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. Stainer 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".

A “Masterclass in Scholarship” or an Ideological Retreat? John Morrill’s Cromwell Edition and the Politics of Historical Revisionism

The publication of John Morrill’s new edition of The Letters, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell has been greeted with a remarkable unanimity of praise from the historical profession. Such consensus is itself a political fact. As the uploaded document insists, this edition “deserves to be examined not merely as an editorial achievement but in terms of its political and historiographical implications,” and the “universal acclaim from the historical profession should itself be interrogated.”¹ The task of Marxist historiography is not to echo academic fashion but to expose the class forces that shape it. Morrill’s edition is not a neutral scholarly improvement upon Thomas Carlyle’s 1845 text; it is an intervention in a decades‑long ideological struggle over the meaning of the English Revolution.

Carlyle’s Edition and the Revolutionary Tradition

Thomas Carlyle’s 1845 edition of Cromwell’s writings was a landmark in nineteenth‑century historiography. Despite his limitations—his “great man” theory and his later reactionary turn—Carlyle possessed the intellectual courage to recognise Cromwell as a revolutionary figure. Marx praised Carlyle for having “taken the literary field against the bourgeoisie at a time when its views, tastes and ideas held the whole of official English literature totally in thrall,” citing “his apology for Cromwell” as one of his most significant interventions.²

Carlyle understood, however imperfectly, that the English Civil War was not a constitutional misunderstanding but, in the words of the uploaded document, “a world-historical convulsion in which a class seized power through the execution of a king.”³ This insight—partial, distorted, but nonetheless real—explains why Marx and Engels valued Carlyle’s work. They recognised in the English Revolution the first great bourgeois revolution, the event that cleared the ground for capitalist development and inaugurated the modern epoch.

Carlyle’s edition was flawed, as the document acknowledges: “his transcriptions were not always reliable, his selection was idiosyncratic, his commentary was infused with his own increasingly authoritarian worldview.”⁴ But these were the flaws of a bourgeois radical struggling to articulate the class dynamics of a revolution whose full meaning only Marxism could later reveal.

The Rise of Revisionism and Morrill’s Role

John Morrill is not a neutral editor. He is a leading figure of the revisionist school that has dominated English Civil War historiography since the 1970s. This tendency—associated with Conrad Russell and others—denies that the 1640s constituted a bourgeois revolution. It rejects the notion of a rising bourgeoisie, dismisses the class character of the conflict, and reinterprets the revolution as a contingent political or religious crisis.

The revisionists insist 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.”⁵ Even Cromwell, they argue, was not a revolutionary but “a representative of the declining gentry.”⁶

This is the intellectual framework within which Morrill has worked for decades. His edition is therefore, as the document states, “not a politically innocent replacement of a ‘flawed’ Victorian text with a ‘scientific’ modern one. It is an intervention in a long-running class struggle within historiography.”⁷

What Revisionism Seeks to Erase

The revisionist school does not correct Carlyle’s limitations from a more advanced standpoint. It retreats from them. It denies that the English Revolution was a revolution at all.

Against this retreat, Christopher Hill’s Marxist historiography stands as a towering achievement. Hill demonstrated in God’s Englishman that Cromwell was a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie: a man who purged Parliament until it reflected the needs of his class, built the New Model Army as an instrument of revolutionary power, and suppressed the Levellers when they threatened to push the revolution beyond the limits of capitalist development. Hill’s position was that Cromwell “must be understood as a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie… who suppressed the Levellers when the plebeian elements threatened to push the revolution beyond the limits required for capitalist society.”⁸

Hill’s work followed Trotsky’s analysis in Where Is Britain Going?, which identified two revolutionary traditions in British history—Cromwell and Chartism—both of which were systematically denied by the Whig myth of gradualism. Revisionism, for all its claims to sophistication, represents a return to this Whig outlook: the comforting fiction that Britain has been uniquely blessed with peaceful, incremental change. As the document notes, Simon Schama proudly declares himself “a born-again Whig.”⁹

The Political Meaning of Today’s Acclaim

The universal praise for Morrill’s edition is not a matter of scholarly merit alone. It reflects the political trajectory of the bourgeoisie itself. The class that once celebrated Cromwell as its revolutionary ancestor now finds that ancestry embarrassing. Having long since abandoned all progressive historical tasks, the bourgeoisie prefers to pretend that revolution never happened.

The bourgeoisie now insists that “the execution of Charles I was a regrettable incident, that the Levellers were irrelevant extremists, and that the whole unpleasant episode could have been avoided if only people had been more reasonable.”¹⁰This ideological sanitisation is not accidental. It serves contemporary political needs. A ruling class that fears revolution must deny that revolutions have ever been necessary, progressive, or successful.

Hence, the “unanimity of the acclaim” for Morrill’s edition. It “conforms to what the contemporary historical profession wants to believe about the seventeenth century and about revolution in general.”¹¹ A genuinely critical edition—one that illuminated rather than obscured the class forces at work—would not receive such praise. 

The Working Class and the Revolutionary Heritage

The working class has every interest in understanding the English Revolution for what it was: the first in the series of bourgeois revolutions that created the conditions for modern capitalism and, in doing so, brought into being the proletariat itself.

The revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie—however historically limited—belong not to today’s anaemic liberalism but to the international working class. As the document concludes, these traditions “belong to the heritage of the international working class – not to the anaemic, phlegmatic liberalism that now disowns them.”¹²

To defend the revolutionary content of the English Civil War is therefore not an antiquarian exercise. It is part of the broader struggle to arm the working class with an understanding of the historical processes that shaped the modern world—and to expose the ideological falsifications through which the bourgeoisie seeks to obscure its own past and the revolutionary future that confronts it.

Notes

1.  “This is a significant publication… the universal acclaim from the historical profession should itself be interrogated.”
2. Ibid.: Marx praised Carlyle for “having taken the literary field against the bourgeoisie… citing specifically ‘his apology for Cromwell’.”
3. Ibid.: Carlyle recognised the Civil War as “a world-historical convulsion in which a class seized power through the execution of a king.”
4. Ibid.: “His transcriptions were not always reliable… his commentary was infused with his own increasingly authoritarian worldview.”
5. Ibid.: “There was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie…”
6. Ibid.: “Even Cromwell… can better be understood as a representative of the declining gentry.”
7. Ibid.: Morrill’s edition “is an intervention in a long-running class struggle within historiography.”
8. Ibid.: Cromwell “must be understood as a revolutionary leader of the bourgeoisie… who suppressed the Levellers…”
9. Ibid.: “Simon Schama… happily declares himself ‘a born-again Whig.’”
10. Ibid.: The bourgeoisie now claims “the execution of Charles I was a regrettable incident…”
11. Ibid.: Morrill’s edition “conforms to what the contemporary historical profession wants to believe…”
12. Ibid.: “The revolutionary traditions of the bourgeoisie… belong to the heritage of the international working class.”

 

Alison Stuart commented on What do we really know about Oliver Cromwell by Professor John Morrill? The First Barry Coward Memorial

Thank you for posting this fascinating review of Morrill's work. I look forward to his conclusion. It is hard to separate fact from fiction after so many centuries and there are elements of Cromwell that strike at a contradictory personality.

The account above recalls the wholesale slaughter of the "Irish" women after the battle of Naseby. Keep us posted        

  

John Morrill, Bourgeois Historiography, and the Marxist Question of the English Revolution

Professor John Morrill’s inaugural Barry Coward Memorial Lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, was by any measure an impressive scholarly performance. Morrill is one of the most accomplished historians of the English Revolution working today, and his five‑volume edition of Cromwell’s writings — supported by a substantial Leverhulme grant — will undoubtedly become the definitive textual resource for future scholarship. His tribute to Barry Coward was warm, sincere, and entirely fitting.

But Morrill’s lecture, and the monumental editorial project it announced, also exposes the deeper limits of contemporary Cromwell studies. It reveals a historiographical method that is technically rigorous yet politically anaemic; a scholarship capable of restoring Cromwell’s words with unprecedented precision while leaving the social and class content of the English Revolution fundamentally untouched.

From a Marxist perspective, Morrill’s method exemplifies the wider trend in bourgeois historiography: focusing on textual precision and individual agency, which masks the revolutionary forces of the 1640s and the social classes that shaped Cromwell. This essay presents a summary of Morrill’s lecture alongside a Marxist critique of its underlying historiographical approach.

Morrill’s Project: Restoring Cromwell’s Voice

Morrill announced a much-needed scholarly project: a detailed, critically edited collection of Cromwell’s speeches and writings. Current editions—Carlyle’s romanticised 1845 compilation and Lomas’s 1904 revision—are full of errors, missing details, and editorial changes. Morrill’s team of eight editors plans to produce the most accurate text yet by examining all manuscripts and printed editions, aiming to eliminate two centuries of inaccuracies.

The example he offered — two versions of Cromwell’s speech opening the Barebones Parliament highlights the issue. A 1654 version refers to “the day of the power of Christ,”. In contrast, a later edition softens this to “a day of the power of Christ,” subtly transforming Cromwell from an apocalyptic prophet to a devout statesman. Morrill contended that these modifications add up to a significantly changed perception of Cromwell. The project is undoubtedly valuable, as it aims to provide scholars with the most precise texts of Cromwell ever compiled. However, ensuring textual accuracy does not necessarily mean that the historical understanding will be equally precise.

The Fetish of Accuracy: A Technical Solution to a Political Problem

Morrill’s lecture consistently focused on the importance of “accuracy.” He pointed out Carlyle's carelessness, Lomas's slight improvement, and Abbott's strong ideological stance. Morrill’s edition aims to address these issues. However, this focus on textual precision reveals a broader methodological belief: that understanding Cromwell depends on finding his “true” words. This approach reflects scholarly obsession — the idea that the authentic sentence will reveal the genuine Cromwell.

A Marxist perspective emphasises the importance of class struggle in understanding Cromwell’s words. Whether he referred to “the day of the power of Christ” or “a day” is less important than analysing the social forces behind his speech. The key questions are: what social interests motivated Cromwell’s language, and how did it serve revolutionary goals? Morrill’s method falls short because it views Cromwell’s speeches as isolated entities, ignoring their role as ideological expressions shaped by class interests.

Cromwell as a Figure Re‑Made to Suit Ruling‑Class Needs

Morrill recognised that each century has its own version of Cromwell—whether Carlyle’s Victorian hero, Abbott’s proto-fascist leader, or the moderate constitutional figure of the mid-century—each reflecting the ideological needs of its time. However, Morrill did not explore the deeper implication: Cromwell’s image is not merely misinterpreted but is intentionally constructed as a political tool. Bourgeois historiography repeatedly reimagines Cromwell to reinforce the ideological foundations of the modern British state. From a Marxist perspective, Cromwell cannot be viewed as a timeless “great man.” Instead, he must be seen as the political representative of an emerging bourgeois class whose interests called for the dismantling of feudal absolutism, the creation of a national market, the consolidation of capitalist property, and the suppression of plebeian democratic movements. This is the version of Cromwell that bourgeois historiography refuses to acknowledge—and thus remains invisible.

