Review: The Crimson Ribbon by Katherine Clements ISBN-10: 1472204220 11 Sep 2014

The Crimson Ribbon is a very well written and researched debut historical novel by Katherine Clements.  The supreme test of a historical novel is how well the author blends fictional characters with real-life figures and events. The Crimson Ribbons passes that test.

The central character of the book is Ruth Flowers, a very believable creation of the author's imagination. Flower's life intersects with the real-life figures of Oliver Cromwell and Elizabeth Poole.

Clements treatment of Cromwell and Poole is very disciplined and accurate. It is always tempting for a novelist to play fast and loose with history and historical figures. Cromwell is a very well-known and written about figure and does not play a too greater part in the book. Poole, on the other hand, is not well known, and Clements has a bit more space to explore her life creatively.

The opening chapter of the book is very violent and explores the treatment of women who stepped out of line with the authorities. The English revolution brought about a significant politicisation of all sectors of society none more so than women. In the 17th century, England women were allowed to be seen but not heard.

While it was dangerous for men to question the existing political and economic setup, for women at the beginning of the 17th century, it was nearly impossible. But women of all classes managed to be heard, and some cases very loudly. The explosion of printing presses enabled women with little money to spread their ideas and propaganda to a wider audience than ever before.

But this had a severe price. The ruling elite correctly saw this radicalisation of women as a direct threat to their power and privileges. The women who spoke up, formed groups and joined the radical parties such as the Levellers Fifth Monarchists and even Baptists or Quakers were seen as a plague and in many cases labelled witches.

According to the writer John Carey "a woman could be publicly humiliated, ducked or bridled merely for scolding her husband, neighbours – or government". The book highlights the precarious nature of women who step outside the bounds of society. The descent into poverty, prostitution and sometimes death was all too real. Given the growth, today of young women who for one reason have left their family home and have descended into poverty and homelessness with little protection from the state shows that despite the novel being set in the 17th century it has a contemporary feel to it.

Clements character Ruth is well written and believable. The fact that real-life characters similar to Flowers existed during the war has largely passed historians by. Another aspect of the war that has only recently been addressed is the tremendous growth of printing presses during the revolution. Clements's book appears to be the first novel to broach the subject.[1] Much the way the internet has given a voice to people who would never be heard so did the illegal printing presses in the 17th century.

Having read her writings, it is clear that  Elizabeth Poole was a very political young woman. She was close to a few of the radical groups that were prevalent at the time and was close to the Fifth Monarchists.

The story of Ruth Flowers is used by Clements to keep the novel ticking over. However the most interesting real-life character is Elizabeth Poole. It is clear from extensive research on Poole that not much is known about her life; even her birth and death are not agreed. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, she was born 1622? died in or after 1668.

Poole's main claim to fame was her intervention into the debate over the fate of Charles 1st. According to Manfred Brod "It was into this situation that Elizabeth Poole entered towards the end of December as a kind of consultant prophetess. After some preliminary hearings of which little is known, she was received in a plenary session of the council of officers on 29 December. She told of a vision she had had, in which the army, as a healthy young man, cured the nation, as a sick woman, of its disease. [2]

The power of the army, she explained, came from God and must not be given away. Several officers, including Ireton, spoke to approve of her presentation. Immediately afterwards, Lilburne came in with a petition, A Plea for Common-Right and Freedom, which contained detailed proposals for the conversion of the council of officers to a national executive body. Poole had been brought in to play a mediating role between officers and Levellers.

There appears to be no proof that Poole met Lilburne but is clear that she was very sympathetic towards him and the Levellers and used their documents in her arguments against Cromwell and Ireton.

"I Have considered the agreement of the people that is before you, and I am very jealous lest you should betray your trust in it (in as much as the Kingly Power is faln into your hands) in giving it up to the people; for thereby you give up the trust committed to you, and in so doing you will prove your selves more treacherous then they that went before you, they being no wayes able to improve it without you. You justly blame the King for betraying his trust, and the Parliament for betraying theirs: This is the great thing I have to say to you, Betray not you your trust".[3]

She then according to Brod in 1653 "Poole forced her way into the pulpit of the chapel of Somerset House in London and preached in favour of Lilburne, then on trial for his life. The congregation was a socially prominent one, and the action was widely and sensationally reported in the newsbooks".[4]

Despite being strong on plot and history, there is an overriding weakness in the book, which is the near absence of politics.  Clements use of real figures such as William Kiffin (1616–1701), while being historically accurate leaves out his political relationship with figures like Poole.

Kiffin in Clements book is correctly portrayed as being extremely hostile to Poole's indiscretions. However his real hostility is her perceived association with the radical groups, especially the Levellers and Fifth Monarchists, according to Michael A. G. Haykin "During the late 1640s and 1650s Kiffin emerged as a skilled spokesman for the fledgeling Baptist movement. In 1646 Kiffin and Knollys were involved in a public debate in Coventry with two paedobaptists, John Bryan and Obadiah Grew. Kiffin was a signatory to the dedication in Walwins Wiles (1649), an attack on the Levellers usually attributed to John Price".[5]

According to Brod "Kiffin also played a prominent role in the expansion of the movement beyond London. Extant documents from places as far afield as Wales and Northumberland, Ireland and the Midlands reveal Kiffin's involvement in planning the establishment of new churches and associations, then in giving them advice and counsel, and generally in providing stability to the Baptist cause during these early days of the movement. One critical moment came in May 1658, when, at the meeting of the western association of Baptist churches in Dorchester, some individuals who were sympathetic to the potentially subversive politics of the Fifth Monarchy movement sought to convince the representatives of the churches in the association to espouse publicly the ideals and goals of this party. Kiffin, who was present with other representatives from the churches in London, successfully persuaded the western association not to commit itself in this direction. While some of the Fifth Monarchy movement appears to have been relatively harmless students of the Bible, others had definite revolutionary tendencies and were convinced that they should take an active, even violent, role in the fulfilment of the prophecies of Daniel. Open and widespread adherence to these views by the Particular Baptists would have had harmful and serious repercussions for the Baptist movement."[6]

Historical novels are notoriously hard to place within the current historiography of the English revolution. Academic work is easier. While researching her novel, Clements mentions Christopher Hill as one of her influences. Hill, despite being an academic historian belonged to a group of Communist Party historians who pioneered the history from below genre.  Clements book is a historical novel from below.

