell to crush the Ranters as to liquidate
Lilburne’s Levellers and Winstanley’s Diggers. A few selections from their
tracts will show their lack of appeal to class so enamoured of compromise (with
its’ betters,’ of course) as the British bourgeoisie”. [12]
One of the compound and exciting chapter in the book is The
Laws of England and the free-born Englishman. One major criticism of Foxley’s
work is her little use of Soviet historians works on the English Revolution.One
historian comes to mind is Evgeny Bronislavovich Pashukanis. In his work
Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English State and Law 1927
postulates that much of Lilburne’s theory on state law was adopted at a later
date by the English bourgeoisie according to Pashukhanis “John Lilburne in his
work, The Fundamental Laws and Liberties, incidentally formulates two classical
principles of the bourgeois doctrine of criminal law: no one may be convicted
other than on the basis of a law existing at the moment of commission of the
act, and the punishment must correspond to the crime according to the principle
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Lilburne himself was, of course, the
first man in England to succeed in being served with an indictment.”[13]
It is a fact that that this book was primarily targeted at
academic circles. It is perhaps natural given the complex nature of the subject
material. However, the book should be read by all history students. Foxley’s
book is a significant contribution in placing Levellers in their proper
revolutionary context. Hopefully, when the book is published in paperback, a
reasonable price would mean it is getting the wider readership it deserves.
[1] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit
[3]
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1750-0206.12111_4?campaign=woletoc
[4] Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit- G. W. F. Hegel-
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hegel-s-preface-to-the-phenomenology-of-spirit/
[5] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519
[6] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill
By Ann Talbot-25 March
2003-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[7] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism
By David North 24 October 1996
[8] Leveller organisation and the dynamic of the English
Revolution-John Rees
Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2014.
http://research.gold.ac.uk/10465/1/HIS_thesis_Rees_Thesis_2014.pdf
[9] The Levellers: Radical political thought in the English
Revolution-By Rachel Foxley
[10] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1519
[11] John Rees, review of The Levellers: Radical Political
Thought in the English Revolution, (review no. 1519)
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1519
[12] Cliff Slaughter Religion and Social Revolt from Labour
Review, Vol.3 No.3, May-June 1958, pp.77-82.
[13] Revolutionary Elements in the History of the English
State and Law
(1927)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pashukanis/1927/xx/english.htm
Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English
Revolution by Fiona McCall ISBN: 9781409455776 317pp
This book examines
experiences of the expropriated loyalist clergy during the highpoint of the
English Revolution. It offers new insight into the practices and of this
significant group.The first thing that strikes you about McCall’s book is a
heavy concentration on the Loyalist clergy. She, unfortunately, has little to
say on the English revolution. In this circumstance, it is unclear to me whether
the author chooses the title or as I suspect the editor or publishers did.
Baal’s Priest steers clear on any political controversy surrounding the
resurgence of studies of Royalist involvement of the English revolution.
The book is groundbreaking in other aspects with it being
the first major study that uses the John Walker collection of manuscripts held
in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It is hard to believe that this excellent
collection of oral histories has not been mined before. You have to admire her
adherence to the historian’s craft. She must have spent a long time in that
archive. The underuse of the Walker archive by historians is a little
mysterious as it appears to contain a goldmine of material.
However, caution is needed in that this source should be
approached with extreme caution. Drawing political conclusions from a
relatively unreliable source such as an archive based on oral transcripts is a
challenging and complicated thing to do. A thing that Mcall has largely
avoided. Some might say this detracts from her book. Oral testimonies are a
valuable source of material but can take a historian only so far. As the great
old Karl Marx said Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they
please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves
and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such
epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the
past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes
in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise
and borrowed language.”[1] Hopefully, McCall’s book will provoke an interest in
the archive.
The Walker collection began life in 1702 following the
publication of Edmund Calamy’s work which catalogued some ministers who were
driven from their livings during the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. John
Walker was given ‘over a thousand letters’ along with contemporary letters and
legal documents dating back to the 1640s and the 1650s, They catalogue a trail
of misery for large numbers of clergy who supported the royalist cause in one
form or another. The strength of this book is the detailed description of the
various maltreatments of Loyalist clergy at the hands of the Cromwellian
regime. For any student or a general reader wishing to study the impact, the
civil war had on significant sections of the population this book would be a
good start. The vast majority of the accounts are incredibly detailed and were
written by people who were members of the sufferer’s family or their Clergymen.
These Clergymen were often imprisoned.
The Walker Archive
According to R. Freeman Bullen, “the “Sufferings of the
Clergy” is two distinct works. The first part treats of ecclesiastical affairs
under Puritan rule part two deals with the persecution suffered by individual
clergy; it is this moiety which will mainly interest the local historian.
Walker had been engaged upon his work for about ten years when it was finally
published in 1714. This means that from 60 to 70 years had elapsed since the
period of the sequestrations and that to a very great extent, Walker was
dependent upon existing documents, plus tradition, for his data. His notes and
correspondence still exist in the Bodleian Library, and from these, we may
gather some ideas of his method. Walker conducted his research using printed
and manuscript sources available to him. He also directly solicited
information, via a circular sent to archdeacons to disseminate amongst parish
clergy. He received over a thousand letters in response. After his death
accounts were deposited, along with his other papers, as the J. Walker archive
in the Bodleian Library”.[2]
In many ways, McCall faced the same problems encountered by
Walker. Both had to interpret the material as best they could. Both questioned
how accurate and truthful the records were. Despite some reservations, McCall
is happy to treat the Walker manuscripts as a generally reliable archive of
materials. Caution should be observed when viewing the Walker accounts of
trauma. Those on the receiving end sought to back up their accounts in order
not to be dismissed. Walker was a good enough historian to err on the side of
caution himself when recording events and testimonies. There are
inconsistencies within the archive and should it not be treated as verbatim.
Despite McCall’s aversion to politics, she does offer the reader glimpses of
class relations and even class antagonisms between loyalist clergy and their
tormentors.
Some of these battles were personal others followed the
battle lines drawn in the revolution itself. Perhaps one of the strongest
attributes of the book is its opposition to some historians attempts to
“consign Civil War experiences to oblivion.” As James Mawdesley from the
University of Sheffield points out in his review of the book “None of this is
to suggest that these clergymen only accepted their lot as poor sufferers for
their king. Jonathan Swift, the grandson of Thomas Swift, the vicar of Goodrich
in Herefordshire, claimed that his grandfather’s setting of a trap in a river
resulted in the deaths of 200 of the enemy (p. 107), and McCall has calculated
that no fewer than 150 of the Walker accounts include acts of aggression by the
‘sufferer’ (p. 201).”[3]
McCall’s book establishes that the attacks on loyalist
clergy were sanctioned by the highest authorities with Parliament operating as
a rubber stamp. While McCall treads carefully in her book to separate the
subjective interpretation of walker’s collection from the objective assessment
of the material this even for a trained historian is a difficult task for the
general reader it is doubly difficult.
I also agree with Maudsley when he says the book would “have
benefited from being interwoven with a general account of the civil wars and
republic: the execution of Charles I in January 1649 is omitted from McCall’s
chronology, and it is not made clear when governance without a monarchy
commenced”.McCall is fascinated with how memory is used to portray historical
events. The trauma suffered by the Loyalist clergy and their families and
supporters was real clear to see. I would, however, have liked a more balanced
approach after all suffering on a large scale appeared on both sides of the
barricades. It is ironic in the least as McCall points out that the clergy who
suffered during the civil war and under the Cromwellian regime despite the
monarchies return to power the loyalist clergy in many places fared not better
than under Cromwell. Charles II was more interested in settling old scores.
Historiography.
As with as a large number of modern books on the civil war,
it is extremely hard to fathom McCall’s historiography. She does not favour the
view of an English revolution. McCall is sympathetic to the historical writing
of ‘Marxists’ like Christopher Hill, but her historiography has more connection
to historians Like John Morrill who saw the civil war as the last religious
conflict of the 17th century and continuation of the Thirty years war.
To conclude, any reader looking for an attack on revisionist
historians downplaying the social effects of the English Civil War will be
disappointed for them this relatively mild conflict and a ‘war without an
enemy.’In Baal’s Priests, Fiona McCall has written an important study which
will hopefully provoke an interest in the Walker manuscripts. The book is
solidly researched and is written in a style that is both accessible to the
academic and general reader. It is hoped that if McCall returns to this
subject, she is able to draw some political conclusions from her hard work. It
should be seen as an excellent introduction to the subject and not the final word
on royalism, or the Walker manuscripts.
[1] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx
1852
[2] Sequestration In Suffolk -R. Freeman Bullen.
http://suffolkinstitute.pdfsrv.co.uk/
[3] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1540
.
Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century
English Radicalism in Context 2011 Ariel Hessayon-David Finnegan Editors-
Ashgate Publishers ISBN: 9780754669050
“The term political
radicalism (or simply, in political science, radicalism) denotes political
principles focused on altering social structures through revolutionary means
and changing value systems in fundamental ways.”[1]
To Be Radical is to Grasp Things by the Root-
Karl Marx- The German Ideology
“It is a commonplace that the past is at the mercy of the
present and that in every generation there are those who deliberately distort
aspects of it to reflect a vision of their own or another’s making. Most
historical writing about radicalism and the English Revolution can be
considered fabrication – in the sense of both manufacture and invention. There
have been several critical studies documenting this process, including recent
work by Mario Caricchio.” Ariel Hessayon.
This collection of essays explore the terms ‘radical’ and
‘radicalism’ in the Early Modern English context. The term radical or
radicalism has like all things connected with the English Revolution in the
seventeenth century or political struggles in the eighteenth century come under
attack by a coterie of revisionist historians.As Edward Vallance points out in
his essay Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century The afterlife of John Lilburne:”
this is a persuasive presentation of the historical influence of the radicalism
of the civil war and one which reflects a broader scholarly unease with the
conception of a ‘radical tradition’. The notion of a tradition of radical
thought was powerfully evoked in the classic works of British Marxist
historians such as Christopher Hill and Edward Thompson. It retained some
importance in the popular historical imagination.5 Academics have become
increasingly critical, however, both of the use of the term ‘radical’ to
describe pre-modern politics and of the idea of a continuum of radical ideas
and movements. Scholars have pointed out that the term ‘radical’ – not in
common political use until the early nineteenth century anyway – had a very
different meaning in the seventeenth century, indicating not ideas that would
dramatically transform the status quo but instead a return to fundamentals or
the root. Using the term ‘radical’ in its modern sense then risks distorting
the political outlook of historic individuals who did not necessarily view
themselves as advocating anything new or novel. The notion of a radical
tradition is now seen as equally problematic, as it implies both a similarity
in radical thought over the ages and a degree of influence from one radical
group to the next which often cannot be supported with empirical evidence.6 At
best, the idea of a radical tradition is seen as a poor way of thinking about
intellectual influence. At worst, the concept is seen as a historical
fabrication, little more than an exercise in wish-fulfilment on the part of
modern left-wing academics and journalists.[2]
Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century
English Radicalism in Context is an ambitious book which attempts to go beyond
the conceptual categories which permeate the study of The English Revolution.
The book is one of many recent studies that seek to clarify but ultimately
fails what is meant by many of the concepts used in the Revolution. The 12
essays in this book are the product of the work presented at a conference held
at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2006.
Understanding radicalism is not an easy task as it is clear
the term means many things to many people. Historically some early modern
historians have used the term radical or radicalism to describe the plethora of
groups that took part in the English Revolution. However, even conservative
historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper had adopted the term. Radicals can also be
found on the royalist side as well according to one historian in this book. The
term radical is a relatively modern concept. According to Professor Diego
Lucci, “the historian Conal Condren has written that it was not until the late
18th century that ‘radical’ became a political term associated with extensive
political and social reform, and it was not until 1819 that Jeremy Bentham
coined the word ‘radicalism’.[3]
One problem with several essays written by historians who
are largely revisionists in nature is that they are more adept at telling us
what they reject rather than arguing for what they believe. Readers who are
looking for new historiography from this collection of essays will be brutally
disappointed.In the introduction, Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan make it
clear that these articles do not identify with the “linguistic turn “school of
historiography or otherwise known as the nominalist approach.These historians
in order to remove “anachronism” from historical study believe it is best to
remove terms like radicalism from early modern historiography. In its most
extreme form nominalist historians would also like to remove words such as
‘puritan’, ‘royalist’ ‘antiquity’, ‘medieval’, and ‘modern’. In other words,
formalism went mad.
The second approach, identified in the introduction, is
called ‘substantive’ and is the polar opposite of nominalist. The functional
approach favoured by two divergent schools of historiography Whig and Marxist.
These two trends have towered over the study of the English Revolution.The
authors in this collection of essays have rejected both Whig and Marxist
historiography and have adopted a semi functionalist approach to the study of English
radicalism.Revisionists of one sort or another have sought over the last three
decades to eradicate the influence of both Whig and Marxist historiography. As
Hessayon and Finnegan observe correctly that even the use of the word radical
has come under attack from a coterie of revisionist historians. So much so it
has become increasingly difficult to keep track of the various strands of
thought as regards the English Revolution.
A distorted defence of Marxist historiography was carried
out by historians in and around the Communist Party of Great Britain. They
sought with varying degrees of success to apply a historical materialist method
when writing and studying the various radical groups. Historians which included
the likes of Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, A. L. Morton and E. P. Thompson
developed the ‘history from below’ genre,One of the essential features of their
approach was to establish the importance of radical groups in the English
Revolution. The Communist Party historians rescued them from obscurity.
However, they could not escape the influence of the Stalinist controlled party
of the USSR. They were following a historical and political line that came from
the Stalin led Russian Communist International during the mid1930s.
As was said before, Hessayon and Finnegan do not support the
linguistic but are hostile to a Marxist interpretation. They treat the matter
of radicalism from a purely academic standpoint. However, such a topic such as
the level of radicalism in the English Revolution requires a political
understanding. That is why Hessayon is hostile to “dangerous extremists”
hijacking of groups such as the Levellers for their modern-day political
agenda.Hessayon levelled this very same charge at the historian Edward Vallance
in a review of Vallance’s A Radical History of Britain for the Institute of
Historical Research website. The review crossed a line in that it was a nasty
and inaccurate attack.On Vallance’s book, he said “there is another purpose to
Vallance’s book: a political agenda. Located somewhere to the left of New
Labour in Guardian, New Statesman and John Pilger reading territory (pp. 11,
38, 40–2, 430–1, 531, 551), displaying an evident if understandable distaste
for Thatcherism (pp. 52, 228, 260), A Radical History of Britain is intended as
a celebration of the British people’s capacity for dissent and, when necessary,
recourse to direct action in defending their liberties and securing new rights
(pp. 11, 13, 18, 38–9, 119–21, 181, 201, 526–7). Nor to Vallance’s mind is his
narrative a record of heroic failure, but rather a testament to the
achievements of British radicals and revolutionary movements”.
He continues “As historians, we have a collective
responsibility to maintain the highest standards of scholarly rigour, especially
when undertaking the challenging yet rewarding business of educating
non-specialists. Furthermore, shaping aspects of the past to advance
present-day political goals is a practice almost as old as the discipline
itself. Anyone engaged in this enterprise, however, must take the greatest care
not to legitimise the indefensible or give ammunition to dangerous
extremist”.Vallance correctly sought to defend his the integrity of his work.
“It is rather difficult for me to respond to Dr Hessayon’s review, not least
because he appears to be offering a critique of quite a different book from the
one that I have written. In particular, I am baffled by his repeated references
to the British National Party (eight in all) within his review, where he refers
to the BNP twice as many times as I do within the whole 600 + pages of my A
Radical History of Britain. To put this in perspective, there are almost as
many references to him within my book as there are to that far-right party.
” So it is with some puzzlement that I met Dr Hessayon’s
suggestions that my book may provide ‘ammunition to dangerous extremists’. I
realise that many readers of Reviews in History will not have looked at my
work, so I provide here a key passage from p. 549: This yoking together of
freedom and Britishness has continued, through the writing of George Orwell in
The Lion and the Unicorn, to the present day, with Gordon Brown’s calls for a
new sense of national identity constructed around British values of ‘liberty,
tolerance and fair play’. The BNP would certainly struggle to live up to the
second of those values. It is hard to see how British radical movements such as
the Chartists, which included prominent black members and supported the
abolition of the slave-trade, or the suffragettes, who included leading
anti-colonialists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, can fit into the BNP’s
bleached-white vision of Britain. Yet, in the radical tradition’s appropriation
by the far-right, we can nonetheless see some of the dangers in claiming
universal values such as tolerance, fairness and liberty as peculiarly British.
More recently another right-wing group has claimed allegiance to the radicals
throughout history. During the recent by-election victory of the UKIP at
Rochester the newly elected MP Mark Reckless believed that his party stood in
the “radical tradition,” one that historically “took power away from the elites
and spread it to the people. It is the tradition of Levellers, Chartists, and
Suffragettes.”
Vallance continues “Overall, this seems an eccentric reading
of my book, especially given my left-leaning politics which will be evident to
anyone who has read my New Statesman articles or heard my talks at Demos or
Republic: The Campaign for an Elected Head of State. His points concerning Dr.
Dunn and Dr. Harvey’s works aside, Dr. Hessayon’s review offers little serious
engagement with my work and, in my view, breaches the IHR’s standards for
scholarly debate”.If Hessayon wanted to attack Vallance properly, he could have
pointed out that while Britain did have a radical tradition, this was not
somehow unbroken. The theory of an unbroken radical tradition largely stems
from the Communist Party Historians Group.
As Philip Bounds pointed out in his outstanding essay Orwell
and Englishness: in the section titled The Dialogue with British Marxism
“British Communism and the “English Radical Tradition” he states “The idea of
Englishness became an obsession for British communists after the Seventh
Congress of the Communist International in 1935. (The Communist International
or “Comintern” had been established in Moscow in 1919. Its function was to
determine the policies of the various pro-Soviet Communist Parties which came
into existence in the wake of the October Revolution.) Meeting at a time when
Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy posed an increasingly evident threat to
international order, the Seventh Congress was primarily important for
determining communist strategy towards the growth of fascism. The most famous
speech was delivered by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov, newly
appointed President of the Comintern, who had become a hero throughout the
world movement after being acquitted by a Nazi court on charges of burning down
the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament) in 1933. After defining fascism as “the
open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and
most imperialist elements of finance capital,” 5 Dimitrov insisted that
communists should now give priority to defending established democratic
institutions against the fascist attempt to overthrow them. This could best be
done by uniting all anti-fascists, including those whom the communists had
previously dismissed as “bourgeois” (e.g. liberals and even progressive
conservatives), into nationally based “People’s Fronts.”
This political line was catastrophic and paved the way for
numerous defeats of the working class. It did, however, provide the historians
of the Communist Party the possibility of examining subjects such as the
English Revolution and the in particular radicals without coming into conflict
with the leadership in Moscow.As Bounds continues from 1935 onwards, in a
flurry of intellectual activity, many of the CPGB’s leading writers made a
sustained effort to excavate the history of what was usually called the “English
radical tradition.” The body of work which they produced can broadly be divided
into two categories. On the one hand, there was a series of writings which
traced the history of plebeian revolt in Britain since the Peasants’ Rising of
1381. These were supplemented by a more extensive (though perhaps not so
influential) group of works which explored the influence of radical ideas on a
selection of Britain’s most famous writers — Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens
among them.”
The Beauty of Holiness
The book opens with the chapter The Beauty of Holiness and
the Poetics of Antinomianism Richard Crashaw, John Saltmarsh and the Language
of Religious Radicalism in the 1640s. Nicholas McDowell essay examines the
language of religious radicalism in the 1640s, with a special focus on the
poems of Richard Crashaw and John Saltmarsh.
McDowell adopts a reformist rather than a revolutionary
position as regards the radical groups as seen in this quote. “The most
sensible discussion of radicalism in the English Revolution is the third of G.
E. Aylmer’s four presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society on
‘Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’. In his paper on
‘Varieties of Radicalism’, delivered in 1987, Aylmer quickly dispenses with the
nominalist wrangling that continues to obsess historians. I quote his opening
two sentences: ‘Since the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before
the nineteenth century, it may reasonably be asked what they signify when
applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The answer is a pragmatic one: by
radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church and society which
would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream
Puritan-Parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Assembly of
Divines.'[1] Aylmer immediately and with a minimum of fuss defines the context
for discussing radicalism in the English Revolution. Having dispensed with the
circular debate over naming, Aylmer proceeds to get on with trying to
characterise the distinguishing features of mid-seventeenth-century
radicalism.[4]
McDowell follows Hessayon lead in opposing historians who
have adopted the linguistic turn. He writes If we are not to call ‘radical’ the
writers I discuss at length in the book – the ‘Ranter’ Coppe, the Levellers
Walwyn and Richard Overton, the Quaker Samuel Fisher, the Fifth Monarchist John
Rogers – then what exactly are we to call them? ‘Sectarian’ will hardly
do”.Jason Peacey’s chapter Radicalism Relocated: Royalist Politics and
Pamphleting of the Late 1640s is an indicator of the growing interest in
Royalist politics and their use of pamphleting. Peacey is open to the idea that
radical politics permeated into every aspect of everyday life.According to
Diego Lucci, “Peacey stresses that radical ideas, especially in matters of
religious, social and political reform, penetrated various areas of English
politics and, therefore, were shared by different, and sometimes clashing,
milieus. Therefore, Peacey argues that radicalism was a phenomenon largely
independent from the distinctions between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and
influenced both sides of the political spectrum.”
Mario Caricchio’s News from the New Jerusalem; Giles Calvert
and the Radical experience Mario Caricchio’s section concentrates on the how
bookselling and pamphleteering influenced political and religious debates of
the English Revolution. Caricchio focuses on Giles Calvert, one of the main
publishers and booksellers in England between 1641 and 1660. Caricchio
maintains that Calvert’s bookshop was part of a broader network of social
networks.As Caricchio said, in a 2006 essay “Radicalism and English revolution
are not on a high road but at a crossroads. Historians seem to place them where
a number of contexts intersect. This could be an answer to the question of the
“nature of the English revolution”, which, as John Morrill put it by citing
Hill, required attention to be paid more to “environment” than to
“heredity”.[36] This is a two-sided issue. On the one hand, there is the radicalisation
of conflict that shattered the unity of the “political nation” at the beginning
of the 1640s and precipitated England into the civil war. On the other hand,
there is the problem of late 1640s radicalism, which Morrill, envisaging a
comparison between the Levellers and the Clubmen, raised in a stimulating
question: how “Leveller pamphlets and petitions combined deeply regressive
economic and social ideas with a core commitment to religious liberty and a
political doctrine born of the experience of Independent churches, all bound
together in an innovative natural rights framework”? In this question and its
possible answer, popular participation and radical ideas still stand at the
heart of the matter. The varieties of the English religious experience together
with the widening or thickening publicity of discourses seem to be the decisive
turning on the map: where the last war of religion becomes a revolution”.[5]
Gerrard Winstanley: Radical Reformerby Ariel Hessayon is a
continuation of Hessayon’s attack on left-wing historians. In an essay in 2006,
he attacks Christopher Hills evaluation of the Digger leader Winstanley.”In
1973 Hill’s edition of Winstanley’s selected writings was published by Penguin.
His introduction portrayed Winstanley in modern dress as an advocate of ‘human
progress’, ‘reason’ and ‘international brotherhood’; an author whose insights
‘may be of interest to those in the Third World today who face the transition
from an agrarian to an industrial society’. Here again was a radical, mostly
secular Winstanley whose biblical language and ‘high-flown metaphorical style’
was worth penetrating in the same way that readers had to get through the
‘Hegelian jargon’ to understand the early Marx. [76] In a subsequent essay
‘From Lollards to Levellers’ (1978) Hill attempted to provide both genealogy
and ecology for ‘lower-class’
radicalism by exploring the continuity of radical ideas
within an orally transmitted ‘underground tradition’. His focus was on
doctrinal and geographical continuities, particularly in pastoral, forest,
moorland and fen areas where ecclesiastical control was less tight.
But if in retrospect the 1970s represented a pinnacle in
Hill’s writing on radicalism, it was also during this decade that his work was
most severely attacked. Indeed, Hill’s preoccupation with twentieth-century
ideological struggles and his moralising tone made his work vulnerable to
charges of being obsessively present-centred, of putting theory above facts.
And it must be said that he used evidence inaccurately and selectively,
depending almost entirely on printed sources. Ultimately Hill’s vision of the
past is largely unconvincing, revealing much about his agenda while misleading
readers unfamiliar with the evidence. To quote Montaigne: People are prone to
apply the meaning of other men’s writings to suit opinions that they have
previously determined in their minds.”
Hill, as far as I can make out, did not reply directly to
any of these attacks. But I will. Attacking a historian for his politics is one
thing, but accusing a historian of fabricating history is another and has no
place in any historians debate. The attack on Hill and the CPHG is reminiscent
of J .C. Davis in the 1980s. Davis’s great theory was that most of the radical
groups that existed during the English Revolution were figments of the
imagination of left-wing historians such as Hill. A similar line of attack was
taken by historian Alastair MacLachlan in his extraordinarily provocative book
The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: Essay on the Fabrication of
Seventeenth-Century History. MacLachlan should be made to retract his
accusations and issue an apology.To conclude, this collection of essays
continues a revisionist trend to downplay the radicals in the English
Revolution. There are some worthwhile essays, but overall the book disappoints.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_radicalism
2] Reborn John?: The Eighteenth-century Afterlife of John
Lilburne
Edward Vallance-
https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/74/1/1/825488
[3] https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1157
[4] N. McDowell , “Writing the Literary and Cultural History
of Radicalism in the English Revolution”,
http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/mcdowell.html>
[5] M. Caricchio, “Radicalism and the English Revolution”,
in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino, eds., Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent
historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th-18th Centuries),
2006-2007
Killers of the King – The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I
Hardcover – 11 Sep 2014 352 pages Bloomsbury Publishing – ISBN-13:
978-1408851708
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ye shall not defile the land wherein ye are: for blood it
defileth the land; and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed
therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.
Book of Numbers [35 v. 33]
The bestselling historian Charles Spencer new book tells the
stories of the men that dared to kill a king. It is an understatement to say
this is an interesting subject. A belief widely held amongst historians and the
general reading public.His trial and subsequent execution was a watershed
moment in British and world history. The only people to kill a king. As Blair
Worden writes “the beheading of Charles I on January 30th, 1649, left an
indelible mark on the history of England and on the way that the English think
about themselves. It was the climactic moment of the Puritan Revolution, and it
also changed the whole character of the conflict. Most of the people who had
taken up arms against Charles I seven years earlier was opposed to his killing,
if not outraged by it. They knew that it would destroy their cause, though they
could not have foreseen how lasting the condemnation of the regicide would
be”.[1]
Charles Spencer’s new book is a splendid, narrative-driven
book and is part of a large number of narrative-driven books recently
published. It would appear that this particular historical genre is on the up.
As Tom Holland flamboyantly points out “Imagine the Odessa File re-written by
Christopher Hill, and you will have some idea of the pleasure to be had in
reading Killers of the King. The virtues of a thriller and scholarship are
potently combined”.[2]Not all historians are fans of narrative-based historical
writing. When C V Wedgwood produced her splendid book A King Condemned-The
Trial and Execution of Charles Ist, it was criticized by some historians. In
the foreword of the 2011 edition, Clive Holmes said: “Wedgwood’s relationship
with academic historians was not an easy one, and the immediate reception of
this work by the professionals in their flagship journals was cool and even
condescending.” This silly snobbery is why there have been no academic reviews
of Spencer’s book.
In terms of historiography Spencer’s book is part of a new
wave of studies concentrating on different aspects of the Royalist cause.
Royalism during and after the English revolution is a legitimate subject for
study. It is surprising to discover as I am sure Spencer would have found a
dearth of serious academic studies of the trial and execution of the king and
subsequent politics contained within the trial and execution of the
regicides.It is a richly, rewarding subject to study, so it is hard to
understand why such an important event in the history of both Britain and the
world has been so under-researched. Outside of C V Wedgewood’s The Regicides
and the Execution of Charles I there is Jason Peacey’s, The Regicides and the
Execution of Charles I December 7th 2001, Why Was Charles I Executed? 2007 by
Clive Holmes and last but no means least in 2010 we have The Tyrannicide Brief:
The Story of the Man who sent Charles I to the Scaffold by Geoffrey Robertson
apart from these there is little on offer.
Like many other studies of the English revolution, the study
of why and how early the revolutionists were prepared to kill the king. Clive
Holmes defends the view that the regicides knew exactly what they were doing
when they executed the king and had prepared for his killing a good few years
before. Spencer broadly agrees with this viewpoint.Not all historians agree
with Holmes. Sean Kelsey argued that the New Model Army and the purged Long
Parliament had no wish to see the king dead when they brought him to trial on
charges of committing treason against his people.Sean Kelsey argued in his
essay The Ordinance for the Trial of Charles I that parliament had a
significantly bigger role in bringing the king to execution than had previously
thought. Kelsey believes that far too little attention has been paid to the
role of parliament in bringing about the trial of the king.
A contemporaneous print showing the 1649 execution of
Charles I outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall, London
“The ordinance passed by the Commons on January 1st, 1649
has never aroused much interest amongst historians of the English Revolution,
one of whom has remarked that “formal documentary evidence for this (first)
tribunal is lacking.” Neither the House of Lords Record Office, not the
principal collections of parliamentary papers has yielded the secrets of the
Ordinance. A search of the National Archives of Scotland has not yet located a
copy of the Common’s measure which the commissioners of Edinburgh parliament
resident at Westminster in January 1649 sent to their superiors shortly after
its passage in the English lower house”.[3]
The trial and execution of the king were the high point and
culmination of a long and protracted process. The highpoint of that process was
the English Revolution. The theory of high road to revolution has come under
heavy attack from revisionist historians. Admittedly the men who started the
revolution against the king did not start to kill him but to make revolutionary
changes in 1642 for “king and parliament” but ended it cutting the kings head
off. It is not Spencer’s fault that his book does not explain this
contradiction. The problem is not Spencer’s ability as a writer but his method
or theory of historical events.
He could have consulted even an out and out revisionist
historian such as Blair Worden who perceptibly writes, “Yet wars, once embarked
upon, have to be won. The fighting and winning of them can radically extend
their aims. The New Model Army, raised in 1645 to end the carnage, acquired
revolutionary goals in both politics and religion. Only slowly did its generals
come to contemplate trying the king. The decisive event was the Second Civil
War, fought in 1648. It centred on an invasion by a Scottish army, with whose
leaders Charles had been conspiring even as he negotiated, ostensibly in good
faith, for his restoration of the English parliament. In 1647 Oliver Cromwell and
his ally and son-in-law Henry Ireton had conducted their negotiations with him.
Now they concluded that Charles’s inherent duplicity would wreck any
settlement. There could be no lasting peace, they decided, while he remained
alive”.[4]
His concentration on the narrative to the detriment of
theory does not get us very far. While it is important to understand what went
through the minds of the leading actors of the revolution such as Cromwell,
Ireton, and Harrison to do so would only give us a one-sided understanding of
the why a king’s head was cut off and a republic established. Spencer is free
to adopt whatever theoretical approach he wants to portray historical events
but the rise of narrative history has been at the direct expense of a
materialist understanding of the revolution.As Karl Marx correctly points out
“the production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of
men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of
men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The
same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics,
laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of people. Men are the producers
of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned
by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse
corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be
anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear
upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from
their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does
from their physical life-process.”[5]
A snapshot of the regicides shows that they came from
diverse social backgrounds but were united by their opposition to the king.
They were not conscious revolutionists they were however to varying degree
conscious of their role as “ideologists of the revolution (who) ransacked the
Bible, and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to
explain what they were doing”.The most politically aware of the revolutionists
were astute enough to know that when they executed their king after a
complicated trial with long deliberation, it was the result not of an accident
or misunderstanding. Many soldiers from the New Model Army who were mainly
drawn from smallholders and lower yeomanry were acutely aware of what and more
importantly, why they moved against the king. When the Cornet George Joyce
captured the king, he was challenged by Charles who asked him where he received
his commission Joyce is reported to have waved his sword towards his troops and
replied: ” here is my commission.”
It cannot be denied that the killing of the king had as Ann
Talbot recounts “ a profound revolutionary significance entailing a complete
break with the feudal past. Although the Monarchy was later restored and the
triumphant bourgeoisie was soon eager to pretend that the whole thing had been
a ghastly mistake, no monarch sat quickly on the throne after that event until
quite late in Victoria’s reign”.[6]The Killers of the King is Spencer’s third
book covering the English Civil War. The author was recently asked why this
subject and answered “the three most important history books that I have
written have concentrated on the period 1642-1704 – quite a short period, in
fact. I am not the first to be intrigued by the English Civil War – but my
particular interest is in the characters involved: there seem to have been so
many huge personalities active during that time of massive, national, upheaval.
For me, history has always been more about people watching than dry statistics
and dates. The mid- to late seventeenth century provides very rich pickings
indeed”.
The book and the author have received a substantial amount
of interest from the media partly because the subjects dramatic content. The
book is very well written and very well researched and is beautifully
illustrated. It is not for the fainthearted as Spencer at times goes into
graphic detail of the punishment handed out to the king killers. Many after all
were hung drawn and quartered and their genitals cut off and innards burned
before their eyes while still alive.
Spencer’s book at times reads like a novel. He shows that
leading figures of the revolution turned on their former colleagues and hunted
them down. One was Sir George Downing of Downing Street fame, and described by
Samuel Pepys as “that perfidious rogue,” he plotted and went to the Continent,
kidnap and if necessary murder then and there his former friends or bundle them
back to England to stand trial and certain execution.
It would appear from the book that the reign of Charles was
dominated by this manhunt. While sanctioning what amounted to judicial murder,
the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The longer the show trial went
on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers became and recognized the
growing danger of rebellion. Charles II made one mistake in giving a public
funeral to one of the regicides over twenty thousand people attended testifying
the still considerable support held for Republican ideas.As I said above
Spencer’s understanding of why Charles II would undertake a risky thing to try
his father’s killers is very limited and tends to put the trial down to pure
revenge as Spencer states “Charles II naturally loathed those who had seen to
his father’s beheading. He was unable to exact vengeance on all those who had
fought for parliament, of course – approximately half the nation; but he was
allowed to bring down retribution on the regicides. Originally he was only
looking to make seven of them suffer, but many – especially in the House of
Lords – wanted all those intimately involved in Charles I’s death to die. They
had their own reasons for vengeance. For a lot of Parliamentarians, choosing
the king’s killers as scapegoats took the attention away from their own years
of rebellion against the Crown.”
.
Spencer further elaborates on this matter “Killers of the
King starts with the fall of Charles I, and then his trial and execution. But
the driving narrative is what happened to the many diverse men who came together
to end his life. On the whole, these were not people with a grand background –
they included a butcher’s son, a jeweller, a brewer, and a tanner of hides –
men who had risen through merit to regimental command in Parliament’s New Model
Army. British history tends inevitably to be seen through a royal prism,
because – apart from the 11 years between Charles I’s death and Charles II’s
restoration, of course – we have always had a monarchy”.
One would normally expect Earl Spencer to side with one of his
own in the matter of the regicide of the king but the opposite would appear to
be the case, As Spencer says “I started the book with a view that I would end
up being hugely sympathetic to Charles I as a victim of a kangaroo court, but,
as I researched the extraordinary drama of the civil war it had thrown up,
these intriguing, individuals whose stories were so fascinating and diverse.
Getting to know some of the key regicides in greater depth meant I sympathized
with them much more,” says Spencer, who despite being an Earl, would have sided
with parliament had he been alive at the time.
His book is not a radical history of the English revolution.
The author if anything is sympathetic to the Whig interpretation of history.
Spencer believes that the civil war was a progressive development and supports
Geoffrey Robertson’s contention that “the proceeding against Charles I in 1649
secured the constitutional gains of the Civil War – the supremacy of
Parliament, the independence of judges, an individual freedom guaranteed by
Magna Carta and the common law”.
Spencer adds “I do believe the king had to die for England
to have a hope of peace. He was impossible to trust, and the one thing you had
to be like a ruler was decisive otherwise you were too weak to survive. The
whole of society was changing in a fundamental way, and something drastic has
to happen. Sadly for Charles, it was being decapitated. But despite my feelings
against him as a king, I have enormous personal regard for him as a man. He was
a gentle, church-loving, chess playing figure. I feel very sorry for him, but I
also think those who put him to death were very brave men.”
Another striking aspect of the book and Spencer gives ample
room space to is how people who were once leading members in the Cromwellian
era shifted their allegiances like some people change a shirt.
Charles Monck, who has always struck me as a person of
extreme opportunism was “a turncoat of heroic proportions”. He had been
commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower of
Cromwell. But after being promised the unheard-of sum of £100,000 a year for
the rest of his life changed sides and decided to do the king’s dirty work. It
would have added to Spencer’s book if he had investigated this phenomenon further.
Another perceived weakness of the book is that fact that he never actually
addresses what happened to the revolution. Why was it so easy for a regime
change so shortly after Cromwell’s death?
One severe weakness of the book is that it fails to convey
how the regicides lost power and a monarchy established albeit with the help of
substantial sections of the bourgeoisie. The book is absent as to the political
and economic makeup of the Charles ll regime. The trial far from just being
about revenge was a counter-revolution by sections of the bourgeoisie who were
still firmly connected to the Monarchy.As James Holstun’s correctly states
“What turned the tide was the failure of bourgeois republican revolutionaries
to unify themselves militarily, and create an interest and stake in the
republic among the copyholders, soldiers, sailors and apprentices; and the
superior power of General Monck and the forces of Restoration in shaping and
controlling the army”. To conclude Spencer’s book is theoretically light and is
not in the same case as Wedgewood. It could have been improved if he had used
previous academic research. However, I would recommend the book and would grace
any bookshelf.
[1] The Execution of Charles I-
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/execution-charles-i
[2]
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/killers-of-the-king-9781408851715/
[3] The Ordinance for the trial of Charles I-Sean
Kelsey-Historical Research- Volume 76, Issue 193
[4] The Execution of Charles I-
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/execution-charles-i
[5] Part I: Feuerbach.Opposition of the Materialist and
Idealist Outlook-German Ideology-
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
[6] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill
By Ann Talbot-25 March 2003-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
Cromwell-An Honourable Enemy by Tom Reilly
This is a guest blog by the writer Tom Reilly. It is
copyrighted further publication is at the discretion of the author.
On the morning before Oliver Cromwell swung his legs out of
bed to travel to Ireland, the notion of besieging the town of Drogheda – the
event that would later become the biggest blot on his career – would never have
even occurred to him. That’s because Drogheda was under roundhead control that
day as it had been for the lengthy duration of two whole years previously. He
could simply have strolled through any of the gates of the walled town any time
that day and he would have been greeted with a barrage of deferential good
morning sirs.
On 11 July 1649 the town of Drogheda was captured by the
royalists under Lord Inchiquin and wrested from the hands of Parliament, who
had been in military occupation since the summer of 1647. It was
parliamentarian soldiers who would later be accused of committing civilian
atrocities at Drogheda, yet it was parliamentarian soldiers who had lived
peaceably, side by side with these very same inhabitants for two long years
beforehand, with no recorded evidence of discord between the military and
civilian occupants whatsoever. Indeed, there is even some evidence to suggest
that Cromwell’s attacking forces at Drogheda included members of roundhead
regiments who had fraternised with the local populace for those two years
previously. Cromwell, who would not have been aware of the royalist victory at
Drogheda the previous day, left London for Ireland on 12 July 1649 to crush
royalist resistance there.
But that’s not what the history books will tell you –
especially Irish history books. In Irish history it is much more difficult than
in the story of most other countries to reverse traditional views, and although
there have been many investigators of this period at first hand, few have
concluded that Cromwell was not a war criminal.
The idea that the massacre of the unarmed civilian
populations of both Drogheda and Wexford by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army
did indeed take place has survived through the centuries almost perfectly
intact. Indeed, it is so well constructed that it is virtually indestructible.
The years bristle with the names of erudite academics who have studied
Cromwell’s Irish campaign and who have produced hundreds of articles and books
on the subject.
Even the most ardent Cromwell enthusiasts who have studied
the period forensically have conceded that large-scale massacres of defenceless
civilians occurred in September (Drogheda) and October (Wexford) 1649. Done
deal. Case closed. The result of their labour is captured in short sound bytes
in both past and present Irish school textbooks. In 2004, Folens published
Earthlink 5th Class. On page 87 the following words are printed: ‘Cromwell
captured Drogheda. About 3,000 men, women and children were killed.’ The
Educational Company of Ireland released Timeline in 2008. A paragraph on page
223 reads, ‘He [Cromwell] first laid siege to Drogheda. He was determined to
make an example of the town. When he captured it he slaughtered the entire
population.’ There is no ambiguity there.
Such is his murderous Irish legacy, Cromwell features in a
modern-day cult card game called Terror Top Chumps, a ‘politically charged
version’ of the children’s card game Top Trumps (created by Fear Trade Ltd.)
alongside Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Ivan the
Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Sadam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden; a total of
thirty-two terrorists and dictators in all – and has a body count of 600,000
attributed to him. Not by coincidence, this figure has often been used as the
entire number of people who died due to famine, pestilence and war during the
Cromwellian period in Ireland.
When discussing the horrific events at Drogheda in 1649, one
of the ‘go to’ sources for many is the (second hand) account of the
parliamentarian soldier Thomas á Wood, who fought at Drogheda and therefore
could be (and often has been) described as an eyewitness. Wood reputedly tells
us that children were used ‘as a buckler of defence’ by the attackers and he
describes the gruesome killing of a young local girl, whom he tried to save but
one of his crazed colleagues stabbed her through ‘her belly or fundament
whereupon Mr Wood seeing her gasping, took away her money, jewels &c., and
flung her down over the works.’
Although some have determined that Wood’s tract is
melodramatic hyperbole it has generally been used in a primary source context
coming directly from an eyewitness. This is a mistake. Now for the first time
the stories of Thomas á Wood, which were transcribed decades later by his
brother Anthony, (rendering it non-eyewitness testimony) in the context of
fireside stories with which he regaled his ‘brethren’ can be revealed as
unequivocally untrustworthy. The source is normally cited loosely as The Life
of Anthony á Wood from the year 1632 to 1672 written by himself.
New evidence now clearly shows that this book was first
compiled (not published) in 1711 by a Doctor Thomas Tanner, 16 years after
Anthony á Wood died and 62 years after Drogheda. Most significantly however, is
the fact that it might easily have been influenced by the hands of others and
it did not see the light of day until 1772, when a Thomas Hearne edited and
published it – that’s 123 years after the events!Anthony á Wood, a staunch
royalist, who was always suspected of being a Catholic had his life’s
historical works published after his death in various publications, and all
with different editors (including the Rev Sir J Peshall 1773, John Gutch 1786,
Phillip Bliss 1813, Andrew Clark 1889), some of which included the story of his
life, which in turn contains the account of his brother Thomas at Drogheda.
Wood’s biography was not in fact published by himself in the literal sense, but
was transcribed by editor Hearne in 1772 from pocket diaries, documents and manuscripts
that Wood left to Dr. Tanner, among others, on his deathbed. This is not
exactly what you would call an authentic primary source directly from an
eyewitness. Diminishing the credibility of the source even further is the fact
that Colonel Henry Ingoldsby, Thomas á Wood’s commanding officer described
Thomas as having ‘an art of merriment called buffooning.’ Just the type of
soldier, as Samuel Rawson Gardiner has suggested, who might make up sensational
stories to impress a fireside audience.
It is important to analyse Anthony á Wood’s commentary
because his is the only account that gives details of civilian deaths at
Drogheda, using his brother’s lurid stories, if they even were his brother’s
own lurid stories.
In stark contrast to what the Wood brothers purportedly say
are the actual words of Oliver Cromwell. As soon as he landed in Ireland he
issued orders to his troops not to do ‘any wrong or violence to any person, not
in arms or office with the enemy.’ In the main, commentators on this topic throughout
antiquity tend to assume that Cromwell just ignored the fact that many of his
troops simply disregarded this order and lost their self-control at Drogheda,
as indeed did their commanding officer himself. But the evidence does not
support this point of view.
In his declaration to the Catholic clergy in the winter of
1649, after Drogheda and Wexford Cromwell categorically denies that he has
stepped outside the military domain, and on no less than ten occasions he
emphasises that the ordinary unarmed people of Ireland are to be left
unmolested. On one occasion he even denies that he has actually killed unarmed
civilians and he is consistent in this respectful attitude to the civilian
population in all of his documented utterances throughout his entire campaign
in Ireland. On his approach to Drogheda he even had two of his men hanged for
stealing hens from an old woman, a clear breach of his orders.
On several occasions throughout his life Cromwell shows his
abhorrence of indiscriminate civilian massacres when he hears of them. In
Ireland he unequivocally blames the Catholic clergy for the 1641 massacres of
innocent Protestant settlers and outlines his revulsion of such behaviour in no
uncertain terms in the above mentioned declaration.
Also in May 1655 as Lord Protector he is clearly horrified
when he learns of the massacre by the troops of the Catholic duke of Savoy, of
some 200-300 Protestants known as Waldensians who lived in the adjoining
isolated Alpine valleys in Piedmont to the west of Turin. There is ample
evidence from throughout his life that Cromwell’s moral threshold was high and
even in this narrow context of an appreciation of his character, a massacre of
unarmed blacksmiths, cobblers, innkeepers, their wives, daughters, babies and
toddlers at either Drogheda or Wexford at his hands does not accord with his
personality and now given these fresh insights seems ludicrous in the extreme.
Those who promote Cromwell as a war criminal perpetuate the idea that he simply
lost his moral compass in Ireland and returned to his old self on his return to
England. This is not an inaccurate portrayal.
So where then did the allegations of civilian atrocities
come from?Much store has been put into the letters (or military despatches)
that Cromwell sent back to his superiors in London from both Drogheda and
Wexford that outline the events at both towns in detail. In the opinion of many
the letter concerning Drogheda in particular has incriminated Cromwell, where
he is alleged to have admitted that he killed ‘many inhabitants’ in that town
in a list of the slain that appears in the official pamphlet that was printed
by parliament on 2 October 1649 to officially announce the news of the fall of
Drogheda.In the pamphlet Letters from Ireland relating the Several great successes
it hath pleased God to give unto the Parliament’s forces there, in the taking
of Drogheda, Trym, Dundalk, Carlingford and the Nury. Together with a list of
the chief commanders, and the number of the officers and soldiers slain in
Drogheda this list appears at the end of Cromwell’s letter, the last line of
which reads, ‘Two thousand Five hundred Foot Soldiers, besides Staff Officers,
Chyrurgeons, &c and many inhabitants.’
For the first time in 365 years this official government
document has now been analysed forensically (by me) in conjunction with the
newsbooks (newspapers) of the day that also carried the exact same list of
those killed. And for the first time ever it can be almost categorically said
(inasmuch anything from that period can) that the three words ‘and many
inhabitants’ were NOT the words of Cromwell himself. Up to now, most early
modern historians have deemed these lists (There is also a list of the
composition of the garrison.) in Letters from Ireland… to have been from the
quill of Old Ironsides himself. (The original letter does not survive.) But
this writer’s analysis proves that the published list of those slain at
Drogheda was in separate circulation to Cromwell’s letter and that it was
published in no less than seven newsbooks in early October 1649 in isolation,
without Cromwell’s letters directly preceding it. Furthermore, none of the
newsbook writers attribute the list to Cromwell himself. It can also be shown
that of the seven publications that printed the list of the slain, only two
include the phrase ‘and many inhabitants’. Most significantly, this list of the
slain can now be shown to have been in circulation on 22 September, TEN days
before Cromwell’s letter was even opened in parliament. It can further be shown
that the pamphlet was printed in haste and that these two lists were simply
slotted into the available spaces on the 16-page leaflet with clear demarcation
lines to separate the lists from Cromwell’s letters.
Of course, the caveat here is that these ‘many inhabitants’
may well have been armed and involved in the conflict, a scenario that is
perfectly plausible since The Moderate Intelligencer of 6 September says of
Drogheda that ‘every man in that kingdom fit to bear arms is in a posture of
war.’ This is another inconvenient fact that is now being brought to general
public attention for the first time ever and that gets in the way of the tales
of indiscriminate massacres of unarmed civilians. After all, an armed civilian
is no longer a civilian.
Seventeenth-century historians rightly generally disregard
(or at least view with acute suspicion) the later accounts of post-Restoration
writers who, when writing their memoirs, documented their accounts about this
issue years afterwards (like Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Earl of Clarendon, Dr
George Bate, and the officer in the regiment of Sir John Clotworthy). None of
these individuals were at either Drogheda or Wexford, they were not qualified
to comment, had axes to grind and all allege that Cromwell engaged in
deliberate civilian massacres.
The most pragmatic way to approach the question of the
origin of the deliberate civilian atrocity allegations is to separate the wheat
from the chaff and identify the primary sources themselves, those that date
from the year 1649 and were written in the weeks and months following the
sackings of Drogheda and Wexford. These 1649 sources are well-known and mostly
comprise the newsbooks of the day, the letters of those in command of the
royalist army (Lord Ormond and Lord Inchiquin) and one or two private letters.
It may therefore occasion surprise for one to learn that in
the eleven intervening years between the stormings of both Drogheda and Wexford
and the Restoration there are just TWO contemporary accounts that allege
Cromwell slaughtered the lawyers, merchants, servants, farmers, doctors,
carpenters, washerwomen, widows, teenagers and children of Drogheda and
Wexford.
That being the case, it is not such a wild leap of faith to
identify these two individuals as the ones who instigated the civilian massacre
stories – or alternatively to identify them as the ones who framed Oliver
Cromwell. Sir George Wharton and John Crouch were royalist propagandists who
spewed out their radical anti-government newsbooks Mercurius Elencticus and The
Man in the Moon respectively on a weekly basis. Both Wharton and Crouch have
been described by many early modern print experts as the purveyors of little
news but lots of outlandish absurdity. Any analysis of any of their
publications will reveal their penchant for lies, slander, slurs, calumny and
character assassination, including crass sexual innuendo directed at Cromwell
himself and his high profile parliamentary bosses. Indeed, in his edition of 7
November 1649 John Crouch decides to spread a rumour that Cromwell’s penis was
shot off at Drogheda and goes into some explicit and gaudy details as to how
this might affect Mrs Cromwell.
For eleven long years no other document, that we know, of
accuses Cromwell of civilian atrocities. There the matter should really have
ended. Indeed, it is worth speculating that if the House of Cromwell, in the
guise of his son Richard in the first instance, the second Lord Protector, had
survived into the 1660s and beyond it is likely that both Crouch’s and
Wharton’s outrageous publications would have been long cast to the mists of
time.
Instead, of course, the Restoration happened when Charles II
restored his royal seat on the throne and it wasn’t long before his father’s
killers became the victims of vengeful royalist wrath. Not long after the
bodies of Cromwell, his parliamentarian compatriot John Bradshaw and son-in-law
Henry Ireton were exhumed and defiled as the chief protagonists of the failed
republic, people couldn’t get to the printing presses quickly enough to destroy
their reputations. The royalist James Heath was one of the first out of the
traps when he published his scurrilous Flagellum, The Life and Death, Birth,
Burial of O Cromwell, the Late Usurper in1660 where the author alleges that
Cromwell himself ordered the massacre of 300 women around the market cross in
Wexford. Indeed, Heath further alleges that those troops he ordered to carry
out the dastardly deed refused and Cromwell, sneering them for their refusal,
called another group of soldiers up to complete the task. Few historians take
anything Heath says seriously.
Interestingly, Heath doesn’t even mention the deaths of any
inhabitants of Drogheda in his heavily biased narrative. That particular
privilege is left to the Catholic clergy in Ireland, who join in the post-Restoration
Cromwell bashing free-for-all and now ludicrously declare that 4,000 civilians
had died in Drogheda without a scrap of primary source evidence. Naturally
4,000 dead civilians at Drogheda makes no sense whatsoever, since the
population of the town was approximately 3,000 and we already know that upwards
of 3,000 soldiers were slaughtered. No other source, credible or otherwise
suggests for a moment that 7,000 souls lost their lives at Drogheda.
Furthermore, this same body politic of Catholic clergy had already had their
say about Drogheda and Wexford in their decrees from Clonmacnoise in the winter
of 1649, when there is no mention of this assertion whatsoever. And the
difference in the timing? Cromwell was still alive and well, still in Ireland,
and he would have dismissed such claims out of hand in the strongest possible
terms, one imagines, with any talk of a restoration at that point aeons away.
Among the many other fresh revelations that this writer has
discovered is evidence from several different sources that suggest the civilian
population of Drogheda were not even in the town by the time the 12,000
Roundheads sat down in front of the walls. For instance, there was a siege of
Drogheda just eight years earlier when the Irish rebels, under the command of
Sir Phelim O’Neill surrounded the entire town and reduced the population to
eating rats and horses. It is difficult to believe that they would stay put to
have a similar culinary experience so soon afterwards. Furthermore, Ormond was
expecting a long siege and ordered all ‘superfluous’ people to depart from the
town in order that the provisions (a reported nine-month supply) stored there
would stretch among the soldiers over the several months they expected the
siege to last. Dean Nicholas Bernard, the Protestant minister at St Peter’s
Church in Drogheda in 1649, and an eyewitness, confirms that his family were
sent out of the town. Bernard, who saw what happened that day and wrote a
detailed account of it later, says nothing of civilian deaths.
There is no doubt that some women died in Wexford as a
result of them cramming into boats and the boats sinking in the harbour in an
attempt to flee the place. But they clearly died as the result of an accident
and not because of a deliberate policy to kill the innocent by the New Model.
Also into this anti-Interregnum maelstrom of vengeance came
the petition of the people of Wexford, who were pleading to Charles II for the
restoration of their properties following the Cromwellian Plantation.
Remarkably the petition writers seem to have chosen to grossly exaggerate
Cromwell’s actions in Ireland in order to receive clemency from their new king.
In their petition they claim that after entering Wexford, Cromwell ‘put man,
woman and child, to a very few’ to the sword, again a scenario that has no
supporting contemporary evidence or eyewitness attestation. In the same
petition the writers allege that Cromwell ‘put all of the inhabitants and
soldiers’ of Drogheda to the sword, an allegation that simply does not stand up
since nobody who was there on that fateful day corroborates this contention.
This significantly reduces the credibility of the petitioners’ sycophantic
petition, which Charles II ultimately ignored anyway.
The evidence now being revealed by this writer simply hones
in on whether or not Cromwell was responsible for deliberately killing large
numbers of innocent, unarmed civilians in Ireland in the year 1649. Some may
have died in the cross-fire, as the result of collateral damage, others
definitely drowned by accident. The subsequent dreadful Cromwellian Plantation
that devastated Catholic Ireland is another matter altogether and should not
cloud one’s judgement when discussing these alleged war crimes. Were large
numbers of innocent civilians deliberately massacred? Did Cromwell do it, or
did he not? Should we still be teaching children that Cromwell indiscriminately
slaughtered entire town populations? As President of the Cromwell Association,
Prof John Morrill has recently announced, ‘Paradoxically, by blaming Cromwell
for the much more lasting horrors of the Commonwealth period in Ireland, we let
those really responsible off the hook.’
I, for one, as an Irish citizen and native of Drogheda would
like to start the ball rolling and posthumously apologise to Oliver Cromwell
and his family for staining his reputation. He was an honourable enemy and the
victim of a huge miscarriage of historical justice. Cromwell was framed.
Wharton and Crouch fitted him up.
Interview with Writer/Historian Tom Reilly
I recently came into contact with the Irish historian/writer
Tom Reilly. His books have concentrated on many aspects of Oliver Cromwell’s
controversial military and political campaign in Ireland. I have only started
to read Tom’s last two books and would like to review them at a later date. I
will therefore reserve comment on his work. I would welcome comments on this
interview and Tom’s writing on Ireland and Cromwell.
Q What made you take up the study of history and especially
your specialization of Cromwell in Ireland?
A I would love to say that I was always suspicious of the
politicisation of Irish history and that my cynicism was piqued when it came to
what we (Irish citizens) were being taught about Cromwell in Ireland but that’s
not really true. Well, there is a grain of truth about it and that’s to do with
me being a cynic, which I believe I am. I was one of those ‘question authority’
types when I wore a younger man’s clothes. (He didn’t seem to mind. ) However,
the real reason why I took up this study is because I come from Drogheda – the
scene of Old Ironsides’ most notorious deeds. Indeed, I now live in a house,
the boundary of which was once the town wall, and furthermore it was into my
garden that the breach in the walls was made and the Roundheads poured through
in 1649.
I was brought up in this town. My family go back generations
here. I used to hang around (what was left of) the town walls and was
fascinated about the fact that Cromwell is supposed to have killed all of my
ancestors. So, as a young adult, I decided to check the local records to see if
there was anything to be gleaned there. And lo and behold, the records go back
to the year 1649. In these records, there were the names of hundreds of
Drogheda’s inhabitants whose daily lives continued through into the 1650s and
beyond, all of whom showed very little signs of being massacred in cold blood.
This was not a document (Drogheda Corporation records) that many historians had
checked in the past, but it seemed obvious to me, even though I wasn’t a
historian. I’m still not. That was the starting point. And I have never looked
back since.
Q Describe how difficult it was for an amateur writing in
the current formally academic controlled climate.
A That’s quite an interesting question. So, to start at the
beginning, it wasn’t long before I felt that I was on to something. So I wiped
the slate clean and dismissed all I have ever heard about Cromwell and I began
to read voraciously about the man – SR Gardiner, WC Abbott, Thomas Carlyle,
Hillaire Belloc, Pauline Gregg, Ivan Roots, Peter Gaunt, John Morrill, etc.
etc. all made an impact on me and none of them seemed to think that Cromwell
was a complete bastard. Hmm. That’s odd. It was Antonia Fraser’s Cromwell, Our
Chief of Men that gave me a real insight into his personality and as I kept on
reading and reading it seemed to me that a pattern was beginning to emerge. Fr
Denis Murphy (Cromwell in Ireland) and JP Prendergast (The Cromwellian
Settlement of Ireland) DMR Esson (The Curse of Cromwell) typified Irish
attitudes to Cromwell, whereas English writers tended to be much more
circumspect when it came to the stories of civilian atrocities. So I wasn’t
alone. Gardiner in particular did not believe the war criminal allegations and
copper-fastened my doubt that the stories of indiscriminate massacres of
civilians might be just that, stories. That was enough for my cynicism to
ignite and it continues to burn in flames today.
But what to do?
So in 1993, in the middle of my research, I wrote an
amateurish book called Cromwell at Drogheda, which didn’t really say anything
at all except explain the facts of the siege. It was for the local market
(1,000 copies) and it sold out.
Finally, I had so much material assembled I decided to write
another book. Strangely, for me, this was more about writing than it was about
history. Like many amateur writers I wanted to be heard. I brought out
(self-published) two more books on local history in the nineties and after
completing the first draft of Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy, I sent it to a few
publishers (70!!) to see if they’d bite, not for a minute thinking that any of
them would. Steve McDonogh (Brandon Books) rang me one day and I nearly fell
out of my standing. He wanted to publish – but the book would need footnotes. I
think I said something like, ‘I’m sorry, footwhats?’ Not a clue. I failed
second level history at school, so I had absolutely no idea what he meant.
Naturally I had encountered footnotes in all of my research because many of the
books that I had read had footnotes, or endnotes (I still don’t know the
difference, if there is a difference) or references of some sort. But could I
actually do this? Me?!
To make a long story longer, I gave it a go. I vaguely knew
that if you stated a fact you needed to reference it. So I copied the footnote
style of others, (probably various others), went back through the manuscript
(this was a hell of a memory test) to see if I could remember where I read this
fact and that fact and the other fact. After several more months, I had the
footnotes done. I had referenced all of the facts (well, those that I figured
needed referencing, my editor never questioned them) that were in the text that
identified the location where I got these same facts. Of course, little did I
know that I had suddenly dipped my toe into the bewildering world of academia,
a world, where a primary source reference can be compromised if that reference
comes second-hand from a modern-day publication, or shock horror, if a comma is
misplaced. I hadn’t a clue. I simply thought it was good enough to say where I
had read the fact. But hey, the publisher didn’t question my references so I
seemed to be getting away with it. After another long wait the book was
published. There was no going back now. I had definitely gotten away with it. A
book with footnotes eh? Go me.
So what was the question? Oh yeah, how difficult it was
writing in an academically controlled climate. Actually, it wasn’t difficult at
all first time round. I had no idea that the climate was controlled by
academia. But by Jaysus, do I know now!
The academics were horrified. They thought of me as if I was
dirt on their shoe. Reviews in most of the national Irish newspapers were bad.
‘None of this is convincing’ said the Irish Times. ‘This is a painfully bad
book’, said Dr Jason McElligott and he followed up with, ‘and it is tempting to
suggest that its main use will be to teach students how not to conduct
research, assess evidence or write prose.’ I was stunned. ‘But, the evidence, I
cried. Look at the evidence’.
Thankfully, those without insular opinions embraced the book
and its thesis. I began to realise that those who came out against it were
simply showing themselves up. Cromwell didn’t massacre unarmed women and
children. They knew/know it. Surely this is about balance. If you don’t buy my
entire thesis then, c’mon historians, at least come out and agree that the
teenagers, granddads, grannies, toddlers and babies of Ireland weren’t
slaughtered by Cromwell in 1649. But I digress.
Q What do you make of the current historiography regarding
Cromwell?
A I’m going to assume that this means Cromwell in Ireland. I
have discovered that there is a vast difference between Irish attitudes and
English attitudes (no kidding, right?) to Cromwell. Here is an excerpt from the
opening chapter of my book, which succinctly explains what I make of it:
‘As the crow of antiquity flies, the early modern period is
not really that far away in terms of distance in time, especially in Ireland
where history has an irritating habit of not going away. This is something that
we Irish know to our cost. History and myth have always been close companions;
indeed, one is frequently mistaken for the other. Myth is a powerful tool that
has been used to shape nations. The axiom that truth is the first casualty of
war has rarely been in sharper focus than in seventeenth century Ireland. Irish
history is strewn with colourful myths, many of which are associated with
Oliver Cromwell.
Often given credit for being personally responsible for
founding the British Empire, Cromwell is full of contradiction; a country
squire who became an outstanding military commander; a king killer who was
offered the crown and refused it; a champion of religious toleration who was
terrified of the power of Catholicism; a party reveller who danced late into
the night and who banned Christmas; a practical joker who became an enduring
symbol of everything Puritanical.
Such is his murderous legacy, Cromwell features in a
modern-day cult card game called Terror Top Chumps, a ‘politically charged
version’ of the children’s card game Top Trumps (created by Fear Trade Ltd.)
alongside Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Ivan the
Terrible, Vlad the Impaler, Sadam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden; a total of
thirty-two terrorists and dictators in all – and has a body count of 600,000
attributed to him. Not by coincidence, this figure has often been used as the
entire number of people who died due to famine, pestilence and war during the
Cromwellian period in Ireland.’
One of the main problems here is that the seventeenth
century experts in Ireland seem extremely reluctant to accept a rehabilitated
Cromwell and they still want to perpetuate myths. Oh, hang on, that’s the next
question.
Q As you say in the preface you have received much criticism
over your book how much do you think this was politically motivated.
A Political motivation is an excellent way of describing
some of the hostility towards my work. Without getting personal there are some
Irish historians who are very obviously nationalists and even if you took them
back to 1649 in a time machine and showed them what happened and they saw it
with their own eyes, they still wouldn’t believe it. This is a fact. (Well,
inasmuch as it can be since time travel hasn’t been invented yet.)
It is always a source of amazement to me how one’s political
inclinations can determine how one views history. It’s unlikely (although not
impossible) that any member of Sinn Féin (for instance) would agree with me in
a million years. Just not gonna happen. I think this is a tragedy of major
proportions. This issue has been an accelerant in the incessant deterioration
of Anglo-Irish relations over the years and it is one of the reasons why
Ireland holds a huge grudge against England today. It fuels bigotry and insular
thinking. Still today, an Irishman will point to Cromwell as the source of all
of Ireland’s woes; the bastard that slaughtered whole Irish communities without
batting an eyelid.
The biggest issue I have with politically motivated
attitudes is the historians. There are many non-historians (lay people I
suppose) who really don’t know any better and look to experts to tell them what
to think. Well, nuts to that. I don’t need an expert to tell me what to think.
I can make up my own mind. That’s why I didn’t use footnotes in my new book,
Cromwell was Framed. I will see their book with footnotes and I will raise them
a book that ordinary folk can read. And that’s why I reproduced most of the
actual primary documents in this new book. There is no need for footnotes,
because the documents are there for all to see. I didn’t want to hide behind a
reference/footnote that I have interpreted on behalf of Joe and Josephine
Public. I included them so people can interpret them themselves. Besides, I
wasn’t going down that road again. I have no idea how to assemble a footnote.
So I’m not going to take on the historians at their own game. I’m going to take
them on at mine. And hey, if there are any seventeenth century historians out
there please tear my work to shreds if you can. Go on. Prove that I’m wrong.
Shut me up forever. Make me go away. Make me crawl back under the non-academic
stone from whence I came. But if you do try, you better be clear of your facts.
Because any rebuttal will be closely scrutinised by the world at large – and
who knows, your work may be labelled politically motivated and your reputation
might be tarnished as a result. Because that’s exactly what has happened/will
happen to the historians I mention in the book. Touché
.
Q Has there been much discussion on your book in Ireland. If
so could you describe it?
A Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy has been virtually dismissed
by most historians here. At least the ones who have ventured into print. There
are many who have not said anything and who knows what their private thoughts
are. But none, and I mean none, have publically come out and supported me in
any book that has been written since 1999. It’s virtually impossible for
academics to accept the fact that an amateur has had the temerity to state that
generations of experts have gotten such a controversial issue in Irish history
wrong. Those who have ventured into print with rebuttals of my work are dealt
with in the new book. I have proved that they have used disingenuous methods of
interpretation to draw conclusions. And they should be totally ashamed of
themselves for doing this, especially when this is such a hot political potato.
But will they apologise and display any humility or contrition? Will they heck?
I know this sounds like another Internet rant. And that’s what it is. But I’m
nothing if not honest. And I’ve also waived all royalties for this new book.
Why? Because I have been accused in the past of doing this for money. Get real
people. This is about history. About righting a wrong.
Cromwell was Framed is probably well on the way to being
dismissed by those same historians. Ah, but here’s the rub. They are going to
have to come up with primary source evidence that has not yet entered the
public domain if they are to do challenge me in a meaningful way. And I mean
primary source proof from the year 1649. Sure, I could be wrong. But until a
serious challenge comes along that completely refutes my thesis, then I will
continue to have the confidence to shout this from the highest rooftops. The historians
are wrong. Cromwell did not commit war crimes in Ireland. Get over it. Have I a
chip on my shoulder? You betcha. But hey, is it any wonder? It’s the constant
refusal of scholars and experts to accept my work that irks. Call it a desire
to be accepted if you will. So, yes, they’re to blame for my attitude. Not me.
I see this as the little person versus the might of academia. And so far I’m
winning
.
Q What are your future plans?