Against Revisionism: The Bourgeois Evasion of the English Revolution

For over forty years, "revisionist” Civil War scholarship has held sway in the British academic world. It claims to be objective, fact-based, and opposed to Whig history. However, it is actually the most politically cautious interpretation ever used to analyse the English Revolution. Its main accomplishment has been to undermine the idea of revolution itself—instead portraying a major historical turning point as merely a collection of local conflicts, religious feelings, and personal miscommunications.

Revisionism’s approach is straightforward: break down, remove politics, and dissolve distinctions. While earlier thinkers viewed history as a revolutionary clash between social orders, revisionists see only “multiple kingdoms,” “local contexts,” and "parish politics." Where Marxists highlight the rise of the bourgeoisie and the fall of feudal absolutism, revisionists claim class is “anachronistic,” “over-systematised,” or simply “not evident in the sources.” Similarly, movements like the Levellers and Diggers, originally seen as democratic and proto-communist, are reinterpreted by revisionists as “pressure groups,” “agitators,” or “political minorities.”

The outcome is a historiography where events lack intentional causes, especially social ones. The English Revolution appears as a chain of accidents. Cromwell is seen as a man responding to crises. The New Model Army is viewed as a disciplinary issue. Ireland is considered a tragic misunderstanding. Radicalism is dismissed as mere noise. This is not genuine scholarship; it is ideological suppression.

Revisionism appeared in the late 20th century, coinciding with the British academy's move away from social history, class analysis, and materialist views. It presents a reassuring story: the Civil War was not a revolution but just a “war of three kingdoms.” Its participants are seen not as representatives of social forces, but as individuals driven by religious differences. Its conclusion is not the end of feudalism but just a constitutional adjustment. Essentially, revisionism rejects the revolution to dismiss its repercussions.

It cannot acknowledge that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It cannot acknowledge that Cromwell was the political instrument of a rising class. It cannot acknowledge that plebeian movements represented the unfulfilled democratic content of the struggle. It cannot acknowledge that revolutionary violence was structurally necessary.

Instead, it presents a Cromwell who is psychologically nuanced but socially insubstantial, a Parliament that is complex in structure yet devoid of class distinctions, and a revolution that paradoxically isn't truly a revolution. This is why revisionism has become so appealing to the modern academy: it sanitises history. It strips away the explosive elements of the 1640s—the overthrow of monarchy, the mobilisation of people with low incomes, the rise of democratic calls, and the development of capitalist social relations—and substitutes a politically neutral mosaic of “contexts." A Marxist critique pierces through this illusion. The English Revolution was not a mistake, nor a local crisis, nor a religious conflict. It was the first major bourgeois revolution, and its contradictions—its radicalism, violence, and repression of democratic forces—mirror the conflicting interests of the class driving it. Revisionism fails to recognise this because it cannot accept it. Its goal isn't to explain the revolution but to diminish its significance.

Ireland and the Politics of Sanitisation

The most insightful part of Morrill’s lecture focused on Ireland. He highlighted uncertainties in casualty numbers, questioned the reliability of Cromwell’s letters, and noted Parliament’s tendency to "tidy up” his words. He carefully differentiated between civilians killed in combat and those killed after surrender. While this stance of meticulous neutrality seems objective, it serves a political purpose by diverting attention from the underlying reality: the Irish campaign was an element of the brutal consolidation of a new bourgeois state.

The Drogheda massacre—regardless of how its details are reconstructed—was not merely a tragic mistake. It was a calculated act of terror executed by a revolutionary force whose triumph depended on dismantling the ancient Irish order. Morrill’s approach, by emphasising textual uncertainty, downplays the revolutionary violence central to the English bourgeois revolution.

Morrill’s approach exemplifies the broader shift towards revisionism in Civil War historiography. This perspective critiques the traditional Whig narrative of constitutional progress, replacing it with an equally ideological focus on local grievances, religious sensitivities, and individual agency. It breaks down the revolution into a series of contingencies, interprets class struggle through cultural anthropology, and views Cromwell as a psychologically intricate individual managing crises. Instead of seeing the revolution as driven by material forces, it portrays it as a patchwork of personal decisions. Conversely, a Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell was not merely contingent but a necessary outcome—shaped structurally by the decline of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

The Erasure of Radical Movements

A key aspect of Morrill’s historiography is how it downplays radical movements. Levellers, Diggers, and Army agitators—the democratic and proto-communist groups of the 1640s—are only seen as “pressures” on Cromwell, not as independent class movements driven by their own historical logic. Cromwell’s suppression of these groups is viewed as political prudence, not as a reflection of his role in defending property and supporting the “gentlemen Independents." This approach is not objective scholarship; it reduces plebeian politics to mere background noise, ideologically diminishing their significance.

The Cleaned Portrait Without the Canvas

Morrill concluded his lecture with a metaphor: Cromwell is like a Great Master painting that takes on a new life when cleaned and restored. The metaphor is insightful—Morrill restores the portrait but leaves the canvas untouched. The Cromwell he depicts is precise in text but stripped of political context, portraying him as a man of conscience rather than a revolutionary. A Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell’s significance lies not in his personality but in his role as the military and political representative of a rising bourgeoisie, both triggering and holding back revolution. Morrill’s approach cannot uncover this deeper, class-based understanding of Cromwell because it doesn't address the class dynamics of the English Revolution.