I liked the book. It works on two levels; it is a very well written book, and the storyline is plausible. The history is well researched and accurate up to a point. An examination of the politics of the characters in the book would have made the book a better read.

Apart from this nitpicking, I would recommend the book to those interested in the subject. The Crimson Ribbon has been extensively reviewed both in the mainstream media and given the number of blogs mentioned in the blurb quite heavily in the blogosphere deserves a wide readership.

---

[1]  See also Gutenberg's Apprentice - 2014 by Alix Christie

[2] http://www.oxforddnb.com

[3] From the writings of Elizabeth Poole http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/index.html

[4] http://www.oxforddnb.com

[5] http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15521- Michael A. G. Haykin

[6] Kiffin, William (1616–1701), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15521

Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill - Lyttelton Theatre

The Play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire by Caryl Churchill is currently playing to packed audiences at the Lyttelton Theatre in London. The play has been well received by a diverse audience.

Past reviews have been on the whole appreciative. The Financial Times said “Churchill shows us an age of unbelievable fluidity in the social order...” The play reminds us sombrely that such moment of potential pass: they either come to nothing in the first place, or the old order is soon restored. Michelle Terry and Helena Lymbery each excel in the Putney sequence”.

The play is set amidst the English Civil war so knowledge of this event is a must before seeing or reading the play. The blurb for the play by Churchill sets the scene “1649. After years of bloody civil conflict, an exhausted England is in the hands of radical extremists. Turning the country upside down, Parliament’s soldiers kill the King and take power into their own hands. Theirs is a war to establish Heaven on Earth. This is the story of the most terrifying decade in our history. Struggling to find a voice in the face of unspeakable suffering, a group of ordinary men and women cling to the belief that they will be shown a glimpse of unspeakable, transcendent glory”.

Churchill wrote the play in 1976 and the first productions of the play have a Kafkaesque sparseness to them with only a table and six chairs for props. In contrast, today’s production is a little more expensive but in places is visually stunning? Having not been performed for a good while the play marked as one writer put it “a major UK revival of Churchill’s seminal play brought to the stage by Polly Findlay and the stellar creative team behind Thyestes (Arcola) and Eigengrau (Bush)". The play also marked Churchill’s first collaboration with the Joint Stock Theatre Group.

In her programme notes Churchill correctly bemoans the fact that the English revolution and particularly its radical groups get scant attention in modern school history. Churchill’s plays concentrates on three main groups the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters. While there are programmatic distinctions between the groups there is much that unites them. While Churchill does not examine the role of Quakers in her play many leading figures of the Levellers, Ranters and Diggers would end their days paid up members of the Quakers.

One word of warning the play as far as I can see does not follow any chronological order. One critic cautioned that audiences may “find themselves disoriented by the swirl of events and even by the style of storytelling. In all productions it seems that six actresses and actors repeatedly switch roles while playing dozens of characters. Identification is often deliberately blurred.

Churchill throughout her career to date has tackled complex historical questions in a simple but thought-provoking way. Earlier plays have included “Fen" which was about farmworkers in England and "Mad Forest" on the Romanian revolution. She has also not been scared to use theatrical different techniques such as the use collage form.

The plays title taken from the Digger Pamphlet The Light Shining in Buckinghamshire [1]“JEHOVAH ELLOHIM Created Man after his own likenesse and image, which image is his Sonne Jesus, Heb. I. verse 2. who is the image of the Invisible God: now Man being made after Gods image or likenesse, and created by the word of God, which word was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us; which word was life, and that life the light of men, I Joh. 2. this light I take to be that pure spirit in man which we call Reason, which discusseth things right and reflecteth, which we call conscience; from all which there issued out that golden rule or law, which we call equitie: the sum me of which is, saith Jesus, whatsoever yee would that men should doe to you, doe to them, this is the Law and the Prophets; and James cals it the royall Law, and to live from this principle is calld a good conscience: and the creature Man was priviledged with being Lord over other inferior creatures, but not over his own kinde; for all men being a like priviledged by birth, so all men were to enjoy the creatures a like without proprietie one more than the other, all men by the grant of God are a like free, and every man individuall, that is to say, no man was to Lord or command over his own kinde: neither to enclose the creatures to his own use, to the impoverishing of his neigh- bours, see the Charter, I. Gen. from 26. vers. to the end of the Chapt. and see the renewing of the Charter to Noah and his Sons, Gen. 9. from the I. vers. to the 18.

Despite much of the language of the play being couched in religious phraseology it is clear that many people were starting to examine their place in the world and were starting to express a profound disagreement with the way they were being governed.

As David north wrote “until the early seventeenth century, even educated people still generally accepted that the ultimate answers to all the mysteries of the universe and the problems of life were to be found in the Old Testament. But its unchallengeable authority had been slowly eroding, especially since the publication of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus in the year of his death in 1543, which dealt the death blow to the Ptolemaic conception of the universe and provided the essential point of departure for the future conquests of Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johann Kepler (1571-1630) and, of course, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Intellectually, if not yet socially, the liberation of man from the fetters of Medieval superstition and the political structures that rested upon it, was well under way.[2]

The Play

The play consists of two acts and examines the revolutionary events before and after the  Putney debates of 1647 . The first group examined by Churchill are the Levellers. They were by far the biggest and most organized of the revolutionary groups. The high tide for this group was the Putney debates and Churchill correctly places an abridged account of them at the center of the whole play.

That Levellers were not the only group to couch their writings and speeches in religious garb. According to Marx “Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again”.[3]

Putney debates

While much of the play has been written by Churchill she still manages to accurately and skillfully to weave real events and words spoken at the time. By far the strongest part of the play is the partially verbatim transcript of the Putney Debates of 1647, which saw rank and file soldiers and commoners arguing for a broadening of the democratic franchise and an end to social inequality this was opposed by Cromwell, Ireton and other leaders of the revolution.