A Now there’s a question. I got nothing. If anybody can
think of a controversial topic for me to write about let me know. I’m on
Facebook. I’d love to find out that St Patrick wasn’t all he was cracked up to
be and do an exposé on him. Watch this space.
Two Revolutionary Crises
This is a paper delivered yesterday afternoon at the Early
Modern Studies Conference at the University of Reading by Chris Thompson. It
has a new explanation of the origins of the English Civil War\Revolution. The
paper is copyrighted Permission is needed to reproduce.
Exactly a century ago, A.P.Newton’s seminal book, The
Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, was published. It traced the
lineage of the Providence island Company with its unsuccessful attempts to
found profitable Puritan settlements in the Bay of Honduras in the 1630s back
to Elizabethan colonising and privateering efforts and forward to the
expeditions of the Cromwellian Protectorate to the Caribbean in the 1650s. His
investigation of the ties between the company’s adventurers and their activities
in opposition to Charles I’s regime in the period of Personal Rule cast new
scholarly light on this subject and had a profound influence on later
historians.
Inevitably, however, the contours of historical analysis
have changed. The events of the 1620s and 1640s are no longer viewed as
causally linked. Accidents and contingency, the interplay of multiple kingdoms
and rival conspiracy theories, the problems of political and religious myopia
as well as those of personality now predominate. It has, indeed, never been
more dangerous to enter the historical equivalent of a billiard hall.
Even so, it is impossible (for me, at least) to pass by such
premises with their deep green baize tables, dim lights and interesting
characters without being tempted in. I am conscious of the risk in doing so but
life is too short not to do so at all. The argument that I shall put to you is
basically that there were two profound crises in early Stuart England, a
proto-revolutionary one in the late-1620s and a revolutionary one in the 1640s.
I shall argue that these crises were umbilically linked and that there is
unmistakable evidence not just of deep hostility to the Caroline regime after
1629 on the part of the king’s leading opponents but also of a growing
willingness to resist him by force of arms from the mid-1630s. It was,
therefore, in England, not in Ireland or Scotland, that the most serious of the
early crises occurred and where discussions on alternative forms of government
in Church and State first began.
The Crisis of 1629
The origins of the crisis of the 1620s can be traced to
England’s engagement and failure in simultaneous wars against France and Spain;
to the fiscal and military measures used to fight those wars; to the alleged
infringement of the subject’s rights by the Crown in implementing those
policies and the support for authoritarian rule from Arminian clerics in the
Church whose doctrines and practices were anathema to Calvinists. Its symptoms
were evident in resistance in varying degrees to levies of men, money and
munitions; in the pressures placed on the machinery of local and national
government to work in the face of this opposition; in arguments inside and
outside Parliaments about the respective rights of the king and his subjects
and in the development of ideas about conspiracies to subvert established forms
of government in Church and State on the one hand and threats to undermine the
sovereignty of the Crown on the other. There were little noticed revolts in the
House of Lords in 1626 and 1628 against royal attempts to manipulate its
membership, to intimidate opponents and to frustrate its dealings with the
grievances of the House of Commons. Across the country, physical violence was
common – in attacks, for example, on unpaid soldiers billeted on unwilling host
communities, in protests from indigent sailors, and, most notably, in the
murder of the royal favourite’s astrologer and of the Duke of Buckingham
himself. These were quite apart from the remarkable tax strikes by merchants,
especially in the Levant and East India companies, over duties involving an
assault on the Customs House in London led by a former Lord Mayor and the
brother of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Crown was effectively bankrupt by
March, 1629 as Charles I’s critics well knew. If either of the groups then
manoeuvring in the lower House had succeeded in their aims, the king would have
been shorn of royal supremacy in religion and his capacity to choose his own
servants severely limited. Within a few months, he characterised them as
republicans aiming to reduce his power to nothing
.
It is easy enough to find alarmist comments by
contemporaries on the political situation in England after the dissolution of
Parliament in March 1629. Domestic and foreign observers agreed on the divided
state of the country. The king’s view was that the crisis was the result of the
malice of a small group of M.P.s led by Sir John Eliot, a contention set out in
a series of proclamations. The private correspondence of his advisers and
servants, men like Viscount Dorchester, Heath and Roe, was on similar lines
although Councillors were divided on whether Parliament could or should be
summoned again. Regal and conciliar authority had to be restored, particularly
by punishing the former M.P.s now imprisoned for sedition and, if Charles had
his way, for treason. Attempts to do so in the courts nonetheless kept issues
about Parliamentary privilege, the grounds for their imprisonment and terms for
bail uncomfortably alive.
Critics of the regime shared such gloom. The unprecedented
threat of violence on the floor of the House of Commons shocked Sir Thomas
Barrington to the point where he told his mother that he blessed God there had
been no more serious consequences. Dramatic accounts of the concluding events
reached the godly further afield destroying hopes for defeating the twin
menaces of Arminianism and Popery and for the further reformation of the
Church. The Venetian Ambassador, Contarini, was in no doubt about the hostility
to the king and his councillors and the prospect for future conflict in the
spring of 1629, a view shared by a later report from a Spanish agent. Peace
abroad, a resumption of trade and restoration of order offered the only hope.
There is some historiographical justification for regarding
this as a proto-revolutionary situation. G.M.Trevelyan described the members
leaving St Stephen’s Chapel at Westminster in March 1629 as “freemen still and
almost rebels” while Russell considered the aim of the demonstration planned
for the 2nd as “the potentially revolutionary one of appealing over the King’s
head to the country at large.” John Reeve and Austin Woolrych have both written
about the wide-ranging, potentially revolutionary implications of the
resolutions passed on that day for the idea of treason against the
commonwealth. Hexter argued that relations between the royal Court and the more
amorphous remainder of the body politic, the ‘Country’, broke down after 1618
and had reached ‘crisis level’ by the end of the next decade. They had ceased
to speak the same language and the Commons had by then constructed a view of
the Court as its palpable enemy. Puritan clergy and gentry were full of rage at
the impotence of English policy abroad and the inroads made by Popery at home.
He was thus the advocate of a theory of successive crises, one in the 1620s and
a second one in the early-1640s leading to Civil War and Revolution. Stone
agreed. It was the experiences of the late-1620s that led the future leaders of
the Long Parliament, according to Trevor-Roper, to organise themselves in
country houses, Puritan societies and trading companies for the revenge they
were determined after 1640 to take. The concept of a link between the two
crises of the late-1620s and the early-1640s thus has a respectable ancestry
even if its genealogy has not hitherto been precisely traces.
The reaction of the leading critics of Caroline rule is
difficult to detect given the absence of correspondence and diaries. But the
strategy of Pym and Rich, the two men in the Commons most closely associated
with the ‘great contrivers’ of the 1640s, had been predicated on inoculating
the Church of England against Arminianism and crypto-Popery in return for
settling the legality of collecting Tonnage and Poundage (and, perhaps,
impositions). The breakdown of Parliament made that aim unrealisable. The
anxiety of the great merchants in the East India and Levant companies over a
continuing refusal to trade was sufficiently alarming for the 2nd Earl of
Warwick, Viscount Say and Sele and the 2nd Lord Brooke, three of the principal
figures in Newton’s embryonic connection, to appear at the Quarter Court of the
East India company held on 2nd March to open a serious attack on the dominant
London merchants. This suggests but does not prove that the idea of withholding
revenues from the Crown to exact concessions was already present in their
minds.
The Peers and their connections
The core of this group had been drawn together in the
politics of the mid to late-1620s. They were committed to the Protestant cause
in the Thirty Years’ War, to struggles against Arminianism and for the
preservation of the House of Lords’ privileges and the rights of the subject.
They were also connected to the Cambridge Puritan, John Preston. Warwick and
Say and Sele, Pym and Rich are too well known to need much discussion here. The
4th Earl of Lincoln is probably best known as Say’s son-in-law and Preston’s
pupil. The two men together with Francis, Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, the
future 4th Earl of Bedford, supervised the settlement of the debts of Lincoln’s
father. Lincoln was probably the author of the appeal to English freeholders in
January 1627 to resist the Forced Loan as illegal and a threat to Parliament’s
survival and to call them to follow his fellow peers in their resistance to the
levy. His household and local allies were deeply involved in this campaign and
many of them later became involved in the colonisation of Massachusetts.
Lincoln’s relationship with one of Preston’s other allies,
the 2nd Earl of Warwick, is less well known. Warwick was not a Lincolnshire
landowner himself but his step-mother, originally Frances Wray, was. There is
evidence to connect their households and Lincoln’s in the late-1620s. Both men
shared a taste for theological disputations before and at the York House
conferences of February 1626 and were patrons of two of the first three
ministers sent to New England in 1629. Both Earls proved to be supporters of
Sir John Eliot after his incarceration in the Tower and drank the health of
this arch-enemy of Charles I’s regime at every meal on a trip to the West
country in 1631. Lincoln is, indeed, the most likely figure to have sought
Warwick’s consent as President of the Council for New England to the granting
of the New England and Massachusetts Bay Company charters in 1628 and 1629
respectively.
New England
The links between these men were already in place by the
summer of 1628. The revival of plans to settle and trade in New England first
developed by John White of Dorchester and his local allies was also under way
in alliance with London merchants such as Matthew Cradock and John Venn, both
of them friends of Eliot: in the next few months, a Lincolnshire contingent
appeared, perhaps as a result of so many Forced Loan resisters having been sent
to Dorset in 1627, many of them from the 4th Earl’s network of allies. The
story of the transformation of the New England venture into the Massachusetts
Bay Company in March 1629 with a new charter that allowed its place of
government to be transferred there is one of the most familiar episodes in
early colonial history. Warwick must have known about this.
The enterprise was more fundamentally transformed in the
summer and autumn of that year. The idea of establishing a godly commonwealth
there was canvassed with increasing enthusiasm in lay and clerical circles
associated with the Earls of Warwick and Lincoln. A key meeting was held in
Sempringham, probably in the Priory, which was Lincoln’s home, late in July and
early in August 1629. Out of it came a series of observations from John
Winthrop on the imminent doom awaiting England for its sinfulness: Antichrist
had risen, the Church and universities had been corrupted, inflation was
rampant and poverty multiplying: the only hope was to go to New England to
found a new commonwealth and a new church. The remnant of the godly could
follow the path of righteousness, multiply there and create a bulwark against
Popery. It was a searing indictment of England under Charles I’s rule, a more
comprehensive indictment than anything uttered by Alexander Gil in his cups or
John Scott of Canterbury in his diary. It is possible to watch this argument
being spread much further afield to sympathisers like Eliot and John Hampden
before the Great Migration of 1630.
It is often said that the New England colonies in general
and Massachusetts in particular owed nothing to aristocratic patronage. This is
doubtful. Warwick – with whom John Winthrop the elder had long been connected –
was of practical help in managing the rival claims of the Gorges family to the
territory, in providing access to fortifications in Essex and in securing
patents for new land. Winthrop himself was taken up by men in Lincoln’s circle
in the autumn of 1629 and early winter of 1630|: when he sailed on the Arbella
late in March 1630 he was accompanied by Lincoln’s brother, one of the Earl’s
sisters and her husband, Lincoln’s putative former household steward and other
allies of the peer. As the Barrington family’s correspondence shows, Warwick’s
gentry allies and their clerical dependents were interested in the settlement
and, like Warwick, prepared to help persecuted clergymen and others move there.
Saye and Sele’s interest in New England (with its
distinctive form of congregational church government and a franchise dependent
from the outset on church membership) was even more important. He, like
Lincoln’s brother, was one of the recipients in March 1632 of the ‘Old Patent’
of Connecticut and, later that year, together with the 2nd Lord Brooke, bought
the patent of Pascataqua. Its governor provided crucial evidence on behalf of
Massachusetts before the Privy Council at the turn of the year against charges
brought by Gorges and Mason alleging that the charter had been illegitimately
obtained and that the colony was a nest of political and religious rebels. The
colony’s most “noble and best friends” advised it to have a Council of allies
in England to protect its interests. But a second hearing before the Council
late in 1633 resulted in a demand for the return of the Massachusetts Bay
Company’s charter. The colony’s enemy, Thomas Morton, gleefully reported how
Cradock and Venn, its merchant allies, had been denounced by Archbishop Laud
and, despite their great friends, had left the Council Chamber with lowered
shoulders.
The reaction in Massachusetts was to procrastinate and to
prepare to resist any expedition sent from England with force. In England, the
colony’s supporters had already responded by dispatching a large quantity of
arms. Simultaneously, propositions were sent “from some persons of great
qualitye & estate (& of speciall note for pietye)” indicating their
intentions to join with them if satisfied by Massachusetts’ rulers. Saye and
Sele and Lord Brooke have traditionally been thought to be the authors of these
proposals. This willingness to support forcible resistance to the Caroline
regime, admittedly at a very great distance from England, is highly
significant. It shows that, long before 1640 or 1642, such men had been
alienated from the king’s rule to the extent that the use of violence against
it was acceptable. More interestingly still, in the same summer, John Winthrop
received a letter from Warwick offering his support and expressing his
willingness to further the colony’s prosperity.
Fortunately, there is other material to illustrate the close
relationship between these peers and the Bay colony’s rulers. The settlement of
Connecticut was planned as a joint venture in 1634 and 1635 with the two
noblemen and their radical allies, including Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Henry
Lawrence, aiming to move there. The fort, moreover, to be erected at the mouth
of the Connecticut River was explicitly intended as part of the coastal
defences protecting their friends in Massachusetts from a sea-borne attack from
England. In fact, Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke had distinct constitutional
proposals in 1636 for a commonwealth covering both Connecticut and
Massachusetts: they envisaged a ruling assembly divided into a house composed
by gentlemen all of whose heirs would inherit places and a second composed of
the elected representatives of the freemen for whom a property qualification
was required: each house would have a negative voice and all officers would be
responsible to the assembly. There was nothing in these proposals acknowledging
royal authority at all: this would have been a minuscule Venetian republic
without even a Doge. But, whatever the peers’ admitted personal qualities,
severing the link between church membership and the rights of freemen in
Massachusetts proved too much for the godly rulers of that colony to accept.
They preferred their own arrangements and relations with the Saybrook
adventurers deteriorated partly, at least, because migrants from the towns of
Massachusetts seized the adventurers’ lands. Even so, when the members of the
prospective ‘Junto’ were in treasonable contact with the Scottish Covenanters
in 1639, it was to the refuge of Saybrook that they planned to flee if their
plans to overthrow Charles I failed.
Conclusion
This colonial evidence casts important light on the
evolution of the views of those identified by A.P.Newton as the core of the
critics and opponents of Charles I’s regime in the 1630s. It can be
supplemented by additional material from Bermuda and Providence Island, both
potential refuges for the godly at that time. There was indeed, as Newton
thought, a middle term, a connecting link between the major crises of the
late-1620s and the early-1640s. Some of the fissile human material ejected by
the first, proto-revolutionary detonation found its way to Massachusetts, which
was the sanctuary for the defeated and explains, in part, some of its
fossil-like features after 1640s. Revolutionary situations do not necessarily
lead to revolution because accidents and errors intervene but, in the case of
Charles I’s realms, the delay merely increased the power of the ultimate
explosion. Those who sought to exploit it remembered its origins very clearly
and were determined not to lose their opportunity to re-cast the Church and
State a second time.
At the R H Tawney Archive
A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the
supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the
next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this. R H
Tawney.
It is not often I get the chance or the time to examine
primary sources. It was therefore too good an opportunity to pass up when a
passing remark from academic researcher Chris Thompson led me to investigate
the large collection of the R H Tawney archives held at the London School of
Economics.
I last visited the archive when it was in some little room
in the basement of the prestigious university. It has been given a long-overdue
makeover and is now part of The Women’s Library which was saved from
homelessness by the intervention of the LSE.
I will not go into details of the collection as a simple
search of the Library website will give you a detailed list of what is in the
archive.
The archivists have been thorough and the documents are
presented in easy to access boxes. Some of Tawney’s notes including lecture
notes are in delicate condition. His notes are both handwritten and typescript.
It would appear that Tawney typed some of his notes on rice paper. The archive
contains some 188 boxes.
I plan to spend some time at the archive as I would like to
examine Tawney’s papers concerning the Gentry controversy.
I must admit that I still get a thrill at examining archives
that have not been widely accessed. God forbid that everything becomes
digitized and archives become surplus to research requirements.
Major-General Thomas Harrison: Millenarianism, Fifth Monarchism
and the English Revolution 1616-1660 by David Farr Ashgate Publishing, Limited
ISBN-13: 9781409465546
‘Religious misery is,
at the same time, the expression of real misery and the protest against that
real misery.” –
Cliff Slaughter
‘That man of blood” Major General Thomas Harrison
“The scum and scouring of the country… Deduct the weavers,
tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, carmen, draymen, broom-men and mat makers
and then give me a list of the gentlemen. Their names may be writ in text,
within the compass of a single halfpenny. Mercurius Elencticus (7-14 June
I648), British Library, E447/ II, 226 Major General Thomas Harrison is probably
bestremembered for his part in the regicide of King Charles Ist. His calling
the monarch “that man of blood” will also stay in the minds of people who study
and read about this period for many more decades to come.It is, therefore, a
little surprising that Harrison has not had a full modern academic study given
that he played such a fundamental role in the English Revolution. It is to
David Farr and Ashgate publishers credit that this poor oversight has been
largely rectified.
In the past, the absence of such a biography has been
because of a lack of source material.” Historian C H Simpkinson who in his
review Thomas Harrison- Regicide and Major General in the American Historical
Review Vol 11 No 1 1905 said “it would be interesting to know what induced the
publishers of the Temple Biographies to include in their list Thomas Harrison.
It is impossible to make out of him a popular subject.Moreover, the facts in
his life are too little known to make it possible to write a successful popular
biography. Consequently, it would be better to have attempted a life based
strictly upon thorough research”.[1]Farr’s biography is based on very thorough
research. It is certainly is the most subtle view of Harrison than has
previously has been portrayed. As the blurb for the book points out “Unlike the
only two previous full-length studies of Harrison, the present work makes use of
a full range of manuscript, primary and secondary sources, including the vast
range of new material that has fundamentally changed how the early modern
period is now understood. Fully footnoted and referenced, this study provides
the first modern academic study of Harrison”.
One difficulty Farr sought to overcome was that Harrison is
best known for his role in the regicide of Charles 1st. Harrison was one of the
foremost republican leaders during the English revolution. He was never
forgiven by later monarchists for this role, and his death was a brutal and
bloody affair.He was hanged, drawn and quartered by the Restoration government
in 1660. Harrison’s gruesome fate was witnessed by Samuel Pepys who wrote of
him “To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my
Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison
hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as
any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and
heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said,
that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to
judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming
again”.[2]
Given that Harrison’s later life is better documented than
his earlier work it is understandable that Farr in his book employs a thematic,
rather than a chronological approach, as the introduction says in order “to
illustrate the role of millenarianism and providence in the English Revolution,
religion within the new model army, literature, image and reputation, and
Harrison’s relationship with key individuals like Ireton and Cromwell as well
as groups, most notably the Fifth Monarchists”.The book is subdivided into
three main parts. The first part starts with an analysis of Harrison’s last few
years of life. Farr seeks in this section of the book to explain Harrison’s
problem in coming to terms with the political collapse of the Interregnum
regimes. A collapse he had no social, political or military answer to. It must
be said that he was not the only radical figure to fail to understand his fall
from influence and power. Harrison’s only answer was to put his faith in God,
believing that his fall from power had been pre-ordained.
This answer may have suited people living in the 17th
century, but I am afraid people residing in the 21st century need a little
more. One of the few historians to examine the defeat of the radical groups was
Christopher Hill. Hill controversially sought to understand how the radical
groups fell from Providence so quickly. He believed that Milton’s Paradise Lost
was a “mediation on the reasons for the revolution’s failure.”His conclusions
were a little pessimistic especially when he drew incorrect comparisons with
‘other failed revolutions’.
Part two examines “Harrison’s years of ‘power.” Farr spends
a significant amount of space in this part of book evaluating Harrison’s
political activities and how they impacted on his role in the New Model Army
and his major part in the trial and regicide of the king. Farr’s research into
the regicide is a welcome change from modern revisionist historiography.
Geoffrey Robertson agreed that revisionist “historians rarely have a good word
to say about the trial”.Harrison was one of the first regicides to be put on
trial and publicly executed. Leading monarchists and the king saw Harrison as
leading Puritan revolutionary. Important both politically and militarily enough
to act out their very public revenge. Of the 59 regicides, Harrison was third
only to Cromwell and Henry Ireton in the leadership of the revolution. Also, he
was a key individual in the process that brought Charles to his execution. A
swift show trial and implementation were meant to demonstrate to the population
that revolutionary action should be discouraged.
Harrison was proceeded against because he was seen as a
personification of the revolutionary republicanism that had seen the first and
only Republic in English history. The show trial aimed to make the regicide
illegitimate in the eyes of the population. It did not work too well. So much
so that the bourgeoisie has for centuries sought to remove it from
history.According to an article in the February 2014 issue of History, Today
even the new immigration test has eliminated the entire period of the civil war
because “the wounds are still too fresh.”[3]Conservative historians have in the
last analysis sought to deny that all of modern England grew up out of the
revolution in the seventeenth century.
Chapter 3 is certainly the most problematical in the sense
that Farr’s use of words such as “textual” is a little ambiguous. Take for
instance this quote quote “in October 1660, the restoration regime staged show
trials of the men it regarded as either the greatest immediate threat, the most
culpable for the regicide or most responsible for the subsequent
non-monarchical regimes. Harrison’s execution was also reinforced in the text
to disseminate the example as widely as possible.
Harrison had felt impelled to act in 1642 and, in 1660, the
dynamic of religion still prompted him to make a final protest. Harrison, by
the unrepentant stand he took at his trial and the courageous manner in which
he met his death, and also the textual representations of his actions also
provided a contrasting example of protest and continued allegiance to what he
regarded as a godly cause. The contradictory messages from the same events can
be seen in the differing textual responses they provoked and how they were read.
Harrison’s stance and the responses to it, whether textual or ‘real’, can also
be seen as partly responsible for the limits of the overt restoration
repression”.[4]
I do not like Farr’s use of the word “textual” it tends s to
give far to much credence to the work of historians such as the late Stuart
Hall who was in or around the Communist Party of Britain. Hall advocated
cultural studies as a way of analyzing the past and present historical and
political problems. As was pointed out in a recent obituary of Hall “Cultural
Studies originated as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed
above all against its contemporary expression, Trotskyism. The academic field
sought to shift the focus of social criticism away from class and onto other
social formations, thus promoting the development of identity politics. Its
establishment, in the final analysis, was a hostile response to the gains made
by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from the 1950s onwards.[5]
Farr correctly points out that the trial was considered
risky and in some cases bordered on the reckless action for the ruling elite at
the time. Harrison still had considerable if passive support amongst sections
of the lower middle classes.
To his supporters, he was an example that despite coming
from a poor and relatively obscure background, a man could rise to the highest
positions in the state. While not being openly for Harrison’s revolutionary
politics, i.e. his republicanism Farr does an excellent job of restoring
Harrison’s reputation. Unlike many modern-day historians, he believes that
Harrison’s behaviour during and after the war was significantly influenced by
his earlier life and economic position. Farr describes him being on the
“fringes of merchant and lawyer networks.”
Farr suggests Harrison was “radicalized by his experience in
the armies of the Eastern Association and new Model to emerge as an extreme
millenarian at the centre of the army’s revolution of 1647–49 and the
developing Fifth Monarchist movement to late 1653”. That Harrison was
radicalized during the civil war is, without doubt, however, I believe that his
strong republicanism and his support for the Fifth Monarchists were also a
product of radical ideas that were developing before the outbreak of the Civil
war. London pre-civil war was an attraction for any radical group or individual
to express their beliefs and to win new supporters.
It is to Harrison’s eternal credit that he very publicly
denounced the king as ‘that man of blood’ in early November 1647. A full two
years before the king was due to be executed. On this particular issue,
Harrison had considerable support inside the New Model Army for this
action.Harrison sought through prayer meetings to find the answer to complex
political, social and even military problems through God. Harrison was not a
great theoretician despite being a strong letter writer he published no
significant body of work and nothing in his papers show a clear theoretical
understanding of republicanism, notwithstanding this handicap it must be said
he was a little more farsighted than Cromwell. This did not stop him standing
at “Cromwell’s shoulder as a fellow millenarian, perhaps a reminder to Cromwell
of, in his most opportune moments, his desire for a hagiocracy. The calling of the
nominated assembly, more commonly known as the ‘Barebones Parliament’, in July
1653 was, perhaps, the closest Britain came to a theocracy and, on the surface,
at its heart appeared to be Harrison and the millenarian Fifth Monarchists”.[6]
As was said earlier, the previous historiography regarding
Harrison leaves a lot to be desired. The last book-length study of Thomas
Harrison came out in 1939. Varley’s account of Harrison appeared in the
‘highgate worthies’ series. C H Simpkinson’s did a series of lectures which
were made into a biography.Harrison is given a brief comment in Maurice
Ashley’s 1954 Cromwell’s Generals. Harrison’s New Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography was by Ian Gentles in 2004.
One way around this problem is to examine as Farr has done
and that is to place Harrison in the context of his membership of the Fifth
Monarchist movement.The Marxist Cliff Slaughter once said ‘Religious misery is
at the same time the expression of real misery and the protest against that
real misery.” [7]The Fifth Monarchists did express the “sigh of the oppressed.”
Given that the Fifth Monarchist was not only a sizable group but wielded
considerable influence, it is baffling that Left historians like Christopher
Hill’s wrote so little about them.
Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down contains next to nothing
on the Fifth Monarchy group. The Pseudo Left David Renton believes the
Leveller’s, diggers were of more importance.[8]A cursory look at previous
historiography on the movement would uncover a degree of confusion as to
exactly what the origins of the group. A study undertaken in 1912 has the Fifth
Monarchists alongside the Baptists.As C. Eden Quainton said” he Quakers and
Fifth Monarchy men, for example, were certainly entitled to be called
Anabaptists, but the label meant nothing except dislike when applied to the
Presbyterians. Anything, however, in the nature of millennial belief or hope
was certain to be called Anabaptist, as was the case with Fifth Monarchy
opinions, which were adopted by many Anabaptists, especially in the army”.[9]
Any study of the group would have to take into consideration
Bernard Capp’s 1972 study. Capp placed the Fifth Monarchists in their broadest
possible context being principally an urban movement and appealing to people
below the gentry. In modern terms, this was a movement of the minor petty
bourgeoisie. Many of the members of the Fifth Monarchists had a real fear that
the civil war would reduce them to penury.One right-wing pamphlet at the time
wrote of the Fifth Monarchy men “The scum and scouring of the country…. Deduct
the weavers, tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, carmen, draymen, broom-men
and mat makers and then give me a list of the gentlemen. Their names may be
writ in the text, within the compass of a single halfpenny. Mercurius
Elencticus (7-14 June I648), British Library, E447/ II, 226.
It is hard not to agree with Capp’s assertion that Harrison
and his Fifth Monarchy friends did not have a coherent set of beliefs and
should not be seen as a political party. While this is true if you examine them
from the standpoint of the 21st century, but if you consider them in the sense
of the 17th century the fact that 40,000 people had similar beliefs and were
prepared to fight and die for their beliefs this was a politically significant
body of people.They faced the same problem as other radical groups such and the
Levelers and Diggers in that they came from a relatively similar class
background as the leaders of the revolution, Ireton, and Cromwell. While
political differences were apparent, especially regard equality and the
franchise.
The fifth monarchists were part of a group of men that
sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking
place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true ‘Ideologues of
the revolution’ and had a limited capacity for abstract thought. To some
degree, I agree with Perez Zagorin that there were similarities with other
radical groups such as the Levellers, and Diggers.In other areas they were
radically different, sections did advocate a violent overthrow of society so
much so that they were persecuted and were spied upon by Cromwell’s spymaster
general John Thurloe. In the end, they had no program to bring about social
change. Sections of the group were in favour of bringing in a Mosaic code. This
collection of religious edicts were extremely authoritarian and bordered on a
form of clerical fascism.Their class outlook, that being of small producers,
conditioned their ideology. The contradiction between their concern for the
poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners caused
some tension. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore they
accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a lot of
the poor to be made more equitable.
Christopher Hill’s review of Capp’s book praises him for his
research that opposes the general view from conservative historians that they
and other radicals were a “lunatic fringe.” While having similarities with the
Leveller’s a significant difference was their opposition to the extension of
the franchise. Also, unlike the Levelers, the Fifth Monarchists were far more
interested in extending the revolution abroad. John Roger’s argued, “how dust
our Army to be still, now the work is to do abroad.”Farr’s book pays
considerable attention despite a paucity of information to the pre-1642
Harrison. Farr correctly states that Harrison’s “millenarian outlook” was
shaped by a developing religious ferment, his meeting of like-minded military
people in the Eastern Association and his economic position in society. “Farr
provides considerable evidence that Harrison was no great shakes as a
politician it is common knowledge that he “was a failure as a political leader,
primarily due to his being ‘sadly wanting in the arts of political strategy’ or
because of his ‘lack of patience for administrative routine’ by considering in
detail Harrison’s engagement with the daily parliamentary routine in his time
as an MP”.
Part 3 examines Harrison’s time in the New Model Army and
the link between his socioeconomic status and his political and military
actions. He was a loyal and valuable member of the army. Farr attempts in his
book to examining to what extent Harrison’s political and military activities
were influenced by socioeconomic factors. Farr draws upon the work of Ian
Gentles, who has written extensively on the political, social and economic
makeup of the New Model Army participants. In an essay called The New Model
Officer Corps in 1647- Gentles is one of the few historians who has bothered to
analyze who did the fighting in the civil war.
Gentles writes “As absorbing as this debate continues to be,
it is noteworthy that few historians in the twentieth century have had anything
to say about those who did the actual fighting. Over 100,000 men put their
lives at risk on behalf of the king or parliament. While many of them had been
pressed into service, thousands of others, mostly cavalry, took up arms
voluntarily. Why were so many ready to kill and to risk being killed? Is there
any correlation between their social origins or their economic interests, and
their allegiance in the civil war? This study attempts an answer to this
question about the revolutionary army. It was the New Model more than any other
body of men that forced the pace of cataclysmic events between I645, the year
of its founding, and i653 when its leader Oliver Cromwell expelled the remnant
of the Long Parliament. Can anything be discovered about their socioeconomic
profile? Is there any link between the sociology of the army and its political
radicalism”?.
It is with this spirit of inquiry that Farr examines the
link between Harrison’s socioeconomic background and his military and political
actions. As is stated in the introduction “Harrison’s history in his native
Staffordshire, particularly the economic, political and religious circumstances
of the Harrison family in Newcastle-under-Lyme. Harrison’s roots are then
further developed by illustrating how important his move to London was in
shaping why he became a parliamentary activist at such an early stage, as well
as laying the foundations for some of the key political, economic and religious
connections of his later life. It enables the text to finish on a rounded
picture of the trajectory of his life from 1616 to his execution in 1660,
rooted in the personal and economic factors that have been overlooked in light
of his high-profile religious and political radicalism but were very much part
of who he was”.
Some objective problems do come up when examining a
soldier’s beliefs in the New Model Army. The main one being a lack of
historical data, especially for rank and file soldiers. Gentles, therefore,
concentrates his research on the upper sections of the army’s hierarchy.Social
mobility in the military was very fluid according to Gentles “we would expect
men who did not enter the army as commissioned officers to come from humbler
backgrounds than those who did. At least thirty-seven, or nearly a sixth of the
238 officers, are known to have arisen from the rank of private, corporal,
sergeant or quartermaster. This is in striking contrast to the royalist armies,
where the policy was never to promote non-commissioned officers to commissioned
rank. Data about social status are available for only fifteen of the
thirty-seven, and not surprisingly, they were mostly merchants, tradesmen, and
small yeomen. The other twenty-two, about whom nothing has been uncovered, are
unlikely to have been more exalted in their status”.
Gentles concludes with a point “The radical dynamic which
was unleashed by the potent brew of anti-popery, antinomianism, and Puritan
egalitarianism was accentuated by the youthfulness and the low social status of
the New Model officers who articulated it.” It is a shame that there is little
of this kind of research into socioeconomic influences on political or military
decisions. After all, it was Cromwell who knew the importance of socioeconomic
status, the man about whom Cromwell said he would ‘rather have a plain,
russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows
than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else.’
To conclude, Farr’s book is a highly enjoyable read. More
importantly, it has shone a bright light on a person that deserves far more
research. Also, he has shown the Fifth Monarchists to be an important part of
the English Revolution. While far more needs to be studied on the republicanism
expressed by the group. Farr’s book should be read straight after Capp’s work.
The book deserves a broad audience and would be a comfortable read for a
general reader as well as the more academic one. Hopefully, it will be placed
on university reading lists in the future. Hopeful the paperback version will
be a little cheaper.
[1] Thomas Harrison- Regicide and Major General by C H
Simpkinson-American Historical Review Vol 11 No 1 1905
[2] The Diary of Samuel Pepys-13th October 1660.
[3] Reluctant Regicides, Toby Haggith and Richard Weight,
History Today February 2014
[4] Major-General Thomas Harrison: Millenarianism, Fifth
Monarchism and the English Revolution 1616-1660 by David Farr Ashgate
Publishing, Limited ISBN-13: 9781409465546
[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932-2014): A political
career dedicated to opposing Marxism
[6] Introduction Major General Thomas Harrison David Farr-
Ashgate 2014
[7] Religion, and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labor Review
Vol 3 No 3 June 1958
[8]
http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/marxist_history.html
[9] Cromwell and the Anabaptists during 1653 Author(s): C.
Eden Quainton Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jun., 1932),
pp. 164-178
The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and
Communities, ed. Nicholas Tyacke. ( Manchester U.P., 2007; pp. 212. £55).
This collection of
essays edited by Nicholas Tyacke are a bold attempt at placing the English
revolution in the context of long term political and social changes in England
that started in the late 1590s and went on well into the 1720s.Most of the essays
are concentrated on the crisis of transition by the English Revolution
(1640–60).It is a big ask to cover 120 years of very complex changes in England
which saw the country transform from a relatively back wood feudal economy into
the early beginnings of a capitalist country saw the execution of a king and
the establishment of a republic.
The date span c.1590–1720 places the book in the context of
a long seventeenth century’. From a historiographical standpoint this
theoretically at least places this collection of essays firmly in the school of
thought belonging several left-wing historians most famously Eric Hobsbawm. His
seminal essay was the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century published in Past and
Present.The term was coined by English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his
pair of 1954 articles and complimented by his contemporary, Hugh Trevor-Roper,
in a 1959 article entitled “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth-Century”
published in the same journal. According to Wikipedia “Hobsbawm discussed an economic
crisis in Europe; Trevor-Roper saw a wider crisis, a crisis in the relations
between society and the State”.
It would be wrong to think that this collection of
present-day historians would like to return to more left-wing historiography.
The book only pays lip service to some conceptions normally associated with the
left historians, for example, the continued use of the phrase “English
revolution”. The book contains ten essays from a mostly post revisionist
historiography. Some of these essays came from a 2004 colloquium on ‘The
English Revolution and its legacies’.One aspect of this lip service to
left-wing historiography is the adoption of the book of a premise that the
origins of and to some extent the causes of the English revolution can be found
in a long-term viewpoint.In his introduction, Tyacke tries to reevaluate the
revolutionary nature of the revolutionary events of 1640 to 1660. In doing so,
he seeks to place this collection firmly in the camp of what has been labelled
the ‘post revisionist school of historiography.
It is hard to understand what audience this collection of
historians is appealing to. Having said that Tyacke does provide a very good
introduction to the subject. In his ‘locating the ‘English Revolution’ his
analysis of Whig and Marxist historiography does give the reader a good insight
into two major interpretations of the English revolution. His analysis of the
revisionist interpretation of this period is a little weak. Perhaps the reason
being that Tyacke and most of the other historians in this collection are too
close to revisionist positions.As one reviewer put it “Few revisionists will be
won over at this stage, but some may find themselves mobilizing in anticipation
of a wider onslaught”.[1]The book is not a point-scoring exercise against
previous revisionist positions. There is a limited attempt to provide an
alternative viewpoint of a very complex subject.
The book is broad in its scope. Some of the strongest
chapters are ones that deal with the period 1640 to 1660. While purporting to
be about moving on from revisionist historiography, the subjects chosen in this
collection are all ones that most revisionist historians are comfortable with
the exception being John Walters’s essay.Sean Kelsey’s chapter is well-argued
and well-researched on the King’s Book. Eikon Basilike and the English
Revolution of 1649 covers some ground that John Adamson has tread and will
tread in his forthcoming book. Kelsey, without intention, highlights that
despite what revisionists say there were class differences amongst even the
Royalists. I hope Kelsey continues this work because a lot of this kind of
research has been abandoned by revisionist historians.This collection of essays
sits very easily with the reader, and they do provide a wide-ranging analysis
but whether they form a groundbreaking development of a post-revisionist
agenda, I am not entirely sure.
Perhaps the two historians that are readily identifiable as
‘post-revisionist’ are Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, their previous work[2] has
built up a body of historiography that has emphasized the ideological struggle
that went on before, during and after the revolution.Michael Braddick’s essay,
The English Revolution and its legacies are in keeping with Hughes and Cust in
that they all use the term The English Revolution. Braddick believes that ‘the
energies unleashed in the 1640s provided the dynamic for a long revolution,
encompassing the exclusion crisis and the “Glorious Revolution”. Braddick
coupled the English Revolution with the 1688 revolution.
The stand out essay is John Walter’s Politicizing the
popular? The ‘tradition of riot’ and popular political culture in the English
Revolution. While holding some similar positions to several Marxist historians,
his research into popular riots and disturbances upholds a tradition of
“history from below” school of historiography. Walter does subscribe to the
revolutionary nature of the period, and that that there was a clash of
ideologies he does not subscribe to the belief that the lower sections of
society were major players in the drama.
To conclude, this collection of essays sets itself very
difficult tasks. I am not sure it completes those tasks. To be in favour of the
conception of a long 17th century is a difficult enough, it is nearly
impossible when most of the essay writers reject any Marxist conceptions that
would have given the book a much better analysis. The fact that none of the
essays tackles deep-seated changes in the English economy is a glaring absence.
The growing distaste amongst revisionist and post revisionist historians for
economic historiography is damaging and short-sighted. All in all, I would
recommend the book for students of the subject and the general public. The book
is well written and researched. Although a read around the subject is a must.
[1] English Historical Review (2010) Ian Warren doi:
10.1093/ehr/ceq085 First published online: April 19, 2010
[2] Conflict in Early Stuart England (1989; rev. ante, cv
[1990], 966–8)
Film Review: A Field in England – Ben Wheatley’s Civil War
drama , 90mins. Starring: Reece Shearsmith, Richard Glover, Michael Smiley (15)
Geoffrey Macnab
“The condition of
man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone…Life is nasty, brutish,
and short.”
― Thomas Hobbes.
Given that there is a paucity of worthwhile films on the
English Civil War, it is perhaps understandable that Ben Wheatley’s new film
has received significant interest from the historians and mainstream
newspapers.The period covered by the film is known to be in the words of one
reviewer “one of the most exciting and tumultuous periods in English and
British history”.Quite why Wheatley chose the setting of the Civil War is a bit
of a mystery. Anyone looking for a history lesson will be bitterly
disappointed.
The film pays homage to so many different film genres; it is
sometimes a little hard to keep up. The film is beautifully shot in black and
white and is heavily influenced by the 1975 film Winstanley.Wheatley’s film,
like Winstanley, has a “stark monochrome beauty” to it. The film style pays homage
to the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Like Winstanley A Field in England
has a resonance with the German expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s,
While the style of the two films is similar, the substance
is entirely different. A Field in Britain offers no real insight into the
ideological differences that arose during the Civil war. However, if you would
like to see a film that beautifully photographed, funny in parts, disturbingly
violent and crude, then this is your film.It would be mistaken to believe that
the film has no philosophy. Wheatley’s apparent limited understanding of the
Civil war does not stop him portraying his characters coming straight out of
Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan. In other words, they were ‘nasty, poor, brutish,
and short’.
The film has a very basic plotline. Shot on a very small
budget and is only 90 minutes long. Following the life four deserters. While it
is unclear which side the deserters came from I would hazard a guess that three
came from Parliament’s side and one Whitehead was a Royalist sympathiser.
Little is seen of the battle that our ‘heroes’ flee from they stumble into a
field which is entirely where the film is set.After eating some magic
mushrooms, the group comes under the control of what seems a devil like figure
O’Neil played very well by Michael Smiley.O’ Neil has been having been pursued
by our anti-hero, Whitehead. What plays out is largely a battle between good
and evil.
Is A Field in England a fair reflection of the times we live
in? Annette Bullen had this to say: “In fact, I think that both these films
reflect their times and the concerns of the day. Winstanley began shooting in
the late 1960s at the end of the period where Marxist historians’ interpreted
the English Civil War as a revolution. It was released in 1975 and this, rather
neatly, coincided with a shift in the interpretation of these events in favour
of new revisionist interpretations. So the earnest and urgent call for
revolution which began in the 1960s had, by the time of the film’s release,
been taken over by a reinterpretation of the Civil War as being more
evolutionary, stressing the importance of attempting to understand events and
evidence in context rather than as a stage in a Marxist interpretation of
history.
A Field in England, too, reflects our current times.
Religion, a fundamental part of society during the 17th century, hardly
features, with only one of the five characters being in anyway religious and
the others sneering or indifferent to his prayers and his god. They would
rather go to the pub to have a beer and a good stew than go to church. Nor are
any of the characters interested in politics or the huge events taking place
around them. Cromwell and the King are mentioned but these soldiers are
self-interested and self-absorbed, fighting for an unknown cause with little
conviction. They make a total contrast to Winstanley’s New Model Army, who
carry copies of ‘The Case of the Armie’ in their hats and debate at Putney
their rights within the society for which they have fought”. [1]The fact that A
Field in England has no Marxist revolutionary ideology or any recognisable
ideology sad reflection on not only the filmmakers but on current
historiography. The film is a wasted opportunity.
[1] http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1446)
A short Interview With Historian John Morrill
This a Q&A with John Morrill and his team of
researchers. John and his team have been working on A New Critical Edition of
all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. My article on this work can
be found with this link
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/why-we-need-new-critical-edition-of-all.html.
Is this a definitive version of Cromwell’s writings or is
there more to be done
Nine of us have spent two years tracking down Cromwell
material. We have found little significant new material (although we do have
new versions of some of the speeches) but we have tracked down a lot of items
not seen since they were poorly transcribed in the 18th and 19th centuries. We
think it very unlikely, but not impossible, that there is unknown material ‘out
there’
How different an Oliver Cromwell do we get from your
research?
There is nothing transformative. But by excluding a few
items that we think are apocryphal and improving the texts for some important
letters and understanding the context better, we think there will be a lot of
small things that cumulatively will make quite a difference – how much will
only be realised when I complete my new biography based on the new edition in
2015 or 2016.
What was the most difficult problem encountered by your
researchers.
A high proportion of Cromwell’s letters and speeches exist
not in autograph but in multiple early copies – especially for the late 1640s
and early 1650s when we have multiple print versions of each letter but no
manuscript. And most the speeches he made to his Parliaments are in multiple
copies from different scribes. Stabilising those texts has been rewarding but
difficult.
Are the comment sections of the writings a move away from
previous historiography on Cromwell?
We will publishing three volumes of ‘texts’, each writing or
speech with a contextual headnote and normal footnotes saying who people are,
noting major differences between the various versions etc. And there will be
two companion volumes – one a set of essays on the edition (Cromwell’s handwriting,
why some things survive and others don’t and exploring the reliability of texts
which are not autographs etc.) and one a set of interpretative essays by a
range of scholars as they work with the new edition – Cromwell’s faith, his
politics, his relations with his family, with the Army, with Parliament etc.).
We think this will make the edition much more reliable than earlier ones, much
more usable and much more useful
5. Are the
volumes aimed primarily at an academic audience or do you plan to make them
accessible to a wider audience?
The texts are presented in their original spelling and
punctuation and so a bit harder to follow than modernised ones would have been,
but the contextual headnotes and footnotes should allow anyone with an interest
in the period to use the volumes. It will be available online with Oxford
Scholarly Editions online which will be the first port of call for scholars;
but it will also be in handsome volumes of 800, 800, 800, 400 and 400 pages
What is the launch date for publication?
We have completed the searches, completed the transcriptions
and decided in almost every case which version to use as our ‘proof text’. Nine
of us will now write the headnotes and footnotes and hope to complete that by
September 2014, with publication by the end of 2015.
A Review of London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War.
Jayne E E Boys Boydell Press
London’s News-Press
and the Thirty Years War is an important addition to our knowledge of the
origins of news reporting in the Thirty Years War. A considerable feat because
of the complexity of the subject.The book is extremely well researched, and
Boys present her arguments clearly and popularly and seeks to demonstrate “the
interplay between high domestic politics, international relations and London
news publication”.Boys believes that Britain in the 17th Century was an
important part of a European-wide news community. The book is welcome in this
respect because it counters recent historiography that has tended to be hostile
to a Eurocentric viewpoint.
During the Thirty Years war, people waited for eager news.
Much of this reporting and printing was illegal and if caught printers and
their writer friends were fined and often jailed.This book is published at a
time when a revolution is taking place amongst our media, mainly led by the
internet. No less a revolution was taking place in the 17th Century. The media
revolution put enormous pressure on monarchs all over Europe, especially in
Britain of James I and Charles I.
The growth of the new media brought unprecedented dangers
for the ruling elites. For the first time, ordinary people could read or hear
news and draw conclusions for themselves about the major issues of the day.
Historiography.
Boys present an understanding of both revisionist and post
revisionist arguments without agreeing with one side or another. It is only
recently that a systematic study of these newsbooks has been undertaken but has
still received a shocking lack of attention by scholars so much so that it is
very difficult at this stage to place Boys work within current
historiography.One of the weaknesses of the book certainly for me is that it
does not in any real detail examine the disparate pre revisionist
historiography of the Thirty Years War. Current revisionist historiography sees
the war as primarily a religious contest as the words of W. Nif’s notes it was
the last of the religious wars and one of the many.
However, this viewpoint was challenged by Marxist historians
such as Eric Hobsbawm who saw the war in the context of a general economic,
social and political crisis of the 17th Century. According to, J. V.
Polišenský, the Thirty Years’ War was “the logical outcome of the crisis of
policy of the old feudal ruling class. This political crisis of the declining
sixteenth and the commencing seventeenth centuries had deep social and economic
roots. Economic and political changes did not develop evenly. The law of uneven
development resulted in a peculiar situation in those countries whose economic
and political interests were in a violent contradiction. These buffer-countries
” lay in a disputed no-man’s land and were necessarily regarded as natural
danger zones”. An examination of the various historiography’s would have
improved an already good book.
Criticisms
Boys research makes extensive use of Corantos.[1] She
correctly shows that these newsbooks and informational broadsheets during the
Thirty Years War had an important part to play in the dissemination of news
during the English revolution. Boys has spent a significant amount of time
pouring over manuscripts. Her use of the British Library resources is evident
by the use of sources such as the Trumbull Papers and Joseph Mead’s
correspondence,Like the historian, Christopher Hill Boys has been unfairly
criticized for mostly using printed sources, both primary and secondary. One
such critic said “the author cites the Calendar of State Papers Domestic for
the reigns of James I and Charles I, but not the State Papers Domestic (SP14
and SP16) in manuscript, available on microfilm and online. To understand what
attempts the early Stuart monarchs did make to control the press, information
from the actual documents in SPD is vital. SPD is primarily the archive of the
secretaries of State’s office which supervised all the monarch’s correspondence
(indeed all the monarch’s government business). The senior secretary of State
also coordinated Privy Council business and exercised crown supervision of
printed matter.
“This research lacunae (among others) has led Boys’ to
repeat an unfortunate miss-identification of a licenser for the press, Mr.
Cottington, who is the joint focus of an entire chapter in her book.
Cottington’s misidentification here is even more unfortunate because he was
correctly identified decades ago by W. W. Greg, with Greg’s findings supported
later by research from Sheila Lambert. Boys is aware of the controversy over
Cottington’s identity but chose to follow mistakes originating with F. S.
Siebert, perpetuated in more recent studies by Michael Frearson and Cyndia Clegg.
Greg found the autograph imprimatur of George Cottington on a manuscript
submitted to him for approval, now in the Bodleian Library. Lambert found
George Cottington’s entrance to and a degree from Oxford. My research places
him among the chaplains of the bishop of London”.[2]
Boys point that during the Thirty Years war Britain’s ruling
elite showed a real fear that news dissemination to the masses was politically
dangerous. Therefore the Crown actively sought to control the news by
appointing Georg Rudolph Weckherlin in 1627 who was “given oversight of news,
as well as other print genres deemed to be politically dangerous”.
Weckherlin’s appointment was done in a typically English
empirical fashion. He was not employed directly by the Crown. However with
political and military events proceeding at a dangerous pace the State needed a
far robust response to the growing danger of Britain being dragged into the
Thirty years war and to counteract the growing political, economic and social
crisis already mounting in England.So from early 1630s William Laud, archbishop
of Canterbury, working through the High Commission for Causes Ecclesiastical
was brought in to control the press. Almost immediately, the Star Chamber was
used to indict a growing number of people deemed to be advocating sedition.
Towards the end of 1637 several trials of prominent figures such Henry Burton,
John Bastwick, William Prynne, and John Williams, bishop of Lincoln, were
charged with seditious libel. However, political events beyond the control of
Laud and his master Charles I were to hamper attempts at press censorship.
Of particularly interest is Boys treatment of the foreign
policies of James I and Charles I.as one reviewer said ” Boys supports recent
scholarly efforts to rehabilitate James’s political and foreign policies,
arguing that the king “was aware of the power of words and sought to influence
public opinion” or that Charles, carried out a “laissez-fair approach to the
press”.It is clear that Charles I had little understanding of the use of
Newsbooks in developing his foreign policy. He “simply did not appreciate the
desirability of telling his side of events, nor see the need to persuade.”
To conclude, the book is also beautifully presented and
illustrated Boydell Press and deserves a wide readership. It enhances our
knowledge of both the Thirty Years War and the early origins of newspapers. The
book as one writer says it also “increases our understanding of the development
of English periodicals, the monograph also helps explain the fascination with
and establishes the importance of international news in early Stuart England”.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/coranto
[2] Professor Sabrina Alcorn Baron, review of London’s News
Press and the Thirty Years War, (review no. 1374) URL:
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1374
Conrad Russell and the “Mirage” of the English Revolution
The coalition government recently published its changes to
the National Curriculum. Aside from the fact that the new changes are way too
narrow, parochial and would return the educational system to the Victorian era,
they have provoked an ideological battle amongst writers, historians and other
academics.
Amongst historians, the battle lines are being drawn between
left and right-leaning historians. It is perhaps with great irony that Tory
government supporters have labelled their opponents Marxists. A recent headline
in the Daily Mail was entitled “I refuse to surrender to the Marxist teachers
hell-bent on destroying our schools: Education Secretary berates ‘the new
enemies of promise’ for opposing his plan”. [1]
The reason I say ironic is that for the last twenty years or
so there has been a concerted attempt to downplay and in some cases deny that
Marxists or Marxism has any role to play in the understanding of history.
Certainly, in the area of English civil war historiography, the attack on
Marxism has been over the years heated, persistent and in some cases
aggressive. The purpose of this essay is not to trawl through the entire
history of these attacks except one of them caught my attention, Conrad
Russell’s essay The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage”.[2]
The essay which was published in history today in 1990 was
more populist in style than academic. Russell’s article was perhaps the most
open polemical attack on historical materialism and was published in what has
become a house organ for revisionist historians. His article was also one of
many types of articles in the field of history and politics that sought to cast
doubt on historical materialism and Marxism in general as a method of
historical analysis.
One such article was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History
and the Last Man. In that article Fukuyama wrote: “All countries un¬dergoing
economic modernization must increasingly resemble one another: they must unify
nationally on the basis of a central¬ized state, urbanize, replace traditional
forms of social organiza¬tion like tribe, sect, and family with economically
rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal
education of their citizens. Such societies have become increas¬ingly linked
with one another through global markets and the spread of a universal consumer
culture. Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a
universal evolu¬tion in the direction of capitalism.”
As David Walsh noted “It is painful to read the gloating
stupidities that were churned out by Western academics in the wake of the
demise of the Soviet Union. Seemingly every journal devoted to politics,
current affairs or culture felt obliged to publish a special issue devoted to
the supposed rout of socialism. The word “End” or “Death” or “Fall” or a
synonym had to be included somewhere in the title.”[3]
Fukuyama’s attack coincided with a systematic attack from
revisionist historians on Marxist historiography in the field of history. This
gained added momentum in the aftermath of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. His
article echoed a school of thought both inside and outside academia which saw
the end of the U.S.S.R as signifying the end of Marxism. Several academics
wrongly saw the collapse of Stalinism as the collapse of Marxism.
According to Conrad Russell, the English bourgeois
revolution was a mirage something illusory and unattainable or an incorrect
conception. Russell’s conclusion was there was no revolution in the 1640s, and
for that matter, he does not fancy there being one in 1688 either. It should be
borne in mind that before Russell wrote his article, it was broadly accepted
that some kind of revolution had happened. Whether it was a puritan revolution
or a bourgeois revolution.
Russell’s framework for answering the question was there a
revolution? Is a little ropey to say the least? Relying on Professor Alfred
Cobban “Four laws!” was hardly the most objective or for that matter,
scientific yardstick. Cobban like Russell was opposed to Marxism and held similar
views to Russell, albeit in a different area of study, Cobban wrote extensively
on the French revolution. Cobban did not believe it was a social revolution.
According to Wikipedia “Cobban’s views and works in the
macrocosm were to be the inspiration and birthplace of the historical school
now known as Revisionism. Along with George V. Taylor, Cobban vehemently
attacked the traditional Marxist conception of the past within Marx’s
dialectic, particularly in his work The Social Interpretation of the French
Revolution. His resultant argument was that the revolution could not be seen as
a social revolution exacerbated by economic changes (specifically the
development of capitalism and by corollary, class conflict between the
bourgeoisie and the nobility). Rather, argued Cobban, the French Revolution
should be seen as a political revolution with social consequences”.[4]
Whether Cobban’s work, the birthplace of a new form of
Revisionism is open to question. In some sense all historians are revisionists,
but this particular group of historians was united by their hostility to both
Whig and Marxist historiography. It is also strange that Russell, who was a
very distinguished historian, failed in his essay to produce any real detailed
examination of Marx’s actual writings on the English bourgeois revolution.
Although not prodigious however he did write extensively on the rise of the
bourgeoisie.
In his book, the Communist Manifesto. He notes “The
bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered
form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted
disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into the air all that is holy is profaned, and man is
at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and
his relations with his kind”. Marx was familiar with people who denied
revolutions had taken place.
Russell had an annoying habit in this essay of lumping Whig
history together with Marxist. So much so that Russell believed that the Whig
version of the origins of the English Civil War was a dialectical one. It is
not in the realm of this essay to go into any detail suffice to say that
Russell did not know what he was talking about. I am not sure how much Marxist
literature he read, but it is not enough for such an eminent historian to make
such a flippant remark without really backing his argument up.
Russell who would have been fully conversant with the Whig
interpretation of history and he would have also been aware that Sir Herbert
Butterfield’s slim volume of that name was, in fact, a polemic, directed at
economic determinism. In examining Russell’s theories, it should be noted that
he was not the first to revise Marxist historiography. When this revision
started in Britain is open to much debate. I guess that it started with G.R
Elton’s High Road to Civil War essay.
Elton’s essay is a strange one. Having read it a few times,
one is struck by the paucity of his argument, which is odd because of the
tremendous influence it had on large numbers of revisionist historians. Elton’s
essay was an expression of his conception of how to practice history. In the
essay, he opposes the conception that every historical event can be rationally
explained.
In ‘The Practice of History’, which was written in response
to E H Carr’s 1961 book What is History? Elton commented “All assessment of
evidence must be the work of the intellect, of the reasoning faculty. The
historian cannot but work on the assumption that whatever happened is capable
of rational explanation and that evidence is the product of an act discoverable
by reason. And yet we all know that this is not quite true; that we act, react
and reflect on motives which have little to do with reason and under
influences–such as ill-health, a quarrel with people not involved in the
transaction, whim and lack of thought–that can but rarely appear in the
evidence”.[5]
Elton’s “empirical or thesis-free” method was attractive to
Russell, and he adopted some if not all, Elton’s love of empirical methodology.
For me, Russell is a pivotal link between earlier revisionists such as Elton
and their more modern-day counterparts. Russell main argument is that Marxist
historiography stood or fell on the theory that the English Civil War was
provoked by the rise of the gentry/middle class. Which predicted the rise of
the bourgeoisie.[6]
Russell believed “the notion of the rising middle classes is
a fallacy” and “together with increasing doubt about the rising middle classes,
historians are showing increasing doubt about the dialectical model, in which
change comes about by the clash of opposites. This model, as Marx generously
admitted, is one we originally owe to Hegel, and its survival has owed as much
to Hegelian as to Marxist influence. The Whig version of the origins of the
English Civil War, for example, was a dialectical view, and it has come in for
heavy criticism in the past fifteen years” [7].
Some things need to be said about the above quote. Firstly,
to be honest, you would be hard-pressed to find in Russell’s writing when the
bourgeoisie did rise. Russell, in his essay never really comes close to
answering why before he wrote his essay that it was generally accepted that a
revolution of some kind did take place in the 1640s. This was accepted by
serious historians for the better part of three centuries
Even during the 17th century some of the more perceptive
writers saw that a revolution of some kind had taken place. Vernon F Snow wrote
an important essay outlining the use of the word revolution during the 17th
century. Snow says “One of the first writers-if, not the first to apply the
concept specifically to the English political upheaval was Matthew Wren, the
son of Dr Matthew Wren, Bishop of Ely. Sometime after the trial and execution
of Charles I, this royalist wrote a treatise entitled Of the Origin and
Progress of the Revolution in England. ‘The world is full’, he wrote, ‘of both
books and pamphlets, who have nothing to do but to teach their readers these
events; and the design of writing this was only summarily to treat of the most
general causes of those strange revolutions we have seen.” [8]
Russell is strangely silent on this varied historical usage
of the word revolution. His essay almost takes the form of a religious
exorcism. According to Russell “historians are showing increasing doubt about
the dialectical model. Who are these historians? What are they saying and more
importantly, what is their political?. When Russell ties the theory of a rising
Middle Class or bourgeoisie to the fate of the Marxist historians he is doing a
disservice to his profession. Strangely, Russell does not elaborate on the
“Storm over the Gentry” debate. Because if he did, he would have had to tackle
what leading Marxist historians such as Hill did say on the matter?
Russell mentions nothing in his article about Hill being
very wary of the debate over the rise or decline of the gentry. The debates
over the gentry which took place in the early 1950s were for Marxists far more
complex than just placing their entire historical faith on the rise of the
middle class. As Norah Carlin notes in her excellent essay “The gentry were, in
origin, simply the mass of the feudal landowning class in England, where only
the upper crust of this class had distinctive ‘noble’ titles. Both Marx and
Engels suggested that the development of commodity production in agriculture in
sixteenth-century England and the two-way social mobility between the gentry
and the bourgeoisie made the gentry natural allies of the bourgeoisie in the
revolution. Tawney’s thesis went much further than this. According to Tawney,
the gentry were a revolutionary social class in themselves: a distinct social
class, fundamentally opposed to the old ‘aristocratic’ ruling class; the
revolution was made by and for them.
But it is in fact very hard to separate ‘gentry’ from
‘aristocracy’ as distinct social classes. Their sources of wealth were the same
– land, with an admixture of trade and office-holding. ‘Traditional’ and
‘commercial’ attitudes to wealth (which Tawney proposes as an essential
difference between the two) are found equally on both sides of the barrier of
noble title. In terms of power, noble and gentle landowners shared the ruling
positions in provincial society, both had access to positions at court, and they
even (as Lords and Commons, both in opposition to Charles I in 1640) shared
Parliament. Mobility between the two groups was very common, for a gentleman
could easily be made a lord (under James I, he could even directly buy the
title), while a lord’s younger sons were automatically mere gentlemen. The
gentry were, it seems, born and bred members of the existing ruling class under
the Stuart monarchy.
The ‘rise of the gentry’ thus becomes a gaping trap for
Marxists into which perhaps only Perry Anderson of New Left Review has jumped
with both feet. For Anderson, the English Civil War was ‘a “bourgeois
revolution” only by proxy’, because it was made by a section of the ruling
class. [6] But if a bourgeois revolution can be made by proxy from above, can a
proletarian revolution? If a section of the ruling class could break the last
bonds of feudalism on behalf of the bourgeoisie, could not a section of the
bourgeoisie set up socialism on behalf of the working class?. The way out of
this situation lies in a re-examination of the actual role of the gentry in the
English Civil War – the very task at which the New Historians have been
beavering away in the belief that they were destroying Marxism.[9]
Russell’s original point was that Marxism stood or fell
based on a rising gentry. The “Storm over the gentry debate is probably one of
the most important in civil war historiography. The original debate was centred
on R H Tawney’s thesis of a rising gentry later supported by Lawrence Stone who
in 1948, who was close to the historical positions of R.H. Tawney published in
the Economic History Review entitled “The Anatomy of the Elizabethan
Aristocracy”. Tawney and Stone’s arguments were countered by historians Hugh
Trevor Roper and later by J H Hexter.
It would be a mistake to describe both Tawney or Stone as
Marxists, and their positions regarding the gentry were not Marxist positions.
This is not to say that their work is not without great merit and should be
studied at great length. Although Stone himself did describe himself in the
early part of his career as being a young Marxist, his mistakes were the
product of incomplete assimilation of the Marxist method of Historical
Materialism. Stone had a major problem in that he never really understood the
difference between genuine Marxism and a crude form of economic determinism.
Stone himself soon moved away from any link with Marxist historiography, and in
his own words he became in 1987, “an old fashioned Whig”.
Hill’s positions on the debate are instructive. He was
critical of both sides and that the debate was more to do with the developing
Cold War anti-communism than merely a debate over civil war historiography.
Hill also called for further research into the economic positions of people on
both sides who took part in the war/revolution. Hill was also a good enough
Marxist historian to understand that the real target of the debate was not just
Tawney or Stone or himself for that matter but of Marxism itself.
The question is should Marx and his method of investigating
and explaining historical phenomena be held responsible for the implementation
of his method by subsequent historians Marxist or otherwise. After all, if a
patient dies on the operating table, should that lead to the questioning and
repudiation of the whole history of medical science?
To buttress his claim that the middle class did not rise at
this time or that there was a revolution, Russell leans on the
ultra-conservative historian J H Hexter. Hexter’s article the Myth of the
Middle Class in Tudor England published in 1961. Russell’s use of Hexter is
natural to bolster his argument but to use a rebuttal piece by K.G. Davies
called The Mess of the Middle Class in the same paragraph is a little weird.
I am all for historical balance, but this seems a little
strange. I could be wrong but Russell’s choice of historians to defend his
charge gives the appearance that Russell did not give much thought to them.
They almost seem to be thrown in as an afterthought. He does not detail much
about their work, and most annoyingly no footnotes are used, making research
difficult.
Hexter’s most important essay entitled “The Storm over the
Gentry” which Russell strangely ignores was published in a mainstream magazine
after it was turned down by several leading American historical journals.
Hexter’s main criticism was that left-wing historians relied too heavily on a
social determinist argument.
Hexter who has been described as a Neo Whig and was as
William H Dray said “unabashedly, and often polemically Whiggish. For Hexter,
the English Civil War was to be seen as the defence of traditional English
liberties against an aggressive Crown. This position contrasted in the 1970s
with the revisionist views of Conrad Russell and others who disputed both the
uniqueness of the English Civil War and its connection with ideas of liberty.
However, since the revisionists were also explicitly anti-Marxist, their stance
owed a great deal to Hexter’s critiques. Russell, in particular, echoed
Hexter’s emphasis on continuity in English political values, Hexter’s
distinction between the Civil War and the subsequent revolution, and Hexter’s
belief that contingencies better explained the coming of the war, while
rejecting Hexter’s view that Parliament was acting out of a clear-cut sense of
constitutional obligation and embracing instead the view that religious
conflicts and practical problems in the composite monarchy were more
decisive”.[10]
In Dray’s essay, he attempts to try to define what is to be
a Whig historian. For instance, Hexter’s fascination with constitutional
matters certainly would put him in the Whig camp. Russell went on “Another flaw
in the model is that, in its pure and original form, it does not recognize the
power of ideas as an independent variable. Ideas do not simply reflect the economic
circumstances of their thinkers. Where they do correlate with the economic
circumstances of their thinkers, they do so in a way so various that a much
more flexible instrument than that of class is needed to explain it. It might
be possible to construct an explanation of why Victorian poll books show
weavers voting Liberal, and butchers voting Conservative, but if so, it is an
explanation which would have more to do with industrial psychology than with
class conflict. In the English Civil War, people’s allegiance normally
correlates with their religion, but their religion does not correlate with
their social background. Even in areas which were strongly of one persuasion,
such as Northampton, we find people like the man who was recommended for a job
on the ground that he was ‘of Northampton, but I thank God not of that
persuasion’. There is no way the material can be explained unless by admitting
the autonomy of the mind”. [11]
Russell’s divorce of ideas from their economic or material
base is common to most of the later revisionist historians. Hill disagreed with
Russell’s downplaying of the link between ideas and their material basis. In
his book The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, he sought to use
the method of Marxism to understand the complex and dialectical relationship
between ideas and their origins.
In the introduction, he states “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 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 a significant group in the society in which it comes into
prominence”.[12]
Another reason Russell believed that the revolution was a
mirage is his point that the gentry or bourgeois fought on both sides so,
therefore, how could you talk of a bourgeois revolution. He made the correct
point that the social origins of the civil war bourgeoisie were not clear cut
and that capitalists were on both sides. For him, the Civil War was nothing out
of the ordinary and was largely a series of breakdowns or mistakes from leading
players such as Charles Ist.
There have been varying degrees of success of how well
Marxist historians have applied historical materialism to the study of the
English revolution. The historian Robert Ashton in his essay The Civil War and
the Class Struggle outlined the pitfalls encountered by Marxists historians.
Ashton is correct in his analysis of the tensions between the king and growing
section of the bourgeoisie over several issues that went back over a few
decades at least.
Ashton does not subscribe to the revisionist argument that
just because there were bourgeois elements on both sides of the war that it
discounts the Marxist theory of a bourgeois revolution. Ashton points out that
this makes it harder for a clear cut analysis but does not rule out the
possibility of doing one.
For Ashton, the makeup of the 17th century was complex and
varied. In his article On Charles and the City of London contained in Essays in
the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England; he believes the
monarchy had the support of a small but significant section of the bourgeoisie
who stood to gain if Charles won the war. On parliaments, side stood varying
different sections of the bourgeoisie. While this scenario does make it
difficult to make generalizations, it does not as Russell believes make a
Marxist analysis null and void.
Having read enough of Hill, I am clear that he accepted that
there were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the Civil War
and small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side, i.e. different sections of
the bourgeoisie and Aristocracy. From his knowledge of early Soviet historians
and his study of the writings of Marx and Engels, he never assumed that this
was a chemically pure revolution. In fact, in his major writings, he makes the
point that large numbers of people fought and took sides outside of purely
economic reasons.