What We Really Know About Cromwell

Morrill’s edition will be invaluable, providing the most precise collection of Cromwell texts to date. However, it won’t answer the fundamental question Morrill asked: What do we truly know about Oliver Cromwell? To truly understand Cromwell, we must grasp the class forces that drove him to power, the economic changes that enabled the revolution, the social tensions that influenced his religious rhetoric, and the historical necessity that positioned him as the figurehead of a rising bourgeois class. Achieving this understanding requires a Marxist analysis—an approach that the bourgeois academy has largely avoided for decades. Morrill’s project cleaned the portrait. It will not reveal the painter.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources on Revisionism

• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. A foundational critique of revisionist approaches, surveying Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Paul Christianson, and others.
• Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford University Press, 1979. A key text in the revisionist dismantling of long-term social explanations.
• Russell, Conrad. The Origins of the English Civil War. Macmillan, 1973. The central revisionist statement rejecting class-based interpretations.
• Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650. Longman, 1980 (orig. 1976). A major revisionist work emphasising localism and provincial grievances.
• Sharpe, Kevin (ed.). Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. Oxford University Press, 1978. A revisionist collection emphasising political culture over social structure.
• Christianson, Paul. “The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Journal of British Studies 15:2 (1976), 40–75. A revisionist attack on Marxist and Whig causal frameworks.
• Ashton, Robert. The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603–1649. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. Often grouped with revisionists for its scepticism toward long-term structural causes.

Responses to Revisionism

• Hexter, J. H. “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England.” Journal of Modern History 50:1 (1978), 1–50. A rebuttal defending structural and ideological explanations.
• Hill, Christopher. “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 100–124. A Marxist counter-argument emphasising popular mobilisation.
• Rabb, T. K. “The Role of the Commons.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 55–78. A critique of revisionist minimisation of parliamentary radicalism.
• Hirst, Derek. “The Place of Principle.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 79–99. A defence of ideological and principled motivations against revisionist reductionism.

Marxist and Social-Historical Works

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972. The classic Marxist study of Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian radicalism.
• Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. Foundational Marxist interpretation of the revolution as a bourgeois upheaval.
• Bernstein, Eduard. Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution. Allen & Unwin, 1930. A pioneering Marxist analysis of radical democratic and proto-communist movements.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Heinemann, 1976. A major social-history rebuttal to revisionism, emphasising class mobilisation.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 2006. A detailed study of radical class forces suppressed by Cromwell.
• Shaw, A. L. The Levellers. Longman, 1968. A key study of democratic radicalism within the New Model Army.

Historiographical Context

• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. Essential for situating revisionism within broader historiographical debates.
• Rosenberg, John S. “Toward a New Civil War Revisionism.” Journal of Modern History. Although focused on the American Civil War, it provides a comparative framework for understanding revisionist cycles in national historiography.

 

The New Social History and the 17th Century English Revolution

The New Social History emerged as a historiographical movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and is arguably the last significant school of the twentieth century to attempt a full explanation of the English Revolution. Before the 1970s, most social history had been confined to the study of everyday life. Over the following three decades the field grew steadily in prominence, despite becoming something of a bête noire for revisionist historians. Its most valuable contribution was to bring the lives of working people and the poor — long neglected by mainstream historians — into the historical record. Its most significant weakness, from a materialist standpoint, was its divorce from economic explanation.

In its methods, the New Social History was not radically different from the older "social history" that preceded it, a field the English historian G. M. Trevelyan once described as a hodgepodge of disciplines unlike any other historiographical tradition. Trevelyan himself saw social history as the connective tissue between economic and political history, writing that "without social history, economic history is barren and political history unintelligible."[1] It was also Trevelyan who supplied the movement's most famous, and most contested, definition: social history as "the history of the people with the politics left out." Historians have argued over what exactly he meant by this ever since.

E. H. Carr took a different view of the historian's task altogether, insisting that the past should be analysed in the light of the present and the future growing out of it. For Carr, the historian's job was not simply to identify what was significant in the past, but to "isolate and illuminate the fundamental changes at work in the society in which we live," and in doing so to help people understand the processes by which the problems of their own generation might be resolved. People are shaped by history — their judgements and actions conditioned by what came before — and Carr believed the historian's task was to make that conditioning visible, thereby loosening its grip and opening the possibility of shaping the future rather than simply repeating the past.[2]

An international movement

Although English historians were at the forefront of the New Social History, it was never a purely English phenomenon. The American historian Paul E. Johnson recalled its arrival at UCLA in the late 1960s, where he was trained as a quantitative social science historian. He was taught that "literary" evidence, and the kinds of history that could be built from it, were inherently elitist and unreliable. The French Annalistes, meanwhile, spoke of setting aside heroes and events altogether in favour of reconstructing the more enduring social "background" of history — a project that, in Johnson's recollection, could only be carried out with quantifiable sources, and was pursued at times with what he called "mad-scientist bravado." One prominent quantifier reportedly argued that no one ignorant of statistics through multiple regression should hold a job in a history department; Johnson's own doctoral adviser wanted history to become "a predictive social science." Johnson never went that far himself. What drew him to the New Social History was its democratic inclusiveness as much as its statistical precision — the ambition to write the history of ordinary people, situating them within the social structures and long-term trends that shaped their lives while still recovering what they actually said and did.[3]

The French Annales School profoundly shaped British social history. Keith Wrightson, in English Society, argued that the social changes of the period were evolutionary rather than revolutionary, while posing a genuinely difficult question at the outset of his book: to what extent was English society polarised enough to produce civil war, revolution, and the execution of a king? And to what extent did growing social inequality shape the social, economic, and political events that followed?