The quotes for this production come from Geoffrey Robertson’s book[4]. At the Putney Debates Cromwell was clearly taken by surprise by the arguments of the Levellers. But once Cromwell and other grandees recovered their composure they opposed every demand by the Levellers to extend the franchise. 

Ireton spoke for the Grandees when he said “no man hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom... that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom.” Thomas Rainsborough a Leveller countered by saying  “I really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.”[5]

The Levellers were defeated at Putney and before long were wiped out as a coherent political organization. The play does attempt to grope for an answer why the Levellers and other revolutionary groups failed to develop the revolution in a more left wing direction. In this matter Churchill fails. But in this failure she is not alone. Accomplished historians like Christopher Hill struggled to provide a significant answer to this conundrum. Hill says “The Leveller conception of free Englishmen was thus restricted, even if much wider, than the embodied in the existing franchise. Their proposals would perhaps have doubled the number of men entitled to vote. But manhood suffrage would have quadrupled it. The generals, generally horrified, pretended at Putney that the Levellers were more democratic than they were”.

It is hardly possible in this review to explore in any great detail but a sober evaluation should be made. The Levellers appeared to take on many of the characteristics of a political party in the years 1645-46. This is a contentious issue and has been disputed. They were the radical wing of the Independent coalition and were responsible for many of modern day political techniques such as mass demonstrations, collecting petitions, leafleting and the lobby of MPs. As an aside William Clarke who provided us with the report of the Putney Debates was an avid collector of books, pamphlets and leaflets found in his collection was over eighty Leveller pamphlets. The Levellers strength mainly lay in London and other towns and had not an insignificant support in the army.

The main plank of its manifesto was the call for a democratic republic in which the House of Commons would be more important than the House of Lords. A Leveller would have a wanted redistribution and extension of the franchise, legal and economic reform on behalf of men of small property, artisans, yeoman, small merchants, and the very layers which made up the composition of the Levellers themselves.

The Levellers themselves were part of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the true ‘Ideologues of the revolution’ and had a capacity for abstract thought. Levellers also wished to democratise the gilds and the City of London, a decentralization of justice and the election of local governors and stability of tenure for copyholders. While the Levellers were sympathetic to the poor, which stemmed from their religion they had no programme to bring about social change, they never advocated a violent overturning of society.

Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Levellers constitute a mass movement. The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for the lot of the poor to be made more equitable. One of their members John Cooke explained “I am no advocate for the poore further then to provide bread and necessaries for them, without which, life cannot be maintained, let rich men feast, and the poore make hard meale, but let them have bread sufficient”.

Knowing that they could not come to power through the presently constituted electorate the Levellers attempted to find constitutional ways of getting round it. A draft constitution produced in 1647 called the Agreement of the People declared that the state had broken down in civil war and must be refounded on the basis of certain fundamental “native rights” safeguarded even from a sovereign went against one of the most fundamental reasons for the war in the first place. The Agreement amongst other demands, called for biennial parliaments, franchise reform, only those who contracted into the new state by accepting the agreement were to have the vote.

The one real chance the Levellers had to put their ideas into practice was to gain control of the army. The development of the new model army was central to the outcome of the English civil war, who controlled the army controlled state power. The Levellers had agitated for the arrears of wages to be paid and that indemnity for actions committed during the civil war be granted. This agitation had won them considerable support in the army.

In the end as Churchill writes in the Play the only thing the Levellers got out of Putney was the promise of Cromwell to take things to a committee.

To put it more simply the generals deliberately exaggerated the radicalism of a majority of the Levellers in order to label them extremists and to mobilise their own supporters against them. Cromwell correctly recognised that if the franchise was widened it would threaten his position in parliament. Again Hill explains “Defending the existing franchise Cromwell son in law, Henry Ireton rejected the doctrine ‘that by a man being born here, he shall have a share in that power that shall dispose of the lands here and of all things here’. The vote was rightly restricted to those who ‘had a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom’. Namely, ‘the person in whom all lands lies and that incorporation’s in whom all trading lies”.

Ireton claimed the present House of Commons represented them and went on to ask by what right the vote was demanded for all free Englishmen. If by natural right, taking up the Levellers point that they should be free. Who could freely dispose of their own labour? Then Ireton could see no reason why men had as much natural right to property as to the vote. He went on to point out that if you give them the vote, then they will be the majority in parliament and they will give equal property rights to everybody. This argument completely confused Rainborowe and undermined his argument.

Cromwell was acutely aware that the ideas of the Levellers and the smaller groups within them such as the Diggers were becoming a dangerous business. Cromwell said of what he called the ‘lunaticks’ “You must break these men or they will break you” Cromwell declared. By May 1649 the Levellers had been defeated in battle and their influence in the army and in civilian life disappeared.

In many respects, the true revolutionary of the civil war was Cromwell and his New Model Army. While not agreeing with the revisionists that the Levellers were an insignificant movement, they should not also be hyped into something they were not. They were essentially a movement of the lower middle class that sought to extend the franchise on a limited basis. The reason this failed was that the social and economic basis for their ideas had not yet developed in this sense their egalitarian ideas were a foretaste of future social movements, not communistic but more in the tradition of social democracy.

Conclusion

The size and variety of the audiences for the play denote that ideas discussed have a deep resonance with the people today and the play does have a contemporary feel to it. The questions of democracy and of social inequality, the treatment of women, wars and revolution and the subjugation of Ireland is in many senses still with us. The play works on many levels. People without a knowledge of the Levellers will still get a lot out of it. The more academically minded person will also have their intellect satisfied. I would recommend the play wholeheartedly.

[1] LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, or A Discovery of the main ground, original Cause of all the Slavery in the world, but cheifly in England: presented by way of a Declaration of many of the welaffected in that County, to all their poore oppessed Country men of England, &c. First Published: 1648, anonymous Digger pamphlet;

Source: From George Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965) 

[2] Equality, the Rights of Man and the Birth of Socialism, By David North 24 October 1996

[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 

[4] The Putney Debates (Revolutions Series) Paperback – 22 Oct 2007

[5] —Putney Debates record book 1647, Worcester College, Oxford, MS 65. Spelling and capitalisation as in the original manuscript.