According to Ann Talbot Hill was “sensitive enough to his
historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse
social backgrounds into the struggle against the king and well-grounded enough
in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic
guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the
Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to
explain what they were doing”.[13]
Russell rejected this analysis and reiterated that
“historians are showing increasing doubt about the dialectical model, in which
change comes about by the clash of opposites. This model, as Marx generously
admitted, is one we originally owe to Hegel, and its survival has owed as much
to Hegelian as to Marxist influence. The Whig version of the origins of the
English Civil War, for example, was a dialectical view, and it has come in for
heavy criticism in the past fifteen years”.
Marx did indeed owe a debt to Hegel. Marxism was a
development on from Hegel’s philosophy. Russell is correct that one of the
basic components of Marxism is the conception of the unity of opposites. Marx
took what was the best or materialist from Hegel and discarded his idealist
component.
Ilya Stavinsky explains this well “any development, in a
wide sense of this word, consists of the birth of the event, its development,
in the narrow sense of this word, and its death. So with time, the birth of the
event transforms into its opposition, the death of the event. Consequently,
birth and death are opposite meanings, and for this reason, they constitute a
dialectical contradiction.
The essence of the dialectical logic consists in the fact
that it describes the development of this contradiction, i.e. it shows the
transition of the event from one stage, the birth, to its opposite stage,
death. For this purpose, dialectical logic possesses by its system of category
and by its abstract laws. By using them, dialectical logic can grasp in detail
the process of any development independent of its character, whether it is a
social or natural event. Such categories are form, content, and essence, quality,
quantity, elementary form, particular form, universal form, and opposites, real
and formal contradiction and so on. Examples of laws: the transformation of
content into forms, the transformation of quantity into quality, unity of
opposites and so on”.[14]
Marx tied the study of history with the study of society
itself. If Russell had probed a little further in his research, he would have
found that the main writers and philosophers during the 17th century attempted
albeit gingerly to understand their revolution along those similar lines. On
this matter, Russell could have done no worse than consulted several articles
written by a number of the Soviet historians who wrote on this matter. It would
have perhaps given his arguments more objectivity.
One such writer Evgeny Pashukanis said “The English
Revolution of the seventeenth century gave birth to the basic directions of
bourgeois social thought, and forcibly advanced the scientific, i.e.
materialist, understanding of social phenomena. “It suffices to mention such a
work as Oceana – by the English writer Harrington, and which appeared soon
after the English Revolution of the seventeenth century – in which changes in
political structure are related to the changing distribution of landed
property. It suffices to mention the work of Barnave – one of the architects of
the great French Revolution – who in the same way sought explanations of
political struggle and the political order in property relations. In studying
bourgeois revolutions, French restorationist historians – Guizot, Mineaux and
Thierry – concluded that the leitmotif of these revolutions was the class
struggle between the third estate (i.e. the bourgeoisie) and the privileged
estates of feudalism and their monarch. This is why Marx, in his well-known
[15]letter to Weydemeyer, indicates that the theory of the class struggle was
known before him”.[15]
The war was a qualitative turning point. One cannot
underestimate the importance of an investigation into the growing capitalistic
nature of agriculture which is key to understand who fought and why they did.
If it is correct to say that we are dealing with a class of landowners who held
sway before and after 1642 what was the material or economic basis of this
power and how did it reflect in the political superstructure.
Another aspect of Marxist analysis that was attacked by
Russell and a whole host of subsequent revisionist historians has been the
development of the Base and superstructure argument. As Marx pointed out “In
the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are
indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which
correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive
forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic
structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political
superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that
determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness.
“At a certain stage of their development, the material
productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of
production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the
property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of
development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic
foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly
transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be
made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of
production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and
the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short,
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it
out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of
himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own
consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather
from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between
the social productive forces and the relations of production.
No social order ever perishes before all the productive
forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations
of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence
have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always
sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more
closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the
material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the
process of formation”.[16]
But no all historians rejected the base and superstructure
argument. Robert Ashton writing on the English Revolution makes an interesting
point on some historians while not being Marxist did use some use of Marxist
ideas. Ashton said “The idea of religious, political and constitutional issues
as an ideological superstructure based on foundations of material and class
interests has been influential far beyond the ranks of Marxist historians. It
has indeed been adopted, in part at least and with a radically different
emphasis, by some of their more formidable and determined opponents.”
While to the casual observer of historical debate these
arguments could be viewed as Storm in a teapot what lay behind them was
Russell’s systematic attack on any materialist approach to historical
understanding, smuggled in under the guise of a revaluation of the English
revolution.
Speaking of Russell Jim Holstun described his work as a
‘manifesto for historical revisionism’, Holstun makes the point that Russell
sought another way to explain the social changes that were taken place in the
English revolution that historians should concentrate on the upper yeomanry,
the middling sort of people who were rising according to Russell’ not so much
at the expense of the gentry, as at the expense of smallholders and the
labouring poor’. Russell would often make the point that he not conversant with
the term’s feudalism and capitalism.
Russell’s essay is heavy on what was negative about Marxist
historiography but is extremely poor when it comes to an alternative thesis.
This negativity was picked up upon Mary Fullbrook who said “The negative
emphasis of much of revisionist work so far has quite understandably provoked
the sort of reaction quoted by John Morrill in the preface to the new edition
of his book, The Revolt of the Provinces: ‘One colleague and friend wryly
accused me of “explaining why no civil war broke out in England in 1642″… ‘.
But revisionists feel no great compulsion to develop a comprehensive
explanation since they consider that the object of explanation has itself been
misinterpreted: the English Revolution was not a world-historically important
event requiring a commensurate scale of explanation, but rather represents, at
least in origins, a somewhat bloody tiff between a specific monarch and certain
factions among his subjects.”[17]
To conclude, where does this debate over an essay written
over twenty years ago leave us? Whether Russell knew how much damage his and
other attacks on the Marxist historiography of the civil war would do is a moot
point. I believe he was acting very consciously when writing his essay and was
genuinely hostile to Marxism. While better writers than me have been able to
refute the main thrust of his arguments, this debate does not take place in a
vacuum and some consequences flow from his ideas.
There has been a definite shift away from studies that have
been commonly associated with Marxism or “history from below” to a more
right-wing “History from above” over the last 20 years.
As confirmed by this article in the New York Times “In
History Departments, It is Up With Capitalism. It goes on A spectre is haunting
university history departments: the spectre of capitalism. After decades of
“history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized
people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly
turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all:
the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy”.[18]
What damage this shift away from Marxist historiography has
done would need a PhD thesis. One thing is clear that the paucity of research
into the economic changes taking place in the 17th century will badly limit our
knowledge of the English revolution. I am not saying that Russell is solely
responsible for the shift in academic circles both here and America. But his
essay did play a small part in creating this hostility to Marxism.
[1] I refuse to surrender to the Marxist teachers hell-bent
on destroying our schools: Education Secretary berates ‘the new enemies of
promise’ for opposing his plan-By Michael Gove 23 March
[2]
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/bourgeois-revolution-mirage
[3]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/17/dwle-s17.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Cobban
[5] Defender of the Faith: Geoffrey Elton and the Philosophy
of History- Geoffrey Roberts http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/elton.htm
[6] For more detail on this debate see Causes of the English
Revolution. Lawrence Stone
[7] The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage? Conrad Russell,
History Today Volume: 40 Issue: 9 1990.
http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage
[8] The Concept of Revolution in 17th Century England The
Historical Journal V2 1962
[9] Norah Carlin-Marxism and the English Civil War-(Autumn
1980)
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/carlin/1980/xx/civilwar.html
[10] ] J H Hexter Neo Whiggism and Early Stuart
Historiography History and Theory Vol26 No 2 May 1987 pp133-149 by William H
Dray
[11] The Bourgeois Revolution: A Mirage? Conrad Russell,
History Today Volume: 40 Issue: 9 1990.
http://www.historytoday.com/conrad-russell/bourgeois-revolution-mirage
[12] Intellectual origins of the English Revolution
Panther-C Hill
[13] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill-By Ann Talbot 25 March 2003
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[14] Formal and Dialectical Logic as Unity of Opposites or
Development of Classical Philosophy. By Ilya Stavinsky
[15] Evgeny Pashukanis The Marxist Theory of State and Law
(1932)
[16] Evgeny Pashukanis The Marxist Theory of State and Law
(1932)
[17] The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt Mary
Fulbrook Social History
[18] In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism-
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?_r=0
Jared van Duinen on ‘An Engine Which the World Sees Nothing
of’: Revealing Dissent under Charles I’s ‘Personal Rule’
By Christopher Thompson
Jared van Duinen’s essay, which first appeared in the
Australian journal, Parergon, in 2011, addresses two main themes. The first of
these is an historiographical one covering the analysis of the ‘Personal Rule’
of King Charles I between 1629 and 1640 by historianslargely since the
appearance of ‘revisionisim’ in the 1970s. The second involves a call to
current and future historians to focus their research on the personal networks
of Puritan association that linked together the King’s opponents in the period
before the summoning of the Short and Long Parliaments. It is thus a review of
relatively recent work and a programme for new work. It is always helpful for a
field of historical research to be reassessed, especially by a young scholar
reflecting on his own recent experiences.
This exercise begins with some observations on the
concentration of much historical work in the twentieth century on the politics
of the centre in England with its focus on Parliament in particular. Whigs and
Marxists as well as the ‘revisionists’ of the 1970s and 1980s inevitably sought
to explain the dissent faced by James VI and I and by Charles I in their
Parliaments from 1604 until 1629 but were less interested in the hidden facets
of dissent in the 1630s when no Parliaments were held. Van Duinen was critical
of Kevin Sharpe’s book, The Personal Rule of Charles I, published in 1992 for
this reason. It emphasized the intrinsically deferential, hierarchical and
unrevolutionary nature of politics and society in the 1630s when England
experience a period of relative calm and stability.
Sharpe’s view was reinforced by the studies of royal
patronage of the arts, of masques, etc., in the same decade, which threw
welcome new light on Court politics and the role of Henrietta Maria as Queen.
Similarly, the debates over the nature of the Caroline Church and the role of
Laudianism served to reinforce the central perspective on the period of
‘Personal Rule’. He was not critical of this work in itself but he thought that
it needed to be balanced by a new concentration on local and regional spheres
of activity to discover how dissident activity was decentralized and diffused
when there was no forum in Parliament to give it focus.
A decentralized research strategy would, in his view, help
to show how national and local concerns about Caroline rule intersected: the
cultural, familial and intellectual milieus of contemporaries as well as the
impact on their political, religious and social links could thus be explored.
Some of this work had already been done. Kenneth Fincham had shown how
sophisticated a grasp the Kentish gentry had on national issues while figures
like Ann Hughes, Jason Peacey and Tom Webster had been able to investigate
important networks of clerical and lay association. Case studies of the careers
and lives of Samuel Rogers and Robert Woodford were equally rewarding.
The Feoffees of Impropriations and the two colonizing
ventures, the Masachusetts Bay Company and the Providence Island Company,
demonstrated how such networks of association drew opponents of the King
together. Indeed, the Providence Island Company offered future leaders of the
Long Parliament valuable grounding in business administration and experience of
committee work. Laudianism, moreover, with its pursuit, sometimes persecution,
of religious opponents helped to construct a “more pronounced or significant
puritan opposition than had hitherto existed”, hence the need for a new
research strategy.
This is, I hope, a fair account of Jared van Duinen’s
argument. It is not, however, one that can be enthusiastically endorsed partly
because the strategy for which he calls has been one I have pursued ever since
I was a postgraduate decades ago. The survival of much of the estate archives
of the Rich family, Earls of Warwick, from 1617, of comparable material from
the estate of William Fiennes, 1st Viscount Say and Sele, of the 4th Earl of
Bedford’s commonplace books and of his letters, and of the colonial manuscripts
covering the Massachusetts Bay, Providence Island and Saybrook companies have
permitted the extensive reconstruction of the attitudes and ideas of those
Jared van Duinen’s own thesis described as the ‘Junto’ from the mid-1620s into
the 1640s.
The colonial material is especially helpful in revealing the
views of these men on forms of government in Church and State alike. How these
connections were constituted and exercised their covert influence in the 1630s
is much better understood than he appreciated. Similarly, the patronage of the
Earls of Bedford and Essex and Warwick, of Viscount Say and Sele and Lord
Brooke and of their allies, men like Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Sir Thomas
Barrington and Richard Knightley has been comprehensively explored in local
government and in the Church. The new strategy for which Dr van Duinen has
called was already out of date when it was issued.
S.R.Gardiner on the ‘Peace Party’ in 1642-1643
A New blog article by Christopher Thompson
S.R.Gardiner’s History of the Great Civil War is one of the
great achievements of late-nineteenth century historiography. It provided more
than just a narrative account of the events of the 1640s in the British Isles
but also a graphic illustration of what the late Christopher Hill called the
“assumptions … of a liberal-minded middle-class Victorian Englishman.”
Much of the framework provided by these assumptions lasted
well beyond the rise of Marxist influence in the period after 1930 and into the
latter part of the twentieth century. Gardiner was certainly responsible for
the concept that, on the Long Parliament’s side in the early stages of the
English Civil War, it was possible to identify ‘peace’ and ‘war’ parties
amongst partisans in the two Houses of Parliament and in the City of London.
This idea was subsequently developed by J.H.Hexter in his work, The Reign of
King Pym, published in 1941 although he elaborated on Gardiner’s scheme by
postulating the existence of a ‘middle group’ led by Pym in the House of
Commons operating between the ‘peace’ and ‘war’ parties.
Gardiner traced the origins of the ‘peace party’ to the
period after the first, indecisive battle of the Civil War at Edgehill in
October, 1642 and the subsequent advance of the King’s forces towards London.
He thought that in the City of London and in Parliament, especially in the
House of Lords, such a party was quickly formed.
Its most respectable member in the upper chamber was “the
kindly Earl of Northumberland, always anxious for a quiet life and always
distrustful of enthusiasts.” He was supported by the former courtier, Henry
Rich, Earl of Holland, and by the 4th Earl of Pembroke, who steered a course
between appeasing the King when he seemed strongest and opposing him when
Parliament seemed most likely to be victorious.
When the House of Lords proposed opening negotiations for
peace with King Charles at the end of October, a peace party formed in the
House of Commons and in the City of London numbering in its ranks lawyers like
Maynard and Whitelocke and figures like D’Ewes and Edmund Waller. Gardiner
considered that they “all shared in the common weakness of desiring compromise,
without rising to the height from which an honourable compromise alone was
possible.
They longed for peace, but there was no intellectual basis
of peace in their minds.” As subsequent discussions in the House of Commons in
November on whether to negotiate over proposals for peace showed, the peace
party could by then count on the support of Denzil Holles, one of the five
Members Charles had attempted to arrest in January, 1642. Gardiner thought
that, between Holles and Pym, the difference was one of perception rather than
principle. “Both [the peace and war] parties preferred peace to war, but
neither party was ready to make those concessions which alone could make peace
possible. … Now members who were agreed on ecclesiastical subjects differed
politically.
Pym would have no peace which did not bring with it
Charles’s complete submission to the directing power of Parliament and to a
Puritan church. Holles and his friends would have made concessions to Charles’s
claim to rule the State, but they expected him to abandon his own ideal of
church government.
As there was not the slightest chance that he would ever do
anything of the kind, they did but beat the air.” Holles, in particular, “was
ready to ask the King to accept, in church matters, the conclusions to which
Parliament should come, upon the advice of the assembly of divines, and to
allow the punishment of such persons as had been impeached before the outbreak
of the troubles.” Gardiner concluded that, if “these were the demands of the
Peace-party, they had no more reasonable hope of winning Charles’s assent than
the proposals of their opponents.”
It was in the House of Lords where the peace party was
predominant that detailed proposals were drawn up and sent down to the House of
Commons on 20th December, 1642.
Gardiner noted that the King was, under this scheme, to
commit himself to passing such bills – presumably on church matters – as
Parliament should approve after consultation with the assembly of divines; to
allow Lord Digby and all others impeached before 1st January, 1642 to stand
their trials in Parliament; to exclude the Earls of Bristol and Hertford and
four others from office and the royal Court; to secure and vindicate the
privileges of Parliament; to assent to Bills for the payment of the
Parliament’s debts; to agree that all acts of the Privy Council should be
signed by those who advised them and to a new Militia Bill as well as
reinstating the Earl of Northumberland as Lord High Admiral. “They asked for
ministerial responsibility and for a Puritan settlement of the Church – for all
those concessions, in short, to which both Charles and his partisans were most
bitterly hostile.”
The peace party “had the good wishes of the vast majority of
the nation, yet, for all that, it was from the first predestined to failure.
There was not the smallest reason to suppose either that the terms which the
Houses now offered would ever be accepted by the King, or that they would
themselves be ready to accept any terms which the King was likely to propose.”
Pym and the war party knew that: they appreciated that Charles could not be
trusted and that a Puritan England could only be created by the sword. As the
negotiations at Oxford in the early months of 1643 proved, they were right.
There are a number of points that arise from Gardiner’s
claims. First of all, there is the matter of the relationship between
supporters of the ‘peace party’ in the House of Lords and those who shared
their views in the House of Commons (as well as in the City of London). How
they may have co-operated is left entirely unexplored. Some co-ordination is
implied by Gardiner himself. Secondly, there is the issue of the extent to
which Holles and his allies were prepared to make concessions to the King on the
degree to which he might rule in the State if not in the church. The
propositions presented to Charles in Oxford on 1st February, 1643 envisaged
that there should be an Act of Parliament to settle the militia on land and sea
as well as command of the country’s forts and ports “in such a manner as shall
be agreed on by both Houses.”
Senior judicial positions were to be held by men nominated
in the propositions as long as they behaved well. Future foreign policy was to
be predicated upon an alliance with the United Provinces and other Protestant
princes. Popish recusants were to be repressed by law while those who had had a
hand in promoting the Irish rebellion of October, 1641 were to be excepted from
any general pardon. Those amongst supporters of the Long Parliament who had
lost their offices were to be compensated and restored to their posts. Certain
named individuals who had counselled or supported the King in this burgeoning
conflict were to be either barred from office or the Court or punished. All this
was in addition to the abolition of Episcopal government in the Church of
England and its remodelling as Parliament after advice from an assembly of
divines should determine.
There was precious little sign of Holles or the peace party
allowing latitude to the King in the government of the State as Gardiner had
claimed: on the contrary, his supporters in the State and in the Church were to
be proscribed and punished while the levers of power and ministerial
responsibility were to be exercised by men responsible to Parliament. Gardiner
was certainly right in thinking that such proposals were unacceptable at that
time to Charles and his supporters but how could Gardiner be sure that the
peace party had the support of the vast majority of the nation or, indeed, that
it was predestined to failure. He could not have done so unless he was reading
the events of 1642-1643 backwards and looking to the emergence of a
constitutional monarchy as preordained.
There is another, perhaps more fundamental issue to be
addressed in future analyses. Is the ‘peace party’/’war party’ framework for
Parliamentary politics or its later derivative, the ‘peace party’/’middle
group’/’war party’ structure plausible any longer? If not, what can justifiably
be put in its place? These are questions John Adamson and David Scott may in
all likelihood answer in the near future.
Review of The King’s Revenge: Charles II and the Greatest
Manhunt in British History Michael Walsh, Don Jordan -ISBN-13: 978-0349123769
“We are not traitors
or murderers or fanatics, but true Christians and good commonwealths men, fixed
and constant in that noble principle of preferring the universality before
particularity.
John Cooke. Regicide.
“We shall therein… by all means possible endeavour to pursue
and bring to their due punishment those bloody traitors who were either actors
or contrivers of that unparalleled and inhuman murder.”
Charles ll
This is a very well written and soundly researched book.
Jordan and Walsh’s book has been described as “a work of popular history”. It
would also suit the more academically minded reader.The fact that both authors
are not historians in the formal sense is all the more remarkable because this
is a very serious attempt at a complex subject and should be read by any
student, academic or member of the public interested in the story of the
regicides.The book works on many levels. On a lower level, this is a personal
story of a son’s revenge for the killing of his father. One minor criticism of
the book is that the authors dwell a little too long on this. On a much higher
level, the vengeance expressed in the manhunt and ultimate murder of over
twenty regicides was the product of a deep-seated counter-revolution against
the very people who took part in the English revolution especially its most
far-sighted and courageous republican representatives.
The first few chapters of the book give an adequate
introduction to the events that led up to one of the greatest show trials in
English and for that matter World history. The book could have done with a bit
more research into the historiography of the events of the civil war and the
trial itself.I share Geoffrey Robertson belief that “historians rarely have a
good word to say about the trial: ‘Oh dear, oh dear – shocking, shocking’ was
all that Richard Holmes, Cromwell’s advocate in the BBC’s 2002 Great Britons
series, could manage (so it was little wonder that Oliver came last in the
voting). J.G. Muddiman, the editor of the notoriously slanted version of the
trial published in 1928 in the influential Famous British Trials series, was a
ranting royalist”.[1]
This downplaying of the importance of the trial of Charles l
is also expressed by numerous revisionist historians. Perhaps the most eloquent
of these is Blair Worden who in his book The English Civil Wars, believes that
the war achieved nothing and that the parliamentarians: “whose exploits were …
emphatically reversed” with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, would have
supported John Dryden, view in 1700: that “Thy wars brought nothing about.”The
most open hostility towards the trial is expressed by Blair Worden in his book
The English Civil Wars, believes that the war achieved nothing and that the
parliamentarians “whose exploits were … emphatically reversed” with the
restoration of Charles II in 1660, would have supported John Dryden, view in
1700: that “Thy wars brought nothing about.” According to Worden, nobody wanted
a revolution; no one wanted to kill the king and that the king died because of
“the law of unintended consequences”.
Hopefully in their next book, Walsh and Jordan will pay more
attention to this historiography and less to drama. To their credit, the
authors have consulted Geoffrey Robertson book The Tyrannicide Brief. Robertson
dubbed the trial of the regicides as the “the first war crimes trial in
history” he also made a valid point in comparing it to Stalin’s show trial of
old Bolsheviks. While not on the same scale both were counter-revolutions
against previous revolutions and both carried out a series of judicial state
murders.This book is not a radical history of the English revolution. The
authors are if anything sympathetic to the Whig interpretation of history and
seem to be republicans. They believed that the civil war was a progressive
development and support Robertson contention that “The proceeding against
Charles I in 1649 secured the constitutional gains of the Civil War – the
supremacy of Parliament, the independence of judges, individual freedom
guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law”.
It must be said that large numbers of these regicides have
been woefully under-researched and their ideas and motivation have been largely
left to small footnotes in old history books. One such figure is the leading
regicide and republican lawyer John Cooke who has been finally recognised in a
recent biography by Geoffrey Robertson. Cooke it seems is more known for his
refusal to pick up the Kings silver top than for providing the theoretical,
constitutional and practical justification for killing the king.
As Cooke said, “We fought for the public good and would have
enfranchised the people and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation
if the nation had not delighted more in servitude than freedom.”One thing is
clear that many who took part, including Cooke, did not believe that the trial
and execution of the king was a foregone conclusion. The majority of the
leading figures of the revolution “did not at first want to kill the King”.John
Cooke, at the beginning, thought that “the proceedings would end with some form
of reconciliation”.
It was only the threat of an intervention from the New Model
Army that moved most of the leading regicides to kill the king. It was after
all the army that wanted “to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an
account for that blood he had shed, and mischief he had done”.The regicides
were leading intellectual figures of the English revolution. The majority were
republicans and were “men of principle”. John Cooke was concerned with the
plight of the poor. He wrote in several publications calling for action to be
taken to secure a better standard of living for the poor. In the book
The Poor Man’s Case. He called for social equality and even
called for a national health service, In another far-sighted way he believed
that poverty was a significant cause of crime, he would later call for limits
to the death sentence and abolition of imprisonment for debt. He even urged
fellow barristers to give away small parts of their salary in order to carry
out legal work for the poor.Cooke for his trouble was hunted down like a common
criminal and was a given the traitor’s death: hanged, drawn and quartered.
Agents and spies were sent all over the world to hunt down and murder if
necessary, every regicide. In 1664 Sir John Lisle, a barrister who helped
organise the trial but did not sign the warrant, was shot on his way to church
in Lausanne, Switzerland, shortly after Edmund Ludlow and five others fled
there from nearby Vevey.
The writer’s Don Jordan and Michael Walsh at times turn
their book into a spy novel. They show how Charles spymaster Sir George Downing
of Downing Street fame, and described by Samuel Pepys as “that perfidious
rogue”, plotted and planned to go himself to the Continent, kidnap and if
necessary murder then and there his former friends or bundle them back to
England to stand trial and certain execution.It would appear from the book that
the reign of Charles was dominated by this manhunt. While sanctioning what
amounted to judicial murder, the regime was hardly a picture of stability. The
longer the show trial went on, the more nervous Charles and his ministers
became and recognised the growing danger of a rebellion. As Jordan and Walsh
point out when the mistake was made to give a public funeral to one of the
regicides, over twenty thousand people attended testifying the still
considerable support held for republican ideas.
Another striking aspect of the book is how people who were
once leading members in the Cromwellian era shifted their allegiances like some
people change a shirt.Charles Monck, who has always struck me as a person of
extreme opportunism, was “a turncoat of heroic proportions”. He had been
commander in chief of the English army in Scotland and an ardent follower of
Cromwell. But after being promised the unheard-of sum of £100,000 a year for
the rest of his life changed sides and decided to do the kings dirty work.One
severe weakness of the book is that it fails to convey how the regicides lost
power and a monarchy established albeit with the help of substantial sections
of the bourgeoisie. The book is absent as to the political and economic makeup
of the Charles ll regime. The trial far from just being about revenge was a
counter-revolution by sections of the bourgeoisie who were still closely
connected to the Monarchy.
Given the skill of the two writers, the failure to explain
the demise of the republicans of the Cromwellian era is a major weakness. Even
if the authors of the book are not sympathetic to Marxist historiography the
least, they could have done examined for instance James Holstun’s assertion
that “What turned the tide was the failure of bourgeois republican
revolutionaries to unify themselves militarily, and create an interest and
stake in the republic among the copyholders, soldiers, sailors and apprentices;
and the superior power of General Monck and the forces of Restoration in
shaping and controlling the army”.To conclude, despite the books many
weaknesses I would still recommend this serious attempt at explaining the
“Kings Revenge”. It is a cracking read and deserves a wide readership and
should be put on university reading lists on the subject.
[1] Geoffrey Robertson, QC is author of The Tyrannicide
Brief: The Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold (Vintage, 2005)
Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War –
Extracting Resources and Constructing Allegiance-ISBN:
978-1-4094-2093-4-Ashgate- Gavin Robinson
“But an animal only
produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces
one-sidedly, whilst man produces universally. It produces only under the
dominion of immediate physical need, whilst man produces even when he is free
from physical need and only truly produces in freedom therefrom. An animal
produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s
product belongs immediately to its physical body, whilst man freely confronts
his product. An animal forms objects only in accordance with the standard and
the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in
accordance with the standard of every species, and knows how to apply
everywhere the inherent standard to the object. Man therefore also forms
objects in accordance with the laws of beauty- Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts-(Marx, 1975: 276)
“all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in
the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too,
must become free.
Thomas Munzer
Horses played a significant economic, political, social and
cultural role in the English revolution. It is safe to say that they played a
bigger role than any other animal. Books on the relationship between horses and
people during Early Modern England are certainly rare and have almost become a
new historical genre.The book is based on Robinson’s extensive knowledge of the
subject and is solidly researched. While claiming to be a book primarily about
horses, it does examine methodologies and ideologies but does not claim to show
the causes of the English Civil war. In the introduction, Robinson makes the
point that the biggest names in British history have failed to explain why war
broke out.
This is a pretty big statement to make, especially when he
fails to back up his assertion. The book really could have done with less
rhetorical flourishes and more substantial examination and proof to back up
such a claim.Despite this annoying habit, Robinson’s book is a welcome addition
to a very small number of specialized books on the subject. The book is also
something of a breakthrough in the respect that the writer developed his art
through a series of blog articles[1]. It also counteracts the snobbish attitude
amongst some historians that history blogs are not really of a high standard or
worse are damaging to historical research.
The book is beautifully presented. It would seem that with
the development of rival eBook devices such as Kindle publishers like Ashgate
have raised their game regards the appearance of the books they publish.Where
does the book fit in with current historiography?. Robinson’s book is a
synthesis of revisionist thought from the last decade and should be categorized
more in the school of the post revisionist school of history. The book rejects
any form of determinist or economic methodology broadly associated with Marxist
historiography. It is a polemic against both Marxist and Whig historiography.
I would hardly call Robinson’s attack on Marxist
historiography major simply because he fails to go into any lengthy detail
aside from a few remarks. Robinson does not examine the huge output of major
figures such as Christopher Hill or Brian Manning.Robinson rejection of the
views of Jason Hribal is one of only a few comments on Marxist historiography.
A cursory view would have the reader believe that Hribal is closer to Robinson’s
viewpoint than he is to Marxism.It is concerning that Robinson has not followed
through on his research. Hribal’s article raises several questions. Hribal is
not an orthodox Marxist, and it has never been a Marxist position that horses
or animals, in general, are part of the worker’s movement.
Admittedly there has not been an outpouring of Marxist
writings on the subject which is a shame because it is an important one. One of
Hribal’s sources used is Joseph Proudhon, who was not a Marxist but an Anarchist.
Hribal’s notes “when Joseph Proudhon formalized his
conception of the working class, this 19th-century anarchist did not hinder
himself with categories of species. Under the Capitalist system, he witnessed
that the exploitation of humans and other animals were interconnected”.Proudhon
concluded that “the horse, who draws our coaches, and the ox who draws our
carts produce with us, but are not associated with us; we take their product
but do not share it with them.” “The animals and labourers whom we employ hold
the same relation to us. Whatever we do for them, we do, not from a sense of
justice, but out of pure benevolence.”[2]
What does Robinson share with these two writers? While it is
true that horses should be looked at from a class standpoint in that a horse
that belongs to a rich person leads a different life from that belonging to a
poor person. As Paul Larfargue noted “Horses are divided into distinct classes.
The equine aristocracy enjoys so many and so oppressive privileges, that if the
human-faced brutes which serve them as jockeys, trainers, stable valets and
grooms were not morally degraded to the point of not feeling their shame, they
would have rebelled against their lords and masters, whom they rub down, groom,
brush and comb, also making their beds, cleaning up their excrements and
receiving bites and kicks by way of thanks”. [3]
Lafargue was close politically to Joseph Proudhon and his
articles share a similar position on horses to the old anarchist. Both writers
were the forerunners of the modern animal right movement. Lafargue believed
like Hribal that animals should be seen as part of the working class.In his The
Rights of the Horse and the Rights of Man (1900) he makes this point “I make
you free,” so speak the Rights of Man to the labourer, “free to earn a wretched
living and turn your employer into a millionaire; free to sell him your liberty
for a mouthful of bread. He will imprison you ten hours or twelve hours in his
workshops; he will not let you go till you are wearied to the marrow of your
bones, till you have just enough strength left to gulp down your soup and sink
into a heavy sleep. You have but one of your rights that you may not sell, and
that is the right to pay taxes.” If you take out the rhetoric and class
content, this is not a million miles away from Robinson’s position.
No Marxist would advocate horses being seen in the same
historical sense as humans. It is certainly not Marx’s position in his Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts, “an animal only produces what it immediately
needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst man produces
universally. It produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need,
whilst man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly
produces in freedom therefrom. An animal produces only itself, whilst man
reproduces the whole of nature. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its
physical body, whilst man freely confronts his product. An animal forms objects
only in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it
belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance with the standard of
every species, and knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard to the
object. Man therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of
beauty.[4]
How does this compare with Robinson’s Viewpoint?. According
to the writer of the books, the jacket notes the “book uses the supply of
horses to parliamentary armies during the English Civil War to make two related
points. Firstly it shows how control of resources – although vital to success –
is contingent upon a variety of logistical and political considerations. It
then demonstrates how competition for resources and construction of
individuals’ identities and allegiances fed into each other”. It argues that
Allegiance was not a fixed underlying condition, but was something external and
changeable. Actions were more important than thoughts and to secure victory.
Both sides needed people to do things rather than feel vaguely sympathetic.
Furthermore, identities were not always self-fashioned but could be imposed on
people against their will, making them liable to disarmament, sequestration,
fines or imprisonment”.
The notes were fashioned by an unidentifiable writer but
must have been sanctioned by the author because they fit it in with Robinson’s
view regarding the English Civil War that “Actions were more important than
thoughts”.
Robinson’s book personifies the glorification of empiricism
that is extremely prevalent in current academic circles. He rejects the three
most important reasons why people took sides, namely class, economics and
politics. What is left after that is a philosophy of anything goes.Robinson
rejects the Marxist concept that social consciousness is determined by social
being and adopts a broadly Existentialist outlook. The book is heavily imbued
with this viewpoint. Again according to the blurb “this study poses fundamental
questions of identity construction, showing how culture and reality influence
each other. Through an exploration of Parliament’s interaction with local
communities and individuals, it reveals fascinating intersections between
military necessity and issues of gender, patriarchy, religion, bureaucracy,
nationalism and allegiance “.
Robinson does not like class-based terms like Royalist and
Parliamentarian. As Nick Poyntzconcurs in his review of the book,
“Parliamentarian’ and ‘Royalist’ are two of those words that it is easy to
throw around unthinkingly. Partly it is because they are such a convenient
shorthand for a set of concepts that are too complicated to express succinctly,
that we can forget the nuances that come with them. But as the introduction of
Horses, People and Parliament points out, it is also because they are bound up
with the particular way civil war allegiance has been defined in the twentieth
century “.[5]Robinson’s rejection of basic class terms is very bold. He never
really outlines what he would replace them with given that his arguments
against them are pretty flimsy. He also fails to explain why, for the last
three hundred years historians of very different political, social and class
backgrounds have been extremely comfortable with these common classifications.
He is not the first to challenge old terms. But as David
Underdown correctly points out, it has been difficult to do so.
As Underdown notes “there has been a continuing,
intimidating, torrent of books and articles on the broader subject of
puritanism in the years since Fire From Heaven came out. When I was writing
that book, some of the trendier members of the historical profession were
trying to ditch the terms’ Puritan’ and ‘Puritanism’ altogether. But a look at
any list of recent publications suggests they did not have much success. The
sceptics did make one useful contribution, though in requiring us to be more
careful about defining those terms before we use them”.[6]Poyntz himself
recognizes the enormity of challenging such fundamental conceptions “Essentialist
assumptions about identity are so deeply embedded in the English language that
they are difficult to challenge, or even recognize. It feels perfectly natural
to say that a person was royalist, and awkwardly unnatural to say that a person
did royalism “.
Despite Robinson’s revisionist outlook Marxism still has a
major part to play in our understanding the English Revolution. Dialectical
thinking still has an important part to play in understanding complex
historical problems.
As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky notes “The
fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that it wishes to content
itself with motionless imprints of a reality which consists of eternal motion.
Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations,
corrections, concretization, a richness of content and flexibility; I would
even say “a succulence” which to a certain extent brings them closer to living
phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage
of development. Not a workers’ state in general, but a given workers’ state in
a backward country in an imperialist encirclement, etc. Dialectical thinking is
related to vulgar in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still
photograph. The motion picture does not outlaw the still photograph but
combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. Dialectics does not
deny the syllogism but teaches us to combine syllogisms in such a way as to
bring our understanding closer to the eternally changing reality. Hegel in his
Logic established a series of laws: change of quantity into quality,
development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption
of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just
as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more
elementary tasks.[7]
One of the major charges against Marxist’ historiography is
that it puts forward a view that England witnessed a bourgeois revolution in
the 1640s. Revsionists counter this by saying that the bourgeoisie was on both
sides and that on numerous occasion, people switched allegiances. It is a
charge that Robinson agrees with.The Marxist historian Christopher Hill
counters this viewpoint saying “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 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 a
significant group in the society in which it comes into prominence”. Hill never
assumed that this was a chemically pure revolution. In fact, in his major
writings, he makes the point that large numbers of people fought and took sides
outside of purely economic reasons.
As Ann Talbot points out Hill “was sensitive enough to his
historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse
social backgrounds into a struggle against the king and well-grounded enough in
history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic
guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the
Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to
explain what they were doing”.[8]Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Robinson
book is the attack on anthropocentric historiography. According to Nick Poynzt
“Horses had their temperaments and did not always respond to human attempts to
control them. Given how essential horses were to civil war armies – not just
for cavalry, but for supply as well – their willingness or unwillingness to
comply could be just as important as human decisions about whether to provide
king or Parliament with resources. There are shades here of ‘for the want of a
nail’, not just in terms of how battles were fought but also in terms of how
resources were gathered”.
There are parts of the book which I have found hard to
digest and they honestly give me some concern. Throughout the book, Robinson
makes a number of references to the assertion that horses should be put on the
same level as humans and should even be “seen as agents in the civil wars” or
that the horses themselves held allegiances.For Robinson, the war has for too
long has been written from an anthropocentric standpoint. [9]The book manages
to stand on its head well over three hundred years of Civil war historiography.
To say that his viewpoint is controversial would be a gross understatement.
Another challenge to established historiography is his
adoption of gender studies. Robinson is heavily influenced by the work of
Rachel Weil.[10] According to her Wikipedia page Rachel Judith Weil 1959- is a
teacher and scholar, specializing in gender and culture in 17th and 18th
Century England.Gender studies form an important aspect of the Robinson book.
One task of the book is to establish gender studies as a crucial way of
explaining the Civil War. Following the lead set by Rachel Weil, Robinson says
“I am always happy to hear calls for more gender. I made it my third priority
after Allegiance and resources as Ann Hughes was already doing it, but there is
so much more that could be done. My only criticism of the Hughes book is that
it is very short for such a huge and under-researched aspect of the civil wars.
I was not sure if anyone would spot that feminist Easter egg in the index, but
it is what most history books should have if they are honest.”
Gender or women’s studies is a new type of historiography.
The recent proliferation of books and articles has many reasons. One major
factor being the growth of women historians who have started to explore this
previously under-researched subjects. Another no less important reason is that
women, in general, have a much-increased degree of political freedom and
economic independence than previous generations of women.Gender historiography
is a relatively new concept in which to study women’s role in history. It is
largely a by-product of the genre “history from below” instigated by the
Communist Party History Group. While producing some extremely valuable research
and publications, the replacing of gender over class in the study of historical
events was a move away from a classical Marxist approach.
Gender studies became especially strong within the History
Workshop movement. The growth was facilitated by such books such as E.P.
Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in the early 1960s provided
a platform for gender studies to grow.This coincided with the rise of
independent women historians and writers who “insisted that women’s experience
no longer be ‘hidden from history’. Sally Alexander and Anna Davin, ‘Feminist
History’, History Workshop Journal, no 1 Spring 1976; Barbara Taylor, Eve and
the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century, 1983.
According to studies, women make up nearly fifty per cent of
the English working population. They also have a degree of freedom not heard of
in previous generations. In other words, the origins of women history studies
appeared as a direct result of the struggle for social quality amongst women.To
conclude. The study of horses is important and under-researched aspect of the
English Civil war. The book is a bit messy in places and could have done with a
firmer editorial hand. I reject Robinson’s central argument that previous
historiography has been too anthropocentric. My approach remains determinedly
anthropocentric.
[1] http://www.investigationsofadog.co.uk/
[2] What is Property? By P. J. Proudhon
[3]
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52984/52984-h/52984-h.htm
[4] Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts-(Marx, 1975:
276).
[5]
mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/horses-people-and-parliament/
[6]See-www.dorchesteranglican.info/stpeters/johnwhite/jww/JWRevisited.p
[7] The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (December 1939)
Extract from A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party.
[8] These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill-By Ann Talbot 25 March 2003
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[9] Anthropocentric- regarding man as the most important and
central factor in the universe
[10] Sexual Ideology and Political Propaganda in England
1680-1714″. Also Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and
Politics in Restoration England” (1993).
Review: Oliver Cromwell: British Library Historic Lives by
Peter Gaunt the British Library Publishing Division (Sep 1 2004) ISBN-13:
978-0712348577
Peter Gaunt’s
biography of Oliver Cromwell is a well written, handsomely illustrated and the
product of substantial research. The book was well received by the general
reader though academic reviews were few and far between. Despite this fact, one
writer said, “this book is as disciplined, vivid and vigorous as the man it
celebrates”.
The book has only a hundred pages of text, with the rest of
it taken up by illustrations. Gaunts uses several portraits of Cromwell and
others well. The book also contains reproductions of letters and other
documents. It is clear that Gaunt has used his access to the British Library
well.Guant is extremely careful in his use of Cromwell’s letters mindful that
Cromwell’s early life is a minefield of historical inaccuracy. It is therefore
hoped that John Morrill’s new editions of Cromwell’s writings and speeches will
clear a lot up of the myths and inaccuracies surrounding Cromwell.
Gaunt like Barry Coward is a partisan historian when it
comes to Cromwell. Also like Coward, he was also a former chairman of The
Cromwell Association. As Stephen Roberts states “His Cromwell Association
credentials are a useful clue as to his approach. He is sympathetic to his
subject, seeing the lord general and the lord protector as one who achieved
much of value and who “always retained a radical edge and never became a
self-satisfied, conservative figure” (p. 9). Always inclined to give Cromwell
the benefit of the doubt–his defence of Cromwell in Ireland in 1649 is the
benchmark of Gaunt’s liberalism as it is in similar vindications by liberals
before him–Gaunt concludes by emphasising the “inherent decency of the man and
his regime “[1].
Guant’s book acknowledges that Cromwell was a leading figure
of the revolution but was not its main theoretician. Cromwell is correctly
portrayed by Gaunt as a deeply religious man. In the main Cromwell’s courageous
and farsighted political action was guided by those beliefs.As poet Andrew
Marvell famously wrote “If these the Times, then this must be the Man.
Moreover, well he therefore does, and well has guest, Who in his Age always has
forward prest: And knowing not where Heavens choice may light,Girds yet his
Sword, and ready stands to fight”.
The great Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay added
that Cromwell was “A force thus composed might, without injury to its
efficiency, be indulged in some liberties which, if allowed to any other
troops, would have proved subversive of all discipline. In general, soldiers
who should form themselves into political clubs, elect delegates, and pass
resolutions on high questions of state would soon break loose from all control
would cease to create an army, and would become the worst and most dangerous of
mobs. Nor would it be safe, in our time, to tolerate in any regiment religious
meetings at which a corporal versed in Scripture should lead the devotions of
his less gifted colonel, and admonish a back-sliding major. However, such was
the intelligence, the gravity, and the self-Command of the warriors whom
Cromwell had trained that in their camp a political organisation and a
religious organisation could exist without destroying a military organisation.
The same men who, off duty, were noted as demagogues and field preachers, were
distinguished by steadiness, by the spirit of order, and by prompt”.
One of the more controversial parts of the book is Guant’s
attitude towards the events in Ireland. Gaunt believes that Cromwell was acting
as any leading member of the new rising bourgeoisie would act. Cromwell being
deeply religious, responded to the persecution of Protestants in Ireland with
his form of justice against the Irish ruling elite and sections of the
population. He was reported to call them “Barbarous and bloodthirsty.” Perhaps
most importantly significant economic gains were made in the plunder of Ireland
by the English bourgeoisie. Cromwell himself invested heavily in the
colonisation of Ireland.It is perhaps that given the short nature of this book
that Gaunt cannot cover every part of Cromwell’s life and the stuff he does
write about must have only a preliminary nature about it.
According to Roberts “Cromwell’s attitude to the Scots is
skated over somewhat; they took the stage in the narrative only in 1644. The
Presbyterianism of the Scots is mentioned but not convincingly described, and
the appearance of the “so-called Presbyterians” (p. 59) of the House of Lords
and the House of Commons will doubtless convey something meaningful to those
conversant with the main themes of the period. However, with no exploration of
why “so-called,” or of how they relate to the other lot of Presbyterians north
of the border, much may well remain perplexing to the readers to whom this book
is addressed. The statement that Cromwell was “tolerant of Protestant beliefs”
but “hated Roman Catholicism” obscures as much as it reveals. In Gaunt’s
account, it was Cromwell and the army who dismissed the conservative MPs of the
Rump at the time of the dissolution of that parliament in 1653, but no mention
is made of the pressure Cromwell was under from the millenarians led by Thomas
Harrison and the threat these radicals represented to Oliver’s position.
Conclusion
This book is much a political history of the English Civil
War as a political biography. Disappointingly there one page of further
reading, It therefore clear that the book is aimed at the general reader rather
than a guide for students. This may have limited the sales of the book but is
not necessarily a bad thing. I will recommend the book as it is a good
introduction to the complex world of Oliver Cromwell
[1] Peter Gaunt. Oliver Cromwell. New York: New York
University Press, 2004. 144 pp. $22.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-3164-2.
Reviewed by Stephen Roberts (History of Parliament Trust, London)Published on
H-Albion (November, 2006)
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy
(Revolutionary Lives) Hardcover – 9 Nov. 2012 by John Gurney
Action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou
dost nothing ‘– Gerrard Winstanley.
Dr John Gurney is fast becoming a leading authority on the
Diggers and their leader Gerrard Winstanley. He is the author of a previous
book on the Diggers called Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English
Revolution and also the author of several papers on the Diggers. Gurney’s
latest book is a result of a paper published from 1994.[1] He regularly
lectures on Winstanley.
The book is a meticulously researched, scholarly and
well-presented. Gurney provides us with a good understanding of the origins of
the Digger movement. It has been praised for setting an “extremely high
standard for local histories of this sort and must rank alongside similar
studies such as Eamon Duffy’s acclaimed The Voices of Morebath.”Gurney’s
biography runs to just over 162 pages. It would be a mistake, however, to
believe that the book is academically or intellectually ‘light ‘. It is nothing
of the sort. Nor should it be treated as an introductory to Winstanley, the
reader to get the best out of this book should at least have a rudimentary
knowledge of the Digger leader and the Diggers struggle.Gurney’s introduction
sets the tone for the rest of the book in the respect that it attempts to place
his work in the context of previous ‘left-wing’ or ‘Marxist’ historiography.
The sign of a good book is that it tells us something new.
Gurney’s work can be seen as development on from the work of Christopher Hill
and others.It is well known that previous Marxist’s had written on the English
revolution. Gurney elaborates that the Russian revolutionaries paid particular
attention to the writings of Winstanley so much so that Vladimir Lenin the then
leader of the fledgling Soviet state issued a decree that a previous Tsarist
monument was to be changed with names of former revolutionaries replacing old
figures of earlier Russian history. Winstanley’s name appeared eighth on the
list.For their revolution, the Russian revolutionaries were able to draw on the
experiences of revolutionaries from England and France. Winstanley had no such
experience to draw upon. This, in some respect, shows why the revolutionaries
had such an empirical outlook.
On the plus side, the English revolutionaries were as Ann
Talbot explains “well-grounded enough in history to identify new and
revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as
the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood
historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were
doing”.[2]The book is well researched and for such a small work shows many
years of hard, painstaking research. The result is a very readable narrative.
The book is extremely informative and thought-provoking.It is perhaps only
recently that the words of Winstanley have been fully appreciated. Gerrard
Winstanley’s ‘extraordinarily rich body of writings’ were little read and even
less written upon between the years 1651 and the 1890s. It was only after an
explosive revolutionary era encompassing the late 19th and early 20th centuries
that his writings were systematically studied and written about. The first to
do so were the early Marxists and later the group of historians around the
Communist Party of Great Britain.
Gurney is clear that the study of Winstanley should be not
solely of historical value but must have a contemporary resonance. He says:
Today, knowledge of Winstanley is widespread, and he has become one of the
best-known figures from the period of the English Revolution. There have been
numerous plays, novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often
been cited as an inspirational figure by politicians of the left. More
specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained prescient, inspiring
generations of activists and social movements” his name he continues “has in
recent years also been invoked by freeganism, squatters, guerrilla gardeners,
allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs, greens and peace campaigners; and
both Marxists and libertarians have laid claim to him as a significant
precursor”.[3]
Knowledge of Gerrard Winstanley’s early life is a bit
sketchy. He was born 1609, and as one writer put it he was “one of the most
extraordinary and engaging figures to emerge during the English Revolution of
1640 – 60”.He was the son of an Edward Winstanley. In 1630 he moved to London and
took up an apprenticeship, and in 1638, he was a freeman of the Merchant
Tailors’ Company. His adult life is unremarkable he married Susan King, who was
the daughter of London surgeon William King, in 1639. It is clear that without
the English Civil War, his life would have moved at the same pedestrian pace as
before. But like many, his world was turned upside down. His business took a
beating during the early part of the war, and in 1643 he was made bankrupt. He
moved to Cobham, Surrey, where he found menial work as a cowherd.
It was at Cobham in Surrey that the Diggers movement was
founded. Winstanley believed that the land was a “common treasury for all”. He
began to recruit like-minded people and began to work the ground on St George’s
Hill in the summer of 1649.The Diggers were part of a group of men that sought
to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place
at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true ‘Ideologues of the
revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract thought. While the Diggers were
sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from their religion, they had no program
to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of
society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their
ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or that matter did the larger group the
Levellers constitute a mass movement. The contradiction between their concern
for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners
caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore
they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a
lot of the poor to be made more equitable.
Where does Gurney’s book fit in today’s historiography of the
English Revolution? Until quite recently little has been written on the Digger
movement. This has been largely down to the fact that over the last few decades
historiography on the English revolution has been dominated by a large group of
revisionist historians who have sought to move away from any Marxist
understanding of the English revolution.According to Michael Braddick,
revisionists have “have tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to
cast it in its terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over
the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical heroes”.[4]Given
that Mark Kishlansky is one of those arch revisionists mentioned by Braddick,
it seems a bit strange that Kishlanskywrote of the book “This is a clear-eyed
yet sympathetic account of one of the most baffling figures of the English
Revolution. Gurney’s painstaking research provides a wealth of new information
that is assembled into a highly readable narrative. An informative and
thought-provoking book.”
Kishlansky despite recommending Gurney’s book is keen to
downplay the role of Winstanley who according to him was “a small businessman
who began his career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain, and in
between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The years when the
world was turned upside down stand in the same relation to the course of
English history as Winstanley’s wild years either side of his fortieth birthday
does to his subsequent life as a churchwarden”.[5]Gurney’s work on the Digger’s
represents opposition to this revisionism. I am not saying that it accounts for
a new form of historiography, but it does mean that opposition to present-day
revisionism is beginning.It is also no accident that interest in Winstanley
coincides with one of the biggest crisis to the capitalist system we have
witnessed since the 1920s and 1930s.
Gurney’s book is invaluable when it starts to trace the
origins of Winstanley’s radicalism. Gurney does not subscribe to the theory
that it was solely down to the war radicalizing people such as Winstanley.
Gurney believes that radical views were being expressed all over the country
before the outbreak of civil war.In a previous essay, Gurney elaborates on why
the Digger’s achieved a level of local support in Cobham “Local support for the
Diggers may also have been connected with Cobham’s marked traditions of social
conflict. The manor of Cobham, a former possession of Chertsey Abbey, had
passed into the hands of Robert Gavell in 1566 and was to remain with his
family until 1708. During the later sixteenth century the Gavell family became
involved in a long and protracted series of disputes with their tenants. In a
case brought in the court of Requests by William Wrenn, a Cobham husbandman,
Robert Gavell was accused of overturning manorial customs and of infringing his
tenants’ rights, by seeking to extract more rent than was customarily paid, and
by spoiling the timber on Wrenn’s copyhold. He was also charged with attempting
to escape the payment of tax by shifting the burden on to his tenants, laying
‘a hevy burden uppon the poorer tennants contrarye to the Ancient usage,
equitie and Consciens’Actions against Robert Gavell and his son Francis were
resumed in the court of Chancery during the 1590s by tenants seeking to halt
the continued assault on manorial custom”.[6]
It has been suggested that Winstanley was proto-communist
and early Marxist but as Geoff Kennedy commented in his Digger Radicalism and
Agrarian Capitalism Winstanley should also be placed in the context of his
times. Winstanley’s thought and writings were profoundly religious, and as the
former Marxist writer, Cliff Slaughter said “for the understanding of some of
the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity. What
is the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs
about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of
acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the ‘Utopians’ wrong in
thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of
social relations to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination
of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx
emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. ‘The
criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.”[7]
To conclude, I would say that this no hagiography. Gurney is
not blind to Winstanley’s weaknesses. He outlines that some of Winstanley’s
ideas were not progressive, or that his attitude towards women’s emancipation
was not the same towards men. Having said that Gurney’s book has the look of a
labour of love. The author even goes as far as to include his photos with the
text. Gerrard Winstanley is an important book and should be read by academics
and the general public alike and for all those in favour of a “common treasury
for all”.
[1] Gurney, J, 1994 Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger
Movement in Walton and Cobham, Hist J, 37(4), 775–802
[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
[3]
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-08-31/diggers-land-and-direct-activisim/
[4]
https://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/07/the-digger-years.html
[5] Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversives and
Visionaries Who Foretold the …
By Christopher Rowland
[6]
http://www.academicroom.com/article/gerrard-winstanley-and-digger-movement-walton-and-cobham
[7] Religion and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labour Review
Vol 3 No 3 June 1958
W.H.Coates on the ‘Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century
England’
(This is an article written by Chris Thompson. I do not know
much about Wilson H Coates but I would like to publish Chris’s article here.
The Storm over the Gentry is a complex debate and although it took place over
half a century ago the debate is still relevant to today’s historiography on
the English revolution.)The ferocious debates over the fortunes of the English
aristocracy and gentry that dominated historical debates over the origins and
course of the English Revolution in the 1940s and 1950s were played out by the
mid-1960s. They are now distant memories, best known probably for the
methodological issues they raised and polemical edge to the exchanges between
R.H.Tawney and Lawrence Stone on one side and Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper
on the other. Undergraduates and, perhaps, postgraduates are most likely to
come across this disputed territory when reading J.H.Hexter’s discussion of the
‘storm over the gentry’ and R.C.Richardson’s comments in his work on the
historiography of the Revolution. Assessments by other scholars – by
W.H.Coates, Christopher Hill and Perez Zagorin, for example, – are less
familiar or even forgotten.
This neglect of their views lends them interest.
The first of these figures, Willson H.Coates, contributed an
essay on the ‘Analysis of Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England’ to
the festschrift published in Wallace Notestein’s honour in 1960. It had
originally been given at the meeting of the American Historical Association in
December, 1956 to which Hexter and Zagorin had also given papers. It would have
been fascinating to have been present then as a fly on the wall. In its
apparently revised version, Coates began by addressing the claims of an
American historian, Alexander Thomson, on the significance of the crises
through which England passed in the seventeenth-century before moving on to
discuss the rival claims of English historians since then. I am not going to
comment on his discussion of Alexander Thomson’s views but rather to focus my
attention on his analysis of the claims and counter-claims of Tawney,
Trevor-Roper and others, which formed the bulk of his essay.
Coates’s analysis focused initially on the Whig
interpretation of the English Revolution. Whigs, he argued, viewed it as
“essentially a war of ideas concerning religion and politics which rent
families and divided members of the ruling gentry class. The seventeenth
century was the crucial period in the emergence of constitutional government
and of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Whether or not such a
result was the intent of the Puritans, the Parliamentarians, the Cromwellians
or the Restoration Whigs, it was – partly because powerful opponents of their
particular views survived – their main historical achievement.” There is little
or nothing in this to which Whig historians from Hallam and Macaulay to
G,M,Trevelyan might have objected.
The most formidable assault on the Whig version of the
English Revolution had, however, been made by R.H.Tawney according to Coates.
He had found the cause of this political upheaval in antecedent social change
and had described the economic transformations in England after 1540 to which
political institutions had had to be adjusted to meet the requirements of a new
social structure. Coates was not, however, convinced by this argument. Tawney’s
hypothesis was not adequately linked in his view to the events in the
early-1640s it was meant to explain. Tawney himself had conceded as much in his
introduction to Brunton and Pennington’s book on the members of the Long
Parliament’s House of Commons when he admitted that, as far as the members of the
lower House were concerned, divisions between Royalists and Parliamentarians
had little to do with diversities of economic interest and social class: even
so, Tawney evidently still hankered after an explanation based on economic
divisions amongst the ruling elite in and after 1642. Coates’s conclusion was
that Tawney’s pre-occupation with underlying causation prevented him from
appreciating that there had been other possible outcomes to the events of
1637-1642 and that he had thus failed to account for the English Revolution.
Essentially, Coates stated or re-stated the standard
objection of historical empiricists to all forms of economic and social
determinism, namely, that the connection between events and their assumed
causes had not been made. Lawrence Stone’s progress from a view of the
Revolution as “inevitable” in 1948 to one in which the old regime was
overthrown peacefully in 1640-1641 and subsequently on to one in which the
political struggle could no longer be explained primarily in economic terms was
discussed more summarily. Despite his remaining reservations about Stone’s
approach to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Coates was apparently sympathetic to
this evolution in Stone’s thinking.
He was much more critical of Trevor-Roper’s hypothesis about
the fortunes of the declining and mere gentry. The idea that the Country-house
radicalism of the mere gentry might lead either to Catholic desperation or
Puritan Independency struck him as implausible. Indeed, the historical
irresponsibility of this kind of diagnosis deserved to be ‘anatomized’ itself
in the Trevor-Roper manner. Moreover, neither the declining gentry nor the
Puritan Independents could be held to have controlled events between 1637 and
1642. And those M.P.s recruited to the House of Commons after the start of the
Civil Wars were scarcely more radical than those elected in the autumn of 1640.
Changes in the composition of county committees in a more radical direction
after 1642 were hardly enough to vindicate Trevor-Roper’s contentions. Once again,
the substance of Coates’s objections appear to lie in the inability of such
claims to sustain a secure political analysis.
Interestingly enough, Coates had relatively little, if
anything, to say about the validity of manorial counts as guides to changing
economic fortunes or on the relative rewards of Court office compared to those
from landownership that had preoccupied his colleagues in England. He was not
opposed in principle to deploying insights gained into the operation of
economic and social forces but thought that the dialectical methods of Tawney
and Trevor-Roper belonged to “a kind of scholastic world of twentieth-century
economic history.” Coates preferred the complex analysis to be found in
C.V.Wedgwood’s narrative works and seventeenth-century realities presented in
those of William Haller. “Major historical changes can be analysed only on
assumptions of multiple causation and the intricate interdependence of a
succession of events.”
Coates did, however, have his own analytical framework to
suggest. Three categories of conflict in seventeenth-century England might be
distinguished. First of all, there was the “continuous social conflict” of
interest to economic historians. A good deal was known about the price
revolution of 1540-1640, about the expansion of banking, commerce and industry,
the sale of Crown and former monastic lands and the shifting patterns of
property ownership among the aristocracy and gentry, industrialists, merchants
and yeomen. “Innumerable shifts in property divided members of a class, cut
across the well-demarcated class lines and effected new combinations of
interest” even if the social revolution was a silent one incapable of
large-scale organization. Such vast social changes did not culminate in one
single historical event but could be seen, for example, in the political
legislation of the Long Parliament in 1641 and in the uncontested sway of
mercantilist doctrines later in the century. This category of social conflict
had strong economic roots and was “closely related to the emergence of modern
Western capitalism.” Calvinism, as Weber and Tawney had argued, placed an
emphasis of prudence, industry and frugality, which were the appropriate
ideological tools for the accumulation of wealth, including land. It was, Coates
claimed, “a moulding factor in economic conflict and change.”
The second distinct category identified by Coates concerned
the issues contemporaries thought they were fighting about, i.e. over the roles
of the royal prerogative, of Parliament and the judiciary as well as the
character of the State Church. In essence, the nineteenth-century picture of
the conflict was right although the part of the Tories in the post-1688
settlement needed to be recognised alongside that of the Whigs.Finally, there
was “the real class conflict that loomed up in the mid-seventeenth century”
with rising demands from the lower classes articulated by the Levellers and the
Diggers. Behind these radical movements lay social and economic discontent. But
they were premature and hopeless: the threat of social revolution was easily
crushed. Even so, these movements had drawn on intellectual and social
circumstances that permitted free discussion and the democratic tendencies of
English Puritanism. Religious ideas and concepts of natural law as well as a
selective reading of history and law fashioned Levellers’ demands.
What remained to be explained was the relationship between
the two main factors in these conflicts, the political and the religious. In
1641, men were concerned with both: by 1688, they were obviously more secularly
minded.
The ground upon which Coates chose to stand was clearly
demarcated. He saw the economic and social changes of the period up to the
English Revolution as critical to its explanation and focused on the influence
of Calvinism and the rise of Capitalism as fundamental. Broadly speaking, he
accepted the Whig interpretation of political and religious conflicts in the
course of the seventeenth-century and an explanation in terms of class conflict
for the appearance of the Levellers and Diggers in the late-1640s. The idea of
an abortive revolution from below would have appealed to Christopher Hill.
But the objections Coates had made against Tawney’s case for
the ‘rise of the gentry’ could have been made with equal validity against his
own analytical framework. The economic and social changes he postulated in the
century before 1640 were not linked either to the key events of 1637-1642 or to
the subsequent period. His approach was based on the old claims of Marx, Weber
and Tawney for Calvinism and the rise of Calvinism. This was the Tawney thesis
shorn of its untenable statistics and without its analytical failings.Secondly,
of course, Coates gave succour to the Whig interpretation that economic and
social explanations were supposed to have rendered redundant. He himself shared
the presuppositions of economic and social determinism at the same time as he
protested against such preconceptions. Logically, he could not begin by making
such a protest and then end by offering a synthesis of the two.
Finally, there is the matter of his use of the language of
‘class’ and of ‘class conflict’. Contemporaries did not use such terminology
and the consensus of historical opinion is that attempts to apply these terms
to seventeenth-century English society have failed, although some, if not very
many, historians believe they can be deployed in this way. When Coates wrote
that Royalists and Parliamentarians alike found “the rising demands from the
lower classes were ominous” and that the Levellers and Diggers constituted a
“social revolutionary movement”, he was using anachronistic language and
testifying to his own antique intellectual equipment.This is why this essay
from a mature historian in his prime was so conservative. It is in part
confused. It is in part confusing because it has nothing new to offer. The
powerful stimulus that the ‘storm over the gentry’ had already given to studies
of the origins and course of the English Revolution in economic and social
history, in county and urban history was never recognised by Coates. That,
perhaps, more than anything explains why his comments have languished in
obscurity for so long.
Comrade Jacob [Paperback] David Caute Panther Books; New
edition (Dec 1973).
‘The power of property was brought into creation by the
sword’, Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1676)
“Thus,” to quote Marx again, “thus were the agricultural
people, firstly forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes,
turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely
terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.”
[Capital] Karl Marx
David Cautes 1961 novel Comrade Jacob is about the struggle
undertaken by Gerard Winstanley to create a “common treasury for all” during
the English revolution. Caute’s book is one of the better novels based on the
English revolution.
While Paul Lay perceptively remarks about another very good
historical novel The Daughter of Time by Josephine Yey “The historical novel
when it is this good, this thoroughly researched, has become a means of
legitimate historical inquiry.” The same could be said of Caute’s novel.
David Caute is not only a gifted novelist but playwright,
historian, journalist and essay writer. He imbues his writing with a strong
left-wing sentiment. As one writer states he “brings a broad knowledge of
European (mainly French) intellectual traditions into English fiction. He is
one of the most intellectually stimulating novelists of recent decades in
England–a “public” rather than a “private “writer”.
Caute’s novel is set in the high point of the English
revolution. A group of disaffected ex-New Model Army soldiers and others along
with wives and children, led by Gerard Winstanley have become disillusioned by
the course of the civil war under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell. The group
decides to take over some land at St Georges Hill in Surrey. They plant crops
and graze cattle to survive.
Their mission was to develop and practice a primitive form
of communism. The settlement expressed in simple terms a growing disgust and
protest by sections of both the lower middle class and sections of an early
working class at the rapidly growing social inequality that existed during the
civil war. Their commune was met with swift and violent punishment, and
eventually, they were defeated.
Although written in 1965 the book and the subject matter
still resonate today in that the same that the issues that appear in the book
such as the nature of democracy, social inequality and the rapacious nature of
private property are still topics that provoke debate and civil unrest today.
How else would you explain that despite the passage of
nearly four hundred years, people are still violently evicted from the land for
protesting at social injustice?.In an article which could have described a
scene 400 hundred years ago, the Guardian writer George Monbiot says this
“Hounded by police and bailiffs, evicted wherever they stopped.
They did not mean to settle here. They had walked out of
London to occupy disused farmland on the Queen’s estates surrounding Windsor
Castle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that didn’t work out very well. But after
several days of pursuit, they landed two fields away from the place where
modern democracy is commonly supposed to have been born.[1]
David Caute recently pointed out that St George’s Hill in
Surrey is now home to some the most expensive real estate in England “Here
opulent private properties sit untouchable behind security gates and
surveillance cameras. It was not always so. In 1649, as the civil war drew to a
close and Charles I stepped out on to a Whitehall balcony to face the
executioner, the landowners of St George’s Hill were confronted by an influx of
nightmare neighbours, the so-called Diggers”.[2]
The leader Gerrard Winstanley, advanced their claims in the
name of social justice. He also called for the end to “Norman yoke” which he
blamed for all of England’s troubles.
The novel is mostly told through words and eyes of
Winstanley, part academic book part novel. While the book, unfortunately, has
been left a little on the shelf, the subject matter has seen a significant
renaissance. It is only recently that a systematic study of Winstanley has
started to emerge. The recent publication of his collected works is one
indication of the trend to restore Winstanley to his place as one of the most
prominent figures of the English revolution.
He was a figure that according to Christopher Hill, who
turned the world upside down. His form of utopian communism went further than
the Levellers in both actions and words. The egalitarian nature of his
philosophy was captured in his pamphlet “The New Law of Righteousness,” written
in 1648. “Selfish imaginations,” he said had lead one man to rule over another.
“But everyone shall put their hands to till the earth and bring up cattle, and
the blessing of the earth shall be common to all,” “When a man hath need of any
corn or cattle, take from the next store-house he meets with. There shall be no
buying and selling, no fairs or markets, but the whole earth shall be the
common Treasury for every man.”
The Diggers and Levellers were part of a group of people
that sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were
taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true
‘Ideologues of the revolution’. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor,
which stemmed from their religion, they had no program to bring about social
change, they never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class
outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage
did the Diggers or that matter did the larger group the Levellers constitute a
mass movement.
The contradiction between their concern for the poor and
their position of representatives of the small property owners caused some
tension. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore they
accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a lot of
the poor to be made more equitable.