It is worth remembering just how improbable the events of the 1640s would have seemed in advance. A straw poll taken at the start of the seventeenth century asking whether England would, within forty years, experience civil war, revolution, and regicide would almost certainly have been met with disbelief. There was no real precedent for what took place in 1640. The leaders of the English Revolution had no earlier revolution to study or learn from — unlike the leaders of the French and Russian revolutions centuries later, who could draw on 1640 itself as a model.

A shifting historiographical fashion

The New Social History's dominance did not go unchallenged. Ann Hughes illustrated the shifting fashion by comparing book titles across the decades: where Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England, 1540–1640 in 1965, the late Barry Coward later produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England, 1550–1750. The substitution of "continuity" for "revolution" in the more recent title captures a more qualified, cautious assessment of just how much genuinely changed in early modern England.

G. E. Aylmer posed the question directly: rebellion, or revolution? How much difference, he asked, did the events of 1640–60 actually make to people's lives? On the debit side stood the casualties, material destruction, and general disruption war brought to agriculture, industry, trade, and transport. On the other side, Aylmer argued, the period brought greater social and political mobility, allowing people to achieve more than they might have in more settled times. He estimated that a few tens of thousands died as a direct result of the conflict — no more, he suggested, than the worst epidemic of the era might have claimed. In his chapter on the quality of life, Aylmer maintained that there was no fundamental shift in the economy or radical alteration of the social structure. While conceding that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive to business development, he argued this would likely have happened regardless — whether Charles I's personal rule had continued indefinitely, or the royalists had won the war outright.[4]

Aylmer steered a middle course between rebellion and revolution, and he was joined in this by a heterogeneous group of historians — Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Mark Kishlansky, and Anthony Fletcher among them — who questioned both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the civil war. They rejected the idea that the conflict grew out of deep-rooted social change, emphasising short-term political contingency and factional infighting instead. Kishlansky in particular argued against what he called the "fallacy of social determinism."

It is also worth correcting a common misreading: many historians associated with, or sympathetic to, the New Social History have been mistakenly labelled Marxists, when the great majority would reject that label outright — and would certainly reject Marx's own account of the individual's place in history, as set out in his 1859 Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely 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... Then begins an era of social revolution.

Popular politics at the local level

While it is generally accepted that outright unrest and mass protest during the civil war years were limited, John Morrill has argued that changes in social and economic policy remained largely under the control of the "middling sort," whose presence helped prevent large-scale disorder. There was, nonetheless, real anxiety among sections of the middle class about the possibility of rioting by people experiencing poverty. Lucy Hutchinson captured this unease vividly, describing how "almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little people," to the point that "many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command" by a certain sort of person that some in the House distinguished, disparagingly, as "worsted stocking men."[5] Hutchinson was almost certainly describing people increasingly influenced by the Levellers, who articulated an emerging awareness — particularly among the lower orders — that having a genuine say in these changes required political organisation.

Morrill has spoken candidly about his own debt to the New Social History, crediting the work of Keith Wrightson in particular as transformative for historians like himself who were more naturally drawn to high politics. As Morrill put it, the "Wrightson revolution" in how social history was written had an enormous impact even on those working on national and constitutional politics rather than social structure — an influence he considered, in his own mid-career reflection, absolutely fundamental.[6]

Underlying this debate over impact lies a more fundamental one: whether the war was genuinely linked to social and economic change in England and Europe at the time, or whether it can be explained without reference to those forces at all. G. M. Trevelyan himself took the latter view, arguing that the Cromwellian revolution was not the product of social and economic forces, but of developments in political and religious thought among men who had no desire to recast society or redistribute wealth.

The New Social History's turn toward localised, parish-level politics — rather than national politics narrowly defined — dovetailed with Morrill's own work in The Revolt of the Provinces. As Mario Caricchio has observed, this body of scholarship demonstrated that the English parish functioned as a genuine political forum: a continuous negotiation of authority and subordination played out through gossip, "rough music," libel, legal disputes, rioting, petitioning, voting, and rebellion — the diverse forms through which conflict was conducted and resolved, and the constitutive elements of a broader "popular political culture" through which ordinary people helped shape early modern Europe.[7]

Joan Thirsk, working alongside Alan Everitt, played a central role in developing this project — the pair became known collectively as the Leicester School of Local History. Beginning with county-level studies and expanding into regional and national work, Thirsk built a regional framework for understanding the early modern agrarian economy and the economic change of the period. How far this approach deepened our understanding of the composite nature of the English Revolution remains genuinely open to debate; the narrowness of its regional remit has led some to argue that this strand of historiography never achieved the broader impact its practitioners had hoped for.