A Critical Review of A People’s History of Scotland- by Chris Bambery Verso, 320pp, £12.99

It is usual for new history books to fall into two broad categories. One is the history book that has no obvious connection to recent historical or political events. The second is a book that is very political and is released to coincide with ongoing historical or political events. It is the second category that Chris Bambery's new book falls into in that it is deeply connected to nationalist politics in Scotland.

As the title alludes, this is a history of the 'ordinary people' of Scotland. According to one writer it "looks beyond the kings and queens, the battles and bloody defeats of the past. It captures the history that matters today, stories of freedom fighters, suffragettes, the workers of Red Clydeside, and the hardship and protest of the treacherous Thatcher era".

I have several problems with this book. To begin with, Bambery never defines what he means by the people. Bambery's unrefined thinking lends itself to him making empty generalisations. In the realm of philosophy, these are known as abstract identities. What is bad about this type of imprecise thinking is that it presents according to  David North an "inadequate mental representations of reality: The material world simply does not consist of such internally undifferentiated phenomena".[1]

Bambery promises us "a corrective to the usual history of kings and queens, victorious battles and bloody defeats." The first hundred pages or so the author struggles to find any of these ordinary people. The only ordinary people he finds were people who made the tactical difference at Bannockburn because they were mistaken for reinforcements by the English troops.

Bambery's choice of the genre of people's history has become popular again. This form of historical study was made extremely popular by the Communist Party Historians Group. The problem is that pseudo-left groups like the Socialist Workers Party which Bambery used to belong to have unfortunately assimilated worst aspects of this genre which is a nationalist outlook.

It is especially important when reading this kind of history that the reader knows the politics of the historian or as Edward Hallett Carr was apt to say "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]

I am not saying that Bambery is a dull dog, but there is a surprising absence of both his politics and of the organisation he once belonged to perspective on Scottish history. I find this a little strange despite his break with the SWP he does not say anything about their position regarding Scottish history.

Bambery has belonged to several pseudo-left groups in the UK. He began as a member of the now-defunct the International Marxist Group he then moved to the Socialist Workers Party. He resigned from the SWP in 2011 having served on their Central Committee and joined International Socialist Group. The SWP lost a significant number of its members to the ISG who were politically active in Scotland.

Bambery shares much of the SWP positions on the recent independence campaign in Scotland.  The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) lined up behind the SNP in the Yes campaign, proclaiming separatism as the only basis on which to oppose austerity and militarism.

The ISG's latest articles go so far as to call for alliances with the SNP, asserting that "the Left will look like a backward break on the movement if it does not initiate the support of the SNP where necessary".[3]

The IMG alongside the SNP believe Scotland is a classless nation. Bambery ignores the fact that Scottish nationalism and the SNP has always had a pronounced right-wing element. As a wsws.org article points out "Class antagonism is a thing quite foreign to the Scottish spirit. It was unknown here until it was imported from England. In Scotland, there is no such inherent feeling of separation between classes."[4]

While this is not an academic history of Scotland, some of Bambery's comments are less than precise, and in many cases, his history contains an absence of class-based history. Bambery's method has very little to do with historical materialism.

Given the sweep of history, you could forgive the author for brevity when it comes to certain periods of Scottish history. But the price he pays is a lowering of a critical analysis of the movements and figures portrayed in the 330 or so pages. Perhaps not so forgivable is his repeated glorification of myths and invention of traditions that permeate Scottish historiography. This flaw in Bambery's approach is neatly captured by his statement, 'Legends will appear throughout this book, and in a way, it does not matter if they are real, because a legend can take on a life of its own and so inspire a future generation.'[5]

Bambery seems to have uncritically adopted Hegel's advice when he said:  "Every nation has its imagery, its gods, angels, devils or saints who live in the nation's traditions, whose stories and deeds the nurse tells her charges and so wins them over by impressing their imagination." [6]

Chris Cassells in his review put it succinctly when he said that Bambery fails "to explore the complex and contradictory relationship between the history and the myth, prevents the book from becoming anything more than the greatest hits of radical – a slippery political term at the best of times – Scottish movements ". His decision after twenty-three pages to recommend Mel Gibson's film Braveheart because it gives "a good account of William Wallace's life." Confirms this observation.

Bambery's glorification of Scottish figures from history comes to the fore when dealing with the Scottish Enlightenment. It is undoubtedly true that Scotland produced some important figures during the enlightenment period, but even these figures were part of an international fraternity, and many of them never conceived their views as promoting nationalism. Bambery's raising them above other European figures is both wrong and will increase nationalist sentiment.

For certain subjects, the use of the people's History Genre or narrative history is both useful and enjoyable. Bringing to the attention of a wide audience, people whom history or historians have forgotten is both legitimate and needed. However, it is not very useful when dealing with very complex historical processes.

Bambery sees Scottish history through nationally tinted glasses. Its ruling elites were more democratic. Its enlightenment figures better and the Scottish working-class more militant and left-wing. This relentless populism flies in the face of history.

Bambery's reckless promotion of Scottish exceptionalism tends to whitewash actual historical events.  After all, even a leading member of the Scottish bourgeoisie Thomas Johnston was forced to describe the Scottish nobility as "a selfish, ferocious, famishing, unprincipled set of hyenas, from whom at no time, and in no way, has the country derived any benefit whatsoever". Bambery for some reason sought to cover up whom Johnston was first describing him as a "19th-century historian" and only later identifying him as "Scotland's most charismatic Secretary of State".

Bambery's nationalist outlook is reflected in the number of historical events that are not even attempted to be examined within their proper international context. Perhaps the most glaring one is Bambery's attitude towards the English bourgeois revolution. Given the importance of this historical event, it gets very little space in the book.

Bambery given his extensive knowledge of the Communist Party's use of the history from below genre would have known the tendency amongst Communist Party historians and other radical writers to portray radicals such as the Leveller as struggling against foreign invaders.

Ann Talbot believes that a large number of the Communist Party historians maintained an essentially national approach to the English revolution, and not placing it an international context.