Caute was a man of the left and the novel reflects Caute’s
academic upbringing as a student of Christopher Hill, as Caute says “I became
acquainted with the Diggers in Oxford University tutorials with the great
historian of our 17th-century upheavals, Christopher Hill, who at that juncture
was severing his links with the Communist party in the wake of the Hungarian
Revolution. Out of this came a novel, Comrade Jacob, published in the spring of
1961. But how to climb into the heads of Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Ranters
and the other mushrooming sects? We find it easier, surely, to understand the
strictly secular doctrines of Jacobins and Bolsheviks. I divided the
storytelling between Winstanley’s own self-righteous narrative and scenes in
which his actions and personality are viewed through a more skeptical authorial
lens. Much of it was mere conjecture – the evidence is hazy. But this haze,
which became the oxygen of the novel, was later lost in the film version”.[3]
After writing the book, Caute says he was approached by some
people offering to make the book into film, But Caute stated that “The
recurrent problem in these adaptations during the 1960s and 70s was the erosion
of two central themes of the novel by the partisan passions of the New Left.
Winstanley’s mystical religious fervour went out of the window – he was always
found on his feet rather than his knees. Also defenestrated was the rising
personal power this opinionated prophet exercised among his poor followers, and
how his “moral parsonage” may have entered his soul. In the stage and screen
adaptations he was to be found striding out of a socialist realist manual, a
clear-headed tribune of the people, a steadfast hero unburdened by the shadow
of Esau. The lessons of Orwell’s Animal Farm did not surface”.
Perhaps the most famous “use “of Caute’s book is the film
Winstanley by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. Caute is heavily critical of
some shortcomings in the movie. Having seen the film and read the book, I am in
agreement with Caute. I like the film it has great merit and is stunningly
photographed but as Caute said the religious/political aspects of Winstanley
are heavily downplayed.
When asked by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, to use the
book Caute said yes but only if he could write the film script myself. Caute
bitterly regretted it and “discovered that screenwriters do not count for much.
Not until I was shown the final product did I realize what had been going on. I
duly withdrew my screenwriting credit”.
Caute criticism was that Winstanley while being a “vivid
commentary on the physical condition of 17th century rural England”, it was
“reluctant to penetrate the strong religious motivations of the time.
Winstanley believed that to know the secrets of nature is to know the works of
God within the creation. This extends to the characters. I make no great claims
for my novel in this regard, but it did attempt to convey individuals’
sometimes perverse changes of mood and motivation. This is indeed retained in
the person of the army commander, Lord General Fairfax, but Winstanley, the
eponymous hero of the film, remains from start to finish a decent, upstanding,
strangely well-spoken Left Book Club idealist. The rough edges of a
Lancastrian, the spiritual torment, the mood swings between pride and humility,
Winstanley’s mounting confusions about God and Reason, have utterly gone”.
The book also has its weaknesses. It should not be seen as a
verbatim account of the role of the Diggers in the English Revolution. Caute
only touches upon some significant events that could have been expanded without
ruining the book. More could have been made of the Putney debates which are
very briefly mentioned in the book. A detailed look at these discussions would
have given a far broader and objective assessment of Winstanley’s role in the
debate over the franchise.
Caute could have also developed more the religious and more
importantly, the political divide between the Presbyterian and Independents. It
should not be lost that the people that sought the Diggers eviction were mostly
Presbyterians; Lord Fairfax was after all heavily on the side of the Independents.
To conclude, despite its shortcomings, the book is a must-read for anyone
interested in the radicals groups of the English revolution. It is one of the
better historical novels to examine the revolution
[1] The Promised Land July 16, 2012 This is the fate of
young people today: excluded, but forbidden to opt out. By George Monbiot,
published in the Guardian 17th July 2012[2]
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/oct/17/david-caute-winstanley-comrade-jacob
[3] Looking back in regret at Winstanley David Caute
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 October 2008
55 Days by Howard Brenton – Nick Hern Books 2012
“We are not just
trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country.”
Howard Brenton’s short play deals with the 55-day military
coup in the mid-1600s when Oliver Cromwell’s army took control of Parliament
and moved to put King Charles Ist on trial for treason. The book works on many
levels. While just shy of one hundred pages, it nonetheless is a substantial
historical work.Brenton is correct to centre the play on the relationship
between Charles I and Cromwell. Brenton’s heavy emphasis on the struggle of
Cromwell to reach an agreement with the King is, to a certain extent accurate
but Brenton takes a few liberties with the historical record.
Some reviews have correctly picked up on the point that
Brenton uses the past to analyse the present. Like a Bertolt Brecht play, it
does shows the conflict between theory and action, as individuals and parties
debate the future of the sovereignty of Parliament. As Michael Billington says
“the real pleasure lies in seeing a pivotal moment in English history presented
with such fervent dramatic power.”[1]
The book like the play itself is demanding, and it is
advisable to have at least a working knowledge of the English revolution in
order not only to understand but enjoy the play. As one critic put it “if you
do a bit of homework first, this is an evening that grips.”The play is
historically accurate and correctly portrays the differences that existed over
the judicial murder of a king. Brenton is clear on the point that the killing
of the King was a necessary step by the bourgeoisie to clear the way for its
rule and establish a parliamentary democracy.It is clear from the reviews of
the play that the historical controversy surrounding the English revolution
still generates heat even today. One reviewer described Cromwell as a
“thundering hypocrite who claims to be an instrument of God’s will, while
craftily packing the commissioners who will pass sentence on the King with yes-men.
Charles I, in contrast, is at least consistent in his belief that he is
divinely appointed.”
The play has certain objectivity in that Brenton makes us
see two sides of the war. Brenton’s inclusion of the Levellers in the form of
their leader John Lillburne is a bit of a surprise until you have a look at
Brenton’s radical sympathies. Brenton is not averse to collaborating with
modern radicals such as Tariq Ali. Brenton’s collaboration with a political
scoundrel of the calibre of Ali was not one of his best decisions. Not
surprisingly Brenton was heavily attacked by right-wing sections of the media
as Janelle Reinelt relates that “in the late 1990s, Brenton endured a drubbing
in the British press from which he is only now emerging.
It seems that taking on the new Labour government early in
its first term was considered to be in bad taste, and satire, an ancient genre
of dramatic writing that Brenton had earlier successfully mixed in with more
“serious” dramas, was now considered terrible writing. Brenton formed a group
called Stigma with longtime friends and collaborators Tariq Ali and Andy de la
Tour to shake up the British electorate by making them laugh at the expense of
the newly triumphant New Labourites. Ugly Rumors (1998), the first of three
plays over three years attempted by Stigma, drew savage criticism from the
press. Even Michael Billington, the Guardian critic whose left-leaning views
and intelligent theatrical judgment usually serve as a reliable bell-weather
wrote, “you feel it is still too early to accuse the Government of some kind of
grand betrayal”.[2]
The inclusion of the Levellers is a brave move given current
historical revisionism’s hostility to the Levellers being included in the
historical drama that was the English revolution. One minor criticism of the
play is that Brenton could have developed Lilburnes opposition to the
regicide.The play at the Hampstead Theatre has come into criticism for the use
of modern dress. Charles is suited with a Vandyke collar and cane, yet others
like Cromwell are dressed like something out of the 1940s. Some critics have
said this is to emphasise the middle-class nature of the revolt. I am sure that
if current historians had reviewed the book and play. I feel a different
interpretation would be forthcoming.
Perhaps the most important and historically significant part
of the play is the meeting of the two main protagonists Cromwell and the King.
The scene is invented as the two did not meet during the trial. Although they
did meet once, before the Civil War. Cromwell was in a Parliamentary group that
went to Charles with a petition.I am not against a counterfactual argument or
the use of an artistic license. Friedrich Schiller, used it to tremendous
effect when he invented a meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots,
Brenton adds a fictional scene in which Cromwell desperately tries to persuade
Charles Ist to save his life.[3]
The problem I have is that Brenton portrays his characters
too much as individuals and not really in the context of the time. While it is
true that Cromwell may have wanted a compromise with the King at an earlier
time, there were larger objective forces that were moving Cromwell at this
time. Cromwell was enough of a politician to know that at that moment to move
against the army, which was the most radical force in the country would have
been suicidal. The army was far to the left of the Levellers who at that stage
were the revolutions left wing.
To conclude, there is no doubt that Brenton is a gifted
writer and director. His 55 days is well worth going to see. Brenton has a
significant grasp of history. His play as one writer puts it “provides an
insight into the pivotal, tumultuous historical background to the drama, and
the men who embodied it.Brenton said “recently I met a Frenchman in London and
we fell to talking about the high drama of the climax of the French Revolution:
the struggle between Danton and Robespierre. ‘In this country, you don’t
remember you also had a revolution,’ he said, adding, rather waspishly, ‘and
you don’t realise you still live with the consequences’.[4]It is true, the
modern-day English bourgeoisie does not like to be reminded of its
revolutionary history. The same goes for some historians who go as far as to
deny a revolution took place. It is good that people like Brenton reminds them
and us of this revolutionary past.
[1]
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/oct/25/55-days-review
[2] The “Rehabilitation” of Howard Brenton- Janelle Reinelt
Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 51, No. 3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 167-174
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stuart_(play)
[4] Howard Brenton: A forgotten revolution – the historical
context to 55
Dayshttp://nickhernbooksblog.com/2012/10/25/howard-brenton-a-forgotten-revolution-the-historical-context-to-55-days/
The Impact of the English Civil Wars (A History Today Book)
[Paperback] J.S. Morrill (Editor) 1991
Like many other
aspects of the history of the English Civil War, its impact on society,
politics and the economy has caused serious disagreements among historians.
While a substantial minority (albeit in the past) have said it is impossible to
ignore or deny that the civil war did have some impact and that changes did
occur in the social, economic and political superstructure, others have played
down appreciably the consequences and some have even tried to deny that social
changes were crucial partly determining the outcome of the war.
Certainly, over the last quarter of a century, it has been
highly fashionable to question the social context of the civil war. In the
book, The Causes of the English Civil War p117 Ann Hughes says this changing
traditional fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of
sources covering early modern social history. In 1965 Lawrence Stone published
Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas Barry Coward
produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The
coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter
work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation at the
beginning of modern England.
The New Social History of Historiography appeared in the
early 1970s. According to some historians it was perhaps the last major
historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical
phenomenon known as the English Civil War. Before the 1970s, Social History had
mostly been limited to a study of everyday life. During the last thirty odd
years, the subject has come to prominence because some aspects of it have
become the bête noir of some revisionist historians. The most positive side of
the new history is that it brought into the public domain the lives of working
people or the poor who had largely been ignored by historians. On the downside
this, new history became divorced from any form of economic or materialist
explanation of the civil war.
This collection of essays comes predominantly from
historians who in one way or another question the impact of the war with the
sole exception of John Walters. This revisionist historiography has taken on
many forms, but its primary component is hostility to any kind of Marxist
historiography. Given John Morrill’s editorial role in preparing this
collection of the essay, it is important to understand his take on these
events. He was clearly influenced by the New Social History historiography in
an interview he describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the
forefront of the group “So there came along the new social history which opened
up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things
to happen for my period was the work which is most naturally associated with
Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews,
returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the Wrightson revolution
indeed, in the way in which social history is made, had an enormous impact on
those of us who were more interested in high politics. I mean modern politics,
constructed high politics. Wrightson’s importance for my work is again
something that people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally,
in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.
In his introduction, John Morrill is correct to point out
while there is general agreement amongst historians of what to call the events
in France around 1789 or 1917 in Russia there is little agreement as to what to
call the revolutionary events in 1640s England. A reader coming to these events
for the first time will find out that this problem is down to many factors. A
major one being the political bias of the historian. Another is the sheer
complexity of the historical crisis that gripped the English state. The book is
recommended in the sense that it does give the reader a broad range of
differing views albeit absent is a Marxist explanation but more on that later.
The book is simple in design but has a generous supply of fantastic
illustrations which in themselves are worth further exploration. Chapter one is
by Charles Charlton and called The Impact of the fighting. Charlton begins by
assessing the numbers of dead and wounded during the conflict. Another ground
for disagreement. Charlton highlights one of the biggest problems is that when
dealing with primary sources regarding causalities these are open to bias
depending on which side they came from?.
In a striking passage in his memoirs Richard Baxter “said he
watched the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the
Parliament. Baxter witnessed fierce fighting. Facing defeat, the Royalists
panicked. Standing next to Baxter was Major Thomas Harrison. As the
Parliamentary army charged the Royalists fled, Baxter heard him ‘with a loud
voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had
been in a rapture.’According to D H Pennington, “it was bloodiest conflict in
relative terms in English history” crops and land were seized; cattle and horses
were taken. Pennington makes the point that the Royalists were often more
brutal than the Parliamentarians.Another useful source on the impact of the
civil war can be found in Steven Porter’s book while careful not to exaggerate
the destruction he has some relevant statistical data on the scale of the
impact of the civil war. 150 towns and 50 villages suffered destruction of
property. According to the House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers,23 Sept.
1648 “…miserable it is to see the multitudes of inhabitants and their children
flocking in the streets of the bordering towns and villages and have not a
house to putt their heads therein, whereby to exercise their calling.”
Taunton was according to Clarendon a third of the town was
destroyed by fire, but according to Sprigge a flourishing city was all but
destroyed. Some books have come out recently, which contain important sources
of eyewitness accounts of the civil war. One such is J Adair By The Sword
Divided highlighted one particular aspect which was the development of social
advancement inside the Army and service in the armies of Parliament certainly
provided opportunities for social advancement. At first, the rival armies were
officered by men of much the same social status, but gradually new people from
the middle, lower middle and artisan classed moved into positions of
responsibility, both on committees that ran the war and in the wider army. John
Hampden’s Shepherd, Thomas Shelbourne, rose to be colonel of Cromwell regiment
of Ironsides and there were similar stories. The more conservative Puritan
Gentry objected to their newcomers as much as on social grounds as on account
of their often unorthodox or radical religious views.
Forced requisitioning took place but a lot of goods were
paid for at market prices. Adair says while there was “decay of life” there was
also opposite to this massive growth of profits for many people. Also, things
such as the legal system remained relatively healthy and survived unscathed. In
the London, the impact of the civil war is hard to assess in many respects
everyday life carried on as normal. London also avoided sack or siege, however,
emergency wartime powers were resented by large sections of the population. Its
economy was vital for the New Model Army and this state of affairs led one
Royalist to lament “if posterity shall ask who pulled the crown from the king’s
head said it was proud unthankful schismatically, rebellious, blood City of
London.”
Charlton who came from a military background is particularly
keen on military matters but when it comes to a more in-depth understanding of
why people fought and how the war came about the chapter is very light. People
on both sides of the war “chose deliberately which side they fought on.Chapter
Two the Impact on Government by David L Smith. Smith seems to argue that the
civil war was largely a defensive maneuver by parliament against a corrupt and
inept monarchy. Smith believes that no appreciable changes occurred during the
civil war and protectorate and we quickly move onto a united monarchy after
Cromwell’s death.
Chapter 3 The Impact of Puritanism is by John Morrill. The
chapter is well written, and Morrill argues his point well, but a lot more
could have been said on this subject. The Puritan religion did have a material
basis. For the understanding of some of the great problems of human history,
the study of religion is a necessity. Cliff Slaughter posed this question “What
is the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs
about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of
acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the ‘Utopians’ wrong in
thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of
social relations to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination
of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx
emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. ‘The
criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.’
Suffice to say this is not Morrill’s position. Therefore I
find his analysis on Puritanism a little one sided. Also, there appears to be
an absence of struggle in Morrill’s chapter. Next, to nothing is made of the
differing radical Puritan groups that were outside mainstream Puritan
politics.This is the history of the victors as Christopher Hill would have
said. Little is mentioned of radical sects such as the Ranters, who flourished
in England at the time of the Puritan Revolution. While it is generally accepted
that there was not a massive amount of unrest and protest during the civil war.
John Morrill has made the point that changes in social and economic policy were
mostly controlled by the middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented
by this class.
However there was a tangible fear amongst sections of the
middle class who feared the little people As Lucy Hutchinson writes with
disdain, “almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with
like factious little people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied
out of their command, some oppressed by a particular sort of individuals in the
House whom, to distinguish from the most honourable gentlemen, they called
worsted stocking men”. Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were
increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness,
particularly amongst the lower sections that to have a say in these changes
they must organize through some kind of political organization.
The ideas of these sects represented the views of the lower
strata of society. Their ideas of wider democracy and equality were an anathema
to the victorious upper-middle classes. It was as necessary for Cromwell to
crush the Ranters as to liquidate Lilburne’s Levellers and Winstanley’s
Diggers. A few selections from their tracts will show their lack of appeal to
class so enamored of compromise as the British bourgeoisie. Coppe, their finest
spokesman, addresses the propertied classes thus: ‘Mighty men! … Those that
have admired, adored, idolized, magnified, set you up, fought for you, ventured
goods, and good name, limb and life for you, shall cease from you.’ ‘For this
Honour, Nobility, Gentility, Propriety, Superfluity. &c. hath (without
contradiction) been the Father of hellish horrid pride, arrogance, haughtiness,
loftinesse, murder, malice, of all manner of wickednesse and impiety; yea the
cause of all the blood that ever hath been shed. from the blood of the
righteous Abell, to the blood of the last Levellers that were shot to death.’
Chapter IV The Impact on Political Thought by Glen Burgess.
For a substantial part of the 20th-century civil war, historiography was
dominated by Marxist historians who were clear that social and economic changes
did bring about changes in people’s thinking. Burgess in this chapter does not
agree that there is a connection what Marxists have called base and
superstructure. As Karl Marx explained in his Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy (1859): he believed that: “In the social production of their
existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, who are independent of
their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage
in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society,
the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and
to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the general process of social, political, and
intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a
certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come
into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely
expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within
the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development
of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole,
immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always
necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in
short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about
himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from
the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the
social forces of production and the relations of production”.
Burgess goes on to explain that previous approaches to
ideological struggles in the Revolution were expressed through an examination
of pamphlets of the 1640s. While recognition that the literature was partisan
they were taken “at face value, as part of a philosophical debate.” This
approach, says Burgess, may be “inherently distorting.” Burgess believes that
politics were fluid and that no one really stuck to their principles but ideas
were mere “rhetoric.” His examination of the different groups including radical
groups guides his approach. He believes that the various political groups were largely
acting empirically. Taking advantage of changes in the political situation with
some rhetorical statements.
This, in my opinion, does not explain the complex
philosophical problems that were being tackled by people like Thomas Hobbes and
Harrington to name just two. In Anti Duhring Engels said if Englishmen nowadays
do not exactly relish the compliment they paid their ancestors, more’s the
pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes and Locke are the
fathers of that brilliant school of French materialists which made the
eighteenth century in spite of all battles of land and sea won over Frenchmen
by Germans and Englishmen, a primarily French Century, even before that
crowning French revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as
well as in Germany are still trying to acclimatise.
Chapter V the Impact of the New Model Army. Ian Gentles
develops an excellent introduction to the New Model Army. Chapter VI John
Walters is a bit of a strange choice in this selection essays in so much as you
would not classify him as the revisionist historian. In fact, he would be much
closer to the Marxist historians. His work is always interesting and thought to
provoke and this essay carries on in the same vein. Walters actually believes
that the world was turned upside down.
Walters examines large swathes of primary sources but like a
good historian does not take them at face value. He recognizes that these are
not impartial documents but were weapons of war. Significantly it is in this
chapter that we get a real feel of the social turmoil that existed during the
civil war. Walter’s believes that large segments of the population were
becoming radicalized and became involved in all number of political and
military activity.Riots broke out all over the place, and many of these
reflected the level of poverty that existed. Walters believes that these
disorders threatened the social order. Walters is the only chapter that women
get a look in. While not examined in any depth Walters recognizes that large
sections of the female population were being radicalized alongside their
menfolk.
Notes
Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars
1638-1651 [Paperback] Charles Carlton
Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War p117
G E Aylmer Rebellion or Revolution
Mark Kishlanksy Ideology and politics in the parliamentary
Armies 1645-49
S Porter The Destruction in the Civil War
G M Trevelyan Social History of Britain
C Hill In the Century of Revolution
Cliff Slaughter From Labour Review, Vol.3 No.3, May-June
1958, pp.77-82. Transcribed & marked up byEinde O’ Callaghan for the
Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NB{ This essay replaces the previous Impact of the English
Civil War on Society in the 1640s}
Men and Women in the English Revolution
By Gaby Mahlberg
Over the summer I agreed to review two books on the English
civil wars. One Blair Worden’s God’s Instruments (2012), the other Ann Hughes’s
Gender and the English Revolution (2012). The first, aside from a few fleeting
references to Lucy Hutchinson, deals almost exclusively with Oliver Cromwell
and other men who fought in the Civil War and determined the politics of the
country in its aftermath. The second focuses mainly on women, though never
studying them separately from the men they supported and challenged.
What I conclude from this is, that nearly half a century
after the emergence of women’s history, it is still possible to write history
books that largely ignore women, while it is virtually impossible to write
anything at all that ignores men. I.e. as far as high political history is
concerned, gender is only a ‘relational concept’ with regards to women.
I do not blame Blair Worden. In fact, I admire his work and
frequently cite it in my own. Besides, I am no less guilty of having written
entire book chapters or journal articles without mentioning a single woman.
Political correctness and indeed the contribution of women to politics and
political decision making easily slip our mind when the evidence is so much
focused on a male political sphere – especially for students of the early
modern period. But I still think we should try and change our practice and ask
ourselves every time we look at a political issue: and what was the
contribution of women?
As Hughes shows in her recent book, aside from Lucy
Hutchinson (the author, translator and biographer of her husband, the
republican Colonel John Hutchinson), there were thousands of other ‘Women at
war’ (35). There was ‘Elizabeth Alkin, also known as “Parliament Joan”’, who
‘spied for the armies of the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller and Sir Thomas
Fairfax’, or the ‘royalist … conspirator … Katherine Stuart, Lady Aubigny’, who
came to London ‘to raise supporters in the city’ and prompted ‘an abortive
plot’ (36).
Women frequently ‘played a full part in organising the
defences of besieged towns’ (36), while soldiers’ wives ‘helped with civil war
administration’ (37). Queen Henrietta Maria herself was one of Charles I’s most
trusted advisors; Elizabeth Cromwell presumably kept the household up and
running while husband Oliver was out killing royalists; and Elizabeth Ludlow
remained the faithful companion and co-conspirator of her regicide husband
Edmund, who had to flee England for continental exile in 1660. There were also
many others without whose contribution history might have developed
differently.I know the case has been made many times before, but the gender
segregation in works on political history shows that it’s worth repeating.
Andrew Barclay. Electing Cromwell: The Making of a
Politician. Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period, London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2011. pp. xi + 288.
The last few decades
have seen an extraordinary growth of popular interest in Oliver Cromwell. It is
unfortunate that most of the books, articles have not increased our
understanding of this complex historical figure. The same cannot be said about
Barclay’s book.Based on meticulous research using a huge range of newly
discovered primary sources, this book has increased our understanding of the
life and career of Oliver Cromwell.
Barclay’s task was not an easy one. Very little is known of
how Cromwell became an MP as Jonathan Fitzgibbons of Christ’s College,
Cambridge points out “among the many mysteries that shroud the career of Oliver
Cromwell, his election as MP for Cambridge in 1640 remains one of the most
baffling.Cromwell was hardly the town’s typical choice for MP; he was not a
member of the civic ruling élite, nor did he have any useful ties to the court.
Yet this outsider, from a relatively humble background, was elected as MP for
Cambridge in 1640 not once but twice: it was no fluke. For almost two decades
the default explanation for this anomaly has been John Morrill’s claim that
Cambridge saw Cromwell as a man with connections worth
cultivating—specifically, his links to a godly network centred upon the earl of
Warwick. Andrew Barclay’s book seeks to demolish this interpretation of
aristocratic patronage—which the author politely dismisses as nothing more than
a ‘suggestive possibility”.[1]
It is clear from the preface that Barclay would like to
present a “warts and all” picture of Cromwell. His book is very much a product
of his work Barclay’ with the History of Parliament Trust House of Commons
project. Barclay’s work for the trust covers the period 1640-1660. The book is
a comprehensive examination of Cromwell’s early political life in Cambridge
borough politics and is as Sabrina Alcorn Baron writes “a model for
interrogating the silences in the historical record.”[2]Barclay rejects placing
Cromwell within the context of the times. According to him”If Cromwell has
loomed large in the histories of Civil War Cambridge, he has also done so, more
debatably, in more general histories of the Civil War. While few have ever seen
him as being wholly typical, his career has conventionally been used to
exemplify many of the war’s major themes. He is the most famous soldier in a
political conflict that was ultimately won on the battlefield. He remains by
far the most obvious example of a man for whom the war was the making of him.
He is the archetypal Puritan.
This temptation to place him in the foreground of these
events has, naturally enough, been least resisted by his many biographers.
Linking Cromwell’s career to the wider social drama, so that one becomes an
implicit microcosm for the other, has proved itself to be one of the more
perennial ways in which historians have tried to make sense of his remarkable
story. Furthermore, just because so much that is new has now been discovered
from the years before he became famous does not lessen that temptation.” [3]
Not all historians agree with Barclay’s method. Christopher
Hill while appreciating Barclay’s hard work would have been slightly critical
as regards solely concentrating on one aspect of Cromwell’s early political
career. In his essay The Pre-Revolutionary Decade he wrote “not all historians,
unfortunately, read literary criticism (and I fear some do not even read
English literature), if they did, they would realise that there was a
revolution in English literature as well as in science, even if they cannot
persuade themselves that there were revolutions in politics, economics, and
society. Those historians, who concentrate on Parliamentary debates, state
papers and the correspondence of the gentry, fail to notice what is going on
elsewhere. It is one of the disastrous consequences of specialisation”.[4]
Having said that Barclay does put his knack of
specialisation to good use to provide a tremendously detailed look at a massive
range of original sources. In his bibliography section, he has examined
forty-six archival collections. The book provides an incredibly original piece
of research into Cromwell’s election as Member of Parliament for Cambridge
borough in both April and November 1640. The book complements John Morrill’s
work on a New Critical Edition of all the Writings and Speeches of Oliver
Cromwell.
One aspect of this re-evaluation is an extensive look at
James Heath’s Flagellum. A word of warning if you are unfamiliar with this
book, a word of caution as John Morrill said in his History Today review “If
the Daily Sport had existed in the 1660s Heath would have been its editor”.
Heath’s book has for a very long time been held by historians to be unreliable,
and in many places, his book has outright falsifications. Barclay has sought to
resurrect Heath as a semi-reliable source of Cromwell’s early political career.
According to Barclay, Heath’s words are the most”accurate account of the
election that exists.” It is not possible in the space of this article to agree
or refute Barclay’s claim.
Suffice to say the reader should be aware that Barclay’s
work is not just a piece of pure research. Historians do not function in a
vacuum, and Barclay has a definite agenda regarding the use of Heath’s work.
Barclay rejects past historiography regarding Cromwell’s election. The
resurrection of Heath fits with Barclay’s and other historians such as John
Adamson view that the civil war was primarily a conspiratorial affair. Adamson’s
book has a theoretical premise that the Civil War as basically a coup de état
by a group of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the King. According
to Diane Purkiss, these nobles were “driven by their code of honor; they acted
to protect themselves and the nation. Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex, and
Warwick move from the sidelines to occupy centre stage, as do their
counterparts among Scottish peers. It was they and not the ignorant masses who
plucked a king from his throne. Oliver Cromwell, for Adamson, was merely one of
their lesser lackeys”.[5]
Sabrina Alcorn Baron supports Heath’s usefulness with some
reservation saying “the disreputable Heath correctly described the machinations
of a group of like-minded godly who had encountered Cromwell in Fenland
conventicles and believed him to be a man of action who would successfully
plead their case at the national level. They then manoeuvre the mayor, who had
no acquaintance with or prior knowledge of him, into appointing Cromwell a freeman
of the borough, and from there Cromwell made his way into the parliamentary
election for the district, a process that historically had been fractious.
Indeed, in the Long Parliament election, he ignored a double return and took
his seat anyway. And the rest, as they say, is history. Barclay ends with
crediting the institution of Parliament as the great catalyst that set Cromwell
in place to become a national hero and head of state”.[6]
Barclay’s work has been defended in some revisionist
circles. John Morrill says “Barclay’s account ‘challenges and overturns’ my own
earlier work with its highly tentative suggestions as to why Cromwell was
elected for Cambridge. Excellent! Barclay has burrowed deep into archives in
Cambridge, Ely and parts of the National Archives (such as ‘Petty Bag’) which
few have dared to enter. Many of his sources can be described as terra
incognita. Even more remarkably, there are citations of manuscripts in no less
than 45 depositories. This is an unintended rebuke to much current academic
laziness, the world of quick-fix scholarship, in which books and articles are
compiled through word-searches in Early English Books Online and British
History Online”.To conclude, this is a very specialised piece of revisionist
writing and is not aimed at the wider reading public. However, it is a goldmine
for researchers.
[1] The English Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 529,
December 2012, Pages 1524–1526, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ces244
[2] Sabrina Alcorn Baron, http://www.academia.edu
[3] Andrew Barclay. Electing Cromwell: The Making of a
Politician. Political and Popular Culture in the Early Modern Period, London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2011. pp. xi + 288
[4] see Christopher Hill, “The Pre-Revolutionary Decades,”
in Writing and Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England.
[5]
https://www.ft.com/content/617713ea-0e56-11dc-8219-000b5df10621
[6] Sabrina Alcorn Baron, http://www.academia.edu
Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution:
1640-1660. By Stevie Davies. London: Women’s Press, 1998. xii + 356 pp. Notes,
bibliography and index. £17.99.
“As a woman, you
glimpsed the world where you had a say”- Stevie Davies
Unbridled Spirits is a book that appeals to both the curious
beginner and the academically minded student. Davies’s aim is “to kindle the
imagination of readers coming fresh to the 17th century but have a dismaying
sense that the period is inaccessibly difficult”.The book bears a striking
similarity to Christopher Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down. Davies
examines the same groups of radical sects that Hill did in his landmark book
but from the standpoint of women.
Davies acknowledges her debt to Hill and other left-wing
historians. Davies describes being “raised on Christopher Hill.” I am not sure
of Davies political views, but her book is influenced by Hill and other radical
historians concept of the study of “history from below.” Davies is not entirely
uncritical of Hill’s work in that she believes he tends to equate the people
with men.Despite writing in the tradition of history from below, I do not
believe the book or the writer espouses a sympathy for gender studies that seem
to dominate the study of women in history at the moment. Gender historiography
is a relatively new concept in which to explore women’s role in history. It is
largely a by-product of the genre “History from below” instigated by the
Communist Party History Group. While producing some precious research and
publications, the replacing of gender over class in the study of historical
events was a move away from a classical Marxist approach.
Gender studies became especially intense within the History
Workshop movement. The growth was facilitated by such books such as E.P.
Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class in the early 1960s it
provided a platform for gender studies to grow. It coincided with the rise of
independent women historians and writers who “insisted that women’s experience
no longer is ‘hidden from history.’ Sally Alexander and Anna Davin, ‘Feminist
History,’ History Workshop Journal, no 1 Spring 1976; Barbara Taylor, Eve and
the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the 19th Century, 1983.
In his review, John Carey describes Davies’s book as
“vibrant and authoritative study of the women of the seventeenth century, women
whose voices have been lost until now. Stevie Davies resurrects forgotten texts
to bring to life prophetesses who predicted the fall of the king and the rise and
fall of Cromwell; Peace Women who marched against the war; Leveller women who
condemned oppressive legislators and abusive taxes; Fifth Monarchists who
attacked the government; separatist women who founded dissenting churches and
spoke for the liberty of conscience; and radical Quakers who stood for gender
and class equality”.Davies’s well researched and well-written book gives an
in-depth insight into the radicalisation of women during the English
revolution. Looking at it from the standpoint of the 21st Century it is a
little difficult to imagine what life would have been like for women of all
classes during the revolution. Davies writes ‘I have been painfully aware of
the silence of the majority of seventeenth-century women, which accompanies the
historian like a mute, spectral companion, of whom little can be recorded save
her existence.’While it was dangerous for men to question the existing
political and economic setup, for women at the beginning of the 17th Century,
it was nearly impossible. But women of all classes managed to be heard, and
some cases very loudly. The explosion of printing presses enabled women with
little money to spread their ideas and propaganda to a wider audience than ever
before.
But this had a price. The ruling elite correctly saw this
radicalisation of women as a direct threat to their power and privileges. The
women that spoke up formed groups and joined the radical parties such as the
Levellers and Quakers were seen as a plague and in many cases labelled witches.
Again according to Carey “a woman could be publicly humiliated, ducked or
bridled merely for scolding her husband, neighbours – or government.”The book
is infused with the spirit and drama of the revolution. It is an overused
phrase but in this instance, a correct one that the world was turned upside
down. A striking aspect of the book is that it is extremely well researched. It
would appear that Davies must have slept overnight in many of the libraries she
studied in. Her use of primary sources is excellent.
The broad range of eyewitness accounts and personal stories
tell of large scale suffering and persecution. Davies, while trying to be as
objective as she can have a partisan approach to the subject. “As a woman, you
glimpsed the world where you had a say,” writes Stevie DaviesSome writers have
put forward that the struggles of these women of the 17th Century bear little
resemblances to modern-day struggles. I tend to disagree. While not on the same
scale, many aspects are the same. In many jobs, women are still treated as
second class citizens and paid accordingly, and the concept that women’s role
is best served by remaining in the home is still alive and kicking. So Davies
book does not just stand as a history book but has a contemporary significance.
Davies began her early career as a literary critic and
renowned novelist. A good training ground for her later development into a
first-rate historian. Like Christopher Hill did with radical male figures
Davies manages to bring to wider audiences brave women such as Anna Trapnel,
Margaret Fell and Lucy Hutchinson. Many of these women, despite enormous
hardship, probably lived life more fully in those short years of the revolution
than many of us live in our lifetime.While it is correct to say that the women
were treated with fear and persecution it should be noted after people got over
the initial shock of hearing these politicised women they began to get a
hearing and find an audience and not only amongst other women. In normal times
these women would be mostly seen but certainly not heard, but these were
extraordinary times, and conditions were being made for layers of the
population to have a voice.
One of these incredible moments was when the Army Council
met in December 1648. Charles 1st had been roundly defeated by Cromwell and the
New Model Army. At a time when dual power presided between Parliament and the
army, a debate opened up as what to do with the king.
Sections of the military which were to the left of Cromwell
wanted The Man of Blood to be brought for trial. Cromwell himself was
undecided. Parliament was for a deal with the monarch.Given women’s lowly
position in society, it seemed inconceivable that a leading radical female
would be invited to the highest ruling body of the army while it debated the trial
of Charles I, but this is what happened. A young prophetess from Abingdon,
Elizabeth Pool was invited to impart her wisdom. She opposed the trial and
killing of the king. This position which was to the right of the army council,
was rejected. In fact, on the execution of the king, most of the radical sects
were opposed to it.
The book does not develop a conventional narrative. Although
there is some interrelationship between the chapters and the events, they
depict most of them stand alone. Chapter nine is one example of this approach.
It discusses three Puritan marriages. In one form or another, relationships
were based on social equality.Perhaps the most important and certainly my
favourite is Davies’s work on the Quakers. The movement of Quaker party is seen
through the lives of Margaret Fell, her husband Thomas, and George Fox, who was
Fell’s second husband. Fell seemed to embody all that was active, creative and
brave in the women of the time. According to Anthony Fletcher “, She was
formidable indeed, an aggressive controversialist into her eighties, whose
stamina did not fail. In a sense, Margaret Fell stands for the many unbridled
women that this book seeks to celebrate. It was she who delivered by hand to
Charles II in 1660 the Quaker manifesto which enshrined the basic claim: “we
are people that follow after those things that make for peace, love, and
unity.”
The book has been met with favourable reviews. One harsh
voice, William Lamont made this criticism “the author brings her narrative
skills to bear in making the story come alive. She often writes in the present
tense, and she does not miss a chance to emphasise the humorous and ironic side
of the events she describes. Although she does not make any glaring factual
mistakes, this treatment tends to rob her subjects of their full dignity and to
suggest their motivation came more from the unconscious need to overcome their
social oppression, which was certainly necessary, than from a genuine movement
of the Holy Spirit. While her treatment of Quaker women is more respectful than
that of some of her other subjects, one might wish for a less arch tone.
Readers wanting a more in-depth treatment of the same period would do well to
go on to read Phyllis Mack’s Visionary Women, or the anthology by Mary Garman,
Judith Applegate, Margaret Benefield, and Dortha Meredith, Hidden in Plain
Sight, for treatment with more depth”. Lamont ends his review by wishing
“Stevie Davies has many readers”.[1] That is the hope of this author.
[1] William Lamont The English Historical Review, Vol. 114,
No. 457 (Jun., 1999)
Working Life Of Women In The Seventeenth Century Alice Clark
2012 400 pages.
“Those who don’t make
mistakes don’t make anything.”
Alice Clark[1]
“A woman that to a whore-monger is wed is in a most
desperate case: She scarce dares performe her duty in bed, with one of
condition so base: For sometimes hee’s bitten with Turnbull-street Fleas, The
Pox, or some other infectious disease; And yet, to her perill, his mind she
must please.”[2]
Historians owe a tremendous debt to the Publisher Forgotten
Books for digitally re-mastering this important book. The book forms a part of
a classic reprint series which uses the latest technology to bring to life facsimiles
of historically significant writings.If ever a book qualified as a historically
significant book, it is this one. I would go as far as to say that it should be
on every university reading list covering the early modern period.In an age
when women’s History writing is dominated by Gender studies, Clark’s book is a
great antidote to this form of historiography. A class-based analysis of
working women in the 17th century is an anomaly. This was not the case when
Clark wrote her book over 80 years ago.It would not be an overstatement to
label it “a classic work of women’s history.” It is a shame that she only wrote
one book. While the book has a rigorous academic look to it, Clark was not an
academic historian only started to take history seriously at the age of 38.
Clark is very sympathetic towards the working women she
portrays. The book contains an underlying anti-capitalist sentiment. Born in
1874 Clark was certainly no Marxist but must have been influenced by the growth
of Communist ideas towards the late 19th century and early 20th century and
would have been radicalised by the crisis gripping world capitalism.Clark had a
very rudimentary understanding of the nature of capitalism, expressed by this
quote “Perhaps it is impossible to say what exactly constitutes a capitalist,
and no attempt will be made to define the term, which is used here to include
the aristocracy who had long been accustomed to the control of wealth, and also
those families whose property had been newly acquired through trade or commerce.
The second group conforms more nearly to the ideas generally understood by the
term capitalist, but in English society, the two groups are closely related”.
(Chapter 2 page 14)
Clark’s social and political makeup was heavily influenced
by her family background as Michael Haynes points out “William Stephens Clark
came from a strong Quaker family, and his connections helped him at a number of
points in his career. In 1866 he married Helen Priestman Bright (1840–1927),
the daughter of John Bright; they had two sons and four daughters, including
Alice Clark (1874–1934), and Hilda Clark (1881–1955). His religious views led
him to emphasise his direct social responsibilities to his workforce as an
employer, and his indirect ones as a leading figure in the local community and
county government. He encouraged homeownership among his workers and various
local improvements including a library, and Crispin Hall for the local
inhabitants to meet in. Such paternalism also had an economic benefit in a
low-wage area where production was sometimes threatened by labour turnover and
out-migration. However, he opposed trade union recognition for his workers
during the period that he was in charge of the firm.”[3]
Alice Clark’s family was also closely linked to leading
figures of the organised movement for women’s rights in the 1860s, including
her mother, and her great-aunts, Priscilla Bright McLaren, Margaret Tanner, and
Mary and Anna Maria Priestman. According to Sandra Stanley Holton “, she
followed their example, working continuously on behalf of women’s rights from
early adulthood. From the 1890s she campaigned on behalf of women’s suffrage as
a member of the Women’s Liberal Federation, helping form a branch in her
locality. Temperance was another cause which she pursued during these years,
alongside adult education”.[4]
Howard continues “she spent much of her adult life (despite
long periods of illness) working in the family factory, starting with an
informal apprentice, to become a director in 1904. She was active in the
suffrage cause, as a Liberal and on the Friends’ Committee for the Relief of
War Victims. She initially took up a studentship to research women’s history in
1913 during one of her enforced breaks for illness and completed her research
after the war.”Clark’s link with the English revolution was direct as she came
from a family of Quakers who at the beginning of the revolution part of its
left wing. The Clark family were shoemakers and were the forebears of the
modern-day shoe sellers dotted around major high streets. She held strongly
feminist ideas. She was concerned about the effects industrialisation had on
the women workers. Clark belongs to the school of historiography, which is
broadly called ‘economic history’ now called social history.
While this term has been accepted and used by modern
historians, this were not always the case. It would be correct to say that
books examining women’s role in history have not had a significant readership.
The historian Keith Thomas who taught history at Oxford in the 1950s decided to
set up a series of lectures on Women and the 17th century. Thomas’s attempt was
met with at best indifference and worst outright hostility.After Working Life
of Women was finished, she returned to the family business; she died in 1934.
She began her book with a forceful rejection of any notion that women were “a
static factor in social developments” and therefore unimportant in historical
study.
On the contrary, according to the blog Early Modern Notes
“they changed considerably over time with changing environments, and those
changes require careful study because of the close bonds between women and men
and women’s (indirect) social and moral influence. She saw the seventeenth
century as a period of profound change in English women’s lives; not perhaps
regarding most women’s actual experiences of change so much as in underlying
trends – the forces represented by ‘capitalism”.[5]
The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century was
published in 1919. The study was groundbreaking in many ways. The book
underwent several reprintings. One writer said that the “study constitutes one
of the most comprehensive surveys available on this topic.”The striking thing
about the book is her great use of primary sources. Letters, diaries, wills,
account books, magistrates’ wage rate assessments, parish records, guild and
municipal records, tax returns, workhouse records. In many ways, this type of
historiography was the precursor to the school of “history from below,” which
mainly championed by the CPHG (Communist Party Historian group).
Her use of Quarter Sessions archives is one example of her
use of primary sources to tell a story. The following quote from the book
highlights the tremendous suffering by women of the lower orders. “The hardships
suffered by the women of the wage-earning class proved fatal to their children.
Gregory King estimated that there were on an average only 33 persons, including
father and mother in a labourer’s family though he gives 4.8 as the average
number of children for each family in villages and hamlet. Another writer gives
three persons as the average number for a labourer’s family. The cases of
disputed settlements which are brought before Quarter Sessions confirm the
substantial truth of these estimates. It is remarkable that where the father is
seldom living more than two or three children are mentioned, often only one
though in cases of widows where the poverty is recent and caused as it were by
the random effect of the husband’s premature death, there are often five to ten
children. In Nottingham, of seventeen families, who had recently come to the
town and been taken, in as tenants, and which the Council wanted to eject for
fear of overcrowding, only one had four children, one three, and the rest only
two or one children apiece.’
“In fact, however significant the birth rate may have been,
and this we have no means of ascertaining, few children in the wage-earning
class were reared. Of those who reached maturity many were crippled in mind or
body, forming a large class of unemployable’s destined to be a burthen instead
of strength to the community. This appalling loss and suffering were not due to
the excessive work of married women but to their underfeeding and bad housing.
Probably the women of the wage-earning class actually accomplished less work
than the women of the husbandman class; but the latter worked under better
conditions and were well nourished, with the result that their sons and
daughters have been the backbone of the English nation”.( Page 87 Chapter 3
Agriculture).
The main concentration of the book centers on how the early
stages of capitalist development affected the lives of women in the 17th
century. Clark examined differing strata of society. Of course, wealthy women
were affected differently than female workers. Clark was enough of a historian
to recognise this. She categorised three different layers of the population.
Capitalists, which included aristocracy/gentry and a growing middle sort
“ordinary people,” small farmers, independent tradesmen/artisans and lastly
“wage earners,” trapped in poverty, a modest but growing group.
Howard is critical of her methodological study in “that her
historical framework was unsatisfactory and too simplistic. Some developments
she associated with the seventeenth century (such as the ‘masculinisation’ of
professions like midwifery, and the removal of most production from the
domestic environment) properly belong to the later 18th century or even later.
She equated ‘capitalism’ with ‘industrialism,’ but the former undoubtedly
preceded the latter by some centuries. Further, subsistence household economies
were already extremely rare by the 17th century”.To conclude, Howard believes
that Clark’s had a “pessimistic view of modernisation” which to a certain extent
she did but she is correct in her attack on the worst excesses of capitalism,
her alternative was to mitigate the worst parts of capitalism. The book is well
worth reading and should be on any serious students reading list.
[1] The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century-By
A. Clark
[2] Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700
edited by C. Malcolmson, M. Suzuki
[3] Clark, William Stephens-(1839–1925) Michael Haynes-ODNB
[4] Alice Clark (1874–1934
ww.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38517?docPos=1
[5]
https://earlymodernnotes.wordpress.com/2005/03/23/alice-clark-working-women/
Gender and the English Revolution- Ann Hughes – 192 pages :
Routledge 2011 ISBN-13: 978-0415214902
“The women of the
property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and
enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means
for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
“The English Civil War broke out over issues; both political
and religious Gender was not among them.”
Bernard Capp
Ann Hughes is Professor of Early Modern History at Keele
University; she has published widely on mid-seventeenth Century English
history. Her specialities are the study of Gender, print culture and religion.
She is undoubtedly one of the foremost authorities on the English Revolution.In
this slim volume, Hughes attempts “to discuss all the ways in which the
political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century interacted with, were
affected by and had an impact on gendered roles and relationships.”
After a dearth of studies of women and the English
revolution, the recent spate of publications examining women and the English
revolution, including Hughes’s book is to be welcomed up to a point. There is
still no of the biography of two of the most famous Leveller women Katherine
Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.While one book cannot make up for a few
centuries of neglect Hughes’s book is an important contribution to our
understanding of the role women played in the English revolution.Hughes’s book
is part of a proliferation of Gender orientated books that have been published
over the last few decades. This relatively new type of historiography has been
promoted heavily by universities and publishers alike. The recent proliferation
of books, articles, etc. has many reasons. One major factor being the growth of
women historians who have started to explore this previously under-researched
subjects. Another reason is that women, in general, have a much-increased
degree of political freedom and economic independence than previous generations
of women.
One of the major problems with this type of politically
motivated historical study is the evisceration of class. There cannot be a
genuine struggle for women’s emancipation without an examination of the class
nature of female exploitation. As this article points out “There is more talk
of gender in the American and global media than perhaps at any previous moment
in history. The #MeToo campaign in the US has supposedly brought the conditions
of women to the fore like never before.
The US media and Hollywood are animated by hardly anything
else.”But this is a fraud. The women are getting nearly all the coverage
belonging to the upper echelons of society, the richest five or ten per cent.
Working-class women are nowhere to be seen in all this, except for a few token
exceptions that prove the rule. This skewed class lineup in the media coverage
reflects a greater social reality: the gap between affluent women and
working-class women has widened dramatically in the past several decades. On
International Women’s Day in 2018, what are the conditions of the great
majority of women in the world, those who are ignored by the media, those who
do not get their faces and their complaints on the evening news? Today, of the
1.3 billion of the planet’s 7.6 billion inhabitants living in extreme poverty,
70 per cent are women or girls, according to Project Concern International.”[1]
The striking feature about the subject matter of Hughes’s
book is that many of the problems faced by 17th Century women are unfortunately
still with us in the 21st Century. As I said earlier, there is a dearth of
material written on the plight of women in the 17th Century.It is over eighty
years since Alice Clark wrote a major work analysing the working life of women
in the 17th Century. Sharon Howard, in an article about Clark wrote, “I have a
soft spot for Alice Clark (not least for her maxim that “those who do not make
mistakes do not make anything”). This was her only book. She was not a
well-known academic historian; rather, a feminist and businesswoman whose life
encompassed many other activities and who only began historical research at the
age of 38. She was a member of the Clark family, who were Quakers, of
shoemaking fame (you know, those horrible sensible shoes you wore as a kid
because your mum made you, except they recently got all trendy and cute).Born
in 1874, she was firmly influenced by the ‘first wave’ of feminism, particularly
by debates about female economic dependence and ‘parasitism’ on men and its
adverse effects on women and society as a whole. She also needs to be
understood in the context of early 20th-century concerns about the social
consequences of industrialisation and pioneering sociological investigations
into contemporary conditions of the poor, and increasing interest in what was
then called ‘economic history’ (it would now be termed social history). The
contribution made to that historiography by women was subsequently ignored by
many historians; feminist historians have in more recent decades worked to
reconsider their significance “.[2]
Gender historiography is a relatively new concept in which
to study women’s role in history. The systematic study of women in history is
largely a by-product of the genre “History from below” instigated by the
Communist Party History Group. While producing some important research and
publications, the replacing of gender over class in the study of historical
events is a move away from a classical or orthodox Marxist approach.Gender
studies were heavily promoted by journals such as History Workshop. The growth
in gender studies was also facilitated by books like The Making of the English
Working Class by Edward P Thompson. Independent women historians and writers
started to insist that “women’s experience no longer is ‘hidden from
history.[3]
Books that started to examine women’s role in history were
not always met with support. When the outstanding historian Keith Thomas who
taught history at Oxford in the 1950s decided to set up a series of lectures on
Women and the 17th Century his attempt was met with at best indifference and
worse outright hostility.The period that Hughes writes about was truly a world
turned upside down, where traditional family roles were coming under high
pressure. 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]
It took much courage to take part in the struggles of the
day. The punishment for doing was swift and brutal. Heavy punishment was meted
out to those women who rebelled against the prevailing orthodoxy. One such
‘rebel’ was Margaret Cavendish who wrote in a tract We become like worms that
only live in the dull earth of ignorance, winding ourselves sometimes out by
the help of some refreshing rain of good educations, which seldom is given us;
for we are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered
from flying abroad to see the several changes of fortune, and the various
humour, ordained and created by nature; thus wanting the experiences of nature,
we must need to want the understanding and knowledge so consequently prudence,
and invention of men: thus by an opinion, which I hope is but an erroneous one
in men, we are shut out of all power and authority, despised, and laughed at,
the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn, by the overweening conceit
men have of themselves and through despisement of us”.[5]
According to Hughes, society’s problem was not the result of
a class struggle but was because England was a patriarchal society. While
Hughes acknowledges the fact that political and economic differences did occur
among men and women, these are mostly ignored. She contends that the primary
motivating factor for pursuing civil war was the struggle of women versus
men.Hughes states that “neither women nor men form a homogeneous category, and
in this book, their experiences during the English revolution are structured by
age, social and marital status, religion, and political allegiance, and
sometimes by national or ethnic identity, as well as by Gender. One category
missing from this list is class.I must admit I have problem historians who
advocate the theory of patriarchy. Under the guise of investigating all women’s
history, there has developed a tendency to reduce all women’s struggle to a
fight against repression regardless of what class they belonged.
The promotion of women’s studies came at the same time
number of revisionist started to attack previous whig and Marxist
historiography.Hughes promotion of Gender studies is in direct opposition to a
class-based study of history.To conclude Hughes book is not without merit as
Gaby Mahlberg says”The power of Hughes’s book, and what makes it so valuable to
both specialist scholars in the field and their students, is the great wealth
of primary source material on which it is based and the ease with which the
author moves between the micro-stories of early modern men and women, their
wider context, and ongoing historiographical debates. Gender and the English
Revolution are likely to join The Causes of the English Civil War (London,
1991) as staple reading for students of the mid-seventeenth century”.[6]
Despite the criticisms and caveats, which include Hughes abandonment of any
class-based analysis of the English revolution the book is worth reading.
.[1] The condition of working-class women on International
Women’s Day-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/09/pers-m09.html
[2] Early Modern Notes by Sharon Howard entitled Alice
Clark, working women’s historian.
[3] Reviewed Works: Hidden from History. Rediscovering Women
in History from the 17th Century to the Present by Sheila Rowbotham; Woman’s
Work. The Housewife, Past and Present by Ann Oakley-Review by: Susan J.
Kleinberg-Journal of Social History
Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 99-103
[4] Dissent and Debauchery: Women and the English Civil War-
Alison Jones
[5] Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655)
[6] Gaby Mahlberg’s Review 12th July 2012
-www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2012.706066
Leveller Women and the English Revolution
“Have we not an equal
interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities
contained in the Petition of Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are
any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from
men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the
neighbourhood”?[1]“That since we are assured of our creation in the image of
God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportional
share in the freedoms of this commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve
that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to
petition or represent our grievances to this honourable House. Have we not an
equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities
contained in the Petition of Right, and other the good laws of the land? Are
any of our lives, limbs, liberties, or goods to be taken from us more than from
men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the
neighbourhood? Would you have us keep at home in our houses, when men of such
faithfulness and integrity as the four prisoners, our friends in the Tower, are
fetched out of their beds and forced from their houses by soldiers, to the
affrighting and undoing of themselves, their wives, children, and families?”
[2]
History and Historians in general have not been kind to
Leveller women who were radicalised during the English Revolution. There is a
dearth of material on women’s struggle during this time. No major biography
exists of two of the most important Leveller women Katherine Chidley and
Elizabeth Lilburne.As Christopher Hill observed the English revolution: “helped
many women both to establish their own independence and to visualise a total
escape for the poorer classes”.It was the poorer classes that suffered the
greatest degradation regularly through jail, torture, war and disease.
Women who joined the Levellers joined a”party” that took on
many of the characteristics of a modern political party. Placing the Leveller’s
in the political spectrum of the 1640s has been a contentious issue. Some
historians have placed them as part of the radical wing of an Independent
coalition.I tend to side with John Rees[3], who believed the levellers were a
stand-alone organisation. The levellers were responsible for using for many of
modern-day political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting
petitions, leafleting and the lobby of MPs.
William Clarke, who provided us with the report of the Putney Debates
was an avid collector of books, pamphlets and leaflets. Over eighty Leveller
pamphlets were found in his collection. The Levellers strength mainly lay in
London and other towns and had significant support in the army.
The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a
democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than
the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and extension
of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property,
artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers which made up the
composition of the Levellers themselves.The Levellers were the pioneers of
modern democracy, but radical as they were in the 17th century they were in
favour of an extension of the voting franchise only for men and to the
exclusion of women. They also refuted”childish fears” that their object was
to”make all men’s estates equal and to decide laws by telling noses”.When women
joined the Levellers, they had two major fights on their hands. The first being
a struggle against social inequality and secondly a struggle to have equal
rights as men. It is a contradiction that they joined an organisation that
wanted to extend the franchise except for women.
For many women, the fight for social and political equality
would be their first involvement in any kind of political work. It can be said
without contradiction that women like Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne
laid the basis for future struggles of working-class women such as the
suffragettes.Women Levellers mounted large scale demonstrations and organised
petitions in favour of social equality. They were met with differing levels of
brutality depending on which class they belonged to. On the whole middle-class
women were treated with derision, but largely no violence was committed against
them. This is not the case with the poorer sections of the women’s movement who
were often treated severely by MP’s and soldiers alike. Many were thrown into
prison, mental institutions or workhouses. Middle-class women were simply
escorted away by soldiers and told to ‘go back to women’s work”.
A typical response to the women’s demonstrations on 26 May
1647 can be seen by Thomas Case who warned the House of Commons that if they
allowed “liberty of conscience,” then “see … how long your civil peace will
secure you when religion is destroyed. . . . Liberty of conscience may in time
improve itself into the liberty of estates and . . . houses and … wives, and in
a word liberty of perdition of souls and bodies”[4]
Sir Simonds D’Ewes[5]who was in attendance at parliament
when the first women’s protest took place on Tuesday, 8 August 1643, said in
his diary “a multitude of women described elsewhere” as two to three hundred
oyster-wives, ‘taking example by the unlawful and tumultuary proceedings of the
former faction. . – came to the very doore of the House and there cryed . . .
Peace, Peace, and interrupted divers of the members both as they went in and as
they came out of the House,’ and threatened violence to those members who were
enemies to peace”.[6]
Women in the 17th century had little or no rights at all,
and according to The Lawes Resolutions of Woman’s Rights, 1632 women’s legal
position depended solely on their husband’s goodwill. The husband had complete
control “over an unmarried daughter and a similar husband authority over his
wife. Married women were not considered legal persons. An independent woman was
viewed suspiciously”. [7]What moved women to go into a struggle. According to
Christopher Durston, not a lot up until the outbreak of the Civil War. It is
true to some extent that radical activity amongst men and women was low at the
beginning of the 17th century. The English Revolution changed all that. The
struggle for equal rights inside and outside the family was a powerful
motivating force. Most of the women’s protest from an ideological standpoint
was cloaked in religious phraseology.
Significantly recent historiography has downplayed the role
of economic factors in motivating people. Historian Soma Marik asked the
question “What kind of economic pressure was brought to bear on the labouring
poor in this age of transition”. The impact of these economic crises, as well
as of political crises, could be contradictory. Women were paid less than men,
who in turn were ill-paid. So they were certainly greatly burdened. But women
were often hired as domestic servants, which reduced family/husband’s control.
During the civil war, the absence of husbands due to exile or military service
also proved to be a two-edged sword. Women faced greater hardship”.[8]
This “poverty” was questioned by Ian Gentles, who thought
that “Chidley’s’ uncompromising radicalism did not prevent them from prospering
under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. An examination of their financial and
administrative careers shows that they may be counted among the tangible
beneficiaries of the English revolution. Katherine won at least two substantial
contracts to supply stockings to the army in Ireland, while Samuel obtained a
job in the State’s service. He was appointed in 1649 to Worcester House where
he took up lodgings as registrar of the debentures used to purchase crown fee farm
rents. How he landed this appointment is unknown, though his fellow saint,
David Brown, asserted that it was thanks to his influence in high places”.[9]It
is to Gentles credit that he is one of the few historians that establishes a
link between Chidley’s economic position and her political activity. What kind
of political activity did women take part in? As with their male counterparts,
it is difficult to match Leveller women’s petitions to their authors and far
more research is needed but the women Levellers did release a substantial
number of petitions to parliament on a number of issues. They demanded the
release of the Leveller leaders, redress from high taxes, and lack of work,
dictatorial government and opposition to meddling in Irish affairs.
While some historians have disputed the figures it is
believed that in 1649 ten thousand Leveller women signed a second women’s
petition to parliament. The significance of this document is that regardless of
class background the petitioners called for equal rights for all women and
equality with men. “Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God,
and of an interest in Christ equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share
in the freedoms of this commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we
should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition
or represent our grievances to this honorable House. Have we not an equal
interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities
contained in the Petition of Right, and other the good laws of the land? Are
any of our lives, limbs, liberties, or goods to be taken from us more than from
men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the
neighborhood? And can you imagine us to be so sottish or stupid as not to
perceive, or not to be sensible when daily those strong defenses of our peace
and welfare are broken down and trod underfoot by force and arbitrary power?
“Would you have us keep at home in our houses, when men of
such faithfulness and integrity as the four prisoners, our friends, in the
Tower, are fetched out of their beds and forced from their houses by soldiers,
to the affrighting and undoing of themselves, their wives, children , and
families? Are not our husbands, o[u]r selves, our children and families, by the
same rule as liable to the like unjust cruelties as they? And are we
Christians, and shall we sit still and keep at home, while such men as have
borne continual testimony against the injustice of all times and unrighteousness
of men, be picked out and be delivered up to the slaughter? And yet must we
show no sense of their sufferings, no tenderness of affections, no bowels of
compassion, nor bear any testimony against so abominable cruelty and
injustice?”[10]
The petition written by Katherine Chidley (though this has
been disputed) is beautifully written and shows the writer was well educated
with a substantial political acumen. Little is known of Chidley’s origins or
social background. Given the level of education needed to write highly
political tracts, it must be assumed she came from a reasonably well off
family. Katherine married Daniel Chidley who by profession was a tailor from
Shrewsbury, Shropshire.Before the revolution, Chidley had a stable family
environment. She gave birth to seven children. Given her family commitments, it
is nothing short of staggering that she was able to combine a busy family life
with no help from modern equipment with an extremely active and brave political
life. While it is clear that outbreak of the civil war fired Chidley’s
radicalism she was politically active in the early 1620s. Along with her
husband she was according to Ian Gentles “active in a Shrewsbury conventicle
which carried on a running quarrel with the rector of St Chad’s, Peter Studley.
In 1626 she and Daniel were among twenty people presented to the consistory
court for non-attendance at church”.[11]
The amount of irreligion in the English revolution has been
contested by numerous historians. Christopher Hill in his pamphlet Irreligion
in the Puritan Revolution quoted Richard Baxter who believed that those who
rejected mainstream religion were ‘a rable“ if any would raise an army to
extirpate knowledge and religion, the tinkers and sow-gelders and
crate-carriers and beggars and bargemen and all the rable that cannot read….
Will be the forwardest to come in to such a militia” It goes without saying
Baxter argued for their suppression with violence if necessary.Gentles says
that Chidley was reported for refusing ‘to come to be churched after
childbirth’. It would appear that this
brush with authority was an early marker for her later radicalism. If she had
remained in Shrewsbury it is open to debate whether she would have had the
opportunity to express her radical beliefs further. But as fate would have it
her hounding by the religious authorities forced her to go to London were she
had the luck to join up with other Levellers such as john Lilburne and John
Duppa.
Chidley’s first pamphlet was published in 1641 by the
printer William Larner. It was called The Justification of the Independant
Churches of Christ (1641). It was a reply to the right wing fanatic Thomas
Edwards, a London preacher. Chidley readily admitted that it was ‘not laid down
in a schollerlik way’, she defended her actions saying they were the plaine
truth of holy Scripture’. She believed
according to Gentles that “churches ought to be exclusive in their
membership, because as Chidley puts it, when God brought his people into the
promised land, he commanded them to be separated from the idolater”Edwards
countered with an attack in Gangraenah by saying “There is, one Katherine
Chidley an old Brownist, and her sonne a young Brownist. who not content with
spreading their poyson in and about
London, goes down into the Country to gather people to them”.
Edwards attack on Chidley in his book Gangraena for
separatist “errors “could be dismissed as nothing more than an aberration if it
were not for the fact that it expressed in general terms a widespread fear in
ruling circles of a growing radicalism amongst the more educated sections of
the population. The other fear was that these educated radicals would spread
their ideas of equality and democracy to the poorer sections of society.
Chidley believed that even the poorest sections of society ‘whether they be
Taylors, Felt-makers, Button-makers, Tent-makers, shepherds or ploughmen, or
what honest trade soever’, were better qualified to create churches than
‘ill-meaning priests’.
Elizabeth Lilburne, a Leveller, was the daughter of Henry
Dewell a London merchant. Like Chidley next to nothing is known of her origins
and social background. She shared a similar background with that of Chidley in
so much as she was involved in irreligious circles. She shared her husband’s politics. Her life with John Lilburne was in
many ways dominated by his persecution at the hands of parliament and later on
by Cromwell.
John Lilburne was frequently jailed and exiled. Far from
cowering Elizabeth she tirelessly lobbed for his release. According to Ann
Hughes when “John, a captain in Lord Brooke’s regiment, was captured by
royalists at Brentford and sentenced to death it was Elizabeth’s determined
petitioning that persuaded parliament to threaten retaliation on royalist
prisoners if Lilburne was hanged. It was a pregnant Elizabeth who carried to
Oxford the life-saving letter from the speaker of the Commons”.Leveller women
did not fight just as individuals. According to the historian Gaby Malhberg the
wives of leading figures of the English revolution “formed their own networks,
discussing political issues in the absence of their husbands. Edmund Ludlow
recorded, for instance, that he had little hope of a pardon from the King
because the wife of his fellow republican Sir Henry Vane had informed Elizabeth
‘that she was assured [General George] Monke’s wife had sayd she would seeke to
the King, upon her knees, that Sir Henry Vane, Major Generall [John] Lambert
and myself should be hanged.”[12]
The civil war put tremendous strain on the Lilburne’s
marriage so much so that John Lilburne’s writings in exile are full of attacks
on his wife’s “mournfull arguments”. John was critical of his wife’s
persistence in asking him to “make peace with Cromwell”.Ann Hughes presents
another picture of Elizabeth saying “Almost everything known about Elizabeth
Lilburne comes from the writings of her self-regarding husband—and his
presentations of his suffering wife may well owe as much to the demands of
particular polemical situations as they do to the reality of her personality or
their life together. The impression is left of a brave and realistic radical
woman, determined to preserve herself and her children in the most difficult
public circumstances”.On the political side, it must also be said that while
the Leveller women were the left-wing of the English revolution, they were not
the only women in a society that led struggles against the King. In some sense,
these women were lucky in that they had access to printing materials and
presses.[13]
Women that were even luckier in their access to print
because of their class background were women of the Aristocracy that were
opposed to the king.One such woman was the formidable and extremely intelligent
Lady Eleanor Davies. For criticising Charles 1st she was imprisoned four times.
Her most important trial was in 1633 when she was found guilty of publishing
unlicensed books and “of circulating false prophecies”.
The fact that an increasing number of women had access to
licensed and unlicensed printing presses is significant because it tells us
that the radicalisation of society went much deeper than had originally been
thought. Secret printing allowed popular ideas and protests to develop. In
Davies’s case she was fined £3,000 which a significant sum in those days and
sent to prison. If that was not all her books were burnt by Archbishop Laud.
Laud was not the only person to burn her books. Both her husbands took delight
in burning her books.
Davies was an aggressive anti-papist. Her aggressiveness
sometimes spilt into vandalism. In one instance in 1636 along with people went
to Lichfield Cathedral, damaged its altar and sat on the bishop’s throne. For
her trouble, she was sentenced to sixteen months in prison. One problem for
modern-day researchers is that in Seventeenth-century England, according to one
writer “very few women, compared with men, wrote for publication their works
form less than one per cent of the total number of texts published in the
period.”To conclude the study of these women would not only be fascinating but
would provide the brave historian with a rich vein of historical study. A
systematic study would deeply enrich our understanding of the radical women of
the 17th century and their role in the English revolution. As a wise man once
said it was a man’s world, but it would be nothing without a radical woman.
[1] Women’s Petition (1649)-From J. O’Faolain and L
Martines, Not in God’s Image (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 266-267.
[2][ Elizabeth Lilburne, A Petition of Women (5th May, 1649)
[3] The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation
in England, 1640-1650
[4] Source: Puritanism and Liberty, being the Army Debates
(1647-9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents, selected and
edited with an Introduction A.S.P. Woodhouse, foreword by A.D. Lindsay
(University of Chicago Press, 1951).
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonds_d%27Ewes
[6] Women Petitioners and the Long Parliament-Ellen A.
M’Arthur-The English Historical Review-Vol. 24, No. 96 (Oct., 1909), pp.
698-709
[7] See- The Family in the English Revolution Christopher
Durston-Basil Blackwell 1989.
[8] Christopher Hill -Women turning the World Upside
Down-Soma Marik Social Scientist vol 32 2004 pp. 50-70
[9] Ian Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English
revolution: the Chidley’s and their circle’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
29 (1978), 281–309
[10] Quoted in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook:
Constructions of Femininity in England
edited by Kate Aughterson
[11] Ian Gentles, ‘London Levellers in the English
revolution: the Chidley’s and their circle’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
29 (1978), 281–309
[12] Gaby Malhberg’s blog http://thehistorywoman.com
[13] Hughes, Ann. “Gender and Politics in Leveller
Literature.” In Political Culture and Cultural Politics in England: Essays
Presented to David Underdown, edited by Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky,
162-188. Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: St Martins, 1995.