Where the real Marxist historians stood

Marxist historians, for their part, generally viewed the New Social History with considerable sympathy. Christopher Hill maintained that the English Revolution produced economic and social changes profound enough that, in his words, "historians are coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in the economic history of England." Hill pointed out that successive governments from the Rump Parliament onward, whatever their political complexion, gave far greater attention to trade and colonial development in their foreign policy than their predecessors had. Restrictions that had previously hampered capitalist economic activity were swept away, and never restored. As Professor Hughes observed with respect to the salt industry, "the first condition of healthy industrial growth was the exclusion of the parasitic entourage of the court."[8]

Until his death, Hill remained the leading proponent of the view that the social, economic, and political transformations of the civil war period amounted to a bourgeois revolution — a genuine turning point not only in English but in world history. This interpretation has been fiercely contested, perhaps by no one more forcefully than Peter Laslett, who argued that the very term "the English Revolution" ought to be abandoned altogether: it is, he suggested, a construction of our own social and political discourse that obstructs rather than aids inquiry and understanding, not least because it forces political, social, and economic change to be read as proceeding at a single, uniform pace. In Laslett's view, there was never any single set of events that could properly be called "the English Revolution."

Hill, however, never argued that events proceeded at a uniform pace across every sphere. His point was rather that grounding these genuinely complex developments in a social and economic framework helps make sense of them. What conclusions, then, can reasonably be drawn? On the weight of the empirical evidence alone, it remains clear that the civil war had a profound and lasting impact on the social and political fabric of England.

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Notes

[1] G. M. Trevelyan, quoted in "Social History," Wikipedia. [2] E. H. Carr, The New Society, ch. 1. [3] Paul E. Johnson, quoted in "Social History," Wikipedia. [4] G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? [5] Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder. [6] John Morrill, interview, Institute of Historical Research, Making History project. [7] Mario Caricchio, "Radicalism and the English Revolution" (Università di Firenze). [8] Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution.

 

'An end to good manners': The Royal College of Physicians and the English Civil War

William Harvey

 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 `1684

According 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.

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[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

A Letter to Richard Cavendish

I cannot say I follow your articles for History Today on a regular basis, but when an article catches my eye, I tend to read it. One such article was called Trotsky Offered Asylum. As the title of your column suggests, you write about events from the near or distant past.

If this particular article was nothing more than a straight factual account of Leon Trotsky’s exile from the former Soviet Union, I would have had nothing to complain about, but it was not. I am sorry to say your article was a little dark and had a strong hint of conservative bias to it to say the least. 

My first complaint is that while you mention the struggle between Trotsky and Stalin for students and people coming to this subject for the first time you would not garner from your article that this was little more than just a personality clash that Trotsky lost.

The life and death struggle was deeply political and to no small extent decided the course of the 20th century and not for the better. In fact, mankind paid a very heavy price for Trotsky’s “fall” from power and subsequent murder. 

Your article does not mention a single political difference between Trotsky and Stalin. I admit you have a lack of space, but your article would have been strengthened by at least a cursory examination over the controversy over Stalin’s theory of building socialism in a single country versus Trotsky’s insistence on global revolution. 

This aside, there are other things in the article that I would like to address. One of your turn of phrase left me a little cold and to say the least was a little sinister. To describe Trotsky’s murderer as a “charming Spanish Communist painter “is a little ridiculous. 

He was a murderer who pursued Trotsky and under Stalin’s personal order caved his skull with an ice pick, perhaps you could explain what was charming about this.

While we are on the subject of Trotsky’s murder to describe the act of murder as a “stab” of an ice pick is just plain bizarre. Trotsky’s skull was caved in why you downplay this horrendous assassination.

  

My last point is that while it is difficult for a historian to come out of their comfort zone and write on a subject, they know little about I must take exception to your description of Robert Service as “Trotsky’s biographer”, given Service’s very right-wing biography which is strewn with major errors it is simply not true. If readers new to the subject of Trotsky's life would like to view a more balance view, then they should look no further than Isaac Deutscher's three-volume trilogy. The compliment you pay Service is not deserved.

Notes

  1. Trotsky offered asylum in Mexico by Richard Cavendish | Published in History Today Volume: 61 Issue: 12 2011 http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/trotsky-offered-asylum-mexico

2.Trotsky: A Biography  by Robert Service; In Defence of Leon Trotsky  by David North Review  By Bertrand M. Patenaude The American Historical Review   Vol. 116, No. 3, June 2011 URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.900

Further comment on Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground

I am grateful for this comment although, alas, I do not think it is right. After his discussion of the dissolution of the Short Parliament, John Adamson did not proceed directly to a discussion of the Petition of the 12 peers but analysed the attitudes of the 2nd Earl of Warwick and his allies towards the Caroline regime in the 1630s and the evidence for collusion in the summer of 1640 between the members of the aristocratic Junto and the Scottish Covenanters.

He identified Maurice Thompson, John Venn and Richard Shute (Noble revolt, page 79) as the bearers of the petition from London supporting the peers' petition: Thompson and Venn had had links with Warwick through their interests in colonization since the late-1620s and in the 1630s, so his point is valid.

There is, in fact, a mass of material in The Noble Revolt on the importance of popular pressures on the proceedings of the two Houses in 1640-1642: if you do not believe me, please read Pages 285-288 on the end of Strafford's life or Pages 468-477 on tumults in the capital. He was and is interested in the impact of demonstrations and the threat of violence in London in this and succeeding periods.

Fortunately, a lot is known about how these demonstrations, etc., were organised from the works of Valerie Pearl, Robert Ashton, Keith Lindley and others. (See Clarendon Ms.20, fol.129 for Venn's role in coordinating such demonstrations.)It is, in any event, for John Adamson to develop his arguments as he wishes rather than meeting old-fashioned Marxist prescriptions.