They had in her words a "tendency to romanticise the religious movements of the period and to be too dismissive of their rational, intellectual descendants such as Newton and Locke. In part, these characteristics arise from the national orientation of his social class and reflect even in Hill vestiges of the Whig outlook that imagined a peculiarly English political tradition rooted in millennial seventeenth-century visionaries like Bunyan that was entirely separate from Enlightenment thought. More significantly it reflects the influence of the popular front politics and national outlook of Stalinism".[7]

Unfortunately, Bambery shares the same outlook as the Communist party. Except his nationalism is not English, it is Scottish. In this book, Bambery rejects the theory of the English bourgeois revolution. He puts forward the premise that the revolution was, in fact, a "war of three kingdoms".

The central premise of this argument is succinctly described by Jane Ohlmeyer when she said: "the English Civil War was just one of an interlocking set of conflicts that encompassed the British Isles in the mid-seventeenth century".[8]

I do not know Bambery that well to say that this has always been his take on the English revolution, but it certainly was not his former party. It is not in the realm of this article to discuss at any length the extent that the SWP has moved away from the central premise of the English bourgeois revolution, but the fact that Bambery held a revisionist and conservative position on this seminal event is an indicator of the type of dissent that has existed in the last decade inside the SWP.

The main theme of this book from the first few pages to the last is to give the impression that Scotland from a very early period was a nation slowly making itself through its struggles against oppression. Bambery asserts that 'freedom was finally won on the field of battle at Bannockburn,' the concept that Scotland was a nation before 1707 permeates a growing body of work of both politicians, writers and historians alike.

The different strands of Scottish nationalism believe that Scotland was a nation before the 1707 Act of Union. Alan McCombes and Tommy Sheridan brag that "Scotland is one of the oldest nations in Europe",[9]this belief that Scottish people have been oppressed for centuries is historically inaccurate and leads to the tendency for workers on both sides to the border to be played against each other.

Bambery plays very fast and loose with this history. The Scottish bourgeoisie and aristocracy were in pretty bad shape before 1707. Before the union, the failure of the Darien Scheme in the 1690s had a massive economic impact. The plan, which was to build a predominantly Scottish trading colony in Panama ended in financial disaster for Scotland's aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

While it true that large sections of the population opposed the union the bourgeoisie and aristocracy in Scotland saw that their sectional interests were best served by the union.

Writer Neal Ascherson states that "It is a cliché that the Scots' punched above their weight' in the empire, and it is misleading. They seldom competed directly with the English or Irish, but established distinct and almost exclusively Scottish fiefdoms: the fur trade, the tobacco trade, the jute industry, the opium business in China, the 'hedge-banking' outfits in Australia, the executive levels of the East India Company…. Scottish capital was thus a full partner in the expansion of British imperialism. This embraced deep involvement in the slave plantations of the Caribbean and American South."

To conclude, this has not been an easy book to review and given the wealth of history covered and in some cases, not covered further articles on this subject will appear in the future. I do not feel the need to repeat my many criticisms of this book. I do like the genre of people's history when it is done well, but Bambery's promotion of Scottish nationalism dressed up as Scottish history leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

---

[1] A critical review of Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners By David North

[2] What Is history

[3] internationalsocialist.org.uk/index.php/2011/06/salmonds-majority-in-the-age-of-austerity/

[4] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/02/scot-f03.html

[5] A People's History of Scotland by Chris Bambery

[6] Hegel 1795 (Berne) The Positivity of the Christian Religion

[7] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/03/hill-m25.html

[8] ://www.historytoday.com/jane-ohlmeyer/wars-three-kingdoms#sthash.vM6OYlyC.dpuf

[9] T Sheridan and A McCombes Imagine Edinburgh 2000, p180.

Tom Reilly's Call For A Conference on Cromwell In Ireland

I would like to try to organise a seminar/debate/conference – call it what you like – to finally determine (inasmuch as we can from this distance) what actually happened at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649. This is in particular regard to the deliberate massacre of large scale unarmed and innocent civilians. I was wondering if you would be interested in helping me get this off the ground. I have no idea where to start.

Here’s the reason, in case you either don’t know or forget:

In 2004, Folens published Earthlink 5th Class. On page 87 the following words are printed: ‘Cromwell captured Drogheda. About 3,000 men, women and children were killed.’ The Educational Company of Ireland released Timeline in 2008. A paragraph on page 223 reads, ‘He [Cromwell] first laid siege to Drogheda. He was determined to make an example of the town. When he captured it he slaughtered the entire population.’

You ALL know that this is wrong. We’re still teaching bullshit to kids in Ireland. Bullshit that engenders anti-British sentiment. Here in 2015! Seriously?!

As you can see I have copied several early modern experts with this message. Many of you might consider me to be a loud-mouth, obnoxious, insufferable loose cannon. 

Which is fine. My wife and kids know who I really am. But that's not the point. Surely historical integrity demands that we stop the rot here. This subject is still highly emotive where I come from. Anybody Irish will agree.

I fully expect this e-mail to be dismissed by most of you in the same way that my work has been and continues to be. I would be happy if you would prove me wrong.

Please help me make a positive impact on what was such a negative part of Irish history so we can all finally move on. Because we haven't.

John Gurney and the English Revolution

"Action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing"– Gerrard Winstanley

There is no denying that the death of John Gurney was a sad and terrible moment for both his family and the history community. His passing at such a young age of 54 of cancer, removes from the scene a gifted historian whose work was starting to produce results on a level of the great Christopher Hill, with whom he met at Oxford.

Gurney was not a Marxist historian, but his latest work published after his death showed a profound shift to the Left in his thinking. His paper Gerard Winstanley and the Left is insightful and thought-provoking. It is certainly one of the best analyses of left-wing historiography of the English Revolution.

Contained within his writings is an excellent example of the Historians Craft. I never met him but had some correspondence with him towards the end of his life. Even with this brief connection, I could tell he was a historian of great ability and tenacity. This was recognised by his friends and colleagues. In a tribute to him, Scott Ashley wrote "John was someone who in both his professional and personal lives could sniff out a story and extract the gold from the archive that made time and place shine fresh. To walk with him around North Shields was to see the streets and buildings with different eyes, not only in the sometimes prosaic now but as part of a more poetic then, as home places to Commonwealth-era churchmen, eighteenth-century ship captains, Victorian professionals. Among the many things I learned from John during the years, I knew him was that being a historian and making a home, physical and imaginative, were part of a common enterprise" [1].

