Nick commented on Oliver Cromwell: God's Warrior and the English Revolution (British History in Perspective) Professor Ian Gentles

I really enjoyed this review - thanks for posting it, I must get round to reading Gentles's book soon.

On the subject of Cromwell and the junto, I don't think it's disputed that he was involved in its fringes during the early 1640s. His links to Oliver St John and through that to the circle around the Earl of Warwick and Viscount Saye and Sele are well documented. Where historians disagree - and ultimately the evidence is too slender to prove either way - is quite how much a part of the circle he was.

It's possible to see his interventions in the Long Parliament in 1640/41 as naive and over-reaching, misjudging the politics of the day, but equally they can be represented as Cromwell flying kites for the junto in full knowledge that they might get watered down (but recognising someone needed to start negotiations). 

Personally, I think Cromwell's involving in freeing John Lilburne points more towards the latter, but whichever the interpretation you take it's clear Cromwell was only a minor player at this stage.

John Adamson is good on this in his chapter on Cromwell and the Long Parliament in John Morrill's "Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Revolution".

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.

Kate Chidley commented on http://keith-perspective.blogspot.co.uk/2010/08/on-katherine-chidley-1616-1653.html

I'd love to find that she was my ancestor ! you go.girl.l've read somewhere that she harangued Cromwell, saying they had promised all would be equal, but, quoting Orwell, some were more equal than others, i.e. men more equal than women. Is it possible to find pamphlets online? What a lady,

Reply

Thank you for the comment. Can you remember where you saw that she met Cromwell? I have just finished an article on Women Levellers and the English Revolution for the blog Hoydens and Firebrands which includes some stuff on Chidley.

If you like I can send you some stuff I have on her. It is true she was quite a lady and apparently one of many. Maybe you should do some research on whether she was a relative. Chidley does not strike me as a common name, where are you from.

Best Wishes

Keith Livesey

Newton commented on winstanley Review

I became excited by Winstanley et. al. through Hill's World Turned Upside Down in the 70s, about the time Kevin Brownlow was creating his movie. Much later, after Christopher Hill gave a talk (on Bunyan), I asked him about the Diggers from the sixties.

I noted, that Emmet Grogan's autobiography, Ringolevio mentions that they decided on calling their NYC group (transplanted to San Francisco) the Diggers after reading an English history book.

I asked what that the book would have been since WTUD came out after the Digger moment.

He smiled with delight to remind me, of course, that he had been writing about the Diggers at length at least since the edited collection of documents, The Good Old Cause, in 1949.   

Cinema and Bourgeois Historical Consciousness-

Winstanley (1975): A rigorous and unsentimental account of England’s first communists

Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s Winstanley deserves to be far better known than it is. Made on a shoestring over several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and shot in a stark, almost ascetic black and white, the film recounts the brief and doomed attempt by Gerrard Winstanley and a band of landless poor to cultivate common ground at St George’s Hill, Surrey, in 1649 — an episode largely written out of the popular memory of the English Revolution, in which the establishment narrative prefers to dwell on constitutional wrangling between Crown and Parliament rather than on the class forces beneath it.

That the film exists at all is remarkable. Brownlow and Mollo financed it independently, outside the structures of the British film industry, with a budget that would barely cover catering on a studio production. The cast, drawn overwhelmingly from historical re‑enactment societies and ordinary volunteers rather than professional actors, gives the film an unpolished, documentary-like authenticity that no amount of studio finance could purchase. Faces are weathered, movements unrehearsed, speech halting in a way that paradoxically brings the seventeenth century closer than any glossier costume drama has managed. This aesthetic choice is not incidental but political.

The historiography of the English Revolution that emerged from the postwar period — above all in the work of Christopher Hill, whose account of the radical undercurrents of the 1640s gave the Diggers and Ranters their due as serious historical actors rather than eccentric footnotes — insisted that the revolution had a submerged current far more radical than Cromwell’s Independency, one that anticipated later socialist and communist thought by centuries. Winstanley’s own writings, with their demand that the earth “be made a common treasury for all” and their attack on buying and selling, on landlordism, on the very basis of private property, place him unmistakably in that current. Brownlow and Mollo’s film, whatever its limitations, is one of the few serious attempts by anyone to bring this history to a mass audience through the medium of cinema.