The Star Chamber-Alison Stuart
Inspired by Keith
Livesey’s post on the Levellers I thought it might be appropriate to talk about
“the Star Chamber” which reached such a level of infamy during the reign of
Charles I that the term “Star Chamber” still exists in our idiom today. It is generally used to denote any judicial
or quasi-judicial action, trial, or hearing which so grossly violates standards
of “due process” that a party appearing in the proceedings (hearing or trial)
is denied a fair hearing.
It has its origins in the fourteenth century and is said to
have derived from a room in the Palace of Westminster decorated with a starred
ceiling where the King and his privy council met. Initially, it served the
valuable role as a “conciliar court” which were convened at short notice to
deal with urgent matters. Initially well regarded because of its speed and
flexibility, it was made up of Privy Counsellors, as well as common-law judges,
and supplemented the activities of the common-law and equity courts in both
civil and criminal matters. In a sense, the court was a supervisory body,
overseeing the operations of lower courts, though its members could hear cases
by direct appeal as well. The court was set up to ensure the fair enforcement
of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could
never convict them of their crimes.
In 1487, a Star Chamber Act was enacted setting up a special
tribunal to deal with subversive activities within the King’s household. In
theory, the Star Chamber could only take cognisance of a matter if there was a
good reason to interfering with the ordinary processes of law. In practice, it
meant that it heard cases and impose punishments in matters where no actual
crime had been committed but, in the subjective opinion of the court, were
considered morally reprehensible. The sort of matters coming before it would
now constitute offences such as conspiracy, libel, forgery, perjury, riot,
conspiracy and sedition. Henry VII and Henry VIII, in particular, used the
power of the Star Chamber to break the powerful nobles who opposed his reign.
Prosecutions were brought by the Attorney General and prisoners tried summarily
by affidavit and interrogation (which very often included torture). Punishments
included fines, imprisonment, pillory, branding or loss of an ear. It did not
have the power to order a death sentence.
It’s more sinister side began to emerge by the end of the
fifteenth and into the sixteenth century when it began to lose its “civil”
side, and notwithstanding its inability to mete out death, by the reign of
Charles I, the Star Chamber had achieved a terrible reputation for severity and
tyranny.Charles I routinely used the Star Chamber Charles to examine cases of
sedition, which meant that the court could be used to suppress opposition to
royal policies. It came to be used to try nobles too powerful to be brought to
trial in the lower court. During the time of Charles “personal rule”, he
ruthlessly stamped down on the freedom of the press and religious and political
dissenters. William Prynne, Alexander
Leighton, John Bastwick and Henry Burton, all appeared before the Star Chamber
for their views on religious dissent. William Prynne, for example, was a
puritan who published a number of tracts opposing religious feast days and
entertainment such as stage plays. The latter was construed as a direct attack
on the Queen and in 1634 he was sentenced in the Star Chamber to life
imprisonment, a fine of £5000, he was stripped of his qualifications and
membership of Lincolns Inn and lost both his ears in the pillory.
It was the treatment of John Lilburne that eventually led to
the abolition of the Star Chamber. As you will have read in Keith Livesey’s
post, John was a Leveller (“Free born John”). In 1637 he was arrested for
publishing unlicensed books (one of them by William Prynne). In that time all
printing presses had to be officially licensed. John was brought before the
Star Chamber In his examinations, he refused to take the oath known as the
‘ex-officio’ oath (on the ground that he was not bound to incriminate himself),
and thus called in question the court’s usual procedure. On 13 February 1638 he
was sentenced to be fined £500, whipped, pilloried, and imprisoned till he
obeyed.
On 18 April 1638 Lilburne was flogged with a three-thonged
whip on his bare back, as he was dragged by his hands tied to the rear of an ox
cart from Fleet Prison to the pillory at Westminster. He was then forced to
stoop in the pillory where he still managed to campaign against his censors
while distributing more unlicensed literature to the crowds. He was then gagged. Finally, he was thrown in
prison. He was taken back to the court and again imprisoned. During his
imprisonment in Fleet he was cruelly treated. While in prison he, however,
managed to write and to get printed in 1638 an account of his own punishment
styled The Work of the Beast and in 1639 an apology for separation from the
church of England, entitled Come out of her, my people. John spent the next few
years going back and forth between the Star Chamber and prison.
In 1640, the King’s personal rule ended and he was forced to
reconvene Parliament. Incensed by John Lilburne’s treatment at the hands of the
Star Court, John Pym led a campaign to abolish it and in 1640 one of the most
significant pieces of legislation in the western world was enacted, the Habeus
Corpus Act. This Act abolished the Star Chamber and declared that anyone
imprisoned by order of the king, privy council, or any councilor could apply
for a writ of habeas corpus (literally meaning “release the body”) and it
required that all returns to the writ “certify the true cause” of
imprisonment. It also clarified that the
Court of Common Pleas had jurisdiction to issue the writ in such cases (prior
to which it was argued that only the King’s Bench could issue the writ). On
this statute stands our basic right to a fair trial.
Despite the rights of Habeas Corpus, “Star Chambers” still
creep into our modern age. In modern American history, for example, the best example of star chamber proceedings
was the conduct of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (1938-1975) which
used its subpoena power to intimidate citizens by asking them unconstitutional
questions about their political beliefs and associations and then charging them
with contempt of Congress for refusing to answer. Another example was the
conduct of criminal proceedings against black defendants in some southern
states from 1876 until the late 1960s. As a lawyer I have my doubts about the
proceedings against the Guantamo Bay detainees but this is probably not the
time and place to discuss these issues.
References:
An Introduction to Legal History J.H. Baker
Luminarium, Encyclopedia Project
http://www.luminarium.org/encyclopedia/starchamber.htm
http://www.alisonstuart.com
http://www.hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.com
Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English Revolution
(British History in Perspective) Professor Ian Gentles. 288 pages Publisher:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Ian Gentles’ book (a welcome addition to the British History
in Perspective Series edited by Jeremy Black) is the first new biography of
Oliver Cromwell in many years. The book contains significant new research, and
Professor Gentles presents us with a far more in-depth picture of the private
and public life of Cromwell than have previous biographers. It does not break
much new ground from a historiographical perspective, but to his credit, the
author does try to infuse his new biography with the work of previous scholars.
The book is ideal for students and the general public and should be used as an
excellent introduction to the subject.
That we now know more about Cromwell than we did even ten
years ago is down not only to a renewed interest in the man but to the
tremendous efforts of a growing number of historians. The work of Andrew
Barclay has given us a far clearer picture of Cromwell’s early political life,
while John Morrill and his team of historians and researchers are working on
new critical editions of Cromwell’s collected works.
Recently I asked Professor Gentles what motivated him to do
this biography. He replied: ‘I am fascinated by Oliver Cromwell, and believe
that I understand the ‘inner man’ better than most historians, especially his
religion, which is of such fundamental importance in understanding him.
Finally, I believe I had some original information and insights to impart.
Through my research in the Close Rolls (NA, C 54) I turned up material on his
personal finances of which no one else was aware. I am also the first person to
draw public attention to the ‘Fleetwood Chest’, his wedding gift to his
daughter Bridget, now held in the Collins Barracks Museum in Dublin. I also
believe that I have successfully interwoven his political and military careers
and shown how they were interconnected, and influenced each other’.Despite
this, Gentles still feels the need to justify the need for a new biography in
his foreword, arguing that the new evidence he alludes to above should throw up
new interpretations and to some extent this book is a slightly new
interpretation.
Gentles is a skilled and thoughtful historian. He is
Professor of History at York University’s Glendon College and at Tyndale
University College. Most of his academic career has concentrated on the English
Revolution, on which he has written numerous articles as well as four books: He
has written significant articles and three books.(1)This Cromwell biography
manages to strike a balance between Cromwell’s public and private life,
although to my mind Gentles concentrates too heavily on Cromwell’s military career
to the detriment of spending more time on his political activities. He does
present a ‘warts and all’ picture of Cromwell but also attaches importance to
recent research on Cromwell’s practice of lay preaching and his significant
patronage of the arts. To his credit does attempt to counter the old picture of
Cromwell as a dour and cultureless figure.
Gentles spends time on his new research into Cromwell’s pay
as a soldier, in chapter ten asking if Cromwell ‘was a greedy puritan’. Gentles
is accurate in his assertion that many modern day historians have paid little
attention to Cromwell’s economic position or for that matter even his personal
finances. Gentles is correct when he implies that Cromwell was not guided
solely by money in his social and political actions. In fact, on many
occasions, he cancelled debts and on more than one occasion financed military
operations himself – such as the occupation of Ireland. Cromwell was not alone
in doing this as other major Republican figures such as Henry Marten did the
same.
It has become part of modern revisionist historiography to
play down the link between a person’s economic status and their political
persuasions. I am not saying that there exists an umbilical cord between the
two, or that historical figures like Cromwell were not motivated into action by
their religious and ideological conceptions, but I do insist as Nick Beams
eloquently put it ’that it is necessary to examine the motives behind the
motives – the real, underlying, driving forces of the historical process and to
make clear the social interests served by a given ideology – a relationship
that may or may not be consciously grasped by the individual involved’.(2)
Gentles is perceptive enough to grasp the importance of the
work of historians such as Robert Brenner, and while being critical of
Brenner’s ‘social interpretation,’ he acknowledged that a study of mercantilism
would enhance the theory that the there was a transition from feudalism to
capitalism.Gentles makes this point ‘The new merchant leaders and their radical
allies among the City’s shopkeepers, mariners and artisans were at the height
of their power in the early years of the revolution, 1642 and 1643.
Simultaneously they pursued their anti-Spanish offensive in the Caribbean and launched
a policy of imperial conquest against Ireland. Indeed, in Brenner’s candid
portrait of these men, nothing comes across so clearly as the brutal,
buccaneering character of early-modern mercantile capitalism. (3)
Gentles does spend a significant amount of time on military
matters. He acknowledges that Cromwell had no formal military training. Gentles
it seems does not rate him highly as a military figure which is a little
strange because if you read Royalist supporting military historians like Peter
Young you get a much more accurate picture of Cromwell’s military prowess.
Historiography
Three aspects of Gentles’ historiographical proclivities
come to the fore in this biography. He does not subscribe to a ’Three Kingdoms‘
approach to the English civil war – as Jasmin L. Johnson wrote contained within
this approach ‘is a tendency to bounce back and forth from country to country
and from campaign to campaign, causing confusion and obscuring the effects that
developments in one theatre of operations might have had on the others’.(4)
Secondly, while taking on board some aspects of revisionist
and post-revisionist historiography, Gentles centres Cromwell’s life as part of
a ‘people’s revolution’, indicating that the influence of Marxist historians
such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning is not entirely dead. Professor
Gentles is one of the few modern day historians who does not downplay the
influence that groups such as the Levellers had. Gentles does offer a fresh insight
into the complex relationship between Cromwell and Leveller leaders such as
John Lilburne. In fact contrary to modern historiography Gentles provides a
description of Cromwell being a far more radical figure than has previously
been thought.
Thirdly, and perhaps more controversially, where Gentles
does subscribe to one aspect of modern historiography is when he describes
Cromwell belonging to a ‘Junto’. The definition of Junto is ‘a group of men
united together for some secret intrigue’, with the champion of this new
historiography is being John Adamson. The main theoretical premise of his book
The Noble Revolt is to put forward a view of the Civil War as basically a coup
d’état by a group of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the King. According
to Diane Purkiss, these nobles were ‘driven by their code of honour, they acted
to protect themselves and the nation. Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex and
Warwick move from the sidelines to occupy centre stage, as do their
counterparts among Scottish peers. It was they and not the rude masses who
plucked a king from his throne. Oliver Cromwell, for Adamson, was merely one of
their lesser lackeys’.
The more you get to know Gentles’ work the clearer it
becomes that he is attempting to take a middle ground between the modern-day
revisionist historians and an older more left-wing historiography.While not
rejecting that Cromwell was part of a ‘Junto’, I think far more work is needed
to either prove or disprove this thesis. After all, Cromwell had a series of
alliances throughout his career. To paraphrase Lord Palmerston, he had no
permanent alliances but only permanent interests. Gentles biography does not go
into too much detail on this, but maybe in the future, he will.Like Martyn
Bennett in his review, I have a significant disagreement. Gentles last sentence
where he sums up Cromwell’s life by concluding to quote Bennett ‘ After an
incredibly perceptive journey through Cromwell’s life, Gentles concludes that
Cromwell’s ‘achievements were chiefly destructive’. (5)
Revolutions by their nature are destructive, but out of that
destruction hopefully, something new and better arises. In the case of the
English revolution, we witnessed all be it slowly the transition from feudalism
to capitalism. Cromwell whatever his faults played an critical role in that
process.I will leave it to others to decide whether Cromwell’s adventures in
Ireland are a blot on his record as Gentles suggests, but he does make some
interesting points, arguing that Cromwell’s overriding concern in Ireland was
the neutralisation of Royalist threat and that the attack on, and massacre of,
Catholics was a by-product of that action. Cromwell’s hatred for Catholicism
was prevalent amongst the rising bourgeoisie of the 17th century. He further
suggests that Cromwell played a key part in the development of Irish
nationalism.To conclude, I would recommend this book to general readers and
more academically minded students, as it is an intelligent and well-researched
introduction to Oliver Cromwell. It has extensive footnotes and a lengthy
bibliography, a useful list of abbreviations, a detailed index, good maps and
battlefield plans.It is only inevitable that Gentles does revisit the same
areas of research covered by other historians such as Christopher Hill, John
Morrill and Barry Coward, but whether or not this biography transcends those
written previously, it is certainly a valuable addition to the literature.
References
(1) The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland,
1645–1653 (London, 1992); Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English
Revolution (Cambridge, 1998); and The English Revolution and the Wars in the
Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (London, 2007).
(2)Nick Beams -Imperialism and the political economy of the
Holocaust 12 May 2010
(3)Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution-A New Social
Interpretation New Left Review by Ian
Gentles
(4) Ian Gentles. The English Revolution and the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms, 1638-1652. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007. xvi + 522 pp. $36.00
(paper), ISBN 978-0-582-06551-2. Reviewed by Jasmin L. Johnson (Independent
Scholar, Gillingham, Kent, United Kingdom) Published on H-War (February, 2008)
(5) Oliver Cromwell: God’s Warrior and the English
Revolution. By Ian Gentles. Review by M Bennett . History vol 97 issue 326 17
April 2012.
Further reading
(1) Electing
Cromwell: The Making of a Politician Political and Popular Culture in the Early
Modern Period Hb: Andrew Barclay 290pp: 2011 978 1 84893 018 6
(2) More
information on the new critical edition of the collected works of Oliver
Cromwell can be found through this link
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/research/research-projects/early-modern/new-edition-of-Cromwell.
(3) Professor
gentles is working a biography of Col. Thomas Pride for the History of
Parliament, His longer-term project is a
book on Ireland and England in the 16th and 17th centuries, with particular
attention to the plantations of the 1650s.
(4) Oliver
Cromwell-Peter Young 1962
A Short Q&A with Professor Ian Gentles.
Professor Ian Gentles is the author of a new biography of
Oliver Cromwell. To compliment my review I asked him a few questions
Q. What made you write another biography of Cromwell?
A. I wrote this biography because the publisher invited me
to. In addition, I am fascinated by
Oliver Cromwell, and believe that I understand the ‘inner man’ better than most
historians, especially his religion, which is of such key importance in
understanding him. Finally, I believe I had some original information and
insights to impart. Through my research
in the Close Rolls (NA, C 54) I turned up material on his personal finances of
which no one else was aware. I am also
the first person to draw public attention to the “Fleetwood Chest”, his wedding
gift to his daughter Bridget, now held in the Collins Barracks Museum in
Dublin. I believe also that I have
successfully interwoven his political and military careers and shown how they
were interconnected, and influenced each other.
Q Are you aware that Prof john Morrill and his team are
working on a new critical edition of the collected works of Oliver Cromwell.
A. Yes, I know about the forthcoming critical edition. John Morrill is a good friend of mine, and we
have discussed many aspects of Cromwell’s life. The critical edition will be
most welcome since WC Abbott’s edition is unsatisfactory in many respects.
Q How do you see the current historiography on Oliver
Cromwell
A.It is striking that new material on Cromwell is being
turned up all the time. In particular
Patrick little has written about the Protectorate, as well as Cromwell’s
daughters’ marriages, his interest in horses, and music, and his sense of
humour. Andrew Barclay has written a
valuable study of Cromwell’s early life, in which he has solved the puzzle of
how Cromwell managed to get elected for the borough of Cambridge in 1640. Both Little and Barclay have kindly shared
with me their research findings in advance of publication. Blair Worden is preparing a keenly-awaited
intellectual biography of Cromwell.
Q What are you working on now.
A.This summer I am writing the biography of Col. Thomas
Pride for the History of Parliament, and preparing a keynote address to the
Midwest Conference on British Studies on the state of play in Civil War
studies. My longer-term project is a
book on Ireland and England in the 16th and 17th centuries, with particular
attention to the plantations of the 1650s.
Winstanley [DVD] [1975] Director Kevin Brownlow and Andrew
Mollo
“We could certainly do with a new Winstanley to help today”
Kevin Brownlow
“You poor take courage; you rich take care/This Earth was
made a Common Treasury for everyone to share/All things in common, all people
one “.Diggers Song.
Winstanley is the stunning 1975 film about the 17th-century
revolutionary Digger Gerrard Winstanley. To begin with, anyone who is looking
to view this movie should at least have a basic understanding of the English
revolution. To get even more enjoyment out of the movie, they should acquaint
themselves with the left-wing of that revolution the Diggers and to a lesser
extent the Ranters.
The film has as one writer put It a “stark monochrome
beauty” to it. The film style pays homage to the Russian filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein. The film was clearly a labour of love for Brownlow and Mollo with a
large degree of perfection for detail and costume. Winstanley was produced on a
minuscule budget £24,000 with a volunteer cast apart from one professional
actor, first shown in 1975. This review is of the digital re-mastering carried
out by the British Film Institute.What was Brownlow’s inspiration from making
this film? Like many people he had become disillusioned with the political set
up (this was in 1975),” The Labour Party is no longer the Labour Party. Nor is
the Conservative Party. You can hardly tell the difference. We are in a real
mess. And I don’t know where we’re heading.”.
Why should anyone want to see this film and what relevance
does it have today. Like under four hundred years ago we live in a time of
wars, revolution and economic upheaval. Social inequality still exists, and
democracy does not exist for millions of people. So in this respect, we are not
so far away from the people who fought in the English Civil War.
According to the writer Marina Lewycka who worked on the
film “ it is no coincidence that there should have been a renewed surge of
interest in Winstanley and the Diggers in the 1960s and 1970s, at a time when
the spirit of revolution was out on the streets, and latter-day Diggers were
occupying campuses and squatting houses and apartment blocks. I was a
starry-eyed young PhD student in 1970, researching radical thought in the 17th
century. What drew me to Winstanley was not only his political radicalism but
that he seemed to have a “psychological” understanding of the biblical
narrative, unusual at that time, as an allegory of the struggle between good
and evil which took place in every human heart”.
The director of Winstanley Kevin Brownlow like some people
had not heard of his subject matter before starting work on the film. The fact
that the movie is so good is, even more, testimony to him and co- director
Andrew Mollo’s enthusiasm to learn about Winstanley and apply that learning
with such startling effect.Lewycka explains the ethics behind the making of the
film “in some ways, the making of the movie Winstanley mirrored the endeavour
of the original Diggers. It was an enterprise held together by a shared belief
that commitment was more important than money, a lack of hierarchy that
occasionally bordered on the anarchic, the spirit of voluntarism, good humour,
camaraderie, stoicism in the face of setbacks, and a willingness to submit to
the rigours of English dirt and English weather in pursuit of a higher purpose.
Like Winstanley, we had our priorities straight. We knew that fame, fortune and
ambition were not what it was about; what mattered was doing it properly”.It is
only recently that a systematic study of Winstanley has started to emerge. The
recent publication of his collected works is one indication of the trend to
restore Winstanley to his place as one of the most prominent figures of the
English civil war.
He is certainly a figure that according to Christopher Hill
who turned the world upside down.His form of utopian communism was influenced
by John Lilburne and his fellow Levellers. But in ideological terms, he went
further than the Levellers in both actions and words.The egalitarian nature of
his philosophy was captured in his pamphlet “The New Law of Righteousness”,
written in 1648. “Selfish imaginations”, he said had lead one man to rule over
another. “But everyone shall put their hands to till the earth and bring up
cattle, and the blessing of the earth shall be common to all,” “When a man hath
need of any corn or cattle, take from the next store-house he meets with. There
shall be no buying and selling, no fairs or markets, but the whole earth shall
be the common Treasury for every man.”
Cromwell does not appear in the film which is a pity because
along with Ireton he was the chief ideological opponent of the Levellers,
Diggers and Ranters not Fairfax who does appear in the movie. Cromwell’s rebuke
to Winstanley “What is the purport of the levelling principle but to make the
tenant as liberal a fortune as the landlord. I was by birth a gentleman. You
must cut these people in pieces, or they will cut you in pieces.”Winstanley
founded his commune of Diggers at St George’s Hill, Surrey. The film portrays
with heartbreaking accuracy the tremendous poverty of the people belonging to
the commune. Who also faced increasing violence at the hands of both New Model
Army soldiers and the local population.
The commune was to last only two years. Within in that two
years, other communities began to spring up, but these were eventually
dissolved. In many ways, this was a movement way ahead of its time.The film has
mixed reviews which are a little harsh as Brownlow admits “No artist is ever
satisfied. We did the best we could at the time. ”I wanted to be a professional
director, making films with a social context here or in Hollywood, If I hadn’t
made those first two features outside the industry, and taken a more regular
route, I might have achieved that ambition. Money is essential in making films.
If you get enough of it, it gives you time to make them properly – and time
ensures quality. That’s why cheap pictures are usually so awful and why
Hollywood spends hundreds of millions to achieve the standards of epics like
Titanic.”Winstanley is a superb film. See it if you can. More could have done
to explore the ideological differences that occurred during the war. Perhaps in
this one case more money would have helped. Having said that Winstanley is
still a little gem.
Notes
(1) Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley: Warts and All, 320 pages
UKA Press (8 May 2009)ISBN- 1905796226
(2) The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley Hardcover
Thomas N. Corns (Editor), Ann Hughes (Editor), David Loewenstein (Editor) OUP
Oxford (24 Dec 2009)
On the historiography of the English Civil War
by Chris Thompson.
I will return to his comments shortly as I have some other
projects which are taking my limited time. As for the original target of my
piece called should the English Civil War Be at the Heart of the National
Curriculum? Paul Lay I will not hold my breath for a reply. I am not sure that
blog writers appear on his intellectual radar too much to warrant a reply. I
hope to be surprised. Chris Thompson’s blog can be found at here
http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.co.uk/. Any one studying the subject of
early modern Britain will find a valuable research tool.
Over the last three years, I have become more sympathetic to
Keith Livesey’s blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. I have grown to like him too. This
is partly because he is an unrepentant Marxist of a kind much more common when
I was an undergraduate and postgraduate in the 1960s. He believes that the
events of the period between 1640 and 1660 were a genuine revolution, that they
had as their principal causes antecedent economic and social changes and that
they paved the way for the emergence and triumph of capitalism in England with
all the momentous consequences that had for the world as a whole in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Christopher Hill, it is no surprise to find, is one of his
heroes in the ranks of professional historians and he is no less interested in
the Communist Party’s group of historians that flourished in the late-1940s and
until the mid-1950s. This is a perfectly respectable and defensible position
although not one that I accepted either in the 1960s or subsequently.(One of my
favourite conversational gambits when confronted by a Marxist four or five
decades ago was to deny that there had been a ‘Revolution’ in a recognisably
Marxist sense at all.)
Keith Livesey recently (13th March) commented on the views
of the Editor of History Today, Paul Lay, on the contents of a revised National
Curriculum for history. He agreed with Paul Lay that it should cover the
English Civil War and offered his agreement if the former meant “that the English
Revolution paved the way for capitalism to flourish in England”. But he was
apprehensive that Paul Lay seemed to belong to a group of historians who “have
sought to revise previous Marxist historiography of the English Civil War.” He
went further when he expressed the view that Paul Lay and other revisionist
historians had downplayed the role of economics in people’s actions at that
time. “Lay’s real beef is with Marxist historiography …. Lay blames Marxist
historians such as Christopher Hill for using base and superstructure to best
understand the civil war. Lay believes that the demise of Marxism has once
again brought the role of religion as the main driving force behind civil war.
Lay has the right to his ideology but the constant attack by revisionists and
their apologists is doing untold disservice to those students who wish to have
a multi rather than one dimensional understanding of the civil war.”
I am sure that Paul Lay, if he so wishes, is perfectly
capable of responding to these criticisms. Nonetheless, there are some
important points that need clarifying for the record. There was never a time
when Marxist interpretations of the English Civil War or the English Revolution
constituted an established historiographical orthodoxy in this country (the
United Kingdom).Nor did they do so in the United States. Hugh Trevor-Roper,
John Cooper and Jack Hexter’s criticisms decisively punctured the sub-Marxist
explanations of Tawney, Stone, Hill, and others: this was why there was such an
explosion of advanced research into the gentry’s fortunes and the experience of
counties from the late-1950s onwards. Christopher Hill himself came to the view
by the 1970s that the events of the 1640s were not the result of the rise of
the bourgeoisie but the precondition for such a rise later in the seventeenth
century. He was severely criticised by figures like Norah Carlin for such
apostasy.
The second major point that I should make is that
‘Revisionism’ as it came to be termed had a very short life-span. It was born
in the mid-1970s with Conrad Russell’s work on the Parliaments of the 1620s and
was defunct after 1990-1991 when his works on The Causes of the English Civil
War and The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 appeared in print. There
has been no campaign of continuing criticism of Marxist historiography in this
area or of Christopher Hill’s body of work because both have, in general terms,
ceased to be regarded as relevant by academic historians. The debates amongst
historians of the Civil War period have moved on a very long way over the last
twenty years or more.
No historian that I know maintains that economic and social
changes before 1640 were unimportant or unrelated to the events of the years
thereafter. But very few would maintain that economic and social changes in
themselves were decisive in determining the outcomes of the military struggles
between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England or the conflicts in Ireland
and Scotland. Much more sophisticated connections between intellectual and
popular culture, between literacy levels and political and religious changes,
between the rise of aristocratic constitutionalism and the demands of landed
and mercantile elites have been developed since Christopher Hill’s prime. The
terms of the debates will no doubt continue to change. That is right and proper
in academic history. Whigs, Marxists and Revisionists have had their day and
now belong to the students of intellectual historiography.
Should the English Civil War Be At the Heart of the National
Curriculum?
Few historians would disagree with Paul Lay’s comment that
“The English Civil War, the English revolution, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms:
call them what you will, they are the most important and perhaps the most
exciting period in British history, and they should be at the core of the
school curriculum throughout the UK”.[1]
Lay correctly states that the civil war was such a seminal
event not just in British history but world history that every student should
have some knowledge and opinion on this event. I would contend that without an
understanding of at least the fundamental issues that caused the war diminishes
our understanding of history in general.
However, a word of caution is needed. Before a study of the
history, a study of the historian is in order as Edward Hallett Carr said “if,
as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in
the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what
goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to
study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already
done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by
that great scholar Jones of St. Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St. Jude’s to
ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you
read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect
none, either you are tone-deaf, or your historian is a dull dog.”[2]
Lay recently said, “I know my history and that it was in the
17th century that the disparate national histories of these islands came
together to forge the modern world” if by that Lay means the English revolution
paved the way for capitalism to flourish in England, then I would agree with
him. However, several more right-wing historians such as Niall Ferguson have
used the curriculum debate to foster a very right-wing agenda which defends the
historical interests of British imperialism. Ferguson has just called the
current British Prime Minister David Cameron, a new Winston Churchill.
Lay is a very conservative historian and his magazine
History Today is a very conservative Magazine. A list of his favourite
historians who write on the English revolution would confirm this. He writes
“for decades the 17th century has been the richest seam mined in Britain’s
history departments, attracting scholars of the stature of Conrad Russell,
Austin Woolrych, Ann Hughes, Kevin Sharpe, John Adamson, Jane Ohlmeyer, John Morrill,
Barry Coward, Michael Hunter and many more”.There is nothing wrong with this
list except for that the majority of historians apart from Ann Hughes are
revisionist historians. Like Lay these historians believed there was no
revolution, no clash of social classes, and what radicals existed were not
really that important.
For the Lay what was important was that religion and
witchcraft were the prime movers of people he writes “In the aftermath of the
great conflict, we see the birth of Britain and the emergence of Today’s party
political system; the British Army and Royal Navy come into existence in
recognisable form; the battle of ideas over monarchy and republic provides a
stimulating argument for the young; the importance of religion — and witchcraft
— is emphasised as a prime motive of people’s actions; there is the beginning
of the modern financial system with the creation of the Bank of England and the
National Debt. Most important of all, though, this is the age when British
History runs into that of a wider world to be explored in all its variety by
minds prepared for the complexities and contentions of global history by their
engagement with the medieval and Early Modern Worlds. Not even our
much-maligned exam boards can make that annoying”.[3]
Religion or witchcraft did indeed move people, but there was
a class struggle and for the benefit of objectivity which student s of history
should be presented with a different viewpoint such as the one expressed by the
Marxist writer Ann Talbot who writes that the revolution” brought people of
diverse social backgrounds into the struggle against the King and who were
well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the
curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the
revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for
some kind of theory to explain what they were doing”.
To conclude, the last word should be left to Lay, who
somehow manages to make a perceptive point when he says of history that “at its
best, calls everything into question. It offers no comfort, no shelter and no
respite, and it is a discipline of endless revision and argument. It forces its
students to confront the different, the strange, the exotic and the perverse
and reveals in full the possibilities of human existence. It is unafraid of
casting its cold eye on conflict, both physical and intellectual. And there is
more history than ever. It is his story, her story, our story, their story,
History from above and from below, richer, more diverse and increasingly
global. It has no end, as the benighted Francis Fukuyama discovered when the
permanent present ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall came crashing down
on September 11, 2001. History opposes hubris and warns of nemesis. It does not
value events by their outcome; the Whig interpretation of history expired long
ago”.
[1]
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/put-the-civil-wars-back-on-the-syllabus-mr-gove
[2] What is History? (1961)
[3] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/put-the-civil-wars-back-on-the-syllabus-mr-gove
Speeches Of Oliver Cromwell, 1644-1658 (1901) [Paperback] ,
Charles L. Stainer (Editor)
It is an open fact that little of Cromwell’s early life is
known about and hardly anything is down on paper. Cromwell’s political activity
spans the years 1629 to 1658, From 1629-1644 historical material is very
scarce, which is why Stainer begins his collected works in the year
1644,Stainer correctly warns his readers it must be said “of how much must be
missing”, Despite the knowledge that Cromwell did take part in constitutional
debates that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War next to nothing survives.
Given this problem, Stainer felt it was legitimate to add what he calls ”
substance ” to a large number of speeches.
Which means to fill in the blanks of Cromwell’s life with
the words of other people. I think this approach is wrong and that the words of
others should be at the back of a book with an explanation as to who said them
and how accurate they are.Stainer justified adding them because in his words
they “give greater continuity to the book, they enable us to form a more a
general estimate of Cromwell’s speech-making, and to realise the poverty of our
historical records”.Whether we have the actual texts of these so-called
speeches is the task of the new collection of historians working with John
Morrill. After all, a collection of speeches should be an accurate historical
account and not just a literary exercise.
Take for instance Stainer’s use of Bulstrode Whitlockes
writings The Lord General’s discourse with Lord Whitelocke, urging him to
accept the Swedish Embassy, Sept. 13, 1653.
Whitdocke. I was to attend your Excellency but missed of
you.
Cromwell. I knew not of it ; you are always welcome to me. I
hope you have considered the proposal I made to you, and are willing to serve
the Commonwealth.
Whitlocke. I have fully considered it ; and with humble
thanks acknowledge the honour intended me, and am most willing to serve your
Excellency and the Commonwealth; but in this particular, I humbly beg your
excuse. I have endeavoured to satisfy my judgement and my nearest relations,
but can do neither,nor gain a consent; and I should be very unworthy and
ungrateful to go against it.
It would appear that this conversation was recorded by
Whitlocke. Staier should have taken more care in using this record. Whitlocke
was not just some “actual” figure but was very close politically to Cromwell.
Stainer should have warned his audience as to the reliability of such a
subjective piece of writing.Other than the above-mentioned criticism Strainer’s
collected speeches seems to have held a relatively disciplined and principled
editorial approach to the text of Cromwell’s speeches and writings. He has only
altered the text when no proper sense can possibly be made, or “where the
sentences are so confused as to make restoration impossible”.
The punctuation is mostly Stainer’s. I am unaware if Stainer
had help on this volume perhaps Professor Morrill’s team will tell us. Stainer
has corrected the grammar but not being an expert on 17th Century someone with
a knowledge of it will need to comment on Stainer’s accuracy.One major problem
confronting the OUP [Oxford University Press] Team and John Morrill, in
particular, is how they approach the Putney Debates. Stainer whom it would seem
had substantial access to the Clarke Papers only choose to publish only a small
part of the debates and therefore managed to reduce the dramatic scenes at
Putney and Saffron Walden to little more than a Cromwell led debating society.
My feelings as regards the OUP¨will be that the most
important elements of the Putney debates must be produced in full regardless of
whether Cromwell was speaking or not. After all the debates at Putney involved
the question of profound importance not only to people of the 17th Century but
resonate even today. Discussions over private property, social inequality and
the right to democracy are still contemporary issues.Morrill’s OUP team will
have to to make crucial decisions on whether the texts used in previous
editions of collected works are accurate and were they written at the time or
much afterwards?
Stainer explains the problem he had and no doubt the Oxford
team will have the same problems “it is quite astonishing to find so much
diversity when one of the texts appears to be fairly complete and grammatical.
The ‘only explanation that can be suggested is, that these versions were not
taken down at the time of the speech, but are founded on original reports
sufficiently difficult to decipher to permit of such variations”. Morrill has
already warned that while they aim to achieve the highest academic standard in
their work grey areas as regards the veracity of certain of Cromwell’s speech
will always exist.
Stainer makes the point on Cromwell’ speech on May 6, 1647.’
he says that this is “beyond doubt, translation, the true origin of which is
now lost to us ; consequently we have no means of judging whether the
translation is accurate or the text complete. We can only form the same opinion
of Speeches 4-8, for the Worcester College MS. N. 12 (formerly MS. Ixvii), from
which they are copied, is carefully written, and is in fact a collection, very
similar to Clarke MS. 41, from which Speech 3 is taken. Frequent ‘ blanks ‘ in
the sentences, and in some cases on whole pages, show that the translator’s
task was no easy one, and yet it is important to observe that the result is a
text very similar to that in several of our other MSSAyscough, 6125, ‘blanks
for 2 lynes,’ means that the writer was unable to translate the original before
him. That he did copy is evident, as the MS. is a collection, though at present
we have no other authority for the full text of this speech”.
Stainer also asks whether we can prove that these speeches
were initially taken in shorthand or not. Given the fact that well over 100
years have passed since Stainer made his collected speeches we can safely say
that the Oxford team has a far better knowledge of not only type of shorthand
used but our understanding of the type of printers used at the time will
significantly increase our understanding and accuracy of these speeches.
Stainer encountered other problems which were of a more
general character.It is no doubt that the Oxford team will have to tidy up
numerous speeches of Cromwell. Stainer believes that the significant repetition
of sentences throughout these speeches seems “to show that a system of relays
of writers may have been resorted to”. What should be taken into consideration
was that Cromwell was not a slow speaker and spoke for long periods so it
should be borne in mind that this gives his recorders ample time for inaccurate
shorthand. Also due to the length of some speeches if these were written down
sometime after the speech then the possibilities for inaccuracies and outright
distortions are extremely possible.
Stainer believes that “some such system may have been used
whereby writers picked each other up by agreement. The task of assembling the ‘
notes ‘ would then be comparatively easy if everything went well ; but it must
be noted that if the writers were not in full agreement or got confused, the
task of assembling their notes would be a very difficult one”. If the second
writer began before his time long sentences would overlap, and if these were
slightly different both might be introduced into the text. If he did not begin
in time, sentences would be lost; and in addition, the repetition-sentence
being absent, it would become easy to displace whole paragraphs. Much would
then depend on memory, and further delay would be caused by the necessity of
translating the notes, if taken in shorthand, and writing out a correct
version. As to the shorthand system employed, it may have been either Mr.
Shelton’s or Mr. Biche’s ; both are good, though somewhat clumsy, and both
require extreme accuracy. Finally, we must not forget the possibility that the
rooms in which his Highness spoke were inconveniently crowded, and very hot, so
that it was not altogether easy to write.Thus in Speech 17 p. 87) we read: ‘and
therefore seeing you sit here somewhat uneasy by reason of the scantiness of
the room and the heat of the weather, I shall contract myself with respect to
that;’ and again in Speech 34 (p. 211), Cromwell refers to the audience ‘ as
certainly not being able long to bear that condition and heat that you are in.’
While in the case of some speeches it would seem as though no arrangements at
all had been made to report his Highness, and that the versions are made up
from hearsay”.
One strange characteristic of Stainer was to refer Cromwell
as his “Highness”. I am not sure whether he is sarcastic or that he believed
that Cromwell was all but king in the name seems out of place in a scholarly
edition.Stainer is probably correct when he says “on the whole, the general
conclusion must be that the original reports of these speeches are missing, that
many circumstances doubtless conspired to make them difficult to decipher, and
that there is no very great reason to suppose that our translations or copies
of them are necessarily accurate”.Hopefully, the OUP team can develop Stainer’s
work and take it to a much higher level and do justice to Cromwell.
Notes
1 The download version of The Collected Works of Oliver
Cromwell ed C L Stainer is that it is covered in grammatical errors and
therefore the reader would be better off with a hardback book version.
2 C L Stainer used the transcripts of Clarke Paper
especially on Putney Debates
3 From Wikipedia Memorials of the English affairs from the
beginning of the reign of Charles I …, published 1682 and reprinted. According
to the author of Whitelocke’s biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition “[it is] a work which has obtained greater authority than it
deserves, being largely a compilation from various sources, composed after the
events and abounding in errors”.
Why We Need A New Critical Edition of all the Writings and
Speeches of Oliver Cromwell
Despite being such a major historical figure, the collected
writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell are far from accurate, and some
contain outright falsifications. John Morrill and his team of historians and
researchers have been given a Leverhulme Trust-funded research grant of
£204,337 to present new collected work.On the surface, this may seem a
significant amount of money, but given the fact that Leverhulme also gave a
quarter of a million pounds grant to study homing pigeons tends to put
Morrill’s award in some sort of perspective.
Morrill will have a team of eight editors chosen by Oxford
University Press to assemble a five-volume edition of Oliver Cromwell’s collected
writings and speeches. This version will give us a more concrete and precise
appreciation of Oliver Cromwell. It remains to be seen if this is a fundamental
reappraisal of “Our Chief of Men”.It is clear that this is a long-overdue
project.Among the scholars working alongside Morrill is Tim Wales who will be a
Senior Research Associate. He will assist John Morrill and Andrew Barclay with
volume 1 (1599-1649). Elaine Murphy will be a Research Associate. She will work
with Micheál Ó Siochrú and Jason Peacey with volume 2 (1649-1653). Finally,
Joel Halcomb, another Research Associate will be assisting David Smith, and
Patrick Little with volume 3 (1654-1658) All three will be assisting with the
oversight of volumes 4 and 5, co-edited by John Morrill, Peter Gaunt, and Laura
Lunger Knoppers.
It is clear that the team assembled is of a high academic
calibre. Eight editors have been appointed and have signed contracts with OUP:
Andrew Barclay, Peter Gaunt, Laura Knoppers, Patrick Little, John Morrill,
Micheál Ó Siochrú, Jason Peacey, and Davis Smith. According to the University
of Cambridge, “all of them have worked in Cromwell’s life or thought, and all
have a detailed understanding of the sources for the project. An advisory board
of further specialists in Cromwell and the editing of early modern texts have
been created, including Martyn Bennett, Jan Broadway, Ann Hughes, Pádraig
Lenihan, and Blair Worden”.The University of Cambridge website explains “The
mission statement of the Editorial Board has been to record all surviving
evidence of ‘Cromwell’s voice’. This means including all the speeches in
Stainer’s edition; all the letters in Abbott’s edition for which there is any
evidence of Cromwell’s authorial hand and many discovered since 1948; and
contextualised editions of William Clarke’s contemporary notes of Cromwell’s
contributions to the Army Debates of 1647 (their provenance recently
re-examined), and (after much discussion and experimentation) versions of
Cromwell’s contributions to parliamentary debates in the diaries of the early
1640s (often in very different summary form). With respect to most post-1643
letters and speeches which survive not as originals but in multiple early
copies, using recent advances in book and print culture history, it is often
possible to establish which of several printers of a letter was being used by
Parliament or Protectorate to publish. This, as well as internal evidence,
normally allows the ‘best’ text to be established). We have conducted trials to
establish the feasibility of tracking down ‘lost’ documents. Where there are
major discrepancies between versions and no way of seeing which is the more
‘reliable’, we have permission from OUP to publish both (e.g. the speech to the
Nominated Assembly on 4 July 1653). Otherwise, we will establish the best text
using advanced source criticism, and will note significant alternatives in
footnotes”.
Having spent a not-insignificant amount of time studying
Oliver Cromwell and more importantly, his role in the English Revolution, I do
not believe it is necessary to justify the amount of attention given over to
him. He is certainly ” is one of the most studied of Englishmen “. If Morrill’s
project increases interest in Cromwell more the better, but the project has a
deeper and more important role to play.Even a rudimentary look at previous
collected works of Cromwell would tell the reader something was awry. The more
you read the clearer it becomes that every single collection of his speeches
and writings were defective or worse still wholly inaccurate.
What are the problems with the older editions of Cromwell’s
words? It will be an enormous task to find out. How best to”represent
Cromwell’s voice” is a big responsibility. Another problem is how to deal with
several copies of the same Cromwell speech or what do when earlier editors
sneakily and irresponsibly corrected Cromwell’s words.The biggest problem is
that recent and past historians have relied on these editions and have most of
the time uncritically quoted them without questioning the accuracy of
Cromwell’s words or deeds. One such example of this is the biography of Oliver
Cromwell by Graham Goodlad. This book which seems primarily aimed at students
again quotes Cromwell without any warning off to the accuracy of the quote. Over
the last 25 years, Cromwell’s name has been seen in more than one hundred
titles in the British History Online Database. All of these titles have relied
on out of date and inaccurate editions.
Let us take the most well-known and probably the most
valuable collection of Cromwell’s speeches and writings done by Thomas
Carlyle’s in 1845. Carlyle’s was certainly a major accomplishment and remained
in print for over a hundred years. But as John Morrill recently said at the
Barry Coward Memorial Lecture even a writer of Carlyle’s calibre spent next to
no time in editing the speeches or writings. But perhaps the greatest mistake
was that he never compared different versions of the same letter or statement.
He never inquired as to whether the recording of the speech or writing was the
best. He took the easiest way out and just “tidied up the spelling and
punctuation and printed it”.
At the start of the 20th century, the noted scholar Mrs
S.C.Lomas decided to tidy up Carlyle’s edition.
According to Morrill, this improved the quality of the text
Carlyle had chosen, “but a comparison of variant texts was a low priority, and
the use of source criticism to determine ‘best’ readings was, to put it
politely, rudimentary”.It would be fair to assume that Morrill understands that
his research does not take place in either a historical or political vacuum.
Cromwell was and still is a controversial figure. Every century historians have
interpreted a Cromwell that fits in with the politics of their age. Morrill dew
attention to one such historian in the 20th century, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, a
Harvard historian who spent most of his career compiling and editing a
collection of Cromwell’s letters and speeches.
These volumes were published between 1937 and 1947.
According to Morrill Cromwell was described by Abbott as “a proto-fascist”.
Suffice to say Morrill had no time for his extreme right-wing political
assessment or Abbott’s editorial approach. In a recent lecture, he described
Abbott’s defects. It is clear that Abbott spent considerable time researching
his prey. In 1929 he published a ‘Bibliography of Oliver Cromwell’ Between
period 1937 and 1947 he published an edition of Cromwell’s written words in
four large volumes. But as Morrill says “it is almost impossible to use this version
because there is neither a list of contents nor running heads to guide the
reader to what s/he wants; its running commentary is distorted by Abbott’s
increasing obsession to show that Cromwell prefigured the great dictators of
the 1940s.”
Each task facing the historians working on each volume will
be very different. John Morrill and Andrew Barclay, who is working on the
period up to 1649 face mainly two major problems. According to Cambridge
University “Many of Cromwell’s early letters often only exist in later copies
and their transmission histories are, where known, sometimes not encouraging.
We have to try to find the originals of documents whose existence is attested
down to the 19th or 20th century and then lost. And we have the problem of what
to do with the summaries of Cromwell’s speeches which he delivered as a
back-bencher to the Long Parliament, especially in the years 1640-1642, and
what to do about the better-recorded Army Debates of 1647 (including the Putney
Debates) without reproducing the whole of the Debates. For the period
1649-1653, the biggest problem is the non-survival of Cromwell’s official
campaign letters from Ireland and Scotland except in multiple printed form with
often as many as seven or eight versions appearing in a series of pamphlets and
newspapers. From the moment Cromwell became Lord Protector in December 1653, a
new problem arises: what to do about letters that he signed but did not write –
the hundreds of letters which do not speak in his ‘voice’. Abbott, in his edition,
tried to be comprehensive but then, suddenly, in 1657, just stopped. Registers
of letters which Abbott had slavishly copied out up to a specified date are
then abandoned. We intend to make more informed and defensible decisions about
the limits of what to include”.
As Morrill has already said one of the major criticism of
Carlyle is that his method of correcting text turned out in some cases to
rewrite what Cromwell had actual written or said. Also, Lomas and Abbott, both
fixed text and therefore changed some things out of recognition and in extreme
cases, affected the meaning of a passage. This meant instead of an accurate
depiction of what Cromwell said we get a bastardised version which becomes
unusable.Perhaps the most famous saying of Cromwell is open to two wildly
different interpretations. Written by the county committee of Suffolk in
September 1643 demanding that “they abandon their preconceptions of what type
of person is needed for the New Model Army”. In other words, their deeds
mattered more than their social standing: ‘I had rather a plain russet-coated
Captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which
you call a Gentleman and is nothing else. I honour a Gentleman who is so
indeed’.
Deeds first, social standing afterwards. But if you take
another version of Cromwell’s letter at face value then a much more original
Cromwell appears if what Cromwell did, in fact, write: “I honour a Gentleman
who is so in deed’ In this quote, Cromwell is only after Gentlemen that can not
only talk the talk but walk the walk. According to Nick Poyntz, “all existing
versions print the first of these versions. But there is another version where
‘in deed’ are two words, not one”.Perhaps the most challenging work of the team
will probably be in regards to Cromwell’s action in Ireland. Certainly the most
controversial part of Cromwell’s life. Not so much what he wrote or said but
what he did and did not do.
Morrill explained that even today, Cromwell’s involvement
and the extent of civilian casualties is still open to debate. This, of course,
is like all of Cromwell’s actions open to different interpretations again
depending on your political and to some extent, historical persuasion. The sack
of Drogheda in September 1649 by political forces is one such action.In his
article on Cromwell Nick Poyntz makes the point that this oft-quoted phrase
justified his actions: “I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgement of
God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much
innocent blood; and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the
future, which are the satisfactory grounds to such actions, which otherwise
cannot but work remorse and regret”. He questions whether these are Cromwell’s
words as no original letter survives. He also makes the point as does Morrill
that parliament had a habit of tidying up speeches and letters of Cromwell.
Again to what extent his words are accurate is one of the tasks of the project.
It must be said that this is not an envious one.
Morrill recently made the distinction between civilians
killed in the heat of battle as opposed to in cold blood.29 September 1649 two
letters from Cromwell sack of Drogheda were read in the Parliament. “Our men
getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all to the Sword; and indeed
being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare any that were in Arms in
the Town, and I think that night they put to the sword about two thousand men,
divers of the Officers and Soldiers being fled over the Bridge into the other
part of the Town, where about One hundred of them possessed St. Peters Church
Steeple, some the West Gate, and others, a round strong Tower next the Gate,
called St. Sundays: These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused; whereupon
I ordered the Steeple of St. Peters Church to be fired, where one of them was
heard to say in the midst of the flames, God damn me, God confound me, I burn,
I burn; the next day the other two Towers were summoned, in one of which was
about six or seven score, but they refused to yield themselves; and we knowing
that hunger must compel them, set onely good Guards to secure them from running
away, until their stomacks were come down: from one of the said Towers,
notwithstanding their condition, they killed and wounded some of our men; when
they submitted, their Officers were knockt on the head, and every tenth man of
the Soldiers killed, and the rest Shipped for the Barbadoes; the Soldiers in
the other Town were all spared, as to their lives onely, and Shipped likewise
for the Barbadoes. I am persuaded that this is a righteous Judgement of God
upon these Barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent
blood, and that it will tend to preventthe effusion of blood for the future”.As
Morrill pointed out Cromwell made a list officers and soldiers killed “Two
thousand Five hundred-Foot Soldiers, besides Staff-Officers, Chyrurgeons, and many Inhabitants”. So it is clear that
inhabitants were killed.
The team will have to negotiate what is both a political and
the historical minefield of differing opinions on Cromwell’s campaign in
Ireland. One example being Philip Mckeiver in his book A New History of Oliver
Cromwell’s Irish Campaign is an aggressive defence of Cromwell’s actions at one
point, denying any massacres happened at Drogheda or Wexford. Having said that
his book is worth reading as it does expose some myths and outright lies as
regards Cromwell’s actions. Peter Reese in his book the Life of General George
Monck: For King and Cromwell tend to go well overboard when he describes the
Irish rebels fighting Cromwell as “terrorists”.
On the other side of the debate is Micheál Ó Siochrú whose
book I must admit have not read yet but the title Gods Executioner tends to
give you a bit of a flavour as to his historical persuasion. Let us hope his
work on the new editions shows a little more objectivity and follows the advice
of the historian Edward Hallett Carr who argued that it was very dangerous to judge
people at different times according to the moral values of his or her time.
Carr also warned that historians “should not act as judges”.
Perhaps his most valuable advice was that you should “Study
the historian before you begin to consider the facts. This is, after all, not
very abstruse. It is what is already done by the brilliant undergraduate who,
when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude’s, goes
round to a friend at St. Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what
bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out
for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone-deaf, or your
historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the
fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes
inaccessible ocean, and what the historian catches will depend partly on
chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what
tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by
the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the
kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed, if, standing Sir
George Clark on his head, I were to call history “a hard core of interpretation
surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts”, my statement would, no doubt, be
one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to think, than the original
dictum”.What other problems as regards Ireland will the team face. One is
finding different Versions of the Same Speech. In Many previous versions of
Cromwell’s speeches, the historian or writer have failed to inform his
readership why they chose to publish version they did. Another cardinal sin was
to produce “hybrid versions” which historians have found entirely useless for
historical research.
Cambridge University website gives us one example of this ”
on 4 December the Irish Catholic Bishops and other leading clergy met at one of
Ireland’s holiest sites, the ruined abbey at Clonmacnoise, on a hillside
overlooking the Shannon, and they called for a levee en masse of the Catholic
people of Ireland to drive out the invader who had come to ‘extirpate’ the
Irish people and the Catholic religion. Cromwell published a scornful and
haughty rejection of their claims. It was released in Cork and then in Dublin,
his words in those Irish printings of the pamphlet following the words of the
Irish clergy. ‘Yours’, he told them, ‘is a covenant with death and hell’. A
version of this pamphlet, detached from the clerical decrees, was then
published in London under the title A declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland for the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people. Only one copy of the
Irish edition is known to have survived, the Cork printing in a private library
in Ireland and the Dublin printing in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
Neither Irish publication appears in Early English Books Online, and they
appear in the Short-Title Catalogue wrongly ascribed to Henry Ireton and with a
very different title. No current edition of Cromwell’s writings and speeches
has noted the existence of these Irish versions, and each of them reproduces
the London edition, blissfully unaware of the very significant changes that
that London edition introduces, which begin on the title page itself. The title
of the Irish printings lacks the hauteur of the London title page”.
Hopefully, the editorial team will not only correct previous
editions but should elaborate more on the mistakes of past historians. My other
wish is that the publications should be made available to the widest audience
possible and not be priced out of the range of ordinary people or that they are
not just done for an academic audience.
One hopes the team remain objective and that the new
editions of Cromwell’s writing do not exhibit any of the moral judgements and
extreme political bias held by some historians who have written books on the
Lord Protector. Let us hope Professor Morrill and his team does succeed in
their endeavours, and we get a much truer picture of Oliver Cromwell “Warts and
All”. As Morrill said, “Cromwell will come alive in much the same way as a
Great Master painting takes on a new and different life when it is cleaned and
restored”.
Notes
1 More information about the project can be found through
this link
http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/research/research-projects/early-modern/new-edition-of-Cromwell
2 A New History of Cromwell’s Irish Campaign [Illustrated
Philip Graham McKeiver
3 God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of
Ireland Dr Micheál Ó Siochrú
4 Oliver Cromwell (History Insights) [Kindle Edition]Graham
Goodlad
5 Nick Poyntz blog can be found here
http://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/
6 A bloody Irish almanack, or, Rebellious and bloody Ireland
… London, 1646; Hib.7.646.1
7 A bloudy fight at Dublin … London, 1649. Hib.7.649.57
London, 1650. Hib.7.650.8
8 E H Carr What Is History
What do we really know about Oliver Cromwell by Professor
John Morrill? The First Barry Coward Memorial Lecture.
Professor John Morrill gave the First Barry Coward Memorial
Lecture. Organised by the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, it was fitting that a
historian of Morrill’s statue gave this lecture. This is the first time I have
heard John Morrill speak. I do not agree with his type of historiography, but
he is a historian worth listening too.In his introductory remarks, he made a
fitting tribute to the memory of Barry Coward. Morrill regretted his untimely
death and was saddened by it.
Morrill used the lecture to outline the project that he and
a team of eight editors chosen by Oxford University Press to assemble a
five-volume edition of Oliver Cromwell’s collected writings and speeches. This
edition will give us a more concrete and precise appreciation of Oliver
Cromwell. The result will probably result in a significant reappraisal of “Our
Chief of Men”. This is a long-overdue project. The fact that the team won
significant funding of £250,000 from Leverhulme Trust is testimony to its importance.
John Morrill’s main emphasis throughout the entire lecture
was the importance of accuracy in historical research. It is relatively
standard knowledge that the various previous collections of Cromwell’s
collected speeches and writings are found wanting. This project was undertaken
by Morrill and his large team of historians researchers and give us the first
real attempt to put the historical record straight and to furnish us a more
precise understanding of one of the most important historical figures in both
English and world history.
Morrill began his lecture by going over previous editions of
Cromwell’s collected speeches and writings. The first and probably most
well-known collected edition of Cromwell’s words was by Thomas Carlyle in 1845
and updated by S. C. Lomas in 1904. Morrill’s main criticism of Carlyle was
that he made little effort at accuracy. Carlyle never looked at previous
examples of speeches quoted in his collection. Morrill believes the Lomas
version is better but not by much.
In his hand-out given at the lecture Morrill gives us an
example of the obstacles his team has encountered during their research.
Probably one the more well-known misinterpretations of Cromwell’s speeches,
took place at the opening of the Barebones Parliament. One version, made in
1654, says:” I confess I never looked to see such a day as this –
it may not be nor you
neither – when Jesus Christ should be so owned as He is, at this day, and in
this work. Jesus Christ is owned this day by your call, and you own Him by your
willingness to appear for Him; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures
can, to the day of the power of Christ. God manifests it to be the day of the
power of Christ, having, through so much blood, and so much trial as hath been
upon this, made this one of the great one of the great issues thereof……I
confess I did never look back to see such a day.
The same speech recorded 100 years later says this: “I
confess I never looked to see such a day as this –
it may not be nor you
neither – when Jesus Christ shall be so owned as He is, at this day, and in
this world. Jesus Christ is owned this day by you all, and you own Him by your
willingness in appearing here; and you manifest this, as far as poor creatures
can, to a day of the power of Christ by your willingness…god manifests it to be
to be the day of the power of Christ, having, through so much blood, and so
much trials as hath been upon these nations made this one of the great one of
the great issues thereof… I confess I did never look to see such a sight”.
According to Morrill, the second statement makes Cromwell a
far more radical figure than had previously thought. Nick Poyntz agrees with
this assessment as well “The differences are small but important. “Cromwell is
far more radical. Members of the Parliament have called forth the spirit of
Christ through their presence, and the day itself is “the day of the power of
Christ”, an apocalyptic climax to the struggles of the past eleven years. In
the second version, Cromwell calls it “a day of the power of Christ”, which
softens its millenarianism. Representatives have been summoned by Christ, not
the other way around”.[1]
It would be fair to assume that Morrill understands that his
research does not take place in either a historical or political vacuum.
Cromwell was and still is a controversial figure. Every century historians have
interpreted a Cromwell that fits in with the politics of their age. Morrill dew
attention to one such historian in the 20th century, Wilbur Cortez Abbott, a Harvard
historian who spent most of his career to compiling and editing a collection of
Cromwell’s letters and speeches.
These volumes were published between 1937 and 1947.
According to Morrill Cromwell was described by Abbott as “a
proto-fascist”. Suffice to say Morrill
had no time for this extreme right-wing political assessment or for Abbott’s
editorial approach. Certainly, the most controversial part of Cromwell’s life
was his time spent in Ireland. Morrill explained that even today, Cromwell’s
involvement and the extent of civilian casualties is still open to debate.
This, of course, like all of Cromwell’s actions is open to different
interpretations again depending on your political and to some extent,
historical persuasion. The sack of Drogheda in September 1649 by parliamentary
forces is one such action.
Nick Poyntz makes a further point that this oft-quoted phrase: “I am persuaded
that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who
have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood; and that it will tend to
prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are the satisfactory
grounds to such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret”.
He questions whether these are Cromwell’s words as no
original letter survives. He also makes the point as does Morrill that
parliament had a habit of tidying up speeches and letters of Cromwell. Again to
what extent his words are accurate is one of the tasks of the project. It must
be said that this is not an envious one.
Morrill made the distinction between civilians killed in the
heat of battle as opposed to in cold blood.29 September 1649 two letters from
Cromwell sack of Drogheda were read in
the Parliament:”Our men getting up to them, were ordered by me to put them all
to the Sword; and indeed being in the heat of action, I forbade them to spare
any that were in Arms in the Town, and I think that night they put to the sword
about two thousand men, divers of the Officers and Soldiers being fled over the
Bridge into the other part of the Town, where about One hundred of them
possessed St. Peters Church Steeple, some the West Gate, and others, a round
strong Tower next the Gate, called St. Sundays:.
These being summoned to yield to mercy, refused; whereupon I
ordered the Steeple of St. Peters Church to be fired, where one of them was
heard to say in the midst of the flames, God damn me, God confound me, I burn,
I burn; the next day the other two Towers were summoned, in one of which was
about six or seven score, but they refused to yield themselves; and we knowing
that hunger must compel them, set onely good Guards to secure them from running
away, until their stomacks were come down: from one of the said Towers,
notwithstanding their condition, they killed and wounded some of our men; when
they submitted, their Officers were knockt on the head, and every tenth man of
the Soldiers killed, and the rest Shipped for the Barbadoes; the Soldiers in
the other Town were all spared, as to their lives onely, and Shipped likewise for
the Barbadoes. I am perswaded that this is a righteous Judgement of God upon
these Barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent
blood, and that it will tend to preventthe effusion of blood for the future”.
As Morrill pointed out Cromwell made a list of officers and
soldiers killed “Two thousand Five hundred-Foot Soldiers, besides
Staff-Officers, Chyrurgeons, &c. and many Inhabitants”. So it is clear that
inhabitants were killed.Let us hope Professor Morrill and his team succeed in their
endeavours and we get a much more accurate picture of Oliver Cromwell “warts
and all”. As Morrill said, “Cromwell will come alive in much the same way as a
Great Master painting takes on a new and different life when it is cleaned and
restored”.
[1] In his own
words-https://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/in-his-own-words/
The New Social History and the 17th Century English
Revolution
The New Social History Historiography appeared in the late
1960s into the early 1970s. According to some, it was perhaps the last
significant historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex
historical phenomenon known as the English revolution. Before the 1970s, most
social histories had been limited to a study of everyday life.
During the last thirty-odd years, the subject has come to
prominence despite the genre being a bête noir of some revisionist historians.
The most positive side of the new history is that it brought into the public
domain the lives of working people or the poor who had been mainly ignored by
historians. On the downside this, new history was divorced from any form of
economic or materialist explanation of the revolution.
The new social history is not fundamentally different from
its predecessor“old social history, which was described as a “hodgepodge” of
disciplines, unlike any other historiography. The English historian G. M.
Trevelyan saw it as the link between economic and political history, stating,
“Without social history, economic history is barren and political history
unintelligible.”[1]It was G.M. Trevelyan who gave us the most famous definition
when he said that social history was ‘the history of the people with the
politics left out.’ Historians have interpreted this statement in many
different ways.E. H Carr position was “ to analyse the past in the light of the
present and the future which is growing out of it, and to cast the beam of the
past over the issues which dominate current and future.’ It is, he said, the
function of the historian not only to analyse what he or she finds significant
in the past but also ‘to isolate and illuminate the fundamental changes at work
in the society in which we live’, which will entail a view ‘of the processes by
which the problems set to the present generation by these changes can be
resolved’. People are a product of history, their judgements and actions
conditioned by the past, and the historian should work to make them aware of
this, but also to make them aware of the issues and problems of their own time;
to break the chain that binds them to the past and present, and so enable them
to influence the future.”[2]
While English historians were in the forefront of promoting
the new social history it would be wrong to classify this movement as an
English movement , it had international adherents. Paul E. Johnson described
how the movement took place in America in the late 1960s: “The New Social
History reached UCLA at about that time, and I was trained as a quantitative
social science historian. I learned that “literary” evidence and the kinds of
history that could be written from it were inherently elitist and
untrustworthy. Our cousins, the Annalistes, talked of ignoring heroes and
events and reconstructing the more constitutive and enduring “background” of
history. Such history could be made only with quantifiable sources. The result
would be a “History from the Bottom Up” that ultimately engulfed traditional
history and, somehow, helped to make a Better World. Much of this was acted out
with mad-scientist bravado. One well-known quantifier said that anyone who did
not know statistics at least through multiple regression should not hold a job
in a history department. My own advisor told us that he wanted history to
become “a predictive social science.” I never went that far. I was drawn to the
new social history by its democratic inclusiveness as much as by its system and
precision. I wanted to write the history of ordinary people—to historicize
them, put them into the social structures and long-term trends that shaped
their lives, and at the same time resurrect what they said and did. In the late
1960s, quantitative social history looked like the best way to do that”.[3]
Social History in Britain was hugely influenced by the
French Annales School of historical study. Keith Wrightson in his book English
Society that the social changes that took place were not revolutionary but were
rather evolutionary. Wrightson does pose some interesting questions. At the
beginning of his book, he asks to what extent was English society polarised
enough to cause a civil war, revolution and finally to cut a Kings head off. He
also asks to what extent was the growing social inequality a factor in how
social, economic and political events shaped up.It is clear that if you took a
straw poll of people’s view at the beginning of the 17th that within 40 years
there would be a massive civil war, revolution and regicide then they would
have said you were mad. In many ways, there was no precedent for what took
place in 1640. The leaders of the English revolution had no previous revolution
to study to guide them. The 1640s Revolution was unlike any other. Subsequent
leaders of the revolutions such as the French and Russian had the luxury of
learning from previous revolutions.
The new social history’s brand of historiography was
challenged by a growing number of historians. Ann Hughes highlighted this
changing historical fashion by citing the different titles of books produced
during this time.
In 1965 Lawrence Stone published Social Change and
Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas the late Barry Coward produced Social
Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The coupling of
continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the recent work
reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation in early
modern England. E Aylmer posed the question of Rebellion or Revolution. Did he
wonder how much difference did the events of 1640-60 make to people’s lives?
The casualties, damage and other losses arising directly from the fighting,
together with the generally disruptive of war on agriculture, industry, trade,
transport all seem apparent on the debit side, he, on the other hand, he says
the war gave people more social and political mobility, and they were able to
achieve more than in any other time.
He makes the point that he believes that a few tens of
thousands lost their lives and certainly no more than the worst epidemic of the
time. In his chapter on the Quality of Life, he states there was no shift in
the economy or radical alteration of the social structure. While he concedes
that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive for business
development, he says that this would have been the case if Charles 1st Personal
rule had continued indefinitely, or if the royalists had won the civil
war.[4]Aylmer steered a middle course between rebellion and revolution the same
could be said of a heterogeneous group of historians that included Conrad
Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Mark Kishlansky, Anthony Fisher who called into question
both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the Civil War. They rejected the idea
that the war was the product of deep-rooted social changes instead of emphasised
short-term factors and political infighting. Mark Kishlansky believed there was
a “fallacy of social determinism”.
Many historians who have contributed books and articles
which have been in favour of the new social history have been mistakenly labelled
Marxists. The majority of these historians would not in the slightest call
themselves Marxist or be in favour of Marxist historiography.They certainly
would not be in favour of Marx’s theory of the individuals’ place in history as
written in his Critique of Political Economy (1859): he explains”In the social
production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations,
who are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.
“The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with
the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing
in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they
have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole,
immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always
necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in
short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about
himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from
the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the
social forces of production and the relations of production”.
While it is generally accepted that there was not a massive
amount of unrest and protest during the civil war. John Morrill has made the
point that changes in social and economic policy were mostly controlled by the
middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented by this class. However,
there was a real fear amongst sections of the middle class who feared the
possibility of riots by the poor.Lucy Hutchinson describes this attitude so
well “almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like
factious little people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out
of their command, some oppressed by a certain sort of people in the House whom,
to distinguish from the most honourable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking
men”. [5]
Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were
increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness,
particularly amongst the lower sections that to have a say in these changes
they must organise through some kind of political organisation.John Morrill was
clearly influenced by the New Social History historiography in an interview he
describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the for the front
of the group “So there came along the new social history which opened up a
whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things to
happen for my period was the work which is most obviously associated with Keith
Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews returned to
Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the Wrightson revolution indeed, in the
way in which social history is made, had an enormous impact on those of us who
were more interested in high politics. I mean popular politics, constructed
high politics. Wrightson’s importance for my work is again something that
people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally, in my
mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.[6]
While the debate over the impact is important, it is an
expression of a much more fundamental debate over whether the war was linked to
social and economic changes in England and Europe at the time.G M. Trevelyan
states that the Cromwellian revolution was not caused by social and economic
forces but its causes and motives were a result of the development of political
and religious thought and aspiration among men who had no desire to recast
society or distribute wealth.The examination of localised politics as opposed
to national politics by the new social history historians fitted in nicely with
Morrill’s work The Revolt of the Provinces. As Mario Caricchio states “the new
social history has demonstrated the parish in England was a political forum. A
continuing negotiation of authority and subordination featured within it:
gossip, rough music, libel, legal disputes, rioting, petitioning, voting and
rebellion represented the diverse forms of conducting and solving the conflict.