Gurney spent most of his historical life studying the area around where he lived. However, his work on the Diggers and Gerard Winstanley was far from parochial. In many ways, he was instrumental in bringing a fresh perspective to the Diggers and Winstanley. He produced two books on them Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution published in 2007 and Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy of 2013[2].  Both books took our understanding of the Diggers to a new level.

John had many skills as a historian, but three leap out at you. He could explain complicated historical issues in a way that anyone could understand. Secondly, he brought his subject to life and thirdly his stamina to spend significant amounts of time "grubbing in the archives".

To deep mine, an archive may to a layperson seem odd, but this ability gave him a more in-depth insight into the complicated problems faced by revolutionaries such as Winstanley. These seventeenth-century revolutionaries were working without precedents in which to guide their revolution.

If Gerard Winstanley is more well known and highly thought of today, it is because of Gurney. It is hard not to agree with Michael Wood's claim that Winstanley's place in the pantheon of English literature and political thought should be higher than previously thought. Wood believes he should be put alongside Hobbes and Harrington as one of the great writers of English prose of the seventeenth century. We should not forget that Winstanley was also a man of action as well as words. In 17^th century eyes, he was a dangerous revolutionary.

Historians Craft

Gurney's attempt to recreate the past and therefore understand it is done with much empathy and imagination. There is also a doggedness and intellectual objectivity about his work. While some historians seek to make an objective understanding of history, Gurney was almost religious in his pursuit of historical truth.

Gurney's work exhibited a disciplined approach to complex historical questions. He recognised that he did not know everything about his area of study. But his work did show honesty which enabled him to have a greater understanding of his role in the presentation of facts.

Gurney was also mindful of presenting his work in a way that was never apart from its moment in time. Gurney's approach was similar to the French historian of feudal society, Marc Bloch, who wrote in his book, The Historian's Craft "In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This applies to every evolutionary stage, our own, and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: 'Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.'

Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy of 2013.

The book is meticulously researched, scholarly and well-presented. Gurney provides us with a good understanding of the origins of the Digger movement. It has been praised for setting an "extremely high standard for local histories of this sort and must rank alongside similar studies such as Eamon Duffy's acclaimed The Voices of Morebath."

Gurney was clear that the study of Winstanley should be not solely of historical value but must have a contemporary resonance. He says: Today, knowledge of Winstanley is widespread, and he has become one of the best-known figures from the period of the English Revolution. There have been numerous plays, novels, TV dramas, songs and films, and Winstanley has often been cited as an inspirational figure by politicians of the Left.

More specifically, his ideas and achievements have remained prescient, inspiring generations of activists and social movements". He believed that Winstanley "has in recent years also been invoked by freeganism, squatters, guerrilla gardeners, allotment campaigners, social entrepreneurs, greens and peace campaigners; and both Marxists and libertarians have laid claim Who was to him as a significant precursor".

Gurney's book is invaluable when it starts to trace the origins of Winstanley's radicalism. Gurney did not subscribe to the theory that it was solely down to the war radicalising people such as Winstanley. Gurney believed that radical views were being expressed all over the country before the outbreak of the civil war.

In a previous essay, Gurney elaborates on why the Digger's achieved a level of local support in Cobham "Local support for the Diggers may also have been connected with Cobham's marked traditions of social conflict. The manor of Cobham, a former possession of Chertsey Abbey, had passed into the hands of Robert Gavell in 1566 and was to remain with his family until 1708. During the later sixteenth century the Gavell family became involved in a long and protracted series of disputes with their tenants. In a case brought in the court of Requests by William Wrenn, a Cobham husbandman, Robert Gavell was accused of overturning manorial customs and of infringing his tenants' rights, by seeking to extract more rent than was customarily paid, and by spoiling the timber on Wrenn's copyhold. He was also charged with attempting to escape the payment of tax by shifting the burden on to his tenants, laying 'a hevy burden uppon the poorer tennants contrarye to the Ancient usage, equitie and Consciens'Actions against Robert Gavell and his son Francis were resumed in the court of Chancery during the 1590s by tenants seeking to halt the continued assault on manorial custom" [3].

Who Were The Diggers

Gurney was one of the few contemporary historians involved in the study of Early Modern England who understood the importance of class in understanding the English revolution and its radical wing.

The Diggers were part of a group of men that sought to understand the profound political and social changes that were taking place at the beginning of the 17th century. They were the right 'Ideologues of the revolution' and had a capacity for abstract thought. While the Diggers were sympathetic to the poor, this stemmed from their religion, they had no programme to bring about social change; they never advocated a violent overturning of society. Their class outlook, that being of small producers, conditioned their ideology. At no stage did the Diggers or that matter did the larger group the Levellers constitute a mass movement. The contradiction between their concern for the poor and their position of representatives of the small property owners caused some tension. They had no opposition to private property, and therefore they accepted that inequalities would always exist, they merely argued for a lot of the poor to be made more equitable.

Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution published in 2007

Gurney's study of his local area in this case Surrey was not done from a parochial viewpoint. A survey of local events correctly done can add to a more broad and objective understanding of events.

Brave Community was the result of painstaking investigations. Somewhat surprisingly it was the first full-length modern study of the Diggers. 

It was well-received by academic historians. One review of Brave Community by Henk Looijesteijn described it as "a study that successfully blends social and intellectual history in recreating the environment in which one of the most original thinkers of mid-seventeenth-century England originated and acted. As such, this book should be regarded as the starting point for any student of Winstanley and the Digger".

Gerrard Winstanley and the Left

Gurney's last essay Gerrard Winstanley and the Left is a very significant piece of work. It lays the critical groundwork for a further examination of the Left's attitude towards the English revolution. Gurney understood when writing about left-wing historiography on the English Revolution that you had to be aware of the pratfalls especially when writing about the Communist Party Historians Group. One must be cognizant of the enormous amount of ideological baggage these historians carried around. It must be said that some of this baggage was not always in perfect condition.

In many ways, this essay is in microcosm a summation of Gurney's whole body of work. He was very much at the height of his powers when he wrote this article. Gurney acknowledges that it is only recently that the words of Winstanley have been fully appreciated.  However, he believed that it is not the case that nothing of note was written before the 20^th century. He thought that Winstanley's 'extraordinarily rich body of writings' were read and studied between the years 1651 and the 1890s.