The film’s weaknesses are real. Cromwell never appears, a curious absence given that he — far more than Fairfax, who does — was the chief architect of the crushing of the Levellers, Diggers and the left wing of the revolution generally, and his political logic (that the “levelling principle” if allowed to run its course would abolish the distinction between landlord and tenant altogether, and must therefore be suppressed) is essential to understanding why the Digger colony was doomed almost from its founding. Its absence leaves a gap in the film’s account of the forces arrayed against Winstanley: the violence he faced came not only from hostile local landowners and the soldiery but from the political calculation of the new bourgeois state consolidating itself in the aftermath of the king’s execution. A film with greater resources might have found room to dramatize that conflict more fully. Yet this is a criticism of degree, not of kind.

What Brownlow and Mollo achieve, with almost nothing, is a portrait of poverty, hunger and resolve that avoids both sentimentality and condescension — the two besetting sins of nearly every subsequent attempt at “peasant” historical drama. The commune’s poverty is shown as material fact, not picturesque suffering; its members are not saints but people driven to an extraordinary political conclusion by extraordinary circumstances. Miles Halliwell’s Winstanley is not an inspirational speechmaker but a man working out, with visible effort, what it might mean to act on the conviction that the earth belongs to no one and to everyone.

Brownlow made the film at a moment — the tail end of the 1960s radicalization — when the question of what had gone wrong with official politics pressed on him directly; he later spoke of his disillusionment with a Labour Party and Conservative Party that had become indistinguishable from one another. That disillusionment does not make the film didactic or present‑minded in any crude sense — there is no attempt to dress the seventeenth century up as an allegory of 1968 — but it does explain the seriousness with which the film treats its subject, and its refusal to condescend to a movement whose defeat did not make it any less prescient.

Cinema and Bourgeois Historical Consciousness

This seriousness also marks Winstanley out from the broader landscape of British historical cinema, which has long been shaped by the ideological limits of bourgeois historical consciousness. Bourgeois culture can tolerate Cromwell the statesman, Fairfax the gentleman, even the Levellers as proto‑liberals. What it cannot accommodate — what it must repress — is a movement that exposes the class foundations of the society that remembers it. The Diggers are unassimilable because they represent a negation of the very property relations on which bourgeois society rests. To show them truthfully is to show that capitalism was not the inevitable outcome of the seventeenth century but the result of a political defeat.

Mainstream cinema cannot show this defeat because it cannot show the class struggle that produced it. The conventions of bourgeois historical drama — the focus on “great men,” the fetish for costume, the smoothing of conflict into personal dilemmas — obscure the structural antagonisms that drive history. Cromwell becomes a man wrestling with conscience rather than the representative of a rising bourgeois order; the Levellers become democratic idealists rather than the petty‑bourgeois left wing of a revolution whose logic they could not control; the Diggers disappear entirely or are rendered as picturesque eccentrics.

Winstanley breaks this pattern not through rhetorical radicalism but through its aesthetic refusal of heritage cinema. Its stark photography, non‑professional cast, and attention to hunger, cold and labour reject the visual luxuries through which bourgeois cinema domesticates the past. The film’s poverty becomes a political resource: it forces the seventeenth century to appear as a world of material struggle rather than decorative nostalgia. In doing so, it exposes the ideological poverty of mainstream historical cinema, which cannot imagine a past in which capitalism was not the horizon of human development.

The rarity of such a film is itself a historical fact. Bourgeois society can tolerate many kinds of dissent, but it cannot tolerate a representation of its own birth as a moment of counter‑revolution. To show the Diggers truthfully is to show that capitalism emerged through the suppression of a communist alternative — and that is a truth bourgeois cinema, almost by definition, cannot speak.

Conclusion

More than three and a half centuries after St George’s Hill, the conditions that produced Winstanley’s movement — landlessness, social inequality, a political establishment offering no way out — have not disappeared; if anything, the gulf between the propertied and the propertyless has widened enormously since 1975. Winstanley is not, and does not pretend to be, a complete history of the revolution’s left wing. But as a serious, unglamorized attempt to put the Diggers and their ideas before an audience, it remains close to unique, and repays the effort of seeking it out.

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

Correspondence On Speeches Of Oliver Cromwell, 1644-1658 (1901) [Paperback] , Charles L. Stainer (Editor)

Chris Thompson Wrote

Oliver Cromwell's early years before 1640 have recently been illuminated by the work of Andrew Barclay in his "Electing Cromwell. The Making of a Politician", published by Pickering and Chatto in February, 2011. John Morrill review it enthusiastically in the May, 2011 edition of History Today.

Christopher Thompson´s blog can be found at http://earlymodernhistory1.blogspot.com/

 

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.