They constituted elements of “popular political culture”. These were also the
means by which the “ordinary people” shaped modern Europe on the continent.”[7]
A historian that has played an important part in the
deleopment of the new social history project is Joan Thirsk’s who along with
Alan Everitt, so much so that they became to known as the Leicester School of
Local History. Beginning first with a county study, then through a series of
regional and national studies, Thirsk concentrated on producing a regional
framework for understanding the early modern agrarian economy and economic
change in that period. How much this approach deepened, our understanding of the
compound nature of the English Revolution is open to debate. Perhaps the
narrowness of their remits has led to accusations that this type of
historiography has not had the significant impact its historians had hoped for.
The real Marxist historians had a lot of time for the new
social history. Christopher Hill asserted that profound economic and social
changes took place during the English revolution so much that “historians are
coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in
the economic history of England. To back this assertion up saying “After the
civil wars,, successive governments from the Rump onwards, whatever their
political complexion, gave much more attention to the interests of trade and
colonial development in their foreign policies”. Restrictions which had
hampered the growth of capitalist economic activity were removed, never to the
restored. “The first condition of healthy industrial growth,” wrote Professor
Hughes apropos the salt industry, “was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage
of the court”.[8]
Right up until his death Christopher Hill had been the
leading proponent of the opinion that the social, economic, and political
changes that took place in the civil war were the product of a bourgeois revolution.
Hill argued that the seventieth century saw a turning point in English and
world history. This view of trying to understand the social processes at work
in the English revolution has been fiercely attacked by numerous historians yet
none so that by P Lassett who said “The English Revolution ought to be
entombed. It is a term made out of our own social and political discourse…. It
gets in the way of enquiry and understanding, if only because it requires that
change of all these different types go forward at the same pace, the political
pace… There never was such a set of events as the English Revolution”.
Hill never put forward that the events that characterised
the English Civil War proceeded at the same pace. His point is that it helps to
understand very complex developments if they are firstly set to the social and
economic framework. What conclusions can be drawn? Through the sheer weight of
empirical evidence, it is clear that the war had a significant impact on the
social and political fabric of England.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history
[2] E H Carr, The New Society, op cit, chapter 1.
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history
[4] Rebellion or Revolution-G E Aylmer
[5]Order and Disorder-Lucy Hutchinson
[6] https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html
[7] Radicalism and the English Revolution Mario Caricchio
Università di Firenze
[8] In the Century of Revolution
‘An end to good manners’: The Royal College of Physicians
and the English Civil War
The exhibition held at the Royal College of Physicians is
small and limited, but to its credit does offer a great insight into the
attitude of the country’s leading medical professionals to the English Civil
War.At the outbreak of war, members of the RCP were like many in the country
split in their allegiance. The College of Physicians was led by an elite group
of men who wielded significant power. The RCP was not a homogenous body; its
members had differing religious and political opinions.
One of the most famous members of the college was the
Royalist physician William Harvey who was described as “a man of lowest
stature, round-faced; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit; his
hair as black as a raven and curling.”[1]Harvey was not only responsible for
looking after the King’s medical requirements but made a significant
contribution to the development of medicine by showing how blood circulated the
body. He said of his discovery “I found the task so truly arduous… that I was almost
tempted to think… that the movement of the heart was only to be comprehended by
God. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when
the diastole took place because of the rapidity of the movement.” [2]
During the civil war, Harvey took no time in declaring his
allegiance to the crown. Many members switched sides during the war which
enabled them to navigate “their way through the conflict, pragmatically
switching sides”.
The exhibition has a selection of audio readings concentrating
on different parts of the civil war. One such reading is “a true copy of the
high court of justice for the tryal of Charles published London `1684According
to the exhibition notes, this was “Published after the restoration to the
throne of Charles II; this pro-Royalist work includes a transcription of
Charles I’s trial and execution. There is also an appendix which provides ‘An
alphabetical catalogue of the members of the execrable pretended high court of
justice’.
One picture used in the exhibition is described as an
“allegorical frontispiece is unambiguous in overall tone. Devil-like figures
have commandeered a carriage, taking the crown and ‘three nations’ hostage,
leaving liberty in the balance. Sheep and doves are attacked behind it, and the
beheaded King Charles is crushed beneath its wheels. An accompanying
explanatory verse was still deemed necessary, making reference to ‘wounded
justice’ and a ‘murder’d monarch’.In one memorable exchange, the Clerk of the Court
read “Charles Stuart, King of England, you have been accused on behalf of the
people of England, of high treason, and other crimes, the court have determined
that you ought to answer the same. To this, the King replied “I will answer the
same as soon as I know by what authority you do this”. Stubborn to the end the
Kings last words on the scaffold were “I go from a corruptible to an
incorruptible crown, where no disturbances can be.”[3]
One of the significant weaknesses of the exhibition is its
failure to go into any detail as regards the significant dissension of many
members towards the monarchy. We get a small glimpse of this dissension in a
quote used in the exhibition ‘…when dissolution and idleness had put an end to
good manners), some seditious ‘tribunes’ of the people and ill-conditioned
scoundrels … had defiled all things … the Phoenix … rose at last …’ but fails
to explain its meaning.
According to William Birken[4] there was significant
dissension amongst men of medicine. According to him “In England, medicine has
always been something of a refuge for individuals whose lives have been
dislocated by religious and political strife. This was particularly true in the
seventeenth century when changes in Church and State were occurring at a
blinding speed”.
Christopher Hill has described the “erratic careers of some
radical clergy and intellectuals who studied and practised medicine in times of
dislocation. A list pulled together from Hill’s book would include: John
Pordage, Samuel Pordage, Henry Stubbe, John Webster, John Rogers, Abiezer
Coppe, William Walwyn and Marchamont Nedham. Medicine, as a practical option
for a lost career, or to supplement and subsidize uncertain jobs, can also be
found among Royalists and Anglicans when their lives were similarly disrupted
during the Interregnum”.He continues “among these were the brilliant Vaughan
twins, Thomas, the Hermetic philosopher, and Henry, the metaphysical poet and
clergyman; the poet, Abraham Cowley; and the mercurial Nedham, who was
dislocated both as a Republican and as a royalist. The Anglicans Ralph Bathurst
and Mathew Robinson were forced to abandon their clerical careers temporarily
for medicine, only to return to the Church when times were more
propitious”.[5]The exhibition is a rare glimpse into the treasure trove of
material held by the RCP. A lot of this material has rarely been seen in
public.
[1]https://upscgk.com/Online-gk/5843/harvey-stayed-at-the-kings-school-for-five-years-after-which-he-matriculated-at-gonville-and-caius-college-in-cambridge
[2] William Harvey, On The Motion Of The Heart And Blood In
Animals
[3] ] A True copy of the journal of the High Court of
Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons
and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court / taken by
J. Nalson Jan. 4, 1683 : Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Digital
Library Production Service
[4] The Dissenting Tradition in English Medicine of the 17th
and 18th Century William Birken Medical History 1995
[5] The Experience of Defeat-Christopher Hill
Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New
Ground”
The primary purpose of this article is to answer Nick Poyntz
claim that john Adamson’s work “breaks new ground”. It will do so within the
context of Adamson’s revisionist historiography.For the uninitiated Adamson’s
primary work has been the book the Noble Revolt. Its basic premise is that a
small Junto made up of nobles led a revolt which caused the overthrow of
Charles 1st.Adamson’s book is well written and researched as you would expect
from a Cambridge University-based historian while the book contains new
material that is not enough to say that the book breaks new ground.
In order to break new ground or create new historiography,
he would have to at least absorb the two most crucial historiography that of
Whig and Marxist in order to create a new synthesis. Not doing this means he
has not created new historiography but continues with post revisionist
historiography.As Mary Fulbrook perceptively writes”The empirical inductivism
of revisionists, and their somewhat strident anti- orthodoxy, have failed to
provide adequate positive theses to fill the vacuum left by their negative
critiques. The over-emphasis on the politics of patronage, apart from being
inadequately established historically, suffers from theoretical and
metatheoretical shortcomings.40 Theoretically, it can really only tell us
something about the medium of politics; it is an empirically open question
whether or not there is any ideological content to the formation and struggles
of different political factions. Metatheoretically, such exaggerated stress on
patron-client relationships is at least as philosophically degrading as any
other form of downplaying the autonomy of human action – such as seeing men
merely as agents of historical forces – and should, therefore, be rejected by
revisionists on their arguments.”
In my opinion, for a piece of work to break new ground has
to be more than a well-reasoned argument or a rather large amount of text or
have high colour pictures. It must be able to define itself. Revisionism and
post revisionism is nothing more than a mishmash of theories that lead the
study of the English revolution into a dead end.
Noble Revolt
Whether or not as John Morrill said that the revisionism
that developed in the early part of the 1970s was a movement, it had one
defining characteristic; it was hostile to Marxism.This hostility to Marxism
was not so much from a historical standpoint but more to do with politics. It
is no accident that the growth of a revisionist movement coincided with the
rise of a right-wing political movement spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher and
Ronald Reagan. This movement gained ground with the final collapse of the USSR,
which led to numerous theories that the fall of Communism meant that the
socialist project had failed. The most pessimistic expression of these
principles came with the End of History by Francis Fukuyama. The English Civil
War was not the only subject that had a noticeable revisionist trend during
this time. From the 1970s Studies of the into the Russian Revolution and French
revolution provoked a similar revisionist backlash.
Historians and their historiography do indeed go out of
fashion. However, historiographies that were fashionable two hundred years ago
still can contribute to our understanding of the war, despite the protestations
of Christopher Thompson.Adamson refers to the English gentry but does not go
into any extensive detail as to the class composition of the gentry. What was
its economic position towards the king? Adamson is a skilled historian, but a
more detailed description of the class struggle involving his Cabal would have
made the Noble Revolt far more precise and concrete.Adamson’s work has
previously come under ferocious attack from the historian Mark Kishlansky.I am
not saying that Adamson is a left-wing historian by any stretch of the
imagination, but it has been modus operandi of right-wing historians to attack
other historians in order to push them and their study of history to the right.
You only have to look at the”Storm Over The Gentry” Debate to see this.
Kishlansky is first essay Saye What challenged Adamson’s
historiography. In reality, this essay was nothing more than a catalogue of
Adamson’s errors. Kishlansky’s critique of Adamson does seem to border on
academic bullying. In all probability, Adamson made some errors but who has
not.What lies behind Kishlansky’s attack is his opposition to Adamson,
concluding the facts. In this quote from Conrad Russell, he appears to back
Kishlansky’s attack on Adamson saying“What makes a historian master of his
craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more
than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from
this discipline, risks acquiring dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements
which are unscholarly because unverifiable”.
Kishlansky accuses Adamson of “tendentious interpretation”.
Well, you could blame every single historian that has written on the English
Civil War of this. Historians have the right to interpret the facts or sources
the way they feel fit without fear.This dispute with Kishlansky clearly
bothered Adamson so much so that his book does contain a large number of
footnotes 191 to be precise maybe this was a defensive reaction to Kishlansky’s
critique. Kishlansky alleged that Adamson was “deliberately abusing and
misreading sourcesAs Nick points out “the unfortunate thing about the debate
was that it tended to damn the rest of Adamson’s much wider thesis; unfairly,
in my view”.
The Royal Stuarts by Allan Massie: Jonathan Cape :A Review
The Royal Stuarts is
a portrait of one of the most famous families in British history. It is open to
debate whether they were the family that “shaped Britain” and can be challenged
quite easily.Logically Massie starts at the beginning of the Stewart’s reign.
The spelling of the family name was changed to ‘Stuart’ by Mary, Queen of
Scots, to “stop the French mispronouncing it”.
The Stuarts began life as wealthy landowners from Brittany,
France before moving to Scotland where they acquired the hereditary office of
‘steward’ to the Scottish kings. Massie book highlights the fact that the
family span a considerable range of British history, from the Middle Ages to
the Napoleonic period.
Massie’s book is not an academic account of the Stuarts and
if truth be told it reads more like a novel as Noel Malcolm poetically writes
“he has the novelist’s ability to conjure up context and background in a brief
sketch, the journalist’s knack of summarising arguments and issues, and the
storyteller’s gift for picking out those key actions or remarks that bring a
person’s character to life”.[1]
Massie’s generous and in some cases, sloppy use of footnotes
is annoying but not a game-changer. However, his use of historians is mainly
from an older generation is annoying. His book would be much better with the
use of more modern historians.
One of the biggest gripes against Massie according to
several leading historians is the fact that he is not a professional historian,
and this has led to these historians to bemoan the fact that he has used no
original primary sources or consulted any manuscripts.Tim Harris is equally
scathing in his review of the book “The footnoting is sloppy. Many quotes are
not footnoted at all, and when they are, often, no page numbers are given.
Moreover, Massie appears to be completely ignorant of much of the relevant
historiography. The work of distinguished scholars at the world’s leading
universities is ignored: John Morrill (Cambridge), Clive Holmes (Oxford), Mark
Kishlansky (Harvard), Daniel Szechi (Manchester), Ronald Hutton (Bristol), and
John Miller (London), to name but a few. Massie seems to think the last word on
Charles II is the work of Arthur Bryant and Hester Chapman. Normally when those
outside the profession turn their hand to writing history, it is because they have
a deep love of the field. Massie seems to hold the world of professional
historical scholarship in contempt.”[2]
Other mistakes include Massie citing that Charles Ist did
‘find refuge’ in Carisbrooke Castle, this is not strictly true as he was in
reality held under armed parliamentary guard. Massie asserts Charles ‘almost
certainly’ did not read Hobbes’s Leviathan. However, this is contradicted by
the fact Hobbes himself gave that a manuscript copy.
Historiography
From a historiography standpoint, Massie’s book is part of a
cottage industry of Royalist studies. The book is one dimensional in that it
pays minimal attention if all to the profound economic changes that covered the
reign of the Stuart family. Nothing is learnt of the close connection of the
Stuarts to a section of the growing mercantile class that grew up in the 15th
and 16th centuries and came of age in the 17th century and played no small role
in the English revolution.
Also, a kiss of death of any book is when the historian
appears to have sympathy for his or her subject. Massie indicates sympathy for
Charles. Massie is a very conservative
writer, and the book would not look out of place in the growing revisionist
historiography. The main characteristic of this historiography being hostility
to both Whig and Marxist historiography.Massie also believes that Charles was
not responsible for the civil war it was nasty parliaments fault. Massie
uncritically presents the counterfactual argument If Charles had not been so
stubborn, then things might not have developed into a civil war.
Massie, as one writer states “is well known for advocating a
Tory viewpoint. Stuarts are meat and drink to conservative revisionist
historians because their complex personalities and the shifting, pre-modern
nature of their kingdoms (plural after 1603) made them unusually susceptible to
interpretative spin. Stuart reputations go up and down like the stock market”.
To conclude, Massie is an excellent writer and his approach
throughout the book is intelligent and does not talk down to the reader.
However, do we need another book on the Stuarts that mostly rehashes previous
work and offers nothing new?
1]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7724980/The-Royal-Stuarts-by-Allan-Massie-review.html
[2] Review The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family that
Shaped Britain by Allan Massie Review by Tim Harris -The Historian, Vol. 75,
No. 2 (SUMMER 2013), pp. 392-393
The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I by John Adamson
576 pp, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25
“he has impressively uncovered a neglected aspect of the
mentality of the age. It does not follow that the juntos were the cause of the
war or that the war was what they thought it was”.
Diane Purkiss
John Adamson is a competent historian and his book is well
written and extensively researched. The Noble Revolt has been described as “a
work of great style and imagination as well as scholarship… As with a great
19th-century novel, the story and the characters will become your friends for
life.”[1]
Adamson’s books on the English revolution are part of what
has become the ‘post-revisionist’ school of history writing. The main
characteristic of this school is the rejection of both Marxist and Whig
historiography. Before the Post-Revisionist we had just the revisionists. These
historians were also characterised by a rejection of Marxist historiography.
As Sarah Mortimer describes, even the word revolution was
taboo “revolution is a very un-English activity and in the 1980s’ revisionist,’
historians doubted whether England ever really had one. Instead, they argued
that the English Civil War of the 1640s was something of an accident. Charles
I’s realm was beset with structural problems (including a rickety financial
system and three entirely different kingdoms) that would have taxed even the
most astute politician. And Charles was far from being that: his blend of
self-righteousness and inability to compromise left England vulnerable to the
sparks of rebellion. That spark came from Scotland, which in 1639 rose up
against Charles’ heavy-handed religious policies. Two years later the Irish
rebelled; the changing situation in Britain had brought the latent religious and
ethnic pressures there to boiling point. The English Civil War was, therefore,
part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, with England the last to take up arms
against its king. This interpretation was set out in Conrad Russell’s The
Causes of the English Civil War (Clarendon Press,1990), but two decades later
the picture no longer seems so clear and historians have begun to wonder
whether England was quite so unrevolutionary as the revisionists suggested.”[2]
The book is beautifully illustrated with full-colour photos,
helpful maps and plans. You get the feeling that a lot of money was spent on
this book. Which is a little strange as it appeals to such a small audience.The
chronological dates of the book are May 1640 and January 10, 1642, when the
king departed London. The layer studied by Adamson composed a minuscule part of
the English ruling elite in the early 1640s. There nothing wrong in studying
this layer but they have to place within the context of the revolution.Not all
historians have been enamoured with Adamson’s book The historian R C Richardson
has called the book title and subtitle” both highly misleading. The events
documented in this book did not lead to the overthrow of Charles I. As Adamson
himself now concedes, what happened in the 1640s “was no mere barons’ war” and
the “baronial context” was one of several that coalesced at the time. “Nor was
it a revolt of the nobility, or even the major part of the nobility, acting
alone”.[3]
A better book would have recognised that these two years
covered by Adamson were extremely crucial not only because of the rebellion by
a minority of the Nobility as Adamson suggests but they set the scene for the
future course of the war. The tendency amongst post-revisionist historians to
concentrate on limited political aspects covering only the ruling elite and a
small majority for that matter is detrimental to a fuller and more
multi-dimensional understanding of the war.The Noble Revolt is very much a
by-product of the “revisionists revolt”. The book took Adamson nearly 15 years
to research and write. It is a formidable read with close to two hundred pages
of notes. The central theoretical premise of the book is that the war was a
coup d’ état by a group of nobles or aristocrats who no longer supported the
king.
According to Diane Purkiss, these nobles were “driven by
their code of honour, and they acted to protect themselves and the nation.
Names such as Saye, Bedford, Essex and Warwick move from the sidelines to
occupy centre stage, as do their counterparts among Scottish peers. It was they
and not the ignorant masses who plucked a king from his throne. Oliver
Cromwell, for Adamson, was merely one of their lesser lackeys”. [4]For such a
long book, it is light on analysis and Adamson’s theory is not that original and
appears to be a rehash of some previous revisionist historians. It is also
noticeable in the majority of Adamson’s work “ordinary people” rarely get a
mention.Adamson is politically conservative, and this reflects in his
historiography. Robert Boynton describes the early days of this group in an
article “Ferguson calls this his “punk Tory” period, a phase when he and
Sullivan listened to the Sex Pistols and vied to see who could most effectively
rankle the left-liberal majority. He treasures an invitation he received from
friends at Balliol in the early eighties, to a cocktail party to celebrate the
deployment of U.S. cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. The invitations were
illustrated with champagne bottles emitting mushroom clouds. The conservative Cambridge
historian John Adamson remembers dining with Ferguson the night Thatcher
resigned. “We both sensed it was the end of an era,” Adamson said. [5]
Adamson has a sympathy for Charles 1st as can be seen in
this quote “from the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles caught a glimpse
of the gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the boat turned
westwards, past the Abbey, and under the great east window of St Stephen’s
Chapel – the Commons’ chamber, and the scene of his most recent political debacle.
It would be seven years before Charles saw his palace again”.[6]Adamson seems
the revel in the idea that the leading players in the revolution were reacting
blindly to events. One reviewer of Adamson’s book said “Unlike hind sighted
historians, they stumbled forward, seeking peace if possible and war if
necessary. Like Oliver Cromwell, in 1640 an obscure farmer on the fringes of
Warwick’s circle, once said, ‘no one travels so high as he who knows not where
he is going’.[7]
The book is a door stopper with over two hundred pages
footnotes and has been suggested that this was in response to criticism of his
work by historian Mark Kishlansky who alleged that Adamson in the past was
“deliberately abusing and misreading sources”. What started as a small dispute
soon snowballed into a much bigger historical debate.Both sides of the debate
took the pages of various academic journals. Well established historians such
as Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper all weighted into the
dispute.This dispute tended to confirm Lawrence Stone argument when he said of
the study of the 17th-century revolution as ‘a battleground which has been
heavily fought over…beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes operated by
ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.”
The book also contains significant omissions which include
the major role played by the Earl of Essex as Parliamentary commander after the
outbreak of civil war, the creation of the Royalist party, the significance of
the New Model Army, the military defeat and eventual elimination of the king,
and the abolition of the House of Lords.Another significant omission is the
fact that Adamson does not touch upon any of the controversies over the war.
According to one blog review Nick Poyntz “There is no coverage of other
historians from a wide range of theoretical or argumentative backgrounds. This
extends through the book’s epilogue, where Adamson is keen to debunk Whigs and
revisionists alike by finding a third way to explaining the origins of the war
– but can coverage of only 1640-1642 cover enough of the origins of the war to
adequately explain them? I do not believe it can.”[8]
Adamson tends to try and rule out the revolutionary nature
of the civil war. His Noble Revolt essentially put forwards a consistent view
used by numerous right-wing historians, commentators and one prime minister
that Britain does not make violent revolutions Adamson says “Unlike our
Continental neighbours, British revolutions have tended to be relatively polite
and orderly affairs. Not for us the tumbrels and tanks in the streets, the
giddy cycles of massacre”.[9]
This theory is not new as Ann Talbot explains “The sense
that in Britain things were done differently and without continental excess is
not entirely new. Burke had expressed it in his Reflections on the French
Revolution, but there were plenty of voices to gainsay him and the social
disturbances in the years of economic upheaval that followed the Napoleonic
wars were a testimony to the contrary. Luddism, anti-corn law agitation, the
anti-poor law movement, strikes and most of all, Chartism demonstrated that
Britain was not an island of social peace. Nonetheless, the Whig interpretation
of history had deep roots in the consciousness of the British political class.
The visitor to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire can still see in the great
entrance hall a fireplace inscribed with the legend “1688 The year of our
liberty.” It refers to the “Glorious Revolution” when James II quit his throne
and his kingdom overnight, and William of Orange was installed as king. This
was the kind of palace revolution that the British ruling class increasingly
preferred to look back on rather than the revolution in the 1640s when they had
executed the king, conveniently overlooking the fact that James would not have
run if he had not remembered the fate of his father—Charles I”.[10]
Like many of his revisionist friends, he has accused Marxist
historians of relying too much on large abstract forces and felt that this
“economic determinist” viewpoint did not explain too much. Adamson echoes the
prevailing academic orthodoxy that there was no bourgeois revolution mainly
because he felt there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all social
classes can be found on either side of the struggle.To conclude, according to
Adamson, the war was caused by Charles the 1st and his inexperience and vanity.
There is no doubting Adamson’s work rate or ability to carry out prodigious
research, but his inability to present a multidimensional history is a
weakness. I am not sure it is a “significant contribution to the debate on the
origins of the English Civil War”.
[1]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3664846/How-Charles-I-lost-his-head.html
[2] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/civil-wars
[3] Not the main act but a prelude to drama 20 July 2007
Roger Richardson-Times Higher Education-
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/not-the-main-act-but-a-prelude-to-drama/209736.article
[4]
https://www.ft.com/content/617713ea-0e56-11dc-8219-000b5df10621
[5]
https://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=50
[6] https://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/the-noble-revolt/
[7]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3664846/How-Charles-I-lost-his-head.html
[8]
https://mercuriuspoliticus.wordpress.com/2007/07/12/the-noble-revolt/
[9] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1280580/Clegg-Cameron-Torvill-Dean-Lenin-Trotsky-make-mistake-revolution.html
[10] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html
A Short Review of Regicide and Republic-England 1603 -1660
Graham E Seel Cambridge Perspectives in History 2001.
This short book is a decent account of a very complex
historical event. The book is part of Cambridge Perspectives in History and is
aimed at AS and A Level history students. The author Graham E Seel covers the
period from 1603 to 1660.
Seel explains well the complex religious and political
developments such as the remarkable execution of Charles I, civil war and the
introduction of a republican form of government.
The book is well laid out and is beautifully illustrated
with free and entertaining pictures.The book was published in 2001, and this is
reflected in a large number of quotes from revisionist and post-revisionist
historians.
It should come as no surprise as the revisionists tend to
dominate this particular historical field at the moment. The book does contain
a chapter on economical questions which again is a rarity but is to be welcomed
anyway.
The book is very light on historiography but does at least
give a fundamental rundown of the various schools of thought on the civil war.
Seel does issue a valuable piece of advice in that any new student of the
subject must study the historian before you study the history.
How to Do Good to Many: The Public Good Is the Christian’s
Life – 13 Nov 2018by Richard Baxter & Jordan J Ballor (Editor) Christian’s
Library Press
In his book, Richard Baxter and Puritan Politics Richard
Schlatter shows that figures like Baxter have been significantly overlooked by
historians of both left and right persuasions. Schlatter is correct when saying
that the English Civil War was one of a half dozen creative periods of world
history. While figures such as Baxter have faded into the background, the Civil
War still provokes great interest. The purpose of this short article is to go
some way to redress this imbalance.
Richard Baxter was born in 1615 in the village of Rowton,
Shropshire. Baxter described his father as “a mean Freeholder”. Baxter’s early
family life was hard, and the family struggled with debt. Although much of this
was brought on by a family trait of addiction to gambling.
Despite this wild beginning, the family soon began to adopt
the Puritan lifestyle and philosophical outlook. Baxter later acknowledged his
fathers as the “Instrument of my first Convictions, and Approbation of a Holy
Life’. Baxter was in many ways a representative of the archetypal
lower-middle-class layer that saw Puritanism as both a moral and philosophical
outlook. His father also bred into his son that hostility to Puritanism stems
from “mere Malice’ and that ‘Godly People were the best’.
Baxter’s own ‘vehement desires’ had been to proceed from
school to university to achieve ‘Academick Glory’, and throughout his life, he
regretted his lack of university education and pointed to his ‘wanting
Academical Honours’ as a mark of his insufficiency as a minister.Despite his
lowly academic status, how does one account for the fact that Baxter “became
one of the most learned of seventeenth-century divines.” Baxter himself
probably puts this down to his devotion to God. But while not downplaying the
fact that Baxter was undoubtedly a gifted speaker and writer Baxter was also
moved by the massive social, political and religious upheavals brought about by
the English revolution.
While much of Baxter’s thought was cloaked in religious
trappings, his political and philosophical writings should be studied today
because they play an important part in our understanding of the events of the
17th-century English revolution.Baxter even early on in his life, engendered
dislike and hatred from many sides of the class struggle. One example came in
1642 when a churchwarden tried to impose a parliamentary order for the
demolition of any outstanding images of the persons of the Trinity or the
Virgin Mary. Baxter was held by many accountable for this order and was
targeted by ‘a Crew of the drunken riotous Party of the Town’. Baxter clearly
feared for his life at this time. The tensions and hostilities surrounding the
outbreak of civil war further heightened feelings: ‘a violent Country
Gentleman’ passing Baxter in the street’ stopt and said, There goeth a
Traitor’.
Baxter politically was on the right-wing of the Presbyterians.
He never gave his full backing to Cromwell and never really adhered to his
ideas about the war and later the Commonwealth. One thing is also certain is
that he was hostile to the left-wing independents such as Hugh Peters. He
reserved his anger for “sectaries” such as Thomas Rainborow. As for the
Levellers and Diggers, he saw them as nothing more than “tools of Anabaptists’,
in fact, anyone who sought to enfranchise a wider selection of the population
were labelled Anabaptists.
Baxter was a prodigious writer turning out more than 130
books (the exact figure depends upon how works published in a variety of forms
are counted), several of them folios over 1 million words in length. The civil
war produced an outpouring of writing that had never been seen previously in
England and would match any contemporary event. According to Christopher Hill
“People especially Puritans began to utilise the press more often than not
secretly to forward their thoughts and views on the nature of religion politics
and philosophy. It has been said with his volume of work Baxter “was the first
author of a string of best-sellers in British literary history”. The political
theorist, Hobbes, describes how the Presbyterian merchant class of the city of
London was the first centre of sedition, trying to build a state-governed like
the republics of Holland and Venice, by merchants for their interests. (The
comparison with the bourgeois republics is constantly recurring in
Parliamentarian writings.) Mrs Hutchinson, the wife of one of Cromwell’s
colonels, said all were described as Puritans who “crossed the views of the
needy courtiers, the encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd
nobility and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or
conversation, or anything good.”
Baxter claimed no credit for his letter writing. Again he
put his thoughts down to a gift from God. He was, however, a compulsive letter
writer. His 1200 letters which were sent to over 350 people. This amount of
letter writing bears testimony to not only Baxter’s love of life but give us a
deeper insight into the culture and politics during the civil war.
According to one writer “The largest single group among
Baxter’s correspondence consists of some seventy men who became nonconformist ministers
at the Restoration, but the interest of the letters is not confined to the
history of nonconformity, ecclesiastical affairs, or theological controversy.
Baxter was an acute enquirer into matters arcane and mundane, inveterately
interested in both public affairs and individuals’ experience,
encyclopaedically industrious in establishing the grounds for the opinions
which, for over half a century, he freely discussed in letters with persons of
every walk of life, from peers, the gentry, and members of the professions, to
merchants, apprentices, farmers, and seamen.The result is not merely a rich
historical archive: the range of this correspondence, the vitality of its
engagement with a great variety of topics, the immediacy of its expression, and
the unpredictability’s of its mood and tone make this collection a record of
felt experience unique among early epistolary archives”.
Would it be correct to say that Baxter’s writing represented
a definite strand within Puritan philosophy?. No not really, In most doctrinal
disputes he sought a middle position. Another writer suggested, “that his
affinities with the Cambridge Platonists have placed Baxter as a precursor for
the rationalism which was to lead to John Locke and the deists”.While people
took sides in the war for different reasons, Baxter would have preferred to
remain neutral, and it was touch and go which side he would support as he felt
comfortable with both.Baxter chose the parliamentary side because he felt that
“for the debauched rabble through the land emboldened by his (the kings)
gentry, and seconded by the common soldiers of his army, took all that were
called Puritans for their enemies”. Baxter blamed the King for the war and was
disturbed by the fact that it could in his words disturb the rabble into a
riot.
Some of his writings as regards the poor have the whiff of
fascism about it. He did not believe that men “from the Dung-cart to make us
laws, and from the Ale-house and the May-pole to dispose of our religion,
lives, and estates. When a pack of the rabble are got together, the multitude
of the needy and the dissolute prodigals if they were ungoverned, would tear
out the throats of the more wealthy and industrious…. And turn all into a
constant war”. It would be easy to dismiss Baxter’s writing as an exception but
in reality they expressed a real fear amongst the propertied elite that the
revolution would lead to a wider enfranchisement and a rebellion against
property.
If you strip away all the religious trappings Baxter’s
writings are imbued with this hatred of the masses. His Holy Commonwealth which
is probably his most famous book is a manifesto against wider democracy except
for the chosen few namely people like him. Baxter’s hostility to the working
masses was expressed most vehemently in his opposition to the Leveller’s. In
fact a study of people like Baxter shows eloquently the social and political
forces that were reigned against the Levellers.
During his time in the New Model army as an army Chaplin he
took on the Levellers in debate. He accused the Levellers of publishing large
numbers of wild pamphlets as “changeable as the moon “and advocating “a
heretical democracy”.Despite Baxter’s hostility to the Levellers Baxter’s books
themselves were burnt and he was labelled a subversive.While some writers have
compared Baxter’s writings to that of Hobbes and Harrington according to
Schlatter Baxter’s opposition to Hobbes and Harrington were that they believed
in a secular state but Baxter did not. Baxter followed the writings of Hobbes
and Harrington very closely ,Baxter declares: “I must begin at the bottom and
touch these Praecognita which the politicians doth presuppose because I have to
do with some that will deny as much, as shame will suffer them to deny.”
Harrington, Hobbes and to a lesser extent Baxter writings expressed the
sentiment that at the heart of the civil war was the unresolved nature of
democracy. Like Baxter perhaps the majority of puritans including the
leadership of the revolution were extremely hostile to a wider enfranchisement
of the population.
Baxter was heavily critical of Hobbes whose “mistake”
according to one writer “was that in his doctrine of “absolute impious
Monarchy’ he gives priority to man by making sovereign the will of man rather
than the will of God. Baxter deplored any attempt to draw criteria for right
and wrong from man’s As for Harrington; his great fallacy consisted in denying
God’s sovereignty by making “God the Proposer, and the people the Resolvers or
Confirmers of all their laws.” If his [Harrington’s] doctrine be true, the Law
of nature is no Law, till men consent to it. At least where the Major Vote can
carry it, Atheism, Idolatry, Murder, Theft, Whoredome, etc., are no sins
against God. Yea no man sinneth against God but he that consenteth to his
Laws.The people have greater authority or Government than Gods in Baxter’s
view, such conceptions of politics and its practice as those of Hobbes and
Harrington is suited to atheists and heathen”.
While Baxter was critical of both Hobbes and Harrington much
of his philosophical writings bore similarities to them both. Politically
speaking he took a moderate position constantly seeking not to alienate the
political establishment of his day of which he did not succeed. According to
Geoffrey Nuttall who summarised Baxter’s political position by pointing to the
fact that “in politics as well as ecclesiastical position as continually taking
a ‘moderate’ position which from both sides would bring him charges of betrayal
or insincerity.”
In many ways Baxter work was physical proof that despite
recent revisionist historian’s denial that the Civil war was very much fought
along class lines. As Baxter himself put it at the time: “A very great part of
the knights and gentlemen of England . . . adhered to the King . . . And most
of the tenants of these gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people,
whom the others call the rabble, did follow the gentry and were for the King.
On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some
thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and the greatest part of the
tradesmen and freeholders and the middle sort of men, especially in those
corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such
manufactures…Freeholders and tradesmen are the strength of religion and
civility in the land, and gentlemen and beggars and servile tenants are the
strength of iniquity”.
How to understand Baxter, Schlatter offers some advice
“students of Baxter must look backwards, for he stands near the end of a
tradition which, although someone is always trying to revive it as a weapon in
the never-ending war on liberty and democracy has long been dead. To understand
Baxter’s politics, we must reflect on that long political tradition which
achieved its first and most magnificent expression in the City of God, which
flourished in the Middle Ages and Reformation, and died in the Age of Reason”.
A Brief History of the The English Civil Wars-John Miller
The English Civil War is in the words of historian Lawrence
Stone “a battleground which has been heavily fought over…beset with mines,
booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every
inch of the way.” John Miller’s A Brief History of the English Civil Wars is an
excellent introduction to the complexities of this war/revolution.
Miller uses dramatic accounts of decisive battles and
confrontations, as a backdrop to explaining the complex nature of the revolution.
As Miller explains, the war changed the political, social and economic
landscape of Britain.The wars changed the political, social, religious and
intellectual landscape of the country forever. In this brief account of just
200 pages of the civil war, Miller uses a lifetime of experience and study of
the period.
It is unfortunate but given the lack of space at no point
does Miller examine the different historiography on the English Civil War. The
book is light on military aspects which I think is a good thing but heavy on
Parliamentary politics during the revolution.Miller believes that this was a
period that changed “the political, social, religious and intellectual
landscape of the country forever and was “an extraordinary turning point in
British history”.The book is not profoundly academic but is aimed at the
student or general reader who does not have too deep an understanding of the
complex nature of this subject. In the forward Miller says his aim was “to
produce something for students and interested general readers that is both
brief and clear’.To conclude the author of this book knows the subject very
well, and because of that, the book is a decent introduction to the very
complex events of the English Revolution.
The Civil Wars 1637-1653 Martyn Bennett Sutton Pocket
Histories-1998
A historian recently wrote “over the last generation
historians have moved away from the image of a distinctively English (and
Welsh) civil war, of a limited, civilised and dignified conflict between
factions of the cultured elite, and of a contest in which the common people
appear if at all as a mindless, deferential, anonymous mass. Instead,
historians have recently stressed the British-wide nature of the wars of the
mid-seventeenth century, have portrayed those wars as brutal, bloody and
all-pervasive, and have explored far more fully and sympathetically the role,
allegiance, outlook and involvement of the non-elite.
Although he was reviewing another Martyn Bennett’s Books
much the same could be said about his book The Civil Wars 1637-1653. Bennett’s
book appeared in the same decade that produced a veritable cottage industry of
books that sought to overturn previous Whig and Marxist historiography.
Revisionist historians like Bennett were clear on what they were against a
little less clear on what they wanted to replace the previous historiography
with.
Alongside Bennett’s book, was John Morrill’s Revolt in the
Provinces: The English People and the Tragedies of War, 1634-1648. Mark Stoyle.
Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War,
The English Civil War and Revolution: Keith Lindley, The English Wars and
Republic, 1637-1660 to name but a few.
The majority of the new historiography produced in the 90s
was predominantly hostile to both Whig or Marxist historiography. Martyn
Bennett’s book is in that context.One by-product of the rejection of both whig
and Marxists historiography was the development of the theory “the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms”. While the popularity f the theory grew in the 90s it was, in
fact, an ancient explanation for the English revolution it dates back to 1662
in James Heath’s book A Brief Chronicle of all the Chief Actions so fatally
Falling out in the Three Kingdoms, first published in 1662.
Bennett explains his reasoning behind his choice of
historiography, saying “The enduring symbol of the crisis which gripped the
British Isles during the middle of the seventeenth century is the name given to
it, The English Civil War’. This symbol is itself problematic and can even act
as a barrier to a clear understanding of what happened in that turbulent
century. It may be argued that calling the conflict the English Civil War
limits the scope of our perceptions. By labelling it an English event, we can marginalise
Scotland and Ireland and perhaps even ignore Wales altogether. However, all
four nations were involved in the rebellions, wars and revolutions that made up
the period“[1]
Bennett’s book starts with examining the War from the
standpoint of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales in the first three chapters.
As a writer put this historiography was “a trend by modern historians aiming to
take a unified overview rather than treating some of the conflicts as mere
background to the English Civil War. Some, such as Carlton and Gaunt, have
labelled them the British Civil Wars.”[2]
This type of explanation for the revolution was popular with
historians based outside England. The Northern Irish historian Jane Ohlmeyer
argued “Proponents of the New British Histories agree that British history
should not be enriched English history which focuses on Whitehall and uses
events in Ireland and Scotland to explain developments in England. Yet the
traditional terms used to describe the conflict which engulfed Britain and
Ireland during the 1640s, which include ‘Puritan Revolution’, ‘English
Revolution’, and more recently ‘British Civil War(s)’, tend to perpetuate this
anglocentrism. None of these reflects the fact that the conflict originated in
Scotland and Ireland and throughout the 1640s embraced all of the Stuart
kingdoms; or that, in addition to the War enjoying a pan-British and Irish
dimension, each of the Stuart states experienced its own domestic civil wars.
The phrase ‘Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ acknowledges the centrality of the
various civil wars fought within the Stuart kingdoms as well as the
interactions between them.[3]
Bennett while supporting the “wars of three kingdoms”
historiography does explain its limitations warning “against thinking that this
current interpretation of the War is the last word, historical fashions come
and go. It may be as well to paraphrase Mark Twain: reports of the death of the
English Civil War may yet be greatly exaggerated”.Bennett attaches great
importance to the use of terminology in explaining the English revolution
because it says a lot about how the historian “reflects and reinforces the
interpretations we make”. This approach is commendable. As Edward Hallett Carr
said “if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has
gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must
re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the historian before
you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what
is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read
a work by that great scholar Jones of St. Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St.
Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet.
When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can
detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog”. [4]
The date spread used in this book 1637-1653 is not one I
have come across. This throwing around of dates seems to have been popular in
the 1990s. Bennett explains his reasoning “Imposing the dates 1642-1651 on the
civil wars renders them relatively meaningless outside the bounds of England
and Wales: calling them the ‘English’ Civil War is similarly problematic. The term
English Civil War became common during the last century, adding to the range of
titles available – from the contentious ‘English Revolution’ to the ‘Great
Rebellion’ and the ‘Great Civil War’. Yet such a title does obscure the
involvement of the other nations as effectively in the book market as it does
in popular entertainment“[5]
Bennett uses the term revolution a couple of times in the
book but does not believe this was a bourgeois revolution. The book does not
provide any insight into the socio-economic problems that gave rise to the
conflict. Bennett, to his credit, does believe that the War was a product of
long term political changes at the base and superstructure of English society.
The book gives a good explanation of what took place during
the War. Chapters 1-6 deal primarily with this and can be seen as a good
introduction. Perhaps the most exciting and informative chapters are 7-8.
Chapter 7 called Revolution in England and Wales gives an essential insight
into the growing divergence of views within parliament and the growing threat
posed by the Levellers. Chapter 8 gives a presentable account of the views and
actions of the Levellers.The book is quite striking in its minimal use of
historiography. I think he mentions only one other historian, but this is
compensated by the excellent notes at the back of the book.To conclude is a
short book Bennett of 114 pages, it should not be seen as an in-depth or
analytical study of the revolution. At best, it is an excellent introduction to
the conflict. It would have a been a better book if Bennett had given more of
his understanding of the revolution.
[1] What’s in a Name? the Death of the English Civil War:M
Bennett-https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-98171389/what-s-in-a-name-the-death-of-the-english-civil-war
[2] Quoted from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Three_Kingdoms
[3] ]
http://www.historybookshop.com/articles/commentary/civil-wars-of-three-kingdoms-ht.asp
[4] E H Carr-What is History
[5] https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-98171389/what-s-in-a-name-the-death-of-the-english-civil-war
Two Posts from Christopher Thompson
I am reprinting two articles from Chris Thompson Blog. His
blog can be accessed at http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.com/
The Kishlansky Case
Earlier this week, I noted the publication of Ian Gentles’s
new book, Oliver Cromwell. God’s Warrior and the English Revolution, and of the
festschrift for John Morrill edited by Michael J.Braddick and David L.Smith,
The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland. The former arrived
on Tuesday and the latter today. I have been leafing through both. Ian
Gentles’s work is, as one would expect, clearly written and a persuasive work
of scholarship. I have not had the time to read the Morrill festschrift in
detail but I have looked at Mark Kishlansky’s tribute in detail.
It is a warm piece
testifying to a friendship that has lasted for almost forty years. I was,
however, particularly struck by Kishlansky’s account (ibid., Pp.xxx-xxxi) of
the controversy into which he entered in the pages of The Historical Journal in
1990-1991 and subsequently in The Journal of British Studies. The target of his
criticism is not named at all but is simply described first of all as someone
“who happened to hold a junior position at Cambridge” and then as a person who
“held only a position as a College fellow” when everyone interested in the
period knows exactly who he means. He also claims that, following comments from
the Historical Journal’s two readers of his original draft article and from
John Morrill himself, “the amended essay would then be submitted [to his
target]… for response”.
I do know a little about this episode. Kishlansky’s
prospective attack was revealed by a very senior American historian from a
university on that country’s eastern seaboard on a visit to London in the
summer of 1990. He described how he had learnt from Kishlansky himself, then
holding a post at the University of Chicago, of the planned publication of this
article in the Historical Journal. News of this inevitably spread and came to
the ears of Kishlansky’s intended victim who knew nothing of this manoeuvre and
who had not been supplied with a copy. He naturally learnt of its contents and
details about those to whom it had already been circulated. No less naturally,
he began preparing his response. Soon the whole matter became widely known and
entangled in intellectual politics in Cambridge and elsewhere.
I do not know who the “senior member of the field” was who
sent John Morrill “a menacing missive” demanding that Kishlansky’s essay should
not appear and asserting that Morrill’s own career would be damaged if it did.
G.R.Elton is a possibility but Conrad Russell seems a much more likely
candidate. Either way, Kishlansky’s essay did appear in the Historical Journal
late in 1990 to be followed in the next edition by a far-reaching rebuttal. In
my view, Kishlansky had much the worse of this exchange but others will, no
doubt, have their own opinions.
Nostalgia Marxist style
When James Holstun, the literary scholar and Marxist
polemicist, wrote his appreciation of the career and works of the late Brian
Manning in 2004, he observed with a degree of regret that Marxism was hardly to
be found amongst academic historians studying the English Revolution but could
only be discovered in the ranks of tutors for the Workers’ Educational
Association and amongst political scientists and sociologists. I was reminded
of this observation when reading the essay by Geoff Kennedy, a political
scientist at Durham University, on Radicalism and Revisionism in the English
Revolution (in Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys, ed., History and Revolution.
Refuting Revisionism, Verso Press 2007).
His picture of the historiography of the pre-1970s was
predicated on belief in a traditional social interpretation of the events of
the 1640s and 1650s deriving from the works of Christopher Hill, R.H.Tawney and
Lawrence Stone later rejected at the behest of G.R.Elton and under the
stimulation of the works of Conrad Russell. Revisionists apparently denied the
importance of historical materialism and adopted a form of static
traditionalism that was itself a form of reductionism. Long-term causes,
especially the importance of the development of capitalism, had been abandoned
to Dr Kennedy’s regret. Political history had been denied its social context
and isolated from it by this regrettable process.
I am afraid that the pillars underpinning this argument will
not bear such weight. The arguments advanced by Hill in 1940 and by Tawney in
1941 had become fiercely contested in little over a decade: the criticisms of
Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper inspired a vast range of Ph.D.theses and books
on the fortunes of the gentry and peerage that would not have been composed had
there been such a “social interpretation” in place. ‘Revisionism’, to use Ted
Rabb’s phrase, was itself a protest against the kind of reductionism advocated
by Hill, Tawney and Stone and was, in any case, principally, an Oxford rather
than a Cambridge phenomenon. Kennedy’s appeal to Bob Brenner’s case developed
in the festschrift for Lawrence Stone that the 1590s saw a shift to economic
rents on large estates is very fragile: Stone had not, in truth, examined
leasing practices in any detail on any aristocratic estate: where this has been
done, e.g. on the estate of the Rich family in Essex, the length of leases (at
21 years) and the high proportion going to former tenants suggests that there
was little, if any, such competition and certainly no development of
agricultural capitalism in this period.
Geoff Kennedy’s view that the Levellers in the 1640s
represented a petit-bourgeois group carries little conviction. Of course, there
are those who would still like to adhere to the views of Hill or Tawney in
1940-1941 but those views have long ceased to have any purchase in serious
historical study. ‘Revisionism’ has been dead for twenty years. Neither Marxism
or Revisionism is relevant to serious historical research in this period any
longer. The clock cannot be turned back whatever Geoff Kennedy might hope for.
Radicalism in the English Revolution, 1640-60 (Historical
Association Studies) Paperback 18 Apr 1985-F.D. Dow
“That an inequitable thing it is for one man to have
thousands, and another want bread, and that the pleasure of God is, that all
men should have enough, and not that one man should abound in this worlds good,
spending it upon his lusts, and another man of far better deserts, not be worth
two pence, and that it is no such difficulty as men make it to be, to alter the
course of the world in this thing, and that a few diligent and valiant spirits
may turn the world upside down, if they observe their seasons, and shall with
life and courage ingage accordingly”.
William Walwyn
Given the speed that historiography of the English
revolution is moving it is sometimes wise to look at where we have been to find
out where we are going. A review of Francis Dow’s book would be a good place to
start.Written over thirty years ago, Dow’s book was aimed at students and the
general public. Her book is of a very good standard and in no way dumbs down her
writing. In fact, given that her target audience was pre-degree students, it is
of a good academic standard.It is undeniable that there has been a recent
resurgence of interest in the Levellers both in academic and non-academic
publications. It is certainly easier to write on the Levellers today than when
Dow wrote her book.
The Debate on the English Revolution
Her first chapter begins with a Debate on the English
Revolution. Dow makes clear that her little book is not a narrative of the
events of the English civil war. The first chapter has limited space but gives
a good introduction to the level of radicalism in the English Revolution.She is
clear that the subject of her book has generated many controversies. Outside of
the Russian and French revolutions, respectively, no other revolution has
generated as much academic heat.
Her assessment of 1980s radical historiographies is precise
and informative. Today’s readers should bear in mind that at the time of Dow’s
book revisionist historians had been attacking any historian who sought to
place the Levellers in their proper historical context.More specifically, Dow
believes that most of the revisionist’s fire had been against Marxist
historiography, especially Marxists insistence of the long-term causes of the
English civil war.
Even the use of the term radical to describe groups such as
the Levellers had come under attack by historians as Glenn Burgess points out
“it has been suggested – by Conal Condren and Jonathan Clark especially – that
the term ‘radicalism’ should not be applied to phenomena that exist before the
term itself was coined. Clark has pointed out that it applies “to a doctrine
newly coined in England in the 1820s to describe a fusion of universal
suffrage, Ricardian economics and programmatic atheism. To speak of an
eighteenth – or a seventeenth-century radicalism is therefore as much of a
solecism as to speak of an eighteenth- or seventeenth-century fascism or
Marxism”. His point is essential that in using the term to yoke together
disparate phenomena with a common label, we create false or fictional histories
and traditions. Condren suggests other objections. First, that ‘radical’ as a
label risks miss-describing the language used by those so labelled. It
attributes to them polemical and rhetorical strategies of subversion and
opposition without considering whether such strategies were adopted. Secondly,
the label risks miss-describing intentionality. Its application suggests an
identity – that a person or group is knowingly and consciously ‘radical’ –
whether appropriately or not.[1]
It is hard to find Dow’s historiographical preferences.
While not rejecting out of hand both the Marxist and conservative historians
she does, however, posit what she calls a third-way argument on the radical
groups.She says “Hill’s picture of a radical plebeian culture cannot be ignored.
The significance of his work and other like-minded historians prompts the
question: can radicalism be put into a new perspective which considers the
convincing arguments of the conservative ‘revisionists’ but leaves room for the
belief that there was a ‘revolution’ in the 1640s and 1650s.”[2]
This arguement anticipated by well over three decades the
current position of the post- revisionist school of historiography. Dow
explains that the turn away from Marxist historiography brought about a
plethora of other explanations as to why the radical groups were not that
radical.Conservative historians such as by A M Everitt and later John Morrill
sought to examine local aspects of the revolution while playing down the
influence of the radicals.Studies such as The County Committee of Kent in the
Civil War by A M Everitt and more famously John Morrill’s work on the Revolt of
the Provinces emphasised short-term explanations. The rise of local studies
does not necessary mean all the historians who adopted this approach had a
right-wing agenda. David Underdown’s Riot, Rebel, and Rebellion book is well
worth a look at.
Other revisionist historians such as John Adamson limited
the civil war to a struggle amongst the nobility not a class struggle in his
Noble Revolt. This perspective leads to an outright denial of class struggles
in the English civil war.
Despite agreeing with many conservative historians, Dow does
not buy into the premise that there were no long-term causes of the revolution
or for the rise of radicalism.Dow quotes Brain Manning who “forcefully argued
that economic discontent and popular unrest were important elements in
producing an atmosphere of crisis before and after 1640 … that this eruption of
the lower and middling orders into the political arena crucially affected the
alignment of political groupings within the elite … parliament’s appeal to the
‘middling sort of people’ was … to release one of the most dynamic forces of
the decade and substantially promote the cause of popular radicalism“[3]
Parliamentarians and Republicans
In Chapter Two, Dow examines the philosophical basis for the
Civil War. She explains that before the Civil war, the English ruling elite was
largely content with the divine rule of kings. Society was in order and that
God ordained everything.Dow correctly spends some time on the philosophy of
James Harrington. The importance of Harrington is that his writings are a
confirmation of the relationship between political thought and political
action. Dow, however, downplays Harringon grasp of the relationship between
property and power saying he was not a “proto-Marxist”. While this is true, he
was a writer who anticipated a materialist understanding of history.
The Levellers
Chapter three, Dow, examines the complex issue of the Levellers.
To what extent were the Levellers able to articulate the political and social
needs of large sections of the population.Dow believes that the “Mournful Cries
of Many Thousand Poor Tradesmen heard heard throughout the English revolution
“O Parliament men, and Soldiers! Necessity dissolves all Lawes and Government,
and Hunger will break: through stone walls, Tender Mothers will sooner devoure
You, then the Fruit of their owne wombe and Hunger regards no Swords nor
Cannons. It may be some great oppressours intends tumults that they may escape
in a croud, but your food may then be wanting as well as ours, and your Armes
will bee hard diet. O hearke, hearke at our doores how out children cry bread,
bread, bread, and we now with bleeding hearts, cry, once more to you, pity,
pity, an oppressed inslaved people: carry our cries in the large petition to
the Parliament, and tell them if they be still and illegible; the Teares of the
oppressed will wash away the foundations of their houses. Amen, Amen so be it“.[4]
Whether social inequality was to a most important factor in
leading to revolution is a matter of conjecture. What is clear from Dow’s book
is that the Levellers amongst other radical groups exploited the significant
rise in social inequality and they politically articulated the wants and needs
of a large section of the population.People were also beginning to question
their place in the grand scheme of things. The world was being turned upside
down and they needed answers to why.As the Marxist political writer, David
North explains “Until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still
generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the
universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But
its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the
publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543,
which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and
provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho
Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from
the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested
upon it, was well underway. The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the
general intellectual environment“.[5]
It would be wrong to mechanically apply this type of reason
to the thinking of parliamentary opposition to the King. People’s thinking was
mostly confused and not coherently thought out. As Dow mentions on (p15) “Four
major issues were touched upon by these new writers, the nature, and location
of sovereignty, the origins of government in the consent of the people, the welfare
of the people as the end or purpose of government and the role of common people
in resisting the king”. Dow attempts in this chapter to establish a link
between the new philosophy and the actions of the Levellers revolution.
For Dow, the chief ideologues of the revolution were the
radical groups such as the Levellers, Diggers. She states on page 8 that
“Ideological and organisational advances were made by radicals who were not
matched until the 1760s. Although the Levellers did not achieve power and succeeded
more in frightening those who did hold power than in convincing them of the
merits of the radical case., their beliefs and their program opened new vistas
of political participation, religious toleration, and social equality. If not
for all men, then at least for very significant sections of the middling
classes”.
The Levellers according to Dow were the “founding fathers of
the working-class movement”. Dow claimed the Levellers broke new ground.” They
grounded their program of a new ideological basis by developing arguments based
on doctrines of natural rights and popular sovereignty. And they mobilised
support for their movement by employing sophisticated modern techniques of
propaganda and organisation”.
Dow’s assertion is challenged by AL Morton who said of the
Levellers “it was a radical but not a working-class party: indeed, how could it
be at a time when the working class as we know it was only beginning to exist?
Still less was it a ‘socialist’ party in the sense of advocating the type of egalitarian
and agrarian communism which was widespread now” and to add was not
articulately expressed (until) Winstanley and his Diggers or ‘true Levellers‘
[6]Dow admits it is difficult however to paint an exact picture of what
constituted the Leveller party and it was as the Baptist Henry Dunne said a
“very heterogeneous body”.
It is to Dow’s credit that she places the rise of the
Levellers in a socio-economic context. “The socio-economic preconditions for
the rise of the movement like the Levellers had been created by long-term
changes in landholding and in the manufacturing. Those changes which had
adversely affected the status and prosperity of the urban and rural ‘middling
sort’ of people were especially important in providing potential supporters for
the Levellers, who were to become principally the spokesmen for the ‘industrious
sort’. Pressure on the smaller peasant farmer who lacked the resources of his
larger neighbour to benefit from the expanding market and rising prices: the
discontent of the insecure copyholder subject to rack-renting and the fear of
the small cottager or husbandman at the prospect of the enclosure, produce
dissatisfaction which the Levellers could tap and issues on which they could
take a stand”.
Dow makes the strange assertion that the Levellers lacked
strong leadership and in the end lost all effectiveness as a group. Dow seems
to be saying that the levellers were doomed them from their start: “Leveller
ideology may have frightened the rich, neglected the poor, and been “too
innovative in its assumptions to embrace all the godly ‘middling sort”‘ of people.”She
believed that their social base was that of the small craftsmen and tradesmen,
particularly in the towns, “whose independence seemed threatened by large-scale
merchants and entrepreneurs. The existence of such problems in London was
crucially important, for the capital was to provide the core of the Leveller
movement. Here, a large pool of discontent existed among journeymen unable,
because of changes in the structure of manufacturing to find the resources to
set up as masters in their own right. Anger smolder among small tradesmen and
merchants chafing at the alleged oppression of the guilds”.
Dow makes the point that the Levellers tapped into a growing
hostility from people especially in London towards a deal with the monarchy. An
outward display of this came about through the army at Putney. Dow makes a very
perceptive point that “The radicalisation of sections of the rank and file did
not happen solely, or even directly, because of Leveller influence, it happened
because soldiers’ perception of their ill-treatment at the hands of the
Presbyterian majority roduced a political consciousness on which the Levellers
could capitalise”.
Dow crucially examines the nature of the society, or
specific sections of the society, from which the Leveller movemnt sprang.
Several attempts have been made to explain a class background to the Leveller
movement and the people whose support it attracted. While it is prudent to
acknowledge David Underdown’s warning that “Class is a concept that can be
applied to seventeenth-century English society only with the greatest possible
caution”.
Religious Radicals
I am not sure about the title of this chapter. The groups
that Dow mentions are diverse, and she is hard-pressed to establish a common
thread amongst. Groups like the Fifth Monarchists were feared . One pamphlet at
the time wrote of the Fifth Monarchy men “The scum and scouring of the country…
Deduct the weavers, tailors, brewers, cobblers, tinkers, carmen, draymen,
broom-men and mat makers and then give me a list of the gentlemen. Their names
may be writ in text, within the compass of a single halfpenny. Mercurius Elencticus (7-14 June I648),
British Library, E447/ II, 226.
The Diggers and the Clubmen-A Radical Contrast
Dow’s last chapter is a bit of a theoretical muddle. The
Diggers were on the extreme left wing of the revolution. The Diggers were part
of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social
changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were
the true ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract
thought. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from
their religion. They had no program to bring about social change; they never
advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of
small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or
that matter did the larger group the Levellers constitute a mass movement. The
contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of
representatives of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no
opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that inequalities
would always exist, they merely argued for a lot of the poor to be made more
equitable.
The lumping of the Diggers in a chapter with the Clubmen
seems to be a bit of an afterthought by Dow. Maybe her editor should have
intervened to separate the two. The Clubmen were in favour of a return to
“ancient ways” and to describe them a radical is stretching it a little. It
seems almost to be a concession to the conservative revisionists that she ends
the book. The world was not turned upside down.
Conclusion
The book is a very good introduction to the subject of
radicalism in the English Revolution. Dow’s work on the Levellers is equally
important. Her conclusion is a little disappointing. But I agree with Morton
who said: “A Party that held the centre of the stage for three of the most
crucial years in our nation’s history, voiced the aspirations of the
unprivileged masses, and could express with such force ideas that have been
behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as
wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten”.
[1] A Matter of Context: ‘Radicalism’ and the English
Revolution by Glenn
Burgess-www.fupress.net/public/journals/49/Seminar/burgess_radicalism.html#_ftn7
[2] Radicalism in the English Revolution, 1640-60
(Historical Association Studies) Paperback 18 Apr 1985-F.D. Dow
[3] Radicalism in the English Revolution, 1640-60
(Historical Association Studies) Paperback 18 Apr 1985-F.D. Dow-Page 5
[4] The mournful Cries of many thousand Poor Tradesmen, who
are ready to famish through decay of Trade.Or, the warning Tears of the
Oppressed. (22 Jan 1648) http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/leveller-tracts-9#9.21
[5] Equality, the Rights of Man, and the Birth of Socialism
by David North-24 October 1996
http://intsse.com/wswspdf/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.pdf
[6] A. L. Morton Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller
Writings, Lawrence and Wishart, London 1975,
Obituary:Barry Coward: A Partisan Historian of the English
Civil War.
These remarks come one day after attending a memorial
service for the historian and teacher Barry Coward. Well over 130 of Barry’s
family, close friends, co-workers and former students attended the service.
Perhaps it is a bit strange to say this, but it was a hugely enjoyable and
uplifting occasion. The death of any person is a sad thing, but the fact of the
matter is that Barry Coward was a special historian and I certainly left the memorial
with the feeling that knowing him made you a better person.
I first met him in 1999 at Birkbeck University. I was
attending an open evening because I was thinking of doing a part time degree
and Birkbeck had been recommended to me by a friend. At the public meeting was
Barry Coward. Part of the attraction of the degree was the study of the English
revolution. I had a vague likening for the subject, but when I asked Barry
about the course, he immediately fired my enthusiasm and signed up a week later.
This was probably one of my better decisions.The first thing that struck me
about Barry Coward was his incredible and infectious enthusiasm for his chosen
topic. He was also something rare amongst most historians in that he was always
warm and friendly towards his students.
In his own words “I never ceased to be amazed by their
ability to combine full-time employment with part-time study and gain degrees
as good as, and often better than, those who studied full time. It was
enormously rewarding to watch Birkbeck students – especially those who had not
done a formal study for some time – develop academically, and then use Birkbeck
as a launch pad for life-changing experiences. I’d like to thank them for their
enthusiasm and the freshness of their ideas that I drew on in my writings.’
Barry Coward was rare bread. He was both a serious
historian, but he was also a first class teacher. John Croxon who was one of
Barry’s students who spoke at the memorial testified to Barry’s special talent
as a teacher. John’s experience echoed my own and many other students in the
fact that Barry always had time and patience for students no matter how small
their questions.
While listening to the speakers, you got a great sense of
Barry’s modesty. This may have stemmed from the fact that he had a formidable
knowledge of his subject so much so that some his books such as The Stuart Age,
England 1603–1714 (latest edition 2003)The Cromwellian Protectorate (2002) are
standard texts on the subject of the English Civil War. Fellow historian Ian
Roy spoke of Barry’s work. I tend to agree with him as regards probably Barry’s
most important task certainly because of its value for research purposes was
his English Historical Documents, 1603-1660: which edited alongside Peter
Gaunt.
His book on Oliver Cromwell (1991) has also become a
standard textbook on the period. This was not an orthodox biography. He kept an
open mind on the main issues surrounding Cromwell. He made an important point
of saying that it is good to strip away the myths surrounding Cromwell. Many of
these myths and falsehoods were spread by hostile biographers.
As the title says, Barry was a partisan Historian. He was a
former president of the Cromwell Association. While he wore his history on his
sleeve, he did so to further our understanding of not only Cromwell but also
his place in the English revolution.Coward was not a materialist historian.
While not a revisionist historian, he accepted the way history of this period
is now written without any attention to underlying socio-economic causes of
events portrayed in the book. However Coward did concede that the differences
which arose amongst parliamentarians were political rather than religious. The
main reason for disagreement was over what to do with the king. What was the
class basis of the differences between the Independents and Presbyterians?He
makes an outstanding claim that the New Model Army was not political from the
outset and that it was not politicised by the Levellers, which I don to agree
with. Coward says the army spontaneously gravitated to radical solutions over
pay grievances etc. This downplaying of the ideological debates that took place
in the army is a major weak point in the book. That is not to say that Coward
had no grand narrative, which was his fascination with Cromwell’s attempt at a
“Godly Reformation”. Again the weakness in this book is the absence of any
class analysis. What social forces were moving not just Cromwell but other
players?
Barry was an excellent public speaker although not the best
he was not the worse. He also had one of the best traits of a historian in that
during his lectures you could almost sense that when he was speaking on a
subject, he was already rethinking his remarks.It would be remiss of me to say
that I did not always see eye to eye on his political and historical
conclusions on the Civil War. We came from different political family trees. He
was old school labour, and I was certainly to the left of him, but I must say
that during his seminars which were probably the best part of my degree course
we had a frank exchange and that was it. Having said this he was always, the
gentlemen and these debates never became bitter or rancorous.
In conclusion, while Barry never subscribed to the Marxist
method of studying historical events I am sure he would not mind me quoting
Karl Marx to highlight Barry’s attitude to study. In the 1872 Preface to the
French edition of Das Kapital Vol. 1, Marx emphasised that “There is no royal
road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its
steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits”. Reaching a
scientific understanding was hard work. Conscientious, painstaking research was
required, instead of philosophical speculation and unwarranted, sweeping generalisations.
Suffice to say Barry made it to that luminous summit. I will miss Barry and so
will the past and future students of 17th century English revolution.
Historians on the Levellers and the English Revolution
1642-1652
by Chris Thompson
I am afraid that it is not true to claim that there was a
dearth of works on the Levellers before Christopher Hill and other members of
the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group began work to rescue them from
historical oblivion or that this was the responsibility of Whig historians.
S.R.Gardiner considered the Levellers’ influence in the period from 1647-1649
in some detail in Volume IV of his history of the English Civil War and in his
biography of Oliver Cromwell: the first Agreement of the People, now known to
be the product not of Leveller thinking but of a group of radicals around Henry
Marten, appeared in 1889 in his Constitutional Documents of the Puritan
Revolution.
It was C.H.Firth who edited and published The Clarke Papers,
which throw such light on relations between the leaders of the New Model Army,
the Agitators and Levellers, between 1891 and 1901. Eduard Bernstein’s book,
Cromwell and Communism; socialism and democracy in the great English Civil War
was published in German in 1895 and in an English translation in 1930.
G.P.Gooch’s work, The history of English democratic ideas in the 17th century,
first appeared in 1898 and T.C.Pease’s book, The Leveller Movement; A Study in
the history and political theory of the English Great Civil War, was published
in 1916. Margaret James’s book, Social Problems and Policies during the Puritan
Revolution 1640-1660, was published in 1930 as was J.W.Gough’s article, ‘The
Agreements of the People’ in History in the following year. The truth is that
there had been a significant amount of work done on the Levellers long before
they attracted the attention of Christopher Hill or of the Communist Party’s
Historians’ Group.
It is true that there were Marxist historians of importance
working in the pre- and post-Second World War periods. But, by the early-1970s,
their influence was largely spent as far as the early modern period was
concerned as was that of Lawrence Stone. Marxist influence had never been
overwhelming or absolutely predominant even if it had attracted the support of,
perhaps, a third of the specialists in this period. Hugh Trevor-Roper,
J.P.Cooper and J.H.Hexter had seen to that. ‘Revisionism’ in the sense you use
the term was born in the late-1960s and was itself defunct by the early-1990s.
To be a non-Marxist is not to be a ‘revisionist’.
Personally, I prefer a situation in which a range of influences and trends
shape the historiography of the period before, during and after the struggles
of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. Critical attacks on Kishlansky,
Morrill and Russell will not revive historical materialism of the kind
advocated in the 1950s and 1960s. The Levellers were an interesting phenomenon
and important for their ideas amidst the competing political and religious
debates of the late-1640s but their support was relatively small and they were
gone in the space of a very few years. Such a transient phenomenon deserves
serious historical evaluation rather than hagiography.
A Short Biographical Sketch of Sir Michael Livesey
Sir Michael Livesey was born in 1614. During his early
years, he has been presented as a bit of a rebel. How accurate this picture is
open to debate. His family were in reality, somewhat established members of the
17th century English gentry.