As he wrote in the essay "The historical legacy of the Diggers is usually seen as being very different from that of their contemporaries, the Levellers. If the Levellers were misremembered, the Diggers have been understood as being largely forgotten before the 1890s, with professional historians playing little part in their rediscovery.  It took, we are told, the Marxist journalist and politician Eduard Bernstein to rediscover Winstanley quite independently of academic historians when he spent part of his exile in London working on the section on seventeenth-century English radical thinkers for Karl Kautsky's Die Vorla¨ufer des neueren Sozialismus. 

Later, in the 1940s, it was Marxist historians associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain who are said to have picked up Bernstein's baton and created the image of a communist and materialist Winstanley which remains familiar to this day. The Left's responsibility for, and role in, the rediscovery and promotion of the Diggers can, therefore, seem quite clear and uncomplicated. There are, however, a number of problems with this interpretation. For one thing, the Diggers had, before the 1890s, never fallen from public view to the extent often imagined. In fact, it seems that they were reasonably well known over the centuries — and perhaps even more accurately remembered than the mainstream Levellers, who were often confused with them. It is also evident that early detailed research on the Diggers was not confined to the Left and that Bernstein was by no means alone in taking an interest in Winstanley's writings in the 1890s" [4].

Revisionism

Where does Gurney's work fit in with today's in today's historiography of the English Revolution? Due to no fault of his own Gurney's work on Winstanley is an oasis in a desert of revisionism.

As Michael Braddick points out, revisionists have "have tried to cut the English revolution down to size or to cast it in its own terms. In so doing, they naturally also cast a critical eye over the reputation and contemporary significance of its radical heroes".

The historian Mark Kishlansky' has a habit of cutting down the radical heroes of the English Revolution. It is perhaps surprising that he recommends Gurney's book saying "this is a clear-eyed yet sympathetic account of one of the most baffling figures of the English Revolution. Gurney's painstaking research provides a wealth of new information that is assembled into a highly readable narrative. An informative and thought-provoking book."

Kishlansky despite recommending Gurney's book he is keen to downplay Winstanley who according to him was "a small businessman who began his career wholesaling cloth, ended it wholesaling grain, and in between sandwiched a mid-life crisis of epic proportions".

Kishlanksky inadvertently raises an interesting question. What was the relationship between Winstanley's religion, his economic status and his politics? As the Marxist writer Cliff Slaughter says "for the understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity. What is the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure long periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the 'Utopians' wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of social relations to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. 'The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism[5]".

Conclusion

Gurney's work on Winstanley and the Diggers is the start of a new form of historiography on the English Revolution. His work is groundbreaking in many ways and is an antidote to revisionist historiography. Gurney is correct to state there has never been what he calls a definable left-wing interpretation of the Diggers and Winstanley or to be even more precise there has never been a consistent classical Marxist position on the Diggers.  It is hoped that Gurney's work is used to further our knowledge of the radicals of the English Revolution and present a more unified theory as regards these radical gentlemen of the revolution.

[1]  Brave Community: A communal and personal tribute to our friend and colleague, John Gurney (1960-2014)

[2]  https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=john+gurney 

[3] Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger movement in Walton and Cobham- John Gurney

[4] Gerrard Winstanley and the Left-John Gurney.

[5] Religion and Social Revolt Cliff Slaughter Labour Review Vol 3 No 3 June 1958

A Review: Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky 144 pages Publisher: Allen Lane (4 Dec 2014) ISBN-10: 0141979836

"And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come out, thou bloody man, and thou man of Belial: The LORD hath returned upon thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast reigned; and the LORD hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of Absalom thy son: and, behold, thou art taken in thy mischief because thou art a bloody man.—King James Bible 2 Samuel 16:7, 8.[1]

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

—King James Bible Numbers 35:33.

"Even his virtues were misinterpreted and scandalously reviled. His gentleness was miscalled defect of wisdom; his firmness, obstinacy; his regular devotion, popery; his decent worship, superstition; his opposing of schism, hatred of the power of godliness.

Mark Kishlansky's new biography of Charles I is an extremely controversial work. 

Kishlansky believes that Charles has been misunderstood by history a viewpoint that is not shared amongst the majority of historians who study the English revolution. For Kishalnsky Charles was not a "man of blood" as General Thomas Harrison called him and that history has much-maligned this monarch.

Kishlanksy's book is an aggressive defence of both Charles and the monarchy in general. "Princes are not bound to give an account of their actions, but to God alone" Kishlanskyhas taken the quote and turned it into a historical perspective.

According to him "Charles I is the most despised monarch in Britain's historical memory. Considering that among his predecessors were murderers, rapists, psychotics and people who were the mentally challenged, this is no small distinction."

One of the basic premises of writing a biography is to put the individual being written about the context of their times. In this case, the English revolution. The revolution caused widespread devastation and hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded a reigning monarch is executed a republic declared, and the House of Lords abolished, but there is very little of this drama in Kinshlansky's book. One of the main protagonists of the revolution Oliver Cromwell only gets one mention.

Given that the English revolution was primarily a political and religious dispute, Kishlanksy's heavy emphasis on the individual mistakes, misjudgments and general bad luck of the monarch is typical of his historical methodology. In many senses, this biography is primarily a political rehabilitation of Charles. The book takes on the form of a polemical essay rather than a history book.

It is not surprising that Kinshlansky's historiography regarding Charles has been a challenge in academia. As Clive Holmes explains“Mark Kishlansky, in his rather implausible attempt to create a historiographical uniformity, cites a series of quotations from a wide range of historians. He then triumphally demonstrates that a proportion of these comments are dubious or just plain wrong. I have argued here that Kishlansky's attempt to reconfigure the king as open and accessible by a study of his progress itself entails overstatement and misunderstanding. Kevin Sharpe's guarded judgement on this topic, 'it may still remain true that Charles was less than assiduous in cultivating his people in general and his influential subjects in particular, is more compelling.51 But, ultimately, isolation is not simply a matter of propinquity; we do not need to imagine Charles as physically inaccessible, locked away from his people in either Van Dyck's studio or his damp hunting lodges, to judge him isolated.