(This post was forwarded to me by Chris Thompson. It was left anonymously on his blog. I am publishing because while not agreeing with every point it does have something to add to the debate. Chris Thompson’s remarks are also included)

Anonymous

It seems to me that most of the valid intellectual work Adamson's narrative accomplishes was better done by your own work on the "middle group. “Then there are the problems. The valid nugget in Livesey's discontent, I think, is that Adamson has little patience for or interest in what might be called popular mobilization, even though this was what gave aristocratic politics its bite. And his treatment of the events of 1640--the only moment concerning which I have sufficient expertise to comment--is riddled with significant omissions and errors (example omission: he skips directly from the dissolution of the Short Parliament to the Lords' Petition, without offering to explain the summer's agitation; example error: he claims the London Petition was carried by clients of Warwick). While errors are an unavoidable part of the scholarly process, these seem more like errors of opportunity to me, opportunities to affirm the centrality of the figures in his study to the politics of that year.

For me, the main value of Adamson's work is to reopen the problem of the politics of the early 1640s. Which is a legitimate accomplishment. But I understand Livesey's uneasiness.

CT Reply

Christopher Thompson commented Does the Work of British Historian John Adamson” Break New Ground

I am afraid, Keith, that this is not a convincing argument. It is factually incorrect to claim that all historiography before the 1970s offered some kind of explanation founded on a relationship between the 'base' of English society and its 'superstructure' as a reading of Hume, Mackintosh, Hallam, Macaulay and Trevelyan will show.

It is a matter of debate when the heyday of British capitalism occurred but no one has yet shown how this shaped Whig historiography or made it more convincing. In any case, the origins of 'revisionism' lie not in the 1970s, whether early or late, but in the late-1960s when it was increasingly obvious that the kind of deterministic explanations offered by Tawney, Hill, Stone and others were unsustainable because they were at variance with the surviving evidence.

By 1973, the work of 'revision' as Ted Rabb would describe it and the reaction against the kind of history being written by Stone and Hill wa s well under way. This was long before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher reached the front rank of politics on either side of the Atlantic and long before John Adamson began his work on the 1640s.

 No so -called revisionist poured scorn on Marxist theory nor has Adamson downplayed the role of Oliver Cromwell. You should read the latter's essay on 'Oliver Cromwell and the Long Parliament' in John Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (Longman. 1990) as penance. However one defines the political preferences of those you regard as 'revisionists', they were not predominantly or even obliquely right-wing.

Tristram Hunt and Simon Schama are, moreover, hardly specialists in seventeenth-century English history. I ought to add that Kishlansky's attacks on Adamson in and after 1990 had a great deal more to do with academic politics than your account allows. 

There was no requirement on Adamson to preface his study of the political role of the peerage in the 1640s with an analysis of the class composition of the gentry or of its relationship with the Stuart Crown: that would have meant giving up his priorities in research and writing to address a long obsolete Marxist agenda. It was for him to write as he chose and to investigate the issues he wanted to examine. That is the right and duty of every historian. But do not suppose that he is or has been unaware of the connections between the members of the Junto in 1640-1642 and of the grandees later in the decade with the worlds of London mercantile and artisan politics.

The novelty of his work lies in the revelations he has already made about such links and that he will make in subsequent publications. He has reshaped the historiography of the period already and will continue to do so because his work rests on secure evidential foundations, not on a political approach to the past.      

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 sources

As  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”.

History as Costume Drama: Allan Massie’s The Royal Stuarts and the Ideology of Dynastic Narrative

Allan Massie’s The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain presents itself as a sweeping chronicle of a dynasty whose fortunes intersected with some of the most turbulent centuries in British history. Tracing the Stewart line from its medieval origins to Cardinal York’s death in 1807, Massie gives readers a brisk, accessible account of monarchs, marriages, feuds, betrayals, and the long Jacobite aftermath. Reviewers have praised the book’s wit, pace, and readability, and one American publisher even aimed it at audiences drawn to the early modern period through television costume drama rather than archival scholarship. That marketing choice matters: it reveals the kind of book Massie has written—and the kind of history it pushes aside.

The Dynastic Frame as Ideological Device

The three centuries Massie surveys — from the Wars of Independence and the Union of the Crowns to the civil wars, Charles I’s execution, the Cromwellian republic, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the Jacobite risings — were more than vivid episodes in a royal family saga. They were the battleground on which Britain’s shift from feudal-absolutist monarchy to capitalist state took shape: a period of revolutionary rupture, class conflict, and constitutional transformation.

Massie’s structure—one chapter per monarch—reduces this complex historical process to a series of individual lives. Personalities, loyalties, rivalries, and temperaments bear the explanatory weight that a materialist account would instead place on the struggle among an entrenched landed aristocracy, an emerging mercantile bourgeoisie, and the popular forces drawn, unevenly and often tragically, into both camps.

This is more than a matter of style; it is the ideological work of dynastic biography. By casting the Stuarts as the story’s driving force, the genre shifts historical causation from social structures to individual character. Charles I’s execution becomes a family tragedy instead of the political expression of a revolutionary crisis involving crown, Parliament, and the classes each imperfectly represented. Likewise, the Glorious Revolution appears as a courteous transfer of power rather than the consolidation of a new bourgeois order. The promotional language — “backstabbing, betrayal, and ambition gone awry” — makes the substitution explicit. Three centuries of social transformation are repackaged as the plot of a prestige drama.