Michael Livesey’s grandfather was employed as the sheriff of
Surrey. Michael’s father was the first Livesey to inhabit Kent. The family soon
became settled so much so that they became essential community members.The
Livesey’s growing political and financial status was confirmed when Livesey was
granted a baronetcy in 1627. Given the exalted status of the family, it is a
little perplexing to find that Michael Livesey played such a prominent part on
the side of Parliament and a radical independent to boot.
Why people choose, sides in the English Civil War has
occupied historians for centuries. One
of the main problems in determining why Sir Michael Livesey chose parliaments
side in the war is so little is known about his personal views. However, he did
fight and towards the end of the war became a radical independent and gleefully
signed the king’s death warrant.He was to become one of the most fanatical
puritans in the County who gave information according to Jason Pearcy’s
biography “against recusants to the Long Parliament in November 1640. In 1642
he was one of the ringleaders of the Kentish petition of grievances.
This petition provoked Parliament’s ire, and it answered
thus “This Conference is desired concerning the Kentish Petition, upon the
Informations my Lords have received, That it is yet, by the malignant and
ill-affected Party, with great, though secret Industry, carried on; and not
only in that County, but in some others of this Kingdom: And as it may have an
ill Consequence, and a dangerous Effect, in the Disturbance of what the
parliament hath settled for the present Safety of the Kingdom, the Desire of
the Lords is, That the Delinquents, and such as have been Actors in this
Petition, may speedily be brought to their Trial: And that forthwith there may
be a Declaration unto the Kingdom, that whosoever shall be found to further or
to countenance this Petition, or any other of the like Nature, shall be held to
be Disturbers of the Peace and Quiet of this Kingdom, and justly liable to the
Censure of Parliament: And those that shall discover and give Information of
such Practices, shall be reputed to do an acceptable Service to the King and
Parliament.”Ordered, That a Message be sent to the Lords, to acquaint their
Lordships, That this House doth assent to the Declaration mentioned at the last
Conference; and do desire that a Committee of both Houses may be appointed to
draw up one to that Purpose.”[1]
In November 1642 he was one of only two Kentish
parliamentarians excluded from pardon by Charles I”. Livesey’s record in the
civil war is one of contradiction. He commanded a Kentish regiment during the
first civil war. He was a fervent member of the county committee and sheriff in
1643. He had a reputation for ruthlessness against Royalist forces but also
elicited grave suspicions amongst parliamentarians.Little is known about
Livesey’s politics (he did not leave a diary and seldom wrote anything down)
other than he was an independent and was closely aligned to its radical wing.
He was a prominent military figure although his troops were on numerous
occasions accused of disorder and plunder He was warned to keep them under
control, “for fear of disaffecting the community further”.
It is not known whether his army had Leveller influence, but
they were radical enough to sanction Pride’s Purge in December 1648[2]. He was
so trusted by Cromwell that when it came to killing the king, he served on the
high court of justice to try Charles I. His signature is fifth on the death
warrant. Livesey attended every day of the trial. One writer has joked that he
was so eager that he was almost waiting with a quill in his hand, dripping with
ink.The men who signed the death warrant have had a contradictory treatment by
history The 17th-century Italian philosopher Vico described them as Heroes. CV
Wedgwood book[3] they were “rogues and
knaves”.
From what we know of Livesey, it is clear he made choices
and acted on those choices with an undeniable passion. What drove him?
Unfortunately for several established and distinguished historians, this has
become an unimportant question. As far as the historian Conrad Russell is
concerned, there were no great causes of the civil war which drove men such as
Livesey to do what they did in fact according to Russell “it is certainly
easier to understand why sheer frustration might have driven Charles to fight
than it has ever been to understand why the English gentry might have wanted to
make a revolution against him”.Russell found it easier to trace long term
reasons why the king would do what he did but denies that these same long term
reasons could also explain the actions of the Gentry.
“If we were to search the period for long-term reasons why
the King might have wanted to fight a Civil War, we would find the task far
easier than it has ever been to find long-term causes why the gentry might have
wanted to fight a Civil War.” Why, then, has the task never been attempted? The
trouble, I think, comes from our reliance on the concept of ‘revolution.’
Revolutions are thought of as things done to the head of state and not by him.
The result is that Charles has been treated as if he were largely passive in
the drift to Civil War, as a man who reacted to what others did, rather than
doing much to set the pace himself. This picture is definitely incorrect.
Whether the notion of an ‘English Revolution’ is also incorrect is a question I
will not discuss here. Anyone who is determined to find an ‘English Revolution’
should not be looking here, but later on, in the years 1647-1653, and those
years are outside the scope of this article. This article is concerned with the
outbreak of the Civil War, an event in which the king was a very active
participant”.[4]
Well, no one said this was a chemically pure revolution, but
revolution it was. The Gentry fought on both sides of the barricade, so did the
bourgeoisie. As Ann Talbot explains The prevailing academic orthodoxy is that
there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie and
that people from all social classes can be found on either side of the struggle.
One could not expect a chemically pure revolution in which the members of one
social class lined up one side of the barricades and those of the other on the
opposite side. However, historians like Christopher Hill were sensitive enough
to his historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of
diverse social backgrounds into a struggle against the king and well-grounded
enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and
archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution
ransacked the Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of
theory to explain what they were doing.”[5]
As Talbot confirms the beauty of this period is that
identifiable class relations were becoming more definable and parties and
political allegiances became somewhat clearly into view. According to a 20th
century Russian revolutionary speaking on 17th-century revolutionary politics
“The adherents of the Episcopal or Anglican, semi-Catholic Church was the party
of the court, the nobility and of course the higher clergy. The Presbyterians
were the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of wealth and enlightenment. The
Independents and the Puritans especially were the party of the petty
bourgeoisie, the plebeians. Wrapped up in ecclesiastical controversies, in the
form of a struggle over the religious structure of the Church, there took place
social self-determination of classes and their re-grouping along new, bourgeois
lines. Politically the Presbyterian party stood for a limited monarchy; the
Independents, who then were called “root and branch men” or, in the language of
our day, radicals, stood for republic. The half-way position of the
Presbyterians fully, corresponded to the contradictory interests of the
bourgeoisie – between the nobility and the plebeians. The Independents” party
which dared to carry its ideas and slogans through to their conclusion
naturally displaced the Presbyterians among the awakening petty-bourgeois
masses in the towns and the countryside that formed the main force of the
revolution”.[6]
One angle worth looking at as to why men like Livesey fought
is a local angle. Several historians like Alan Everitt[7]
and John Morrill have
sought to explain the behaviour of members of the Gentry such as Sir Michael
Livesey from the standpoint of local politics or religion. Morrill’s most
famous work, The Revolt of the Provinces, addresses this issue.In an interview
with Morrill, he describes how he developed his provincial view of the Civil
War “I think it was in 1973 in Oxford when I was a young research fellow that I
gave a series of lectures called ‘Some Unfashionable Thoughts on English
17th-century History’, and these were extraordinarily crude and unsophisticated
revisionism Avant la Lettre. However, I’m not claiming I’m the progenitor – I’m
saying there were a lot of people trying to work out a new position who were
dissatisfied with the existing position. I’ve no doubt at all that Lawrence
Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) were the thing people reacted
against, with its rather triumphalist claim that you could now produce a kind
of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the English
revolution. It was that I think, which a number of people quite independently
reacted against”.[8]
To conclude, it is very difficult to explain why men like
Livesey did what they did. You could spend hours searching for personal traits
but in the end, as Karl Marx wrote so beautifully “Men make their own history,
but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past”.
[1] House of Commons Journal Volume 2: 21 April 1642′,
Journal of the House of Commons: volume 2: 1640-1643 (1802), pp. 535-537. URL:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=9061
[2]
https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/parliamentaryauthority/civilwar/overview/prides-purge/
[3] The Trial of Charles I
[4] Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?Conrad Russell-
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/why-did-charles-i-fight-civil-war
[5] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill
[6] Chapter 11 of The History of the Russian Revolution
(1931) Leon Trotsky
[7] A. Everitt, The community of Kent and the great
rebellion, 1640–60 (1966)
[8]Professor John Morrill interview Transcript interview
took place in Selwyn College, Cambridge, and 26 March 2008.
In A Free Republic by Alison Plowden
Alison Plowden wrote many books only four that touched upon
the English revolution. Plowden wrote at a time when the historiography of the
English revolution was heavily dominated by male historians.Plowden writes
engagingly and thoughtfully. She once described herself as being “in the
fortunate position of having been able to turn my hobby into a profession”.
“There must be thousands of women doing unsatisfying jobs who have a private
interest or talent which could be turned to full-time and financial advantage…
I do wish more of them would have a go.”
The book is well researched, and she makes good use of
primary sources such as diaries of some leading figures of the revolution. Her
books are prevalent, leading one writer to say on one of her books on the
Elizabethan period “Where Alison Plowden excels, is in shrewdly stressing how
Elizabeth appreciated the dangers of sexual desire; the general reader will
find it wholly informative and very entertaining.”In this book, she does appear
to rely heavily on conservatives figures of the revolution, and especially
there seems to be an over-reliance on the diary of John Evelyn.
Plowden’s background as a writer is interesting. She came to
write academic history from her experiences as a writer in television and a
very successful one at that. Of this job, she said “I could do better than this
with my hands behind my back. Later on, she said “A secretary writing scripts
was a little like a performing monkey at the BBC – there was a sort of ‘Fancy,
what a clever little girl’ attitude.
She seems to have been well-liked among her fellow writers
with historian and journalist Paul Johnson saying she “writes with verve,
brevity and often wit; a most entertaining book which at the same time is
accurate and judicious”.
Plowden wrote four books on the civil war, The Stuart
Princesses (1996), Women All on Fire: Women of the English Civil War
(1998)Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s Indomitable Queen (2001)In a Free Republic
(2006).The Stuart Princesses, which examines the lives of the six princesses of
the House of Stuart. Again the book is a well written and as one writer said
she “combines detailed histories of the individual women into a single coherent
narrative in a somewhat original way”.
She followed up with the book Women All on Fire. This is a
strong book in many ways. It is a valuable study of the women who played a
significant political and social on both sides of the Civil War.
While she had every right to write a book which mostly stems
from a conservative and bordering of royalist historiography In a Free Republic
– Life in Cromwell’s England, it does tend to be heavily critical of Cromwell’s
Republic. While it has been portrayed as looking at the reality of life in
Cromwell’s England, it tends to be a little one-sided. It is not so much what
she writes; it is what she chooses to leave out.A Free Republic does offer a
revealing insight into everyday life during the interregnum, from 1649 to 1660.
She makes heavy use of primary sources, particularly memoirs, diaries of the
social commentator Samuel Pepys, letters, newspapers and state papers.Given
that during this “free” republic press censorship was extremely heavy and any
news had to get approval from the Secretary of State before publishing,
surprisingly, so many many primary sources are available to examine.Alison
Plowden, who died on August 17 aged 75 said: “I am in the fortunate position of
having been able to turn my hobby into a profession”.There must be thousands of
women doing unsatisfying jobs who have a private interest or talent which could
be turned to full-time and financial advantage… I do wish more of them would
have a go.”
Christopher Thompson on: Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the
English Revolution (Routledge Keegan Paul. 1972)
(This is a reply to my original post on Lawrence Stone’s The
Cause of the English Revolution. I am not sure whether I am going to reply to
it. Needless to say I do not agree with some his remarks although some
clarification might be in order. I would welcome any other comments from my
readers. Please do not be shy. All posts within reason will be published)
The publication of this work in 1972 offered sixth-form
pupils and first-year undergraduates a useful overview of the origins and
causes of the English Revolution from the other side of the Atlantic. Since his
move to Princeton in 1963, Stone had become increasingly interested in the work
of anthropologists and political scientists just as he had been in the 1940s in
that of economic historians and in the light, that such work might throw on
long-standing historical problems.
Whatever subscription he had once paid to the influence of
Marx and Tawney had long since gone by the time in the late-1950s and
early-1960s that he composed The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Stone
was certainly never a Marxist in the sense that Christopher Hill was. His early
teaching at Princeton was, in any case, devoted, as the festschrift in his
honour shows, to a survey course on the evolution of English society between
c.1500 and c.1700. Stone certainly liked being at the centre of academic
attention and of controversy, hence his production of works like this although
it was also true to say that he had, by the early-1970s, become cut off from
the main currents of academic research in England.
The origins of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s dislike of Stone did not
lie in the latter storming out of a revision class at Christ Church College in
Oxford. In fact, the quarrel over the gentry arose from Hugh Trevor-Roper
lending his transcripts on aristocratic indebtedness from the Recognizances for
Debt then held in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Stone used this
material without Trevor-Roper’s permission and with the most misleading of
indications as to how he had acquired it in his 1948 article in The Economic
History Review.
Furthermore, because he had not understood the
technicalities of this source, Stone had assigned to the late-Tudor peers
levels of debt twice their real size. Trevor-Roper was perfectly entitled to
criticise Stone’s work and, indeed, that of Tawney whose stature as an
historian was considerably higher in 1950 than that of Stone but whose
analytical errors were, as J.P.Cooper shortly thereafter pointed out, even more
serious
The controversy probably stimulated more interesting
research into English history in the seventeenth-century than any before or
possibly since. Hugh Trevor-Roper was a friend of Jack Hexter until the
publication of Hexter’s essay, Storm over the Gentry, in Encounter in May,
1958. For several years thereafter, their friendship was in abeyance.
Politically, they were very different indeed, as anyone who knew them both
would understand. There is no significance in the funding of that magazine for
their historiographical positions.
The problem with Stone’s 1972 work was not just its use of
sociological jargon like ‘multiple dysfunction’, ‘preconditions’,
‘precipitants’ and ‘triggers’ but also its antiquated analytical framework, its
assumption very long-term factors were at work, that the loss of landed
possessions by the Crown and Church and, as he erroneously believed, the
peerage made Revolution inevitable as the apparatus of Stuart rule failed to
cope with the rise of the gentry, the spread of Puritanism, and the decline in
the prestige of the Crown and Court and the Laudian church. Stone held that the
political and religious history of the pre-Civil War period had already been
written by S.R.Gardiner and C.H.Firth and fundamentally needed no emendation.
He was profoundly wrong as Nicholas Tyacke and others were already
demonstrating.
Stone’s work on the origins and causes of the English
Revolution was dated by the time it appeared in 1972. It belonged essentially
to the 1950s and early-1960s. No amount of sociological dressing could make it
fashionable again.By then, Trevor-Roper had written and published his
ground-breaking essay on the Union of the Crowns. It was to the hypotheses
about the significance of ‘multiple kingdoms’ that the future in 1972 belonged.
Gerrard Winstanley: A Common Treasury-Presented by Tony
Benn-Verso 2011
The recent
publication of Gerrard Winstanley: A
Common Treasury has added to an increasing interest in the life and writings of
Gerrard Winstanley. The publication of his complete works by Oxford University
Press is perhaps the high point of this interest. The purpose of this review is
to evaluate the Verso publication.The publication of by Verso of a selection of
Winstanley’s is timely and needed. The last few decades have not been kind to
Winstanley. A veritable cottage industry of Historians who have downplayed
Winstanley’s historical significance.
According to Michael Braddick, a growing number of
revisionist historians have “have tried to cut the English revolution down to
size or to cast it in its terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a
critical eye over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical
heroes”.Mark Kishlansky, a leading revisionist said of Winstanley, he was “a
small businessman who began his career wholesaling cloth ended it wholesaling
grain, and in between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The
years when the world was turned upside down stand-in the same relation to the
course of English history as Winstanley’s wild years either side of his
fortieth birthday do to his subsequent life as a churchwarden”.
If Winstanley like other theoreticians of the English
revolution were just suffering a mid-life crisis where does that leave in his
place in the revolution? Well, I am afraid that things are a little more
complicated than Kishlansky believes.
Winstanley was indeed a businessman, but his radicalism like
many others coincided with one of the most revolutionary chapters in English
history. Men and women were being moved by profoundly revolutionary events. As
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was fond of saying “There are decades where nothing
happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Verso, while leaving a lot of Winstanley’s writing out have
still managed to include some of his more important writings. The spate of
recent publications on Winstanley or his collected work is to be welcome
because the last few centuries have not been kind to him.For two hundred after
his death, Winstanley was primarily an obscure figure. As Ariel Hessayon points
out”Unlike the Levellers, whose memory was invoked and appropriated by radicals
in the late 18th century as part of their republican heritage, traces of the
Diggers almost vanished though they were noticed by among others the Scottish
philosopher and historian David Hume, the philosopher and novelist William
Godwin, the French politician and historian François Guizot, and the biographer
Thomas Carlyle, who pitied them as a poor Brotherhood. Indeed, not until the
growth of bourgeois liberal-, socialist- and Marxist-inspired historical
studies did they begin to merit extensive discussion – notably with the
publication in 1895 of a book by Eduard Bernstein, a German journalist exiled
in London, which traced the struggle for democracy and social reform together
with the growth of atheistic and communistic tendencies in early modern
England.
Since then the Diggers have been successively appropriated,
first by campaigners for public ownership of land and Protestant Nonconformist
believers in peaceful co-existence, subsequently in the service of new
political doctrines that have sought legitimacy partly through emphasising
supposedly shared ideological antecedents. Recently they have even been
insensitively incorporated within a constructed Green heritage. All of which is
a remarkable legacy for a defeated movement and Winstanley himself, whose extant
writings were published (several in more than one edition) between 1648 and
1652.”
The majority of writings manifesto-like or a call to arms.
He was one chief amongst men and women and a dynamic leader of men and women.
His belief in a “common treasury” was put into practice when one Sunday in
April 1649 five people travelled to St.
George’s Hill in the parish of Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Once there they began
digging the earth and planting vegetables such as with parsnips, carrots and
beans. Sleeping under the stars, they were followed the next day by more
people. At the end of the week, around thirty people were digging the
earth.From a 21st century standpoint, this may seem a little bizarre, but in
the context of the 17th-century revolution, it was a dangerous thing to do and
caused a significant stir. It also produced a swift and brutal response from
locals threatened by the action and from the authorities who saw it as a
challenge to their rule.
The New Law of Righteousness
Perhaps Winstanley’s most famous body of work The New Law of
Righteousness is not in the Verso collection, which is a strange absence. In
this small book, he agitated for a form of Christian Communism. Verses 44 and
45 outlines the essential core in the Book of Acts, and he said: “All who
believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their
possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”
Winstanley argued that “in the beginning of time God made the earth. Not one
word was spoken at the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over
another, but selfish imaginations did set up one man to teach and rule over
another.”
It is worth attempting to trace Winstanley’s radical thought
in The New Law of Righteousness back through time. Indeed, it echoed profoundly
with Wat Tyler and the Peasants’ Revolt (1381). While much of Winstanley and
that of the Diggers thought was couched in religious terms, he was advocating a
primitive form of Communism.In his work “The Law of Freedom the True Leveller”
Winstanley again makes clear the conditions in which a free society is
possible: “The storehouses shall be every Man’s substance and not any one’s… He
or she who calls the earth his and not his brother’s shall be sat upon a stool
with those words written on his forehead before all the congregation, and
afterwards be made a servant for twelve months under the taskmaster. If he
quarrel or seek by secret persuasion or open rising to set up such a kingly
property he shall be put to death.”
In The Law of Freedom, you can see that Winstanley was
heavily influenced by the European Anabaptists. Who believed that all
institutions were by their nature corrupt: “nature tells us that if water
stands long it corrupts; whereas running water keeps sweet and is fit for
common use”. Winstanley in order to combat this corrupting nature called for
all officials should be elected every year. “When public officers remain long
in place of judicature they will degenerate from the bounds of humility,
honesty and tender care of brethren, in regard the heart of man is so subject
to be overspread with the clouds of covetousness, pride, vain glory”.
From A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of
England, he continues this theme of land redistribution saying “The power of
enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your
ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow-creatures, men, and
after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you,
their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold
that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify
the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited
upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and
longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land”.
To say that Winstanley and his writings were a product of
the times is an understatement. As Tom Hazledine says, he exploded onto the scene.
Gerrard Winstanley was born in 1609 and died September 10 1676. Much of his
early life remains a mystery. He was the son of an Edward Winstanley. In 1630
he moved to London and took up an apprenticeship, and in 1638, he was a freeman
of the Merchant Tailors’ Company.His adult life is unremarkable he married
Susan King, who was the daughter of London surgeon William King in 1639. It is clear that without the English Civil
War, his life would have moved at the same pedestrian pace as before. But like
many, his world was turned upside down. His business took a beating during the
early part of the war, and in 1643 he was made bankrupt. He moved to Cobham,
Surrey, where he found menial work as a cowherd.
Winstanly clearly fought the civil war to have a better life
for him and his followers.He saw Cromwell as an ally at first but later saw
hime as an obstacle to this goal. As this quotes shows “O thou Powers of
England, though thou hast promised to make this People a Free People, yet thou
hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, That thou has
wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us; not only
bringing thy fellow Creatures, the Commoners, to a morsel of Bread, but by
confounding all sorts of people by thy Government, of doing and undoing. First,
Thou hast made the people to take a Covenant and Oaths to endeavour a
Reformation, and to bring in Liberty every Man in his place; and yet while a
man is in pursuing of that Covenant, he is imprisoned and oppressed by thy Officers,
Courts, and Justices, so called. Thou hast made Ordinances to cast down
Oppressing, Popish, Episcopal, Self-willed and Prerogative Laws; yet we see,
That Self-wil and Prerogative power, is the great standing Law, that rules all
in action, and others in words.Thou hast made many promises and protestations
to make the Land a Free Nation: And yet at this very day, the same people, to
whom thou hast made such Protestatins of Liberty, are oppressed by thy Courts,
Sizes, Sessions, by thy Justices and Clarks of the Peace, so called, Bayliffs,
Committees, are imprisoned, and forced to spend that bread, that should save
their lives from Famine”.
One strange contradiction of Winstanley is that he had no
problem with his supporters fighting in the civil war but would not countenance
using force to achieve his political and social ends against Cromwell or
Parliament. “And we shall not do this by force of Arms, we abhorre it, For that
is the work of the Midianites, to kill one another; But by obeying the Lord of Hosts,
who hath Revealed himself in us, and to us, by labouring the Earth in
righteousness together, to eate our bread with the sweat of our brows, neither
giving hire, nor taking hire, but working together, and eating together, as one
man, or as one house of Israel restored from Bondage; and so by the power of
Reason, the Law of righteousness in us, we endeavour to lift up the Creation
from that bondage of Civil Propriety, which it groans under”.
Winstanley who was described as “typical Englishman” perhaps
saved his most savage attack on “so-called “free enterprise”. On trade and
speculation “If any do buy or sell the earth or the fruits thereof, unless it
be with strangers or another nation according to the Laws of Navigation, they
shall be both put to death as traitors to the peace of the Commonwealth.”Even a
cursory reading of this document the intent is clear that the act of digging
and planting vegetables in Surrey was a well thought-out and theoretically
justified by this document. Winstanley declares at the beginning “A Declaration
to the Powers of England, and to all the Powers of the World, shewing the Cause
why the Common People of England have begun, and gives Consent to Digge up,
Manure, and Sow Corn upon George-Hill in Surrey; by those that have Subscribed,
and thousands more that gives Consent”.
Winstanley clearly believed that he had Gods blessing for
his actions and that “In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made
the Earth to be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man,
the lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him,
over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the
beginning, That one branch of mankind should rule over another”.While much of
his documents are couched in religious phraseology a careful reading of the
document reveals Winstanley understood the social and economic issues that were
at stake during the Civil war. He attacked the enclosure of land carried out by
previous kings which brought large scale poverty to sections of the population
and the enrichment of a few landlords. Winstanley clearly believed this to be
wrong “And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of
relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the
teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that
Earth that is within this creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought
and sold, and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily
dishonoured, as if he were a respector of persons, delighting int he
comfortable Livelihoods of some, and rejoycing in the miserable povertie and
straits of others “.
Another significant part of the document is Winstanley’s
understanding that history was being made with the Civil war and revolution. He
makes the point that the old world is ending and he hoped that the new world
would be a far more equal one. “But for the present state of the old World that
is running up like parchment in the fire.
This document is a further justification for the actions of
the Diggers in claiming the earth as a common treasury. “We whose narnes are
subscribed, do in the name of all the poor oppressed people in England, declare
unto you, that call your selves lords of Manors, and Lords of the Land, That in
regard the King of Righteousness, our Maker, hath inlightened our hearts so
far, as to see, That the earth was not made purposely for you, to be Lords of
it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggers; but it was made to be a
common Livelihood to all, without respect of persons: And that your buying and
selling of land, and the Fruits of it, one to another, is The cursed thing, and
was brought in by war; which hath, and still does establish murder, and theft,
In the hands of some branches of Mankinde over others, which is the greatest
outward burden, and unrighteous power, that the Creation groans under: For the
power of inclosing land, and owning Propriety, was brought into the creation by
your Ancestors by the sword; which first did murther their fellow Creatures,
Men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land
successively to you, their Children. And therefore, though you did not kill or
theeve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand, by the power of the sword;
and so you justifie the wicked deeds of your Fathers; and that sin of your
Fathers, shall be visited upon the head of you, and your Children, to the third
and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and theeving power be
rooted out of the land.
Winstanley again reiterates that the land has been stolen by
the few from the many. This document gropes towards an understanding of the
laws of England’s early capitalist development. He is clear that the laws of
the land are clearly designed to protect the interest of a money elite. “That
your Laws shall not reach to oppress us any longer, unless you by your Laws
will shed the innocent blood that runs in our veins”.Winstanley believed that
the owners of land have no right to it as he believed that these landlords “got
your Propriety by murther and theft, and you keep it by the same power from us,
that have an equal right to the land with you, by the righteous Law of
Creation, yet we shall have no occasion of quarrelling (as you do) about that
disturbing devil, called Particular propriety: For the Earth, with all her
Fruits of Corn, Cattle, and such like, was made to be a common Store-house of
Livelihood to all Mankinde, friend, and foe, without exception.
While this document exhibits the traits of a primitive form
of Communism to label the Diggers as early Marxists as some historians have
done is misleading. Take this passage.”And to prevent your scrupulous
Objections, know this, That we Must neither buy nor sell; Money must not any
longer (after our work of the Earths community is advanced) be the great God,
that hedges in some, and hedges out others; for Money is but part of the Earth:
And surely, the Righteous Creator, who is king, did never ordain, That unless
some of Mankinde, do bring that Mineral (Silver and Gold) in their hands, to
others of their own kinde, that they should neither be fed, nor be clothed; no
surely, For this was the project of Tyrant-flesh (which Land-lords are branches
of) to set his Image upon Money. And they make this unrighteous Law, that none
should buy or sell, eat, or be clothed, or have any comfortable Livelihood
among men, unless they did bring his Image stamped upon Gold or Silver in their
hands”.
To undertake their project of a common treasury Winstanley
would have to overthrow the present economic and social system i.e. early
capitalism by a revolution. To put matters simply the social and economic
conditions to do that were not in place and secondly the only class that could
have achieved would have been a working class which was only in embryonic
stages. This was not in the plans of the Diggers as they were not against
private property.In A LETTER TO The Lord Fairfax,AND His Councell of War,June
9.Winstanley was already drawing certain conclusions from the actions of the
Diggers. Winstanley and his Diggers spoke in the name of the poor but in
reality his movement was tiny and probably ran into the hundreds. So he decided
to appeal to the one force that could implement or protect his utopia and that
was the New Model Army. Whether Winstanley understood that even if the army had
intervened it would have amounted to a militarily imposed solution. It is that
context that his letter should be seen.
Winstanley in his letter clearly stated that they had no
intention of forcibly defending their action “We understand, that our digging
upon that Common, is the talk of the whole Land; some approving, some
disowning, some are friends, filled with love, and sees the worke intends good
to the Nation, the peace whereof is that which we seeke after; others are
enemies filled with fury, and falsely report of us, that we have intent to
fortifie our selves, and afterwards to fight against others, and take away
their goods from them, which is a thing we abhor: and many other slanders we
rejoyce over, because we know ourselves cleare, our endeavour being not
otherwise, but to improve the Commons, and to cast off that oppression and
outward bondage which the Creation groans under, as much as in us lies, and to
lift up and preserve the purity thereof”.
Winstanley at no stage attributes any bad actions to
Fairfax, Cromwell or to parliament. Winstanley blames “Norman Tryanny” for the
attacks on his commune “that were offended at first, begin now to be moderate,
and to see righteousnesse in our work, and to own it, excepting one or two
covetous Free-holders, that would have all the Commons to themselves, and that
would uphold the Norman Tyranny over us, which by the victorie that you have
got over the Norman Successor, is plucked up by the roots, therefore ought to
be cast away. And we expect, that these our angry neighbours, whom we never
wronged, nor will not wrong, will in time see their furious rashnesse to be
their folly, and become moderate, to speak and carry themselves like men
rationafiy, and leave off pushing with their hornes like beasts: they shall
have no cause to say wee wrong them, unlesse they count us wrongers of them for
seeking a livelihood out of the common Land of England by our righteous labour,
which is our freedome, as we are Englishmen equall with them, and rather our
freedome then theirs, because they are elder brothers and Free-holders, and
call the Inclosures their own land, and we are younger brothers, and the poore
oppressed, and the Common Lands are called ours, by their owne confession”.
Winstanley again reiterates that their aim was not to take
land from other people and if that did happen he freely admits that the laws of
the land should be used against them “But now if you that are elder brothers,
and that call the Inclosures your own land, hedging out others, if you will
have Magistrates and Laws in this outward manner of the Nations, we are not
against it, but freely without disturbance shall let you alone; and if any of
we Commoners, or younger Brothers, shall steal your corne, or cattell, or pull
down your hedges, let your laws take hold upon any of us that so offends”.
To the City of London.Freedome and peace desired.
Perhaps one of the most important documents included in this
Verso book is Winstanley’s address to the City of London. This a rare piece in
so much it is very autobiographical and gives a valuable insight in Winstanley
thinking and clearly outlines how he was moved by the events of the civil war
and it impacted on his class.From the document, we glean that he was a
tradesman in London and according to him a Freeman. When the Civil war broke
out against Charles I, he contributed to the parliament’s cause. But due to the
Civil war, he was deprived of his property, “by fraudulent representatives of
the “thievish art of buying and selling, in conjunction with the oppressive
imposts for the war”,He was then forced to accept the help of friends who gave
the means to settle in the country. This was not a success and was soon
pauperised by war taxes and the fact that soldiers billeted in his property
(which was a common complaint amongst the populous).”
What impact did these events have on Winstanley? For the
revisionists, this kind of change in the social standing and its impact on
someone’s thinking has no importance. But for me, this is crucial to understand
how people like Winstanley and others like him were forced to think through
their lives and react to the profound changes wrought by war and revolution and
change Winstanley did and in an expeditious way.Edward Bernstein relates
according to him”His heart was filled with beautiful thoughts, and things were
revealed to him, of which he had never before read or heard, and which many to
whom he related them could not believe”. One of these ideas was that the earth
should be made a common treasury of all men without distinction of person”.
Adding: “And I see the poore must first be picked out, and honoured in this
work, for they begin to receive the ward of righteousness, but the rich
generally are enemies to true freedome.”
Bernstein adds”He represents the most advanced ideas of his
time; in his utopia, we find coalesced all the popular aspirations engendered
and fertilised by the revolution. It would be more than absurd to criticise,
from our modern standpoint, his positive proposals, or to stress their
imperfections and inexpediency. They are to be explained in light of the
economic structure of society as he found it. We would fain admire the acumen
and sound judgment exhibited by this simple Man of the people, and his insight
into the connection existing between the social conditions of his time and the
causes of the evils which he assails”.
To Conclude the Diggers were part of a group of men that
sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking
place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the real ‘Ideologues of
the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract thought. While the Diggers were
sympathetic to the poor, which stemmed from their religion, they had no
programme to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent
overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers,
conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or that matter did the
larger group the Levellers constitute a mass movement. The contradiction
between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the
small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to private
property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist,
they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable.
Historians and the passing of time
From Christopher Thompson
I ought to begin by saying that I have become increasingly fond
of Keith Livesey’s blog, A Trumpet of Sedition. He and I do not agree on the
origins and causes, the course and significance and the consequences of the
struggles in the British Isles (or the Civil Wars or Revolution) of the 1640s
and 1650s. I believe that the existence of differing views is a good thing
because it stimulates debate and new research. He is attached to the views of
figures like Christopher Hill and Brian Manning, both Marxists and both figures
from my youth. Their approaches were superseded with the rise of the mis-named
‘revisionism’ of the mid-1970s.Christopher Hill ceased to shape the course of
historiographical debates at that time: it is doubtful whether Brian Manning,
whose views had been formed in the early-1950s and which changed remarkably
little, ever had.
This process – of once fashionable views going out of
fashion – happens to everyone. It happened about twenty years ago to Conrad
Russell. He no longer shapes historiographical debates about these events. So,
I hope Keith Livesey will forgive me when I say that there is no group of
revisionists controlling academic or any other forms of discussion about the
1640s and 1650s in these islands. The debate has moved on: Christopher Hill
like Conrad Russell is ‘old hat’. Historians now wear different headgear and
will change it again in the future.
My Reply
I would like to return the compliment made by Christopher
Thompson on my blog and take up briefly a few of his points. I enjoy his blog.
It is the first blog I read and contains extremely valuable information and
insight into Early Modern England. As he has mentioned above we do not see eye
to eye on the origins and causes of the English Revolution but that is life. If
everybody agreed on everything History would be a very boring subject.
In fact I am of the opinion that through understanding
contending views of the civil war we get a closer approximation as to its
complexities. Christopher is of course right when he says that different
generations throw up different types of historians and for that matter
different types or schools of history. Perhaps I am wrong to say that the
revisionist historians control current historiography. Control is too strong a
word but they certainly do dominate. But I will allow a concession to
Christopher and admit that I need to carry out a far more accurate analysis of
their historiography and politics. If the new group of historians have moved
beyond the term revisionists then what are they proposing and can a common
theme be detected amongst them. The next few months will show.
Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England A concise history
from the English Civil War to the end of the Commonwealth Andrew Bradstock
published by I.B.Tauris 2011 pp189 paperback £15.99.
This book is a
rarity. Under conditions where current historiography of the English Civil war
is mostly dominated by revisionist historians who think that groups such as,
Diggers or Levellers are not worth looking or that the Ranters did not exist at
all this book is a welcome challenge.
Bradstock, who is a Howard Paterson Professor of Theology
and Public Issues at the University of Otago New Zealand is to be commended for
writing such a book in a very hostile intellectual climate. His use of
historians, such as Christopher Hill and Brian Manning, who have fallen out of
favour is to be congratulated. It is safe to say that Braddock’s historiography
is heavily influenced by the fact that he is a Christian socialist.
His examination of groups such as the Levellers, Ranters,
Diggers, Fifth Monarchists is highly detailed unlike Christopher Hill his
failure to link these groups to the changes to England’s social and economic
development is a weakness. His apology for using the term is too much of a
concession to the revisionists.
Bradstock was very reluctant to get into a scrap with the
revisionist historians explaining”I do, of course, make it clear (p. xxiv) that
it is not my intention in the book to engage in this debate, though I am afraid
my main reason for adopting this policy is rather tame and un-academic. Early
in the piece, I did inform my publishers that I was rethinking the
appropriateness of the term ‘radical’, and might wish to adopt some other term
in the text, but was duly advised that the title of the book was already fixed
and that retaining the word radical in it was important as a”selling point’. I
must admit I did entirely see their point – and their concern that the book
serve primarily to introduce new readers to the movements it discusses, not
specific scholarly debates – and so decided simply to flag up the debate and
stick with the term (though careful readers will notice that it actually
appears very infrequently in the text, and then almost always in inverted
commas). It seemed to me that, even if I were to go into the issue in some
depth, I would have to come down on the side of retaining the term in order to
make the text match the title, and so I simply indicated my general
‘relaxedness’ regarding the term, echoing Christopher Hill’s exasperation with
those calling for a new one (p. xxv)”.
Bradstock begins with a crucial question. Why study these
groups? Moreover, to answer this, he makes a valid point when he says you
define your attitude to the civil war by your attitude to the radical sects.
In the introduction, Bradstock uses the quote from
Winstanley to set the scene for his history of these groups. The present state
of the old world is running up like “parchment in the fire”.’ claimed Gerrard
Winstanley, leader of the radical religious group the Diggers. As the book states, this period was “one of
the most turbulent periods in that country’s history.
Despite Bradstock’s reluctance to use the word radical, this
is an excellent introduction to the groups such as the Levellers and Diggers.
His diligent research and writing style is very accessible. The book is broking
down by the different religious groups into their own chapters. While Bradstock
cites Hill as one of his influences from an early age, it is clear that
Bradstock comes from an entirely different social and political standpoint from
Hill. While admitting that these groups did turn the world upside down,
Bradstock seems to have not to have taken on board too much of Hill’s
materialist outlook.
The majority of the book concentrates on “Religious issues
and the Bible” and for him, religious issues “drove the conflict and affected
the way people thought and acted. Bradstock is of the firm opinion like John
Morrill that the civil war was “Europe’s last war of religion”.While the book
focuses on people who joined together to a certain body of ideas and who wanted
political, economic, social and religious change” Bradstock hardly mentions the
massive social and economic changes which pulsed during the 17th Century.
The book does, however, challenge the conception that
interest in these groups is nil, and he believes that these groups still have a
contemporary significance mirroring societal problems in the 21st Century. We
are still grappling with many of the issues discussed by Ranters and Diggers
such as the nature of democracy, dictatorship and social inequality today.The
fact that these groups sought to understand the social, political and economic
changes of their day within the framework of religion is not a surprise. The
Marxist writer Cliff Slaughter in his better days wrote Like the religious systems of all class
societies, Christianity is a set of beliefs whose meaning can be turned in
entirely different and sometimes opposite social directions. Since it is not a
rational or scientific theory of the world, its parts may be rearranged and
selected according to the needs and inclinations of the faithful. For the
revolutionary workers under modern capitalism, religion is, without any
qualification, part of the armoury of reaction. However, in previous epochs,
before the objective conditions existed for an oppressed class fully to comprehend
social reality and achieve its liberation, the framework of all social
doctrine, reactionary and progressive, remained religious. The two-sidedness of
Christian development (on the one hand, it served to defend feudal and then
capitalist reaction, on the other it served as an ideological cover and
inspiration for revolt) is rooted in the very nature of universal religions. In
Marx’s words, ‘Religious misery is at the same time the expression of real
misery and the protest against that real misery’.” [1]
While Bradstock does not have very much to say about
modern-day revisionists, he does provide some insight on past controversies. J
C Davis challenged whether the Ranters even existed. Davis went further than
most historians by saying the Ranters were a myth. They were not a coherent
group whom Davis limited to three or four individuals. Anything more was the
creation of “hostile pamphleteers”. [2]According to Christopher Hill, Davis’s
main argument was that the radical sects were primarily a figment of the
imagination of the Communist Party Historians Group of which Hill was a leading
member. In reply is Hill said “I do not think I need comment on Davis’s
allegation that the rediscovery (or invention) of the Ranters in the 1970s was
part of a conspiracy between Communist and ex-Communist historians. This is
flattering to A. L. Morton and myself, though I hardly think it will recommend
itself to Norman Cohn, who preceded both of us, and the many other good
historians who have studied them. However, the analogy perhaps tells us
something about Davis’s mode of thought. Conservative conspirators invented the
Ranters in the Seventeenth Century, communist conspirators re-discovered (or
reinvented) them in the twentieth. The opposing arguments are both necessary if
we are to avoid the just possible alternative, that the Ranters did exist. Why
is it so crucial for Davis to prove that they did not? What is he frightened
of”. [3]
The most substantial part of the book is Bradstock take on
the Levellers. The Levellers started to organise like a political party in the
years 1645-46. They were responsible for many of modern-day political
techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and
the lobby of MPs. Their strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had
quite considerable support in the army. The movement was a hugely disparate
group and frequently crossing over into the Diggers or as they have called the
True Levellers. The Ranters were on the extreme left wing of the Leveller movement.The
central plank of the Leveller manifesto was the call for a democratic republic
in which the House of Commons would be more important than the House of Lords.
A Leveller would have wanted redistribution and extension of the franchise,
legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property, artisans, yeoman,
small merchants, and the very layer which made up the Levellers themselves.
Bradstock shows the persecution suffered by the radical
sects. The treatment of the Quaker leader James Nayler, even by today’s
standards is genuinely shocking. The Baptists, who were one of the smallest
groups were constantly hounded akin to the McCarthy witch hunts of the
Communists of the 1950s and 60s. Their leaders were regularly imprisoned and
tortured.Bradstock observes that arriving at an objective understanding of the
size and influence of these groups is not helped by the exaggerated fear and
reaction to them by the authorities. Oliver Cromwell, however, was acutely
aware that the ideas of the Levellers and the smaller groups within them, such
as the Diggers and Baptists were becoming a dangerous business. Speaking of the
Levellers Cromwell said of what he called the ‘lunaticks’ “You must break these
men, or they will break you.”
The book on numerous occasions cites the fact that the
authorities accused the sects of breaking the social fabric of society. This
fear was not altogether unfounded. Ranters leader Coppe highlights this
friction between classes:‘Mighty men! … Those that have admired, adored,
idolised, magnified, set you up, fought for you, ventured goods, and good name,
limb and life for you, shall cease from you.’ ‘For this Honour, Nobility,
Gentility, Propriety, Superfluity. &c. hath (without contradiction) been the
Father of hellish horrid pride, arrogance, haughtiness, loftinesse, murder,
malice, of all manner of wickednesse and impiety; yea the cause of all the
blood that ever hath been shed. from the blood of the righteous Abell, to the
blood of the last Levellers that were shot to death.’
Hear one word more (whom it hitteth it hitteth) give over
thy base nasty, stinking, formall grace before meat, and after meat … give over
thy stinking family duties, and thy Gospel( Ordinances as thou callest them;
for under them all lies snapping, snarling, biting, besides covetousnesse,
horrid hypocrisie, envy, malice, evil surmising.’‘Kings, Princes, Lords, great
ones, must bow to the poorest Peasants; rich men must stoop to poor rogues, or
else they’ll rue for it …‘Howl, howl, ye nobles, howl honourable, howl ye rich
men for the miseries that are coming upon you ‘For our parts, we that hear the
Apostle preach, will also have all things common; neither will we call anything
that we have our own. [4]No wonder that George Fox, the Quaker, found the
Ranters, ‘were very rude, and stirred up the rude people against us.’
It is a shame that
Bradstock offers little insight into the social origins of any leaders
of the various groups. Gerrard Winstanley leader of the Diggers was a businessman,
and his radicalism coincided with one of
the most revolutionary chapters in English history.His avocation of the
redistribution of land through the pamphlet called The Law of Freedom in a
Platform, saw him elaborate a Christian/Communist basis for society in which
property and wages were abolished. In “ From A Declaration from the Poor
Oppressed People of England he said “The power of enclosing land and owning
property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which
first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away
their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And
therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in
your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of
your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of
you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till
your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land”.
I would not say that Bradock’s book is a turning point in
the study of the radicals of the English revolution. However, does add to our
understanding of these groups and his work forms a growing body of knowledge
that has recently appear other work by John Rees and Rachel Foxley.In
conclusion, as Slaughter writes “for the understanding of some of the great
problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity but”the
criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.”
[1] Religion and
Social Revolt
From Labour Review, Vol.3 No.3, May-June 1958, pp.77-82.
[2] See Fear,Myth
and History-The Ranters and the Historians.
[3] The Lost Ranters? A Critique of J. C. Davis-Christopher
Hill
History Workshop-No. 24 (Autumn, 1987), pp. 134-140
[4] Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm
from the Ranters to …
By Clement Hawes
Barry Coward- (February 1941 – 17 March 2011)
It is very sad to hear the death of Barry Coward this week.
I first met him in 1999 at Birkbeck University. I was attending an open evening
because I was thinking of undertaking a part-time degree and Birkbeck had been
recommended to me by a friend. At the open meeting was Barry Coward.
Part of the attraction of the degree was the study of the
English revolution. I had a vague likening for the subject but when I asked
Barry about the course he immediately fired my enthusiasm and signed up a week
later. This was probably one of the best decisions I have made in my life.
The first thing that struck me about Barry Coward was his
incredible and infectious enthusiasm for his chosen topic. He was also a rare
breed amongst most historians in that he was always warm and friendly towards
his students. This quote sums up his attitude ‘I never ceased to be amazed by
their ability to combine full-time employment with part-time study and gain
degrees as good as, and often better than, those who studied full time.
This was regularly shown by the awards to Birkbeck students
of the Derby Prize for the best BA in history in the whole University of
London. It was enormously rewarding to watch Birkbeck students – especially
those who had not done formal study for some time – develop academically, and
then use Birkbeck as a launchpad for life-changing experiences. I’d like to
thank them for their enthusiasm and the freshness of their ideas that I drew on
in my writings.’
He always had time and patience for me no matter how small
my question. The other thing that struck me was his modesty. This may of
stemmed from the fact that he had a formidable knowledge of his subject so much
so that a number of his books such as The Stuart Age, England 1603–1714 (latest
edition 2003)The Cromwellian Protectorate (2002)Oliver Cromwell (1991) have
become standard textbooks on the period.
Barry was also a good public speaker although not the best
he was not the worse. He also had one of the best traits of a historian in that
during his lectures you could almost sense that when he was speaking on the
subject he was already rethinking his remarks.
It would be remiss of me to say that I did not always see
eye to eye with his political and historical conclusions on the Civil War. We
came from different political family trees. He was old school labour and I was
certainly to the left of him but I must say that during his seminars were the
best part of my degree we had a frank exchange and that was it. Having said
this he was always the gentlemen and these debates never became bitter or
rancorous. I will miss him and so will future students of 17th century England.
Conrad Russell and a case of suppressio veri?
( This is reprinted from Christopher Thompson’s blog by kind
permission. His blog can be found at http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.com/
I first met Conrad Russell when I became a Fellow of the
Institute of Historical Research in the autumn of 1968. He was engaging company
with a dry sense of humour and a wide knowledge of arcane references. We became
friends and remained in touch in the early-1970s. The intellectual parting of
our ways came in the mid-1970s with the publication of his works on
Parliamentary history between 1604 and 1629, on the foreign policy debates in
the House of Commons in November, 1621 and the publications in 1979 of his book
on English Parliaments between 1621 and 1629. I regarded these as unsound,
highly inaccurate and misleading. I still do. To the surprise of many of my
friends, I was not and never have been a follower of Russell.
Perhaps, I may be allowed to illustrate this with one
example amongst hundreds. In July, 1974, I heard his paper on anti-Spanish
sentiment between 1621 and 1624 at the Sheffield Conference on Sir Thomas
Wentworth’s career. It was subsequently published in The Political World of
Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford 1621-1641, edited by J.F.Merritt (Cambridge
University Press 1996, Pp.47-62.
Wentworth’s speeches in the House of Commons on 26th, 27th
and 28th November naturally attracted his attention. Russell rightly pointed
out (ibid., p.56) that, on 26th November, Wentworth argued that the issue of
supply to assist King James to support English forces in the Palatinate and,
perhaps, for a wider war should be put off until the following Saturday and,
before then, for the House to prepare for the end of the session, presumably by
passing Bills.
He went on to claim that Wentworth had not detected any
demand for war in his constituency of Yorkshire. When he turned to the debate
in the lower House on 27th November, Russell argued that the “first shadow was
again cast by Sir Thomas Wentworth, calling for a return to bills ….
Wentworth’s interventions now pass the test for ‘enemy action’. (ibid., p.56)
On the28th, Wentworth stated that he would not give his voice for a subsidy if
he did not believe there was going to be a session (ibid., Pp.57-58) It was on
the basis of these speeches that Russell argued Wentworth could be accounted an
opponent of war in the autumn of 1621.
Russell was certainly right to point out that Sir Thomas
Wentworth argued on 26th November for a discussion of supply to be deferred
until the following Saturday and, in the meantime, for the House of Commons to
concentrate upon the passage of Bills and preparations for the end of the
session.
What he entirely failed to mention – other than in a passing
reference to a demand on Wentworth’s part on the following day for a return to
Bills – was Sir Thomas’s speech on 27th November. For that claim, he cited two
sources, the ‘X’ diary and Sir Thomas Barrington’s diary (ibid., p.56 n.19)
both reproduced in the edition of the Commons’ Debates for 1621 edited by
Notestein, Relf and Simpson. The ‘X’ diary began its report by recording
Wentworth as arguing in favour of “a covenant between the King and his seed and
us and our seed. First, for a present supply. Secondly to a future war of the
King’s part.”
In return, Wentworth wanted an end to the session and Bills
to pass into law: he was willing to “answer the King’s desire to give a
sufficient sum before Christmas for supply … [and advocated] that we would
declare that we would be ready to lay down our lives and estates at his feet.”
Sir Thomas Barrington’s account was equally clear on Wentworth’s desire to
preserve amity with the King; James had asked for supply to maintain an army in
the Palatinate and to sustain a future war; Wentworth, therefore, sought an end
to the present session and a new one in February whilst pledging to “answer the
King’s first proposition for the Palatinate, to give before Christmas” and to
“declare our selves that we will be ready to laye downe our lives and fortunes
when the King shall make a warr.”
These were the two sources Russell cited for his claim that
Wentworth was calling for a return to Bills and that his successive
interventions on 26th and 27th November “pass the test for ‘enemy action’.” The
Commons’ Journal reported the end of Wentworth’s speech as advising the House
“1. To give a present Supply for the Army in the Palatinate. 2ly, A Request to
the King, by some of the Privy Council, for an End of a Session before
Christmas. 3ly, The Proportion of the present Supply, and the manner, as may
add most Reputation to his Majesty’s Endeavours abroad. 4ly, Where War and
peace in the King’s Hand, to declare, that we will be ready, in a Cause
concerning Religion and the Commonwealth, we will be ready to second him.“
The other accounts – Pym, Smyth, Z and Howard – confirm
Wentworth’s willingness to vote for an interim supply to keep the forces in the
Palatinate in being and his desire for a further session in February. Edward
Nicholas, furthermore, noted Wentworth’s suggestion of a conference with the
House of Lords on the question of supply. On this basis, Wentworth was not just
willing to fund military forces in the Palatinate but also to contemplate
grants to pay for a wider war if necessary. Russell’s claims about Wentworth as
an opponent of a war by 27th November cannot be reconciled with the surviving
evidence.
The questions that inevitably arise are very serious. Did
Russell read the sources he used or did he misread them or did he ignore their
contents altogether in the service of his striking but unfounded hypothesis? I
am afraid that there are not just dozens of examples of this kind but hundreds
across his body of work. That is why I cannot agree that he was the foremost
scholar of his generation working on the history of early Stuart parliaments
and politics.
Property and Power: On James Harrington’s 400th Birthday
Power is founded on property. Few people nowadays would deny
this doctrine. The political philosopher James Harrington formulated it in the
mid-seventeenth century. Living in per-industrial England he still considered
land, not money, the most important form of property.
The social group that held most of the country’s land also
held the largest amount of power. In early modern England this was the monarch
and his nobility, including the bishops.
However, from the reign of Henry VII onwards, and especially
through the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries and sale of
Church lands, power relations began to change. Over time, the King (or Queen)
and nobility lost land and power in favour of the next social group, the gentry
and the commoners, represented in the lower house of Parliament.
By the early Stuart period the power balance had been upset
so badly that struggles between the King and the House of Commons led to a
breakdown or ‘dissolution’ of the government in the English Civil War. Anyone
trying to reconstruct the English government in the aftermath of the war would
therefore have to create a new superstructure that took into account the
changed power relations.
The most famous elaboration of Harrington’s theory can be
found in his utopian Commonwealth of Oceana of 1656, in which he tried to
persuade Oliver Cromwell to play the sole legislator, set up the perfect
republican state and retire to the country.
‘Good laws’, Harrington believed, could give the country
stability, and these laws had to be infallible, so that bad men would not be
able to corrupt the state. Harrington never saw his dream come true. The
Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 meant a return of many of the old problems.
But his ideas of mixed government and a balance of power remained influential
in the writings of the Neo-Harringtonians of the later 17th and early 18th
century. They influenced both the American and French Revolutions, while his
materialist theory of political change would also strike a chord with Marxists
and modern economic and political thinkers.
James Harrington would have celebrated his 400th birthday
today. He was born in Upton, Northamptonshire on 3 January 1611 and died in
Little Ambry on 11 September 1677.
The Rehabilitation of John Toland -(1670–1722)
“I take him to be a
candid freethinker and a good scholar. But there is a violent sort of spirit
reigns here, which already begins to show itself against him: and I believe I
will increase daily; for I find the Clergy alarmed to a mighty degree against
him.”
John Locke
“None are found today in the whole mortal world, who are
either as refined in their manners and more honourable, or in all the burdens
and responsibilities of the good civic offices less in error than the sect of
the Chinese called the literati. Their commission and mandate from the king is
a civil administration which excludes religious cults. Although they believe in
an eternal and incorruptible world, they do not believe in a Spirit which is
distinguished from the structure of matter; and they completely reject as
stories and political contrivances the doctrine of the future existence of
souls.”[1]
John Toland
Introduction
Among other things, the historian E. P Thompson was famous
for rescuing people from the condescension of history. It is a shame that
Thompson did not write about John Toland because if ever a figure needed
rescuing from history, it was Toland.John Toland was many things to many
people, and that is a significant problem. He was a prodigious pamphleteer, a
polemicist who liked to play practical jokes. A cursory look at recent academic
articles on Toland confirms a difficulty in placing him in the correct political
and historical context. Academics have found it profoundly difficult to find a
clear picture of him. According to A R Sullivan, “Toland habitually covered his
tracks, and the bulk of his papers have been destroyed”.
Perhaps this is the reason why he has suffered so much over
the last three centuries of historical obscurity. However, thankfully, this has
started to change. The religious and philosophical outlook of John Toland, far
from being a debate confined to the past, has a contemporary feel to it.
According to Paul Harrison people are still looking for “some helpful guidance
about our place in the universe. He continued that people are looking for a
religion that does not suspend rational thought or assume an “invisible realm”.
One of the foremost scientists of the 20th Century Albert
Einstein was attracted to this idea. Recent scientists such as Daniel Dennett
and Richard Dawkins have looked for a religion that would stress the beauty of
the universe revealed by science.This type of religion has been given many
names such as religious atheism, religious humanism. However, according to
Harrison “they all share two basic premises: acceptance of the natural world as
revealed by the senses and science, and deeply religious response to that
revelation”.Publishers are now showing more interest in the works of John
Toland. Lilliput Press republished Christianity Not Mysterious in 1997 with
accompanying essays on Toland and his work.
A Political Biography of John Toland by Michael Brown of Aberdeen University
was recently published. Academics are now publishing substantial essays; one
example among many is Ann Talbot’s The Man without Superstition: John Toland
and China.
Biography
John Toland came to England from Dublin in the summer of
1697. Toland was born in near Londonderry, Ireland on November 30 1670. He was
christened in a Catholic Church but converted to Protestantism at the age of
15. Toland achieved a degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1690. He
studied in England, Germany and Holland. From an early age, Toland’s somewhat
unorthodox views made it difficult for him the make a living. He made money
writing political pamphlets and biographies for aristocrats. Toland wrote on a
wide range of subjects from religious tolerance and civil liberty.
Even at the young age of 27, Toland had a very high level of
political consciousness. It was during this time he produced his most famous
work Christianity, Not Mysterious. Tom Wall points out in an article written
for the Dublin Review of Books that “the
premise of the book was that the original message of Christianity was easily
understood and accessible to human reason but had been usurped and turned into
gibberish in divinity schools to serve the interest of an emergent priestly
class. He argued that mysteries, so-called, could be explained by natural
phenomena. The same case, expressed less stridently, had already been made by
John Locke without too much of a stir. However, in Toland’s case, the
anti-clerical tone outraged the Anglican establishment because it was clear
that their Clergy and bishops, and not just those of the papists, were targets.
Archbishop Marsh of Dublin did everything he could to ensure that Toland
suffered for his impertinence. Toland, referring to himself in the third person,
humorously described the reception he encountered on his arrival in an appendix
to subsequent editions of the book”[2].
“Mr Toland was scarcely arriv’d in that country when he
found himself warmly attack’d from the Pulpit, which at the beginning could not
but startle the People, who until then were equal Strangers to him and his
book, yet they became, in a little time, so well accustomed to this Subject
that it was as much expected of the course as if it had been prescribed in the
Rubrick. This occasioned a Noble Lord to give it for a reason why he frequented
not the church as formerly, that instead of his saviour Jesus Christ, one John
Toland was all the discourse there.”[3]
Toland was acutely aware that the publication of this book
was a danger to his life. While many of the ruling elite who read the book did
not understand it that did not stop them from deeming it blasphemous and
ordered Toland be arrested. His book was burnt with a grand ceremony with a
hangman presiding. Toland was a “Visible, available and vulnerable” target for
those who wanted to find heretics. It was perhaps not all his own
making”.Toland got the message, while the book burning was deemed a piece of
theatre and nothing else Toland would have known that a few months earlier, a
twenty-year-old medical student, Thomas Aikenhead, had been executed for
blasphemy in Edinburgh.
The Englightenment
While it is not difficult to place Toland within the context
of the Englightenment, it is a more complicated matter to figure out how
important was his place in the history of the Englightenment. As Ann Talbot
points out “The name of John Toland has become a relatively well known in early
Enlightenment history following the pioneering work of Margaret Jacob. The
extensive works of Jonathan Israel have placed him among the leading figures of
the radical Enlightenment. He has returned to favour after a long period
of obscurity. Toland’s eclipse can be
dated at least to Leslie Stephens’ dismissal of him as “a poor denizen of Grub
Street.” It might even be said to have begun 6 with Edmund Burke’s remark, “Who
born within the last forty years has read one word of Collins and Toland, and
Tindal and Chubb and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves
freethinkers?” Toland was a central figure in 7 the Deist controversy although
he is often described as a Unitarian and a Pantheist. His philosophy has
attracted considerable attention in the revival of 8 interest in his writings.
Studies of his political writings have explored his role 9 in transmitting
mid-seventeenth century English political ideas to the rest of Europe and the
American colonies.”[4]
While it has been the current fad amongst Post Modernists
writers to attack the importance of the Englightenment it was in the words of
Tom Wall “a defining European historical process. It is perhaps not an
overstatement to describe it as the dawn of intellectual emancipation.If the
early Enlightenment involved only small elites within Europe, in Ireland, it
could only embrace a minority of a minority. But within that (Protestant)
minority there were some who were more than usually receptive. Many veterans of
Cromwell’s army had settled here; the recipients of lands seized from
Catholics. A disproportionate number of these were religiously independent. A high
proportion of the Scottish Presbyterians who settled in Antrim and Down were
non-subscribing (that is refusing to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of
Faith) and receptive to “New Light” liberal Presbyterianism. The oppressed
Catholic majority had more compelling concerns, yet, surprisingly, it was from
a Catholic, Gaelic-speaking community that one of the leading proponents of the
radical Enlightenment emerged. The radical philosophers were distinguished by
their direct challenges to orthodox religious beliefs and their opposition to
the arbitrary power exercised by princes and prelates. John Toland gained much
notoriety throughout Europe for the vehemence with which he advanced such
beliefs”.
Toland’s work began to attract other philosophers who were
beginning to cast doubt on previously held religious and philosophical views.
As the Marxist writer David North writes “Until the early seventeenth century,
even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all
the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the
Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding,
especially since the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus in the year
of his death in 1543, which dealt a death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of
the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future
conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course,
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the
liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political
structures that rested upon it, was well underway.
The discoveries in astronomy profoundly changed the general
intellectual environment. Above all, there was a new sense of the power of
thought and what it could achieve if allowed to operate without the artificial
restraints of untested and unverifiable dogmas. Religion began to encounter the
type of disrespect it deserved, and the gradual decline of its authority introduced
a new optimism. All human misery, the Bible had taught for centuries, was the
inescapable product of the Fall of Man. But the invigorating skepticism
encouraged by science in the absolute validity of the Book of Genesis led
thinking people to wonder whether it was not possible for a man to change the
conditions of his existence and enjoy a better world.[5]
One figure who was looking for a better world was John
Locke, who wrote of Toland “I take him to be a candid freethinker and a good
scholar. But there is a violent sort of spirit reigns here, which already
begins to show itself against him: and I believe will increase daily; for I
find the Clergy alarmed to a mighty degree against him. He has raised against
him the clamour of all parties; and this not so much for his difference in
opinion, as by his unreasonable way of discoursing, propagating and maintaining
it. Coffee houses, and public tables, are not proper places for serious
discourse relating to the most important truths. But when also a tincture of
vanity appears in the whole course of a man’s conversation, it disgusts many
that may otherwise have a due value for his parts and learning.[6]
Pantheism
Locke was defending a very controversial theory Pantheism
coined by Toland 1705 to describe his religious worldview. Toland who was in
awe of the physical universe and believed that “minds were an aspect of the
body”.While Toland never defined himself as a deist and was committed to the
idea of “Pantheist esotericism” it is generally accepted amongst scholars that
Toland was a Deist. According to R E Sullivan “scholars who have characterised
him as a Deist have usually enveloped the label with a patchwork of
qualifications and elaboration”. Toland has not helped things much using the
words atheism and deism as interchangeable.
While Toland defined his beliefs as pantheists anyone who
defined themselves materialists were labelled a deist or atheists. Two of the
most critical materialists of the day Hobbes and Spinoza were called Deists
regularly.According to Sullivan, no one could
“agree on a single principle typical of deism, but that did not deter
them from lumping individuals together as desists”. That is not to say that
there were no deists again according to Sullivan “they adopted this name in
order to describe either their coolness toward revelation or their adherence to
some kind of natural system of belief and practice. In many cases, they seem to
have believed in religious principles, which resemble at least some of those
that Herbert had offered in De Veritate. Sometime before 1730 Tindal had become
a professing deist, but neither Toland nor Collins ever made such a
profession.”
According to the Frederick C Beiser One of the important
events in the history of the early English Enlightenment was the so-called
‘deism controversy’, which began in 1696 and did not die out until the 1740s.
In the most dramatic fashion, this dispute raised anew the old question of the
rule of faith. But it did so in a new form. The issue was no longer whether
reason had some authority— for everyone in the 1690s was ready to grant
that—but whether it had complete sovereignty. Now it was the other rules of
faith—Scripture, enthusiasm, and apostolic tradition—that were in question. The
controversy raised the general issue: Are there any mysteries or truths above
reason in Christianity? Or are all its beliefs subject to the criticism of
reason? By questioning the very possibility of revelation, the dispute cast
doubt upon the old rules of faith, which claimed to be, in one form or another,
sources of knowledge of revelation”[7].
[1]Quoted in Ann Talbot’s The Man without Superstition: John
Toland and China. https://www.academia.edu/39708305/The_Man_without_Superstition
[2]The Inishowen Oracle-Tom Wall-
https://www.drb.ie/essays/the-inishowen-oracle
[3] An apology for
Mr. Toland in a letter from himself to a member of the House of Commons in
Ireland, written the day before his book was resolv’d to be burnt by the
Committee of Religion : to which is prefix’d a narrative containing the
occasion of the said letter. https://eebo.chadwyck.com/home
[4] The Man without Superstition: John Toland and China-Ann
Talbot-
[5]Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism-By
David North-24 October 1996-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1996/10/lect-o24.html
[6] Works of John Locke, Volume 3
[7] The Sovereignty of Reason-Frederick C. Beiser-Published
by Princeton University Press-Chapter 6-Toland and the Deism Contrversy
The English Civil War-Essential Readings-Edited by Peter
Gaunt. Blackwell 2000
“The Debate over the English Revolution” has been
transformed out of all recognition during the past thirty years or so,”
David Underdown.
‘a miserable, distracted time’ in which ‘when thou wentest
to bed at night, thou knewest not whether thou shouldest be murdered afore day.
Sir John Oglander
Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings
(2000) is a collection choice of essays chosen by Gaunt. It is an excellent
introduction to the study of the English revolution allowing us to study the
previous historiography.Gaunt was given the unenviable task of putting together
sixteen essays that were divided into four parts that sum up the historiography
of an extraordinarily complex subject. Gaunt’s choice of essays was made harder
by copyright difficulties and problems of format.Gaunt starts with three
politically disparate historians John Morrill, Brian Manning, and David
Underdown, who attempt to answer ‘What Was The English Revolution?’ the article
first being published in history Today in 1984.
John Morrill[1]
first essay starts
with an explicit rejection that the civil war was the result of any long-term
developments. He describes England after 1600 as a peaceful and prosperous
place with little or no civil disturbances and certainly no reason to have a
civil war.The main thrust of Morrill’s argument is if it was not for Charles
blundering and political inexperience England would have carried on its merry
way. As he states “In 1640, however, Charles blundered away his initiative. He
tried to impose his will upon his Scottish subjects twice, both times without
adequate means. He could have made painful concessions, resumed his personal
rule in England and looked to divide-and-rule tactics to regain his power in
Scotland. But by attempting to impose his own brand of Protestantism on the
Scots through an unco-ordinated force of Irish Catholics, Highland Catholics
and an English army containing many Catholics, all to be paid for with cash to
be provided from Rome and Madrid, he turned the anti-Catholic fears which his
policies and his cultural values had already stimulated into a deep paranoia.
The Scots’ occupation of northeast England, and their demand for war
reparations guaranteed by Parliament, created a wholly unanticipated and wholly
unique situation: a meeting of Lords and Commons over whose determination he
had no control. The MPs who gathered for the Long Parliament knew they had a
once-for-all chance to put things right. They did not set out to organise for
war but to restore the good old days.”[2]Morrill then expands on his theory
that religion was the leading cause of the English revolution. According to him
“Out of England’s wars of religion came the modern secular state”.[3]
Although not covered in this essay Morrill was extraordinarily
vocal in his opposition any historian who even remotely argued that there was a
revolution. This hostility was aimed mainly at the left-wing historians
Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. Quite why Lawrence stone provoked Morrill’s
ire is beyond me as Stone was not even remotely interested in Marxism,
However, even Stone’s limited defence of there being an
English revolution bothered Morrill who said “I have no doubt at all that
Lawrence Stone’s Causes of the English Revolution (1972) were the thing people
reacted against, with its rather triumphalism claim that you could now produce
a kind of social determinist view of the long-term causes and origins of the
English Revolution. It was that I think which some people quite independently
reacted against”.
Morrill was not the only historian to attack Marxist
historiography forming a popular front with other revisionist historians. In an
interview for Making History Morrill describes the origins of the “revisionist
Revolt”,
Well, I think the exciting thing about revisionism was how a
whole series of people came to the same conclusions simultaneously without
really knowing one another. I had not met Mark Kishlansky or Conrad Russell or
Kevin Sharpe when we all published our 1976 works which were the original canon
of revisionism, and that is one of the most exciting things. “It is also worth
saying that almost all the revisionists were people who had studied in Oxford
and then been made to leave, for whom jobs could not be found in Oxford. We
reacted to some extent against a previous generation of Oxford-trained
historians like Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper and Hill.”4]
Brian Manning, in the same essay, attempts a definition of
the word “revolution”. The standard definition of revolution “involves the
replacement by force or threat of force of one political or social system by
another”. For Manning, the English
revolution “was a revolution in that it involved a change of the political
system by force and it was not just the substitution of one set of rulers for
another. However, the constitution devised by the Levellers was not implemented
nor was the political revolution followed by a social revolution”.Manning did
not begin writing on the English revolution with a clear-cut class analysis or
even a Marxist one. In his book The English People and the English Revolution
he says “I do not see the ‘middle sort of people’ as a capitalist class, but as
small independent producers, and I do not see the struggle as being between a
declining feudal class and a rising capitalist class, but as a conflict between
the aristocracy or governing elites and small independent producers”.
