The English Revolution

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.



[1] https://jacobin.com/2022/11/lucy-hutchinson-regicide-king-charles-i-memoirs-english-civil-war





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 Subjects 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 

"If the world was emptied of all but John Lilburne, Lilburne would quarrel with John and John with Lilburne."

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”.

 Colonel Rainborowe

 “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”.

 Towards the end of 1647 with King Charles, I heavily defeated in a bitter civil war, a group of New Model Army officers and soldiers met at St. Mary’s parish church, near the Thames, at Putney Bridge, southwest London. The extraordinary discussion that took place at that church has been examined and then fought over by historians for decades if not centuries. At the time little was known of this debate. Very few of the news broadsheets mentioned the historic debate. 

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 clear that the editor, Michael Mendle was mindful of the extremely conservative and unified nature of the collection of essay writers, so much so that he issued a strange declaration that I have not seen anywhere else: “Those that write here have no party line to follow are adherents of no single interpretive school, and perhaps most notably, span several scholarly generations”.[2] 

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.

 According to Wikipedia the Agreement was produced by “civilian Levellers or agitators and called for regular, two-yearly Parliaments and equal distribution of MPs’ seats by several inhabitants. It guaranteed freedom of conscience, indemnity for Parliamentarian soldiers and equality before the law”. 

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.

 Cromwell was well aware that the invitation of civilian Levellers meant that the discussion held at Putney would have a resonance far beyond the walls of Putney church. How much Cromwell was aware of the growing radicalisation of his army is open to conjecture. To what extent Cromwell read the volumes of letters sent to him from the various radical groups is again hard to fathom. But even this conservative of men would have least noted with alarm the growing influence of radical groups such as the Levellers and Fifth Monarchists. After all one of his top general’s Thomas Harrison was a Fifth Monarchist supporter and shared similar religious and political positions with other radicals. Cromwell also up until Putney had a reasonably close social and political relationship with one of the Leaders of the Leveller’s John Lilburne. 

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 onely desire that according to the Declarations (promising a provision for tender consciences) there may some effectuall course be taken according to the intent thereof; And that such, who, upon 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 Members 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 lesswellinvestigated 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 prerevisionist 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 prePutney 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 selfunderstandings of these authors as well as upon the political identities of those who read and responded positively to them. Yet, dividing developing authorships into preLeveller 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/

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[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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