Massie’s book is not isolated from its cultural moment. It belongs to a culture industry that has taught audiences to consume history as melodrama. Series such as The Tudors, The Borgias, Versailles, and Outlander have popularised a model in which the past becomes courtly spectacle, sexual intrigue, dynastic rivalry, and moralised character drama. Massie writes for that expectation. The genre shapes the book, but the market shapes it as well, offering the emotional grammar of television rather than the analytical grammar of historical explanation. That is why the book’s readability is inseparable from its weakness: it reads like entertainment, and entertainment cannot explain revolution.

The Stuart Mythos and Conservative Nostalgia

The Stuarts have long been fertile ground for conservative romanticisation. Walter Scott’s Jacobite novels, Victorian medievalism, the cult of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” and the modern tourist economy of Highland nostalgia all participate in a cultural project that rehabilitates monarchy as a site of emotional identification rather than political domination.

Massie’s Scottish background and literary formation place his sympathies firmly within this tradition. His Jacobites are tragic, his exiled monarchs dignified, and his villains neatly assigned. The result is a narrative that softens Jacobite reaction into sentimental longing, allowing the emotional fate of a family to obscure the structural forces behind the Revolution.

What the Genre Cannot Explain

The dynastic-biography form cannot explain why the monarchy was abolished in 1649, restored in 1660, overthrown again in 1688, or why the British state that emerged differed fundamentally from the one the Stuarts inherited. It fails because it cannot account for class, structure, or material forces; it can only interpret history through character, temperament, and family drama. For all its craft, Massie’s book therefore becomes less an explanation of the period than a way of avoiding one.

Even sympathetic reviewers have pointed to the book’s uneven evidentiary base: a blend of archival material, literary sources, plays, novels, and earlier histories. That mixture makes the narrative readable but less reliable. Sharper critics have also noted Massie’s tendency to cast some figures as heroes and others as villains without the analytical support serious scholarship demands. These are not incidental defects, but symptoms of a genre that values narrative satisfaction over historical explanation.

Popular dynastic history sells because it offers readers what academic history cannot—and should not—provide: the comforting illusion that great upheavals are ultimately family stories on a grand scale. It makes the past feel emotionally accessible, morally clear, and narratively ordered. The strategy is effective, but deeply distorting. A reader may finish The Royal Stuarts knowing which monarch quarrelled with which sibling, yet still not understand why a social order was overturned, briefly abolished, and restored on fundamentally altered terms.

The Royal Stuarts is a well‑crafted, briskly paced example of a genre built to entertain rather than explain. It succeeds brilliantly on those terms — hence the enthusiastic notices from readers approaching the Stuarts as costume drama rather than as a chapter in the history of the English Revolution.

But readers seeking to understand why the Stuart story cannot be separated from civil war, regicide, and the revolutionary transformation of crown, Parliament, and the emerging capitalist order will need to look elsewhere: to the structural, class-based history this genre works to obscure. Massie has written a family saga. Britain’s history between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries was not a family saga. It was a revolution.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. London: HMSO, various editions.
• Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 1603–1714. London: Public Record Office.
• Clarendon, Edward Hyde. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, various editions.
• Cromwell, Oliver. Letters and Speeches. Edited by Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall, 1845.
• Milton, John. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649).
• The Memoirs of James II. Edited by J.S. Clarke. London: Rivington, 1816.
• Stuart Royal Correspondence, British Library Manuscripts, various collections.

Secondary Sources: Stuart History and the English Revolution

• Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Routledge, 1961.
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1970.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1991.
• Manning, Brian. Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. London: Pluto Press, 1996.
• Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.
• Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Sharpe, Kevin. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
• Harris, Tim. Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720. London: Penguin, 2006.
• Harris, Tim. Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms. London: Allen Lane, 2005.
• Coward, Barry. The Stuart Age: England, 1603–1714. London: Longman, 1980.

Jacobitism and the Stuart Afterlife

• Lenman, Bruce. The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.
• Pittock, Murray. The Myth of the Jacobite Clans. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995.
• Pittock, Murray. Jacobitism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998.
• Szechi, Daniel. The Jacobites: Britain and Europe, 1688–1788. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Popular History, Culture Industry, and Historical Representation

• Hobsbawm, Eric. On History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.
• Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958.
• Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
• Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 (orig. 1944).
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999.
• Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Allen Lane, 2001.
• Schama, Simon. A History of Britain. London: BBC Books, 2000–2002 (for contrast with dynastic narrative).

Historiography and Marxist Approaches

• Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
• Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I.
• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. London: Pluto Press, various editions.
• Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge, 1946.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism. London: Verso, 1999.
• Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958.
• Morton, A.L. A People’s History of England. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1938.

Works on the Stuart Dynasty and Royal Biography

• Massie, Allan. The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010.
• Fraser, Antonia. King Charles II. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.
• Fraser, Antonia. The Gunpowder Plot. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996.
• Weir, Alison. Britain’s Royal Families: The Complete Genealogy. London: Bodley Head, 1989.
• Somerset, Anne. Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion. London: HarperCollins, 2012.

Suggested Further Reading for a Materialist Interpretation of the Stuart Period

• Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Road to Socialism. London: Bookmarks, 1983.
• Callinicos, Alex. Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
• Hill, Christopher. Economic Problems of the Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
• Manning, Brian. 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1992.
• Holmes, Clive. Why Was Charles I Executed? London: Hambledon, 2006.