Like Christopher Hill Manning was attracted to the “history
from below “genre. This coincided with his joining of the International
Socialists forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party(SWP). The SWP was
attractive to Manning as they also supported the history from below genre. The
Communist Party historians Group heavily influenced historians inside the SWP
apart from Norah Carlin. This was not a good influence as Ann Talbot explains
“The Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s History”, which is typified
by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the class character of
former rebels, revolutionaries and famous leaders was obscured by regarding
them all as representatives of a national revolutionary tradition”.
Jim Holstun correctly states for Manning “English workers at
the very centre of the English Revolution as innovative political actors and
theorists in their own right. His approach contrasts strongly with the usual
somnambulist turn to the ruling class initiative and frequently inverts its
causal sequence”.[5]David Underdown was a historian caught between a rock and a
hard place. Neither Marxist or revisionist Underdown steered a middle course
very successfully. According to Mark Kishlansky, Underdown’s work “displayed
two abiding qualities: a mastery of archival sources faithfully reported, and a
compelling prose style that carried both story and argument. He was a craftsman’s
craftsman, a master of sources, of historiography, and of method which had few
equals even among a flashy generation of generalists whose significant theses
dominated discussion but faded over time while his firm conclusions
persevered”.[6]
Underdown was a gifted historian who was able relatively
successfully to navigate the choppy waters of the study of the English
revolution. As he relates in his essay “As always, each historian has his or
her own solution. My own starts from two innocuous premises: first, that the
revolution was not a mere accident (though the fortuitous and unpredictable
certainly played a part in it); secondly, that to understand it we need to look
back once more over the history of the previous century. When we do so we find,
I suggest, a profound division emerging among the English people about the
moral basis of their commonwealth, a division expressed in a cultural conflict
that had both social and regional dimensions. The revolution was an
unsuccessful attempt to resolve the conflict by imposing a particular notion of
moral order, articulated in the culture of the Puritan’ middling sort’, upon
the rest of the kingdom”.
He continues “In any discussion of a political situation as
chaotic as this one, we always need to look at the relative strength of the
countervailing forces of tradition and change”. This is what Underdown has
attempted to do all his life and has been very consistent.From any objective
standpoint Mary Fulbrook’s, the English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt’,
Social History, is one of the most critical essays in the book. Not everyone
was enamoured by her article leading one blogger to write it was “more proof that revisionists and Marxists
will never understand each other because they just do not want to understand
each other”. [7]
Mary Fulbrooks article is probably one of the most
multi-dimensional attacks on the revisionist’s positions. In the opening
paragraph, she explains that “One of the most contentious problems of English
history is the English Revolution, or English Civil War, of the mid-seventeenth
century. Even the very name, the most appropriate characterization of the
phenomenon, is contested. Was it a major historical revolution, requiring
analysis in terms of long-term political, ideological and socio-economic
causes? Or was it rather a mere rebellion, of a familiar and recurrent type,
developing by a series of mistakes and ineptitudes which require short-term
analysis of power struggles, patronage and personalities? In recent years, a
flurry of writings by scholars such as Conrad Russell, Paul Christianson, Kevin
Sharpe and others, have sought to revise what they term the ‘traditional’ approaches
to English seventeenth-century history: the so-called ‘Whig’, ‘Marxist’ and
‘sociological’ approaches which share a grand conception of the revolution and
a grand approach to explanation. These revisionist writings, revolting against
major traditions of interpretation, have been met with a growing wealth of
rebuttals from historians concerned to defend older approaches. It seems that
the battle over the Civil War will continue.’ In the meantime, however, recent
debates have involved issues of more general historiographical
interest”.[8]Fulbrook, while being heavily critical of the revisionist
misrepresentation of Marxist views, had sympathies with the lot of the
revisionists. Sitting on the theoretical fence is a skill both Underdown and
Fulbrook have mastered. The rest of us do not have that luxury.
Conrad Russell,s ‘Why Did Charles I Fight the Civil War?’
History Today, 1984. Is a typical piece of Russell’s work. For Russell there
was no English revolution, no clash of class forces he believes that “Civil
wars are like other quarrels: it takes two to make them. It is, then, something
of a curiosity that we possess no full analysis of why Charles I chose to fight
a Civil War in 1642. Yet the early seventeenth century was in many ways a good
period for the gentry, and a bad period for kings. If we were to search the
period for long-term reasons why the King might have wanted to fight a Civil
War, we would find the task far easier than it has ever been to find long-term
causes why the gentry might have wanted to fight a Civil War[9].t is not for
nothing that Jim Holstun described Russell’s historiography as a ‘manifesto for
historical revisionism’,
Christopher Hill, ‘A Bourgeois Revolution? (1980) is the
most important essay in the book. Hill’s original 1940 essay outlining the
theory of the English bourgeois revolution is what all historians have to
define their work by. Whether they are for or against, they have to deal with
this theory in one way or another.As Ann Talbot correctly states “Hill’s achievements
were twofold. Firstly he identified the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a
revolution, which in the case of Britain overthrew the rule of one class and
brought another to power. Secondly, he recognised that revolutions are made by
the mass of the population and that for a revolution to take place the
consciousness of that mass of people must change, since a few people at the top
do not make revolutions although the character of their leadership is crucial
at certain points. These achievements were considerable at the time and are of
continuing relevance Today when historians increasingly reject any serious
economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work
of a tiny group of conspirators”.
She continues “Hill, of course, was well aware that there
were gentlemen and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the civil war and
small farmers and artisans on the Royalist side. He had read enough Marx and
Lenin to know that one could not expect a chemically pure revolution in which
the members of one social class lined up one side of the barricades and those
of the other on the opposite side. However, he was sensitive enough to his
historical sources to detect the social currents that brought people of diverse
social backgrounds into a struggle against the King and well-grounded enough in
history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic
guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the
Bible and half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to
explain what they were doing”.[10]
Conclusion
It was always going to be a problematic and personal
decision of what historians to leave out.
Articles by Ann Hughes or Kevin Sharpe would have improved
the book. As one reviewer correctly stated, Gaunt has “managed his task with
sensitivity and imagination. Anyone approaching the subject for the first time
could do no better than study this collection of essays.
[1] See Review-More Like Lions Than Men-Sir William Brereton
and the Cheshire Army of Parliament, 1642-46-Andrew Abram -Helion &
Company.
http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2020/03/more-like-lions-than-men-sir-william.html
[2] What was the English-Revolution?John Morrill, Brian
Manning and
David Underdown Originally appeared in History Today 1984
[3] What was the English-Revolution?
[4] Professor John Morrill-Interview Transcript-Selwyn
College, Cambridge, 26 March
2008-https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html
[5] Brian Manning and the dialectics of revolt-Issue:
103-Posted on 29th November
2004-https://isj.org.uk/brian-manning-and-the-dialectics-of-revolt/
[6] Obituary of David Underdown by Mark Kishlansky.
[7]
www.investigations.4-lom.com/2007/10/17/more-civil-war-historiography
[8]
The English Revolution and the revisionist revolt-Social
History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Oct., 1982), pp. 249-264
[9] Why did Charles I fight the Civil War?- Published in
History Today Volume 34 Issue 6 June 1984
[10] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill-www.wsws.org
Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English
Revolution, 1640-1658, David L. Smith Cambridge University Press, 1991, 120pp.,
” Do not trust to the
cheering, for those very persons would shout as much if you and I were going to
be hanged’. Oliver Cromwell.
“I do not know whether you have been alive or dead. I have
not heard you all this time; I have not … Instead of peace and settlement,
instead of mercy and truth being brought together, righteousness and peace are
kissing each other . . . weeds and nettles, briers and thorns, have thriven
under your shadow!”[1]
A good biography of
Oliver Cromwell should be to do what
Thomas Carlyle did and “drag out the Lord Protector from under a
mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion”.David L Smith’s
short and handsomely illustrated book does this to a certain extent. Smith’s
job is not an easy one as over the centuries Cromwell’s reputation has suffered
more than most of calumny and oblivion.It is, therefore, a little surprising in
2002 the Lord Protector was voted 10th Greatest Briton after John Lennon and
Horatio Nelson. His statue still sits outside Parliament. Given Cromwell’s
celebrity status. it is still a little
disconcerting to find that it is possible to go through all phases of the UK
education system and not be taught who Cromwell was.
According to one writer “The National Curriculum at no point
prescribes that Cromwell be studied, and the range of GCSE and A level options
also mean that a positive decision has to be taken to teach on the subject, it
does not happen as a matter of course”.It is to David Smith’s credit that he
has written a book that is aimed at A-Level students. He tackles a subject that
is both complex and “seldom straightforward”.
According to his biography page at Cambridge David L. Smith
is a historian on the Early Modern period of British history. He is
particularly interested in the political, constitutional, legal and religious
history in the Stuart period. He has been an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty
of History at Cambridge since 1995, and he served as Convenor of the Directors
of Studies in History from 2006 to 2010. He also teaches regular weekend,
day-school and summer school courses for Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing
Education.
He is the author or co-author of eight books and the editor
of four others. David L Smith’s book on Oliver Cromwell from the Cambridge
University Press Topics in History provides us with an excellent introduction
to Oliver Cromwell and his place in history. It is not an orthodox biography of
Cromwell but a guide to study. It works both for A-Level students, or degree
level students. The general reader will find the book a good introduction to
both Cromwell and the English revolution.A significant amount of scholarship
published on Cromwell and the English Revolution, in general, have prompted
some university examination boards to reflect this at the Advanced level.It is
hoped that this publication is the start of more less expensive resources being
made available to teachers and students alike. After all, it is cheap to study
the 17th century.
Smith’s book has managed to combine a high academic with a
relatively small price. The book shows significant objectivity towards its
subject. One problem I have with the book is that dismisses both Whig and
Marxist historiography as outdated and no longer fashionable. Smith’s
historiographical preferences are on the conservative side and would not look
out of place with other revisionist historians of his generation.He states
“Over the past 20 years, scholars have placed much greater emphasis on
political and religious culture rather than on high politics. They are also
showing increasing sensitivity to the relationship between ideas and action,
and much more sophistication in the analysis of these themes. Many of the
sources that I use are records of government (e.g. the State Papers Domestic)
and the records of Parliament. I also make extensive use of the letters,
diaries and memoirs left by private individuals, together with a range of other
sources that reveal political or religious attitudes, including literary
sources” [2].
He continues “I came to this period through being taught as
an undergraduate by Professor John Morrill, who later supervised my PhD thesis.
His inspiration and infectious enthusiasm for this period were crucial in
leading me to specialise in it. Another important influence was the late Professor
Sir Geoffrey Elton who also took a very supportive interest in my work. Both
these historians helped me to appreciate not only the importance of this period
but also its complexity, dynamism and colour”.The book neither favours or
criticises Cromwell. Smith does not pad the book out with long-winded
explanations of events or Cromwell’s action. He provides the academic or
general reader with strong notes to carry out further studies. The book
appeared when there were significant re-evaluations of Cromwell and his place
in the English Revolution.
Despite having only a hundred and twenty words to play with
Smith has made excellent use a wide variety of primary sources. Smith’s book is
a useful tool in navigating the choppy water that is the English Revolution.The
book has been well received with Irene Carrier saying “It is a masterly
selection from a bewildering profusion of Cromwellian material. It provides a
cogent overview of staunchly held opinions and interpretations. A hint of a
rather mechanical thesis, antithesis, synthesis approach in the Introduction is
occasionally intrusive. Again, the British dimension merits fuller coverage,
both during the 1640s and the Protectorate. After all, Cromwell was ‘Lord
Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’. Limitations apart, this book is
lively, provocative, and an essential stimulus for Advanced level students”.[3]
[1] The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with
Elucidations by Thomas Carlyle, ed. S. C. Lomas (3 vols., 1904), 11, 407. 409.
[2] ] https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/prospective-undergrads/history-course/profiles-of-lecturers/smith
[3] Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English
Revolution, 16401658, (Cambridge Topics in History series) by David L. Smith
Review by: Irene Carrier Source: Teaching History, No. 67 (April 1992), p. 38
Recollections of Christopher Hill by Chris Thompson
I first became aware of Christopher Hill in the Hilary term
of 1963. Once a week for eight weeks, I and my fellow undergraduates crossed
the snow-covered space between Balliol College’s lodge to its hall to hear
Christopher Hill deliver a series of lectures that later formed part of his
book, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England. Little of their
content remains in my memory although I was struck by his habit of apparently
sniffing every two or three sentences. I found this disconcerting.
I was more impressed by his 1956 work, The Economic Problems
of the Church, which I read whilst preparing an essay on the origins of the
English Civil War for Roger Howell of St John’s College with whom I was
studying the second half of the paper in English History up to 1714. Of the
great figures in the University’s History Faculty – Hugh Trevor-Roper,
J.P.Cooper, and others – Christopher Hill made the least impression on me.
It was a great surprise to me when, on the point of starting
my postgraduate study of the career of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, in the
autumn of 1965, I received a letter from the History Faculty informing me that
Christopher Hill had been appointed my supervisor. I viewed this choice with
considerable trepidation: Christopher Hill was a Marxist, I was not: he was a
specialist in Church history and the literature of the early modern period, I
did not expect to be either the one or the other, at least, not much of one
since my concern in ecclesiastical matters was likely to be more in the realms
of patronage than in those of theology or of Church politics. He, I suspect,
had concerns about me since I had been a pupil of Felix Markham and John
Armstrong at Hertford College.
Our meetings passed amicably enough. He had just been
appointed Master of Balliol which meant he had one hundred and one things to do
apart from seeing me. He did, however, use what I subsequently learnt was an
old Oxford teaching technique, that of remaining completely silent in his chair
in one corner of his office whilst I sat nervously in a chair facing him. This
was intended to encourage me (and other pupils) to fill the silence by talking
more exhaustively about my research and discoveries.
I did find this a draining exercise. My unease over this
procedure remained throughout my time as a postgraduate. He also invited me to
a meeting of his other pupils held, to the best of my recollection, on Monday
evenings in his rooms where a barrel of beer was available to those who came
along with a large number of female undergraduates and postgraduates mainly
from St Hilda’s college invited by his wife, Bridget. These proved to be very
noisy events. Since I knew no one there, I stopped going after two or three
weeks.
I am afraid that both our apprehensions as postgraduate
pupil and supervisor were realised. I was definitely not his kind of historian
nor he mine. In the areas in which I was working, in colonial and political
history, on estate management and county government, he was not equipped to
help me and almost completely unfamiliar with the sources. I gravitated towards
Hugh Trevor-Roper, John Cooper and Valerie Pearl. Gradually, we grew apart as I
became much more critical of his approach to early modern history. The first
pre-monitory tremors of revisionism were already being felt in Oxford and in
the Institute of Historical Research. The intellectual parting of the ways was
inevitable.
After I left Oxford, I only saw him once before 1997. That was
in Malet Street in London in the late-1970s. I did teach a course for the Open
University in the late-1980s which he had had a large hand in designing but it
was hardly recognisable as a reflection of the state of historiography by that
time.
I did, however, meet him and his wife again in January, 1997
when I and he had the privilege of holding Research Fellowships at The
Huntington Library in San Marino, California. Our discussions were much more
relaxed than they had been thirty years before. He still maintained the
position that the English Revolution was a decisive turning point in the
seventeenth century and the essential precondition for the emergence of
capitalism on the world stage. He was just as resourceful as ever in finding
literary evidence and material from the secondary sources to support his
claims.
But he was no less puzzled by the change in intellectual
fashion that had drawn the historical audience he had once hoped to command
away from him since the early-1970s and slightly annoyed by the criticism of
figures like Mark Kishlansky. He was still the old Christopher Hill. His wife,
however, was already concerned about how much his recent work in composing an
introduction to the Calendar of State Papers Venetian had apparently taken out
of him. Sadly, this was the first sign of the serious illness that was to take
his life within a few years. We corresponded for a short while thereafter but,
soon, neither Christopher nor Bridget could sustain such exchanges. She passed
away shortly before he died in February 2003.
I am glad to have known him. He was for a period of twenty
or twenty-five years one of the major figures in the historiography of early
modern England. Now he is to a considerable extent forgotten as John Morrill
has pointed out. Postgraduates do not, by and large, read his works any more
than established historians look to him for positive guidance. That there will
be a revival of interest in him and his output seems highly likely to me.
Perhaps his biographer is already at work. He was, as we all are, a product of
his time. That is of interest in itself. His intellectual influence may have
waned but it will not be forgotten.
The London History Festival – Kensington Central Library 3
November 2009
In 2009 editor of History Today Paul Lay discussed with
historian John Adamson abo Charles I and the origins of the English Civil War.
John Adamson is a fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge
and his book The Noble Revolt has been described as “a work of great style and
imagination as well as scholarship… As with a great 19thcentury novel, the
story and the characters will become your friends for life.”[1]
Early on in his career, Adamson courted controversy,
according to Roger Richardson” In the early 1990s John Adamson found himself at
the centre of a significant historical controversy about his bold
re-interpretation of the English Civil War as the “last baronial revolt”.[2]
Mark Kishlansky of Harvard University led the attack by
accusing Adamson of “slipshod work, misleading handling of the evidence and
weakly supported conclusions. The dispute spilt out from the academic journals
in which it had originated to the newspaper press and many of the big names of
the historical profession at that time – Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone and
Hugh Trevor-Roper among them – weighed in on one side or the other”.
The History Today discussion began with elaboration by
Adamson on why he began his book The Noble Revolt in 1640. From the beginning,
Adamson sought to distance himself from any form of the socio-economic
explanation of the civil war.
He accused some historians of relying too much on large
abstract forces, and the role of the individual had been underestimated. He
said he did not agree with long term views, these got us nowhere, and he
certainly did not agree that there was a bourgeois revolution. He felt that an
“economic determinist” viewpoint did not explain too much.
Adamson echoed the prevailing academic orthodoxy that there
was no bourgeois revolution mainly because he felt there was no rising
bourgeoisie and that people from all social classes can be found on either side
of the struggle.
Adamson concurs with an increasingly large number of
historians who see Cromwell, as a representative of the declining gentry rather
than a rising bourgeoisie. Adamson believes that Cromwell never intended a
revolution. Adamson’s premise that the bourgeoisie was on both sides was of
levelled at Christopher Hill.
In her obituary of Christopher Hill Ann Talbot, states that
“Hill, of course, was well aware that there were gentlemen and landowners on
the Parliamentary side in the Civil war and small farmers and artisans on the
Royalist side. He had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that one could not
expect a chemically real revolution in which the members of one social class
lined up one side of the barricades and those of the other on the opposite
side. However, he was sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the
social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds into a
struggle against the king and well-grounded enough in history to identify new
and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they
appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and
half-understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what
they were doing”.[3]
Adamson explained his reasoning behind his rejection of a
Marxist understanding of history. He believed that socialism had collapsed with
the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He incorrectly stated that no one
had anticipated the fall of the wall and communism, which is not valid. He went
on to say that there has been in the past too much emphasis on social classes
in the civil war, but in reality, the war was much more about personal
allegiances and decisions.
According to Adamson, the war was caused by Charles 1 and
his inexperience and vanity. Adamson during the meeting expressed much sympathy
for Charles 1st. As can be seen from this quote from his book The Noble Revolt
“From the cabin at the stern of the barge, Charles caught a glimpse of the
gilded weather-vanes of Whitehall Palace before the boat turned westwards, past
the Abbey, and under the great east window of St Stephen’s Chapel – the
Commons’ chamber, and the scene of his most recent political debacle. It would
be seven years before Charles saw his palace again”.
The meeting at the London History Festival is crucial in so
much as it gives a glimpse at what a revisionist argument looks like. While
Adamson said a lot of what he was against he said little about what he was for.
[1] (Ed Smith, The Times.Com
[2] Not the main act but a prelude to drama-
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/cn/books/not-the-main-act-but-a-prelude-to-drama/209736.article
[3] “These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of
historian Christopher Hill by Ann Talbot 25 March 2003-www.wsws.org
The Impact of the English Civil Wars (A History Today Book)
[Paperback] J.S. Morrill (Editor) 1991
This collection of
new essays covers a whole range of subjects military, political, social,
religious, cultural and economic that were impacted by the civil war. Primarily
aimed at the student and the general reader the book combines charts, extracts
from original documents and illustrative material drawn largely from
contemporary pamphlets and sources to provide the reader with a basic
understanding of the impact of the civil war.
Like many other aspects of the history of the English Civil
War, its impact on society, politics and the economy has caused serious
disagreements among historians. While a substantial minority (albeit in the
past) have said it is impossible to ignore or deny that the civil war did have
some impact and that changes did occur in the social, economic and political
superstructure, others have played down appreciably the consequences. Some have
even tried to deny that social changes were crucial in determining the outcome
of the war.
Certainly, over the last quarter of a century, it has been
highly fashionable to question the social context of the civil war. In the book,
The Causes of the English Civil War on p117 Ann Hughes says this changing
historical fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of
sources covering early modern social history. In 1965, Lawrence Stone published
Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas Barry Coward
produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The
coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter
work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation at the
beginning of modern England.
The New Social History historiography appeared in the early
1970s. According to some historians, it was perhaps the last major
historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical
phenomenon known as the English Civil War. Before the 1970s, Social History had
mostly been limited to a study of everyday life. During the last thirty-odd
years, the subject has come to prominence because some aspects of it have
become the bête noir of several revisionist historians. The most positive side
of the new history is that it has brought into the public domain the lives of
working people or the poor who had largely been ignored by historians. On the
downside, this new history became divorced from any form of economic or
materialist explanation of the civil war.
This collection of essays comes predominantly from
historians who in one way or another are sceptical regarding the impact of the
war with the sole exception of John Walters. The majority of contributors are
against any form of Marxist historiography.Given John Morrill’s editorial role
in preparing this collection of essays, it is, necessary to understand his take
on these events. He was clearly influenced by the New Social History
historiography in an interview he describes his attitude towards those
historians who were in the forefront of the group “So there came along the new
social history which opened up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one
of the most important things to happen for my period was the work which is most
naturally associated with Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many
years in St Andrews, returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the
Wrightson revolution indeed, in the way in which social history is done, had an
enormous impact on those of us who were more interested in high politics. I
mean traditional politics, constructed high politics. Wrightson’s importance
for my work is again something that people might be a bit surprised to hear
about, but I personally, in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.[1]
In his introduction, John Morrill is correct to point out
while there is general agreement amongst historians of what to call the events
in France around 1789 or 1917 in Russia. However, there is little agreement as
to what to call the revolutionary events in 1640s England.A reader coming to
these events for the first time will find out that this problem is down to many
factors. A major one being the political
bias of the historian. Another is the
sheer complexity of the historical crisis that gripped the English state. The
book is recommended in the sense that it does give the reader a broad range of
differing views, albeit absent is a Marxist explanation. The book is simple in
design but has a generous supply of fantastic illustrations which in themselves
are worth further exploration.
Chapter one is Charles Charlton’s Impact of the fighting.
Charlton begins by assessing the number of dead and wounded during the
conflict. Another ground for disagreement.
Charlton does highlight one of the biggest problems is that when dealing
with primary sources regarding causalities, they are open to bias depending on
which side they came .In a striking passage in his memoirs, Richard Baxter
“said he watched the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the
parliament. Baxter witnessed fierce
fighting. Facing defeat, the Royalists panicked. Standing next to Baxter was
Major Thomas Harrison. As the Parliamentary army charged the Royalists fled,
Baxter heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with
fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture.’[2]
According to D H Pennington, “it was the bloodiest conflict
in relative terms in English history” crops and land were seized; cattle and
horses were taken. Pennington makes the point that the Royalists were often
more brutal than the Parliamentarians.Another useful source on the impact of
the civil war is the work of Steven Porter. While careful not to exaggerate the
destruction, he has some relevant statistical data on the scale of the impact
of the civil war. 150 towns and 50 villages suffered the destruction of
property. According to the House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers,23 Sept.
1648 “…miserable it is to see the multitudes of inhabitants and their children
flocking in the streets of the bordering towns and villages and have not a
house to putt their heads therein, whereby to exercise their calling.”
Taunton according to the Earl of Clarendon heavily destroyed
by fire, but according to Sprigge a flourishing city was all but destroyed. A
number of books have come out recently which contain important sources of
eyewitness accounts of the civil war. Jogh adair’s book contains important eye
witness accounts. Adair highlighted one particular aspect “which was the
development of social advancement inside the army and service in the armies of
parliament certainly provided opportunities for social advancement. At first,
the rival armies were officered by men of much the same social status, but
gradually new people from the middle, lower middle and artisan classed moved
into positions of responsibility, both on committees that ran the war and in
the wider army. John Hampden’s Shepherd, Thomas Shelbourne, rose to be colonel
of Cromwell regiment of Ironsides and there were similar stories. The more
conservative Puritan gentry objected to their newcomers as much as on social
grounds as on account of their often unorthodox or radical religious views”.[3]
Forced requisitioning took place but a lot of goods were
paid for at market prices. Adair says while there was “decay of life” there was
also opposition to this massive growth of profits for many people. Also, things
such as the legal system remained relatively healthy and survived unscathed. In
London, the impact of the civil war is hard to assess in many respects everyday
life carried on as normal. London also avoided sack or siege, however,
emergency wartime powers were resented by large sections of the population. Its
economy was vital for the New Model Army and this state of affairs led one
Royalist to lament “if posterity shall ask who pulled the crown from the king’s
head said it was proud unthankful schismatically, rebellious, blood City of
London”.Charlton who came from a military background is particularly keen on
military matters, but when it comes to a more in-depth understanding of why
people fought and how the war came about, the chapter is very light. People on
both sides of the war “chose deliberately which side they fought on”.
Chapter Two the Impact on Government by David L Smith. Smith seems to argue that the civil war was
largely a defensive manoeuvre by parliament against a corrupt and inept
monarchy. Smith believes that no appreciable changes occurred during the civil
war and protectorate, and we quickly move onto a united monarchy after
Cromwell’s death.
Chapter 3 The Impact of Puritanism is by John Morrill is
well written, and Morrill argues his point well but a lot more could have been
said on this subject. The Puritan religion did have a material basis. For the
understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the study of
religion is a necessity. Cliff slaughter posed this question “What are the
relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs about the
nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of acceptance
of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the ‘Utopians’ wrong in thinking
that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of social
relations in order to proceed to its construction? It was out of the
examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of
religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of
society. ‘The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.’ [4]
Suffice to say this is not Morrill’s position. Therefore, I
find his analysis on Puritanism a little one-sided.
Also, there appears to be an absence of struggle in
Morrill’s chapter. Morrill writes nothing about the differing radical Puritan
groups that were outside mainstream Puritan politics.This is the history of the
victors as Christopher Hill would have said. Little is mentioned of radical
sects such as the Ranters, who flourished in England at the time of the Puritan
Revolution. While it is generally accepted that there was not a massive amount
of unrest and protest during the civil war, there was riots and unrest. John
Morrill has made the point that changes in social and economic policy were
mostly controlled by the middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented
by this class.
However, there was a tangible fear amongst sections of the
middle class who feared the little people As Lucy Hutchinson writes with disdain, “almost all the
Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little
people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their
command, some oppressed by a particular sort of individuals in the House whom,
to distinguish from the most honorable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking
men”.[5]Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were increasingly
being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness especially among
the lower sections of society that in order to have a say in these changes they
must organise through some kind of political organisation.
The ideas of this group came from the lower strata of
society. Their ideas of wider democracy and equality were an anathema to the
victorious upper-middle classes. It was as necessary for Cromwell to crush the
Ranters as to liquidate Lilburne’s Levellers and Winstanley’s Diggers.Chapter
IV The Impact on Political Thought by Glen Burgess. For a substantial part of
the 20th-century, civil war historiography was dominated by Marxist historians
who were clear that social and economic changes did bring about changes in
people’s thinking.Burgess in this chapter does not agree that there is a
connection between economics and politics which Marxists have commonly
described as the relationship between base and superstructure.
As Karl Marx explained in his Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy (1859) “In the social production of their existence, men
inevitably enter into definite relations, who are independent of their will,
namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which
correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material
life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual
life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but
their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage
of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict
with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same
thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of
which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive
forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social
revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to
the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such
transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material
transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be
determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political,
religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge
an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a
period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this
consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from
the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations
of production”.
Burgess goes on to explain that previous approaches to
ideological struggles in the revolution were expressed through an examination
of pamphlets of the 1640s. While recognising that the literature was partisan,
they were taken “at face value, as part of a philosophical debate.” This
approach, says Burgess, maybe “inherently distorting.”
Burgess believes that politics were fluid and that no one
stuck to their principles but ideas were mere “rhetoric.” His examination of
the different groups, including radical groups guides his approach. He believes
that the various political groups were mostly acting empirically. Taking
advantage of changes in the political situation with some rhetorical
statements.
This, in my opinion, does not explain the complex
philosophical problems that were being tackled by people like Thomas Hobbes and
James Harrington, to name just two. In
Anti Duhring Engels said if “Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the
compliment they paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less
undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant
school of French materialists which made the eighteenth century in spite of all
battles of land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a
primarily French Century, even before that crowning French revolution, the
results of which we outsiders, in England as well as in Germany are still
trying to acclimatise”.[6]
Chapter V the Impact of the New Model Army. Ian Gentles does
an excellent introduction to the New Model Army. John Walters chapter is a bit
of a strange choice in this selection essays in so much as you would not
classify him as a revisionist historian. He would be much closer to Marxist
historians. His work is always impressive, and this essay carries on in the
same vein. Walters actually believes that the world was turned upside down.
Walters examines large swathes of primary sources, but like
a good historian does not take them at face value. He recognises that these are
not impartial documents but were weapons of war. Significantly it is in this chapter that we
get a real feel of the social turmoil that existed during the civil war.
Walter’s believes that large segments of the population were becoming
radicalised and became involved in all number of political and military
activity. Riots broke out all over the place and many of these reflected the
level of poverty that existed. Walters believes that these disorders threatened
the social order. Walters is the only chapter that women get a look in. while
not examined in any depth Walters recognises that large sections of the female
population were being radicalised alongside their menfolk.
[1] Professor John Morrill Interview Transcript This interview
took place at Selwyn College, Cambridge, 26 March 2008
[2] Quoted in -Going to the Wars: The Experience of the
British Civil Wars 1638-1651 by Charles Carlton Routledge, 428 pp, £25.00,
October 1992, ISBN 0 415 03282 2
[3] By the Sword Divided: Eyewitness Accounts of the English
Civil War (Sutton Illustrated History Paperbacks) Paperback – 22 April 1998
by John Adair
[4] Cliff Slaughter Religion and Social Revolt From Labour
Review, Vol.3 No.3, May-June 1958,
[5] ] Memoirs of the life of Colonel Hutchinson, publ. by J.
Hutchinson. To which is prefixed The life of Mrs. Hutchinson, written by
herself (Google eBook)
[6] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific-By Friedrich Engels
“These the times … this the man”: an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill
By Ann Talbot
Christopher Hill, the renowned expert on seventeenth-century
English history, who died on February 24 at the age of 91, lived through the
great upheavals of the twentieth century. Its wars and revolutions moulded the
mind of a historian who looked back from one revolutionary century to another,
giving him a unique insight into his subject and his books a lasting value that
few historians can claim.
Hill influenced the way in which an entire generation of
students and general readers saw the English Civil War, and even when in more
recent years with the fall of the Soviet Union his view that the events of the
1640s constituted a revolution has been widely rejected, academics still define
their position on the period in opposition to his analysis. Within a week of
his death, however, it was not just the value of his academic work that was
being discussed in the press but his own political activity as a member of the
Communist Party, when it was alleged that Hill had been a Soviet agent.
Hill seems to be a mass of contradictions. There is Hill the
Master of Balliol College, Oxford and prestigious academic; Hill the popular
historian who would give lectures at the Socialist Workers Party summer schools
where masses of young people would crowd in to hear him speak about the
seventeenth century revolution—and now we are told there is Hill the Soviet
mole. If we are to draw a coherent picture out of all this, we have to see Hill
in the context of his time. As his fellow Yorkshireman Andrew Marvell said of Oliver
Cromwell, “If these the times, then this must be the man.”
Hill was himself part of a historical phenomenon. Born in
1912 the son of a well-to-do solicitor, he was educated at St. Peter’s School
York. It was a privileged existence, but its apparent security was overshadowed
by the great political and economic turmoil of the period. A child of five when
the Russian Revolution broke out, Hill grew to maturity at the time of the
abortive revolution in China, of the British General Strike of 1926 and the
Great Crash of 1929. The 1920s saw mass unemployment and hunger marches. By the
time Hill went up to Oxford in 1931, unemployment had risen to nearly 3
million. As one historian has said of the 1926 General Strike, “The class
divisions of the country were starkly revealed, even if they did not spill over
into violence.”
He was already expressing left-wing views as a schoolboy,
although it has never been clear when precisely he joined the Communist Party.
This was one of the areas of his life about which Hill was always reticent. At
Oxford, he came under the influence of Humphrey Sumner, an expert on Russian
history who arranged for him to go to Russia for an extended stay in 1935. He
came back fluent in Russian but never spoke about what he had done while he was
there, pleading that he had been ill most of the time. In 1936, he became a
lecturer at University College Cardiff, but in 1938 returned to Balliol where
he remained until he retired as master of the college in 1978. His 40 years at
Balliol were only briefly interrupted by his wartime service, during which he
was seconded as an intelligence officer to the Foreign Office.
His period at the Foreign Office was another aspect of his
life that he was reluctant to discuss. The historian Dr Anthony Glees, a
specialist in modern German history at Brunel University, now claims that he
has discovered documents which show that Hill kept his membership of the
Communist Party secret while he was working at the Foreign Office. Dr Glees,
who has not published the evidence to back up his allegations, claims that Hill
acted as an agent of influence on behalf of the Soviet Union while he worked
first as a liaison officer for military intelligence and then as head of the
Russian desk at the Foreign Office. Glees considers it inconceivable that the
Foreign Office would have employed Hill if the security services had known
about his party membership. He told the London Times, “His failure to own up to
his party membership was outrageous, sinister and highly suspicious.”
There is something more than a little artificial about this
indignation. It would have been rather more surprising to find that Hill was
not a member of the Communist Party by 1940 since so many young intellectuals
of his generation were either members or sympathisers. Nor can it be assumed
that such an orientation inevitably implied support for revolution. It was
entirely possible in this period to be both a patriotic subject of his
Britannic Majesty and a “friend” of the Soviet Union, as for example the Fabians
Sidney and Beatrice Webb were. As Trotsky pointed out in his Revolution
Betrayed, in the case of people like the Webbs, “Friendship for the Soviet
bureaucracy is not friendship for proletarian revolution but on the contrary
insurance against it” ( The Revolution Betrayed, Labor Publications, Detroit,
1991, p. 258).
There was a significant section of the British ruling class
who saw in the Soviet Union their best hope of preserving Britain’s position in
the world and preventing revolution at home. Hill’s selection for an extended
stay in the Soviet Union and his secondment to the Foreign Office suggests that
at an early stage in his career he was being groomed by a section of the ruling
class who looked on the Soviet Union under bureaucratic control as just such an
insurance against revolution.
Ever since the end of World War I, Britain had faced a
thoroughgoing political, social, economic and intellectual crisis as the
position it had held since the mid-eighteenth century as the leading world
power was eclipsed by the rise of the United States. For a time, it even seemed
possible that the next major world conflict would be between Britain and the
US, until the older power learned to accept its newly subordinate position. At
the same time class relations that had been based on Britain’s position of
world dominance, which had allowed the creation of a large labour aristocracy
and trade union bureaucracy who worked with the Liberals to maintain social
peace, were seriously destabilised by Britain’s relative decline.
With its rapid industrialisation, the Soviet Union seemed to
offer a model of how Britain’s declining industries might be revived and its
increasing weight internationally offered a potential counterbalance to the
growing power of the US in world affairs. But most of all the example of the
Stalinist bureaucracy impressed reformists like the Webbs as the means by which
the working class could be brought under control.If Hill had remained a civil
servant or died in the war before he wrote his books, it is doubtful whether
anyone would have been very interested in his political activities. He would
have been one among many and would certainly not have rated any media interest.
Guy Fawkes would still be the most famous old boy of St. Peter’s school. What
makes his wartime political activities significant is the question of how it
affects his reputation as a historian of seventeenth-century England and that
question was there to be asked long before the recent revelations.
What any serious reader interested in history or politics
wants to know is, when we read Hill’s books are we reading the work of an
apologist for the Stalinist bureaucracy or of someone who was genuinely
struggling to make a Marxist analysis of an aspect of English history? It has to
be said that this is a complex question. Not everyone who was attracted to the
bureaucratically degenerated Communist Party could be classified with the
Webbs. The most gifted and outstanding representatives of the British
intellectual elite, whether poets, novelists, scientists, musicians or
historians, associated themselves with the Communist Party because the old
institutions of church and state had lost their hold over the imaginations of
the young while the Soviet Union seemed to embody all that was new, modern and
progressive.
The Communist Party attracted minds of the very highest
intellectual calibre, as can be seen from the fact that many of the
developments that were made in biochemistry during the post-war period were
prepared by the group around J.D. Bernal, J.B.S. Haldane and other biologists
who were prominent supporters of the Communist Party at Cambridge. For minds of
this order of brilliance, the Communist Party became a pole of attraction since
despite its degeneration under Stalin it still retained vestiges of the
immensely powerful intellectual heritage of Marx and Engels.
They could not pursue their intellectual work in isolation
from the influence of the Stalinist bureaucracy, however. Despite the fact that
the Cambridge biologists were all leading geneticists they accepted the
fraudulent work of Lysenko because Lysenko had Stalin’s support. The influence
of Stalinism on the historians was if anything even greater. The Cambridge
biologists never adopted Lysenko’s theories in their own work, but historians
associated with the Communist Party developed an approach to history that was
directly influenced by the politics of the bureaucracy.
The Communist Party sponsored a form of “People’s History”,
which is typified by A.L. Morton’s People’s History of England in which the
class character of earlier rebels, revolutionaries and popular leaders was
obscured by regarding them all as representatives of a national revolutionary
tradition. This historical approach reflected the nationalism of the
bureaucracy, their hostility to internationalism and their attempts to form an
unprincipled alliance with the supposedly democratic capitalists against the
fascist Axis countries. People’s history was an attempt to give some historical
foundation to the policies of Popular Front—the subordination of the working
class to supposedly progressive sections of the bourgeoisie and the limiting of
political action to the defence of bourgeois democracy—which provided a
democratic facade to the systematic murder of thousands of genuine
revolutionaries, including Trotsky. It was the approach that Christopher Hill
was trained in, along with E.P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, who
were part of the Marxist Historians Group and came under the influence of Maurice
Dobb and Dona Torr.
There is something Jesuitical about the relationship of
these historians to Marxism. They seem to have been capable of partitioning
their minds and pursuing a scientific Marxist approach to history up to the
point where the Stalinist bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists
who would pursue their investigations as far as the Church authorities
permitted, but no further. It was an approach that was further encouraged by
the extreme specialisation of academic life that enabled them to concentrate on
very narrow areas of history that never brought them into direct collision with
the bureaucracy on political questions.
It is notable that of the Marxist Historians Group Hill
wrote on the seventeenth century, Thompson on the eighteenth century, Hobsbawm
mostly on the nineteenth century and Hilton on the Middle Ages. But none of
them specialised in the twentieth century. In more recent areas of history, as
in politics, the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy was too great to allow
the free development of Marxist thought and whether deliberately or not they
all avoided venturing into the modern arena. It is notable that E.H. Carr, who
was never a member of the Communist Party but wrote on the history of the
Russian Revolution and expressed a high regard for Trotsky, was for long
periods unemployed and unemployable because his views clashed with those on
both the left and right of British academic life.
Hill’s sole attempt at modern history, his study of Lenin,
is undoubtedly his weakest book. It is marred by repeated attacks on Trotsky,
who is dismissed as one of the “Westernising theoreticians” of the
revolutionary movement. Discussing whether Trotsky could ever have become the
leader of the Bolshevik Party after Lenin’s death, Hill concludes, “Such a view
exaggerates, I think, the importance of Trotsky in the party.”
As Hill should have known, the British government were well
aware of Trotsky’s importance since they would not allow him into the country
when he requested asylum. But still Hill’s historical faculties would not let
him deny that Trotsky was a great orator, that he organised the insurrection
which brought the Bolsheviks to power, and nor does he avoid giving Trotsky
more references in the index than Stalin. At no point does Hill repeat the
false charges that the Stalinists made against Trotsky and his followers at the
Moscow trials. Even in this book, which is certainly hack work, Hill did not
make himself fully a Stalinist hack. His criticisms of Trotsky are ill-judged
and betray an ignorance of his subject, rather than being malicious and
dishonest. He retained a core of intellectual honesty in a work that was
written in 1947 as the lines were being drawn for the Cold War, which was
designed to defend the Russian Revolution and not to win him friends in high
places at home or in the Kremlin.
If his book on Lenin represented the low point of Hill’s
work, the best was yet to come as he began to publish his remarkable series of
books on the English revolution that were to change the way in which the period
was understood. His years of greatest productivity came after 1957 when he left
the Communist Party following the Soviet invasion of Hungary that suppressed a
workers’ uprising. The fact that Hill was not among the most politically
advanced elements of the party—those who then joined the Fourth
International—is perhaps a greater tribute to them than it is a criticism of
him. His subsequent work showed him to be a better historian than he was a
political thinker.
Hill’s great achievement as a historian was to challenge the
accepted consensus of Whig history—that Britain had been peculiarly blessed
with a tranquil history based on gradual change and had achieved peaceful
progress through class compromise without the excesses of revolution. The most
outstanding representative of the Whig tradition is Macaulay and it was
continued in the twentieth century by his nephew Trevelyan. It had the
advantage that it was at once suited to Liberalism and Labourism. It was a
tradition that was physically embodied in the Trevelyan’s country house at
Wallington, Northumberland, where Macaulay’s desk is preserved and which was
the scene of annual Labour picnics. The roofed central court of this house is
decorated with historical scenes and not a revolution among them—as the
national epic unfolds from prehistoric times to the triumph of industry and
empire in Victorian Britain. They were images that adorned children’s history
books well into the twentieth century and underlay much of the popular
consciousness of British history.
The term the “Whig interpretation of history” dates back to
Sir Herbert Butterfield’s slim volume of that name. As a polemic, it was not
particularly well aimed and has often since been directed at economic
determinism rather than the Victorian view of British history that was its
target. But the name has stuck. The Whiggish view of history gained ground as
Britain achieved a degree of social stability as its economic supremacy emerged
that must have been surprising to many contemporaries given its turbulent past
history. Writing in the midst of the 1848 revolutions and as the Chartists
marched in London, the historian J.M. Kemble expressed the sense of Britain’s
special destiny:
“On every side of us thrones totter and the deep foundations
of society are convulsed. Shot and shell sweep the streets of capitals which
have long been pointed out as the chosen abodes of order: cavalry and bayonets
cannot control populations whose loyalty has become a proverb here, whose peace
has been made a reproach to our own miscalled disquiet. Yet the exalted Lady
who wields the sceptre of these realms sits safe upon her throne and fearless
in the holy circle of her domestic happiness, secure in the affections of
people whose institutions have given to them all the blessings of an equal
law.”
The sense that in Britain things were done differently and
without continental excess was not entirely new. Burke had expressed it in his
Reflections on the French Revolution, but there were plenty of voices to
gainsay him and the social disturbances in the years of economic upheaval that
followed the Napoleonic wars were a testimony to the contrary. Luddism,
anti-corn law agitation, the anti-poor law movement, strikes and most of all
Chartism demonstrated that Britain was not an island of social peace.
Nonetheless, the Whig interpretation of history had deep
roots in the consciousness of the British political class. The visitor to
Chatsworth House in Derbyshire can still see in the great entrance hall a
fireplace inscribed with the legend “1688 The year of our liberty.” It refers
to the “Glorious Revolution” when James II quit his throne and his kingdom
overnight and William of Orange was installed as king. This was the kind of
palace revolution that the British ruling class increasingly preferred to look
back on rather than the revolution in the 1640s when they had executed the
king, conveniently overlooking the fact that James would not have run if he had
not remembered the fate of his father—Charles I.
The myth of the “Glorious Revolution” was the target of
Hill’s first published article, which appeared in the Communist International
under the pseudonym E.C. Gore in 1937. It was followed in 1940 by a short
essay, The English Revolution 1640, which contained a concise statement of the
arguments that Hill was to spend the rest of his life elucidating.
Hill never acknowledged having read Trotsky, but there are
distinct parallels between his attacks on the Whig interpretation of history
and Trotsky’s brief but trenchant analysis in Where is Britain Going? in which
he identified two revolutionary traditions in British history—that of the
Cromwell in the seventeenth century and later of Chartism—both of which were
denied by the prevailing conception of gradualism that characterised the Whig view
of history. “The ‘great’ national historian Macaulay,” Trotsky wrote,
“vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner
struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always
superficial.”
Trotsky recognised Cromwell as a revolutionary leader of the
bourgeoisie, whose New Model Army was not merely an army but a party with which
he repeatedly purged Parliament until it reflected the needs of his class and
suppressed the Levellers who represented the plebeian elements who wanted to
take the revolution further than was necessary for capitalist society to
thrive. Whether he got it from Trotsky, or arrived at his assessment of
Cromwell independently by reading Marx and Engels, Hill reflected this analysis
of Cromwell in God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution
(1970) in which he explored Cromwell’s revolutionary role. It was a measured
portrait of the man that recognised his ruthless pursuit of the interests of
the class he represented—as when he had the leaders of the Levellers executed
and in Ireland where he sacked the towns of Drogheda and Wexford, executing the
captured garrison and civilian population. If in concluding that Cromwell’s
historical importance could be compared to that of Stalin as much as Lenin,
Hill revealed that his affiliations still lay with the party he had left in
1957, he perhaps also revealed something of his own inner feelings when he said
of the English revolution, “The dreams of a Milton, a Winstanley, a George Fox,
a Bunyan, were not realised; nor indeed were those of Oliver himself: ‘would
that we were all saints’.”
Employing the Old Testament phraseology of the seventeenth
century he concluded, “The sons of Zeruiah proved too strong for the ideals
which had animated the New Model Army.” For the seventeenth century
revolutionaries the Sons of Zeruiah represented the forces of reaction that had
prevented them achieving their vision of utopia. Perhaps Hill also thought of
the Soviet Union as a country in which the Sons of Zeruiah had proved too
strong.
Hill’s achievements were twofold. Firstly he identified the
mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution, which in the case of Britain
overthrew the rule of one class and brought another to power. Secondly he recognised
that revolutions are made by the mass of the population and that for a
revolution to take place the consciousness of that mass of people must change,
since revolutions are not made by a few people at the top although the
character of their leadership is crucial at certain points.
These achievements were considerable at the time and are of
continuing relevance today, when historians increasingly reject any serious
economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work
of a tiny group of conspirators. Hill conveys a sense of the organic character
of revolution and views the many ordinary people who made the seventeenth
century revolution with admirable humanity.
He has been criticised by later historians for only using
the published sources and not making any use of the manuscript material that is
available. Hill had some excuse for doing so, however, in that the amount of
published material from this period when censorship collapsed is so enormous.
In the 1640s everyone had something to say about the way the world was going
and everyone who was literate wanted to get into print. It is a dramatic
contrast with the preceding centuries, when only a small elite with government
approval found their way into print. If later historians have made far greater
use of unpublished manuscript sources, this to some degree reflects the extent
to which Hill made the published sources his own so that they have had to look
for new material.
What fundamentally separates Hill from his detractors is not
that they have turned to new sources, but that they have rejected his
conclusion that a bourgeois revolution took place in the mid-seventeenth
century. The prevailing academic orthodoxy is that there was no bourgeois
revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie and that people from all
social classes can be found on either side of the struggle. Even Cromwell, it
is argued, can better be understood as a representative of the declining gentry
rather than the rising bourgeois. He and those around him aimed not at
revolution, but wished merely to restore what they believed to be the ancient
constitution of the kingdom. The whole unpleasant episode could have been
avoided if only Charles II had been a little wiser.
Hill, of course, was well aware that there were gentlemen
and landowners on the Parliamentary side in the civil war and small farmers and
artisans on the Royalist side. He had read enough Marx and Lenin to know that
one could not expect a chemically pure revolution in which the members of one
social class lined up one side of the barricades and those of the other on the
opposite side. However, he was sensitive enough to his historical sources to
detect the social currents that brought people of diverse social backgrounds
into struggle against the king and well grounded enough in history to identify
new and revolutionary ideas in the curious and archaic guise in which they
appeared—as the ideologists of the revolution ransacked the Bible and half
understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they
were doing.
Most of all he was sufficiently astute to realise that when
the people execute their king after a solemn trial and much deliberation, it is
not the result of a misunderstanding but has a profound revolutionary significance
entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the monarchy was
later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie were soon eager to pretend that
the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no monarch sat easily on the throne
after that event until quite late in Victoria’s reign.
More serious Marxist criticisms of Hill are that he always
maintains an essentially national approach to the English revolution, which he
does not place in an international context, and that he has a tendency to romanticise
the religious movements of the period and to be too dismissive of their
rational intellectual descendants such as Newton and Locke. In part these
characteristics arise from the national orientation of his social class and
reflect even in Hill vestiges of the Whig outlook that imagined a peculiarly
English political tradition rooted in millennial seventeenth century
visionaries like Bunyan that was entirely separate from Enlightenment thought.
More significantly it reflects the influence of the popular
front politics and national outlook of Stalinism. With Hill this is evident
more in what he does not write than in what he does write.
Within the strict confines of the few decades that comprise
the Civil War and Commonwealth period, Hill had some reason to concentrate on
the many religious sects which to modern eyes are so strange that their
connection with revolution is by no means obvious. In The Intellectual Origins
of the English Revolution (1965), Hill performs a useful task in showing that
although there was no Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Karl Marx in the English
revolution the revolutionaries of the period were moved by definite social,
political and economic ideas—albeit expressed in a religious form.
In the period after 1660, all these groups lose their
revolutionary impetus, but Hill persists in pursuing them as though they
retained their political significance. Like E.P. Thompson he was concerned to
demonstrate that there was a distinctive English revolutionary tradition than
ran intact from the Civil War to modern times. He had therefore no interest in
showing the continental origins of many of the ideas that inspired the English
revolution, such as natural rights theory that was to play such a significant
role in the development of Enlightenment thought and the political ideas of
subsequent centuries. Nor was he interested in examining how the English
philosopher, John Locke, or the political theorist, Algernon Sidney, took up
the ideas that had been expressed in the course of the English revolution and
distilled them into a more precise programmatic form that could be developed in
turn by American and French revolutionaries.
The science of the period that did so much to inspire a
rational approach to politics and society was only of interest to him insofar
as he could connect the scientists directly to the revolutionary movement. He
never explored the complex relationship between the impetus to social
revolution and the scientific revolution, because the increasingly rational and
materialistic conclusions of science were uncongenial to him. The materialism
of Hobbes and Spinoza was outside his orbit and even Newton, for all his
mysticism and millennial visions, left Hill cold.
Yet within the 20-year period from 1640 to 1660, Hill’s
historical achievements were significant in his own lifetime and are likely to
prove more so in the future because current academic history is hardly less
complacent than the Whig interpretation of history was in Hill’s day. Simon
Schama, who recently presented A History of Britain for the BBC, declares
himself to be “a born-again Whig”. His account of the Civil War in volume two
of the books that accompany the series is full of colourful incident and
fascinating detail, but there is no analysis of the contending class forces
involved and the clash of interests that led to the bloody suppression of the
Levellers, or to Cromwell’s repeated purges of Parliament and his personal
dictatorship.
The actions with which Cromwell ensured the success of the
revolution are, for Schama, excesses or deviations which violated “precisely
the parliamentary independence that the war had been fought to preserve.” This
is Whig history indeed, although to be fair to Macaulay it is a neutered
variety of the genre.
Set against this background Hill’s analysis of the Civil War
takes on a very contemporary significance. As an historian he stands head and
shoulders above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and
if with a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his
limitations and faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations
are the product of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only
bettered by those who have studied him.
Charles I’s Executioners -Civil War, Regicide and the
Republic By James Hobson- Pen & Sword History-Published: 4th November 2020.
January 1649, a unique event in English history. For the
first time, a king was killed by his people after a bloody revolution. As one
reviewer of the book puts it, “a once-unfathomable act” was taken.
Hobson’s book is an excellent and well put together account
of this bloody deed. The book contains new research. While aimed at the
educated general reader, it retains a good academic standard.
James Hobson’s new book is an important addition to our
understanding of the motives and political positions that led to Charles Ist’s
regicide. The book is extremely well researched, and it is clear that Hobson
has deep mined a few archives. He has brought to the wider public several
English revolutionaries that historians have long forgotten. As Hobson states
when he “pitched the book to his publishers, he stated that no one had produced
a 59 person history of the regicides”. So in that sense, it is groundbreaking
work.
Another first was a historian who explained how he wrote the
book and the pratfalls he encountered, which Hobson did in a blog post.
Explaining that Chapter 1 “The plan was to get those who died early out of the
way. But this was also an introduction, and it soon became obvious that each of
these men represented a different ‘aspect’ of the regicide. Alured was the
three-generation puritan, and I put him first because he also had most of the
other qualities of the regicides. Moore as the Northern hater of Catholics;
Blakiston as the anti-Bishop figure; Temple as the early military fighter for
Protestantism and Pelham as the local military commander and run-of-the-mill
MP. Temple was my first compromise; he did not die early but seemed to do
nothing after 1650. Another early death was John Venn, a famous iconoclast in
an age that was already infamous for such behaviour. However, when I researched
him, he struck me far too important to go in this chapter. I debated which I
wanted more; a 100% all-around watertight introduction OR Venn in the correct
place”.
Probably the most important regicide after Oliver Cromwell
was Henry Ireton. Hobson does him justice. Hobson correctly states that Ireton
was the motor force behind the regicide. Also, the restoration of Thomas Pride
to his rightful place in history was long overdue. Hobson rescues a large
number of regicides from the condescension of history. The book shows the
varied political, economical and social makeup of the regicides. Some were
lawyers, soldiers, puritans and republicans. All came from lower-middle-class
or gentry backgrounds.
As Hobson shows in the book, revolution does strange things
to men. Firstly it was an enormously brave thing to do, and many of the
regicides would have known that if the revolution failed, it would mean their
lives would have ended. Hobson recounts that even leading members of the
revolution, from Thomas Fairfax to Leveller leader John Lilburne did not sign
the death warrant.
None of the regicides would have believed that at the start
of their revolution that at its end, they would kill a king after a long and
bloody revolution. To their credit, many, even after the demise of the
revolution, still held that their actions were right and did not retract their
beliefs despite Charles II bloody reprisals. Nine regicides were subject to
treason’s full penalties, being hung, drawn and quartered., two died in custody
before being executed. Despite knowing that the killing of a king would have a
serious impact on their lives, they held onto their belief in the revolution’s
correctness.
The book has a couple of major weaknesses. The first being
Hobson’s failure to examine recent historiography on the regicide. Nothing is
made of the recent historian’s debate. Hobson says nothing of the debate
between Sean Kelsey and Clive Holmes[1]. Hobson also could have commented on
several recent books examining the regicide and the fate of its
participants[2].
The second is a bit more serious. To Hobson’s credit, he rejects
current revisionist historiography and believes that a revolution took place.
Despite a cursory look at many of the regicides’ economic background, most came
from the gentry, with some being merchants engaged in transatlantic trade.
Hobson fails to put the regicides in a more objective context. This is a major
flaw in the book after all, as Karl Marx so brilliantly said, “Hegel remarks
somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to
speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as
farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of
1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle.
And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of
the Eighteenth Brumaire. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as
they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under
circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The
tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves
and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such
epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the
past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes
in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise
and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the
Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman
Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better
to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In
like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it
back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language
and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling
the old and when he forgets his native tongue”.
To conclude, I would recommend this book. It deserves to be
on every reading list at major universities and deserves a wide read. Hobson is
to be congratulated for the work he has done on these important
revolutionaries. His book will be a basic textbook to aid future study.
About the Author
Author James Hobson has written such works as ”Dark Days of
Georgian Britain’, ‘Following in the Footsteps of Oliver Cromwell’. and ‘The
English Civil War Fact and Fiction’. Hobson has a website @ https://about1816.wordpress.com/
________________________________________
[1] See Andrew Hopper’s excellent summation-
https://media.nationalarchives.gov.uk/index.php/reluctant-regicides/
[2] Charles I’s Killers in America: The Lives and Afterlives
of Edward Whalley and William Goffe 13 Jun. 2019- Matthew Jenkinson.
Review: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John
Milton-Nicholas McDowell-Princeton University Press October 27 2020- 494 pages
“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
O raise us up, return to us again,
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.”
William Wordsworth-London, 1802[1]
Let us never forget Milton, the first defender of
regicide.[2]
-Frederick Engels, The Northern Star December 18, 1847.
“Innocence, Once Lost, Can Never Be Regained. Darkness, Once
Gazed Upon, Can Never Be Lost.”
John Milton
“We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s
own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are
foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world
what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to
acquire, even if it does not want to”.
Karl Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher
to Ruge (1843)
It would be perhaps an understatement to say that the poet
John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique position in England’s literary and
intellectual history. It could also be argued that Paradise Lost and other
great works could place Milton in the realm of one of the world’s greatest
narrative poets.
Nicholas McDowell’s new book provides the reader with a
competent introduction to the life of John Milton. While I do not normally pay
too much attention to the title of a book, it is worth mentioning on this
occasion. While Mcdowell concedes that Milton was a “poet of Revolution”, he
does not say that Milton was the poet of the English bourgeois revolution.
McDowell deliberately downplays Milton’s radicalism and his theoretical
connection to groups like the Levellers, Diggers and other radical groups that
appeared during the English bourgeois revolution.
A second significant omission from Mcdowell’s book is his
failure to show Milton’s significant contemporary importance. The Poet
Christopher Kempf recently issued a collection of Poems entitled What Though
The Field Be Lost.[3] Kempf is a huge fan of Milton. According to Erik
Schreiber, “The book takes its title from a line in Poet John Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667), which describes Satan’s rebellion against God, his defeat and his
temptation of Adam and Eve. Critics have likened the angels’ uprising to a
civil war, and Milton’s initial attempt to write the epic was indeed
interrupted by the English Civil War. It is legitimate that Kempf turned to
Milton after being inspired to focus on the American Civil War”.[4]
Kempf, to his eternal credit, quotes for an ordinary soldier
who, even during the most bloody conflict in American history, had the
outstanding ability to compare his struggle with that of Milton’s, writing, “An
eagle in the very midst of the thunderstorm might have experienced such
confusion. Milton’s account of the great battle between the forces of good and
evil, which originated in this same question of secession, gives some faint
idea of this artillery duel.”[5]–
The biggest weakness of McDowell’s book is its deliberate
failure to draw any connection Milton had to radical groups such as the
Levellers and Diggers. His oversight is perhaps driven more by ideological
considerations than an unintended omission on McDowell’s part. One such
omission is Mcdowell’s non-use of David William’s, Milton’s Leveller God.
According to John Rees, Williams has “done a considerable
service in bringing out this interpretation of Paradise Lost as an account of
self-determining democratic revolution. It is a powerful and closely argued
reading that will repay careful consideration by all those who wish to
understand Milton’s purpose. But there are more difficulties in seeing this as
a direct reflection of specifically Leveller politics. First, there are some
circumstantial difficulties. Things said in the revolutionary 1640s do not have
the same meaning when said in the late 1660s. And they are not the same said in
poetry rather than pamphlet prose. A revolutionary program advanced in the heat
of debate and a poetic reflection two decades later may be related, but not in
simple or straightforward ways. Second, and more importantly, in concentrating
on the Leveller strand of thought informing Milton’s politics, Williams
excludes other threads in a more varied tapestry. There are, to be sure,
continuities between Milton and the Levellers, but there are also important
differences. Williams has certainly done us all a service in highlighting the
former, but the latter need some consideration as well.[6]
Milton was a genius for all to see, but his Dissent and
radicalism did not fall from the sky. He was part of the intellectual flowering
of Dissent, a complex religious and intellectual development shared by other
radical elements of the English Civil War, such as the Levellers, who wanted
greater equality although not for everyone in society.
Milton and the other radical groups were also part of the
merchant and manufacturing classes in their struggle against the aristocracy.
Milton put this struggle by the merchant and manufacturing classes into a
literary form and was joined by other major figures like John Bunyan’s and his
world-famous Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). According to Paul Mitchell, Bunyan’s
use of imagery” reflected deep objective changes in society that also expressed
the subjective strivings for a better future”.
Milton’s defence of the English Revolution and his agreement
with the execution of Charles I meant his work would go on to influence a whole
number of French and American revolutionaries. Milton’s work was also followed
by major figures in the 1917 Russian Revolution. The people’s commissar for the
Enlightenment, Anatole Lunarcharsky, compared the Russian Revolution to
Milton’s. Milton is also an attractive figure for revolutionaries of today. His
revolutionary fervour, unfailing attachment to the ‘good old cause’, commitment
to human freedom, and hatred of all forms of tyranny are good examples for all
revolutionaries to follow. But you would not get that from McDowell’s book.
McDowell’s book is not without merit. It is a groundbreaking
work in many ways and contains recent archival discoveries that, on a limited
basis, further our understanding of the connection between Milton and the
revolution he fought for. Mcdowell, unfortunately, is not a radical. His
biography is very conservative and challenges biographers such as the Marxist
Christopher Hill[7] , who, unlike Mcdowell, believed Milton was radical at a
very early age and became more radical during the English revolution. Also, unlike
McDowell, Hill believed that Milton’s prose was heavily influenced by the
English bourgeois revolution and groups such as the Levellers and Diggers.
McDowell mentions the Levellers only twice in the book.
McDowell believes that Milton was a great history man but
does not subscribe to any materialist or Marxist view of such men. Although the
great Russian Marxist G.V Plekhanov was writing about a different period of
history and different historical characters, his perceptive understanding of
the role great figures play in history could be applied quite easily to Milton.
Plekhanov writes, “In the history of the development of
human intellect, the success of some individual hinders the success of another
individual very much more rarely. But even here, we are not free from the
above-mentioned optical illusion. When a given state of society sets certain
problems before its intellectual representatives, the attention of prominent
minds is concentrated upon them until these problems are solved. As soon as
they have succeeded in solving them, their attention is transferred to another
object. By solving a problem, a given talent-A diverts the attention of talent
B from the problem already solved to another problem. And when we are asked:
What would have happened if A had died before he had solved problem X? – we
imagine that the thread of development of the human intellect would have been
broken. We forget that had A died, B, or C, or D might have tackled the
problem, and the thread of intellectual development would have remained intact
in spite of A’s premature demise.
In order that a man who possesses a particular kind of
talent may, by means of it, greatly influence the course of events, two
conditions are needed. First, this talent must make him more conformable to the
social needs of the given epoch than anyone else: if Napoleon had possessed the
musical gifts of Beethoven instead of his own military genius, he would not, of
course, have become an emperor. Second, the existing social order must not bar
the road to the person possessing the talent which is needed and useful precisely
at the given time. This very Napoleon would have died as the barely known
General, or Colonel, Bonaparte, had the old order in France existed another
seventy-five years. [8]
Christopher Hill
As was said earlier, Mcdowell does not subscribe to a materialist
view of historical development. The last person to place Milton within the
context of the great English bourgeois revolution was the Marxist Christopher
Hill. Even with a cursory look at his biography of Milton,[9] it is easy to see
that it contains more insight and gives the reader a far more multifaceted view
of the poet than any other biography of Milton, including McDowell’s. It could
be argued that this was Hill’s greatest book.
Hill correctly places Milton alongside other “Bourgois
radicals” of the English Revolution. While Milton was influenced by ancient
writers such as Plato, Aquinas, and Homer, Hill, believed Milton’s connection
with radical groups such as the Levellers and Diggers and others had a far more
profound impact on his thinking and actions than has been given credit.
As this quote shows, Hill did not think Milton was a
Leveller but said, “Lest I be misunderstood, I repeat that I do not think
Milton was a Leveller, a Ranter, a Muggletonian or a Behemist. Rather I suggest
that we should see him living in a state of permanent dialogue with radical
views which he could not wholly accept, yet some of which greatly attracted
him. (Milton and the English Revolution [1977], 113-14)
As Andrew Milner perceptively writes, “By the standards of previous
Milton criticism, Hill’s Milton is boldly adventurous. It restores the poet to
that social context from which he has been wrenched by the ahistorical idealism
of mainstream literary criticism. Its emphasis on the radicalism both of that
context and of the poet himself serves as a valuable corrective to those who
have sought to subsume Milton under the mantle of conservative orthodoxy.
Milton the dour Puritan is superseded by Milton, the libertarian revolutionary,
and much that has previously appeared obscure becomes clarified”.[10]
Conclusion
McDowell’s Poet of Revolution is not a bad book and contains
much that is worthwhile. However, it does not give the reader any great new
insight into the English bourgeois revolution or Milton’ place within that
revolution. Milton was a major player in that revolution. Marxists like Hill
saw the English Revolution of 1640-1660
as a bourgeois revolution. Hill also believed that paved the way for the future
development of capitalism.
Figures like Milton and Oliver Cromwell were bourgeois
revolutionaries who were convinced that they had divine support for their
revolution. But they were not alone. Other radicals formed the left wing of
this revolution. It was these groups that had an important impact on Milton’s thinking
as a poet and revolutionary. The next biography of Milton needs to explore this
connection in greater depth.
________________________________________
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45528/london-1802
[2] https://wikirouge.net/texts/en/Louis_Blanc%27s_Speech_at_the_Dijon_Banquet
[3] What Though the Field Be Lost-Poems-by Christopher
Kempf- LSU Press
[4]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/29/kemp-j29.html
[5] Pvt. John C. West, 4th Texas, July 27,
1863-http://atlengthmag.com/poetry/the-union-forever/
[6] Williams, David. Milton’s Leveller God. Montreal and
Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2017. xviii + 494pp. ISBN 13: 9780773550339.
$120.00 (cloth). Review by John Rees.
https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/doi/full/10.1111/milt.12280
[7] Milton and the English Revolution Paperback – 18 Aug.
1997
by Christopher Hill
[8] G.V. Plekhanov-On the Role of the Individual in
History(1898)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.htmlhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individual.html
[9] Milton and the English Revolution-Christopher
Hill-https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/610425/milton-and-the-english-revolution-by-christopher-hill/
[10]
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-349-04853-3_6
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