His isolation was a function of his refusal to engage in meaningful dialogue with 'the people who count', and of his consequent failure to understand both the limitations imposed on his actions by the administrative structure of England and the political and legal prejudices of those who staffed that machinery at all levels. Kishlansky does not engage specifically with all the negative comments that he recites in his introduction, imagining that his vigorous refutation of some points will explode every aspect of the professional consensus - Richard Cust's 'straw man' may be a better image - that he has constructed. But some of the arguments he dismisses by implication seem basically right: not least Gardiner's sense that it was the king's lack of empathy, his 'want of imaginative power', that was at the root of his failure is still a most telling judgement”.[2]

Kishlansky defended his love affair with Charles in his reply to Clive Holmes, Nearly every conflict between subjects and sovereign in the early part of the reign of Charles I resulted from fear: fear that the king would introduce popery, fear that the king would govern without Parliament, fear that the king would not obey the law. Although Charles attempted to allay each of these concerns, he learned to his cost that there was something irrational about them, that his subjects 'had not the will to be pleased'.Leading men of his realm misinterpreted his intentions, misapprehended his aspirations, misunderstood his motives and misconstrued his character. He could not see himself as the king that they feared and therefore, could do little to allay their suspicions. In the end, he could only conclude that he was a case of mistaken identity.[3]

This theme of Charles not being understood is a continual theme of the book. The theme is so strong even Amazon deemed it important enough to put it on the cover blurb saying "In Mark Kishlanksy's brilliant account it is never in doubt that Charles created his catastrophe, but he was nonetheless opposed by men with far fewer scruples and less consistency who for often quite different reasons conspired to destroy him. This is a remarkable portrait of one of the most talented, thoughtful, loyal, moral, artistically alert and yet, somehow, disastrous of all this country's rulers".

Of course, it is Amazon's right to promote the book anyway it sees fit, but as the above quote suggests this has gone beyond standard promotion. Hopefully whoever wrote the media blurb was not a historian for it reduces history to the level of a Janet and John book. Firstly it must be said that the men who opposed Charles both inside Parliament and out were men of principle and fought for those principles through to the end.

Kishlanksy's adoption of the bad man theory of history does not enlighten us about Charles or the men who fought him. Kishlansky believes of Charles that "Beneath the reviled and excoriated King of historical reputation is a flesh-and-blood man trapped by circumstances he could not control and events he could not shape." Kishlanksy's belief that individuals are prisoners of external forces also does not get us very far.

As Herbert Spencer once wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown...Before he can remake his society, his society must make him."[4] Kishlanksy's aim in this book is to overturn centuries of the historiography that attempted to place Charles in the context of his times rather than elevated him above it in some supernatural way.

He believes that the long-held view of Charles and his reign has been distorted and the centuries-long historical narratives opposing this view is mere "Parliamentarian propaganda."Kishlansky's rehabilitation of Charles found support in a surprising place. A review of his book was written on the Guardian website. It is widely sympathetic to Kishlanksy's' view. Without examining in any detail what major historians have printed on the subject matter, it produces quotes that back up the Kishlansky hypothesis. It uncritically quotes Kishlansky "What began as propaganda has been transmuted into seeming fact."

The Guardian article continues Kishlanksy's theme that Charles was battling against bad luck all through his life "Whichever side you take, it's hard to deny that Charles was plagued from early on by almost comical levels of bad luck. As a young man, his daring incognito voyage to Spain to woo the Infanta turned into a fiasco. Two decades later, not only would his armies suffer crippling losses at the battle of Naseby, but Charles's correspondence would be captured: the public revelation of his efforts to secure Catholic support against the forces of Parliament would be a devastating blow to the king's reputation. A botched attempt to attack and plunder Spanish shipping in the first year of his reign set the tone for later military ventures: 'the winds, as always for Charles, were contrary'.[5]

Kishlanksy's defence of Charles I is absolute and unconditional. He rejects the standard view that Charles was intransigent. He believes that the king bent over backwards to conciliate and to compromise with Parliament. Kishlansky is perfectly in his right as an established historian to counter prevailing historiography. It is a little surprising that he chooses to do so in such a limited space is astonishing. But to overturn three centuries of historiography is going to take a lot longer than 144 pages. As one writer puts it, the "small amounts of evidence are made to bear an enormous argumentative burden".

Even the sympathetic Guardian reviewer was forced to admit that Kishlanksy's hoop-jumping was in danger of turning his reconsideration of Charles into a "whitewash."

It is not within the scope of this review to go over Kishlanksy's previous written work, but it is evident from this new book that his place as a pioneer of a transatlantic revisionist interpretation of early Stuart history is secured. Kishlansky joins a growing number of major historians such Kevin Sharpe, Conrad Russell and John Morrill who reject both the Whig and Marxist historians who had seen the Civil Wars of the 1640s as stemming from the growth of ideological opposition to the Stuart monarchs over the previous half-century.

The revisionist school seek to challenge the "ideological consensus" or as Kishlansky puts it the "fallacy of social determinism' that has existed since the 1920s. These historians reject any severe economic or social analysis and argue that revolutions are nothing but the work of a tiny group of conspirators.

To conclude In any review, I try to be as generous as I can, and on the whole, I would recommend this short narrative on the life of Charles I was a competent introduction to the subject. If that were all it was, then I would have no trouble, but as this is more a polemic than a history book it needs to be answered in the future in a more detailed manner.

---

[1] A Sermon produced thirty years after Charles's death

[2] CHARLES I: A Case of Mistaken Identity[with Reply] Clive Holmes, Julian Goodare, Richard Cust and  Mark Kishlansky Source: Past & Present, No. 205 pp. 175-237

[3] Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity Author(s): Mark Kishlansky Source: Past & Present, No. 189 (Nov., 2005), pp. 41-80

[4] https://fli.institute/2014/08/19/the-great-man-theory-of-leadership/

[5] Charles I: An Abbreviated Life by Mark Kishlansky – http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/18/charles-i-an-abbreviated-life-king-mark-kishlansky-review